S4:E159 The Weekly Venture Update and VBase Oil

S4:E159 David opens with the weekly update in Venture and then Paul interviews Jeff and Michelle DiMaio, cofounders of VBASE Oil, a B2B producer of New Tech proprietary synthetic ester base oils and lubricants that outperform traditional products but are bio based, biodegradable, non-toxic and non-bioaccumulating in support of sustainable and circular industrial practices. It’s not your traditional tech startup but it’s very innovative, solves a big problem in a very big global market, has a wide moat against competitors and is scalable. (interview recorded 2/17/25)

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Welcome back to Venture in the South podcast about angel investing and startups in the Southeastern United States. This week's episode, I'm your host Paul, and I'm here with Jeffrey and Michelle from Vbase Oil. They are a recent addition to the VentureSouth South portfolio last year and working on some pretty innovative things. So we wanted to welcome them on the show to tell listeners their story. Jeff and Michelle, welcome. Great, thank you. Great to be here. Maybe we'll start with a softball question on you just giving us a little bit about your background and how you got to be on the show today. Sure, I'll kick it off. Yeah, So my background is I've been in advanced materials business for the last 20 years. I graduated from Clemson with a PhD in material science and always just kind of want to run my own company. Back when I graduated, had started working at this company, Touchmore Technologies, which was a spin out of Clemson and we were about four people working there and I got this great job offer with Solvay in Atlanta, so a big chemical company. And when I was leaving, the vice president said, you know, we'd to have you work here, this small business thing seems pretty cool. Why don't you do that? And I drove back and about two hours later when I got home, I decided to turn down the job and kind of go the entrepreneurial route. So, Did that for the last 24 years. 24 years later, Michelle and I owned the company, run it together. For about 12 years, I was COO and CEO. And then last year, left to go with Vbase Oil Company, which we're talking about today, which is a spin out of Touchmer. And when I went over to Vbase full time as CEO, Michelle took over as CEO of Touchmer. And Michelle? Yeah, I'll give you a little background on me and about us connected. We met the first day of our freshman year at Clemson back in 1997. And did I ever see that we would be doing this 25 years later down the road in Pendleton? Absolutely not, right? So my background, my undergrad back in the day was in psychology and I was doing graduate program in neuroscience. Ended up stepping out of that into a family role for quite a while, but also was involved with Tetchmer over the years as we... I did a lot of technical editing, marketing. I owned a small business for a while. So I've gotten a taste of the science and development as we go, but on the business side. So I lead up our marketing effort at Vbase. And as Jeff said, I've stepped into operational role and then now CEO at Tetramer. So we're tag teaming a whole, whole lot of things. In addition to 25 years married in two companies, we also have five kids. So we have... 21, 19, 17, and twins that are 13. And if you can do five kids, two companies is basically nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. sure! For those of us who aren't quite so good at covering so many things at once Maybe could you just give us a quick intro to what tetra does or did or does? And then how V base came out of that? Sure. Tetramer is an advanced materials company. So our goal is to take technologies out of the lab and bring them into the marketplace. And we've done that for 24 years. We have about 20, 25 chemists and material scientists. And our job is to build a molecule that has the right properties to give the desired performance and to make sure we can do that profitably. So Tetramer works with industry, Department of Defense, energy companies to develop these new materials, scale them up and sell them. And then when we were working on a project at Tetra, I had this one chemist, a scientist who kept saying, I don't understand why we don't use this molecule as a lubricant. And he really said it to the point that I was a little bit tired of hearing him. And I said, listen, I'll get it tested. I'll pay for the testing. And then we'll know why we don't use it as a lubricant. We actually got really good data back from it and kept going down that route. We're really fortunate to get some Department of Energy and USDA funding to continue the research and development. so again, seven years later, we've taken that technology, this base oil technology that can be used in lubricants and spun that out into the VBase Oil Company. And so now VBase Oil Company is its own entity that's what we've done fundraising through and we're growing that as a global lubricant company. Okay. Got it. Can you help us understand what a base oil is and, and walk us through sort of the oil lubrication industry build up? Sure, So, you when you think about a base oil, you tend to think about petroleum, right? The oil that comes out of the ground. And that gets mixed with additives to make things like hydraulic fluids, gear oils, compressor oils. So these very kind of industrial lubricants. They also can be used in automotive fuel oils, so crankcase oils. So that's one type of base oil is the petroleum. There's also synthetic base oils and you can buy those at Advanced Auto parts for your again, for cars, but you can also buy them for hydraulic fluids. So our base oil is about 50 to 75 % bio-based. So it comes from plant products. But we really built that around high performance. We actually didn't even tell people for the first five years or first three years that it was bio-based. We just talked about the fact we've built this really high performance lubricant that It doesn't break down under high heat, high pressure. It will last longer in your equipment and bring efficiency. On the back end, we've started telling people it is environmentally safe. It is biodegradable. It is safe for the environment. But that's really a plus up for our technology. Okay, got it. Can you share a bit about what it is, what the base oil is made of? Yes, so proprietary materials. That's always a hard question. We use one of our starting materials as seed oil. So you can think like soybean oil, sunflower oil, coconut oils. So one of the components comes from that material. And then the other component that we react with it is a not bio-based material that we react with it. So that's kind of the secret sauce of our chemistry. Okay, got it. And so you sell that base oil to other people then that mix in the additives or use it for the specific applications that they are aiming at, right? Yes, so we're taking the base oil, it's the flour in the cake. We're adding the ingredients that make it a chocolate cake or make it a carrot cake or make it a, you know, angel food cake. So we're the base base ingredients. Okay. And so how do you commercialize that? Who buys that from you and when? So we're selling to lubricant formulators or manufacturers who are then making that hydraulic fluid or gear oil and then they're selling it to their customers. So some of those would be, know, in the entire world there's about 700 oil companies and these are people that will blend the oil together and turn around and sell it as the hydraulic fluid or gear oil. And I kind of... I've tried to think of a list of companies that people would have heard of because in the industrial space because you don't always hear about these companies. But some of the ones that if you're going through, you know, an auto parts store, an Amsoil, Lucas Oil, Royal Purple, Valvoline, those are on the automotive side. But those are the types of companies that buy base oils, blend them together and then resell them. The other ways we sell that oil is, you know, you can go to an OEM. So, you know, a Caterpillar or a JCB or John Deere, those companies have their own hydraulic fluids and they will take those and give them to another third party that manufacture and sell under their label. And so that's another way that we can commercialize this product is to work with OEMs and use that as their OEM based oil. Got it. But most of your focus isn't on the automotive side, right? It's in the industrial applications. Yes, everything we're doing right now is in the industrial application space. We do have some of our customers that are formulating crankcase oils, some that are in the racing industry that are looking at them. So there are some of those applications, but that's a really hard space to go into with a lot of requirements, a lot of approvals that you have to get through. So it's a slower market entry. So strategically, we're focusing on industrial lubricants. Okay, got it. And I know it's a sort of plus part, not the foundational sales pitch at the beginning, but does the bio-based mean you can apply it in places that perhaps is harder to use traditional formulations? So yes, they're well suited for environmentally sensitive areas. So if you're doing drilling, where you're near the water table, that's important. If you have hydraulic equipment, they are required to use this kind of environmentally acceptable lubricant, a EAL. And so we're a great base oil for environmentally acceptable lubricants. It's that hard balance of saying it's super, super high performance and also has those applications. So another big space for us is marine lubricants. Yeah, and mining again, mining is a big one. We do have some oil right now that's up in the Arctic Circle at a hydropower facility where we're doing field trials. So again, we kind of think of where are some harsh environments inside of a very large turbine under high, sheer water column and throw it up in the Arctic Circle. Seems like a pretty good place to start. Yeah, I if it's allowed to be used there, presumably you can use it just about anywhere! But what is the process of being allowed to use a new base oil? That's a really good question. One of the challenges for us is we have to be able to develop the molecule. We have to get approvals from every government in the world where the oil will be used as a new molecule. So that's always a big challenge. we have, you know, in the US we have EPA approval, we have Canadian approval, we will have approval in what's called REACH, which is for Europe and the UK this quarter. So you know, have the ability to sell the oil. but then you have to go to a hydraulic fluid manufacturer and show them that it actually works as an oil, not just that it's safe to produce. So there are lots of existing tests, ASTM tests, ISO tests that you have to go through and really build these very large data sheets for every grade of oil that you can give to the manufacturers, the blenders that show where it performs better than a traditional lubricant, traditional base oil. and what the cost-benefit ratio is. So you have to build those out. One way to do that is to actually formulate your own fluid. So we do have hydraulic fluids that we've tested as fire resistant hydraulic fluids where we've made it, we've shown it's a good hydraulic fluid. We set it off and had it sprayed through an acetylene torch and showed that it doesn't catch on fire. And so when you now take that data to your customers, they say, okay, I've seen it works. I'll make my own, but it's nice to know that there's not the risk of, you know, in not working at all. So it's very technical. The sales are very technical. It requires a lot of work to build that resource packet for them. Yeah, I imagine. the data that they I guess the good news is the data that you produce is the data that they would recognize, right? They understand the performance data of their current oil base and can see how much better yours is. How much better is yours, though? Is it sort of a 2 % improvement or is it 20x better? And what are people looking for? Yeah, that's a really hard question and we get it all the time. One of the challenges with a base oil is if it goes into a hydraulic fluid, there's an improvement associated with some properties that are very different than the properties you want in a gear oil. So as an example, in a hydraulic fluid, one of the things that determines the size of the reservoir in a piece of equipment, like how many gallons do you actually have to put there into the the equipment is the amount of time it takes for air to release from it. So there's all this air that gets trapped and it has to bubble to the top and come out. materials release air in about 30 seconds, 10 to 30 seconds. Some of the commercial materials, it's about six minutes. So there is a significant increase in performance in air release. We're doing efficiency testing right now. We haven't got the data back, but we expect in hydraulic fluids ours to be about 10 % more efficient in fuel consumption. it actually is, there's a direct increase in fuel savings. We're doing some work in gear oils where we expect, again, we don't have that data back, about a one to two percent increase in energy savings. And then there's just the lubrication aspect of it. So in some gear oils, we can go, they're much higher shear, much higher stress, let's say twice as much without getting metal metal contact, which causes two gears to kind of stick together and seize up, right? But every application has its own kind of sweet spot. And again, you have to build that data set and be able to sell to your customer where the performance difference is. Okay, got it. Yeah, that makes sense that it would be very application specific. It does sound like that probably translates into a fairly long and challenging and technical sales cycle for you. How do you, how do you deal with that as as a startup entrepreneur? Yeah, so that, know, one of our biggest challenges is the sales cycle. It tends to be anywhere from 18 to 30 months to do the sale cycle of a new base oil or just a base oil. We are a new base oil. It's a new chemistry. And so that is even more difficult. So that as a startup has been really difficult. One way we got around that is we started this as Tetramer. And so we were able to kind of slow play it, give samples out. So that when we spun out the company and six months ago when three of us fully left Tetra and went full time at Vbase to really push forward, we'd already got a lot of that cycle out of the way. And we're starting to get sales now, but that's the big challenge is just the very technical sale. Now the plus side of that is the volumes that are purchased are very large. So it is very much a, we're gonna spend 18 to 30 months trying to get the sale and then starting volumes are you know, $2 million and then ramping quickly from there. So, very different from a, you know, we're going to sell widgets and we start getting cash flow immediately. Okay. And I assume, I guess, ironically, that once you're in, you're pretty sticky so that you don't, the people aren't moving base oils very frequently. Is that, is that true? there not many other base oil technologies out there? No, there are not many new base oils coming around. And like you said, if someone takes our ingredient, our base oil, and creates for themselves their new lubricant fluid to sell to their customers, they're not anxious to start that process all over again. And so they don't really want to make a change, especially if the performance is giving them what they need and that plus up of the environmental on the side, they're going to be sticky. Yeah, one of the reasons we started this company is the existing base oils really aren't performing at the level that the industry needs. And what has happened is, you know, 40 years ago, the base oils they were using were good enough. But then as requirements increased and the performance wasn't good enough, they kept putting more additives into the base oils. And so you kept adding to the price of the base of the finished lubricants. But also you kind of stretched out what was really possible to achieve. And so there's this pressure where lubricant manufacturers are reformulating and reformulating. Once we get into this market and they start adopting our technology and it hits the specs that they need, for them to move away from that is going to be very costly. there's a lot of, know, 18 to 30 months of work is a long time for us, but our customers are putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into that development cycle. And being that we have a patented product and there's really nothing like it on the market, they can't switch away without starting that whole process over again. And I will say, you know, having led the marketing effort for this, across the world, there is a curiosity and a hunger to learn what could you possibly be bringing that to new? What have we not seen already? And how can this fill these new needs that new equipment are having? So yeah, there's a lot of excitement for it, a lot of need. Okay. So on the marketing side, how do you do that Michelle? What is the marketing that goes into doing this? do you do that? You just started global oil business as your side gig. Honestly, the curiosity has made it easy. In the lubricant industry, there is a limited number of companies. We're talking about 700 companies worldwide as far as formulators. There are a few trade organizations that are North America and then some that are global. We've done a great job, I think, of engaging with some of the leadership there, being published in their industry trade magazines, attending their trade shows and that kind of thing. And really we have been welcomed with open arms because people are hungry for a new solution and curious about the performance claims that we're able to put out. I think one thing that I'm not sure we kind of brought out is, we had this early funding on the Tetramer side under Department of Energy and USDA and under that funding, we're able to build a huge data set. So when we go to a new customer, even as a new spin out, we're bringing to them here's robust third party data that shows you in your terms how this is going to work for you. And so there's a lot of curiosity about that. So it's been fun to watch that for sure. And I will say actually, was going to give Michelle credit for this. Our CTO is in Switzerland right now and he was... Chief Technology Officer. Yeah, Chief Technology Officer. So he's a world expert in lubricants. He worked for Dow Chemical, was in Switzerland and he caught us up one day. out of the blue and just said, you know, I wanted to talk to you about this Vbase. Never heard of it before. I keep seeing you guys everywhere. Like you're in all the trade magazines on LinkedIn and I have no idea what this new oil is. I've been in the industry for 25 years and I know all of the base oils and I develop base oils and that's what I do and I've never heard of this technology. But he caught us from Switzerland and so it was really interesting how good of a job Michelle was able to do of, you know, creating a global brand in a period of about two and a half years where people were very curious, wondering what's going on and really coming to us asking for that information. Got it. Yeah, that's impressive. So how many places around the world or applications are you either already being used in or are people working on development projects with? So we have over 60 people that are currently using it, formulating it, doing development. We say people. Some of those are mom and pop formulators that are very specialized in metalworking fluids, and some are huge multinational corporations. So it's kind of hard to say. But if we look at a map. Yeah, across the world. Yeah, if you look at a map, we have a map of kind of where it's going. And we've had a ton of interest with people asking for it. in Africa where you have these these mines that have open gear pits and one they want to protect the environment but they also want to have higher efficiency. So if you can do both of those at the same time while mining, that's great. Africa was not on our, yeah, we're going to target that and it's a smaller market. So that's not our key target. But we have people from South America, Africa, Asia, the whole world, a heavy presence in Europe and then of course the Americas as well. And then, and some of the application spaces are, you we need an oil that goes to negative 60 degrees Celsius, right? And so you get into these Arctic applications and things like that. So it's always interesting when customers come to you with a problem, you know, for aviation, you need to be below negative 45. And so you're always, you know, getting interesting problems when people talk to you about that. Yeah, right. I guess the flip side of that is how do you focus on the most likely success locations or applications that you want to see the product in? Yeah, that we talk about focus all the time, in both, you know, where you reach out to, but also what technical data sets do you make? Right. So I mean, it's standard business development, business marketing. We take market reports and say, you know, where are we the best fit? You right now we would tell you fire resistant hydraulic fluids is our number one focus than hydraulic fluids in general. But it's all based on, you know, what barriers to entry are there. So in hydraulic fluids, there's not a ton of requirements that you have to pass to be able to sell it as a hydraulic fluid versus if I wanted to get, you know, a engine oil, I have to go through millions of dollars of testing to get into there. And it's a very competitive market and it's price sensitive, right? So we're trying to, you know, we're looking at low barrier to entry, high value. In many cases, very high volume. So like some of these customers, If you get in their product, the volumes are just ridiculous. Nobody's going to spend hundreds of thousands of to validate something to sell it for $10. They're selling huge, huge amounts of money if it really goes in those spaces. We just hired a new chief operating officer who's got a background both on the sales side but also on the manufacturing side. And so what he's doing now, and he's been here a month now, is going through all of our different market segments, all the research we've already done, and then paring that down into the business cases for each one, and really building that plan of how do we attack it, when do we attack it. Okay, got it. While we're talking about money, when do your customers pay you? Do they pay you for the development work or do they only pay you when you send them a gallon of the the base oil? For the most part, all the work that we do in the oil industry in general, if you're sending out samples, that's all kind of freebies up to a gallon, let's say. Most of the development work that we do is just done internally to build that database. There are models where if it starts to become very specific and where they could pay us, but for the most part, it's pretty simple. We sell a drum or a tote of oil. and then they pay us net 30 and we keep that going. On the development side, they're really usually putting their internal money into doing their own development work. Yeah, so we build the base information to make them know that it's worth the effort for the development, but then they do all that development, their work themselves. To get to the finished lubricant. Yeah. Okay. Talking about money from another angle, I think you raised capital recently, because we're an investor. So that must have happened at some point. But other people invested too. How did you how did how did that go? How did how did pitching a base oil company go? Yeah, we did a great job because you guys were our lead investors. I think my thought was it was pretty intense while we've entrepreneurship, we've run our own companies for years. This is first time we've done actual fundraising. It was a heavy lift and I think the biggest challenge was understanding the B2B market aspect of an industrial lubricant. Communicating that. Yeah, communicating that to our customer, to our investors and getting them to understand the long sales cycle is not a lack of interest. It's just it's the sales cycle. And then also, you know, getting them to understand here's the ramp rate and, know, this looks great. These are small markets. This is a small piece of a really big pie. So that was a challenge. What made me feel a lot better was when I realized that everyone told me this is probably the worst time to be raising money in last umpteen years. And so then that made me actually feel pretty good about it. Yep. Yeah. No, there's not no small achievement to raise money in the last 18 months. and it's a very interesting kind of company that is not a typical venture capital kind of, you know, SAS business that can be replicated overnight by an AI. This is much harder in, in many ways than that and much harder to get investors interested because it is different from sort of the standard fair. it's out of people's norm for sure. And we're bringing seven years of development, but we're a startup. It's just a little bit confusing for people at first. It's nice how much people have given us their ear to learn and been excited about it though in the region. As I was going say, we did get some comments of one of the big challenges was explaining to people how we could become a global company. They said, how are you going from you know a molecule on a piece of paper five years ago seven years ago to a global oil business you know ten years later and and we had to kind of walk them through that of well we need to be a global oil business because oil travels if I put an oil on a ship and it leaves New York and goes to Australia I have to be able to have oil in Australia but the other thing for us was when we looked at this company this idea of We're building the technology and the packages, but we're not having to use manufacturing. We don't use our own manufacturing. We do that through third party. So it gives us this ability to scale very quickly, very low risk, low capital scaling. So it's not your traditional, you know, SaaS AI, which is going to be lower on the capex, but we're more like that than a company that says, I'm going to have to build, to be global, I'm going to have to build a $20 million factory. we avoid that piece of it. And I think that was really what made this attractive to a lot of investors. Yeah, not needing 10s of millions of dollars of scaling capital is obviously helpful when that is particularly hard to come by at the moment. Yeah. at Tetramer was one of the things too to give people confidence of this isn't just we had this idea for a lubricant, but we've done thousands of research and development projects over 25 years at Tetramer. And this was, we say this is the only one we spun out. This was the most opportunistic technology we had seen that had this ability to become this global business. And so when you see that opportunity, you go all in and execute. Yeah. So given that global vision and the long sales cycles, albeit you're through them a bit already, how long a journey is this from here for you? Do you think it to, grow VBase into what you ultimately think it can become? So we're looking from an investment perspective, we're telling people is we're looking to exit in five years. And so for us, that's an inflection point in the company where it goes from going from a there is risk associated with it, we're still scaling, we're getting global certifications. Five years from now, we've hit all those inflection points. We are selling on every continent we have. know, strong sales forces, have all the operational pieces in place. And at that point, you know, we look at that as saying, we're gonna need another injection of capital either to build manufacturing or to go that next step to go to fully formulated, whatever that next piece is. And so for us, I think that's when the exit occurs. Now having said that, I think it's another five to 10 years from then to where... VBase is a billion dollar company and that is where we see it getting to. think that valuation is reasonable. That's just another bridge to get to there. Yeah. Okay. Very, very interesting and good luck on that journey. one of the questions we often asked us, how do you keep a competitive edge against other people catching up with you? I guess in your case, as you're constantly helping companies develop applications, I mean, the whole business is a competitive edge, kind of generation company, right? Yeah, I think for us, you one of the keys is you don't want to be careful not to rely on patents, right? That's not this indefensible wall that you have. But we do have patents on the technology and as we develop new applications, new use cases, we continue to kind of push in that direction. But another aspect of that is knowledge of the molecule. So as we go down through years, we start to build this understanding that nobody else has on how to formulate it, how to push it forward. And then we also start going into new application spaces. So we started industrial lubricants, but there are advanced materials applications, there's cosmetic applications. And so it's just understanding of how do you keep growing, keep building new spaces and again, create value for your customer, better service, better help with deliverables. logistics look like? How do you piece all of that together? And it's not just the technology itself. can people hearing about this for the first time help if, at all, is there anything outside people who can do to help you succeed? That's a great question. wasn't, yeah. I wasn't prepared for that one. No, I think, mean, you we are going to do another, we will be doing another fund raising. We will do a series A on the back end of 2025. So, I mean, that's a great way to help, you know, entrepreneurs is to fund them. And so, you know, that would be helpful. I think in general, it partly it's, you know, that idea of, you know, where can these go? Where do we see applications that said, you know, as we start to roll out some of our high efficiency hydraulic fluids, right? You know, why isn't my company using this? Right? Or if we're in an environment, if we are in an area that, you know, has environmental concerns, forestry, farming, why aren't we using these high performance and environmentally acceptable safe lubricants? Because they're going to save you money when you use them. But also if you do spill them, they're good for the environment. And I think that's that balance right there. Yeah. Okay. We'll finish up with two fairly easy questions. think given you've been doing this for a while. How do you like being entrepreneurs? What are the pros and cons that you would share with other others? Well, both. Yeah. like And today, what do we like about it? It's different than yesterday. you want to go first? The entrepreneur part, what do we like about being an entrepreneur? It's something different every day. You don't know what the next challenge is going to be, but you also don't know what the next opportunity will be. So yeah, I think that's what I like the most about it. Yeah, I like, I think from my perspective as an entrepreneur, you know, I never really associated myself with that word. was just kind of, you know, doing stuff, right? Just trying to stay in business with Tecmer and now Vbase. think with Vbase, I feel more like it when I go out and pitch. Yeah, I like solving problems. That's why I'm a scientist. I like hard problems that are difficult to solve and I like figuring it out. I do like the idea of the big win. It's one of the things we liked about Vbase was, you know, we're not trying to start a company that's going to, you know, support us and our family for the next 50 years and we'll raise kids on it. We're like, let's make a global base oil company that's going to be huge and, you know, let's go big and see what happens with that. So I do like that excitement aspect of it. As the married entrepreneur, I mean, I think we... yeah. We obviously we sit really close together even when we're not on camera. This is basically we just sit like this the whole time But but yeah that has its own challenges to especially as you know We work together for a long time running one company and there was kind of a an alignment with that what's best for touchmer and then you know Six months ago. I literally moved my office to the back of the building with the other guys that are running that company V base and And now it's like we have two CEOs and so now we're kind of competing for, for, he's renting. Yeah. Yeah. I have to write her a rent check every year, every month. But no, it's, it's, are now kind of competing for mental space on, know, I'm focused on Vbase and how we push that forward. And she's helping with Vbase, but also pushing. But I think there's a, there's a level of understanding and alignment that's grown out of that, that never would have existed if we hadn't walked down this road together. you know, when you. If you've got to stay up late and answer a customer email or deal with a problem, you feel for each other a little more than if it was just like, I don't know, I had a long day at the office. We kind of know what battles we're each fighting. Yeah, we never ask each other, why are you taking that call on vacation? It's like, what are they saying? Did you get a sale? Yeah. Our kids hear all about it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot of debate about whether you should fund married couples and we have repeated the Adventure South. So we're obviously comfortable with that. There's also a lot of debate about being lonely as an entrepreneur, because you do feel like you have to do those calls and perhaps your spouse doesn't have to do that as part of their job. So it's good to have two people in the same boat. Yeah, yeah, and I don't want you to ask our kids how they like having parents that are married. My family has always, but my parents and siblings all own their own business. It was not something that I thought of as weird. You're just kind of living that balance all the time. So sometimes work gives sometimes family goes, seems like it's worked pretty well for us. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. Great. Well, it seems to have worked so far. We're proud to be on the cap table and wish you guys the best of luck on growing the business as you go forward. Great, thank you. Appreciate it, Paula. It was fun. Yeah, great. Thanks. There we go. Stop.