Slow is smooth, smooth is fast — Mac Reddin on building Commsor as a VC-backed founder

# Revenue Reimagined Podcast Transcript

Everyone knows MVP, but have you heard of SLC before? SLC, so MVP, right? Minimum viable product. SLC is sort of like a counter-MVP and it stands for Simple Lovable Complete. So instead of trying to build a minimum viable product, you should build the simplest, most complete thing that could be lovable by an end customer.

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagined Podcast. We are so thrilled to be joined by the very first founder who is joining this show, and that is by design. We'll get into that a little bit later why we chose Mac to be the very first founder. But with us today is Mac Reen, the CEO of Commor, who has coined the term that you're now seeing all over the place. I'm looking at it on my LinkedIn screen right now. Go to network. Mac, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks, thanks for having me.

Yes, super pumped to have you. The first one we got our Dino hoodies on, so representing the crew, representing the team as we're reimagining revenue. And just this whole go-to-market is like completely changing. One of the things that I always like to talk to founders about is their origin story. Like, what's that emotional connection? Like, what made you start the company? What drives that passion so that the audience can feel like why you started this company?

Oh man, there are like nine different ways I can answer that question, even though I feel like I've answered that question a million times because it's always like the classic question every founder gets. But every VC, right? Mac, tell me what your origin story is. Man, why did you do this? Tell us your background. Tell us about yourself.

Not a background. I could care less. Not. I'm really the emotional connection on why you built it.

So I have been a founder since I was seventeen. I've basically never had a normal job. I had one stint where I sold a company and worked for like six months for a British company I sold it to, and I hated it and I was a terrible employee and never went back. And that's a whole rabbit hole for another time.

I'm jotting it down.

It makes sense that I take notes. They've all had like they've all had some element of community to them. So my first business was actually built on top of Minecraft, the video game. It had a huge community element to it. I'm going over like the super spark notes version right now.

So I used to joke that I was like, I've been a community builder for fifteen years—unintentional for six years and intentionally for six, seven, however many years—because it wasn't until I exited that first Minecraft business and stepped back and was like, okay, you know, I've been a bootstrapper. I've worn like you know, eight million hats as a founder here. And I realized one, the power of community and how it had impacted our business. And two, the community building aspect had been kind of the hat I had enjoyed wearing the most of all the hats. So that started me shifting into this community intentional world. And "Comm," and that's the C-O-M in the name, comes from started as a community-led growth company. So we were sort of at the tip of the spear on this community growth movement, you know, two, three, four years ago when we started.

So for me emotionally, I mean, it actually started as an accident. Product Hunt had a no-code hackathon. You had two days to build a prototype of a product without using any code. You had to use only no-code tools. So Commor was Comm sponsor originally, which is where you can see where the short name came from. No intention of being in business. I was just having fun hacking away for a weekend. Kept hacking away on it weekend after weekend. Suddenly started making money. And long story short, became this community-led growth tool.

And then I guess even longer story, even shorter, that evolved into go-to-network when we realized that the original idea of helping communities, or helping companies measure their community, was misguided. Because companies don't have a community. They might have a community that's owned by a community team. They might have a community you point to and you're like, that's their community on Slack or here or wherever. But in reality, companies are made up of lots of different overlapping networks. Hence, go-to-network. And where that all came from.

So a lot of it was kind of, I don't know if it's like an intentional emotional connection as much as it's just like, I've always been building things that I enjoyed and building for myself. I'm a builder by trade. I'm a generalist. I can do a little bit of coding, a little bit of selling, a little bit of design. A little bit of everything. But you know, I'm not a master of any one thing. And yeah, I always say like, if Comor were shut down tomorrow, I would probably start another company. And if that one shut down, I'd start another one. Because I just like building things. And sometimes they've been side projects, sometimes they've turned into huge venture-backed companies, usually somewhere in the middle. But I love that it just kind of happened.

I love that serial entrepreneur. And those are the best kind, right? You are the entrepreneur that heads of sales will line up to work with because you've done it before and you've done it successfully. You know, when we're coaching folks, often times the first piece of advice is if you could find a multiple-time founder, you have a much better chance of success than with a first-time founder. No offense to any first-time founders listening, but it's very hard being that head of sales with a first-time founder who hasn't gone through that before.

I always feel like I'm kind of both, weird leak, because this is my first time being VC-backed, which brings a different, it's a whole different world, right?

Yeah, it's a different, it's a different set of building blocks, right? So like, yeah, and I'm happy to talk about that later. But we've made the mistake of hiring the VP sales too early when we didn't need one. And we've done the classic VC-backed overfunded sales mistakes. So like there's a weird mix of like, yes, I've run companies before, but like also a lot of times they were small teams, bootstrapped. You know, the biggest company before Comor for me was fourteen people. And how many are you up to at Comor?

We're eighteen, nineteen now.

Okay, so we're already scaling it. Yeah.

So Mac, you've done quite a few startups. And when you're building a startup, especially a VC-backed startup, there's a ton of like common best practices or assumptions or things that like you should do, right? Like I'm sure you've had that board member who's been like, "Mac, you really need to do this because I've seen it work at my seventeen prior companies, only one of which has been successful."

What are some of the ones that you've just kind of thrown out the window or that you've challenged to really like help drive that growth?

All of them. I love it.

In general, I so interestingly enough, because I didn't come from like a traditional work at a startup, start a company, like the background is very untraditional for a multiple-time founder. I think Comor was successful early on because we weren't following a playbook. We were just like, we were just kind of, I don't know, leading more by vibes instead of data, if that makes sense for you. I know that makes a lot of people cringe or be upset, be like, "How dare you? The data. There is. As D and I tell everyone, every decision has to be backed by data."

I think it does. But also, when you're early, there is no data. So you have to kind of like, there's a trade-off of like, you kind of just have to wing it on a wing and a prayer and some gut feeling. And that got Comor to a point where VCs threw a bunch of money at us. And then once we raised a crazy preemptive Series B—because we're like the poster child for fundraising in 2020, 2021, 2022, when it was like if you had a heartbeat people would throw money at you, which is not the way it works anymore as any founder who's fundraising right now knows—but once we raised this Series B, this like impostor syndrome set in with me, where I was like, okay, I'm a Series B CEO now. There's always pressure. We got a board. I've never done this. Okay, now I have to start following the playbook. And I'm not saying that's the only reason, but like it definitely contributed. It almost killed us. Like, this pressure of too much money, follow the playbook. Like, the thing that made Comor unique got almost like washed away. And I didn't notice it because it happens slowly, right? It's not something that happens overnight. It took a year post-Series B for me to wake up one day and be like, "Wait, like, this is. I'm not being the founder I want to be. I'm not being the CEO I want to be. I'm not building the company that I set out to build. I've like, I'm following other people's playbooks on how to build companies over the last ten years."

And objectively, if you look at how companies have been built over the last ten years, they haven't worked. So like, why would you follow that playbook? I saw a stat the other day that was looking at like, it was like, what percent of tech companies who've gone public in the last decade have been profitable for more than two quarters in a row? The astoundingly was like four percent of them. It was like none of them. Like objectively, none of them.

# Transcript

So like, all these playbooks on how to build the next Uber, how to build this—it's like it didn't work. So why are we following that playbook?

**100%. Yeah, and you mentioned something in particular. So you hired a VP of sales based on this playbook, and probably the pressure from the board and having the money to spend it—build a team, grow, grow, grow. So what was the biggest challenge you saw? Not from a personal perspective, but why did that not jive? And what are your recommendations to founders getting into that situation?**

We definitely were getting pressure from investors and board. Just kind of like, you know, process pressure if you will. Like, "Oh, we need to have a founder who can't be doing sales if you're a Series B company." I mean, we also had the problem like we were a premature Series B company. So like we had the plenty of a Series B company, but we weren't actually a Series B company by stage or maturity, which is a whole separate type of tension.

But yeah, it was pressure from the board. And I think the mistake was we kind of hired for pedigree. Like, "Oh, this guy's been the sales leader and the sales director and the VP at this company, and they've done the good stuff." And this investor personally recommended them. And it was not from a personal reason, but the disconnect was they were expecting a Series B company with Series B maturity, which we weren't. So they were expecting to like, you know, sit in their ivory tower and dictate and manage, whereas we actually needed someone who was going to get in the trenches and help with that transition from founder-led sales to actually building a team. And I know that's something that is near and dear to both of your hearts—the transition from founder-led sales.

We jumped the gun a bit. We went too far ahead of what we actually needed. And then what was the biggest challenge? Was it like you didn't have the process documented? You were like, he was trying to do it, or you weren't mature enough? And I think there was a little bit of like, I was stubborn and bullheaded. Like, "No, this is how we do things." And he was stubborn and bullheaded. Like, neither of us wanted to come down and up to meet in the middle, which was problematic.

I also think fundamentally we were building a B2B software company, but our whole premise was that there was a different way to sell. Community-led growth was our whole thing. But then VCs were like, "Yeah, but if you're going to sell to companies, you need the BDR team, you need the BDR manager, you need the VP of sales." So suddenly we were trying to force a square peg into a round hole. We were trying to hire a sales team to run a process that was fundamentally not aligned with the very product we were building. We're like, "That's not even our ethos. Our ethos is to do it via network."

Yeah, that's not what we're selling to our customers. So why are we selling that way? Wait a second. This is— But like, you get caught up in the impostor feeling, like, "Okay, well, we've raised all this money. I've never done it, so I'm going to listen to other people because I don't know better."

Yeah, yeah. And hence why it's better to have a second or third-time founder, because you've already gone through that problem, and you would probably at this point push back on the VCs and the venture people. Be like, "Look, no."

Yeah, absolutely.

**So double-click on that for me. So you talk about being the poster child for just raising money, right? And those days are long gone. And kudos to you for being able to raise and hopefully turn it into an amazing company. But it's harder than ever now to raise money. You raised in that environment. The environment's changed, and you have to kind of balance the need for scale with the need for sustainability and responsibility. As Dale and I talk about, how do you manage that balance? That's a tight rope to walk, right?**

I don't know if there is a balance. There is no scale without sustainability anymore, right? I think that's the whole reason why the tech giants in the last 10 years have objectively not been great. You made 10 billion dollars, you lost 20, right? You spent 54 but you made 10. WeWork is a great example. They hit the scale game out of the park. Doesn't matter. It objectively doesn't matter.

So I think—I don't know who said it first, but I always heard it from my dad. My dad used to race cars for a living, and he used to always say, "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast." I think there's a lot of that that can apply to building and scaling a company. Where it's like, if you build it sustainably, then you can scale it sustainably. If you just go for scale and you skip over the things that actually make it foundationally worth scaling, like scaling for scaling sake is not a long-term good thing.

Yeah, and I think that's where you get the pressure from the investors as well, right? They're like, "I gave you money. You have to invest it. Scale." But you don't know where to scale because you haven't built the foundation. So building that foundational element is one of the more important things as you go through that process.

Yeah, and there could be an interesting, you know, give or take. Because some VCs would rather have you just throw money at the wall, and if it works, great. If it doesn't, they don't care. They got 72 other eggs in the basket, right?

Right. Whereas like, when you're a founder and you're like, "This is the thing, and I'm going to do this the next 10 years," like I can't just throw all the eggs at the wall in one go and just be like, "Well, I'll try again." I mean, actually, I guess with WeWork, I guess you can do that, but I don't know. This is not the way.

**And would you—like, now that you've gone through the VC pieces and you've started trying to do the scaling and all this other building—I would assume that you'd be more selective in the VCs or PE firms or whoever's investing in the company. Because you need someone that's going to be in the same mindset, philosophy, ecosystem that you're thinking about. Because you don't want to get stuck in this process. How would you go about that? Would you interview them differently? Ask different questions?**

I mean, we're very lucky that because there was so much interest and money throwing around like crazy back then, we had a lot of options to pick from when it came to which VC. So we've gotten very—we have great VCs for the most part, you know? I say we not say anything else. Be honest. But for the most part, we have great VCs who are not overly pressuring or like pulling that "we're going to remove you" card or whatever kind of card. They believe in the thing we believe in and the way we're going to do it.

I think some of them are actually relieved, frankly, that we're doing this because, like, once again, they invested based on the way we were doing it. Then we raised a ton of money, and we changed. And it's like, "But that's not the company they invested in." We basically for a whole year post our Series B were basically just like, "insert other SaaS company." We're like the same. Like, yeah, our product might have been different than yours, but our process was the same. We were checking the same boxes as everyone else. The messaging is the same. You're in like everyone's top... yeah. And now I'm like, "Now my messaging is: you want a fun fact about dinosaurs?" Like, what Series B CEO does that? That's awesome. I love my dinosaur hoodie. It's super soft.

**So you guys have pivoted a little bit, right? The product has changed. It's not the first product that probably VCs invested in. It's not probably maybe even the second product when you look at balancing kind of innovation and changing the product versus perfection when it comes to execution. Talk to me a little bit. How your mind works and how your team works with that balance of, like, is it innovation, is it execution, or where in the middle does it go?**

It's definitely somewhere in the middle. I think I sometimes sit on both extremes of that too much at the same time, as paradoxical as that might be. I'm sometimes very good at identifying a new idea or new opportunity, but, you know, shiny object syndrome can definitely be a terrible thing.

Yeah, it's like I have a great COO now who manages that because I definitely am like the pingpong ball. Like, "Oh, what about..."

This thing, right? This whatever—you are the dog in the movie Up. Yep. But at the same time, I'm also like nothing's ever good enough. So like, there is that perfectionist of, like, we've had things like our new product launched six weeks earlier than we were planning on launching it. Or, I guess, more than I was planning on launching it because it wasn't ready yet. It wasn't ready yet. And our team was like, "Let's just—we're never, you're never going to know until you put it out there."

There's like a great quote I can't remember who said it, but like if you know, if you're not embarrassed of your first launch, you launched too late. I think it's a YC quote. But there's like, you ever heard the old patent quote of "no plan survives contact with the enemy"? I've always loved the version we used internally: "No plan survives contact with the customer." So you can plan and build and document and plan and plan and plan, until you put it out there and you talk to customers, you put it in their hands, and you iterate. You're never really going to know.

So I think we try to strike a balance, like an iterative balance between those two. I would say my mindset is never, never say no to at least looking at what's behind a door of innovation because, especially in today's day and age, the market changes so quickly. You don't want to be left behind. And just because you spent six months on one thing doesn't mean that's the thing you should do for the next six months—sunk cost and all that. At the same time, don't get over-indexed on the thing you're doing and over-perfecting it. Like, get it out there, find out, iterate, test again.

So, I mean, like, with one of our products right now, we have two because we're also like not following traditional startup advice by that measure. We're basically building like four different things in the product right now, and we're putting all four out there at once. And then it's like, okay, which of these—one or two or three—are the things we should go deep on? And then worry about perfection there.

I'm so glad you said that. We're actually talking to a founder and an investor today, and this exact conversation came up. It was like, do we sell before it's perfect? And in perfect's eyes, it's perfect to the developer. I used a code, right? So I used to be a developer, and I, it was the same thing. Like, you don't want to put something out. It's almost like you put your name on it, you're afraid that it's not going to be good enough. But we never know what good enough is until you actually put it on the market. And the market—good doesn't exist. Like, perfection doesn't exist, right? It's like a never-ending bar. And the market never loses, right? The market's always right. Whether you think it's right or not is a totally different story, but the market's always going to tell you. They're going to tell you how much they're going to pay for it. They're going to tell you what features and functionality you like, even though you can direct them, but they never lose.

So there's also like, you know, everyone knows MVP, but have you heard SLC before? SLC? So MVP, right? Minimum viable product. SLC is sort of like a counter-MVP, and it stands for simple, lovable, complete. So instead of trying to build a minimum viable product, you should build the simplest, most complete thing that could be lovable by an end customer.

Oh, I like that. That's a great quote. I am simply jotting that down, and that'll find its way to a future LinkedIn post.

I'll beat you to it tomorrow.

Love it. Yeah, I never heard that term. I like it, but it makes sense.

Being a founder is hard, right? Like, I think that's something Dale and I have realized over the past six months, you know, as we try to build out Revenue Reimagined. There's great days, there's struggle days, there's days where you love your co-founder, there's days where Dale wants to strangle me. More of those days, right? Than probably I thought that conversation was going to go in a completely different direction. But it's hard. How do you deal with all of the pressure, all of the stress, all of the people coming at you from a million different directions who want to tell you, "Do this, do that, no, stop doing this"? Like, how have you found that balance as a founder?

The honest answer is I'm not entirely sure I have. Okay. But I, um, someone told me once—I can't remember who said it originally, but I heard it from someone—this idea that being a founder is like chewing glass and getting addicted to the taste of your own blood. And that's like a very gruesome way to put it, but there are definitely days where that feels true. And my response to that is I am definitely addicted to the taste of my own blood in that analogy. It has ups, it has downs. It's you know, people say it's a roller coaster, but I think it's more like a ping pong ball thrown into a cement box because a roller coaster, yeah, it's up and down, but you can tell it's predictable. A ping pong ball is like you have no idea—up, down, left, right, sideways. Like, you could wake up one day and you're like, "This is the best day ever." By lunchtime, you're like, "It's the worst day ever." By the end of the day, you're like, "It's the best day ever." And you're like, "What happened?" And that might happen six times in one day.

I think for me, one thing I think I used to be terrible at doing anything outside of work. I was like, literally, between the ages of 20 and 27, I worked. That's what I did. I worked on my startups 24/7. That's the only thing I did. And that was okay. I learned a lot. But I think I've gotten better at dealing with the stress by having other outlets, whether it's like going and playing badminton with the same group every Sunday, or like I found cooking to become like a very cathartic thing for me—of like, step away from the screen, do something with your hands, make something, the smells. It's like a sensory relaxation in a way. So I think you have to find these things that can create those moments of calmness for you because you can't really do it in the work. So you have to find places around it and outside of it.

Yeah, but I don't know. It's I have days where I have weeks, even months, where I'm like, "I got this. I'm a great founder. I know what I'm doing. I got a system." And then I'll have whole months where I'm like, "I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm barely staying above water every day." And I don't know. I have not figured something out yet that I can look at and be like, "Oh, I've done this for three years, and for three years it's worked perfectly."

So jumping off the back of that, I always find it fascinating on leadership evolution because like, where you start isn't where you are or where you're probably going to be. So how do you think your leadership style has evolved from like, you know, the time that you started the company to like growing through all the pains that you've gone through and where you are now?

Oh, there's I mean that could be an hour-long conversation in itself. Trying to think of what would be the most concise way to—I think when I started Comor, I was very much like "one-man army" was my mindset. Like, you know, if you want it done right, do it yourself. I think that comes with, you know, I think a lot of the startups I've run in the past, it was like me or maybe a few people. It was like, you know, there wasn't really a team. It was right, with the exception of one company—it's like solopreneur type stuff where like it is literally one-man army. You are marketing, you are sales, you are product, you are design, you are development, you are everything in one.

I think early on I definitely struggled with delegation. And I think there were definitely moments where, and probably still a little bit, where you know, I'd have moments like, "Well, what makes sense in my head? Like, Adam, why doesn't it make sense to you? Like, it makes sense here. So like, what's—" I'm like, "Oh, I'm doing a job of explaining this. Like, that's that's on me."

I would say, I mean, actually, like, I think I posted on LinkedIn the other week, but like, there's like a letter I don't know if you saw it that I that it's like the first page in our handbook. It's like a letter from Mac. Welcome to the company. And I'm actually, I just want to like almost pull it up right now and just like read the first part of it because I think it sums up me as a leader better than I'm going to. It's like: "Ask permission. Play it safe. Learn to compromise. You shouldn't make your logo a dinosaur. It's impossible to build a high-functioning team without an office. CEO shouldn't swear. It's not professional. It's against the rules. Fuck the rules." That's like the first thing you read on your first day at Comor.

And I think, I don't know, I would, I know beyond that, I would sum it up is I want to hire smart people and get out of their way. And I tell everyone that starts, if you say you're going to get something done on Friday and you realize Thursday you got—

# Transcript

To put an extra hour or two in to get it done on Friday. I expect that to be done, but also if you say you're going to get it on Friday and you get it on Thursday and you want to take Friday off, great. So be it. There's like an element of hire smart people, let people own their own destiny. Try not to micromanage. I am definitely still kind of bad at that because I'm a very opinionated person. Because I'm a generalist, because I could do your job, I'm going to have opinions about it, which can always be challenging too.

I would sum it up: you've kind of gone from like a one-man army to a collaborative approach. I think there's still room to do that even more, but I would say that's the theme over the last four years. That's our theme for '24. Our theme for '24 is collaboration. There's so many people do what we do or like want to do what we do, and our philosophy into '24 is like collaborate with as many of them as possible. You'd see most people that are in the space being like, "You're a competitor." Yeah, rising tide and all that. Yes, very much so. But collaboration is important, right? I agree with Dale. I think some of our best conversations we've had are from people who arguably would have been competitors. It's funny. So as we started this podcast, Scott Lee texted me. I know you know Scott, and Scott and us very much play in the same space. Doesn't mean we can't talk. Doesn't mean we can't be friends. There's so much. It goes back to Dale and's origin story, right? We had, by most people's definition, like we had no business speaking to one another. We were competitors and we shouldn't have spoken. But I think when you look at collaboration, a lot of things can happen.

Mac, when you look at five years from now, you know everything's changing. AI is supposedly going to change the world. You can now make your little Mac bot. You know, you could probably hack that out over a weekend and have a little Mac bot. You're probably doing it already. Where do you see Comor going? What's the change going to be?

I'm trying to think of how much I should share versus how much I should neuter my answer because I have the answer that I would share internally to that question—the motivational, David versus Goliath take on the man answer. I'm going to start with more like maybe where I see the world and then where I see Comor. So I think yes, AI, automation, the world's changing very quickly. I think one or two things are going to happen. There's kind of the dystopian version in my mind, and then there's the version where I'm like, "Doesn't matter what I do. The world's going to go one way and I can't fight it." And then there's part of me that thinks I don't think we're going to end up at this AI-led, AI-talking-to-AI world. We will for some stuff, but I think people are going to want the humanity back.

We saw people reacted to virtual events and stuff during COVID, but as soon as there was a chance to get together in person again, it was like, "Please give me that." AI will have a place, but I think AI will be like good CGI. Good AI. You won't even notice it's AI. Whereas you only notice it when it's bad.

I do think over the next two or three years there is going to be a reckoning in software. Not the layoffs of the last year, but like when people talk about sales advice, they always skip over like, "Is the product worth selling?" You know, we've had ten years of like you could have an okay product, you put a good sales team behind it, and yeah you'll scale to ten million ARR pretty quickly. I don't think we've quite come face to face with this realization that we might actually have a contraction in the software and tech space before we have expansion again.

That being said, where Comor is going, I mean I'm trying to think of like the non-aggressive way to say this. I will say okay, there are a number of categories of business that I would like to make a dent in putting out of business.

I love that. I think I know where you're going as well, but we'll see how this progress. I figure also like, there's a line that maybe I shouldn't just say yet, but I love it. There's a lot of crap that I don't think the world needs, and I think we're all on the same page. We're in that swirl of crap that is what we're, what we believe needs to change. It's ripe for changing and we need it to change.

Okay, Mac, so our Revenue Reimagined. We believe in giving more than we receive. So you were so gracious to give. What do you want to give to the audience?

I'd love to give my time for a founder or two, or three or four—depends on how many people are interested—to someone who's about to or has just started their founder journey. I've done this a lot in a lot of different ways and a lot of different markets over the last ten years, and I've made the mistake of not seeking out advice and help and guidance early on in my journeys, pretty much every single time, even though it seems like I have not learned from those mistakes.

I've been in that spot where talking to someone who's a few steps ahead would have been helpful. So yeah, if there's a founder or a soon-to-be founder who's looking just for a sounding board, advice, thoughts, I would just say I probably can't help you with fundraising advice because when we fundraised, the rules didn't exist. We fundraised without a pitch deck. Can't really do that these days unless you're like a crazy high-growth AI company. But yeah, that would be my give.

That's a pretty awesome gift. There's not often are you going to get a founder, a successful founder who's done it multiple times, to share your insight. So we'll have to make sure to pick someone super special, and if there's more than one that's fine too. We have to get some comments or something going on in that.

Absolutely. Mac, before we wrap it up, are you game for a little bit of rapid fire?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, ten words or less, or Dale hits the gong button. If you weren't in tech, what profession would you be in?

Farmer or running a tea shop.

Wow, interesting. Cool. So the big question everyone always thinks about: what's more important, or what do you start first—marketing or sales?

I think they should be the same thing at the early stage.

Love that. You said you found an outlet in cooking. What's your favorite dish to cook?

Something I haven't cooked yet specifically. So I love specifically having to go—I love looking at a weird ingredient. Like you need this weird specific pepper from Thailand, and like I'm like, "Now I gotta go find a place to get that." So I love doing that. I love also, like specifically—I know that's more than ten answers, ten words, but yeah.

There we go. Oh awesome. What's the first app you check when you wake up?

Slack. Unfortunately, most unusual.

Most unusual item on your desk right now?

A sneak peek at our next merch item.

Ooh, I like it. Wow, very cool. We got kids. I love it. Last one: what's your dream vacation destination?

An A-frame cabin in the middle of the woods with no internet and no people for a hundred miles.

Nice. For how long?

Ever. Two weeks, I yeah—it's vacation, so it has to have an end, but two weeks.

Awesome. Super cool. Mac, this has been an absolute pleasure, man. I cannot thank you enough on behalf of both Dale and I for coming and hanging out with us, chatting all things the founder's journey. Where can folks find you?

Lots of places. On LinkedIn. Where should folks find you on LinkedIn? I guess, unless you don't agree with my takes on sales process being bad, then don't look for me. And yeah, other than that, I don't know—wherever your nearest dinosaur is, you'll probably find me nearby. I don't know. It's a terrible answer.

I love it, Mac. Thanks so much. Leave the last part out?

It's fine. Leave it in. People like the awkward, not fully put together side of me, so leave it.

There you go. I love it. Thank you, Mac. Appreciate it, man.

Any time. Likewise.