Vollständiges Transkript von Danny Davis: Cheaper to Start, Not Cheaper to Build

sort of stuff. But also at the same time it's like, man, it's really hard to go out and do anything without spending not just a buck, but a number of bucks, right? Danny Davis: Yeah. And I think, you know, we w now with AI, we're thinking that AI is gonna cause you know, efficiencies and cost structures. not in the short term, it's not. it's going to it's expensive to run AI. We don't have the power that we need to to be good with AI and we can talk a little bit about AI as we go through this, but we're we're not yet in a world in which we can leverage AI to to make things cheaper. If anything, it's it's causing things to be a little bit more complicated and more expensive in the short term just because of scarcity and things of that nature. But I think there's an opportunity in the next couple of years where AI is going to find efficiencies and drive prices down where there's a lot of margin or fat in some of these deals. I think AI is gonna be do a good job at cutting some of that out and redistributing it back to the people that in the form of discounts or lower rates or competitive pricing. Hunter Harris: Especially competitive pricing is part of what I'm really excited about with AI. I c I cannot quote the reading that I did here, but I remember reading a bunch about how AI is expected to be heavily deflationary in terms of efficiencies. Essentially the competition driven I I believe it was the competition driven and the efficiencies found by AI drives additional competition in the market, which drives prices back down. But I think we are some time away from seeing that on like a real societal level. Danny Davis: I agree. I think the equipment itself, you know, if you look at the industry across the board, there are not many technologies that have have become accelerated the deceleration of expense is is something to be noticed. if you if you look at how fast the cost has come down on compute, it's one of the fastest drops in the history of technology in the amount of time that it's been out. So it looks like the law of accelerating returns really affects things like AI because of you know it's based on chips and I think Ray Kurzwell you know sort of set the precedent years ago and and now we're seeing it you know it may not Be a thousand times every 10 years, it might be 10,000 times cheaper every 10 years. So I'm excited to see what's what's gonna happen there. Hunter Harris: It's a really exciting world. I I wanna take it back a little bit. You mentioned previously about your exits, right? So part of the mythos is hey, you take your company public, you make a big old bucket of cash, you sell the company, you make a giant bucket of cash. w why don't you tell me a little bit of about the truth of how this can actually go for founders, right? Danny Davis: Yeah. so started a company in two thousand thirteen and you know built that company up over six years. revenues are growing pretty exponentially and took that company public in 2018, exited

with forty-seven to forty-nine percent of the public stock in 2019, did a separation agreement with the company there they wanted me as a consultant. I had I'd sort of run my course of the company. I wanted to grow it and change it and all this. And the board, they wanted to stay on the this, you know, straight. narrow path. They didn't want to go innovate and do a bunch of other stuff. So we kind of had our difference of opinion. Hunter Harris: Tough. Danny Davis: But yeah, and what you learn right away is that Boston bankers are not great operators. They are they're good at banking. and I will give a kudos to our current investors who are fantastic Boston investors, some of the most successful probably in the United States. but in in in place of that they're not good operators. So if the lesson for founders in this situation is if you have a private equity group or a a a non operator running a company that they acquire. Doesn't mat matter how much public stock you have or equity you have if the stock or the equity goes to zero. So that did happen in my Hunter Harris: quite Danny Davis: case. Yeah, that did happen later on. I did make a decent chunk of change when when we went public and I was selling stock. But once that dried up, it was time to launch a new company. So so that's what I did. And if you would like I can dive into the the second company and and let you know that we didn't really I didn't extra I didn't profit extremely from the second company, but I did do something smart. I did move to a state for the most part where I don't pay personal income tax. So I established residency in Vegas, still in California 10 to 12 days a month and Nevada 18 days a month so my lesson for founders here is if you're selling for less or you want to avoid some of the extra tax there and be strategic about what you're doing and and do it above board look at states like Nevada, and Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: you know, you'll see s you'll see states like Florida doing similar things. we're Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: seeing a lot of political climate in some of these other states. So Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: so that's my my second lesson was which is if you're gonna sell, even if you're a solo founder and you're gonna make a nice chunk of change, it's a much better chunk of change if you are strategic about it. You're qualified small business, make sure you have a great CPA. make sure you have good lawyers and and and and there's that the the other story is not as fortunate my third company that i sort of launched before this and we can dive into that if you'd like but i'm happy to take a pause here and and see if you had additional questions Hunter Harris: Sure, I I did want to dig into one piece here just so we get specific numbers on here. So you're splitting time between Nevada and California. What's the income tax rate roughly for California? And you said the income tax rate is zero for Nevada, right? So Danny Davis: Yeah. It depend it depends. Yeah, Hunter Harris: for a reasonably Danny Davis: it as as the a answer to all and I don't mean to interrupt, the answer to all economic questions, if you're an economist is it depends. but in California, you're looking at several factors. You're looking at a personal base income tax, a potential wealth tax if you ha make a certain amount. you have all of your real estate taxes that are quite expensive, your property tax. You have a lot of other tax that you're paying that you don't really realize. Is that you're paying until you add it all up. So on average, I would say it's 20% cheaper to live in the state of Nevada. now, if you choose to go to this trip and go to a five-star dinner every night, then that's that's your problem, man. You're bringing that on. But if you live Hunter Harris: Right. Danny Davis: if you live like a normal person, you can you can reduce your tax exposure by about 20% overall. Hunter Harris: Which is just that that much more that you can put back in the business or, you know, send back to your family or send back to your like wherever your community is, right? Danny Davis: Agreed, agreed. Hunter Harris: So the second one was that one hyperfy? Danny Davis: No, second company I excited was called Origin Labs. it was Hunter Harris: Catholic. Danny Davis: it was a a blockchain intelligence, blockchain company. We did some things with NFTs, we did some things with some agricultural supply chain intelligence. You know, COVID really cost caused a lot of us to have to pivot. we pivoted and we leveraged some of the technology that we pivoted to to do some some brands and for the most part we built a lot of custom software and and AI, thank thank God we're out of that business because AI sort of swallowed that. business up and I don't know if we would have been able to exit, you know, a year and a half later after we did. So We were happy to move out of that. You mentioned the word hyperfy. that's near and dear to our hearts because it's a company that my co-founder my current co-founder and I started before we launched this company, StackYak. And you know, there you can read my posts about it on on LinkedIn and there's some other public documents you know, that's Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: probably sitting in courtrooms somewhere. But we started a company with a group of investors that had promised us a bunch of stuff and those promises did not come true and funding did not occur as it said it would and even though we had you know contracts, we had a term sheet, we had hit our milestones, we've done all the right things. they didn't Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: fund. And for what reason, I guess one day someone will get to the bottom of that. they'll argue that you know of course we didn't hit milestones. Of course we did otherwise we wouldn't have been so steadfast on it. But that'll be set at it settled in the court of public opinion. The lesson for founder here though is it's

something really important which is you can't let bad investors make you a bad founder meaning you can't lay down you can't quit you gotta stand up for yourself and I say that because after this company we we resigned from the business my co-founder and I after they failed to fund and would not appear at board meetings and just drove the company into the in the into the ground we we sent out a a message that we had, you know, talked to our lawyer and he You need to communicate this message to your suppliers, your partners and we did. And they didn't like that. And they sued me personally. And they they it was a shock to me. I've never seen a private equity group or private equity sponsor. They're not actually a fund, a private equity sponsor push a narrative that the founder is the problem in a situation in which they didn't fund and and as we found this is actually a theme of theirs and and I'm sure if we ever have to depose people that will that will come to fruition. But we what we realize is not only are they not funding other companies, they're not funding us and we we No matter what we say, even though it wasn't not defamatory, they'll they don't want people to know that. So they they sued and they lost. they ended up withdrawing. they lost in court twice. The judge threw it out pretty much. They then withdrew, and we decided that too much damage had been done to our reputation publicly. So we are now suing them. And I won't I won't go into too much of the detail. It's public case. So if you're in the state of Nevada, you could probably look it up and you can see our complaint, you can see their you know, cross complaint, which is you know, of course, in our opinion nonsense, but but I'm I'm I feel very good about the fact that as a founder the second founder lesson here is when things go wrong make sure that you did everything the right way you use a moral compass Hunter Harris: Thousand percent. Danny Davis: you you are following the process from your lawyers and remember this we have a fantastic lawyer in fact he's still the same lawyer for our current company but That lawyer is the lawyer for the business. And he is not your personal Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: attorney. So no matter how great they are or that that team is, and you can love them to death, they cannot give advice to you personally that is against the company or against the investors of the company. So I think one one piece that needs to to always be rem remembered is always have a good personal attorney just in case. because Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: those guys are out there and those women are out there to save you from yourself sometimes because you're Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: busy building a company and you don't realize that they're not there to support you. So those are some of the founder lessons, you know, which is you know, don't sell a company if you don't have to and don't hand it over to a private equity group that doesn't know how

to be operators. Number two, be careful what you do when you sell a business and how to pay those taxes and what you qualify as a small business. Make sure you use platforms like Carta and all these other things. Make sure you're getting a 409A, which is a proper valuation for the company. These are all things you should be doing and with AI it helps you Walk walk you through it. And lastly, two of the founder lessons. one, which is you know, know what you're getting, what what you're getting and and make sure you're a a good investor, even if you have or good founder, even if you have bad investors. And secondarily, it's okay to fight, it's okay to protect yourself. If people are going to attack you publicly, you should defend yourself publicly. And and I will say we earned respect from our current investors for doing so, and we even provided reps and warranties for that situation. So it does have Have a negative effect on us. But when you do things the right way, it's easy to remember the truth because you don't have to make it up. Hunter Harris: And I love the shout-out to just generally the legal field. I found a lot of founders, they're like, lawyers, what do they do really? It's expensive. I don't need to worry about that. Nothing's gonna happen. But the reality is running a business, a business is a legal entity, right? And when you engage in business, you are engaging in of a legal activity, right? And if you choose to not engage the the legal system by trying to, I don't know, just have ChatGPT fully be your lawyer, I'm not I'm not gonna say don't use AI to help you out with aspects of the process, etc. But there there is no substitute for good high quality legal help. And Danny Davis: No. Hunter Harris: it's always best to get that help well before you need it and build those relationships well before you need it. Cause you know, I Danny Davis: What's the what's the rule, right? The o legal if you didn't do it right in the first place, when you're finally figuring out how to do it with the legal legally properly, it's too late, right? and I agree with you. Spend money there. Hunter Harris: Yeah, right. And and I I think there's like two other phrases too. It's like what is it? Like lawyers always get their pound of flesh for something, right? and it do it right the first Danny Davis: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it's it's true and it's it's right. Hunter Harris: time or pay ten times the cost, right? And Danny Davis: Yeah, I think it applies across all businesses, right? So the, you know, construction, Hunter Harris: Course. Danny Davis: they always say measure twice, cut once. Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: and I think we are in the situation where that's that's really what you're doing with with with legal. I I would make sure that you appropriate the a proper budget for for legal when you're building the company. do not try to skimp, do not say five grand a month should cover it. you know, raising a pre-seed round, raising a seed round, raising a series A round. These are all expensive things to do. And if you don't do it the right way, your company's valued improperly. You lose vote control, you could lose your bot spot on the board if you write a bad employment agreement that says you have to step down from the board if you resign from the company. there's there's a lot of caveats and and ChatGPT and all these other AI platforms don't they don't cover for any of that. That's why when you sign a master services agreement with a normal company, it's 28 pages long. ChatGPT's goal is to make that thing one page long. And I can tell you, one page of legal of legalese is not what you need when you go into a courtroom. I saw a recent instance that this was it affected a family. two people were getting married. They put a a deposit down on a on a a wedding venue and before they got married the husband died the fiance died and they went to get their money back from the venue and the venue said no it says no refunds if it's if the wedding is canceled or rescheduled. They said well there's in this instance the person died and they said well we don't have a clause for that And it's like you're always protecting yourself for the worst case scenario, not for the best. So when you're doing Hunter Harris: Exactly. Danny Davis: when you're doing legal documents and when you're talking to people and you're negotiating these things, it is not personal. It is going to affect you personally in the long run. So invest the time early because that's the time to get those deals done. So I wholeheartedly agree with you. and you know, I I've got into some contentious, contentious arguments with boards in the past where they want to do one thing, I want to do the other. you know, in retrospect, I was right in most of those instances. founder-led companies are much sexier and and much more exciting as they grow. But sometimes the company thinks they can they can move into a new realm without you and they learn that maybe they were moving too fast or they weren't moving in the right direction. So I'm a big proponent of founder-led companies with great legal teams. So please Hunter Harris: thousand percent. Danny Davis: you know don't give up control early and make sure you have a great legal team that and and a and a good personal attorney team just in case you can bo bounce some of those questions off of Hunter Harris: Mm. Yeah, I mean, devil's in the details and legal's just a thing where you want all of your T's crossed, all of your I's dotted, and absolutely no unnecessarily legal unnecessary wiggle room thrown in there anywhere. So I I wanna Danny Davis: Yeah. way Andrew Hunter Harris: go ahead. Danny Davis: I do want to make I would want to make one comment and because you you talked about AI and documents. I'll tell you what AI really is good at. It's good at consolidating documents that lawyers have already written. So once you actually Hunter Harris: Yes. Danny Davis: have a database of legal

documents that are signed and executed it it is good at analyzing language because it is very analytical and you know it's it's a s it it was built to you know execute better code. we didn't know that ChatGPT and all these other platforms were gonna do what it does now but it's very good at decoding legal documents, and and giving Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: you sort of arguments for and against. so if I could be a proponent for AI and legal documents, it's after they're signed and executed, go through and and really use the the tool to help defend you if anything ever happens. Hunter Harris: Treat it kind of like a librarian and maybe not less a scribe in this case, but have it help you move through your very documents, et cetera, as opposed to churning out the legal paperwork itself. I I wanted to take it back a little bit to the HyperFi investors specifically, too. So given the cautionary tale here, like if you took yourself back, if you could like give yourself the knowledge that you have today. what would have you what would you have done differently in terms of that particular fundraising around and your engagement with with them and, you know, the magic words of due diligence, right? Danny Davis: Yeah, I think we would have done more due diligence on the actual fund. I I tend to believe that maybe they haven't raised as much money as they say, or maybe they you know, the promises that they made, the things that aren't always in documents, the things that you trust, the things that they that they say. I think being cautionary about that. I mean it all seems really exciting when you're building it, but but Even when there's a document that says, hey, we're gonna fund if you do those these things, you know, they could argue that they don't think you did those things, even if you did. and they could and literally they can withhold funding for any reason. And and so if you're put all your eggs in one basket, like we did and and we did it for a reason, which was a very large term sheet. So the raise was up to a very large amount. So it caused us to not have to raise multiple times. Now, in retrospect, we should have gone in the other direction, but the the icing Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: on the cake here is that our investors that are The investors that we had talked to before, the VC funds and all that, they actually were still interested in us after we we left. And so we created an entirely new company. No, no, none of the same code, none of the same IP. And we we created reps and warranties against it. And what it showed us was the right investors are your friend when you are fully transparent. You tell them what happened, you show them everything, you give them, you build great companies, you build ideas, and you take these ideas and turn them into a good company. And people want invest in you you're transparent you you know provide your financials up front you give them you know monthly investor updates we were doing that

with a previous investor and it felt hostile the entire entire time you want founder friendly investors even at series a series b and beyond so the worst possible scenario is feeling like you're under the gun from your early stage investors you should never feel like that your early stage investors are the ones that are building something that helping you build something that doesn't yet exist and they're patient and they're they're friendly and they're helpful and they're introducing you to other funds and other groups and we were not getting that we were we were getting the opposite which was this needs to be done by this time or we're not gonna fund we're not gonna do this or we're not i mean we were past our milestones and they still said we hadn't better milestones so Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: you you you can't get into business with with people that are you know notorious for doing this and and the the proof is talk to any other founder in the portfolio and you start to learn this is not a Exception. This is the rule. And and so you know, our our our suggestion to them is, you know, even in our original documents, is you know, we will just depose everybody that you already work with. And I I don't think they're gonna Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: have very good things to say about you. I mean, I don't want to be defamatory and guess what they're gonna say, but I know we won't have a very good things to say about them. And from the from the people that have so far stepped forward to do declarations for us, they don't have anything good to say either. So I think there's a trend here, and I think doing due diligence on Hunter Harris: Yeah, I I want to highlight too, or you partially talked about it, but like really good investors are a source of significantly more than just money. I think a lot of people consider their investors to be like, give me check, thank you, we'll talk later. Versus like really it can be a whole relationship where there's things like introductions to potential business partners, in introductions to potential customers, introductions to potential operators. Like there's a a ton that your investors can do for you if you have the right ones, right? And if you have Danny Davis: Yeah. Hunter Harris: the opportunity to build that right relationship, right? Danny Davis: Yeah, I'd love to comment on that. we were fortunate enough to meet they're very active on social. it's a a VC slash accelerator. They they they're so good at what they do, I call them an accelerator. I don't know if they actually are, but they're very good at it. Hunter Harris: Hm it counts. Danny Davis: Yeah, it's their name is Founders Edge, they're out of Boston. some of the most well connected, positive people I've ever met. They are in the weeds. they have they're two partners and they are phenomenal. They balance each other really well. one is Jess Jess Lynch and the other is Greg Rays. And I actually met them through TikTok. They were just doing, hey, send us your Hunter Harris: Really? Danny Davis: deck, yeah, send us your deck, we'll critique it, we'll tell you if it's interesting. and they're heavily involved. And after we after we started going down the road with them, I mean we spent a good you know Know five months going back and forth showing them you know founders' videos and and product demos and all this kind of stuff. And it wasn't always r roses, right? It was like you guys shouldn't do Hunter Harris: Course. Danny Davis: it that way, you should do it like this. And they were very honest and transparent about where they were. And what's great about that is we now have a relationship with them that you know, the other day they said, Hey, we're doing a launch event in Boston. We you know, we're gonna have you guys come out. send me, you know, a hundred different companies you want to meet, 50 different contacts you want to meet, these different companies. We'll see where we fit and we'll set them up. and by the way, well, all help you raise the rest of your entire round with our contacts which they did so our round was Hunter Harris: Awesome. Danny Davis: raised out of Boston through Founders Edge and you know I say that not to give them a massive amount of unnecessary deal flow they'll probably probably kill me for 40 new 40 new decks flying in per day but when you have investors that are helpful in more than just investing and giving you a check it it's really powerful and that's why you're gonna give up a little bit of additional equity to do it because the value Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: goes so much further and and if I can you know give that as a piece of a founder's advice since we're on that sort of track of giving founders advice here get with a accelerator if you can or an early stage fund as as fast as you can because trust me their network is much bigger than yours Hunter Harris: Absolutely. I mean, especially in the early stages, right, where like obviously if you're already accelerated, right? Like you're up, you're jamming, they can still add to that, right? But the Danny Davis: yeah. Hunter Harris: earliest parts are the riskiest parts. So if you have opportunities to just shortcut stuff and also get advice from operators that have seen it and done it before, basically like why trek fifty miles through the jungle when someone can just, you know Drop you off at the resort at the end, right? Yeah. Danny Davis: Pick you up in a Jeep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I am The there's some routing lingo called open shortest path first. And in routing, it doesn't care how complex the route is, it's just trying to find the open fast the open port, the fastest route that's available between those two locations. there's some downside to it, but the upside Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: is you get there faster. And in the business of speed, we are especially with AI, we're in the business of trying to build stuff as fast as we can. And as you know, speed Hunter

Harris: Absolutely. Danny Davis: speed is the enemy of efficiency. So how do you balance those two? You you basically get a high quality speed you know car. You basically get something that provides speed and also safety and then those and then those those traps become less evident and they happen less. And so I think for for us, I give people this advice all the time. I don't like solo founders. I know it's possible to do so to be a solo founder. I don't like it. I already Hunter Harris: It's tough. Danny Davis: yeah I already perform you know 20 different jobs and my Hunter Harris: Yeah, Danny Davis: co-founder does Hunter Harris: I can add it. Danny Davis: you know twenty different tasks and twenty different jobs. It's it it's really impossible for solo founders unless there is a a really simple product that's a push to the market where they are just trying to build traction before they go get other people. But I'm a big proponent of of co-founders. you also don't want too many founders so I I always frown if there's like six founders of a company because they usually argue and there's nobody knows who to listen to and you know it's it's Hunter Harris: I mean, if you have six founders you probably still have like one or two founders. You're just like handing out the title Danny Davis: Right. Hunter Harris: a little bit too much, right? Danny Davis: Yeah, I think OpenAI on paper has eight founders. So I think Hunter Harris: Wild. Danny Davis: or cl I'm sorry, Anthropic has like eight founders on paper. Anduril, the defense company, Palmer Luckey's company, I think they have like six founders. they're all doing fine. So I so you know, they're doing they're all multi-billion dollar companies. So who am I to say that? I'm just saying in seed and pre-seed and launching companies. I find that Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: it's easier with a smaller a smaller founder list. And and then also the cap table's important early on. So if you can get those smaller checks from quality teams, it looks really good as you move forward. So if somebody comes to you and says, Hey, I can only give you 50,000, and you go, Well, our minimum is a hundred thousand, but that but that one company is a good accelerator or that company is well recognized as funding future rounds, take the money because they are gonna be extremely Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: valuable later on, even if you're only a small investment. So something to think about as you start to think about You know, how much value do they add? Maybe their most of their value is going to be allowing you to get to the next round faster. Hunter Harris: Which I I mean, to the point of speed too, like getting to the round to the next round faster is just that much risk you're mitigating and that much more chance of future success, right? Danny Davis: Agreed. while it's cheaper to run a company because of AI, it's not cheaper to essentially operate companies with the many as many pieces of software in

in the stack that you need because now you're paying for compute and you're paying your AWS bill and you're paying your anthropic bill and you're buying tokens and you're you know, you're buying credits and some of these other platforms and SAS is in some markets struggling, so they've done some price adjustments. I mean AI is making things more efficient, but but it's still expensive to build a company. So you know, being properly funded with the right people is definitely you know it sounds it sounds so cliche to to say that and so everyone say, well of course you do. But when it comes down to it, a lot of people they take shortcuts and they say, we only need 500,000 to do this. And what if you need two million, right? And you fail before you finish. So I I met with an investor the other day and they said something really interesting, and I will I'll share this in analogy. There's a lot of companies right now building in the AI space that are building a product equivalent to a cancer drug or just a drug in general. And with drugs, you can't really go to somebody and say, hey, tell us all of your deal flow for your drugs, how much revenue do you have for your drug? You don't have anything until you build the drug. You can go pre-sell concepts of the drug, but you can't go book a bunch of revenue. And so if you're a kind of company that needs to build the drug before you can sell it, you're gonna have to raise more money because people aren't gonna continue to Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: give you money if you have no track. That you can show. So that's another thing is specialty investors. Make sure you're looking at investors. Do they invest in infrastructure? Are you an infrastructure company? Do they do debt financing for equipment? you know, are they pure equity? And if they're pure equity, do you really need to raise as much? Does some of that need to be raised as as debt so you can buy equipment? because debt is still cheaper than equity. So there's a lot Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: of ways to look at the business and look at investors. So the other piece of advice that I just mentioned is basically make sure you're choosing the right investors for your company, the type of investor. Hunter Harris: I I love the call out to debt too, because man, like the narrative is just like you gotta go pitch the VCs and there's so many non equity options for I mean, like, I don't know, I I've applied for a loan anytime recently. I'm sure it's not like easy easy, but like there's so many options out there aside from Danny Davis: Well, there's some early funding. I mean there's grants. there's a lot of grants right now in energy space. people are all trying Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: to come up with with ways to to, you know, find other additional ways to build energy, you know, or make energy more efficient in a data center. that's really one of the Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: main limitations we have right now. It's not

just the compute, it's the power to to to run the compute in many of these data centers. So Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: I've seen I'm seeing grants from the government. I seen some grants in the state of Nevada. So Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: I think there's I think there's a lot going on for non-dilutable funding and if you don't know what non-dilutable is you know it's for those of you that are listening it just means that you don't take a cap table hit you just have to hit milestones and you you get to keep your you get to keep that investment as long as you're you're doing the right thing for the program you applied for. and I think the other thing too is applying to you know government contracts and other really unique software contracts because it's it's a market where everybody's looking for more efficient efficiency and you get one Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: good federal contract and you're on your way. So there's some other ways to fund very e to fund early. we chose the VC route because it's a quality group of people as a quality you know it's a quality It's a more trusted version of how we can raise capital for this particular industry. Because we're in AI Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: infrastructure and inference, it's important that we partner with the right people. And the VCs ha have nailed this space, the hyperscales have nailed this space. So we really wanna move in the rising boats raise all tide the rising tides raise all boats. We wanna be one of those boats. Hunter Harris: Right. Danny Davis: So Hunter Harris: Thousand percent. Well, Danny, I wanna be respectful of your time. Do you wanna plug your pluggables? Danny Davis: sure. I mean look, we are we're building StackYak. It is a AI orchestration platform for enterprise. It that's what we call frictionless and sovereign. it gives enterprises the ability to build multiple parts of their stack on a single platform. we've been running in stealth for a while. We have some really large enterprise customers testing our platform. and if you're out there and you're you're you know looking to to make some additional money and you're not sure what you're gonna do yet, we do have an agent and subagent program where you can resell our platform. And if you have existing customers that need compute or need inference or if all this is new to you and you want to learn about it, you know, join our our agent reseller program. We'll show you some training videos, tell you how to sell it, and you'll be off to the races. compute's not going away. and Hunter Harris: No. Danny Davis: a huge opportunity right now to to build that with your customers. And remember, this is the biggest piece of advice I can give anyone building in the AI space. People are craving. Real relationships. Real conversations, Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: real discovery, real problem solving. And AI is only get gonna give them a small piece of that. So if Hunter Harris: Mm-hmm. Danny Davis: you have customers, you have partners, you have relationships in that space, reach out to them, ask them questions, do discovery, ask them what the problems they have are and if you can provide some of those solutions. and they w happen to work with StackYak or or others in the AI industry and you wanna reach out to me and just ask us about some of our partners, we're happy to share. So we thank you for your time, Hunter. and We're available. It's very easy. It's stackyak.ai. It's a big old yak carrying a bunch of servers. And and my email address is easy. It's danny.davis at stackyak.ai. Hunter Harris: I love it. And the the plug for real conversations on a podcast where we're having a real conversation is just kind of a perfect note to end on, I think. So thank you very much for joining us. Greatly appreciate all the advice you've given. I think this is just I mean, it's more than a vein of gold. It's like a whole mine of gold here, right? And for everyone watching, I God, I hope you've learned a ton here. There's just so much good stuff here. so I hope you've enjoyed, hope you've learned, and I hope you can take it back to build your business better and as Danny was saying, like keep at it through adversity too, right? I hope you all have a fantastic day. Peace. Danny Davis: Thanks, Hunter.