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Jason Atkins and the Cake Equity team unpack startup equity, covering how early stage founders and their teams can build awesome employee ownership culture, manage dilution and stock options, handle cross border equity, raise better, and have great exits.
No old school boring jargon here. Maybe we can even have some fun!? We interview leading founders and experts to uncover real world lessons, tips and guides and even the best f’ups!
Jason Atkins: Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's Startup Equity Matters podcast. Today, I have the awesome Alistair Blenkin from ProcurePro, and we're going to be talking about one of the best prepared rounds in Australian history, which is super exciting. About a month ago, I saw this on LinkedIn, where Airtree, one of Australia's top VCs for the international listeners, had called out Alistair's deck–not even deck, just the information that he'd provided when going for funding as A+. Best they'd seen, I think, which was extremely intriguing to me and I believe will be intriguing to many of you who are looking to put their best foot forward when going out for funding. It's an extremely hard thing to do. And to be able to communicate very clearly in a way that investors appreciate is going to be a huge asset. Because I do a lot of coaching and mentoring on capital raising, I'll be taking notes, and some of this, I'm sure will end up in my material going forward as long as it has Alistair's blessing. So welcome, mate.
Alastair Blenkin: Thanks, Jase. Great to be here, mate.
Jason Atkins: Great. We've known each other for quite some time as well. I think in 2018, we met on a London Tech Week mission, if I remember correctly.
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, before the world changed. But yeah, I had a good time in London where now I've relocated my life to, but a few beers over there and then been side by side growing it at similar paces along the startup journey over the last few years.
Jason Atkins: We have and it's been great to see you doing that sometimes from afar and touching base from time to time. We just compared ARR and we're pretty much neck and neck, so that's pretty cool. We met on day zero or day minus one almost and we were both chugging along nicely, so I'm really happy for you. Securing a round from one of the big three in Australia is no mean feat, so congratulations on that. Let's kick things off there. So Airtree led the round, I think, your most recent round.
Alastair Blenkin: Overall, just for some context, ProcurePro is an enterprise software platform for the construction industry. We solve procurement for major builders, so anyone who's building a tower, a hospital, or a lot of data centers going up in the world at the moment, they need all of their subcontractors on board. We've got a pretty unique bit of tech that services a gap in the market in the construction tech ecosystem that's typically plugged by 15, 20 different spreadsheets and Word documents and emails all cobbled together with duct tape. So we've built a really nice bit of enterprise software that's growing at venture scale rates over the last couple of years, and then put some more fuel in the tank to be able to attack the UK, where I've moved to as of late last year, and we're now signing up the first few customers, so that was a little bit of background and the context to I suppose to why, to who we are, and why we raised some money recently.
Jason Atkins: Thanks for that. I got a bit excited and jumped ahead. You've been at this, what, five or six years, I think, five or six years, would you say?
Alastair Blenkin: I've been in startups for six years now.I used to be a lawyer and we originally set out to build highly verticalized contract management software for the commercial real estate industry, so large institutional landlords doing high volume retail and commercial leasing. That was what I was building when we met Jase. Then, I had a lot of learnings through the course of building that business and spotted an adjacent opportunity in construction, so related space, people who own developments have got to build them in the first place. So, it was a similar looking problem, but dealing in a slightly different sector where there was a lot bigger contract values, a lot more time urgency behind the projects and therefore, need for solutions and also less lawyers involved, which makes it easy to sell products, that's for sure. When COVID hit, that was really the catalyst that turned the commercial real estate tap completely off because anyone who's a landlord was dealing with lockdowns and tenants not wanting to pay rent. Then Rick gave us a free swing opportunity to pivot, which is to basically start again in construction. Also brought one of my longtime mates of over 15 years home to the country and he'd spent a decade in construction. So yeah, it was really what seemed like absolute chaos at the time was the perfect storm and a blessing in disguise.
Jason Atkins: Yeah, look, congratulations navigating that time. It was a super gnarly time, and I guess now, benefiting from some pretty smart decisions is pretty hard work, I presume, during that pivot.
Alastair Blenkin: A bit of funding itself in JobKeeper to allow us when you weren't making money, and we still had some grant money and a bit of friends and family in the bank, but still to be able to build. We had to go back into R&D for 15 months to build something that was commercially viable, so it's a pretty big, meaty bit of enterprise software that takes time to build. So yeah, interesting time, that's for sure.
Jason Atkins: Congrats. Yeah, I think many of the best companies didn't start out doing what they're doing now, and who knows what Procure Pro and Cake will be doing in 20 years time. But no, congrats man. That's a really cool story. Then what's on for 2024 now that you've moved to London? There's quite a bit of focus on the UK for this year.
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, I mean, it's to keep winning in Australia, keep building and build really good foundations in the UK. The memo for any venture-backed startup is a minimum double each year, and in the earlier stages, is to try to go more than that. We've got some aggressive revenue targets. We've got some really exciting roadmap that we're building as well. Then I think on the UK side of things, we're on base. We've just signed our third customer very recently, and we've got a pretty good line of sight at numbers. 4, 5, 6, 7, getting conferences in place and the marketing engine going and hiring a team. So I got a million things happening all at the same time. Definitely looking for some talent across sales, marketing, chief of staff out of the UK as well as some sales roles into Australia as well at the moment, so we're always hiring, we're always building, and really trying to impact the world. We're on a mission to save a billion construction administration hours, and obviously executing at pace is the way that we achieve that. But interestingly, it's sort of some of the things that I've learned coming to the construction sector is it's an industry which really impacts every human every day. Houses you live in, the shops that you buy food from, the pubs you go and have a beer in, the hospitals that you heal in if you get sick. We are trying to build a really big, impactful business, an iconic tech company that comes out of Australia. We're also doing it for a purpose of impacting the world and having a really huge impact on the people who build the world.
Jason Atkins: One little favour I have for you, mate. They're redoing the motorway just behind my house here and it's taking a really long time. Do you reckon you could get in and just speed up the construction of this motorway for me, please, buddy?
Alastair Blenkin: That's what we do. So if you're building a motorway, you need all the subbies. You need the people who are doing the groundworks, the civil, the curb, all of this stuff. They're all subbies that the main contractor has to procure. It's really hard to even get them, go out, get your quotes, come back in, compare them, go, who are we going to go with on these you know, big, you know, multi, multimillion dollar projects, billion dollar projects, so it all takes time. Getting the right subbies in place really sets projects up for success. That's the problem that we solve and getting the right people on board quicker. It's not the whole construction process, that's for sure, but it certainly sets projects up for success and gets them underway and hopefully gives you a new motorway and out of your hair quicker, mate.
Jason Atkins: No, you've got me, mate. I'm super keen to see this problem solved. Very cool. So, yeah, London. How is London these days? I used to live there for five years. I got a soft spot, having been back a couple of times. Obviously, we were there in 2018. I was amazed to see how much investment had occurred and how much the tech sector was really booming over there. It felt like it had gone from the capital of finance to the capital of tech. Are you still feeling tons of energy there when it comes to the tech sector?
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, I'm sort of living in Shoreditch, so right near Silicon, what do they call it, Silicon Roundabout, so it's good being right in the middle of town. It's a buzzing city and there's always lots happening. It's a pretty flat economy, I think everyone's experiencing at the moment, obviously, cost of living has gone up. Sales is hard, but it's never kind of easy, right? But there's a problem to be solved, and when you can deliver something of value, you can always find areas to win. Coming into summer as well, which I'm particularly excited about after making it through the winter and then also pretty keen for what's to come over the next couple of years as well. So we've got a good team in place. We've built some good foundations here. We're starting to get the brand out and market. I'm going on tour around the country in another week or so to a bunch of events and conferences and coming in. So yeah, lots coming up in the next couple of months for us and probably a few beers and not enough sleep.
Jason Atkins: Yeah, I know you need to focus, but make sure you get across to Europe and get some sunshine and get into the slopes and maybe do some skiing or something like that just to keep your sanity. Otherwise, I think the London weather kind of gets to you. But if you need any tips, let me know. Although I might have been outdated, so you might have to forge your own way around Europe. Yeah, it's cool. The proximity to all those different cultures and opportunities from London is incredible. And perhaps, that'll be a growth path for you leading forward into Europe. Or are you thinking maybe the US next?
Alastair Blenkin: It's interesting to see where you get inbound from around the world. So the US is the obvious sort of big fish, but you want to treat that with the respect it deserves. I'm not assuming that it's one big market. It's 52 sub markets and you need to have the product sort of ready to go in terms of regionalization. You go to market regionalization, the balance sheet is in good shape. So much like we do with a company in the UK, we came here a couple of months ago, but it was actually a two-year run-up, and this was from when we had about 10 staff who were saying, okay, what's our next market? How do we plan to get to the UK? It was a US versus UK decision. We made the decision for the UK just because of less product development to do to regionalize similar business processes and you do well as an Aussie coming over here, so that ease of go-to-market when you're still not the largest company. We've got about 40 staff at the moment for context, but it was that two-year run-up to go. What does the product need to look like? What does the team need to look like in terms of succession hiring? And what does the balance sheet need to look like? And so having that really long run up and ticking those items off allowed us to get to the point where we were late last year, getting myself and another co-founder over here being a really key strategy to lead the charge. Then making sure that when we get to market, we hit the ground running, not going, oh, whoops, we missed these five features that we really need to build. Then the product team is being pulled across geographies. I think the US and North America is the big one to sort of work towards over the next couple of years in terms of maturing the product and the business to a sense to be able to attack that. But we got some really natural pull out of the Middle East, out of Canada in particular, which I think will naturally acquire customers remotely before even setting up operations in those regions.
Jason Atkins: Yeah, it's nice to have a bit of pull to sort of help you try and work out where to go next. Yeah, exciting times for you and a lot of work to be done as well. Obviously I wish you all the best with that. Let's shift now across to your most recent round. Do you mind sharing what you can around the round? Like it was at seed series A or like what's the publicly available summary?
Alastair Blenkin: So we'd previously done a little bit of friends and family. We raised a 2.175 mil caught seed two years ago. We set out to raise a post-seed of about two and a half, three. We’re default alive, so we had optionality around raising in the first place, which is a good position to be, obviously, from a position of strength. We ended up raising 6.1 from Airtree as the lead, and then also the co-founders of Aconex, Lee Jasper, who's been there, done that before in construction tech, and exited to Oracle for 1.6 bill Aussie, as well as a range of angel investors. So we raised off angels in our seed round and we wanted to get a good collection of angels to come in again through series A so that we basically build our supporter base which has proved invaluable to us at seed and again sort of even post this series A, getting a broad cross-section of people from industry, from tech who really can help us. So that was I suppose some of the learnings that came through the round in terms of changing what we raised was some of the maturing of our understanding of capitalist strategy and having that slightly bigger balance sheet gives you a bit more freedom to swing, a bit more backing or a kind of plan B if you don't go quite as well as you want to out of the gate. Then also just sort of less stress in your life as a founder as well. I mean, it creates other stress as well. It's not all beer and Skittles, but having that really long, I think we had like five years of runway at a point a couple of months ago and we're spending it. So that's naturally shortening, but making sure that you have that level of comfort and that freedom to swing without worrying too much in the short term about exactly what your balance sheet looks like.
Jason Atkins: Super interesting, man, hearing what happens when a round goes really well. There's not too many founders out there that go out to raise a certain amount and then end up with two and a half times that and absolute top tier VC and angels on the cap table, so, congratulations. Awesome to be able to share your story today. So thanks for coming on and doing that. Yeah, so like, we sort of talked through the high level round details and I'd love to hear some of the insight into the opportunity that creates for you. You know, as we've talked about before, there was something about the documentation that you provided to investors that was pretty exceptional, and I've seen a little bit of it. Thanks for sharing that with me. Can you tell me a little bit about just the reception that you got as you were raising from investors with regard to the information, the pack, and maybe what the pack included with regard to the key docs?
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, absolutely. So naturally, we did a deck as a starting point and some of the learnings or my little soundbite through raising is it's 98% of the work’s in the preparation. If you do all that work up front, the rest goes smoothly. So the deck itself sort of had a hundred iterations, but that wasn't the document I think that grabbed people's attention. It's sort of coupled with this long form business FAQ. So the business FAQ is all of the key questions that you're going to get asked in fundraising that investors will have questions on your business. If they really want to get into the details that you need to answer at some point, you're probably going to need to write them down, and we sort of had a slight taste of this instead and I could see the writing on the walls for what the next round would look like. So we preemptively and proactively really prepared this long-form FAQ, which is basically think Google Doc, 10 pages. It's not like really, really long answers. You're trying to be as succinct as possible, but probably like a paragraph, three to ten lines in size nine or ten font or something with small margins on every key question. So from the starting point up the top of this document, we had four short videos with thumbnails of what's our product, what's our financial model, what's our pathway to 10 mil ARR, sort of that next big leap going from a couple of mil ARR and then does another video, which just scares me at the moment, into then, like, who's our team? What's our founding story? What is our business? Who is our ICP? Who are our user personas? Just the details of the business that you can't get across and is too much detail for a deck because you want a deck to be able to flick through, get someone excited, they digest it simply within a couple of minutes. Then this was almost all of the detail that sort of underlayed that. I expected every single investor to read every single inch of this and understand every single inch of it. Some of them will, some of them definitely won't, and if you put analytics on your docs, you can see which one's doing, which one's don't, and how much they care. But it was as much about sort of being prepared as making sure that we didn't have to do that work when we were fundraising, when we should be trying to work the funnel. Then a big piece around it was optics. I wanted to send my materials over and just go, “Wow, you have got everything sorted.” And the amount of times I honestly, I almost got bored of it by the end of getting onto a meeting with investors and they'd go, “Oh my God, these are the best materials I've ever seen.” These are the top 5%, top 10% of materials. And I'd be going, “Yeah, yeah, let's get down to business.” You're kind of going, “Yeah, I've heard it all before.” But obviously, that sentiment coming out of the investor side, when you're not just, when you are competing against attention and sort of their limited ability to invest in companies, it was a big part of why we also did it, which was nice to get some of that feedback on the other side.
Jason Atkins: That was way better than the alternative. Yeah, so I guess you had the traditional dare financial model data room. That's what everybody does. Quite often people will do an FAQ. Cool. I think people underutilized FAQ in general. Anyway, I'm a huge advocate for that because as you say, preparation is almost everything, and for me, the last month or so is all about FAQ because you're testing your vision and your strategy and you're getting feedback and you're asking for advice and you're sharing your deck and people are asking lots of questions. There's so much FAQ going on in that last month before you raise, so I'm a big advocate for creating a document like that. But the way you did it was much better than what I've done, so hats off to you. Can we dig into it a little bit?
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, I was going to say, and for those listening as well, if you want to see it in action, go to Airtree's website, to their open source VC as well. We've open sourced it without the content, but there’s certainly a lot of the headings around key questions that we've used, but I've got it open, so I'll flick through a few more, but into your funding rounds, your milestones that you've hit.
Jason Atkins: Just let me jump in for a sec because Airtree has a ton of great resources and many of you would know that and they're huge advocates of open sourcing, so it's cool to see that they've added this into their suite of documents, which include a term sheet, the shareholders’ agreement, ESOP docs, and amazing investor list. Such a wonderful resource and good friends of ours. So definitely get on there. You've been added, I guess, to this suite of market leading docs, so congrats on that. Let me ask a few questions, because when you were going through it before, and I think you're going to oversimplify it because perhaps you're a bit bored of it. I'm just going to dig into a few little things here to extract some insights out. Not particularly about your company, because it's not really fair to put you on the spot about your exact details, but there were some cool things I saw in here. For example, one of the cool things you did was seed round milestones. One thing investors love to say is that you do what you say you're going to do. Or if not, you've got a bloody good reason. Or let's have a good conversation about what worked and what didn't work. I really loved this section where you have seed round milestones, target versus actual. Can you just elaborate on that a little bit and why you thought that was going to be important?
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely good in retrospect, if you can sit there and you've hit them to be able to put that in. So again, it's like an optics piece around trust as we did what we said we were going to do. I think practically, as a founder at seed round, did I know exactly what those milestones were going to be or should be? No, it's really hard. It's finger-in-the-wind stuff, and I think my key learning around milestones is to put a range. If you put a single number, we're going to grow to like X revenue and founders have an optimism bias. You're way too aggressive and everything takes way more time than you want it to, and you don't grow as fast as you want to and all that stuff. But if you put a range, it's going to go. ”Hey, we're going to go from 50k ARR to the one to two million in revenue type thing in your round.” Even if you want to go harder, faster, you've got to sort of balance around what's going to get someone excited around where it could go and if we really smash the lights out but then also some of that fall back around if we still want to be able to hit our milestones as well. That was some of the tactics around being able to set milestones. But then I think it's even. I sort of extracted these into an FAQ, but really like there's a piece in the deck that's kind of going, “What are you going to do with your money?” And it's pretty simple in terms of going, what was our starting point in terms of cash, ARR, number of customers, team size? What did that product look like? What's our go-to-market look like? And what's then our international expansion. And so that was going from, “We had this much cash” to “We haven't spent all of it basically up post our seed round.” We went from, “We had our first two enterprise licenses, so like 50, 70K ARR, we'd got up to a couple of mil.” We'd gone from seven customers, I think we targeted 40 and we're up to 60. We'd gone from sort of just an initial viable product to some really strong product market fit. We'd gone from in terms of go-to-market initial acquisition to We had a repeatable sales motion. Is it fully scalable? Do we have all of the team and the infrastructure around it? No, but you can see the foundations and then internationally, we had absolutely nothing to expand readily. Then we want to be in multiple markets sort of beyond. So yeah, that's again, just trying to take it, might be really practical about what some of those milestones were as opposed to overly theoretical.
Jason Atkins: Yeah. I mean, the best founders, I think, are quite practical and you do need to find that balance between managing expectations and telling that massive story. One thing I noticed in those metrics is that you were absolutely smashing it as well, and I think it's probably worthwhile mentioning that not only was the documentation great, but the results were super exceptional, so congrats on that. If that doesn't, let's all make sure we don't forget that when it comes to getting top tier funding, you really do need top tier returns. I'm not here to embarrass you, but that's some pretty nice stuff. What do you think?
Alastair Blenkin: I was going to say, I think that's kind of naturally built into Aussie founders. We're pretty capital efficient, but you've also got to sort of introspect yourself, and we look at some of our stuff now and go “Okay, we've got a huge underinvestment in sales and marketing, and that's what we're correcting at the moment.” And it's kind of going, “Okay, we might be super efficient and have some awesome SaaS metrics, but do we have an ability to double this year?” There may be a push and that's like…
Jason Atkins: It's going to deploy all that capital and keep the numbers really good, so that's like a big shift.
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, it's not just throwing money at growth though, right? It's also about going, “Do we have the team in place? Do we have a mature sales process and team? Are we selling off the back of a couple of good salespeople now?” Yes. Versus “Do we have sort of front, top of final lead gen sorted?” Not quite, but that's obviously what we're building on at the moment.
Jason Atkins: Yeah, without those things, unit economics can get out of control quite quickly. Where do you think your capital efficiency is? How do you think that helped you? It seems like a market where capital efficiency is important. Do you feel like that was a big plus for you when you were raising?
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, I mean, naturally, like different businesses are going to be in different states of capital efficiency. Like we're a B2B enterprise software product. We've built something that has a really good product market fit, and one of the strengths of our business is hyper focus on an ICP. We're not distracted by sort of adjacent sectors, overseas opportunities, shiny objects, right? There's a very, very clear methodology and alignment in the business around what we're doing, and as a result, some of that sales efficiency, more than anything, is reflected in basically world-class LTV to CAC gross margins. We had a burn rate-burn ratio, so I'm going to stuff the metric name up for lesson one. So there's a few things like that, which are really efficient, but I think taking the lesson, that's sort of an outcome metric. Some of the sort of stuff that you can do in the lead up as a founder to help that and what we've–the investors didn't just like the pack, they liked our understanding of metrics and the data in the business as well. So the actual ability to achieve that was going back two years in the making. Again, we started to learn about SaaS metrics, going, “Hey, what are all these ratios?” How do we actually build them, get them, how do we make them, get them on a dashboard, make them easy,, which is dashboarding software. Then you go deep into the SaaS blog posting world and you start reading about accounting and you actually realize that all of your ability to extract these SaaS metrics is built off the back of having a well-structured chart of accounts in your financial software, and you're kind of then going, ”Oh my God, I'm so deep down in the weeds of this.” But it was some of that like fundamental accounting hygiene and getting some help from some consultants and this, that and the other that allowed us to go, “Okay, can we start producing these metrics?”, “Can we get them onto a dashboard?”, “Can we get them into a monthly report?”, “Can we start looking at them?” And it was all that work in the lead up, which was kind of then also a big part of the the effort that was required to sort of culminate in some round material, some metrics and some resources that look pretty good on the investor side of things.
Jason Atkins: No, I like how you focused on that, and in this document, this FAQ document that you've done, it's an investment document, and I think a lot of founders can end up pitching their product or not really understanding what the investors are thinking. They're looking for investment opportunities, so you start with a business overview, then the funding section, and then the finance and SaaS metrics. And I know you've got the summary at the top of the videos, which does have the product, and of course, it's very important. But it is an investment, like a discussion, so highlighting those investment elements that they're very, very keen to dig into is a really great skill. I think people jumping on the Airtree website and grabbing your template and doing your homework 6-12 months in advance before you need to raise and start to build this discipline into the company like long before you need to raise it is probably pretty important as well. I mean, how did you say you're preparing for this? I presume you didn't do it overnight. How long do you think it took you to build this discipline into the company to have this data to be able to then put together a document like this that's so strong?
Alastair Blenkin: Oh, I mean, it's continual more than anything, so I look at me and our head of operations, Shilpa, we would literally just be on calls with–we use a software company called Jira and they're pretty awesome in helping us sort of build out these dashboards, but it was just like so into the weeds, like early morning, late night calls, like 10, 15, 20 calls with the US, like going into the weeds of these ratios, and there might be some slightly easier ways to do it, but you know, and more off the shelf stuff, but you've kind of got to like do it.
Jason Atkins: I haven't found any.
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, I think this person from CraftVentures is building something at the moment, or he's done it, and I don't know if he's productizing it or spun it out. There's all of this work that's going to happen over a long period of time, as well as building a product, as well as selling it. You've got to build the financial operations of the business to be able to produce some of this stuff. Unfortunately, as a founder, there's just so many things that you've got to do all at once. Was it the right time to do this at you know, 20K ARR? Absolutely not. But once you've got a couple of 100K ARR, you've got a couple of salespeople selling, “We don't have internal finance still”, like we need to hire that, but we didn't have a CFO, we didn't outsource this to an accountant to do the job or to not do the job. Like all of this effort, if we didn't do it sort of as founders and key leaders in the business, would it have fully got done and all the way there? Probably not. I suppose the other tip for people listening as well is the SaaS CFO has got some, if you look up his website, he's got some awesome blog content as well that really helps you through all of this stuff.
Jason Atkins: Love that guy. He's based out of Denver as well, which is one of the cities I've been spending quite a bit of time in, but yeah, really high quality content from the SaaS CFO, so I'll echo that. Yeah, just to sum up, what can you give people–like the top three or five points that they should be thinking about here. I guess number one is probably go get the template and check it out. But what would you advocate people doing to try and emulate or put the best foot forward when going for a seed series A round?
Alastair Blenkin: Yeah, unfortunately, the really lame advice is build a good business kind of first and foremost, and then be operationally diligent so that we like to think we're really operationally strong. You could go and sell and market, and luck your way to a million or two million ARR, whatever it is. But if you have churn or you haven't got some of the infrastructure and the foundations that are going to allow you to sort of scale beyond that, if you are sort of in that, you've built a product, you can sell it type territory, then some of this maturity in terms of the financial side of the business and some of the operational aspects as well is An important part of the journey, I suppose where we're at right now as well, is we get to about 40 staff, we're fully remote, but it's still kind of pretty easy to know everyone. But the next part of the journey when you go beyond that is really building the people infrastructure side of the business. So how do we make sure not just that we build a good product and we're growing quickly, but we build a great place to work and that people want to come here and they've got their own career pathway trajectory that we can compensate them well, which is also a really big focus for the business to be able to continue to do that, to make sure that we scale effectively without stumbling.
Jason Atkins: Amazing, mate. Thanks for your advice. Look, not to put you on the spot, but look, you are one of Australia's best up and coming founders and startups. so congratulations on being backed by one of Australia's best VCs. This maybe is just a bit of a cheeky one for me, but people quite often give VCs a bad rap, and it is a hard situation when raising capital, and they do have to say no a lot. But here you have an example of how you know a little bit of a window into how to be exceptional to get a lot of funding. It's a lot of money that's other people's money, and it has to be allocated into the absolute best companies that have a chance to disrupt incumbents, which is extremely difficult. I think what Alistair's shown today is that with this operational diligence and operational excellence, coupled with tremendous growth and real product market fit, it can be done. So, it's exciting to get a bit of a look in and I was very stoked to see you announce this round with a bit of history we have together and I'm very happy for you and really excited to see your ongoing success. Thank you, mate, and thanks for sharing. We always finish with that creative and healthy lifestyle question. I don't know if I schooled you up on this. I'm going to put you on the spot. You are in London, one of the dreariest cities where everybody does nothing but drink pints, so hopefully you'll have something to say. How do you see health in your own journey? You know, at Cake, we see it as really important because being a founder and working in startups is bloody, bloody hard, and it just goes on and on like it's like a sprint marathon. So how do you see health for yourself or for your company? What can you share?
Alastair Blenkin: My health at the moment, or my work-life balance, lack of balance, is sort of the practical realities, I think, of building a business. It's not great at the moment, but that's kind of also not forever, and it's what we want to change, so we're trying to build, at the moment, from a business perspective, a lot more autonomy and control from our heads of department, so they own their patch. Basically, a deal at some point made me redundant and have all of the reporting, the information flow within the business. Again, giving everyone a lot of confidence into what everyone's doing and that focus on execution. All of that is intended then to allow me to sleep a little bit more and to genuinely leave the business and sort of not be such a force in terms of managing it. I think where we are at the moment, it's sort of natural as you're trying to build that out that it does take a whole lot of effort, but trying to give a pathway towards me doing less and less over time, obviously then taking more and more holidays, which I've still been able to do some good ones since I've been here. I went to Finland over Christmas and New Year's in like full negative 30, like a metre worth of snow type stuff up in the cabins with the locals. So that was pretty cool, as well as a few other trips. There's a hell of a lot of hard work in start-ups and kind of building these businesses, but you've got to have a good time at the same time and then I suppose the other key strategy is where I mentioned hiring a chief of staff as well at the moment, which is a big one to basically be able to unlock a lot of bandwidth for me to be able to focus on sales and marketing and obviously then just give more and more work off my plate and to delegate and to empower a team to make it happen. All part of the fun at the moment, so if there's any absolute weapon, chief ofsStaff, so if anyone listening has referrals to people in the UK, I am all ears, so send me a message on LinkedIn.
Jason Atkins: Yeah, there couldn't be many better spots to be right now than in that chief of staff role, so definitely check that out. Look, thanks again and congratulations again. And hopefully, everybody enjoyed hearing about the ProcurePro journey. This cool new way to share information about your startup is to build connection, high quality connections with investors. Good to have you, mate. All the best. Speak soon.
Alastair Blenkin: Thanks, Jase.