This 1st time founder raised a $38M Series A—after taking over 2 years to launch. | Chris Ellis, Founder of Thatch

This first time founder just raised a $38 million Series A. The crazy part is that for all of 2021, 2022, 2023, he had almost no revenue. He spent all that time building and pivoting. Finally he launched in 2024—and it blew up.

I saw his LinkedIn post and his revenue chart doesn't look like a hockey stick... it looks like straight a vertical line. He built a health benefits platform—it doesn't get less sexy than that. And yet, it absolutely exploded to millions in ARR in less than a year.

All because he figured out how to make something that every single company in the U.S. needs, exceptionally simple. 

Here's the story.

Why you should listen:

• Why choosing the right co-founder is the most important thing.
• Why having a mission is crucial to make it through the ups and downs.
• How to listen to and understand customer pain points. 
• Why pivots are not a bad thing, and can actually be the key to crazy traction.
• How to use external deadlines to drive urgency and focus .

Keywords
Thatch, startup journey, co-founders, healthcare innovation, product market fit, venture capital, entrepreneurship, health benefits, business challenges, pivoting, healthcare, startups, product development, market demand, customer needs, external deadlines, product market fit, scaling, company culture, founder intuition

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Intro 
(00:02:27) Finding the Right Co-Founder
(00:10:23) Why You Need to Go All In
(00:16:20) The Seed Round & Pivoting From the Original Idea of Thatch
(00:30:08) How to use external deadlines to drive focus
(00:37:55) The Growth in 2024 & The Business Model
(00:42:16) The Benefits of Forcing Functions
(00:45:58) How Many Customers are Using Thatch Today?
(00:47:50) Finding True Product Market Fit
(00:52:10) People Didn't Believe in Thatch

Chapters

• 2:27 Finding the Right Co-Founder
• 10:23 Why You Need to Go All In
• 16:20 The Seed Round & Pivoting From the Original Idea of Thatch
• 30:08 How to use external deadlines to drive focus
• 37:55 The Growth in 2024 & The Business Model
• 42:16 The Benefits of Forcing Functions
• 45:58 How Many Customers are Using Thatch Today?
• 47:50 Finding True Product Market Fit
• 52:10 People Didn't Believe in Thatch

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00):

So I just spoke with Chris, the founder of Thatch. This is a first time founder who just raised a $38 million series A led by index. The crazy part is when I went through the story, I mean, he started in 2021 and if you look at it from 2021, 2022, 2023, he had almost no revenue. Like he was really just building a product, pivoting. And then he finally launched. And 2024 was such a crazy year. In fact, the reason that I got him on the show is 'cause I saw his LinkedIn post and his revenue chart doesn't look like a hockey stick. It looks like a vertical line like this guy launched in 2024 with this, it's basically like a health benefits platform. I mean, it doesn't get less sexy than that on the surface, but it absolutely exploded. And it's all because he figured out how to make something that every single company in the US needs exceptionally simple. 

Previous Guests (00:57):

That's product market fit, product market fit, product market fit. I call that the product market fit question, product market fit, product market fit, product market fit product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market Fit.

Pablo Srugo (01:09):

Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? 'cause If you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to dig out your phone, you have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. 

Man, welcome to welcome to the show. 

Chris Ellis (1:24)

It's so great to be here, Pablo. I'm a big fan of your show. 

Pablo Srugo (1:26)

Dude, I, I had to have you on because I just saw a post of yours and it was your revenue chart. And you know, they talk about how- you want like hockey stick growth, but this wasn't hockey stick growth, it was just like a vertical line <laugh>, you know what I mean? Like, literally, it was kinda like nothing. And then it was just up. And so I was like, okay, I don't know what the Y axis is there, but this guy just raised a $38 million series A from index and general catalyst, which was also part of that kinda whole post.

Pablo Srugo (01:53):

And I was like, all right, something's going on here, gotta see what's going on. And you know, you did it in health benefits no less, which is not ,from the outside looking in, something you'd expect  is about to be reinvented. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's just not one of those. People think you gotta do something crazy. Maybe you are doing something crazy, but in this space that's just not anybody would consider sexy. So with all that said, you know, take us to the beginning. Like you mentioned there was kind of a pivot, you kind of ended up here by accident. So where did things like all start? 

Chris Ellis (2:27)

When people think about the journey to product market fit, a lot of folks start at writing the first line of code or when you get the idea in the shower or maybe when you get your first customer. But in my experience, it actually starts way before all of that. And the single most important determining factor to getting to product market fit is actually who you choose as your co-founder. And I'll tell you what I mean. you have kids,? You’re married. do you have kids yet? 

Pablo Srugo (2:57) 

We’re trying we’re trying. We're in the process, but no, no kids yet.

Chris Ellis (02:59):

Okay.. Well well good luck with that. I just had my first a few months ago. 

Pablo Srugo (3:06)

Congrats. 

Chris Ellis (3:06)

Beautiful boy. Yeah, I feel so lucky. He's amazing. And you know, having a baby is a lot of work though, I mean, you're staying up all night, not getting a sleep, and you really want them to grow up and be a successful, you know, member of society, you gotta teach 'em how to sleep and walk and talk and all that. And who you raise your kid with is actually a really important factor. Like, you wouldn't go on one date and say, Hey, you wanna have kids, you know, next week and then you’re off to raising a child. And I'm super lucky to have this really amazing life partner, my wife and I couldn't imagine, you know, raising this, the child without her.

Chris Ellis (03:48):

But when you think about it, most people get to know their partner over a very long period of time before they, you know, make the big leap to start a family. And what's amazing, you know, now being three months into having a baby and three years into a startup doing a startup is a lot more work. <laugh>, or at least a lot more time invested than you know, raising a kid. And it's something that when you think about how many people are out there starting companies with somebody that they barely know, it kind of seems crazy to me because you're in, oftentimes just as long of a journey if you're building something really meaningful. And so that person that you start the company with, is just truly, the most important first decision you make.

Chris Ellis (04:33):

And I know a lot of people- I think back to my story of how I met my co-founder, who, you know, he's truly just this amazing person who I'm extremely lucky to have started Dash with, his name's Adam Stevenson. And we didn't meet in college. We weren't even working at the same company. Funnily enough, I was in biotech at the time in software product development, and I was reading some of these new regulations that were passing in US healthcare, rather esoteric. A lot of them focus on APIs and healthcare. And, you know, my background, API stands for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient. And so it means something quite different in the technology sector. And I remember coming across his profile, Adam, on a YC form, and he had started his career in healthcare, a big insurance company, security engineering. He had built and launched a few bootstrap things on the side.

Chris Ellis (05:23):

And one of those led him into Stripe where he was an early engineer and ended up rising through the ranks to oversee, you know,from  a hundred people to several thousand people. So he had this just really amazing perspective on APIs and from his early experience healthcare. So  I reached out to him like, can you help me make sense of what I just read? And he was kind enough to respond to my cold outbound email. And when we met, we had this instant connection. We were actually both at a point in our careers where we were ready to lead and start something new. We were both kicking around a few ideas. We always knew we wanted to start a company one day. We bonded over the fact that, you know, very early on, too early, we had both lost parents to cancer.

Chris Ellis (06:08):

We knew we wanted to build something in healthcare. And this idea of improving the healthcare experience for individuals with something that was always really kind of core to our DNA. But we didn't go the next week and say, let's go leave our job and start our company. It was actually funny. I remember in our first meeting we were on a call and I was really enjoying the conversation. I thought we were having this super amazing call and it was really insightful, but I could kind of hear him on his mechanical keyboard, like typing the whole time. And I was like, oh man, you must be busy sending all these emails. And you know, he's obviously a busy guy. And then that evening he responds, he sends me an email, it's like a 20 page summary of things that we talked about and all these ideas that he had.

Chris Ellis (06:51):

And I remember thinking, what! it was probably the best email I'd ever received. It turns out he wasn't sending emails, he was typing these like rigorous pages of pages of notes in our conversation. And so the next morning, I cracked my knuckles and fired away something that was like 50% longer. And, and at that point it was kind of the beginning of this really long series of exchanges that we got to know each other over a period of several months. A lot of it through writing and exchanging long format ideas. I remember like a month in, he sent me this, you know, a hundred page personality questionnaire and assess for compatibility. Like, even my wife we didn’t have a do something like that.

Pablo Srugo (07:31):

How do you- let me ask you this man, and I'm trying to phrase it the right way, but like, he's the more proven one in this, right? Like, he's at Stripe like six years there he is technical, he has got so many options. What do you think he saw in you? And I asked this because like your founder and you know, these days you're trying to find a technical co-founder. Like, it's really hard to find someone who's already kind of proven in the way that Adam was like, but what do you think he saw in you at the time that made him write those long things, that made him dig in, right? and get excited about working together?

Chris Ellis (08:10):

It's a great question and the irony on my part is, you know, I spent years twirling away in a research lab and have an advanced degree in science from MIT to be the non-technical co-founder. I think that one of his gifts actually is spotting talent. And I've seen that both  at Thatch now over the years. I mean, the thing I'm most proud of at the company is the team that we have assembled. And he played a critical, the most important role in assembling most of the team. But he had also developed that reputation when he was at Stripe and had actually sourced a lot of the solutions engineering team himself and, you know, was recognized as a talent magnet within Stripe. And so I think for these types of things, when you think about starting a company a lot of it has to do with this idea of internal chemistry between the two people, but also complementary where you know, in some ways if you think about what start, you know, what you need to start a company and be successful, it's basically building stuff, recruiting people, <laugh> and selling stuff.

Chris Ellis (09:14):

I think that perhaps he saw from my background going from a cancer researcher at MIT to then starting a sales team for a technology startup, that that was a little bit of an unconventional and, you know , high risk high reward type of path. Maybe he could see me, you know, sitting on the product market fit show and hopefully having a good conversation. But I'm definitely super grateful for the experience that we had while we were getting to know each other, which ultimately culminated in going out on this trip together in the mountains. And it was like the fall, how

Pablo Srugo (09:49):

Long after you met each other was this?

Chris Ellis (09:52):

It was maybe six months or so. And we spent a long weekend in Utah. It went hiking and it was beautiful. The leaves are starting to change color and everything's kind of all magnificent. 

Pablo Srugo (10:02):

This is like your classic Bromance story, man. This is incredible

Chris Ellis (10:07):

And we, and we came back and I remember, you know, we were getting ready to go to dinner and he sat down and was like, so you wanna do this? And I said, hell yeah. And I quit my job on Monday and-

Pablo Srugo (10:18):

No way.

Chris Ellis (10:19):

Yeah and-

Pablo Srugo (10:20):

you guys had no idea yet. you guys had ideas or?

Chris Ellis (10:22):

We did. We did. We had, we had ideas. They just didn't happen to be the one that we're doing now. And so I remember actually you know, as soon as we left our jobs, we were kind of on the path.

Pablo Srugo (10:34):

He quit too, that Monday stripe?

Chris Ellis (10:35):

Yeah, I think it was maybe a few days after due to some notice and stuff like that. But we were basically starting at the exact same time, and so we both went all in.

Pablo Srugo (10:45):

I just gotta ask one tangent, like how do you-  and maybe this didn't even come up, maybe it's a better question for Adam, but, but because you were part of this kind of recruiting thing, maybe it is actually a question for you, like how does he justify, how do you justify to him almost the opportunity cost of going into a startup? Maybe you didn't think of it this way at all, but like, one of the things I see is, and I've heard this before, it's like, especially like at Stripe, like a, you're already making whatever he was making, you know, six years in running, you know, thousands of people, but then there's the stock, there's the, there's the potential, like, you know, Stripe is on a tear, like it's not going anywhere. You have so much stock upside, you do the math on like an annual basis, that's millions of dollars probably per year. And then you do the math on, what does this have to become like, this idea. We haven't even really come up with what it would exit for, me to even just be in the same place. And sometimes like people look at that, they're like, that's just dumb <laugh>, I'm just not gonna do that. Did he think that way at all? Did he do that kind of math?

Chris Ellis (11:46):

That's a good question. I don't think that if you wanna start a company, you should be optimizing for financial outcome, actually <laugh>. Because if you, if you run all the numbers and you, and you break it down, you're much more likely to be just excluding your own personal desire you're much more likely to be better off staying at a big technology company. And this kind of comes down to why do people start companies or what was kind of his motivation? and my motivation, you know, a big part of it, of course is you want to build this venture backable technology company and go, you know, expand your career and your skillset. But a lot of it comes down to actually what you wanna do with your life and what's the impact that you wanna make on the world.

Chris Ellis (12:32):

And I was just thinking about today, you know, in the US we had the new presidential inauguration yesterday, and it's, you know, remarkable the institution that has been built over these few hundred years in the us. But people forget that the system as it is today, endures and is largely what it is. Thanks to much of the wisdoms of many of America's first founders and arguably the most successful founder of all time is George Washington. I really like the question that you asked because when you think about Washington, most people think about, he's the first president of the United States, or he was this kind of decorated commander who fought in the Revolutionary War. But what a lot of people don't know about him is that in the very beginning of his career, he was a commander, but he was fighting for the British and he was fighting for freedom in the American colonies.

Chris Ellis (13:23):

That's what he believed in. And much later he pivoted to fighting for actual American independence. But there was a stretch of time in between like 15 years that nobody knows about. Oris is not well known where he was actually America's one of America's first venture capitalists. And so after his stint fighting for the English to protect American people and before he started the Revolutionary War, back then people weren't investing in seed stage startups. The big speculative asset was land. And so he was an early speculator over 15 years, he pioneered a lot of the concepts in VC like general partnership limited partners carried interest. He accumulated over that time assets that today would be equivalent to like $38 billion in, you know, adjusted GDP terms. And you can ask kind of him- you have all this money, why would you give all that up to go fight in the Revolutionary War?

Chris Ellis (14:21):

And it turns out that he had this mission or this belief that, you know, the American population should be free, that the principles of economics should be grounded in free markets and liberty. And if he had stayed on the VC path or the entrepreneurial path, you could say he wouldn't have actually been able to realize the great institution that became the United States. And so when I think about for Adam, or for anyone who's trying to start a company, it can't just be about financial outcome. It also also has to be about a mission or what you believe in. And if you can actually marry those two things, I think that he was actually a great president, not because he was a great warlord and in fact maybe he would've tried to become a king and we would've had a dictator if that was the case. But I think the experience of rationing, economic forces and being an early venture capitalist actually informed a lot of his ability to govern a country and set to foundational principles.

Pablo Srugo (15:15):

I think I think that's totally legit. And I like you pointing that out because you know, the utilitarian kind of philosophy, it's all about maximizing happiness and minimizing pain. And, and that's the sort of thinking that'll get you down the road of like, why would I ever, you know, go down this higher risk, lower financial or probably, you know, outcome when I have this thing. But you know, it turns out at least my kind of philosophy I've adopted, from the Vic Viktor Frankl camp is, we're all really in search of meaning. And that's why people do what, you know, George Washington did. That's why people go fight wars that they know are going to be frankly only painful. And that's why people I think start startups for the most part, like even whatever they're driven, like in some cases they are driven by money, but there is this kind of quest that for meaning in underneath it all, a quest for impact, quest for building something that you think needs to exist, like from really going from zero to one. And so it makes sense that, you know, the people that do it, frankly, typically, I mean sometimes it's because they have no alternative, but like in many cases, at least certainly in you and Adam’s case, I think like that's why.

Chris Ellis (16:19):

Yeah, very well said. And I think that you kind of have to believe in some kind of mission to endure all of the BS and pain that you're about to go through. And it's funny because we came outta the gate like super strong. I mean, we closed this amazing seed round from amazing investors and we were so proud we were kind of on top of the world.

Pablo Srugo (16:39):

 And how much did you raise? 

Chris Ellis (16:40):

It was around five or 6 million i or so, and it was kind of the boon times of early 2021

Pablo Srugo (16:47):

It was 2021?. And it was all like kind of this team market fit like two rock stars going after some big market. Like what was even the thing then?

Chris Ellis (16:56):

Great question. So I kind of alluded, we had both lost parents to cancer and we originally looking at a clinical direction and talking to cancer patients. And we had a few theories, but no customers, kind of an early prototype. You know, we raised the money kind of on this idea of expedition and kind of this general, this general theme. But, you know, very shortly afterwards we conducted a bunch of user interviews and found that there wasn't really that much demand for the thing that we were building, which was kind of more patient trial matching. And technically the data access to do so plugging into existing healthcare APIs wasn't entirely there. And so here we were like a couple weeks after raising this big round, and realizing, oh man, this is not gonna work.

Pablo Srugo (17:42):

And the timeline, just so I understand the timeline is you quit on like a Monday. Adam quit a few weeks later and you raise the seed round kinda right away.

Chris Ellis (17:48):

We raised a little bit of friends and family money first, so it was like a handful of angel investors. And then it was literally three months later that we closed our seed draft. So we were very, very early. I don't know if I would recommend that in retrospect, but on the other hand actually I think, you know, the window is open and it worked out quite well for us. So it's hard to look back and, and rewrite history and ask what could have been different. But I do know it was very hard when we kind of, you know, all of our best laid plans were basically coming to nothing.  It's a time like this where I think that, you're having a conversation with your investors, you're like, well, this is not gonna work.

Chris Ellis (18:25):

But, it's a time like this where having this idea of a mission is really important because we knew we wanted to make an impact on the healthcare system for people. And so we didn't go say, okay, now we're gonna go pivot to building a dev tool or we're gonna go pivot to doing this. Like we, we really listened in the interviews to what the pain points the individuals we talked to had articulated. And one big one, which may not resonate in Canada but certainly in the US is that paying for healthcare sucks. And so we ended up looking down a path involving the healthcare payment rails. So there's a health savings account and flexible spending account, really these consumer directed accounts designed to make it easier to afford and pay for healthcare.

Pablo Srugo (19:07)

Well, what did you hear, I'm curious, specifically in those customer interviews?

Chris Ellis (19:10):

Yeah, I mean in some cases it was “the insurance that my company offered didn't cover this really expensive cancer treatment” or “I'm getting these confusing bills from the health system and it's hard for me to keep track of what's in network and out of network”. And they all kind of were really centered on this idea that the financial experience in healthcare was quite suboptimal. And we think about the US I mean almost 20% of GDP is healthcare. If it was its own country, it would be bigger than basically every other country, but China and we're having all of this money flowing through it, and yet it's the most opaque and complex industry. And so when we kind of had this light bulb moment. My co-founder has this amazing FinTech background, I have a ton of experience in healthcare, actually looking at that intersection where magic can happen makes a lot of sense.

Chris Ellis (20:04):

And so that's what we did. We started going down this path of tooling out an HSA 

Pablo Srugo (20:09) 

and is this ‘22 now like early 2022? 

Chris Ellis (20:12)

Yeah, it's a good question. It's all, it's all kind of going- 

Pablo Srugo (20:16) 

 it's a blur, man. I know.  the three years- 

Chris Ellis (20:17)

and our big goal is kind of like launching it by the end of the year, the end of 2022. I believe in maximizing the surface area of luck. And that means trying to talk to as many people as possible. And so as we were building it, you know, I was taking every single call that I could get. Like everybody who was willing to talk to me, it doesn't matter who they were or what they were doing. Like I, in the early days, it's very, very important that you tune your antenna to as many ideas or as many perspectives as possible. And you mean, but

Pablo Srugo (20:47):

Specifically people in this kind of health finance world?

Chris Ellis (20:51):

And mostly potential customers. And maybe I should clarify that like you know, people in the health finance world, yes, but really talking to potential users and so anybody who would be willing to use your thing or even adjacent to using your thing. And it was funny, you know, we had this one conversation with an individual and kind of coming out of these conversations in general, one of them mentioned this new law that had passed called the individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement or ICHRA, which is by the way, I mean these US healthcare acronyms that keep getting worse, like HSA, FSA, ICHRA but he said, can you use the technology you're building for this? And I said, I don't know. So we went in, did a little bit of research and when I learned about it, it made so much sense.

Chris Ellis (21:33):

It was this idea that rather than the company having to choose the health insurance and health benefits for their team, instead they could give them this bucket of tax-free money and everybody could opt-in to the experience that makes sense for them, whether that's insurance or copays, they can pay for therapy, whatever it might be. And it reminded me of some of the initial conversations we had heard around the pain being related to networks, what insurance you opt into because your employer chooses for you related to being able to pay for things out of pocket. 

Pablo Srugo (22:03):

And just to be clear, is this just a health spending account? or is it a bit more than that? Because you can use that to sign up to a plan that then is more than a health spending account?

Chris Ellis (22:13):

Yeah, exactly. So it's almost like we call it a turbocharged HSA, so you can use it on out-of-pocket expenses, but you can also use it to buy these individual health insurance policies. And maybe this will make sense when I give you an example, we literally had this problem ourselves. So when we are getting set up as, as a small company, a small startup getting health insurance set up for our team, when you're getting started by the way, it's like- you download your- you get your payroll, it takes five seconds, you get your zoom for, you know, video conferencing, get Slack for communications and then you get healthcare. It's like, I actually, it's funny when you look at all those lists that people have, like startup tools, so get started, like no one actually lists healthcare 'cause it's such a pain in the ass. So you have to talk to an insurance broker, they run you to these really complex options.

Pablo Srugo (22:58):

That's the one part that's still like the old school way.

Chris Ellis (23:00):

Super old school. Yeah. Well, and the funny thing too is like if you add up all other SaaS spend that a startup may pay for, it's still maybe like 20% or even maybe 10% of the cost of actual health insurance <laugh>, it's still expensive. It's insanely expensive and this is like a US thing but it's insanely expensive. And you know, it's something as well that if you're a small company, you're maybe not fully equipped to even make a decision on behalf of a distributed team. And so I chose a plan that was based out of Texas as I live in Austin, but our first employee started, he lived in San Francisco and the first thing he said was, why don't we have Kaiser? It's this health system I love. And it reminds me of the French model back home.

Chris Ellis (23:43):

He was from France and you know, gosh, our insurance really sucks 'cause we don't offer Kaiser. And then we hired someone in New York and, oh, I can't see my doctor anymore. What's the problem? Like, why do we have such a terrible plan? And I'm talking to my co-founder Adam, like we're spending all this money on something everyone's complaining about. And by the way, something like 10% in the US… 10% of VC dollars go directly to health insurance companies. So, it's a really big expense, like it's percentage of total comp, it's gigantic. So we're having this experience and it's like a total pain. And so I'm instantly getting, okay, yeah, if everyone can choose their own plan, I could probably provide the money that actually makes a lot more sense. And then the actual administration of health insurance is also real pain too.

Chris Ellis (24:23):

Like I remember  my mom, and this is late 2022, my mom had just retired and we were taking this trip kind of to celebrate and we were in Japan and it was the first time we'd all gone, we'd all wanted to go for many years. And we're in Tokyo and I start getting these Slack pings, someone's at the doctor and they say, Hey, they're not taking my insurance. And then someone's at the pharmacy and they say, Hey, my prescription’s not covered anymore. And I'm like, oh no, <laugh>. And I was like, just go again tomorrow. It's something weird, they'll be fine. And then it turns out that in the process of trying to switch our first plan to a new plan that made everyone happy, which turns out is not possible. The administrator had dropped the ball and had canceled our coverage, and so everyone was gonna be without insurance for two months. And so in healthcare, in the American health field, this is very bad. And so I'm on the phone, I set my alarm for like 3:00 AM Tokyo time to have this conversation with the insurance company when they were open about like, please I’m begging you please,don’t-

Pablo Srugo (25:16):

Just complete chaos. And it's like, not that-, you know, you think of building a startup and you know you're gonna have to fight battles, but like, this is not the battle you wanna be fighting around, like helping people pay for the doctors. Like that's supposed to be the status quo stuff that just kind of happens, just kind of works. And then you build on top of that

Chris Ellis (25:34):

A hundred percent. Yeah, it's supposed to just work and it was occupying all this time. And so the learning from, for me there was kind of the classic YC wisdom of solving a problem that you have yourself. And it was kind of staring me in the face for quite a while and that's why you know it, but to, but, but sometimes you just have to actually experience it and that's then gonna influence the way you design it. And you know, when you're pivoting, it's really tricky because you have employees.

Pablo Srugo (25:59):

How many people did you have at this point? Like late 22?

Chris Ellis (26:02):

It was still single digits. But it was not just two, you know? And so you have employees and they sign up to this one thing and you know, in some sense folks sign on for the mission and to and know that there's going to be some changes along the way to get to where you need to go. But you know, everyone's been spending six months building this other thing and, and so now it's like, oh geez, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna do something different. And so, you wanna be really careful about kind of knowing when the right time is to commit. And, you know, huge credit to my, my co-founder. Our approach here was we were actually getting ready to do a piece in TechCrunch and announce things to the world. And I'm really glad that we waited because -

Pablo Srugo (26:46):

Announcing the old, like the existing product? not the new, not the new product.

Chris Ellis (26:50):

Well, so yes. But <laughs> 

We were getting ready to announce the launch, and I'm glad we waited because like the genie doesn't go back in the bottle. And what we did, we said, Hey, we've got this, this HSA and we were rather vague about it, but like, you know, empowering startups to offer health benefits and we included some language around it that gave us a little bit of optionality even though the product, like we hadn't built anything. And we figured if there really was demand for this thing, that we would get some inbound demo requests and stuff like that. And so the weekend <laugh>, this is kind of crazy when I think about it, but the weekend before my co-founder, and this is why, you know, choosing the right co-founder is so important. He's super scrappy, you know, he's got great front end design sense. And so he prototyped what the new product would look like. Of course none of the buttons worked, but it was kind of this, you could see the experience end to end. And so we ran the piece and got a bunch of demo requests and walked a bunch of people through kind of the first 10 minutes, like, here's the product of today

Pablo Srugo (27:53):

And how many, like, how are you talking about 10, 20, 30? Like how many, how many requests did you geT?

Chris Ellis (27:57):

It was at least a hundred and so my calendar was like stacked, like-

Pablo Srugo (28:03):

That's demand right there. Like you put out a piece, I mean, TechCrunch is putting out stuff every day. Yeah, sure. A lot of people read it, but like a lot of stuff you just skim through it. So a hundred actual actions of a request is a big deal. 

Chris Ellis (28:13):

It was crazy, especially with how vaguely it all was written, which in retrospect, I'm so glad we did that. And so we shared what we had today and then also we're getting ready to launch this new thing, and we ran through the demo of the prototype and without fail, probably seven or 8 people on the first day, maybe one of them was interested in the HSA. Seven were actually interested in the other thing. They're like, I don't care about that, but like, you gimme that other thing, I really want it. And maybe one person wasn't interested. And so I remember at the end of the day, I ended up, you know, I picked up the phone, I called Adam and, I'm like, dude, we're gonna be able to sell the crap outta this thing. 

Pablo Srugo (28:47):

And what were you like, tell me a little bit more like what, when you talked about the new thing, what were you saying at that point? Like what was your kind of your pitch, let's say?

Chris Ellis (28:56):

It was easy to articulate it because we had the problem ourselves, which is, it's hard to find the solution that makes everybody on your team happy. It's really expensive and painful and you don't have the time to deal with it. So let us handle it. You set a budget, give people the money, they can opt into what makes what makes the most sense for them, and people will be happier and you'll save time and money.

Pablo Srugo (29:18):

That's like the turbocharge HSA, right? Which you kept calling it that? Okay.

Chris Ellis (29:22):

Yeah, exactly. The learning out of here is you can almost always get 80% of the signal from 20% of the work. Like if you think about the 80/20 principle, we put in 20% of the work building a full product and got 80% of the signal. And if you think about it, you can get 100%- in the same amount of time. If you can get 100% of the signal on one product, you can get actually 80% of the signal on five by doing 20% of the work. And so a lot of times it's about getting as many shots on goal or at least getting enough things in front of enough people that you can start to really make a determination. And when that happened, that's when we committed and we said to the team like, Hey, this is gonna be hard, but we're gonna do it and we're gonna do it in time for open enrollment.

Chris Ellis (30:08):

So in the US there's this, you know, time period called open enrollment where everybody is allowed to get health insurance. starts from November ends in December, and if you miss that window, it's gonna be, it's very seasonal business. So if you miss that window, you have a whole year of learning that you're gonna miss out on. And we couldn't afford to miss out on that year of learning. Like it was, you know, you have money, but you had that much money and you had a team and you had to move quickly. And one reflection was that by actually defining where we wanna be at by a certain period of time, that external deadline was imposed upon us. It's actually an amazing forcing function for, you know, in a high trust environment to say, I trust you that like all of the planes are going to land on time and I trust that you're going to make the right decision to deprioritize the things that we don't need in order to make sure that we can launch as fast as we can.

Chris Ellis (31:01):

And I think one of the things that can hurt startups when they're getting off the ground is they don't really have any externally imposed deadlines. It's all internal and we wanna get this done by so and so dates like, well, but the scope- expand it and okay, we'll push it a little bit longer. Oh, we got, and so in our case, I feel very fortunate that we had this worsening function in our business because if we didn't, I could have seen it slipping or we made decisions to delay it. And if we, if we weren't ready at that time, I mean, we went from zero customers begging our first users. To having a hundred companies and you know, half a million run rate in like a month from zero, this

Pablo Srugo (31:38):

by the way, this was the end of ‘23 that you were targeting for launch, November 23?

Chris Ellis (31:43):

So this would be, that's right. Yeah. So it's 23..

Pablo Srugo (31:46):

And so you're building like all of- like 22, you kind of have this TechCrunch thing, you get all these insights and then 23 is just like build mode, like hone in force and function.

Chris Ellis (31:55):

Yeah, and you know, ‘22, we built the HSA and we actually launched it in 23. It was a total flop, nobody wanted it.

Pablo Srugo (32:00):

And that sounds so similar too.  turbocharge HSA and just HSA, like, but HSA doesn't let you pick a plan, is that the core difference? <nods> . And that was so big because just having money you can spend wherever is one thing, having a plan, an actual policy in place is a completely different thing from the perspective of a user. And I guess the company servicing those, those employees, those users,

Chris Ellis (32:20):

Exactly. Because I mean, healthcare is a local business in the US and so that means that the local network of hospitals that have engaged with the local insurers determines the quality of the experience you're gonna get. And so if you can opt into, if you have the choice to say, I'm seeing Dr. Smith and Dr. Smith takes Aetna, therefore I'm gonna get the Aetna plan, that's much better than if your company opts into, I'm gonna take Blue Cross. Well, it doesn't cover Dr. Smith, so it's not helpful for me. So that part's useful. And then the big bucket of money around it, you can allocate- half of people in a given year aren't even gonna go to the doctor. And so the company's spending all this money as something that no one's gonna actually use. Well, in this paradigm, you can actually opt into a very inexpensive plan that's likely to cover you or that will definitely cover you in the event of anything really bad happening, but you're not likely to use.

Chris Ellis (33:10):

And so now what do I do with all this extra money? So I mean, that's where it gets really interesting. We see people buying GLP1’s, you know, directly from Lilly Cash pay. We see people being able to pay for that high dollar therapist that doesn't take insurance. kind of on and on and like that can be really life changing to people even outside of the insurance. But because the bucket of money is a lot bigger you actually can't get that under an HSA, which might be 50 bucks a month or a hundred bucks a month, just it's not the same. and everybody attached wanted to use it ourselves, and that was a great thing. It was like, I wanted this as an employer, I wanted this as an employee.

Chris Ellis (33:47):

And when we launched it was great too, because like then we were all customers of our own product, and that made it really easy to iterate and, you know, like getting everything done on time. Like it's not gonna be, it's not gonna come outta the gate. Perfect. Right? Like we felt like things were clicking because we were actually getting a lot of companies in, but then we found like every sharp edge of the product and we had to patch all these things up. And I remember having conversations with CEOs of companies, CEOs of companies we just onboarded saying, you know, I'm so sorry that the thing broke  or whatever. And it was really tough because we had to fix a lot of things. But one thing I learned is if your customers care enough to complain and get you on a call or rake you over the coals, it means you're onto something, right?

Chris Ellis (34:32):

Because if they didn't care, then they would just leave, you know? And we were grateful. You know, a year later we actually kept the vast majority of the customers onboarded and we saw very strong retention and that kind of told us that we were onto something really big. But even then when we were kind of right at that point, it still felt somewhat precarious because then we had the question of like, how are we gonna scale this sufficiently and get distribution and, you know, all these other things. And so I think that that was, that was one of the first moments where it felt like it was clicking, but it's still, you know, I wasn't sure we had captured that elusive product market fit. 

Pablo Srugo (35:11):

You love this show, you don't wanna miss the next episode. Why would you?  So hit that follow button? Trust me, it's in your own best interest. What was the innovation like? Were you just the first to spot and act on a regulatory change, or was there technical or other innovation happening, something else that you saw or were able to do that others just, you know, hadn't seen or just hadn't tried to build around?

Chris Ellis (35:35):

I mean, this, this comes back to kind of the importance of the co-founder and the complimentary skill sets and bringing different domains together. But back when we were trying to do it ourselves there was no easy way to administer an ICHRA. You had to send people to insurance companies' websites and navigate these kinds of hellholes government exchanges. And then they had to put these big insurance premiums like a thousand bucks a month in some cases, 2,400 bucks a month per family on their personal credit cards. They had to file for reimbursement from the employer and punch it into payroll. And we had this insight with the team coming from Stripe, Shopify, Robinhood, that these are FinTech problems and if you build really great financial infrastructure, you can actually create a super compelling product experience. And we combined that financial acumen, that financial technology acumen with having literally experienced this problem firsthand.

Chris Ellis (36:26):

And I think that it was that, putting it together. that allowed us to build the products in the way that we wanted to use. And in that way we had a slightly different model. A lot of folks in the industry had maybe, and we weren't the first person to do this, but a lot of folks in the industry had a more operationally heavy build. And we recognized that we wanted to make it self serve, we wanted to make it intuitive. We wanted to make it easy for a small business startup founder to use. And that insight of having the pain and then also coming to it with the right technology actually allowed us to innovate more quickly and smooth some of these rough edges over faster and create an experience that actually felt better and more compelling than traditional insurance.

Chris Ellis (37:06):

Because if you send people to healthcare.gov and you do all this, it kind of takes the magic out of it. 'cause It's kind of painful. Like people want it to just work. And so we worked pretty hard. It helped be in a hole for like a year to nail that experience. And I'm so glad we did. I think the bar for an MVP in healthcare is also a little bit higher because this is people's like, large sums of money. This is people's health that we're talking about. Like the cost of messing up is someone can't see their doctor or have an appointment or get the surgery. It's a big deal. And so it's really important coming outta the gate. You know, we felt that you wanted to build something that really, really worked and we put a lot of energy into it and it still wasn't perfect. So you're never gonna be perfect in your first launch. But I think if you're building in healthcare, you do have to have a slightly higher bar for what is your MVP,

Pablo Srugo (37:55):

You know, it's crazy. If you think about the Thatch story so far, like 21, 22, 23, like you're two and a half or so years in, you've raised a few million and all you've really done so far is launch a product and somehow from here, a year later you raise a $40 million round <laugh>. Like what happened in 2024? It must have been just a crazy year.

Chris Ellis (38:17):

Well, you know, after we kinda stuck the pitch through the Python at the end of 2023, 2024 was, you know, in retrospect, I mean it was an amazing year. You grew like 80 x plus and we onboarded, you know, so many companies and numbers and it was but along the way it actually felt a lot more precarious than it was when we onboarded our first large customer. We still didn't believe that we actually could do that repeatedly. We still had to really innovate on distribution and ask where is health insurance distributed today? Like,

Pablo Srugo (38:51):

And walk me through: what was the business model? How do you charge? just per employee per month or is it something else? 

Chris Ellis (38:56):

Yeah, we charge per employee per month. And then there's a component around actually getting commissions from the insurance companies when you do enrollments for them. And so it adds up to kind of a nice you know, average revenue per user or kind of the mid hundreds 

Pablo Srugo (39:13):

Hundreds per employer? Per employee.

Chris Ellis (39:16):

Per employee,

Pablo Srugo (39:17):

Yeah, per employee per month of high margin revenue?

Chris Ellis (39:21)

per year. 

Pablo Srugo (39:23)

Of high margin revenue? like SaaS-like margin revenue to you?

Chris Ellis (39:25):

Yeah, and this kind of comes back to building the infrastructure in the right way. But the margin profile is quite strong if you build it in a way that's kind of self-service and scalable. Now there's nuance in local markets where in some cases it's more operationally intensive to support certain carriers and so forth. But on the whole, you know, it's a real technology company and that was obviously what we set out to do. And, you know I don't think we would've raised such an amazing round if there were, you know, doubts about whether this was kind of an operational business. I think a big insight was that today a lot of health insurance is distributed through payroll companies, it's distributed through health insurance brokers. And we can try to go direct to employers all we want. And we do have a motion where we take companies that come in down to us, but we recognize that working directly with these distributors would give us an opportunity to get our product into more hands more quickly.

Chris Ellis (40:20): 

And so just as 2023 was about product you know, innovation or iteration or pivoting. 2024 was about go-to-market iteration and pivoting. And they were like, we're doing things a year ago. That did not work at all. Like we ran TikTok and Facebook ads and we did all sorts of stuff, but one of the big moments where things clicked was actually we were able to close a really big partnership with QuickBooks and Allstate to distribute Thatch into their payroll system. And you know, to do that we actually had to spin up a SWAT team, you know, really incredible folks who had to expose a lot of our infrastructure as an API, which I'm very glad we have all those Stripe engineers <laugh> as a result. But we ended up going live and it was a smashing success.

Chris Ellis (41:05):

Ended up driving, you know, over a hundred companies in a couple months and it, it's still scaling kind of in the off season, but it wasn't really just one thing that clicked. It was a lot of small things like getting slightly better in terms of our product readiness and go to market readiness up market, getting a little bit better at playing nice with partners and actually seeing brokers and payroll partners as, you know, we wanna distribute through you, we wanna be a partner to you. We don't wanna be antagonistic to you, and so how can we reshape some of our product surface area and our go to market around you? So those were a lot of the things that we had to get right. And then it all kind of, because it's a seasonal business, you don't fully know if all of the things that you did are gonna pay off until this short period of time where everybody enrolls. And that was really when we started to feel, hey things are starting to really work and we've got something really magical and we were really grateful to because

Pablo Srugo (42:02):

so that's why the line is so, 'cause the 8x happens not really through the year, but mainly in those last two months.

Chris Ellis (42:09):

Yeah, exactly.. So we do, we do onboard people throughout the year,

Pablo Srugo (42:13):

But there's kind of like, and then just the inflection point, and walk me through this. You know, you mentioned there's a couple things that one of them is the the, the forcing functions, which I think are so important and either underutilized or, or maybe not used the right way. Like, do you find, are you intentional about that? Like do you find ways to create forcing functions, especially given that you just have those two months, like, but through the years so that your team is fully aligned and has something? you see the big guys, like you see, see Jobs, Musk or whatever, like, you know, they're doing this on purpose you see happening all the time. Like are you doing things like that as well internally? 

Chris Ellis (42:50):

Yeah, that's a good question. I remember joking,  I wish that open enrollment was every quarter <laugh> and because we would get a lot more done, but no, I, so as the company gets a little bit bigger and more mature, you know, you have to kind of start to build, develop frameworks around you know, quarters and OKRs. And so that was a big thing in 2024 where we started setting out quarterly goals and kind of operated around these quarters and started to move the whole operating rhythm of the company around these, with the big one, obviously leading up to November. The other thing that helps actually comes down to the idea of the mission and what you stand for. In our case, you know, our mission is to build a healthcare system people love and it actually becoming very easy, while you're kind of making these micro decisions along the way to get there through the question, is this getting us closer to a healthcare system that people love?

Chris Ellis (43:43):

Or is this just something that makes sense or is cool as a business? for example, a lot of people asked us or a lot of people have said, you know, why don't you go offer payroll? Because if you have the payroll yourself, then it would be a lot easier. You could be the one-stop shop. I said, I can see how that would be beneficial to our margins and our ARR. I'm not clear on how that gets us faster to building an amazing healthcare system that is founded on the principles of free markets and individual choice. And so although it makes sense for us as a business, it actually doesn't get us closer to that place that we're trying to go. And when you imbue that into the culture, then everyone doesn't need to wonder or ask, should I do this or that?

Chris Ellis (44:23):

Or does it make sense? You can actually move a lot more quickly. And that kind of comes back to the idea from the beginning where, you know, having that mission or having something you stand for is really important. Not just for you as a founder, building something, but also for your team knowing why are we here? Like, what are we trying to build? I mean, why do we leave our big technology cushy jobs to go join a startup? It's not just for a financial return. Obviously, if we're successful, we'll get that, but it's also because we care about what we're doing and we want to, everybody on the team wants to build something in healthcare. They've had an experience with themselves or someone they love. There's so much- It’s a target rich environment for opportunity and, you know, to improve the kind of chaotic landscape of healthcare today. So what, what I found is having that, that mission in addition to kind of the formal structure and the operating rhythm, you know, really helps speed things up and accelerate, particularly as you grow.

Pablo Srugo (45:17):

Well, you know, missions like, it sometimes seems a little bit cheesy, right? But the reality is a good mission energizes, it aligns, it focuses and ties that with, with a good culture, like meaningful culture is culture that helps people make micro decisions without policies. Like they understand general principles as a result of that. They know how to make decisions that come up in the day-to-day without having to be like, Hey, should I go this way or that way? On every single thing because they understand the kind of bigger picture. Let me ask one question before we go to our final two questions that we always end with, which is just like, in terms of scale, in terms of numbers, like how many customers, how many employees are using Thatch today? 

Chris Ellis (45:58):

Yeah I mean we've got, you know, roundabout a thousand or so companies give or give or take. And in terms of the scale of employees at those companies, you know, we're in the tens of thousands. And so it's been really remarkable. You know, it's funny, I remember going back at our internal projection, you know, a year ago and

Pablo Srugo (46:15):

Yeah, I'm sure you didn't have that. You actually beat it, you're one of the few that beat <laugh>. Well, 'cause you went literally from effectively zero to 10,000 in what, like a year, maybe 14 months, right? Something like that.

Chris Ellis (46:26):

yeah, it was basically a year. Which is, which is pretty-

Pablo Srugo (46:29):

That’s incredible.

Chris Ellis (46:31):

And you know, it comes back to the most important choices you make in the startup or the people that you share it with. And i want- I'm glad to be on the show and give insights, but it's much more about the co-founder you choose and the team that you gather than it is about a single brilliant stroke of insight or anything. And so I think it's really amazing that we've put together such an incredible team. and again, I think when we're looking to next year, hey, what is, what does a year from now look like? It looks, you know, just as scary and crazy. Like after every summit, there's another summit and how are we gonna get there? But that's where having the right people around you that you trust and that you know can execute and allows you to say kind of with some level of comfort that even though we can't connect all the dots from here to there, we believe that we can connect one dot at a time and we can see that dot that's right in front of us. And so let's get after it together.

Pablo Srugo (47:27):

We'll end there. We'll take that even as your, as your kind of final piece of advice. 'cause I think that's been a huge focus area, which is the people, the team. And like that is, that is the one thing that you have, like the market will change, the competition will change, the product will change the team, the core team especially, hopefully stays intact, or can stay intact for many, many years. So then let me ask the, the other final question, which is like, when did you feel like you had true product market fit?

Chris Ellis (47:50):

We had lunch one day with Ben Horowitz. and we asked him what his definition of product market fit was, and he said, there's not, particularly in B2B, there's not one moment of product market fit, product market fit, and B2B looks kind of like a sawtooth curve where you've got it with one sub subsection, and then you kind of have to go to another subsection and you have to, and so you're always kind of iterating and getting there. And that certainly was true in our case where, you know, when we onboarded a bunch of small companies, we said, oh, we have product market fit here, and we onboarded some bigger companies. We said we had a product market fit here, and then we started getting distributions in new ways, so I kind of got a product market fit here. But looking back, there was never one moment where I felt like, oh, I've made it. And so it's all secure, it's safe. And I still wake up, you know, <laugh> every every few hours in the middle of the night and wonder, you know, what is the next

Pablo Srugo (48:41):

Hard pounding outta your chest? Like, that's just the classic <laugh> the founder wake up.

Chris Ellis (48:45):

And you know, I I think that, you know, just your point about advice to, to founders and you know, one thing that we didn't fully cover was just how much you're going to get advice from experts that may not actually be right and how important it is to trust your own intuition. And I think about VCs, I mean it's really tough when you raise your first round of funding and you're, you're a first time founder and you see VCs and they've worked with the best companies and they've studied all the history and they have all the context. But one thing I've realized is VCs are all kind of like art critics where they know what greatness looks like. They can distinguish between okay art and, and great art. But in many cases it's, it's been some time since they've, you know, picked up a paintbrush or in some cases they never have.

Chris Ellis (49:37):

And when you think back to, you know great painters who are learning how to develop their style if they had just followed along with what art critics told them to do. They can learn a lot, but they'll never find their own style. And when I think about being a founder, a lot of it is about trusting your intuition, figuring out the way that you paint, which may be very different from the way that others paint. And when I think about really you know, trusting your own intuition, it's really tough because it, you know, I remember there were so many times when really smart people told us that our idea didn't make sense or, or it wasn't gonna work. And when I think back to, you know, Churchill, which we're gonna, we're gonna bring it back a little bit, but when he was at the end, end of his career, and everybody knows him today as his great prime minister who guided, guided the UK through World War II.

Chris Ellis (50:34):

But in the years leading up to it, he actually was really you know, looking like he was at the very end of his political career. He was known as a great speaker, but he hadn't really accomplished much of anything. And his father was much more famous than he was at the time. And so he was living in his father's shadow, and as he was at the tail end approaching retirement, this was kind of the time when, you know, Hitler was on the rise in Germany. And a few years before war broke out, he was sounding the alarm bell, every day. And he was saying, you know he's actually gonna be a tyrant. And it's, you know, it's not safe. And this was a very unpopular view at the time because the UK wasn't interested in getting into another war.

Chris Ellis (51:18):

They had a philosophy of appeasement. But by the time everybody realized that he was right, he was the only person who had invested the time and energy into figuring out a solution. And so he was the actually only person who was fit to lead them through that crisis. And when I think about starting a company, believing in something that nobody else does, helps you to achieve something that nobody else can. And if you are experiencing people telling you that you're not going to be successful and that your idea doesn't make sense, you might just be on the right path and you should just keep going.

Pablo Srugo (51:55):

I love that. I wanna end there, but I have to pull on just one thread really quick. You mentioned a lot of people said your idea wouldn't work. What, what's the, tell me more, like, I'm not talking about names, but just tell me more about that. Like which type of people, what idea and like when sort of thing.

Chris Ellis (52:10):

You know, a lot of it were kind of the initial folks who had were leading go to market at major brokerages or major insurance companies, and they said, oh, it'll never be ready for prime time. And oh, don't, you know, the economics of it don't make sense. Or, you know, the only customers that actually use it are these kinds of rural cash strapped small businesses and the, you know rural areas. And they were right, actually a lot of the things that they said were true. But what they hadn't considered was that those were problems that could be solved through technology ingenuity and the natural shift over the past few years of the individual market plans getting better, less expensive, and more parity with traditional health plans. And nobody at the time, a couple years ago, necessarily could have predicted that shift.

Chris Ellis (53:00):

We had this intuition, this feeling that actually it does make sense. It is getting better every year. If you play this for 10 years, it's going to look much different in 10 years than it does now. And when we talked to customers, I remember I was taking my dog to this dog trainer. He lived in rural Texas. I had to drive like two hours out. He was in the middle of this, you know, field in the middle of nowhere. And I'm walking to pick up our dog and we're walking around the grounds and he's this big Texan guy with suspenders and the cowboy hat and everything. He has a big barn that says Texas a&m on it. And it was his alma mater, and I was telling him you know, thank you so much.

Chris Ellis (53:42):

Our dog is so amazing. Thanks for watching. We were on a trip. And he asked me, so what do you do? I was like, oh, I'm in tech. He's like, oh, what kind of tech? Well, we help small companies like you get health benefits. And I explained to him how it works. And he's like, oh, you mean the individual markets? Like,I have this problem myself. I have these employees that we can't pay and, and it's really hard to do it. I have to do it through the salary. And, and he just started talking for 20 minutes about how great this idea was and how he really wanted to use it himself. And I remember like, no, none of these experts are talking to like this person, right, who is like on the ground, who is having the problem and actually experiences it. And when I think about having that resilience part of it, you know, it can't just be the resilience of insanity. Like you, you have to have, you have to have some validation that you're on the right path. But the validation is much more important when it comes from customers than when it comes from experts. And that's why listening to your customers is the most important thing.

Pablo Srugo (54:38):

I fully agree, and I'm a firm believer that if people have problems, the problems will get solved because things move forward. We don't know when, but it's not a matter of if it's just a matter of time. And I think a lot of times the incumbents are so stuck in seeing things just be that way that they start to assume it'll always be that way. But you know, that's the beauty of capitalism is it'll find the problems and over time and at some point when the tech aligns, it'll figure out a way to solve them. Anyways, Chris, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. This has been great. 

Chris Ellis (55:14):

Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Pablo Srugo (55:16):

So picture this, it's months from now, years from now, and one of your founder friends, a really close founder, friends of yours, guess what? Their startup went bankrupt. And it turns out, if you had just shared the product market fit show with them, they would've learned everything they needed to, to find product market fit, and to create a huge success. But instead, their startup has completely failed. You have blood on your hands. Don't let that happen. You don't wanna live like that. It is terrible. So do what you need to do. Tell them about the show. Send it to them, put it on WhatsApp, put it on Slack, put it where you need to put it. Just make sure they know about it and they check it out.