Ed Buckley - Great Distribution Beats a Great Product

Mr. Ed, how are you?

I'm lovely. How are you boys doing?

Doing well, doing well.

A while since we last connected. I mean, I think I'm two companies in since the last time we talked, you know.

But it's really difficult for you because you have been in exit so many companies and doing so many things.

So it's like uh it's hard to keep up with you for sure.

Uh yeah, it's fun. I love it. Gotta stay busy.

We were just thinking about uh recording a little introduction, and we were like, where do we even start? Like which which company should we mention? Um, how do we mention all of them in 30 seconds? It's it's almost impossible.

It's it's very difficult. It's very difficult, yeah.

But that's the beautiful thing that now we have a lot of things to talk about. Yes. Between all the features that you've made before, all the companies that you built, all the exits, so many things. So it's really cool. It's really, really cool.

Well, Ed, to jump in, we want to start with a few rapid fire questions to kind of heat up, and then we can dive into all their experiences. Uh, as you know, we really want to focus on the highs and lows of building products and companies. So anything you can share and you're willing to share is more than welcome, especially the lows and especially the shortcomings, the wrong decisions, and where you really had to learn rather than actually only where succeeding. So um, but yeah, let's kick it off with some some rapid fire questions. Let's do it. Tampa or Miami? Tampa. Water Street Tampa. Kind of had a guess to be honest, but yeah.

AI in classrooms, yes or no?

Yes. Big yes. Overhyped or underhyped about the same question of AI in classroom.

I think it's overhyped right now, but where it works, it works exceedingly well. Mountains or beach? I used to be a beach person, but it's so hot in Florida, I crave the mountains in the cold air right now.

I can imagine, I can imagine.

I agree.

Favorite sport to watch?

Oh. Tennis. Definitely tennis. Wimbledon just happened.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who did you root for in the final?

Well, this is a big in my family, they're all tennis fans. So, like everyone wants to see center succeed. He's just a good guy, right? The women's was hard because it was, you know, two fairly unknown people from the same country. So there wasn't a lot of dog in the fight there. The women's is far more wide open than the men's, you know, right now. And it's in it, it's a transition period, right? Novak's going out, center's kind of on the rise, and Alcaraz wasn't even in the tournament. So Yeah.

So almost decided before the tournament.

Favorite sport to practice?

Really, the only sport that I do is running and triathlons, which you could make a joke is just exercising professionally. It's not really a sport, but that's what I do.

So that's the count. Um, now that you're getting back into the schooling part, school system, what was your favorite school subject growing up?

Ooh, I loved science and math. And so when I got into calculus and physics, I was like, oh, it's the two of them together. This is awesome. So I loved that.

I'm gonna do a follow-up on this one then. What was your kind of nightmare subject that you hated?

I thought English literature or literature in general was not good. Not that I don't like stories, but the way that we do it in school as like a class kind of sucked. I love to debate about the stories, but that's not it was about write boring reports about a book that is really long and boring.

So maybe it's because we are getting old. And when you are getting old, you like to learn more about your past, or maybe I don't know. That's why I'm very deep on the story and history in from America and Latin America and Europe and everything. That's why I love to learn.

Isn't that funny? As you get older, you become more reflective, right? Yes, you become, I guess maybe that's where wisdom comes from, is you finally open up to becoming reflective and learning the lessons of the past that when you're young and impetuous, you kind of are just headstrong and don't listen to.

I agree. When you're young, you're running all the time. I I'm running still, but it's like you're not running the same way. You are running, but now you are trying to trust and you find something more bigger than yourself, and then you start to reflect about your you know behaviors and how can you manage the stress and if you have a family, whatever. So it's you are putting things in perspective, and that's why maybe you start to learn from the past.

I heard someone's analysis one time about that, about why, especially men are so headstrong when they're younger. And it's like, well, because you're having to break into the pack, which is trying to keep you down, right? Like you're you are having to break into it, which is why you're this young, energetic, high testosterone person, because you have to have that something to exist to survive the like coming into the pack and being accepted.

I think so. It makes sense, at least. Makes a lot of sense. And let me go with the last one so we can go into the widths and all your experience, because I really want to know which company was the most challenging to build.

Because then in Pierfit, we started a second business, which was Pierfit Move. That was the first time that I learned, ooh, I'm doing this again. It's it's easier, right? Like I things, you just know things more. And then Fit on Health was a little bit easier. And then Scholar had a lot of like smoothness and sort intelligence, right? So that was the first, because at that point, all I had really done is Peer Fit, right? And so you never got to start over to see what new skills you had acquired. So Peer Fit one was by far the most difficult, and it took the longest, right? So almost every one of my companies since we've gone from zero to a million in revenue in a year, right? Almost every single one of them we've done that. Peer fit took us like five years to get to a million in revenue, probably. So why do you think that that is so?

Like, is it really missing knowledge that you had? Because, like, yeah, first time you're building from scratch, you're you're making a lot of mistakes, or is it also somewhat missing resources, missing network, all these things that you start building obviously with your first company that you can now leverage in a second, third, fourth company? Or like if you have to boil it down to some of the reasons why it's the most challenging one, like what would you say?

So I think I can provide a fairly objective answer here. Because what you're asking is if Ed 15 years ago was handed $2 million, you didn't have to worry about raising gap, and would he have been able to get to a million in revenue in the first year? No. Well, absolutely not. Wouldn't happen. I would have burned through the cash. We would have made some stupid thing that I thought was good that the customers didn't want. And what I hadn't fully appreciated, what I would say, like if you could boil down why have they been more successful, the maxim that I have is I'd rather have a good product with great distribution than a great product with good distribution, right? And so what you start to learn is distribution matters a lot. You can have the best product in the world, but if you don't know the right way to get it into the market at scale efficiently to the right people, who cares? Right. So I'd I'd rather have a pretty good product that I know how to get right into people's hands because then also once people are using your product, you'll get the feedback to improve that product fairly rapidly if you know how to listen. But getting distribution right is something that I think a lot of first time founders, myself included, you know, when I started, they don't pay that much attention to. And you can see it in their decks. Like now that I also am an investor and have invested, you know, in startups, these founders bring you these decks. And it's like, okay, out of the 20 slides, 12 of them are on the product. And then you've got eight slides for market opportunity, competition, finance, projections. And it's like, flip that, right? I want three slides on your product. I want to spend the rest of the time looking at the market and your distribution strategy. That's what I care about.

And it's I like I would even argue it's becoming even more important right now with like the AI age of building fast and you can accelerate engineering and data science, et cetera. Distribution is one of the modes, I would say, that's still out there for great companies. So, like, what's your feeling there on how distribution is changing right now? And like, how's your way thinking about it? And I do want to ask you this from a product lens, because often people build product, but they forget about distribution or they don't have that go-to-market site clearly in set. So, like, what is your take on how is distribution changing and how should someone from a product perspective really have a lens on this change in distribution? Today was kind of like the AI push coming along.

If you make the assumption that within reason, almost anyone can create a decent product now of any type, right? You can have entrepreneurs of one, a company of one, because to your point, you can build a bunch of agents around you, you can code and build a bunch of things. So you can at least get to a NVP level product. So if you assume that that capability is almost accessible to anyone who wants it, then you have to say, like, okay, what really matters then? Like, because then anyone can build a copycat of what you do fairly quickly and easily. So that's no longer a moat. Well, then the moat is your reputation and trustworthiness, people who want to do business with you, relationships once you get them, and then to your point, distribution. Like those kind of become everything. And I'll and I'll use Scholar as an example. When we started three years ago, it was like everyone was building point solution, AI point solutions for the classroom. And I told Marley, because Marley had spent her entire career in the schools, not in, you know, startups. Listen, I've raised a lot of capital. I've done growth before. The pathway will be 90% of these companies will be dead in a year. They don't know how to raise capital and they don't understand distribution. Most of them are teachers who are like, oh, I just want to vibe code some solution. And they haven't really thought downstream. And once again, I try to measure things objectively. And what I pointed Marley to was, you know, we were able to get that, you know, a million dollars in contracts in our first year. And she was then going out and talking to other startups who'd been around three, four, five years, had never even achieved that yet. Right. And the reason was we focused on distribution from like day one. Like that was incredibly important.

So for you, you are going to build more startups and you're going to build more companies, of course. So for you, the first thing that you have in your mind is how you're going to distribute XYZ product and then you build the product. Or how how is your process?

Always starting with the problem, right? Like there is some unmet need in the market.

Yeah, 100%.

Who's you have to ask yourself two things? Who's going to consume the product and who's going to pay for it? I generally don't do direct-to-consumer. I almost always do enterprise. Obviously, when you're doing D2C, the consumer's also the person paying. But in enterprise, that's not the case. And so I always ask myself, like, what is it that the consumer of the product needs to see and feel? And then the person who's buying it on their behalf, how do I get to them as leverage and as quick as possible? Right. So let's go back to peer fit. We went direct to employer just to get the first few cases. And then we focused on insurance companies to be our leverage distribution. And yeah, to close that first insurance contract might take 12 or 18 months. And your board and investors are in that 12 to 18 months will start to lose faith a little bit of like, where's the revenue? But then that one comes on and it gives you three years worth of revenue that you could never have achieved otherwise, right? That's how I generally try to approach enterprises where is the most leveraged distribution point? And just get laser focused on how do we get there.

Do you want to ask something, Jeminus?

I I want to I have a follow-up in mind. I mean, I have many questions coming to mind. It's hard to put them all one after another. But like for me, like when you think about distribution now, and we're taking this example of okay, enterprise B2B mode, how much is the product somewhat responsible to do part of the distribution? Or is distribution something like really about go-to-market channels, certain kind of channel partnerships that you build out? Like, how do you how do you think about distribution if you have to kind of break it down into different pieces, so to say? And if you want to take Scholar as an example or any of the previous examples, that's that's great.

So if you think about what you're asking from the product perspective, i.e., how much of this motion is your sales and marketing team versus your product, right?

Almost like a sales led growth, product led growth type of disclosure and how much of a bundle or mix, yeah.

Right. Well, when you think about D2C things, I mean your product better be really good at referrals, spreading, sharing, right? It's like that you've got to have that. Because it's just so difficult to get to a consumer and get them to activate. So you want to turn the one that you activated into like four, five, six, seven of their friends. Okay. In enterprise, what you're thinking about is what are the metrics that the person who's paying for it will look at downstream of its users, right? And that is where the product-led spread happens. So let's just say Marco is the purchaser, he's the head of procurement at this company. He's not going to use the software. The software's for the employees, and Jonas, you're, you know, an employee there. What I'm looking at is like, how does when Jonas use it? That's the D2C part of like, will it propagate to his coworkers to use? Right. So you need the product to help you share within the ecosystem, which does look different than a pure D2C market where they could share it with anyone. They can only share it with their coworkers, right? So, what is the thing that would make them talk about it or share it? And how do they share it? Can they, you know, share it directly? Do they have to go through an internet? Did it have to get activated? So that's where you have to think about it from a product perspective. And then we've got to boil it down to say, Marco's evaluating it. Does he care the number of people who are using it, or does he only need a handful of power users to use it a lot, right? Those are two completely different types of approaches, which is I'm not trying to get everyone to use it. I just need the people who use it to be obsessed with it, versus they're going to look at activation rate. They don't care how often, how much, it's just like, I want some percentage, some made-up number. I need 20% of my employees to be using it. Otherwise, I don't think it's worth paying for. Right. So that question will generally answer the different product features that you want to focus on. But to the question about like enterprise sales, you basically have to have two concurrent things, which is I need a motion to get to Marco, and then a campaign to reinforce the data so he feels good about his purchase. And then I need a campaign to the employees, Jonas, to use it and either use it a bunch or propagate it to the people around him. That makes sense. That's great.

That's beautiful. And when you're thinking about the distribution, do you have like a sweet spot in terms of the type of people that you have to sell? I mean, for example, product area, more on the technology with the engineers or with the data scientists. Do you have like a sweet spot over there? Or because normally it's a completely different way you have to approach. If you go with the engineers, they don't want to talk with no one. If you go with the product team, they have a different mindset. They need to know how I can improve what they are doing. What about that?

You know what? I am uniquely positioned now versus a few years ago, whereas, you know, at Peer Fit and FitOn, we sold to the same group of people, right? And then we expanded into Medicare. So it was like a mirrored group. But then Scholar, all of a sudden selling to schools and legislatures, never had done. Then Sword Intelligence, we're selling to hospital IT and chief of medicine people. So now if you talk about in three years, we've sold to employers, to insurers, to Medicaid plans, to schools, to legislatures, and then to hospital IT and chief medical officers. So I've kind of seen the gambit. And I would say that was one of my favorite things about sword intelligence, is that sale was so different than anything I had ever done. Normally I could get a great salesperson who understood benefits or understood, you know, one thing. We're selling to an insurance company, we're selling to an employer. It can be sales, the sales team can do everything. But with sword intelligence, that pitch is like head of engineering is in on it from our side, head of product is in on our side, and the business person is there. Because we've got to talk really in-depth about the product integrations, we've got to talk about the engineering concerns, and then we're going to have to talk about the business relationship. And so, you know, that's one that would take six meetings, you know, to get through because it was so layered and so nuanced. And it is, it is funny because you don't expect your engineers and product people to have the charm and charisma of a salesperson, but you also can't let them go in there and be a stereotype, ho-hum, you know, engineer or product person. And so I had two amazing people that we brought into Sword Intelligence, right? Rick, who was led our product, and JP, who led engineering. And actually, the way that we got JP was was funny. So when I started Sword Intelligence, it was under Sword, and they said, build this up. You can take some people, you can recruit some people from Sword, you can go hire people, right? Do whatever you want to do. And JP was actually our liaison from the parent co. And he was presenting us with engineers that we would be interested in. And he gives me this whole list, and I said, What isn't your name on this list? And he's like, I was told to present to you. And I'm like, Cool, I want you because you know how to present. And I was like, This is going to be such an engineering-led presentation in sales. I needed an engineer who had a great personality and that you could put out in meetings and eat wow people. And it was a full charm offensive, and we ultimately got him, and he was an amazing, amazing uh person to work with.

Definitely, yes. I mean, that type of you know, personalities is really difficult to find. Someone who is really on the development engineer part and that can talk that way, but at the same time have the charm to talk. It's a really weird or difficult, you know, type of persona to find.

Well, and if I could follow up also on that one, the one why that was probably one of the better learning experiences for me was okay, I'm starting a new startup, but it's under another company. Oh, wait, and a bunch of it's gonna be in other countries where I don't speak the language. So normally I'm the number one salesperson. I can just go in and charm anybody and life will be great. But all of a sudden I was like, I'm going in. We're gonna have engineering discussions that are above my head. And in some meetings, I won't even be speaking the language. So I had to learn how to lead in a completely different way than Pierfit, where I was the subject matter expert and I was the best salesperson, you know, and everything was in my kind of realm where all of a sudden I had to learn how to truly be someone who empowered and trusted everyone. And I was really there to support them rather than like lead from the front. So it was an amazing learning experience for sure.

That's a leader at the end of the day, right? You have to empower other people to start doing what you need to. And yeah.

It's hard to do, right? It's hard to do. You want to do everything yourself. It's a very, very difficult discipline for sure.

Very founder.

That's awesome. I want to switch gears here a little bit. So you mentioned already a bit of obviously the different companies you've been at, but maybe you can just put us through the order of things, like okay, what was first, second, third, fourth, and kind of how did one thing evolve to the next one? And then from there, diving a bit into yeah, what was the toughest moments, the challenges along that way? That would be amazing.

Yeah. So started Peer Fit when I was in school at University of Florida. And we built that business up, raised some good capital, had some professional sports team owners on our board, on our cap table, got a lot of accolades when Florida was very difficult to raise capital, you know, in and from. And then after having that business for probably six years or something, we decided to start a second business called Peer Fit Move. And it would basically be an analogous business that sold into Medicare. And so that different the product and support act look and act differently enough, where by and large, we had two teams under the same, you know, family banner. Then COVID hit and we did a deal with Peloton where we sold off. Part of the business and part of the company team-wise to Peloton. And that was it's its own interesting story. And then two years later, Fiton, the largest fitness app, came and did a full takedown of the business and kept it as a wholly owned sub. And I stayed on as CEO. And they are consumer. We were enterprise, and the board said, we're gonna have to pick a lane. Like we can't, you can't have two quarterbacks. One of them's gonna have to be the main focus. And the board decided that enterprise needed to be the growth focus. So we ended up putting the brands together so it wasn't fit on and peer fit anymore. It became fit on health, right? And ran that business. We five X'd it in three years. So it was great growth from a pretty mature business already. And then my time ended there after we brought in a private equity group who took out all the Peer Fit investors and recapped that business. So then I left there. During the last year or so of my time there, started Scholar concurrently. So I teamed up with Marley and we started Scholar. And then a year and a half ago, I did Sword Intelligence. So Sword called me up and said, we've got some AI assets. We need them commercialized. We can't do it inside of the Parent Co. This will be the first time we've allowed like a subco-startup basically to exist. So built that team, figured out what to commercialize it with, got it up and running, got some really interesting deals done, and then rolled it inside of the Sword Health Parent Co. So it could operate more like the other units as they get bigger and restructure. And now at Scholar, you know, we're three years in. We've got the classroom software, which has been great. But we've just started Scholar Health. So it's a subco underneath of it. And it is a digital health company inside of education, right? So it's basically a digital psychology practice so that we can do learning disability evaluations, giftedness evaluations. Yeah. So that's where we are now.

Sorry, I need to go back a little bit. I really want to know what happened and how was the those conversations with Peloton? Can you tell us a little bit about what happened?

Yeah, they were a really great team, and I've stayed connected to them years later. And a lot of my team are still there, right? So I talked to my, you know, former PeerFit team who are still there quite often. You know, that was a wild time. You should literally talking like, if I went back and looked at the emails, probably like March 21st or March 23rd that me and the CEO of Peloton started chatting, and the world was crazy at that time. Nobody knew what was gonna happen, right? And we sure as heck didn't know their stock was about to go up from $5 to $150, you know, during that time. But, you know, we looked at it. The pitch was we have a lot of dollars from health insurance companies that are gonna need to be spent on fitness. In-person fitness is a huge question mark, but digital fitness isn't. And you guys are the name of digital fitness, you know, maybe there's something there. And ultimately the deal that was put together was, you know, they didn't want the whole company because we had so many gym partners makes sense, right? But they still wanted the underlying knowledge, capability, and the platform that could do what we did. So we put together a really great deal that gave them what they wanted and gave us what we wanted, and here we are all these years later.

Now, how did you start with that conversation with the CEO of Peloton?

I had met John years before and total founder thing, like basically forced him to meet with me when he was leaving a speech and just told him something that he really needed to hear. And I think, you know, a lot of times the higher up you are, people kiss your ass all the time. So I told him what I thought he needed to hear. And the next day I got an email at 9 a.m. from his president, and he says, I don't know who you are, but you clearly made an impression on John because he said, You will go call this person this morning. He said, So I don't know if you're important or what, but it John made me meet with you. So we'd looked at doing a partnership, and you know, it just wasn't a priority with how we were structuring it, but we had built a relationship over that time, you know, with the company. So when COVID hit, I reached out to him and said, We got money from insurance, you got fitness, we should probably look at that partnership. And the message I got back was, no, we should look at buying the whole company, not a partnership. And I was like, okay. And that's how we went down that path.

That's crazy, right? When you're starting to connect the dots, like why and how did you get started connected with him and all the communication that you have between you and and John, it's impressive. It's really impressive how the world works.

Well, I think the lesson is don't ever be disappointed that you don't get what you think you want in that exact moment. Right? Everyone wants, oh, I need to get to this person. And if I can get to them, then I should be able to convince them and get it right then. It's like, no, we actually didn't get what we wanted via that partnership. But then we built a relationship. And so two years, when the time and conditions were right, then it blossomed, right? So you never know when you're going to be in a useful position for someone, and vice versa, when they're going to be in a useful position for you. So it's just always to build a network because you like the person and you're impressed with what they do. And maybe you can do something for them. Maybe you can't, but you never know how it'll unfold in the future.

I agree. That's something that we were learning all the time. It's like uh you have to be authentic. That's the first thing, and then try to help. And you never know. Yeah. You never know. Just be a good person, period. And then build a relationship all about it's how can you build a relationship with the other person? That's it. And keep that relationship, right?

Yeah. There's some saying that's like people do business with people they want to do business with. So it's like, don't be a jerk, be easy to work with. It's pretty simple. Exactly. I agree. I agree.

And it's a great reminder as well of like just getting out of the comfort zone, right? Like, how often are you at a conference, you see that one person, you're like, oh, I should talk to the person, and then you're not, you're ending up, you know, like finding any stupid excuse of why you're not talking to the person. And it's great when you get out of the comfort zone and you're like, even if it's just a few words, you never know where this leads to. And in your case, it led all the way to you know being partly quiet by peloton, which is great.

Well, it's funny you say it. So to be very clear, what actually happened was he spoke way longer than he was supposed to. And then they were gonna do a QA, and they're like, oh, we've only got time for one or two questions. I literally like pushed my way to the front. As soon as I realized they were gonna still do QA, I'm like, I'm gonna go start the line. Right. So I know at least I'll get to ask a question. And I asked a really provocative question that I didn't think he would have an answer for, business wise, which then the only solution would be, well, then you should work with us. And so it was such a provocative thing that afterwards I went over to him. I'm like, if you're interested in having the solution that you're looking for, we should talk.

So really smart. That's awesome. Along those, along those, the journey and like all these different experiences, building products, building companies, like what have been the toughest moments? Like, what have been the moments where you were like sitting there in your room and you're like, fuck, I have no idea how to solve this, or I don't know what's next. Or, you know, like we often talk about the great moments, the acquisitions, the exits, the fundraising rounds, and and when things are really going great. But obviously, along a journey of so many companies, there must have been a lot of down moments as well. What can you share?

I think the hardest moments are human moments, right? So you've got staff who's just not working out. And now you're gonna have to confront that with them and their team, especially if they're well liked. Maybe if they're jerks, everyone's like, good, get rid of them, right? But you've got someone on your team who's just not working out and they're really nice. Or you've got a client who loves you and they're just not getting use and value out of the product, right? Those are sometimes I think the hardest moments because you're like, oh, I I like working with you, but it's just not working, right? Like we've had that. If you've been in business, you've had a client say, Hey, on paper, this was everything I'm looking for. But my people just, for whatever reason, they're too busy, they don't like it, it's not hitting with them. And that kind of sucks, right? It'd be easier if they hated you, but they're like, Man, I really like working with you, but this just product isn't unlocking what we thought it would unlock for us. Because then you've got to look back at your team and you're like, what's not working? On paper, this group, this is a group who wants to use it. On paper, it is what they're looking for, but it just isn't working. And that's a really hard introspective discussion. Because if you're in the product org, you can look at it from like, as we talked about earlier, are we getting activations? Does activations get them to come back? Are they spreading it to their others? That's how you look at it. From my viewpoint, what I end up looking at is like, where's the system breaking down? Product is one piece of that. But like the account management part, the sharing the information and data part is feedback from the field getting back to our product team, right? We've all built features that are like this is totally what they're looking for, and nobody uses it, right? And it is, and then you go and talk to the users, and they're like, oh, well, what I was really looking for was this. And you're like, I wish I knew that before, right? And at Scholar, we went into it saying, we kind of don't know what the teachers want in the age of AI, but let's just start getting things into their hand and listen. And so what now is effectively the whole business, which is focusing on special education, started as just literally one piece. And it wasn't a piece we designed from our thoughts. The teacher said, Well, if it's already doing X and Y for me, why isn't it doing Z for me? And Z was special education accommodations. And I'm like, Oh, sure, we can, yeah, we can do that. And so we didn't build it because we're so smart. The teacher came to us and was like, Why, why haven't you built this for me yet? And that one feature ended up turning into basically the whole company. And, you know, that's a lesson I told Marley early on, as I said, Marley, no matter what we're doing today, whatever we become successful for, we're not even doing it right now. Right. And if you can mentally grasp that, probably happens 90% of successful startups, not all of them, but probably 90%, like whatever you're doing on day zero, probably will be nothing similar to what you actually end up finding the fit and scaling.

I love it. It's it's so aligned to the name of the podcast, even, because this feature will save us. It's like, how often did we thought about like this is the one, this is the one that's gonna be the killer feature. And then you end up, okay, it was something totally different, or it was something totally unexpected.

It's like a compliance regulatory administrative feature, and now it's the whole company. And to the thing of like this feature will save us. Had we not done special education, I'm not so sure Scholar would have ended up finding something because it's such a crowded field and everyone's doing it, right? And now you also have this backlash of compressing screen time and limiting technology in schools. So this is something that is truly a pain point, which is there are kids out there who need their education tethered. They're either gifted or they're falling behind. And then there is a regulatory required set of things that you must do to support them. So it's not a nice to have, it's a must-have. But it's also not the sexiest thing. Like people in Silicon Valley aren't rolling out of bed being like, let's go build features for special education. So for us, it's like highly regulated industry, schools, government. It's kind of difficult. Kids who are falling behind in schools, it's highly sensitive. And then, like I said, it isn't like there's not, you're not going to take out a billboard about it. So it really is a unique thing that went from being one feature to now being the whole company, to now we're starting a second company in Scholar Health dedicated to this problem.

I love it. And I think again, it it gets back into the beginning of the conversation that we were saying about the features. And it's really impressive that you now because we were talking about the difference between prefit and what you're building today. It took at the very beginning six years to build a one billion company one million company, and now it it takes one year for you. But it's because now you are learning to listen your clients, listen exactly the problems that they are struggling, and you have time. And before you were running all the time, let's run, run, run this feature and the other feature and the other and the other. And again, today the problem is not to build features because now you can build all the features that you want in one hour.

Cloud will do it for you. You don't even have to build anything. Cloud does it.

Yeah, exactly. That's crazy because now there's the big struggle that we have to confront is that we need to invest more time with your clients or with your potential clients to solve this specific problem. Maybe it will be just one small feature. But again, if you go into regulated businesses and everything, that's where you can scale. It's crazy. It's it's I'm very aligned with that. I'm very, very aligned.

I want to follow up on the a bit what like Marco just said right now. When thinking about like building now a company in today's world, so like right now, literally with the AI going on, is there kind of like for you a new rule of thumb of like how much time spent on listening to the client versus actually building the product versus trying to build out go to market versus uh and maybe it's too high-level that question, but how is this changing now? Is there a need to be even more custom? Before custom wasn't great, right? Investors hate it. Like if you have to do custom work for one client, it's like, no way, like this is never gonna scale, this is impossible. Do we see there a new opportunity now opening up where there is an opportunity to maybe be more custom? And I want to actually add a bit of root context here as well for you. Like, we have always said like we are the plaid for wearable health data, for health data. Plaid being kind of like an infrastructure play of we connect the dots and we provide the infrastructure for you to build. And now we're often saying like we want to become maybe more of a palantier. So, yes, the AI layer, yes, the intelligence, yes, the infrastructure, but maybe a consultant kind of level of business on top of it. Maybe that approach of customization actually becomes important right now. And AI is enabling us to do that still at scale.

So I'll focus this to the most recent businesses because that's the AI era, right? So sword intelligence was hey, we have six products, and the customization is you can buy one through six together in an assembly line if all you need is one, if all you need is one and four, if you need one, four, and six, we'll put them together, customized to your experience. So it was a bit of like we have items on a shelf that we know provide value. You can customize which ones you're getting, and then we can personalize those into your existing stack, right? So a bit a bit of both to your to your point. Uh scholar, the way to think about this is customization. I'll use the phrase, is the enterprise fit, and personalization is the individual fit. And so by and large, the customization into a school, and every school's slightly different. There's probably, let's call it, 10% variance that we will allow. Otherwise, you will just death by a thousand cuts. Use a slightly different third-party sync system, cool. Use a slightly different protocol on rostering, fine. But after that, the experience into the classroom is going to look largely the same, right? The integrations might be slightly unique. Then within the classroom, it's about personalizing it. So there's three of us. Let's say Marco's gifted, Jonas is right in the middle, and I'm falling behind. I have a learning disability. So what we are able to do is impersonalize the lesson that everyone should learn that day, right? We're learning about the moon. Marco gets a little bit more, bigger words, extra questions. Jonas delivers the lesson as it's meant to be. And I get easier, chopped-up versions of that lesson that's chunked out. And it's at a much, much simpler thing. So, in that sense, we all got the same visual experience and user experience, but it was personalized to where we were on a particular variable, in this case, you know, learning capabilities. I think that that's the balance you want to have is if you are solving a real problem, yeah, you can have some 10% variance per customer in setup. And then you have the ability for personalization at the individual level. But if at the enterprise customization level you're always moving it around, you're not really solving the real problem then, right? You haven't found it quite yet. You're close, but you haven't quite found it. That's great insight.

We're coming up on time here, Ed. And uh, we would love to chat probably for another two. We do this forever. Yes.

Yeah. You blow my mind in different ways. So, I mean, what's really great. Yeah, we definitely need to have a follow-up chat.

There's a lot of questions, like personally, really like interesting for us as a learning curve as well. So, really appreciate your time. We can't let you go, obviously, without having to do the final question, which is what feature will save us? So, whatever you can share of what you're currently building, what is this new next killer feature you have in mind for Scholar or for any of the other companies that you are still somewhat involved in? We'd love to hear it.

So I've talked about the classroom. I talked about the evals, I will talk about the one thing I haven't talked, which is the middle between those two, which is the schools have to write plans. So the child gets evaluated. You need the plan to be instituted in the classroom. But writing the plan today is very manual, very analog, takes months. So the feature that we are working on right now is how do you digitize that process so that the school psychologists, the school teachers, the administration can go from analog back and forth of taking months. And I can't even tell you what the feature is going to be quite yet, because we're really building it from listening to these professionals. It's like, what is the killer feature that is going to unlock the most value, compress the timeline, but still make them feel like they're in control and they're in charge of the quality of that plan. So when we discover that feature, that will be a killer feature that will save a lot of schools, a lot of heartache, and will help both the schools and the families have a much shorter timeline to get that done. I love it.

Perfect. Thank you so much for your time. Super appreciate it. Thanks for having me.