#33: Ahmed Qureshi, Co-Founder, President & COO | BILT

On this episode of In The Thick of It, Scott meets with Ahmed Qureshi, Co-Founder President & COO of BILT, a revolutionary app utilizing 3D technology to deliver interactive and immersive environments to users. BILT's goal is to help companies put their products in the hands of customers through a digital format.

Ahmed shares life before launching his business, including stories of his childhood in Saudi Arabia, majoring in Middle East Studies at BYU, and helping Papa John’s expand internationally all while serving his country in the reserves. Ahmed highlights the importance of collaboration and the significance of having the right capital partnerships in a startup’s early journey.

Today, Ahmed finds inspiration in witnessing the awe and excitement from clients when using the BILT app. But, getting the startup to where it is today didn’t come without its sacrifices and major responsibilities.

About Ahmed
Ahmed Qureshi is a global business executive, consultant, entrepreneur and national security professional who has more than 30 years of experience living, studying and working both at home in the United States and abroad. He has worked for multi-national corporations, his own start-up firms and has advised organizations in cross cultural team building and other business best practices.

In 2015 he co-founded BILT Incorporated and serves as the President and COO; BILT is a SaaS network technology firm supporting global brands with 3D interactive and XR immersive Intelligent Instructions via a cloud-based application focused on improving the end user experience. In 2004 he co-founded Harbinger Technologies Group where he helped develop entity resolution software solutions and oversee the training of more than 35,000 law enforcement and military personnel; he helped sell the company in 2007. Prior to Harbinger, he served as the vice president for global business development at INVESTools Incorporated and as the head of Middle East operations for Papa John’s International.

From 2004 to 2017 he was an adjunct professor at the United States Air Force Special Operations School based at Hurlburt Field. He is a graduate of the Middle East Studies program at Brigham Young University, the MBA program at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, the Naval War College command and staff program, the Joint Forces Staff College and was a yearlong Fulbright grantee to the University of Jordan. He completed his doctorate at King’s College, University of London, writing on US policy and military decision making in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. He has been a drilling reservist since 1992 and has deployed overseas for various operations and training missions. He currently resides in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area with his family.

About the BILT app
The BILT app is a revolutionary new tool for anything requiring assembly, set-up, repair or maintenance. BILT is 3D and interactive; it allows you to TAP on a part for details, PINCH to zoom in & DRAG to rotate the image 360°. Whether you need a new part or you want to troubleshoot, the information is right at your fingertips. There's no need to squint & no need for paper instructions. BILT allows you to protect your investment by registering the product, capturing the receipt & holding the warranty, so you always have it on your device.  It's like a virtual filing cabinet in your pocket.

To learn more, visit www.biltapp.com

Creators & Guests

Host

Scott Hollrah

Founder & CEO of Venn Technology

Guest

Ahmed Qureshi

Co-Founder, President & COO of BILT

What is In The Thick of It?

Join Scott Hollrah, founder of Venn Technology, as he takes you "In the Thick of It" with the real stories of founders who are actively navigating the challenges and triumphs of running their businesses. This podcast goes beyond the typical entrepreneurial success stories and delves into the messy, gritty, and sometimes chaotic world of building and growing a company. Get inspired, learn from the experiences of others, and gain insights into what it truly means to be in the thick of the entrepreneurial journey.

You know, you do the best you can at the moment with what knowledge,

information, and resources you have.

So it's always easy to second guess and go, oh, I wish I'd done this or done that.

But I tell you, again, do the best you can in the moment.

You can get a capital partner on early enough if you need the capital

and get the right people in place early on.

I mean, that's always the dream, right?

But again, sometimes you're left with whatever resources you have,

financially and individually as well.

So you do the best you can with what you got.

Welcome to In The Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

On this episode of In The Thick of It, I'm joined by Ahmed Qureshi,

co-founder, president, and COO of BILT, a revolutionary app utilizing 3d technology

to deliver interactive and immersive environments to users.

BILT's goal is to help companies put their products

in the hands of customers through a digital format.

Ahmed shares life before launching his business, including stories of his childhood in Saudi Arabia,

majoring in Middle east, studies at BYU,

and helping Papa John's expand internationally, all while serving his country in the reserves.

Ahmed highlights the importance of collaboration and the significance

of having the right capital partnerships in a startup's early journey.

Today, Ahmed finds inspiration in witnessing the awe

and excitement from clients when using the BILT app.

But getting the startup to where it is today didn't come

without its sacrifices and major responsibilities.

Joining me in the studio today is Ahmed Qureshi.

Thank you so much.

It was a short drive getting over here.

You're a local.

It's always nice to have people in person.

So thanks for coming in, Scott.

Thanks for having me today.

I appreciate it.

We're only about 3 miles apart, so easy drive.

That's great.

Well, we'll get into bilt and what y'all are doing there, but want to kind of start much earlier

in life and kind of just talk about your journey along the way.

Growing up as a kid, where did you spend your time?

Where did you guys live?

I was born in Colorado.

Both my parents were immigrants, my dad born in India, my mom in Norway, and they

came to school in the United States, and they had me, and we were living in

Colorado, and this was the late seventies, and my dad was an engineer, and he felt

the beckon call to go overseas and was recruited by the arabian american oil

company Aramco.

Today it's called Saudi Aramco, and it was just an unbelievable opportunity

for him as a young engineer to go work on the best funded oil and gas projects in the world.

And they ran a major hiring opportunity for people to come and join

the company and build up the infrastructure in Saudi Arabia.

So myself and even my business partner, Nate Henderson, we met there in 1978.

We've known each other that long?

We both grew up there while our fathers worked for Aramco.

Wow.

We talked a few weeks back and I knew you had a partner, knew you had known each other a long time.

I didn't realize it went back that far.

Yeah.

Elementary school, intermediate school, junior high, a little bit of break.

We both went off to boarding school.

He went to Tennessee.

I went to Culver Military Academy outside of Chicago, northern Indiana for a couple of years,

and then we both served two year missions for our church.

I went to Toronto, Canada, he went to Mexico, Chihuahua.

And then we both ended up back at BYU, undergrad at BYU, a short break, and then we both ended

up doing our mbas together at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona.

So you've spent most of your life together?

We've known each other for a while.

He has twin brother and he has a brother who's my age.

We're actually about a year apart.

And so he's big family.

So, yeah, I've been around him and his family most of my life.

That's awesome.

Good portion of it.

Well, so, I'm sorry, tell me again, how long did you spend in Saudi Arabia?

My family overall was there over 30 years, but I was only there for about the first nine and a half,

ten years.

Okay.

And I mean Colorado, Saudi Arabia.

Yeah.

I mean, just a little different.

What was that adjustment like for you?

I remember the day we landed in Dahran, Saudi Arabia.

I mean, I can still remember.

We got off the plane, we landed in Dhahran, actually, I remember leaving Colorado, my house,

1977, going to Denver airport, the old di, the old Stapleton airport.

I think we flew to New York, then to Paris, and then we flew into Daharon.

It was nighttime, and I just remember the blast coming out of the airplane,

going down those old stairs, warm air.

And it was the first time I'd ever felt something like that.

And people were speaking Arabic and I'm staring around everywhere.

It was just, it was such an interesting experience as a kid.

I was six and a half, not quite seven yet, and I vividly remember it to this day.

Abet.

So what was life like living in Saudi Arabia at that time?

At that time it was, you know, we didn't have the Internet.

It cost a million dollars a minute on a phone to call overseas.

I mean, it was just very expensive.

So we were pretty much cut off from our families.

Whether you lived in Europe, Asia, or wherever you came from, the United States, you went over there

and you were there, and then you wrote letters, and every now and then you might make a phone call.

But at that time, Saudi Arabia was on the cusp of exploding its oil and gas infrastructure.

And so we were really there at a very interesting time

where we had a peek into the old Saudi Arabia still, what it was like decades before us,

and a massive modernization period that was taking place.

And it was really actually, as a kid, it was a very interesting time to be there.

It was fun.

They were quickly trying to build housing for us to live in.

We first lived in some older home for a few days, and then we moved into a trailer.

I think we lived there six or seven months in a trailer.

And then all of a sudden, there was a new neighborhood inside of

Daharan that they were putting families into.

And it was on the edge of the desert.

There was no grass, no trees.

And, you know, I remember we used to buy mom,

after school, we're going off to explore in the desert.

She goes, take your pocket knife, make sure you have water,

and watch out for the wild dogs, because there were wild dogs running around.

I don't know why they were there, who let them loose, but we would just go explore in the desert.

I mean, the stuff we found out there was pretty interesting.

So, I mean, my son would live in the woods around our house if we would let him.

But the desert, like, that's a totally different kind of a thing.

Like, I mean, it's just sand and that just goes on forever.

Or is there more to it than that?

Where we lived, there were what they call jebels.

There are smaller mountains and things like that.

Not mountains like we know in Colorado and those.

But, yeah, there was different desert terrain, if you will,

and back then you could still really explore.

I remember finding old Bedouin caves.

You'd find bones and you would find, like, human bones.

I don't think it was human.

It's probably more animals, would be my guess.

I remember finding this long, big Bedouin knife, and I was like, oh, that's a knife.

I better turn that in.

That's a dangerous thing.

I remember taking its security and turning it in, and I'm sure they were like,

yeah, this is going to look nice over my mantle, right?

I should have kept it, but it was just some knife in this cave,

and it was really really kind of cool.

So we had a lot of interesting experiences.

There were, of course, other cities, a city called al Khobar and Damam.

We would explore those and go there as well.

Aramco tried to build a self contained city for us where we had grocery stores

and shopping and homes and so that we could all live there, and schools

so we could live there, and then whoever's working for Ramco could do their job.

And back then, it kind of was a little bit separate.

They were trying to say the westerners or the foreigners would live

in the camps and everyone else kind of lived outside.

But over the decades from we lived there, things began to merge and mash.

And there was a.

Of course, naturally, there was a saudisation period where they were trying to bring in

local Saudis, let them have jobs in the company, and work in the national oil company,

which at the time was split 50 50, owned by the saudi government.

And what was Standard Oil?

They owned the other half.

I didn't realize that that was tied up in that.

Yeah.

If I recall, in the thirties, the saudi government signed a deal with Standard Oil and they said,

we'll split everything 50 50 for 50 years, something like that.

So.

And that went out to about 1986.

That's why it was called the Arabian American Oil Company.

In 86, it became Saudi Aramco and they nationalized the whole thing.

And what year did you leave Saudi Arabia?

There's no schooling for Americans at that time after grade nine

or for the international kids, but they didn't have any schooling.

There were no high schools.

There was just junior high.

There was a program to either either move back to the states or wherever you were from,

Europe or Asia, or you went to boarding school and they would pay for boarding school.

So many of my friends went off to different boarding schools.

Phillips Exeter, I went to Culver, you name it.

Every boarding school you can imagine, people were going to.

There was a series of schools called Tassis that were in England, I think, Cyprus, Switzerland.

I mean, it was interesting to go off and do that.

And you said Aramco paid.

I believe they paid 80% of it.

Wow.

At the time.

Wow.

I mean, that's pretty attractive if you want people

to come over and live in the desert and help you build.

That's right.

You got to take care of them.

How long before the first Gulf War were you there?

Did you experience any of that?

Was that a.

So I had left already.

I was the oldest of my family,

and so I was actually serving a mission in Canada, Toronto at the time.

That happened in August of 1990, the invasion.

I actually remember walking out of my apartment.

I was living in a town called Oshawa, Ontario, at the time, and I walked out,

and on the newspaper, it had the 82nd airborne division on the tarmac at Dhahran.

And I'm like, oh, the same place I flew into as a kid in 1977.

And I just was like, wow, here's the 82nd airborne in Saudi Arabia.

So I got permission to call home to my father.

Expensive phone call from Canada back to Saudi in 1990,

and he told me, yes, the king just announced that there had been an invasion.

We need to protect the country.

He's invited in, us partners, to come and help and protect the country.

So that was kind of an interesting moment.

So I wasn't there for that.

I had some siblings that were there, and they stayed and they gave basically the Aramco employees.

Hey, look, you can send your families home, but whoever's working,

mainly husbands, you got to stay and keep the company running.

So some people quit and just went home.

Some people sent their families out, and others thought it was, wow, this is interesting.

Let's stay and see what happens.

So there's all kinds of stories about that happened and went on there.

Yeah.

That would be a very crazy time to be in that part of the world.

All right, so you went off to boarding school.

What was that experience like?

You leave home at, what, 14 years old, 15 years old,

something like that, and your family's half a world away.

Yeah.

Was that freedom?

Was that excitement?

Was it no time to buckle down and study?

Yeah.

You know, it was interesting because culturally, there was no schooling for us beyond grade nine.

It was almost like we had skipped high school, and junior high was like high school,

and they were getting you to go, ready to go off to college after 9th grade.

There was kind of that mentality and mindset.

So for a lot of people, it was just natural.

It's like, oh, I'm going to boarding school.

Other families were like, no way.

My 9th grader going into 10th grade is not ready to be on their own.

I want it for ten, three more years.

So some families had to make that choice.

Are we going to quit and go home and put kids in normal public schools

in the back of the states or wherever they were from?

There are people from India and all Europe and other parts of the world,

but for a lot of people, it was just natural.

Oh, yeah, you're going to boarding school is just what you do.

And then you would come home once a year or twice a year,

depending on what your school schedule was.

You know, for me, it was interesting, and I thought, hey,

this would be interesting opportunity to go do this.

So I kind of just was expecting it.

Okay.

And outside of class, what'd you like to do?

I played soccer.

It was a military boarding school.

Culver academies has Culver summer naval schools, Culver girls Academy, and Culver Military Academy.

Old school started in 1894, so I was assigned to a company.

We had cavalry, we had artillery, and we had infantry.

I was in an infantry battalion, and so I did the extracurricular stuff,

tied around the infantry and drill team, and played soccer.

I swam a little bit one year, and it was a neat place.

It helped me buckle down.

There was a lot of structure, which was good for me.

Yeah, the structure helped me a ton.

Were you the kind of person that needed that structure?

Yes.

Was your home back in Saudi?

Was that very structured?

Yeah, I mean, it was.

It wasn't unstructured.

I mean, you know, we had schedules and things like that, but I.

It was good for me.

Yeah.

I needed more structure, so it helped me focus, if you will.

So you finish up high school at your boarding school, and then from there, you went off to BYU.

So I originally went to school called Hampton Sydney College in southern Virginia.

I was an okay soccer player, and when I played with really good players, I performed even better.

Right.

You know, in that amazing quick aside, as an adult,

I played in a recreational hockey league, and every year there was like a.

An all star game after the season was over.

And one year, I don't know why, but my team picked me to go be on the all star team,

and I was skating against the best players in the league,

and I played my absolute best game ever because I had to, to try to keep up with these guys.

And it's amazing when you.

When you're up against people who are better, it makes you better.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's no question.

There's all those little on social media,

you know, you are this average of the five people you hang out with.

Right.

And.

And so that was a neat opportunity to go to Culver, to be exposed to all kinds of people,

and you kind of start to form, hey, I want to be like them, and I want to hang out with

them, and I want to mirror those other people and try to elevate myself to be as good as

they are.

And I thought it'd be fun to play soccer again.

Not the greatest player, but I enjoyed the game.

And so I had a couple of d.

Three schools look at me and I actually had gotten into Virginia military institute.

They were a one double a, I think, at the time, and they brought me down.

My senior year, I played on the VMI team and the indoor

tournament scored a goal, and it was just fun, right?

I was like, okay, this is great, you know?

And I didn't have the grades to go to West Point or anything like that,

so VMI, this would be really cool.

And I go back to Culver, and my soccer coach comes.

He was the german teacher.

Mister Bruch walks out of the school building one day,

and he goes, hey, how bad did you want to go to VMI?

I said, well, I kind of liked it.

That'd be good.

He goes, well, apparently that game you played in was an NCAA recruiting violation.

And, yeah, you weren't supposed to play on their actual VMI team.

So anyway, that quickly ended that, and, you know, here I am like, oh, that's a bummer.

Wow.

Do you ever think about, like, how different your life might have turned out had you gone there?

Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe.

I don't know.

Maybe it would have been again.

They weren't like.

They weren't like Uva, which was like national champions up the road, division one.

Right.

This just would have been a fun opportunity to play at a little higher level.

So I ended up going to Hampton Sydney College.

And it's all male.

There's only, like, two left.

Wabash in Indiana and Hampton Sydney and southern Virginia, and great lacrosse school.

Very good academics, but it was very much like going from boarding school to boarding school.

It was very small, 800 students at the time.

Great classes, a lot of really good, nice people.

And there was this massive fraternity culture there.

Massive party school.

You traveled around all these other girls schools to visit people.

It was just a different culture.

And I was like, this really isn't for me.

And so after my first semester, I just decided not to go back,

and I decided to go serve a mission for my church for two years.

And I was assigned to the Canada Toronto mission for two years,

where I worked with refugees from all over the world, which was a phenomenal experience as well.

And how old were you at that point?

19.

Okay.

Yeah, I was 19.

So you've lived in Colorado, you've lived in Saudi Arabia, Virginia, and now Toronto.

Yeah, Toronto, Canada.

One of the great multicultural cities of the world.

Yeah, I've actually never been.

Yeah, you need to go.

It's really cool.

So you're there for two years in the area, not just Toronto, but I was in that area around Toronto?

Sure.

Do you miss Toronto at all?

You know, it's funny, I thought about trying to go back for visit,

and I've never been able to do it.

You know, just life gets in the way.

You have kids and your job.

We may go back this year.

My wife also served a mission, but she was in the Canada Montreal mission.

So we talk about, let's go up there and hit both places.

See Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa.

Yeah.

So I do.

I think it'd be fun to go back.

People tell me it's grown tremendously, and so it would be fun to see the difference

in 1992, when I left, so, all right, 92, you leave.

And where did you go from there?

I went to Brigham Young University.

Okay.

Where I had gotten into, but instead of went to Hampton, Sydney.

I decided after my mission, I'm going to go back to BYU, and I'm going to go there.

Yeah.

And Provo, Utah.

Provo, Utah.

What'd you study?

So I did a fun degree.

I did Middle east studies in Arabic, and at the time, it was called Near Eastern studies in Arabic,

but today it's called Middle east studies in Arabic, but it was just a fun degree.

I'd grown up in the Middle East.

I liked languages, and in Saudi, we had the choice of Spanish, French, or Arabic.

And for most of my years, I took Arabic.

So I had been exposed to it.

My dad's from India, raised in Pakistan.

After the civil war, they moved from India to Pakistan after world War two.

So I'd been exposed to Arabic and languages that used a lot of Arabic loanwords.

So I was always interested in that.

I said, hey, I didn't really nail it before.

I think I'm going to study it and see what I can do.

And at the time, I thought, you know, maybe I'll go active duty.

And so I joined the Utah Army National Guard, enlisted, and I joined what was called at the time.

They had this SMP program, simultaneous membership program, where you can serve in the National

Guard and also do Army ROTC to prepare to commission when you graduate as a second lieutenant.

I thought, I'm going to go in, I'm going to be an intelligence officer and be great.

And unfortunately, this is the Clinton years.

It's the drawdown post.

You know, the wall has fallen, and we basically gutted our military and our intelligence services.

I think one year in there, you could have gone to the Naval Academy, West Point, Air Force,

and they didn't have slots for you, so they let people out of their obligations.

It was just really rough time.

They just didn't have enough spots to serve.

And then with ROTC, they came to you one day and said,

you need to sign your contract, but we can't guarantee you the job you want.

So if you're willing to do, you know, armor, cavalry.

And I had previously been in a combat engineer in the army

and I was like, yeah, I don't want to do that.

Nothing against it, but I want to do something else.

So I actually dropped Army ROTC and just stayed, enlisted in the guard and I just kept studying.

And I ended up going overseas six months in Jerusalem, studied Arabic there.

My wife did her master's thesis there as well, research.

And then after I graduating, we went over to Jordan for a year.

I had a Fulbright and we just studied Arabic and hung out, my wife and I and my daughter.

And did you meet your wife in college?

Yes, at BYU.

We actually met at a wedding in Arizona, but, you know, we dated up at BYU.

You were both students and you met at a wedding in Arizona?

We did, yeah.

That's too funny.

You got to travel to meet somebody that's right in your backyard.

Yeah.

Her cousin served in Toronto on the same mission I was in

and ended up marrying someone I worked with very closely.

And so I went to the wedding and I met my wife there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Mesa, Arizona.

Wow.

30 years ago, we got married.

So congratulations.

Thank you.

All right, so you got married while you were in school?

Yes.

Okay.

So I guess that's not a very typical college experience for most people in America, anyway.

What was that like being married in college?

It's very common at BYU, actually.

Yeah, I get that.

You know, it was, I was very focused.

I mean, got married.

I'm not dating anymore.

Right, right.

Focused on school and graduating and what comes next.

You know, grad school.

I started applying for different graduate programs.

I applied for this Fulbright and my wife was finishing up grad school at by as well.

So we just, you know, we just became focused on trying

to get schooling done and figure out what we're going to do next.

All right, so you went to Jordan for a year and by then you had a kid.

Yes.

One.

Just one.

Just one?

Yeah.

All right.

And what all were you doing in Jordan?

I was studying Arabic at the University of Jordan and then I took additional classes

at some institute on the side and I also interned in the jordanian parliament.

It was fascinating experience.

Is that something you can talk a little bit more about?

Yeah, I mean, it was really, it was an exercise in meeting lots of people

and having the opportunity to speak the language in different circumstances.

Okay.

Were you spending your time with diplomats or with their elected officials?

Like, so the Fulbright program used to be under an organization

at the state Department that doesn't exist anymore.

Used to be called the USIS, United States Information Service.

And now a Fulbright program is just administered under the State Department.

But we actually did meet diplomats because I would have a chance to access the embassy.

And I remember going to events at the ambassador's house there.

And so, yeah, it gave us the opportunity to access embassy privileges.

But really what I was doing there, I was just going all over the city, hanging out,

just trying to perfect my language skills.

Wow.

So where did you go after Jordan?

We came back to Arizona to prepare to go to Thunderbird School of Global Management,

where Nate and I met back up, my current business partner.

We met back up.

He went off to work after BYU.

He graduated the year after me, and then went to work

at a company called Nuskin International in Provo, Utah.

And then I went off to do this Fulbright and then went to Mesa, where my wife's from,

and took some prep classes because I didn't do any business classes in undergrad.

It's like, oh, I need to learn marketing, finance, accounting.

So I took a couple of classes to prepare for that at a local community college

and then entered the MBA program at Thunderbird school, global management.

And were you working while you were getting your MBA?

By then, I'd switch from the Army National Guard to the Army Reserve.

So I was just doing reserve duty.

And my wife actually really wanted to be a reporter.

And she'd gone through the broadcast news program and she had been a reporter at PBS,

KBYU, and had worked as an intern, I think, in the Fox News.

And there may have been one other place.

I can't remember them all.

And then when we went to grad school,

she ended up being an associate producer, worked for both Fox News and CB's.

So she really worked, basically put me through grad school.

We took some loans out and we still had our first kid.

And then I just buckled down to graduate as fast as I possibly could.

Okay, and what did you want to do on the other side of your MBA?

So I decided I'm not going to go off the indian active duty army until officer that,

you know, things are just kind of cratered

in the military at that time, opportunities for what I wanted to do.

So I said, you know, I'm going to go into international business.

Let me apply some of these experiences of having grown up overseas,

having traveled to Pakistan, where my dad grew up.

He originally from India and all over the Middle east.

My mom's from Europe, had been all over Europe.

I said, I understand international.

Let's go do international business.

So that's why Thunderbird school gold management was just a great place for me to attend and got

the core classes, finance, marketing, accounting, strategy, and all with an international flavor.

Even studied international business in Arabic.

They had a course there as well.

They even had a course.

We went over, all over the Middle east, just hitting different businesses in,

at the time, Lebanon and also the Persian Gulf.

So I was preparing myself to be able to then make myself very marketable

to somebody who said, look, I need help overseas

in the Middle east region and make myself as attractable and marketable to them as possible.

Trey, did you have companies in mind that, did you go into this thinking,

man, these five companies would be the dream coming out of this program?

No, not really.

I did decide, I will look at some of the government agencies.

So I did go through the recruitment process for some government agencies,

and I just decided that's not what I wanted to do full time.

Also, they were so poorly paid, and I had accrued student loans.

I had accrued graduate level business school student loans.

And after 911, the government changed and began paying off student loans.

But prior to 911, I mean, it was just terrible.

The pay was horrific, and people with mounting student loans just couldn't even afford to do it.

So I flirted with that.

But at the end, I was like, if I'm going to pay my student loans off and have any kind

of quality of life for my family, I need to go into business.

So what I decided, because I didn't.

Hadn't worked a ton.

Some students at MBA school had worked three, four, five years.

I mean, I had experience, but it was doing different things.

A lot of this international stuff through, you know, I did mission two years.

I had done some military.

I'd done the Fulbright, so I'd done it.

Had experiences, but not business experiences per se.

I mean, I'd worked at restaurants and paid the bills that way, but not real experience.

So I needed to go learn those additional courses and then begin to network.

So I just started taking any interview I could get.

I just started applying to the career center.

You've heard that it's a full time job to find a job, right?

I really looked at it that way.

Nate was part of this, and others, we were working on our resumes,

trying to craft them in a way that would make it so that we could get interviews.

And I just started interviewing like crazy.

And one day, an advertisement for a, I forget the exact title of Time,

but it was international business manager, Papa John's international.

We're looking for people that Middle East, South America and things like that.

I was like, oh, that's interesting.

I think it was actually the first semester as an MBA school.

I said, well, I'm not going to graduate for a while,

but least throw in for it and maybe I can meet someone.

So I did, and I got the interview, and this gentleman came,

and I think he had actually graduated from BYU and then had this international career.

He spoke Spanish and he said, we're expanding Papa John's pizza all over the world.

Right now, we're the third fastest growing pizza company in the world.

We need someone to oversee, help us start up and oversee Middle east operations.

We're not ready yet, but let's stay in touch.

And so I interviewed with him and we stayed in touch, and then I went through school,

and throughout the process, I interviewed for anything.

I thought that was a fit, and I can't even remember.

I think when I graduated, I had four or five offers, and this was 99.

The offers weren't amazing.

They were okay.

But I ended up taking the Papa John's international job, and it was phenomenal experience.

Saudi Prince Ahmed bin Salman, whos the brother of Mohammed bin Salman,

crown prince in Saudi Arabia, whos the de facto.

He runs the country now.

His father is the king, bought the franchise rights for Papa Johns for the whole region.

He owned a company at the time called Saudi Research and Marketing Group,

owned 17 publications, and he wanted to diversify his holdings.

So he met John Schnatter, the founder of Papa Johns,

and at the Kentucky Derby, where the saudi prince had a horse in it.

And they struck some deal, if I remember right, it was like a handshake.

Million dollars on signing, and then, okay, start making pizza.

And so this gentleman came recruiting that Thunderbird,

and that's, he was trying to find people who could help him.

So in the end, he told me, he said, look, I'm ex army.

I'd served in the army, so I liked that you'd spent some time in the army.

You speak Arabic, you've been on the ground, and you have an NBA.

So you, you, you have all the pieces we're looking for.

Let's go.

And so that's what I did my first job out of MBA school.

This may seem like a dumb question, but when I think of the Middle East, I don't think of pizza.

Like, did, was there an appetite for pizza in the Middle east.

Absolutely.

At the time, Pizza Hut was the king in the Middle east.

Already.

Pizza Hut had the deepest market penetration across the region.

And this was an interesting time.

Things were exploding across the whole region.

And growing up, I think the first franchises that I remember seeing were Pizza Hut.

KFC was big Hardee's and sizzler.

That was kind of it, right?

And then others were like, well, how do we break in and how do we get in the market?

There was also at the time, because the Arab Israeli conflict,

there were some brands you had to pick, am I going to operate in Israel?

Am I going to operate in the rest of the arab world?

And so that kind of, I guess,

kept some of the progress of growth of some of these brands from happening.

And at some point that changed and there was an explosion of brands across the whole Middle east.

And, yeah, Papa Johns, like I said, was the third fastest growing pizza company in the world,

and they had an appetite to expand rapidly.

So I spent a very intensive year at Papa John's just getting that all set up.

I mean, it's, uh, like that would, that would require hours.

I could tell you stories, things we did there,

but it was a fascinating experience for me as my first job out of MBA school.

Did, did that take you back to living in the Middle east or were you

traveling back and forth but managing it from.

Yeah, unfortunately, we were traveling back and forth.

In my opinion, it was a mistake.

They should have had me in the region, no question.

Um, but for whatever reason, they just didn't think that was appropriate.

But if you're going to conduct any kind of business operations internationally

and you really want to have an impact, your people need to be on the ground.

You can't just fly in and out.

And that's a cultural thing.

I explained to them.

I said, it's all about trust in the Middle east region, and you have to sit with them one on one.

It may take two, three years to where they say, okay, now we know you're here to stay.

You're not just flying in and out to take our money, but you're actually here to stay.

And so that was one of those lessons I learned very quickly.

All the companies that were having success had committed long term presence to the region.

Whatever they sold, cars, perfume, I mean, restaurants, whatever,

they had offices there, and they had good local partners as well.

So I traveled a lot.

I was on the plane a lot.

That's a long flight, too.

How long?

You said you were with Papa John's for a year.

I was only there a year.

And what I was able to do at that time for me was I learned all about construction,

the stores, site design, trade area design, logistics.

I mean, there were pieces we had to move from the states

if we couldn't find local vendors to produce things to the quality standards that we had.

Papa John's was, I'm sure they still are, but they were dogmatic at the time on quality.

And so if you wanted a local vendor to sell you, like, cheese, for example,

it had to meet exactly the specs and we'd go and inspect the facilities.

So for me, it was just an amazing year to be at Papa John's to learn all those things.

And I actually didn't want to go, but I had an offer I couldn't refuse.

Where'd that take you?

A friend of mine called me one day.

His name's Scott Elder.

He's a serial entrepreneur.

He lives in Utah.

And he calls me and he says, hey, I was actually on a business trip.

If I remember the story right, my wife was here.

She would tell you perfectly, but I think I was on a business trip in the Middle east,

and he had called and he was looking for me.

And my wife said, oh, he's overseas.

So I came back and said, hey, you need to call Scott.

Something's going on.

He's interested.

He's got this business opportunity.

Back in Utah.

We had said, well, never go back to Utah.

I went to school there.

We need to finally leave Utah.

Nothing wrong with Utah.

We just, we were trying to go do other things.

And he called me, and I'm paraphrasing now, but he said, hey, you know,

the Internet's really taken off, and I've got this company I founded,

co founded with another guy, and we got in trouble overseas, internationally.

We need someone focused on our international operations and help us expand.

And I said, sounds like a great opportunity.

And in a nutshell, what this company was doing was they were taking.

Today, this is just not novel, but we were the first company to do this.

We were taking financial tools that typically the brokerage firms only had access to,

paying whatever, 20, $30,000 a month to have access to these tools,

basically information to make investment decisions.

They were taking these tools and delivering it through a website.

It was www.investortoolbox.com.

And this was new, it was novel.

This was SaaS before we had a name for it, before SAS.

That's exactly how I clarify.

I tell everyone fast, before SAS.

And so, and he said, but we have to teach people how to use these tools.

So we'd created a two day training program, how to use these tools.

So you log into the investor toolbox and Stochastics MACD and they had,

I wouldn't say dumbed things down, but they had made things red light, green light.

Do you buy or do not buy?

And so what had happened was, in Australia,

the regulatory body had said, red light, green light constitutes advice.

Your system is actually giving advice.

Are you a australian?

I think it was Finra, whatever they were called.

Are you regulated?

Oh, you're not regulated.

Shut down.

And so they like, oh my gosh, we don't really have anyone on points,

we just need to figure this out.

And it was all new, so they hired me.

It was maybe an offer that was.

I really appreciated, and I'm trying to pay off student loans, and I love Papa John's.

It was a great opportunity.

I thought I was going to stay there for years, but this was such an amazing opportunity.

So they made me the vp of global business development for basically an Internet startup company.

They said, get us fixed over in Australia and then map out a plan to go global.

It was a dream job for a t bird, as we're called, to be able to do that.

We were able to get with the australian authorities, have a discussion with them.

I mean, it was all brand new, they'd never seen anything like it.

And we walked them through it and we said, well, really, we're not giving the advice.

It's the end user who's playing in the system and making choices.

And then those choices that they made by entering in whatever they wanted generated signals.

Right?

So anyway, we had to have that discussion.

We had to have that same discussion in Ireland, London and many other places as well.

So did you have to make changes to the product or were they able to see it the way that you saw it?

It's been a while.

I don't think we ever had to make a product change for that.

I know we were constantly iterating the product and doing different things.

I don't recall if we specifically made a change for that.

Maybe we added a disclaimer, made it more clear.

There may have been something like that.

It's been so long, I just can't remember it.

But to your point, I learned SaaS at that company before.

We were talking about cloud computing and SaaS.

And for the most part, other than when I went on military deployments,

I've been working in software and technology ever since.

So Harbinger, was that the next company?

So that company was called, it was originally called online investors Advantage.

They merged with a company called Telescan to create invest tools.

It was just, they put the two pieces together.

911 happened.

Like many people.

I got a call, I deployed.

I was gone for a little under two years.

When I came back from that, I co founded Harbinger Technologies group

with a good friend of mine that I had served on active duty with, Jeff Chapman.

We had met and we had become good friends, stayed in touch, and he had an opportunity.

I just come back from deployment and he emailed me and he goes, hey, I got this opportunity.

NYPD actually had an issue, and because of some things we had been working

on while we were deployed together, he goes, I think we can help them solve this.

And so I said, im game, lets go.

And so I went down there to New York and we assisted them.

It was some consulting, if you will.

And then we also came up with a piece of software

to help them with some of the things that they were dealing with.

From there, we built this company called Harbinger Technologies Group.

And we began raising money.

We did, first we self funded, then we did so.

We self funded, then we did friends and family around.

And then we had a couple high net worth individuals in there.

And then we were just trying to really raise an a round when a private equity group out

of Greenwich, Connecticut, heard about us through one individual.

And what they were doing is homeland Security tech was so hot at that time,

and they had acquired, I think, 16 companies already.

And they looked at ours and the 16 companies they had acquired were hardware and we were software.

And they said, well, you dont need to a round, well just buy you now.

And that was like, oh, but no, were going to be huge, right?

We cant sell yet.

Jeff Chapmans father in law was a wise man.

He sat us down and said, gentlemen, how old are you?

Look what they're offering.

And it wasn't Mark Zuckerberg retire money,

but it was still more money than we had ever made before.

And so we sold, we became a part of this larger defense tech roll up in that post 911,

those post 911 years.

And were you building custom software for each individual customer or were you

building products that you were able to then go, go sell over and over again?

No.

Yeah, we had built a core product.

Then we had a couple of things that were ancillary.

They were adjacencies to the product that we sold.

And that was really it, it solved a problem in something called

transliteration search that nobody had really solved.

And I think because of technology today.

Now we have AI and machine learning.

There's been a lot of progress on that, but at the time, nobody had really done what we had done.

And were you delivering this via the cloud or was this something

that somebody had to go and install on their own servers?

It wasn't cloud at the time.

We were actually had to do deployments on site on prem.

From your prior experience, you didn't go, oh, no, this needs to run in a browser.

Yeah.

Our CTO at the time, part of it had to do with classifications.

People wanted it.

The government people hadn't moved to a cloud mentality yet.

Cloud was still new back then.

I still remember the first time someone said to me, oh, everything's going to the cloud.

I was like, okay, but it took years for that to happen.

And so, no, we actually deployed our software on Prem.

I remember in one particular case there was an incident that had happened.

Someone tried to take out an aircraft and they caught the guy and he landed.

And the homeland security director got up and said, oh, we have no tools to help stop this.

It had to do with the watch list.

And anyway, we had sold this piece of software to the government.

I'd sat with the CIO that CTO, and they just didn't implement it.

Didn't know what they had.

Well, they just didn't implement it.

I mean, this is the inefficiencies in the federal government,

sometimes that great people in the government, but there's lots of inefficiencies in there as well.

And as a taxpayer, that makes me just so happy to know

they buff stuff that doesn't get used in the private sector too, though.

It's amazing how often companies will buy software that sits.

Yeah.

And not fully implemented.

Yeah.

So to be fair, it happens as part of organizational behaviors.

Are you actually going to buy something, deploy it, and then train on it,

and then use it, implement it, and then tweak it and follow up to

make sure you're getting the value out of what you had hoped to purchase.

How long did you stay on or have to stay on after the acquisition?

It was interesting about, I cant remember if it was six to twelve months into that acquisition.

That company had a little bit of buyers remorse in that their strategy

was they realized we didnt really fit because they were trying to roll things up now

and everything else was more hardware and not software.

Not that some of their hardware didnt have software in it.

We were just a different animal.

We had some triggers for other liquidity points in our contracts.

Post the sale, we resold ourselves with them,

working with them to Acxiom out of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Acxiom is a fascinating company.

They were doing big data before anybody did big data.

I remember right.

They had acres of servers with data that they'd been aggregating open source since early seventies.

Fascinating company.

So we were acquired by them, public knowledge, and they wanted our technology

to help them with just with their datasets, that's all, to make better sense of their data.

Again, this is all at that cutting edge of

when all these new tools were beginning to be implemented.

Preston, just thinking through that timeline, if I understood it correct, in a six month period, you

went from working for yourselves to working for this new owner to working for another new owner.

It was, it was, it was.

We founded the company, I think was about 18 months,

where we were essentially acquired by this PE group out of Connecticut.

And then, I can't remember, C Zero, four.

Then it was another, it might have been six to twelve months we were under that other umbrella.

I have to go back and check the dates.

Maybe it was twelve to 18 months when we were.

Either way, like, that's a lot of change in a short amount of time.

It was very fast.

Things were, things were moving very, very quickly.

And, I mean, we were managing everything kind of in lots of chaos.

Was that a roller coaster for you?

It was a complete roller coaster, but it was fun.

It was interesting.

We were young, you know, we were.

It was exciting time, actually.

And we were learning.

The learning curve was amazing, just constantly learning.

And, and software was evolving so quickly.

Industries were evolving.

People were trying to get ahead of, hey, don't make me one off stuff anymore.

We need cots, stuff that's already out there.

It was just buying.

Behaviors of customers were changing.

It was a fascinating time.

And during this time, my business partner today,

Nate Henderson, when he left Thunderbird, he went to SAP.

So he spent 17 years at SAP before we started doing bilt.

I would often call him, hey, what do you think of this?

Because he was an enterprise software and just having, again, fascinating experiences,

doing all kinds of things and learning about mobile and when it was brand new.

And so, Preston, were you working like 70, 80 hours a week at this point,

or did you have a pretty good balance in your life?

There's no balance.

I tell you what, we work very hard, we work long hours.

Balance is always extremely difficult.

But we did have freedom, so we were free to adjust schedules, right, if we needed to go.

I coached soccer for my kids.

I served in our church.

I did a lot of scouting, so I was at least able to adjust the schedule to do things.

And the whole time I'm serving in the reserves as well, in different leadership positions.

So it was a busy time.

We had more children.

I have four kids.

Totally.

And so it was busy, and I.

Look, I have to give my wife tons of credit.

Kudos, in fact, the very first time.

But at the 18 month mark, when I told you with Harbinger, we had.

We had double mortgage the house, maxed the credit cards.

I mean, the typical story, we were 30 days, I think, out of money.

And I had a couple interesting offers to go work for someone, two or three, if I remember.

They weren't hand delivered to me yet, but it was like, hey, should I call them?

And I said, we're running out of cash, Juliet.

And I remember she said, nope, keep going.

Wow.

If she has said no at that point, you'd have pulled the ripcord, probably.

Yes, I would have at that time.

So I owe her a lot of credit for just saying, yeah, just stick to it.

My mission president in Toronto was a great man.

He was a turnaround guy.

And so, as young men, he was really training us,

and he would interject stories and all the spiritual stuff we were doing,

but he would interject stories into what he was trying to teach us.

And so many lessons learned from him.

Buying companies and then fixing them and flipping them

and moving on to the next one and really appreciate it.

Now I have those notes, and I took a lot of those lessons.

And I remember one of the lessons, he said to me, Sid Smith was his name.

He said, hey, you have a window of time when you're young to kind of take a ton of risk

where you could, you know, even fail a lot, again, failing your learning.

That's essentially what he's trying to say.

And I remember that.

And so with my wife giving, you know, hey, keep going.

And I said, we're still pretty young.

And how old were you at that point?

Let's see.

At that time, I was probably 32, 33.

Is that right?

Somewhere in their early thirties, right?

Yeah, early thirties.

So.

And at this point, you had moved back to east.

Back east, right.

You were in Virginia, DC area?

Yeah, we're just outside Washington, DC.

Ashburn, Virginia.

We lived, and my business partner was out there as well.

Okay, so how long did you stay with Axiom after that, that acquisition?

So it was very interesting.

We were independent unit running inside of Axiom, and they, you know, they'd.

We'd be given a mandate to deploy our software inside their grid system and whatever.

So we're working with their team, really nice people.

We worked with one of the four founders, but something interesting happened while just after

wed been acquired, they announced they were going to be taken private by two private equity groups,

one of them based here in Dallas, and I forget the name of the other one, where the other one was.

And so it was something we kind of got left alone,

like we were acquired, and they said, oh, youre going to be our skunk works.

Youre innovative, youre young, youre tinkering with things.

We had a really great team, and it just went quiet because their focus shift now

to this acquisition to be taken private again.

And in that period of time, the economy cratered, so the homie did these

numbers, but I think it was like they were going to do the deal at like 27,

$30.27 or $30 a share, and it created like something way, way low again, I

don't remember the exact, but that made it so you just couldn't move forward

with the deal.

And so there was an unwinding price in the deal.

This is probably a case study in some business school now, but the private equity

group paid the unwinding fee because it was cheaper than going forward with the deal.

And once that was done, oh, just the bloodletting across the company just to cut costs.

Meaning layoffs.

Oh, yeah, it was ugly, understandably.

I mean, the company, great company.

But just all of a sudden they had a challenge,

and next thing we know, security people are showing up at our office.

We had to schedule layoffs, and here we were.

We were this young startup, and all of a sudden we had this corporate arm and legal reach into us.

Our office was in Tyson's corner.

I still remember it was terrible.

We had to lay off a bunch of people,

and we were given strict legalese of what we were allowed to say.

We couldn't even tell a lot of these people that, hey, we're so sorry.

We'd worked with them very closely.

They said, you can't say anything, follow the script.

You follow the script or nothing, right?

And so we went through that period and we had to lay off several people.

And it was, it was, it was tough.

I believe, though, in that period,

we gave a lot of people a lot of opportunities to grow and have experiences.

A lot of people who worked with us went on to do some really great stuff.

So grateful, grateful that, you know, we had that experience, even though it was painful at the end.

And so we finished that whole experience, and my business partner at the time,

Jeff Chapman, went off to work for Hank Paulson, who was the secretary of treasurer.

Secretary.

And something very interesting was about to happen.

So I remember going over to Jeff's office at treasury at the time, and they were golfing.

He had this little golf thing in there, and he goes, this is a great job.

I work for Hank Poulsen, and I'm taking notes for him, and I'm learning.

It's just interesting.

And then the collapse of the economy.

This is 0809.

Yeah.

And they had to do the bailout toxic acid relief program, right.

And he.

One day, Jeff, when it was kind of all over, he showed me a picture,

and he goes, see this picture of everyone in the room?

That's a historic picture.

That's the day they decided how much Tarp was going to be.

And he goes, I'm cut out of the picture.

I'm sitting right to the right of that guide.

I didn't make the picture.

So this famous picture.

And he goes, but that's the meaning where they sat around and they said, how much should tart be?

They threw some number out, all these smart bankers, right, and finance people

that were surrounded by Hank Poulsen and the team, and they threw a number out.

And then someone said, it's not enough.

How much should it be?

And they said, just double it.

And then they went out and did the press conference,

and that's where we got the number that was retold to me.

So my partner went off to go do that.

He had a very interesting time doing that.

What I ended up doing was I bought back a part of the company for a dollar.

It was just, they just wanted to get rid of some of it.

And I didnt have the software.

There was a small consulting piece in the company.

So I took that and I moved into my house and moved out of the office.

Did you have people that you brought along?

I had some consultants that were on some contracts and things like that.

I mean, we did them a favor because there was a liability for them.

They didnt know what to do with any of this.

So what that allowed me to do is have a little income.

And I went back to.

I got my PhD from King's College London.

My research was DC focused, but I would bounce between DC and London.

So I ran that while I was continuing to serve in the reserves and also finish up my PhD

at the University of Kings College, the University of London.

And then what happened was I got told I had to go serve overseas.

So you're still.

I'm still in.

They said, it's your turn to go again.

And so I said, okay.

Then I really shut everything down and sold off a few things as well.

And I just shut everything down knowing I'm going to be gone for twelve months.

And I did that.

And then they call back and say, oh, there's nothing available right now for twelve months.

Would you go for three?

And I'm like, three?

What are you talking about?

So anyway, there was an advisor program where you do a year of training stateside.

I got to go learn Farsi, Afghan, Darius,

and then you go year deployed overseas and then come back to the Pentagon work.

So I ended up doing that for about three years.

Wow.

A little bit of curveball.

Yeah, I mean, it was like, so shut all my business down and then go for a year.

Oh, actually there's nothing.

But we actually would like you to do this other thing.

So my wife and I talked about it because it was a year at stateside,

a year overseas and a year back stateside.

We said, okay, we'll do that.

And it was tough, but we did it.

Was your family able to go overseas with you for that year?

Okay.

No, no, you stayed?

I was gone.

Completely gone.

You're on a base and not safe.

Not a family environment.

No, not a family environment at all.

So served with incredible people over there doing just incredible things.

So I came back and I did another year stateside,

finished that tour up and I was like, okay, we got nothing.

I sold all the businesses.

Remember that career prior to 911, being an expat overseas and working in the Middle east?

So let's find an expat job and go spend the next ten years overseas.

Like, I had grown up with my dad as an expat kid and I got two job offers.

It took me eight, nine months to get those two expat packages and they were both great.

And I picked one.

And four months into that job, they just said, our company's not doing well.

We have some challenges in the business.

We'll just keep you on payroll for eleven months, but you're not going overseas.

Okay.

So you hadn't actually moved yet?

No.

Three weeks from moving, they pulled me in and said, we just can't do this.

Wow.

Yeah, we just can't do it.

But they gave you effectively almost a year of severance.

Yeah, I mean, essentially I literally was just on payroll

at the company until they just paid me out.

And so then it was like, okay, what am I going to do?

And so we just decided, let's sell the house and we'll apply and we'll live anywhere.

And that's when Nate Henderson called me one day.

Nate calls me, he says, hey, I developed this piece of software inside the SAP innovation lab.

It's really pretty cool.

It does all this 3d interactive instructions.

We've not really commercialized it yet.

And SAP has decided its not germane to their market.

They dont want to sell it.

Its not something they want to continue to do.

So here you have the innovators dilemma that Clay Christensen out of Harvard always talked about,

right?

Something really, really cool, but it doesnt fit with our core in our business.

So what do you do?

And so Nate, my partner, had studied Clay Christianson and had developed,

over 17 years, this relationship with senior leaders at SAP and talked to them and said, hey,

let me take this out and see if I can commercialize it.

It would follow the path that Clay Christiansen has talked about and also advised

you all here at SAP to consider for opportunities when they come up.

And so he calls me, I'm at scout camp.

I just sold the house.

My wife was at a girls camp.

I was at a scout camp.

And he said, hey, I got the opportunity to take this thing out.

We know each other well.

At school, we always talked about doing something.

What are you doing?

Is this something you could do?

And so this is a fascinating thing.

Had I taken that job and been in Dubai as an expat, which was the plan,

you wouldn't be doing the golden handcuffs of an expat package, which is base salary, housing,

all kinds of stuff, you name it just stacks up.

It's just enough to where I probably wouldn't have done it.

All right, I'll move all the way back, lose everything, and start from scratch.

I was at a point where everything had been sold, and we were like, we could do anything.

So we met again, like a week later or two weeks later, he was out in DC for a family event.

And I talked to my wife, and of course,

my wife has been through multiple startups with me at this point.

She goes, okay, let's go on for the ride again.

Off for the ride again.

Nate had been given some advice.

Find someone who, you know, well, um, who's done startups for and has also been involved

in that fundraising process as, as a partner, because it's gonna be a rough ride.

And so he'd made a list of several people, and he said, I checked all the boxes.

I was like, okay, and you're.

You're living in.

Out east?

Yeah, he's on the west coast.

He's living in Tucson, Arizona, but running a team in Silicon Valley and going back and forth.

Okay.

Yeah.

And how did you guys come to live here in the Dallas area?

Once we knew we were going to effectively take the built product out and roll it into Newco,

which we created built incorporated, we started talking about where we going to put the company.

Some of our early investors are out of Utah.

Do we put it in Silicon Valley, where he had worked for many years?

Silicon Valley east, the greenway Dulles corridor outside of DC.

A lot of startups out there as well.

But the interesting thing, the company that originally hired me to go to Dubai,

they had a headquarters out here in Southlake alliance.

Actually.

I actually interviewed out here.

They flew from DC, went out, flew out here, and that time period, I drove all around this area.

I was like, this is a fantastic area.

Southlake, grapevine, this whole area.

And that was it.

When we were talking, I said, Nate, I know a really great place, Southlake, Texas.

Great find, this area near DFW, because Nate and I knew we would be on the road a lot.

We'd have to travel.

As we began to commercialize belt as a product, to sell it, and we wanted to be

in a place where we could get on a plane, get somewhere pretty quickly, and then also return.

So we don't have begun a week like with DFW, as you know, you can leave,

fly somewhere and be back 48, 72 hours, as opposed to,

if you're on both coasts, that can easily get stretched into four or five days.

You're right smack in the middle of the country.

And on american airlines, this being a big hub, biggest hub.

You can get pretty much anywhere in the world and seldom have to connect.

It was no brainer.

And then I also said to him, I said, texas is a very business friendly state.

There's no taxes for individuals educated, working population to recruit from the airport.

I mean, when you stacked all those things together and we knew we'd be having

to fly to a lot of manufacturers, many of them are east coast.

This was a no brainer.

And this was kind of before the moment when all the.

This is before the pandemic, when everyone started moving here.

So we just did it a couple of years before.

So, all right.

The journey of actually getting built carved out of SAP was an interesting one.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Nate and I still joke about this.

He said, akman, it'll only take, I think, four to six weeks, is what he said, to make this happen.

It took over a year.

It's pretty amazing to me that SAP was willing to let it go in the first place.

It amazes me in general that companies have so much money that they can just go set up a lab

with no.

No business case, no path to revenue.

Don't even know if there's a product market fit and just go come up

with ideas and create things and, you know, we'll see what happens.

And then when they do, they've got something,

and then they decide they don't want to do anything with it.

Most people just shut that stuff down and move on.

Right.

How did he convince SAP to let it go?

Well, I think this is because Nate had built all those relationships over his time at SAP,

and it took 55 meetings.

He actually counted them up to get a yes to where they said, you can now move this thing out.

Wow, that's tenacity.

It is tenacity.

One of our core values at built is tenacity.

You got to be dogged if you believe in your determination to make something happen,

if you believe this is going to happen or you want to make this happen,

it's not ask once, twice, three, four, or five times.

It is.

Stay at it until you actually get it done.

What was that year like?

It was a rollercoaster for us.

We formed the company, and then I invited Paul Ratcliffe,

my attorney, and I'd worked with in Virginia for many years on many deals.

He'd been a startup CEO, he'd been the former CEO of patents.com dot,

and he was really a venture attorney and really multi capable engineer,

aeronautic engineering degree, patent attorney, passed both bars.

Just really versatile.

So I said to Nate, you're still an SAP, but I've already formed, built, incorporate as a company.

We now have our attorney.

I called Paul and I said, paul, listen,

I don't know if there's anything here, and I can't promise you anything.

All I know is we need help, and if something happens, we'll work something out.

And he's used to be calling him.

I've called him with all kinds of harebrained ideas over the years.

And so he's like, I'm in.

And I told Nate, I said, Nate, we have to have.

You're going to need help negotiating with corporate development at SAP,

because that's just how these things are done.

And of course, Nate has been in SAP for so long.

So I was just trying to say, look, you're going to need this.

And so Nate essentially is now 1ft in Newco, built incorporated,

which has been formed to do the asset purchase of the software.

And so we began negotiating with corporate development.

So all the approvals had been given from the board down, the CEO, chairman, CFO, and let

me just tell you, great people at SAP that Nate was able to work with and they gave us

the opportunity, rather than kill something, which lots of things get killed in these

companies, they gave Nate us the opportunity to take it out and try and commercialize

it.

And it was, you know, we really appreciate them to this day for doing that.

We were, it's our understanding at that time that he had never done that before.

So the reason it took longer than four to six weeks was there had never been an established SOP,

if you will, on how to spin something out, if you will take something out.

They're used to acquiring, correct, not divesting.

That's right.

And so we help pave that way.

Now they're of course SAP is one of the global success stories

on the planet for selling software and they have their own venture arm and other things like that.

It just, for whatever reason at that time it just hadn't been set up.

And so it was important for us to go through that process.

Now the reason, it was a roller coaster.

A couple things happened.

Nate's son, we found out he was sick and had cancer.

So we were now faced with, he can't leave his really good healthcare and come to a startup with,

at the time no healthcare.

We had no employees yet and we hadn't done that yet.

So in a strange way, blessing in disguise.

Yeah, I mean we were able to, we raised money, friends and family, we owe them all.

They were so great.

And that money we had to start taking employees out from SAP.

It was all kinds of interesting pressures where people, like some of the people that were allowed

to come with us were being told, you cant work on projects anymore, when are you leaving?

And we kept saying next week, next month, next month, and it just kept dragging on.

So we began operating.

Preston, its amazing to me that SAP didnt just go, hey, sorry, your last date is here.

You know, if we can't get productivity from you, we gotta, we gotta stop the payroll.

But they actually let them continue.

And yes, to their credit, again, we really appreciate it.

We were able to negotiate, even though it was painful, stressful and sometimes confusing.

We were able to negotiate out when they would eventually come,

but for a good eight, nine months it was very stressful.

We actually operated one leg in, one leg out where we had

to because there were a handful of customers we had to do some things for.

So we were doing things for them even though we didn't fully have control of everything.

It was a very strange and scary time for us because at any moment if they had

cut the whole thing off and said we're not doing this, we'd already raised

money and had spent it and yeah, we would have been in trouble had that

personally had we not been able to consummate the deal and then began raising

additional funds.

So you had paying customers.

Were those customers that had signed?

There were test customers, there were a few.

They were inside the lab.

And yes, we had to assume their contracts.

But again, it hadn't been fully commercialized.

It was some early innovators that had said, hey, we'll try this and some really great brands.

Preston, this may seem like a really odd question, but if it was still so early,

why not just leave SAP, hire some developers and build it from scratch?

Yeah, I mean that could have been a course of action,

but we didnt ever think it would take that long.

It looked like a great deal that hey, a few weeks, well negotiate this asset purchase agreement.

Its the price.

Off you go.

The benefit of was the product had already been built.

They didn't want it.

So let us take it out.

And rather than spend years of redeveloping it, it was far enough along,

it was worth trying to, it was beyond minimum viable product.

I mean it worked right.

Again, it just hadn't been fully commercialized yet.

All right, let's pause for a minute and just talk about what Bilt is.

And by the way, for people who are going to go research this, it's not b u I l t, it's b I l t.

So what is built?

Easiest way to find is builtapp.com dot.

That's the way to find us.

Bilt is a mobile app.

We're an award winning commercial and consumer app.

We're available in the App Store, Google Play Store,

and we provide the official 3d interactive instructions for brands.

Brands could partner with us and we have an experience that we believe is darn near perfect

that will deliver a better end user experience to those people who have to use the instructions

tied to the actual products of the brands that are partnering with us and we're able to share.

You're able to have the official instructions always up to date because they're cloud hosted.

You can register your product as a consumer and you can leave feedback for the brands as well.

And all that's aggregated and goes to the actual brands.

We have hundreds of brands thousands of Skus, millions of users around the world,

over 170 countries, 14 languages, and it's just a really great experience.

And why is it in one app, essentially brands.

There's channels for each brand inside of our app, if you will.

That's the way I like to think of it.

But as consumers, there's a fight for app space on our phones.

I don't know.

How many brands do you think there are in your house, Scott?

Oh, well, I'll give you a quick story.

Talking about how many apps are on my phone and fighting for app space.

My last several iPhone upgrades, and I'm an Apple junkie, and I get the new phone every year.

Right, wrong, or indifferent, don't judge.

And for the last, I don't know how many years, I've always just restored my new phone

from the backup from the old one, and I bring over all the junk from the last one.

The last one, last one.

Last week, my phone was just kind of acting funny and been acting funny for a while.

I'm like, you know what?

It's time.

I'm going to wipe it, and I'm going to start over.

And that can be a daunting.

You're brave.

And so it's been a double edged sword.

I've had to do a whole, whole lot of work to get it back to where it is right now.

And I'm still finding things that, oh, I got to go re authenticate into this and that.

But I bet I have 15% of the apps that I had a week ago, because, to your point, I just keep adding

and adding and adding and adding, and it felt really good just to go cut a bunch of stuff.

So I totally understand what you're saying about you're competing for that little tile,

that little square on that home screen.

People use about eight to ten apps, and that's about it.

That's it.

And then all the ones you tried once or twice.

One of the things Nate learned, he ran a chunk of SAP's mobile for North America.

He was building apps for some of the biggest brands in the country, and nobody would use their app.

They wouldn't use it.

And the brands would say, well, we spent x millions on this app.

You built it.

No one's coming to it.

What's wrong?

Nobody wants your app on their phone because there's no real utility to it.

And the number of we have an app for our refrigerator, it really doesn't do much.

I think it'll remind me to change the water filter or something like that.

And that was one that definitely did not make it back on the.

It's tough.

And whatever that brand was, I would say we would put that

into the built app that had their channel.

And so again then it's only one app.

In fact, it was feedback from the brands to Nate that led him to say, hey,

if we had one commonplace where all the brands are that, you know,

that were friendly to the customer, we think that would be uh, that would be better.

So as a consumer, I can go download your, your app and I can find information, instructions,

diagrams, whatever on tons and tons and tons of different products from multiple manufacturers.

Correct.

And as a manufacturer, I can give my customer one place to go that they might already be.

Correct.

That's exactly right.

So you kind of have a two sided marketplace in a sense.

Yeah, yeah that's exactly right.

It's a very user friendly place for the end user.

We make something for our customers, customer on the consumer side.

We're also now heavy into the commercial side of the marketplace as well.

There's a massive skilled trades gap happening right now.

We've done such a good job of telling everyone to go to college that now

go try and get a plumber to come to your house or an h vac technician to come to your house.

It's very difficult.

There's not enough of them.

So Bilt is trying also working to address the skilled trades gap as well.

Whether we're doing it within the United States armed forces where we're also

supporting and trying to some of the initiatives there as well as brands like Siemens

and some of these other innovative brands that are out there that like, hey, we need,

we, we have this workforce that's retiring and now we need to bring in these 18 1920

year olds that are not going to the military or they're not going to college, but they

need to work.

And so what are we going to hand?

Are we going to hand an 1819 year old today?

A three ring binder?

No.

Or even go look at this PDF online?

They're digital natives.

You have to give them something that they're used

to consuming information in and that's mobile devices.

And were even heading into a future thats even beyond that.

But before we get into some of the really, really cool stuff that you guys have done

in more recent months, lets talk a little bit more about the journey.

You finally get this thing spun out of SAP and your business partner son is healthy.

Correct.

And thats a miracle.

Very important to the story.

You get it out situated here in Texas.

Talk us through what those first couple of years were like,

this is like late 2010s was formed August 3, 2015, built Inc.

As a company.

And I think it was August 8, we signed the deal.

And the 9th, we began operating as an independent company with all of the assets now controlled

by Bilt.

So really, 2016 is almost done.

Now we're just trying to put block and tackle the pieces

of the business and finalize the flow of people from SAP in.

And so really, 2017,

2018 and 2019 are the first three years that we're fully commercializing the business.

And what is that, man?

It's just a race to get people out and get out to brands and show them what bilt is.

We're hitting trade shows.

We're getting lots of traffic into the website and just responding to that.

And we're trying to sign up as many brands as we can

and provide them with the ROI that we know Bilt provides.

And so at the end of 2019, we run into what we call our first black Swan event,

the Trade wars, the tariff wars that happened in fall of 2019.

And many of our brands said we're not even sure if we can get our product out

of China because of the tariffs, this trade war that was going on.

And so it was a scary time for us.

You know, we were excited.

We started hiring a lot of people at the end of 2019 and we said 2020 is going to be our year.

And so that, you know, it was a little bit of a, uh oh, the, on the, on the trade wars.

Anyway, that gets resolved.

We round into the early part of 2020 and things are going pretty well.

And then you have a second black swan event.

We got our second black swan event, which is,

of course, everyone had to deal with it globally, which is the pandemic.

Extremely scary.

Of course the whole planet shuts down.

I mean, its insane.

I mean, when you think about what we actually did, shutting down the entire global supply chain

of everything, and no one really thought, well, how hard is that going to be to turn that back on?

Well, we know how hard that is now.

So we did that, I think, within six to eight weeks.

I mean, it was scary time.

We had to furlough some people.

We didn't want to lay them off.

We said, look, we just got a furlough right now because we want to bring you back,

but we just don't know what's going on.

We didn't know, like many people, are all our customers going to disappear?

We just didn't know.

So after about six to eight weeks into it,

we realize everyone's sitting at home and what are they doing?

They're buying things online.

And so usage for the app starts to explode because people are at home assembling things.

And so that was a really interesting time for us to study and learn even more

with our brands about end user experience, people using and built.

And that was really great.

We had some growth there and over time we were able to bring back

the majority of our employees and then begin to grow again.

But scary for sure.

How long did it take for you to start bringing people back on?

Oh, obviously back in the office, I know the exact dates, but it was, it was several months.

Well, how long did it take to bring him back from furlough?

Yeah, so we, I think we began several months after

we did it to begin bringing people back in piecemeal.

Was there animosity on the team for, for having been furloughed or were they pretty understanding?

You know, I think everyone understood that we were in unprecedented times because they could

watch all around them that other businesses were just cratering and nothing was happening.

The economy was just stalled.

So I think everyone understood.

But it was still tough.

Theres no question, of course, we had to pick what team was going to stick

to work on the things we had to do, and then we had to furlough some people.

And then we were like, well, we want, you know, people back, you know, and we lost some people.

Some people had to go and find other jobs.

So it was unfortunate they went and found jobs, other jobs, but it was still a tough time.

There's no question.

It was very, very tough time emotionally for everyone.

We, it's a terrible thing to have to, you know, cut people like that.

But we also have told everyone, as Bilt is a startup that is growing,

moving through the phases of that are part of being in a startup.

And so we told them there's risk.

I mean, if you want something safe, that's guaranteed.

There are other places to do that.

Said, we're still in the startup phase and moving through the different phases of that.

I think safety, though, is an illusion because you go

to work for a big fortune 500 that you think is safe.

And somebody told me this long time ago, in fact, as I was preparing to, to start my firm,

somebody said, you know, Scott, I, I've always had this illusion of safety.

And what I've realized is that if, if there's a bad quarter, oh,

absolutely, you're gone when you're publicly traded, you know, that's, that's when layoffs start.

And so safety, I think, is really just an illusion.

I think that's a great point, especially in today's marketplace.

You have to stay sharp.

You have to keep learning and growing and having experiences.

You should tell yourself that.

I will probably, you know, I could be replaced.

Like, never get comfortable in your job, ever, in my opinion.

That's just the way I think.

I, you know, obviously this is something I've co founded, but we're not comfortable.

We're never.

There's still more.

We always have to do more.

We'll have one victory and it's like, great.

Celebrate for a minute, and we have to keep growing.

It's just what it is.

Yeah.

So you, you had run your own startup before, but I think about Nate coming from SAP,

which is massive international company, and he had all this infrastructure there.

There was an accounting system, I'm sure it was SAP.

They had all this infrastructure.

What was that like for y'all?

Getting the infrastructure built within the company?

So, because I've done several startups,

my role in all the startups has always been to get the infrastructure in place.

So while he was still at SAP, I had, you know, I had, I had begun to put all those things in place,

and it really was a divide and conquer.

Right?

I, you know, I.

Nate had his expertise, and he knew what he could do, I knew what I could do.

So that's just.

We just divided it up that way.

And so I put all the pieces in place, took the lessons learned

from some of the other startups and making sure we did things right.

You know, there were important things like, you know, you need, you need, you need to have

an accountant, you need to follow gap, and you need to have a system in place that's compliant.

There's all these things that, you know, you need to do your registrations and things

that can easily be forgotten about if you haven't gone through the process.

So I tried to take care of all those operational type pieces so that they could focus

on the other things inside of SAP, working the, working with corporate development to negotiate,

using with our attorney to get everything spun out.

Then as pieces, we were getting pieces of the business slowly, over time,

working that into our operational flow.

Like, okay, now we gotta have a payroll system, and all of a sudden we need healthcare.

What are we gonna do?

It?

Just figuring all those things out are important.

So do you remember the first big deal that you all landed?

There's been several, so.

But the one that comes to mind, backyard Discovery,

which is an amazing company with an amazing leader out of Pittsburgh, Kansas.

They make playsets yes.

They're one of the dominant players in the marketplace and they have a very innovative leader.

And they saw, so one of their vps saw built.

And he contacted us through our website and he goes, hey, can someone call me?

So I called him and we did a demo and we talked through this and he goes, this is great.

I'm going to let my company know about this.

And next thing I know, he comes back to me and he says, hey,

we have a product line review for next year with one of the major retailers.

Could you make eight steps of this product?

And then in our line review, we would like to show it to this retailer.

So they're going to go sell to Walmart, target, somebody like that.

And they're actually going to use your tool as part of the pitch.

As part of the pitch, yeah.

Basically saying, look, if you buy this product, it will not only come with our great award

winning place, that product that's safe, and all these other things, and you'll have our 2d

PDF and paper instructions, but you're also going to have this 3d interactive instructions

that for those who would like to have a different experience other than paper or 2d PDF's.

And so they came back from that and they said, yeah, great, we're in.

Can you and your team fly out to meet us and talk

to the broader team and meet with our president of the company?

And the president of the company is great guy.

They're private equity backed, really smart, innovative, forward thinking.

And we sat down there, we briefed the whole team and he said, everyone, we're going to do this.

We're going to do this right there.

We're going to go all in.

And we said, great.

Y'all discussed like commercial terms at that point or I think generally we had.

I can't remember.

I think we probably owed them a final quote, but maybe we'd already done it.

Actually, just my memory.

I'd have to go back and look in my emails.

But one meeting and he was sold on the idea.

Well, yeah, I mean, there had been some prep talk behind the scenes.

This other VP had already briefed and prepped them.

But that was the meeting where they just decided that we're going

to take a chance on an unknown kid named Bilt.

Right.

Because we like what you're doing.

They had seen some of our other commercial that were in the app,

Weber Stevens Grills, a really great company, innovative.

All their grills are in the built app.

That was one of the early test companies inside SAP.

When naded built the company, we had some good things to show them.

But outside of SAP now were a standalone company that was one of the big ones.

Theres a few other in there, but thats one that stands out in my mind right now.

But it took leadership from someone who said to the rest of his team,

hey, we're going to do this, so let's get on board.

And they're a great company.

We love working with them.

And they've, we believe, been the benefactors of this experience.

And, you know, when you're building a three to 400 step playset,

I mean, that's a, that's a lot of stuff to go through.

So keeping it organized and in a visual environment that allows you to

maybe not even get as fatigued as if you're just staring at paper, I get it.

It gave everyone another option.

And so that was a really fun win.

And again, I appreciate his leadership, too, because a lot of companies you'll have at the tactical,

bottom level, frontline people like, oh, we absolutely need that.

We have major problems with our instructions.

People are returning products.

Nothing wrong with the product, but they can't assemble it.

We know inside the company, those frontline tactical leaders are like, we need bill.

And then at the top, the senior leadership.

Oh, yeah, innovation, new technology.

And so that gets pushed down.

So you get pushed into what I call the frozen middle, where all good ideas go to die.

And you have to fight in that frozen middle sometimes,

because people are fighting for old solutions.

They don't want to share.

Rice bowls.

Another thing built cuts across multiple rice bowls in most organizations

because we do quite a few things, provide a lot of data, a lot of insights.

And so we're, it's challenging sometimes for, for people to, to kind of free up, you know,

resources, because they're like, well, that's my money, and I don't want to lose it.

You know, um, as you're talking about this, something just clicked for me.

I can't tell you how many times I've bought something that needed to be assembled.

And in the last few years, it seems to be a trend.

There have been multiple things where there's, like, a little piece of paper,

an insert somewhere in the package that says, before you return this to the store, contact us.

And it seems like, I think that the general situation here

is that people get frustrated trying to put it together.

So instead of trying to work through it, they return it.

Correct.

You're helping them solve that problem?

Oh, there's no question.

We actually stop returns to the store.

We actually decrease phone calls into call centers, because if you can assemble your product,

you're not going to be frustrated, you're not going to return it unless there's something majorly

wrong with it, defect or something like that, or something broke in transfer or shipping.

So anyway, it's, yeah, it's.

We can help.

And then the call centers, if you don't have to call, it's like a dollar a minute.

Average phone calls, 15 minutes.

That's a call center.

A call center.

So if you can reduce your phone calls into a call center or even eliminate your call center,

you're saving money and you're improving your margins as well.

And I think about the, I don't know, the $50 bookshelf thing that I bought at Target.

If it costs them $15 to serve me over the phone

for something I paid retail $50 for and target bought at wholesale.

Yeah, you're talking significant margins.

All right.

So apart from the first and second black swan event,

have there been any other real low moments along the way?

I think we probably have experienced many of the things that other entrepreneurs have experienced.

You're always balancing cash and when's it come in

and you're raising money because you want to grow.

Do you want to grow faster?

We could have been a profitable business years ago,

but we're always plowing money back into growth and innovation.

There's that balance that you always have to decide

from a strategy standpoint of what you want to do.

In early days, we have the stories of pull your last chunk

of money out of your four hundred one k to make payroll.

We've read lots of stories from other companies and other entrepreneurs,

and I feel like we've lived through every one of those ten times you mentioned raising money.

Have you moved beyond the friends and family?

Yeah, we're institutionally backed.

We have a great partner, Silverton Partners out of Austin, Texas.

They're an incredible partner for us.

We held off, actually, for years because we tried to find the right partner,

and we weren't comfortable with many of them.

And I appreciate what the venture capital market does, but not every VC is a fit for every company.

And so that takes some time.

And the folks at Silverton are just incredible.

Morgan Flager is one of the, he's the managing partner there,

founder of the firm, and we're really grateful to him.

And they have a principal there named Matt Saida.

He actually found us, and he's part of research, finding companies.

And so we really appreciate what they've done to back us and help us along the way.

I imagine that you talked to a number of firms along the way.

What advice would you give to somebody who's looking to raise money?

Do your research.

Go to the websites.

Look, you know what your product is.

Don't go to a venture capital firm that if you're in food, don't go to a VC firm that

only invests in tech unless you have some kind of tech play to the food industry.

But there are firms that literally VC firms that specialize in that next franchise,

that next food idea.

And so you try to really get vc alignment of what they like to invest

in because many of the partners and even that are in the firm and even the LP's,

many of them come with backgrounds in what they like to invest in.

So I think that's really important, finding alignments.

All right, I teased this earlier.

You guys had a really significant thing that's happened in the last year, last six months, even.

Talk to us about that.

Well, we were excited on February 2 to launch the built XR app on the Apple Vision Pro headset.

It's an exciting new era of spatial computing that is taking place right now.

And we were excited to be able to partner with Apple in getting the development kit, SDK,

to be able to make the built app available on the new Apple Vision Pro.

When you go into Applevision Pro today, you'll be able to see the built core apps.

The same built app you pull up on your Android or your iPhone or iPad or any tablet.

The regular built app that's 3d interactive is all there.

But there's another one called built XR, which is the one that will take you into this

completely immersive environment to where you could literally pop the product out right in front

of you and play with it and spin it around and just have a completely different experience.

It's an incredible new world, really.

The spatial computing and what Apple has done is game changing.

There's just nothing else out there like the Apple vision Pro.

To be included in the launch, that's a big thing.

Or maybe included in the launch isn't the right term,

but to have gotten in early on, this is a huge, huge deal.

And what you guys have done is so cool.

I downloaded the app earlier today to play with it before you came in.

And I'm going through this assembly of a grill or a griddle and being able

to spin all of these individual parts around, you know, 360 degrees and.

And flip it on its side.

At one point, I picked up the.

The leg for the, um, for the base of this griddle.

And I can stare down the hollow tube of the leg, and I can see the screw holes and all that.

And at one point, I'm like, well, what does it look like from the bottom?

And so I'm able to lift it up and actually get underneath this thing.

It's really, really incredible what you guys have done with it.

Thank you.

We're excited to be a part of it.

There are many companies that got to be able to work on this,

and we're excited to be included in that first group of companies to be able to launch.

We think there's really great opportunities for companies to accelerate learning and operational

enablements, especially for this digital, these digitally natives that are in this next gen

of the workforce that don't want to learn by binders and classroom instruction only.

They want other experiences.

This Apple Vision Pro is going to be a game changer.

And the great thing is, we love that we have the headset.

We have the Applevision Pro.

In a controlled classroom environment, you can learn.

There's even use cases where you could be in your work areas as well, using it.

But then if the Apple vision Pro is not appropriate, well,

then you just open it up on your iPhone or your Android, right?

You could still use your phone or a tablet as well.

And bilt works across all of those different devices to be able to provide the best

user experience when it comes to assembly, setup, maintenance, installation, and repair.

Well, it's awesome what you're doing there.

Thank you.

Back to the business itself.

Thinking about that first startup,

what lessons learned have you carried forward from that early experience into Bilt?

It just.

It takes longer.

Uh, right.

Uh, often.

Um, even though we had an early liquidity event, we weren't still baked.

There were still things to do.

Right.

So it just takes time.

You need a plan.

Know that that plan will probably adjust many, many times, but just keep working it,

and you just gotta have dogged determination to keep going.

And you'll want to quit several times.

You'll get tired.

But there will also be those exhilarating moments when something incredible happens.

And we love our brands, our customers that we support.

We love the feedback we get with them.

We love helping them.

And that truly, for us, is extremely rewarding.

You know, our 3d instruction designers, animators,

those people who work and actually create the experience, they actually can see the fruits

of their labor through the feedback mechanisms that is left inside the app.

And then also working with our actual customers and partners.

Sometimes they'll get to go on meetings.

Sometimes customers will come to visit and they know they're impacting people all over the world.

That's the other thing.

SaaS has allowed us to be a global platform to where we're used all over the place.

That's pretty cool.

To be something apart, to be a part of something that special.

We believe built is a, is a very special product and we're just getting started.

Is there anything you would do differently?

You know, you do the best you can at the moment with what knowledge,

information and resources you have.

So it's always easy to second guess and go, oh, I wish I'd done this or done that,

but I tell you, it's, again, you do the best you can in the moment.

And for example, co founding Bill with Nate,

obviously I was taking lessons learned from the other startups I had done before.

And if you can get a capital partner on early enough,

if you need the capital and get the right people in place early on, that's always the dream.

But again, sometimes you're left with whatever resources you have

financially and individually as well.

So you do the best you can with what you got.

What are the parts of the job that you enjoy most?

It is exciting to be with clients and watch them have the experience that we've created.

I think of some of our defense clients that we work with and in the Apple vision Pro,

and they just open up and see the whole product we have in that immersive environment.

They just, you literally hear gasps sometimes and they say, that's just amazing.

I've always wished we had this.

And we tell them that time is now, you can have this and we can accelerate learning

by using these tools and this technology to the point where we can help you learn faster,

but also understand safety better and make you more proficient.

And then there's also the, the things that you, you only do every so often that you need refresher

on and being able to go back and look at that, even someone who's worked on something 1520 years,

but they only done that ten times in their whole career, but they need to do it every now and

then.

We can quickly give that to them in either a 3d interactive environment or a 3d immersive

environment, depending on what is the most appropriate for them doing that task.

What are the parts you enjoy the least?

Well, look, there's, it's, everyone know, it's long hours, it's absolutely long hours.

And it's sacrificed.

There's no nine to five, it's just, it's actually all the time.

And people say, well, you can't do it all the time.

Well, if you're in a startup, it is all the time.

It absolutely is.

And it's tough that.

So I would say I, you know, this work life balance, it's just trade offs.

It's not even balance.

Like what am I not going to do?

So I can go sleep right?

Or so I can go to a family event or something like that.

It's just really, really hard when it's your business, when you have a fiduciary responsibility

to your financial and capital partners, responsibility to your customers,

when it's on you and you're just not an employee, but you really are responsible.

Thats a heavy weight and burden to carry for a long time and you can only carry that for so long.

Right.

Thats why people have liquidity events and they sell and they eventually get out.

But at the same time were grateful for the opportunity.

Theres all the amazing rewarding things that come along the way that make the tough times worth it.

Preston, you mentioned thats life in a startup.

Do you still think of yourselves as a startup?

Nine, nine years old at this point, right?

Started in 2015, your nine year old startup.

Is that.

Yeah.

So clearly we're not a startup in the, in the aspect of we just started, right.

We are a.

I like thinking as, as a startup cause it still keeps us scrappy.

Like again, I don't want to get comfortable because if we do, we'll get the market.

I mean someone will just take you out.

And so by being scrappy and keeping a startup mentality,

I think it helps you to keep moving and innovating through very,

very demanding changing environments where startups are popping every day.

Theres so much liquidity in the marketplace

to go out and raise a seed or seed round, especially today.

You have a PowerPoint presentation, ten slides,

and you explain the challenge, problem, solution and opportunity.

You can go raise money.

So you have to wolf set your door and you have to be ready all the time.

So in that aspect, I think I still refer to ourselves as a startup.

And maybe one day when we're in a different place we won't call ourselves a startup anymore.

But I think we still are exhibiting those traits in terms of how we operate as a company.

What's next?

Well, we just want to grow.

We just want to keep growing.

We have a very healthy pipeline, we have a lot of interest, a lot of customers.

We're doing more enterprise deals now than we've ever done before.

Those take a little longer, of course.

So we just want to keep growing and delivering our award winning experience to brands

and companies that want to have better solutions for their end users, whether they're customers

or whether their own professional technicians that are working inside their companies.

You can't see everything that's inbuilt on the app.

What you see is only what each brand has decided to make public.

There are some companies that only want their instructions

available to train technicians, which is great.

We have that option as well.

Is there anything you had wanted to talk about that we didn't get into?

I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but I really enjoyed our

conversation today and thank you for letting me talk a little bit about Bilt and our experience.

We love what we do.

And again, for your listeners out there, just go to bilt app.com or, or just go to the Google

Play Store or the Apple Store and you can download the built app and experience it for yourself.

Don't take my word for it, play with it and experience it for yourself.

I second that highly encourage you, especially if you do have a vision Pro.

Absolutely.

It's an incredible, incredible experience.

So Ahmed, thanks so much for coming and sharing your story.

Okay, thanks, Scott.

Thanks for having me on the podcast that was Ahmed creation, co founder and coo of Bilt.

To learn more, visit biltapp.com.

That's b I l tapp.com.

You can also find them on Google Play and the App Store for iOS and Apple Vision Pro.

If you or a founder you know would like to be a guest on

in the face of it, email us at Intro at Founderstory us.