Rolando Rosas 28:39
nice, yeah. Well, that’s great that that that angel investor came along, essentially gave you the the what you needed to get off the ground, your website, your database. And as you’re getting through this, this new you built, this new venture, you’re getting it off the ground. At what point where were you starting to realize there may be an exit here. You know, you talked about $48 million but were there signs and signals that let you know you’re on the right track, or where you’re like, boy, I hope this doesn’t go like down like the last time? Well,
Sharon K. Gillenwater 29:09
from the very beginning, I knew I had something valuable because I was working with Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Google, eventually, Oracle, like all the biggest tech companies, I was getting my information in front of them. You know, we were basically a content company and SaaS company, and they loved it, and they told me to keep going. And those organizations move very slowly. And especially, I had one foot in my company and one foot as a consultant to those companies, and the only thing I was really struggling with in the beginning was when you’re a good consultant, they want to hold on to you, and they want you to keep doing what you’re doing for them in tech. Thing, no one does their own decks. You know, people like me do them. So every piece of content you see is being done by a consultant. So they really rely heavily on the consultants. And so while they loved what I was doing and wanted more of it, they didn’t want me to go away as a consultant and become this SaaS business owner, right? They wanted me to keep, keep doing their decks. And so was
Rolando Rosas 30:26
there a moment, by the way, did you have a moment? Or was there a moment you’re like, enough of the consulting team going on my
Sharon K. Gillenwater 30:31
oh yeah, it was a little seemingly unconscious, consequential request. And I just was like, I’m not doing this. I’m done because the consulting was incredibly lucrative, and this is one way I was able to survive. I live in San Francisco. I had two little kids. My husband was taking care of the kids, so we didn’t have any other income, so I had to keep doing it, and it was a huge amount of time. I worked every night and weekend, because I was doing two different things here, but I knew that at some point I would have to stop. And what happened was I was working for one of these big tech companies, and I had my main point of contact was just really disorganized, very hard to work with, and I did everything for her. And the last straw was when she came to me and she said, You know, I just can’t manage all the scheduling associated with all these projects, so I’d like you to take over the Callen calendaring for everything. And I there is nothing I dislike more than calendar invites, and I screw it up every time. I don’t know how I do it, but for me, it’s like the little things that other people find easy, that I just can’t do, and I hate doing it. And I once accidentally invited every employee of my company to my Zumba class that I was teaching by accident.
Rolando Rosas 32:02
Oh, my royally with invites I put on the wrong dates, even, yeah,
Sharon K. Gillenwater 32:12
or if you’re traveling, you put you have the wrong time zone. You think you’re correcting for it, and you forget the calendar. So, so, yeah, so, plus, I didn’t have access to these people’s calendars because it was, you know, a big, giant company, and I’m a contractor. So So I was in Tahoe with my family on vacation, and I just came unglued at this little, tiny request. And I was like, I’m quitting. And they said, perfect, quit. And I’m like, I don’t know how we’re going to manage financially. And my husband’s like, it’ll be fine. So I, I literally quit a, you know, $300,000 a year gig because somebody asked me to start sending.
Rolando Rosas 32:52
Would you say that was a wise move at the time, or were you like, I don’t care. I don’t give a flying I don’t give a flying bleep.
Sharon K. Gillenwater 32:58
I don’t give I did not, I did not care. And this person was also, I mean, I learned a ton in terms of how you treat people, and you never know if some little thing is just such a pet peeve for that person that they’re just going to leave. So I I try to make work easy for people. Another thing she did is she used to forward me every single email that came through about a project without reading it. And so you read one email and it says one thing, and then you read another email and it contradicts that. So you have to kind of look at the dates and times and say, Okay, which one is the most current, so combing through that all the time. So it was like it became an administrative nightmare. So I don’t care. You know, if someone is your vendor, don’t do that to them, like net it out for them. Organize your stuff before you send because you’re not paying them to be your administrative assistant. You’re paying them to do what they’re good at, and you don’t want to sow seeds of discontent with someone who really does great work for you. So that was, I always take lessons away from everything that happens and try to apply those moving forward. That’s worked really well for me.
Rolando Rosas 34:14
Wow. Well, you know, those are great words of wisdom, and I’m sure anybody that’s hearing this could take that to the bank, because we all in this environment today, you know, we work with vendors that are not part and contractors that are not part of the organization, but they provide critical services. And finding somebody good is hard. It is really hard. You want to find a lot of people. You could put a job posting in tomorrow, and boom, you know, you hire somebody, but finding somebody like what you’re saying, you’re adding value, and you’re critical, and you’re just not a cog in the wheel. And I can’t believe they just simply let you go like that, like but you know, like, come on, share. No, think about it. You know, give it. Give it the weekend, you know. And you know, come back and think on it. But you’re like, F you. I’m getting out of here no more. Well,
Dave Kelly 35:01
quitting during a vacation that must feel freeing as can be. You know, most people that go away on vacation and they’re trying to get their head away from their job for the first six days of the vacation, and then finally, when you’re relaxed, it’s already time to go home. Did you was this at the beginning, middle or end of your trip, and was it a liberating experience once you had that baggage kind of off your shoulders?
Sharon K. Gillenwater 35:28
Well, that that all sounds great, but no, I think that’s the financial implications of quitting were huge, and I knew that I would be in for a fight because they wouldn’t want to let me go, which was true. I mean, even, even after I quit, this company came back and was a database customer. So they, they became a customer of boardroom insiders, and they tried to pull me back into consulting projects that way, like, oh, we have this custom project. And so I had to kind of draw a line in the sand for everybody and say, I’ll do custom work, but if it has nothing to do with the value proposition of boardroom insiders, I’m not doing it. So I’ll do your boardroom insiders was a platform to enable and support C suite selling and executive engagement. So if it had anything to do with that, like if they would say, well, we have these 50 people we’re trying to attract to an event, could you make recommendations of what the event should look like to attract these specific people? I would do that, and that was a custom project. But if they would come back and say, well, our you know, consumer division wants a strategy of which trade shows they should go to next year. I wouldn’t do that because it had nothing to do with advancing the business of boardroom insiders.
Dave Kelly 36:51
So you had to
Sharon K. Gillenwater 36:52
draw a line, and I had to, and that was it was difficult, but it was necessary, because I only had so much time, and I wanted everything I did to focus on the the business,
Rolando Rosas 37:04
and as the business started growing, this is the part where we started the business starts growing. You start getting offers, and you’re saying others are dangling 40, $50 million you really, you know, eventually you realize that that’s not what they’re going to give you. But what happens the moment you said, Okay, we’ll make an exit strategy here. How does that play out as you start through the process and then you eventually, you talk about, you told me how it all went down on the plane, but this just tell me, tell us a little bit about that. How you now, okay, you decide, Okay, time for an exit. Let’s go forward. Or what motivated you really, more importantly, what motivated you to say, okay, yeah, maybe it’s time for something else.
Sharon K. Gillenwater 37:49
It was the timing. We were very concerned about a crash, either a market crash or a tech crash, and both of those things ended up happening shortly after we sold, we were worried. We had a team in Russia. Our our tech vendor was based in Charlotte, but our team was like three people in Russia, and they were fantastic. And we were having conversations months before the war broke out in Ukraine, about how problematic that could potentially be. Because I don’t know if you remember, but all through like 2021 there were rumblings about Russia, and I remember sitting with our vendor at dinner in Charlotte, and they were saying, you know, it’s not going to be a problem unless they disable this SWIFT system, which is how payments are sent to Russia. And they said, if that goes, then we might be in trouble. And so, you know, even into 20 early, 2021 I was worried about having this team in Russia that we worked with constantly. And as it turned out, after we sold shortly thereafter, a month later, the war broke out, and that team, some of them, fled to Istanbul, and it was completely disrupted. So we were thinking about all of those things because we were managing the business well, everything was going great, but we had more people working for us than we had ever had before, and we were kind of exhausted. And so if we’re exhausted, managing the company through good times, we couldn’t imagine what that would be like managing the company through bad times. And our age was a factor. I’m going to be 60 next year. At the time, I was 5657 and my partner was like nine years younger than me, and I didn’t want to manage I didn’t want to spend my late 50s and early 60s managing a company through tough times. So there were all those things that we were thinking about and timing. It all falls under the category of time. Timing. Also at that time, multiples for SaaS company sales were at an all time high. So it was a very frothy market, and we didn’t want to miss out on that either.
Rolando Rosas 40:13
Big money. Still, there was quantitative easing. I know we play a lot in the Amazon space, and Amazon aggregators became a new thing around 2021. Cheap money flowing into these big funds that were buying Amazon companies or Amazon based companies. And when cheap money is flowing, you’ve been around since, you know, you know, the Tech game. You know, 2000 things imploded. 2008 also financial crisis. It’s like you said, it’s a time. There’s a circle here. Things are really good, and you pulled the trigger on it right. And so 2021 22 and two comes around. You’re like, maybe the party will end with
Sharon K. Gillenwater 40:50
this. Yeah, we were really nervous about that. And so the call from the PE firm came in April of 21 I launched a search for a banker, pretty much right after that, it took me several months to interview different bankers talk to their references. I talked to 12 different entrepreneurs who had sold their companies and learned so much from them, and chose our banker hired them Labor Day weekend, so September of 21 and the sale was wrapped up by the end of January 22 and that was an intense process. There are many different aspects to that. I led the process. So I learned a lot, and that really is what launched me into what I’m doing now. Because, I mean, I live in San Francisco, you could probably count 10 or 12 people on my block who have done this and done it in a bigger on a bigger scale. But once I started talking to people afterwards, I realized how rare This is, especially being a woman founder and people begged me to tell their story, to tell my story, and to share information. And so now I have a whole new chapter doing that,
Rolando Rosas 42:08
and I and I really love how you shared so much on Tiktok about your journey and that experience being in that bubble, you said to me, you know, it’s like being in a bubble, and when you’re in that bubble, you don’t, sometimes you don’t know you’re in the bubble, but you speaking out on it was something unheard of. Being a woman in tech, you know, you speak a lot about transparency and in pay, and from a payday perspective, I know on your on your video, you had taught one of your Tiktok. You talked about wrapping up the deal, closing the deal, because the deal is not closed until the literally, the money is in the bank. Tell me about that. You’re on the plane. What happens next?
Sharon K. Gillenwater 42:53
Well, I was on a plane because I had been in South Carolina where my partner and our team was for two weeks waiting for the deal to wrap, and it was supposed to close three times and it didn’t each time there was a delay for various reasons. And so I was really homesick, and I needed to go home, because, you know, how long do you stay there? So they had told me that the deal was going to close that morning before my flight left. And I thought, well, I’ll believe it when I see it. And I kept waiting for the text to jump on a zoom and close it. I was in the American Airlines club waiting. I was in the middle of a Yeah, at the airport. There was a crowd of like, guys in their 30s on their way to a ski trip doing shots behind me at eight o’clock in the morning. And I had to get on the phone with the CEO of the buyer because I had made a comment the day before that upset people. So they said, Well, you know, we have to make sure we’re still aligned. And it was kind of ridiculous, but I had to do that with all these guys doing shots behind me. And then nothing happened. And so I got on the plane and was still waiting as we were just sitting on the plane, and I had been upgraded to first class because of my because I fly so much, and so that was nice. But then nothing happened before takeoff. And so, you know, you the plane takes off, and you have to have your devices off, and as soon as they said I could turn it back on, I turned it back on. Still, nothing. And I think it was a couple hours into the flight where I got the thumbs up that everything had closed, and then I texted my husband, and he the money hit our account immediately. So while I was in the air, I sold my company for 25 million and ten million hit my bank account, and it was why. Failed because I couldn’t what was I going to do? I couldn’t jump up and down in the plane.
Dave Kelly 45:05
You’re in first class. You’re allowed to do that in first class, I
Rolando Rosas 45:07
believe. Or invite those other fellas that were doing shots come back up here to first class.
Sharon K. Gillenwater 45:15
Well, I was, I was drinking champagne, you know, like 10 3011, o’clock in the morning in the plane, and then I got home, and yeah, it was, it was wild. And, you know, I had, I I made another video where I talked about how much debt I had, because bootstrapping can decimate your finances. Usually, that’s not a big deal if you’re in your 20s or 30s, but when you’re in your 50s, it’s a big deal when you don’t save for retirement for a decade, and you rack up a bunch of debt just living your life because you underpay yourself for so long. So that was wonderful to have all of that wiped out because my husband and I, we agreed, like, Let’s pay this off, like, the moment the money comes in. So we had credit card debt. We owed about $100,000 to family. We had a line of credit we had to pay off. And so there was a lot of money going out the door right away. But this is what you know, this is one of the reasons I did it. This is what I envisioned could happen someday, and I didn’t think it would take so long or be so difficult, but we had a lot of fun along the way, too, and I’m really proud of what we built. And
Rolando Rosas 46:34
if you had, if you’re, let’s say, in the matrix, just like in that scene where Neo is confronted with the red and the blue pill. One path leads you down the VC path to do what you just did with the other path, strictly bootstrapping. Which of those two paths would you take? Now,
Sharon K. Gillenwater 46:55
always bootstrapping, always, always, you know, I think I would have felt that way anyway, but here’s what I learned after putting out that video that I had no idea, that just blew my mind. That video went hugely viral, where I talk about, I sold my company for 25 million, how? Here’s how much I walked away with. And I I went through all the deal, fees, my taxes, everything, and it’s pinned to the top of my Tiktok, if anyone wants to go watch that. It got shared a lot by venture capitalists and other VC backed entrepreneurs, and I could not understand that, because I thought, why are the people who would never give me the time of day, and didn’t think I was a bonafide entrepreneur, because I was not VC backed. Why would they think this is so great? And they were very complimentary about it. And I later found out, a woman venture capitalist actually explained it to me. She said, What you don’t understand, and what a lot of people don’t talk about, is that you could raise 50 million as a founder for your company and sell it for 200 so many multiples, yeah, many multiples beyond what I did, and walk away with less than you did. Sharon, and I’m like, what really? And she said, Yes. She said, founder equity typically goes down to single digits. And she said, and that’s for the entire founding team. So I was amazed by that very diluted, serious dilution. And not only that, but, and I don’t really understand these, all the different deals, deal terms that VCs put in place, but you can think you gave up X percentage of equity for your funding, right? So you say, Okay, I have X percent. The VCs have Y percent, but there are deal terms that will allow them to get even more than that percentage. And so you end up with less than you thought. And you might be fully aware of that going in, but you might not. How do
Rolando Rosas 49:03
you exactly so, so you’re, if you’re in your 20s, 30s, maybe early 40s, and you’re entering into this agreement, how do you make sure that doesn’t happen? Like a VC will, they start off with 51 and then when you close, you realize, oh, they took 80,
Sharon K. Gillenwater 49:16
right? You know what? I don’t, I don’t know. I get a great lawyer. And here’s the thing that, and here’s the thing that I think I’ve been able to tap into. People are afraid to ask questions. They’re intimidated, and there’s a lot of gatekeeping using jargon. And what I mean by gatekeeping is withholding the true information that you need to know, right? Because people use all kinds of jargon, and no one wants to say, well, I don’t understand what that means. Could you explain this to me? And I think if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re having those conversations with the VC, I think there’s a fear that if you ask too many kind of easy questions, they’re going to renege, because they’re going to think, oh, this person doesn’t know what they’re doing. People are afraid of Le. Stupid, and you’ve just got to push through and make sure you understand every single detail in plain English. What does this mean? What does preferred stock mean? So what does that mean? And when we sell, and I didn’t do that the first time, when I raised VC funding, that’s not why we lost out. It was a different reason, but that’s really important. And I almost think like if you can bootstrap, do it, just don’t just stay away from that for as long as you can. There may come a time in your business where you do need to raise capital, but if you have a viable, profitable business at that point, then you have leverage. Right in the beginning, you don’t have any leverage. And I just think it’s you’re not, you’re not you don’t know what you don’t know. I know now because I’ve been through it, but you’re not going to outsmart the VCs when it comes to financing your company. You’re just not there. They’re in it to make money. They don’t care about your business. They really don’t. They don’t care about your customers. Are happy how happy they are. They care about the money. I’m not that. I’m not that’s not a derogatory thing. That’s the business they’re in. Yeah, and you have to know that going in and yeah, they might say complimentary things about your business, but they don’t care. And it’s almost the same thing with when you’re acquired, it’s all about the numbers, and as long as you know that going in, you can man it. You know, hopefully you’ll ask a lot of questions and understand what all of the financial implications are for you as a founder that hopes to exit someday. And you know, I’m just getting more and more information. That shocks me. I talked to somebody the other day regarding an acquisition that happened years ago that I was very interested in, because it was kind of in our space. It was in $175 million acquisition, and there were a few founders, and I just found out that one of the founders walked away with two and a half million from that exit, 175 million. I walked away million
Rolando Rosas 52:08
to 2% it’ll be at almost 2% of the deal.
Sharon K. Gillenwater 52:12
Yeah. And, you know, I think that was before tax, like I walked away with 9 million after tax, so on a $25 million deal. So that’s why my video went so viral, but at the time, I didn’t understand, and it’s only now that I’m learning what the financial aspects of these deals often looks like for founders, and it’s not good and it’s not pretty. And, you know, there are trade offs, right? Some people, they some kinds of businesses, you can’t do it without venture capital because they’re very capital intensive. If it’s like some kind of manufacturing or, you know, you need a ton of computing support, you know, in the AI business, for example. But there’s this myth that you have to raise venture capital, if you’re building any kind of company that’s has anything to do with tech, and it’s because of what we hear, the stories we hear in the media. And that’s just not the case. There are lots of SaaS entrepreneurs out there who are bootstrapping, and they’re running it with a virtual team of contractors from their home, and they’re doing really well with it. And the other thing is, you don’t, if you want to build something and sell it, you don’t have to sell it for 100 million, or even 25 million. You could spend three years building something and sell it for 600k or, you know, 2 million or 1 million. I’ve since met entrepreneurs, particularly women entrepreneurs who do this over and over again. They build these little businesses, get them to profitability, and then flip them and then they do it again, and then they flip them again, and they’re really smart about the way they do it. And you don’t have to be a Zuckerberg. You don’t have to be, you know, a Sarah Blakely, the Spanx lady, right? You there’s such a range of entrepreneurial success. And if you think you have to get to like a Zuckerberg level to be a success, you’re going to quit before you even start. And so this is the type of thing I like to talk to people about.
Dave Kelly 54:23
So in speaking with you, Sharon, I appreciate what you’re saying about some of your employees from boardroom advisors and the previous the previous company, when you decided to work through with your exit strategy, what did you implement to also reward your loyal employees. That helps to get you to where you were able to exit. Yeah.
Sharon K. Gillenwater 54:47
So we put in place what we call, what in the industry is called a phantom equity plan. We didn’t want to do a stock option plan. It’s complicated. We had a lot of very young employees. We knew they wouldn’t understand it. I. Um, it would be expensive to administer and put together. And you do all that, and you don’t even know if you’re going to exit, if it’s going to be relevant, right? Nobody ever asked for equity. Unlike here in the Bay Area, you hire people in the Charlotte areas and the South Carolina suburbs of Charlotte, and nobody asked for equity. But in 2020, when we doubled in size, because we were, you know, one of those digital tools that everyone wanted to have during the pandemic, and we started getting all this outreach, and we thought, you know what we want our employees to share in the exit, if we have one that was, you know, the the do gooder kind of angle, but you know, more strategic angle was, we want to be out in the open with what we’re doing in case anybody finds out. Because in an a lack of information causes people to to get distracted and gossip and create their own narrative around what you’re doing, and I don’t like that, so we just decided to tell them. So at the end of 2020, we had this habit of our tradition of having our final meeting of the year, and we would talk about our goals for the following year and give a presentation, and then we would also roll out one new benefit every December. We did that, like four years in a row. And so in December of 2020, we announced that we said, look, you know, someday we do want to sell the company. We don’t know if it’s going to be a year from now or five years from now, but when that happens, we would like everyone to get a nice bonus. And so we’re putting in place a phantom Equity Plan. And what that means is, in the event of an exit of a sale, three and a half percent of the the net proceeds gets put in a pool and divided among the employees, not equally divided. We assigned chunks based on seniority and contribution to the business. And then there was a two year vesting schedule. And at the time that we granted the Phantom equity, we had employees who were instantly vested because they had been there two years or more. And then we had a bunch of people we had just hired in 2020 who were just at the beginning of that vesting process. So we rolled it out at that last meeting of the year, and a lot of people still didn’t really understand what that meant. Like I said, a lot of people right out of college or very early on in their career, and I know from experience, you’re not thinking about your retirement or your financial security, really at that point, you just need to have a job to pay your rent. You’re not thinking that far ahead. And you also assume that nothing’s going to really occur. But when we sold the company, we had 13 vested employees, 14 vested employees, who split almost $800,000
Dave Kelly 58:03
nice chunk of cash.
Rolando Rosas 58:05
I like it. That’s awesome. That’s awesome because that doesn’t happen to every company. And in your case, it had a very nice happy ending. And you know, you mentioned something to me the other day when we had a chance to talk that one, you haven’t splurged as much as you thought, with the with the the windfall that you had after you paid, you still had a nice little chunk of change. And there’s a resort in Montana. I don’t know if did they ever reach out to you? Pause up in Montana. Did they get in touch? Or did you make the trip over there? No, they
Sharon K. Gillenwater 58:36
didn’t get in touch. I haven’t made the trip. I’ve had a lot of life changes happened since this like by my, my, my 85 year old mother has moved in with us, and we did put an apartment in the house. My, what? My younger son has come home from college. So we have a multi generational household going on here now, and we’re kind of making sure that if we do travel like, who’s in charge of what? And, you know, who needs help and all of that, we put a ton of money into our home. I paid off our mortgage. All kinds of money has gone and so while I could definitely afford to go, I just can’t, I can’t pull the trigger. And I think, I think I talked Well, I made a video about it, an extended video, because people had so many questions about that. And I said, Look, I know what would happen if I went there. I would have like, 10 drinks a day and eat over eat, because everything’s included. I’m never going to change from that person. I’m always going to be that person, because I grew up with a scarcity mindset, and I would be bugging every family member, like, Did you do the skate shooting? Did you do the spa? Did you do you know, nobody would be able to be relaxed, relaxing, because I would be forcing them to constantly be eating, drinking or doing activities. So I don’t know if I’m a paws up kind of gal. If I can handle. All, you know, all the all inclusive type of situation, okay, but you know, it really is expensive. And I made another video called undercover rich people, because after I sold the company, I realized, you know, people feel comfortable telling you people who you thought were just the same as you, like, middle club or middle class, like, oh yeah, we went on this great trip. And then you look it up and it’s like, 15 grand a week per person or something. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, yeah,
Rolando Rosas 1:00:28
that’s not, that’s not a programmer salary. Yeah,
Sharon K. Gillenwater 1:00:32
it’s, well, I don’t know. That’s just, you have to, I would have to have a lot more money to feel comfortable, like taking those types of trips routinely, because I have to assume that I’m never going to make another dollar. I hope that’s not the case, but I have to assume that. And I have to assume, you know, maybe I’ll be fortunate enough to live into my 90s. So this money is I don’t want to get to be like 75 or 80, and I’ve spent all the money, or I can’t absorb the market ups and downs that come with, you know, being invested. So I’m still pretty cautious. But, you know, I’m definitely enjoying life. I’m going next week to New York for New York Tech Week, and I’m taking my older son, and he’s a hardcore vegan, so we’re going to 11 Madison Park. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but look it up. It’s like a Michelin star restaurant that went all vegan during the pandemic. And it’s, it’s ridiculously expensive, but, you know, we were, yeah, it’s an experience. And we heard about it, and I turned to him, I said, we should go. We should go there just once. And so we’re gonna go, it’s like 16, $1,600 for three people promised
Rolando Rosas 1:01:45
me you go, you tick tock. The hell out of it. Oh, I’m
Sharon K. Gillenwater 1:01:49
going to
Rolando Rosas 1:01:52
I’m looking forward. I can’t wait to see the tick tock. You know, I’m a fan. I follow you on tick tock. So I can’t wait for other folks to follow you as well. So if folks want to follow you, Sharon, where should they go? Where do you put a lot of information people want to get in touch with you. Where should people go?
Sharon K. Gillenwater 1:02:11
Well, my main platforms are Tiktok and LinkedIn, but I put a lot more personal stuff on Tiktok because I don’t think LinkedIn is the place for that. So you know, if I want to rant about something annoying or share some personal information, I’ll put it on Tiktok. So that’s probably the best place to follow me. And it’s it’s Sharon K Gillenwater,
Rolando Rosas 1:02:32
and there’s another Sharon Gillenwater, as we found an author. That’s why we stress the k, because I don’t think you write fiction love stories and such as she does.
Sharon K. Gillenwater 1:02:45
So yes, that is hilarious. So Sharon Gillenwater is a very well known Tex, South Texas Christian romance novelist, very specific. And I’ve had people look at my luggage tag in the airport and say, how are you? Are you the romance novelist? It’s like, No, and I think now on Google, it has my picture and her books.
Rolando Rosas 1:03:11
Yes, yeah. Confuse the heck out of us. We’re trying to get that
Sharon K. Gillenwater 1:03:15
fixed on Google, but it’s been a few months. I don’t know if they’re going to fix it. And my husband did buy me one of her books a couple years ago for Christmas. That was fun,
Dave Kelly 1:03:26
guy with a cowboy hat, you know, rough shave.
Sharon K. Gillenwater 1:03:31
Yeah, I think, I think we could not be more different, of the two of us, and I’ve never spoken with her, but yeah, she has, she has a huge following, so it can be confusing, especially now that I’m an author too.
Rolando Rosas 1:03:42
I know it confused us for a hot minute, as we were like, wait a minute, definitely. Oh, that’s not her. He didn’t write all those romance books. So, and now you tell me, Texas and San Francisco two very different places. So, but Sharon, I want to thank you for for joining us today, leaving us with a ton of knowledge. I’m hoping that folks that listen to this can take so it’s only takeaways, but can actually put some of that into action if they’re going into a new venture. I know I learned a lot with with VC, we’ve, we ourselves. I have been through some of the challenges that you, you’re talking about. I haven’t really put an episode together to talk about it. Maybe someday we’ll do that. You know, you’ve given me the courage to maybe build up and talk about that, because I haven’t made a Tiktok on that either. So I may, I may talk on that subject a little bit more, but I really appreciate you kind of peeling back the curtain and letting us look inside that world, because it’s, it’s, it’s all unicorns, rainbows, Zuckerbergs, AI, open, open, AI and anthropic and all that money swashing around Silicon Valley and Nvidia and. All that, but there’s a lot more going on below the surface that people don’t know about, and I’m glad that you share that today with us. Yeah,
Sharon K. Gillenwater 1:05:06
well, thanks for having me.
Rolando Rosas 1:05:08
Oh, of course. Any Listen, anytime you want to come back, um, drop some knowledge. Just ring me up. Hey, I want to come back. You got an open invite to do that?
Sharon K. Gillenwater 1:05:15
Thank you.
Rolando Rosas 1:05:16
So we’ve been talking with Sharon K Gillenwater all author, plug in your book. Again, Sharon, what’s the name of that book? Again,
Sharon K. Gillenwater 1:05:26
the book is called Scaling with Soul: How I Built and Sold a $25 Million Tech Company without Being an Asshole. Love it.
Rolando Rosas 1:05:36
I love that title. It cracks me up. And so if you want to support this channel, I invite you to hit that subscribe button if you’ve gotten value out of what we’ve talked about with Sharon. And if you want us to bring more wonderful guests like that, I invite you to go ahead and check out the links in the description below, especially if you’re a business and you’re dealing with complex IT issues. That’s what we specialize in, go ahead and contact us. We’ll get in touch with you, and we can figure out a plan that’s right for you. So I want to thank my guest today, Sharon. I want to thank Dave for joining me, and we will see you next time. Thank you.
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