Cuddle Clones just made Louisville startup history!

Jennifer Williams of Cuddle Clones is making Louisville startup history! Cuddle Clones already made world history by creating the only scalable company that allows you to order online and create a lifelike replica of your pet (https://cuddleclones.com/).

Now, they just made Louisville history by becoming the first Louisville area company to sell equity in their company to the general public under the new Regulation CF crowdfunding laws. These laws allow a company like Cuddle Clones to sell equity in their company to ANYONE for as little as $100 minimum investments. This method of startup fundraising is the way of the future. It will help Louisville get more startups started and let a lot more local people share in the profits!

 

Check out my interview with Jennifer and find out:

◊ Where did the idea come from for Cuddle Clones?

◊ How did they get started?

◊ Where did their early funding come from?

◊ How did they decide to use Regulation CF crowdfunding to raise capital, and what’s the process like?

◊ What can we do to continue to improve Louisville’s startup scene?

 

Transcript (machine generated, so please forgive the typos):

Alan: 00:02 Hey everybody, welcome to the Metro Startup Launcher podcast. This is Alan Grosheider, and today I’m talking to my friend Jennifer Williams. She’s the chief cloning officer of the company. She started called cuddle clones and in my opinion, Jennifer’s now blazing a trail that will be the way of the future for startup companies to raise capital in the area and said, Hey Jennifer, how are you? Good. So she just started a regulation cf crowdfunding capital raise that allows anybody, not just rich accredited investors to invest as little as $100 bucks in her company. But first let’s kind of talk a little bit about what your company is it called. It’s called cuddle clones. Tell us what’s the. What do you do at cudell clones

Jennifer: 00:53 and our flagship product. The cuddle clone is a stuffed animal that’s made to look just like your pet. So customers go onto our website, they upload pictures, they tell us all the special characteristics about their pet and make a few choices and in several weeks they get a plush animal that looks just like their pet and has the markings and every other sort of special thing that represents their pet.

Alan: 01:19 How did you get it to look? Right? I had to have some that came back and you’re just like, what is that?

Jennifer: 01:30 Definitely. Um, it took a while. Uh, this business started out of an idea from the University of Louisville Entrepreneurship Mba program and we kind of did a lot of the academic thing, like a business plan and industry analysis. And at the end of the program we said, okay, well, does anyone actually know how to make a stuffed animal? And we’re looking at each other like, no.

Alan: 01:53 Okay.

Jennifer: 01:55 So a good two years from the program until we launch to get the product. Right. So we went through several consultants. Um, we did, we looked at the US, we looked at Vietnam, we looked at uh, other places, uh, ended up in China where we actually own our own workshop now and that’s actually a really good competitive advantage for us just because we have full control over the quality and there are employees, so, so that’s super nice

Alan: 02:31 entrepreneurs, a lot of opinions as to whether you can start a company where you don’t necessarily know how to do exactly what you’re going to do. And I’m, I’ve always been of the opinion that the entrepreneur, the person who makes the company work is the person that just pulls everybody together. There. Tom Sawyer that gets everybody on board and convinces them to keep moving in the right direction. And it’s, you know, it’d be nice if you are sometimes if you’re an expert in the area that you’re starting the company, but if you really have a passion for, for just making something work. I really think the entrepreneurs, just the person that that never quits and keeps things moving. So it’s a good example, I think of the fact that, you know, you weren’t an expert at making stuffed animals

Jennifer: 03:24 because you know, in your mind you’re like, this has to be able to be done, you know. And so when I hear other people saying no, or you know, some of the huge manufacturers overseas, you know, had said we can’t be your partner because they make 10,000 of the same thing all the time, so it’s not their model to build one. And I’m like, but it’s possible. And so, you know, yeah. You just don’t take no for an answer and keep going until you have something.

Alan: 03:52 How did you get the initial idea? Where did that come about?

Jennifer: 03:56 Through my dog. Yeah, my dog, rufus a, he was a great day. And at the time, and this was actually years before the MBA program even, um, he was a huge dog. He was white with black and white patches and two different colored eyes. And so I was kind of laying around on a Monday and I was like, oh my gosh, it’d be so cool to have a big stuffed animal if you. And I really kind of wrote it down, kind of like how entrepreneurs write down all their ideas. Um, and so it took a while to kind of resurrect the idea in the MBA program.

Alan: 04:30 The exact same thing. I have a list of ideas that I started 20 years ago and just keep adding to it.

Speaker 3: 04:39 Oh No, got it back.

Alan: 04:43 I can literally see ideas that other people did and did really well with. Of course, there’s no real crappy ideas in there too. But people say that there’s a lot of entrepreneurs. I think it’s um, James Alter, I heard him say that you should practice writing down x number of ideas per day so that, because that kind of get your entrepreneurial juices going and then eventually one of them just keeps coming back and coming back. And um, when you first wrote the idea, what did you, did you feel like it was something you might actually do or just thought, well, let’s just kind of a cool idea.

Jennifer: 05:24 A little bit of both. I didn’t really know. Even back then, I mean, I would not really into entrepreneurship, so it wasn’t something I wasn’t something I was into from a young age. Uh, you know, I had a good career as an actuary, you know, working for a consulting firm. And so I didn’t really know what to do if I were to do anything, but it’s still pulled at my train because I googled it and it didn’t really exist. It was pretty rare. Normally when you come up with an idea, you google it and you’re like, oh, there’s like five people doing this already, you know, pretty competitive. And when I googled, you know, the animal of your pet, there was really only kind of one lady out in Arizona who did this as her, you know, she was the sole proprietor. And so she was also the artist and you know, that’s not quite scalable. Um, and hers were maybe $600 and so that was Kinda the only one I found. I was like, okay, that’s interesting. So there was a little bit. Heroin just doesn’t really exist.

Alan: 06:34 Entrepreneurial minded. When you were a kid, did you do paper out cutting grass or lemonade stands or anything?

Jennifer: 06:45 No, the only thing I did was usually I would buy now and laters I don’t know if you remember that candy and I would break like you could buy a whole pack of now and laters for like ten cents and there was like, I don’t know, six or seven of them in there and I would tell them each for breaking up both things and selling them individually.

Alan: 07:06 Cool. And everybody I talked to most people who are now entrepreneurs did something like that as a kid. They were constantly, they were trying sixth grade on which have always been. So what’s the process of getting. What was your background? You said you were an actuary and what was the process from being an actuary to being an entrepreneur?

Jennifer: 07:39 So I worked on large pension plan, so as a pension actuary and

Alan: 07:48 by the way I’m sure that that’s,

Jennifer: 07:54 I do love the math and I dabbled in a lot of people came around stock options and employer stock options and this was around the time for when your options on your income statement became mandatory from the, for on the accounting side. Anyway, so a lot of companies were kind of scrambling to make sure those assumptions were right and whatever. And so I did have the opportunity to jump on board with a guy who kind of broke off from our consulting firms to start his own consulting. And so I did go with him and so that was kind of my first taste of entrepreneurship where, you know, he’s like, Hey, I’m gonna go start this company. You kind of want to go with me. And I was like, yeah, that sounds fun. You know. And so there were two of us for awhile and we, I think we made it up for like five employees and what I realized after it we got some clients and then I think we just didn’t really agree on the direction and I mean I was like 20 don’t really know, but we went our separate ways, but that was kind of the point where I’m like, this is kind of fun, you know, and my dad was encouraging me to why don’t you start your own actuarial firm?

Jennifer: 09:08 And I was like, oh, that’s so boring. And so that’s when I decided to get my Mba. So that kind of propelled me into that role and when I found out about the entrepreneurship program I was like, Oh this is Kinda neat. So that’s kind of how it propelled from actuary to, Oh, let’s dabble in some entrepreneurship stuff.

Alan: 09:37 I just met with Suzanne and I learned a whole lot more about the entrepreneurial programs that really cool that, that we’ve got that resource right here. Do you feel like you, a lot of what you learned there kind of propelled you into actually being an entrepreneur?

Jennifer: 10:00 Yeah, I do. I’m a big fan of structure, so, you know, if someone gives me assignments and tests, I can do those, you know, if you kind of make your own to do list and might not get done. So I definitely liked the structure of school. Um, I could definitely be a career student I think. Um, but yeah, the program, I mean I think probably the biggest thing was just that networking and you know, they forced you to go out and go to venture connectors and go to different things. And so we started learning people and you know, when it came time to raise our first small angel round, we already had kind of a good sense of who to approach and things and um, it was definitely a good program. And you know, you talk about writing down your ideas. I mean, that’s one of the very first class is called the opportunity discovery and either training you to like look around like what problems are people having, you know, write down any little thing that you can think of because you never know. It might be the next big idea.

Alan: 11:04 Did you put a business plan together through the entrepreneurial program? Yes.

Jennifer: 11:11 Um, ahead and. Yeah, so we did like an industry analysis on, um, we kind of looked at the pet industry and the stuffed toy manufacturing industry kind of in tandem because our marketing was going to be geared toward pet owners, but the cost side of the business was making stuff animals to different markets altogether. Um, and we did that and wrote the business plan of course, like, you know, if we go back and read it now, it’s totally awful.

Alan: 11:41 Okay.

Jennifer: 11:41 Same thing. Not even the same thing that we’re doing now, but that’s fine.

Alan: 11:46 A lot of vcs and angel investors these days don’t require you to have full blown business plan. And that in my early entrepreneurial days, you wrote a 30 page, 40 page business and it was just super complicated and, and pretty much all bullshit, you know, whose idea it was gonna work out, but you know, it’s, it’s such a waste of time to, to put together too detailed a business plan. It needs to conceptual and, and, and to show that you at least have some idea of how you’re going to make money, but it’s not to get too deep. It’s kind of a waste from that. I guess. How did you get from the start? There you go, you put the business plan together, then what was the, the start, how did you start the company? How did you capitalize the start of the company?

Jennifer: 12:45 Well, so we had the MBA program and we were fortunate to win a couple business plan competitions and so that gave us around, I think it was like $45,000 and that’s non dilutive cash. So that was awesome. Um, and we used that. We pretty much use that up in the two years following the program to get these consultants in to get the product down. I, as an actuary put some money in, you know, we make pretty good money. And then, um, my business partner, Adam put them in as well. So it was a little bit of founder capital. Not much, but you know enough to kind of say, okay, yeah, we’re in, we’re in this. And then we, when we got around to kind of getting the product closer, we then started developing the website and that’s when we kind of reached out for a friends and family round and we raised $300,000 back in 2013 and the majority of it were people that Adam and I both knew, um, there’s maybe only one person on there that we didn’t really know, but it was the uncle of one of his friends.

Jennifer: 13:55 Um, and so that was nice and we actually, this wasn’t this new crowd funding round for us, isn’t our first foray into having nonaccredited investors on our term sheet or on our cap table. So we actually were able to go through with a full kind of PPM, the perspective thing for nonaccredited investors and we had maybe out of the there were 17 people that invested, maybe only five were accredited and the other 12 are not even on our very first round, so you know we wanted to give our families and other friends that we knew and opportunity to invest and they just needed to be more informed and have all the documentation in front of them.

Alan: 14:42 Good for entrepreneurs to think about. You really have to start networking people that that are are going to invest early on like that because it’s really hard to get people to invest money in a brand new idea that, that they. They don’t know who you are. It’s in. It’s almost impossible if you just have an idea and you don’t have some people, at least a few people around, they can put some money into it. It’s tough.

Jennifer: 15:13 Yeah,

Alan: 15:15 and that’s really what I’m hoping that long term that, that through metro startup launcher and through the regulation cf that eventually we can get a large enough pool of people investing in startups that you know, that, that we can make it a little bit easier to get that friends and family round, um, you know, get, get, uh, enough for people to get a start on their friends and family round.

Jennifer: 15:40 Yeah, definitely. And I mean, I think on the investor side too, it’s a good way for them to get their feet wet. Um, and you know, there’s some people who, you know, they maybe think they’re an angel investor because they invested in one company, but if that failed, you know, it’s kind of souring them where they have to know like, well, you know, as an angel you got to kind of diversify your investments, you know, to maybe 10, 20 different companies before you may see one word. And you know, reg cf is a good way to do it because you’re not putting in 30 grand into each one. You know, you’re maybe putting 500 or a thousand in each one

Alan: 16:17 just to get your feet wet. Exactly. That’s a big part. A big part of what really the main message that I’ve been pushing recently for metro startup launch or is that statistically the angel investors who make money invest in startups in a five year period and doing that make a 27 percent annual return on investment, which is huge. You know, they have to make fairly smart investments, but even even then one out of 10 produces 85 percent of their returns.

Jennifer: 16:50 Yeah.

Alan: 16:51 So, and you’re right, a lot of investors around here I’ve found that people would say, Oh, I invested $25,000 in a startup and it, it, you know, went down the toilet. So I’m never doing that again. But I don’t think that’s. I don’t agree with that. I think that’s a lot of the mindset of people around here. But if you look at the statistics, if there are, if we had 20 startups a year running through doing reg cf raises and 10,000 people investing in those and spreading the risk out, everybody’s gonna make a lot more money.

Jennifer: 17:26 Yeah. Yeah.

Alan: 17:28 So when you did start to get into the actual angel investor community, how did that go? What was the price? Was it a stressful process there?

Jennifer: 17:39 So we, with our first round, um, I did go to some of the local events, venture connectors, met a few people. Well I already kind of knew the people that ended up investing and so the public kind of places where I pitched or you know, Angel groups, we didn’t really get money from those, but I didn’t try necessarily, like I didn’t do the full round, like all angel groups and this and that. I mean we were pretty much closed. It took us from November to February to close on 300,000 and really only, I would say two to three of the people were angels here in Louisville. And the rest were friends and family from out of state. So I didn’t try really hard to get the money from Louisville on this newest round before we decided to do the crowd funding for equity. We, I went to a few different places and um, you know, it didn’t really get any bites so I’m not sure why, but we did have a few people come in on some of the investment where you can get the tax credit.

Jennifer: 18:58 So the angel tax credit for, for a few investors on, on our books. So, but yeah, so then we decided to kind of go to the crowd. I mean, we had somebody on Linkedin that introduced me to indiegogo. I’m just one of their project managers and uh, we had used Indygogo back in 2011 or 12 just to do a quick $5,000 campaign. I mean, this is Kinda when crowdfunding was just getting started. Um, and back then we just did that to, you know, get a little bit of awareness and do some price testing. So we kind of had different levels for how much a cuddle clone would be as far as the perks. And um, so that was a fun little campaign and so when, you know, this guy introduced me to this person in, at Indiegogo, we kind of started talking and were like, you know, pets, consumer products in general and pets especially are probably better suited to the crowd.

Jennifer: 19:58 Um, you know, as opposed to coming into a room of angel investors who maybe don’t understand pets or maybe, you know what I mean, like there’s, you know, a little bit of stuffiness when you get into the more formal presentations were in the crowd, you know, you’re more appealing to their heartstrings, you know, and so they may give you some money. I mean, yeah, we’re doing well and I’m not saying that like, oh, I’m just going to get dumb investors that don’t know what they’re doing. Like it’s not about that. It’s like, hey, we’re doing well and we’re going to continue to grow and we want somebody who’s just as passionate about their pets and, you know, investing in a growing company as we are.

Alan: 20:43 That’s interesting that you said you started pitching some of the local angel investors and you know, I’ve seen your information on, on your crowdfunding site and you guys were profitable for two years of profitability is pretty significant sales. It’s like $7,000,000 in sales over time and people didn’t want to invest. I mean I think and I think that’s a, you know, it’s kind of telling for our, our community, not that people are not investing in startups. I just think it’s a lot more people investing in startups and need that, need that risk, spread it a little bit more, spread out a little bit more so that you know, a good idea that’s a profitable company that’s a good, a good idea and it’s showing that it’s profitable. Should be able to raise capital. And I have people in our startup community telling me all the time, good companies always get capital and do you think that’s true?

Jennifer: 21:48 So I am not discouraged or anything. And you know what’s interesting is we were profitable

Jennifer: 21:56 pretty well, pretty good size in 2016 and 17. We weren’t, but not because, I mean it’s because we chose not to be like we’re trying to grow, we’re not trying to settle in and become profitable, um, although, you know, it’s something we could do, but that wasn’t really our vision from the beginning. Um, and so I think investors need to understand that too, like they’re not, you know, even some of the questions that we’re getting on the crowdfunding campaign right now, you know, when can I see a return on my investment, you know, am I going to get quarterly payments, like this probably isn’t the best place for you to invest. That’s what you’re looking for right now. You know, and Indiegogo does a good job of kind of reviewing all of the answers that we provide for compliance purposes. Um, but you know, some of the non savvy, so get payments immediately or that this is some kind of income investment. Like, no, it’s not, it’s, you know, hey, you’re banking on the future that this company can grow and have a good exit.

Alan: 22:56 Did you have investment debt, convertible debt on the website? Is that safe agreement or what’s the, what did you end up going with for the investment?

Jennifer: 23:12 Uh, I mean I think it’s just the form C or whatever. I mean it’s just a straight convertible note, but there’s no interest.

Alan: 23:22 Is There A. is there a term that will. It’ll convert specifically?

Jennifer: 23:27 No. I know the valuation cap is 10 million and the discount is 20 percent, but there’s no sort of term on it.

Alan: 23:35 Okay. So that’s. Yeah, that’s the interesting thing that’s going on here. People, a lot of investors around here haven’t heard of a safe agreement that they need to get comfortable with it because that’s what. And Silicon Valley or y combinator came up with, with the safe agreement, which is a convertible convertible note that converts. It only converts when certain events happen. It doesn’t convert on ad on a date and a really smart way to do it for the, for the entrepreneur and if it’s done correctly, it’s safe for the investor as well. And it just simplifies everything a whole lot. So I’m a proponent and trying to really push that nomad company. Bluetooth 22 is raising capital using safe agreement, so I’m, I’m hoping that you and I can be, we can be trailblazers here in, in crowdfunding capital raising and we’re doing a little bit different right now. We’re not doing reg cf, we’re doing the regulation d five zero, six C, which is accredited investors only but it’s wide open.

Jennifer: 24:50 Indiegogo site is a little confusing but I think you can raise up to one point. Oh, 7 million under the reg cf unaccredited side. And then I think our total raise was $2 million. So you know, whatever kind of split between those two of determined who ends up in what bucket.

Alan: 25:13 Great. Which I think is a good way to do it. It makes a lot of sensitive simultaneous regulation. Cf in regulation d eventually we would like to do some regulation cf, but we’re sort of working one side first and seeing what we can do. So what was the process? You said you did you. Did you look at a bunch of other crowd funding sites or did you go with indiegogo? Because. Because you’ve met some people that, that Kinda got you started.

Jennifer: 25:47 Yeah, more the latter, but they did do kind of a full due diligence process. I mean it took a good three months before we launched and so we had to pay for, you know, you have to pay for a few things. One is sort of the legal review to the financial review and basically they have a CPA firm come in and take a look at your books, you know, it’s not fully audited financial statements, but it’s a financial review. And so they went back and forth on a, you know, assets, a bunch of questions about our numbers and about our accounting policies and oh, what’s this, what’s that? And they kind of stamp the final financial statements that you see on the campaign.

Jennifer: 26:32 Um, and then we um, put together, they asked us a bunch of questions just about the offering, you know, our history and the story and had to make her video and the video isn’t cheap, but we actually have some internal staff that are working on videos. So that’s good. We already had um, and you know, I tell the story in our video and um, and yeah, it was a pretty good experience so far. I mean we’ll see too because indiegogo was pretty adamant that like, oh, they have a super huge network and I think as of today we’ve got about $114,000 raise crowdfunding, but 100 of it came from. So it was already somebody who was wanting to invest and so we’ll see, you know, there’s like 50 some days left on the campaign and will be kind of pushing our own little marketing campaign to our own audience. But I’m really hoping indeigogo comes through on their network. So they did send out a mass email. They said that their email list is about 500,000 people, but we’ll see because if we end up raising a couple hundred thousand and they’re taking, you know, this see and we paid a bunch of fees, it’s not going to be worth it. So we’ll see. There might be this thing to invest in the last week, like seven days. Who knows? They’re called that psychology.

Alan: 27:56 Yeah. Sometimes being the trailblazer, you, you know, it’s a learning curve and hoping, yeah, my thought on the line from metro startup launch here would be, you know, we’d get a couple of these done in and we continue to build our audience and we’re going to advertise, we’re going to be running facebook ads and stuff, pointing people to invest in cuddle clone. So that’s, you know, I want to make, I want, I want to build enough of an audience that it gets easier and easier for companies to use crowdfunding so that the whole city can kind of benefit from it over time. So just just to everybody that’s listening to this, invest in cuddle clones, invest in blood, you 22 and help us figure this out. Had a how do we crowd, how can we make it easier for startups to crowdfund and eventually for startups to get their friends and family round to get started. That’s where I like to see it go eventually. Um, and metro star actually has, hopefully I believe we’re coming into some relationships where we are going to be able to tap into some pretty significant investment funds as well as helping build that audience for crowdfunding. So hopefully I can introduce you to some, some people soon if you’re still looking for investors. Um, so the process I guess, um, our, our startup community, let’s kind of shift to that. W what, what do you see

Alan: 29:27 that needs, you know, w what is our startup community need, what have you, what are the benefits you’ve gotten from the startup community and how can we all work together to make it better?

Jennifer: 29:41 I would say like some of the things I enjoy most and I guess that kind of goes in tandem with what I have gotten out of it is just a sort of a social community around it. So when I first forge was still happening. Do you remember that? Sorry, there’s a cart going by going out the door. So there was some of that. Um, and you know, right now it’s a startup grind, you know, so they’ve had a few events. So there’s always some kind of organization that is hosting sort of social hour where and entrepreneur speaks and tells their story. I know we have open coffee. Um, there’s venture connectors, there’s a network of entrepreneurial women, so there’s a lot. I mean this town does have a lot going on. Like if you just google entrepreneurship things and movable, you can find something and a lot of them are free or like $5.

Jennifer: 30:40 It’s not like you have to pay an arm and a leg to join something. And so I’ve always thought that was the best thing because you know, I’ve also been involved in a couple of different peer group. I’m around town and some of them are paid and some of them are not. But the only one that really worked for me was an unpaid group that a bunch of us started on our own. There were six of us and we still have it and we’re all ceos have consumer products that are sold via an ecommerce platform. Like that’s our group and it’s very specialized and it’s very specific. But we all have the same issues. Like how to deal with crazy customer, you know, like, so and so, you know, you can really get what you need, I think without spending a lot of money. So that’s what I would say is good.

Jennifer: 31:40 Um, I think what we need, um, I think that it’s tough because I’m pretty scrappy and like, like to do a lot of things on my own, you know, like understand legal documents and do the financials. But I think that a lot of startups get afraid of those types of things. Um, and so, or you know, making a video for a crowdfunding campaign that’s expensive, you can spend thousands of dollars on making a video. And so I think there’s people with ideas who would love to go out and do the crowd funding, but they don’t have the resources for the video. They don’t have a way to, you know, particular their financials because they’ve never used a spreadsheet and some, you know, um, and so I don’t know if this is even feasible from a business perspective, but you know, kind of a start up package almost, you know, that kind of includes like, oh, or maybe even a crowd funding package where Oh hey, this includes your video and you know, you don’t really pay us until you’ve raised $10. You know. But that’s kind of risky for whoever would be providing the services to. But I don’t know, maybe some kind of thing like that. That kinda helps these companies do the first step.

Alan: 33:02 Well, one of the things that we’re working on three meds launcher is to develop a, a group of 20 or 25 people eventually that do exactly that. They may not be able to put up the funding to, to, to do all those various things, but basically they’re going to be sort of the due diligence people that can handhold a startup from the very beginning. And in exchange they would get some equity in your company and maybe they would get, they would have a fee that comes out of the initial capital raise. So you’re maybe they would say, okay, I’m going to charge you 15,000 bucks to put all this together for you, plus I’m going to get five percent equity in your company some, you know, something like that. And then it really helped them through the whole process. I’m hoping that can be something that would accelerate startups. And it sounds like there’s definitely a need for it because people have no clue how to create a cap table or what a private placement is or you know, there’s just so many that are, that are pretty foreign to people when, when they, when they’re brand new with an idea.

Jennifer: 34:19 Yeah. And not everybody has gone through an MBA program and learn that, you know, and I don’t expect everyone to. So there’s some of that. I mean, there’s also the other argument to like, well, but if you’re not willing to kind of take the time as entrepreneur to learn a lot of that on your own, you might not get very far. I mean, it takes a lot of hard work and you know, you can’t just have people handling different sides of it. Um, I think too that, uh, oh, there was something you said that like, I forget what it is now. Sorry.

Alan: 34:56 Well, I do think we have a great startup community and so many people that are trying hard to do to improve it and um, I am really glad to see somebody jump on to do the first regulation, cf crowdfunding. As far as I know. I don’t know if anybody else has done one yet in the Louisville area.

Jennifer: 35:17 Oh, okay. Good.

Alan: 35:19 I haven’t seen one but the, you know, that’s something I’ve been pounding for a couple of years is to, to, for us to really embrace the regulation cf crowd funding. I think it will be the way of the future for startups raise capital. I think that there will be some changes that come, you know, they’re already changes in Congress that they’re considering or people are pushing, like increasing the amount of money you can raise and things like that. But, so I think some changes are gonna occur that make it a little bit better, but honestly I think in 10 years it’ll be the way that, that most startups raise capital. And I also think there’s going to be a secondary market that comes out of that too where you know, it, it’ll be a lot easier for you to, to, to make, make good on your, to your investors. So if you have a thousand investors that come onboard as a regulation cf in a regulation cf crowd fund, there will be secondary markets that would allow them to trade those stocks. That’s already in the works. But I think that’s the way it’s go. And I’m hoping that Louisville, I’m hoping we can kind of be on the forefront of really embracing the regulation cf to, to, uh, help or really early stage startups.

Jennifer: 36:40 So in one of the podcasts I’ve been listening to a pitch or something they talk about and I didn’t know what it was called, but I thought there should be no, not an incubator or some people that are investing in startups and they just have office space there and a few resources, but a true what they call Silicon Valley, a true studio where the studio has a permanent staff that, you know, you’ve got your account and you’ve got your lawyer, whatever that work for the studio and startups come through and they create their own startups as well. So maybe all in all, you know there’s 20 different startups being worked on in the studio and

Jennifer: 37:30 once one of them has traction, then that’s the time where it kind of breaks out on its own and goes and maybe raise some money or build. I’m probably sure that these studios are building mvp for all of these products at the same time. And so it’s sort of a pooling of resources. Once, once I cash out, maybe I’ll start one of these, but I don’t know. I don’t have time right now, but it’s just this idea that you’ve got permit employees working on startups rather than their own or just one at a time in hopes that, you know, you’re going to nurture all of them and then fairly quickly, um, you know, killed the bad ones and move forward with the good ones. And then there’s always this constant supply of ideas running through the studio as well. And even if you have an entrepreneur with an idea, but they have no team, they have no, no, but maybe the idea’s good or maybe they’ve got some fit in whatever industry they want to be in actually run through the studio and equity.

Alan: 38:37 Um, there’s that idea.

Jennifer: 38:38 Yeah. Which I think would be cool here.

Alan: 38:41 Well, I actually have some things in the works. It’s a little too early to talk about, but that’s something that is a little bit in the works with, with some capital, some, some investors that are, that are part of Bluetooth 22. Um, and that’s basically a finished. Everybody doesn’t know that. It’s my kind of my day job is 22 and the. So I’ve got some investors that are coming on board with that, but also some, uh, a group that’s coming on board to help with some of our development and they have an interest to do that, to create that, that studio sort of concept. And so, uh, I think we both need to go out and build our companies sell and then come back with millions of dollars. We can jump on board. Um, we’ll uh, we’ll, we’ll make it happen. Okay. Well anything else you want to talk about before we jump off? I don’t think so. Okay, well good luck with, with the capital raise and everything else and we will, I’ll be doing everything I can to help support you through metro startup launcher and yeah, thanks so much for sharing it. You’re blazing a trail and so go ahead. Really happy to see you doing this and grateful that you’re taking the arrows and make it happen. Alright. Okay. Talk to you later. Bye.