John Corcoran: 06:30
So one of the founders, I went to UCSB, and one of the founders went to UCSB. And so that was one of the original routes. It was like pooling people to get rides between, like LA and Santa Barbara. You know, eventually it became Lyft and and then eventually and then there was also a point where around San Francisco, these cars had these big fuzzy pink mustaches.
Braydan Young: 06:48
Oh, yeah.
John Corcoran: 06:49
And Yeah, that was weird.
Braydan Young: 06:51
I lived in the city from 2009 to, like, 2018. Those were the best nine years because everything was subsidized by VC funds. Like, you had, like, the Lyft rides for like, $5. Uber was sort of there. There were all the food apps for like $8 and it was delivered wherever you were like.
John Corcoran: 07:08
Yeah, because they’re trying to prove out the model. Yeah.
Braydan Young: 07:10
It was like, well, it’s like the SoftBank model of like, you know, buy the market and then we’ll figure out how to make money later. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 07:16
Yeah totally. Okay. So you do that and then eventually maybe skip over a couple of startups here. But you come across this idea of Coffee Sender. So what is Coffee Sender?
Braydan Young: 07:28
So a buddy that I went to college with, we both went to Chico. We both had lived. I slept on his couch for a while in San Francisco. And until I found a house and an apartment and liked him. So we got together for drinks, and he had this idea called Coffee Sender.
And the concept was, I’m going to buy a bunch of Starbucks $5 gift cards, and I’m going to allow people to basically pull a gift card link because this is a link and put them into an email. So my email for sales changes the sales tool. So my email is more like, hey, like not taking a demo, but like, hey, go grab a coffee with me. And if you go grab a coffee on me, like, then like, give me a call and I’ll show you what I’m trying.
John Corcoran: 08:05
And that wasn’t possible at the time.
Braydan Young: 08:06
Was not possible at the time. Was like 2014, 2015. Okay. And like, we built it as a way to make beer money. So coffeecenter.com.
And the first thing we attached it to was like Survey Monkey. So you did a survey, and as a thank you, it would send you a $5 Starbucks gift card. Okay. And we I’m not technical. So we found a bunch of engineers on oDesk or Upwork or whatever it’s called now to help us build it and build it on the side. And then we launched it. And in the very first month it made like 60 grand. And we were like, we were like, oh, this, this actually might.
John Corcoran: 08:36
And you were set to go viral or something like that. How did it go viral?
Braydan Young: 08:40
Okay. Google crawled it. And like, we had to send coffee all over it. And so it was like one of those things where people were like, you know, like with Google, like sending coffee or a pop-up coffee center, and you could send out coffee gift cards to people for five bucks. Like, it’s a pretty cool motion.
And we were buying all these gift cards from Starbucks.com because we didn’t have a relationship with them, but we quickly got a cease and desist from Starbucks. They were like, they’re like, who are you? Why are you buying 60 grand worth of gift cards from us? Because there was no margin there. It was like, that’s all we’re buying with gift cards. Right.
John Corcoran: 09:10
And did your heart sink? I mean, you’ve got this big success in the first month, and you get the cease and desist letter. You must have been like, oh, crap.
Braydan Young: 09:17
We sort of sat in a room when we got the letter and were like, me Chris and, my co-founder, that we were both sales folks. And so we were like, you know what? Like we should pitch Starbucks on why this is important and why this works. So we got on LinkedIn, reached out to everybody there, and found one person who was like, yeah, fly up and pitch us on it. And what we were pitching was the idea of a coffee center and also plugging the coffee center into Salesforce.
So you could send coffee via a Salesforce-like contact if you’re on a contact page, there’s a little button for sending coffee. And they bought it. They were like, yeah, like you guys should do this. And like, we had no clue what the volume would look like. But we met the B2B E-gift division and they were like, go do it.
And this was at the time when like tango cards were sorted around and Blackhawk was owning the physical gift market, and there was a company called Cash Stars. Like, no one had really figured out the e-gift space yet. And yeah, we had a big volume to purchase and they let us run with it, and then we went back home. You must have.
John Corcoran: 10:13
Been thrilled from cease and desist letter. Letter to. Yeah, go ahead and do it. Did they give you money or did they say, just do it, and we won’t sue you?
Braydan Young: 10:20
It was like, do it. We won’t sue you. Like we’ll allow you to use our logo.
John Corcoran: 10:23
Victory nonetheless.
Braydan Young: 10:24
Yeah, yeah. And like, we got to use their logo on like, so we called like, you know, big companies and we’re like, hey, we’re also partners with Starbucks. And they’re like, who are these two guys? So it opened doors, right? At that time, I left my current job in tech and was like, I’m going to go full time and see if we can make this work.
And we started selling coffee centers full time And then we quickly learned that people wanted to do more than Starbucks. The East Coast wanted Dunkin Donuts. And so we were like, we’re like, okay, yeah, we have to figure out how to add more than just coffee. So we started, we added Dunkin. We added some.
I think the next one was we figured out how to do it like DoorDash was sort of out there. We wanted Amazon gift cards and we needed to rebrand. We’re like, coffee doesn’t work. So we changed our name to Sendoso for like, sending them. The joke is we sent oh so much more than coffee was like the sort of joke like, so that was the Sendoso name. And we rebranded Aditi Gifts. And then we decided to figure out warehousing, which was a crazy idea.
John Corcoran: 11:20
And like so, so not everyone does that. I mean, we’re the market has matured to the point where maybe, maybe back then there weren’t three pls and stuff like that.
Braydan Young: 11:28
So there. Yeah, not for the scale that we wanted and we wanted to customize things. So okay like back then Amazon sort of did customization but like we wanted to be able to send handwritten notes in a box with a gift, and we were like. And so we were. Another story. We’re in a bar talking out loud.
John Corcoran: 11:50
Sensing a theme.
Braydan Young: 11:50
Here. Yeah, I know, right? Yeah, I did go to Chico, but like, but then like, so like someone behind me in the bar was like, hey, I, I, I do warehousing. We’re awesome. So we’re like, that’s.
John Corcoran: 12:03
Where you go to.
Braydan Young: 12:03
Source your. It’s such a San Francisco story.
John Corcoran: 12:06
It is true. Yeah.
Braydan Young: 12:07
Someone’s behind me. It’s like, I want to , I want a warehouse in Vegas. So we’re like, great. So we started sending stuff to that warehouse in Vegas and doing kits and doing handwritten notes, and we brought on a lot of customers really quickly because this was a bigger problem than we thought it was.
John Corcoran: 12:23
Let me ask you this, though. Looking back on it now, there’s complexity involved in that a ton. And so you had this kind of vision, but did you at some point figure out that maybe there’s too much complexity in the customization and stuff like that, or how did you fall on that?
Braydan Young: 12:42
That approach from coffee to more so like we. So the coffee one we knew worked people wanted different ways to reach out. And then quickly this phenomenon of marketing came back. Account based marketing became like the term across all marketing. It was like, I want to be personalized but at scale personalization.
So every company was doing like these big swag type sends. And all these marketers had like a bunch of boxes of swag and handwritten notes in their office. And like, so every office we would go visit for our buddies because, you know, everyone had a keg and things in their office. This is the heyday of tech in San Francisco. So we’d go there and you’d go past the marketing swag closet, and it was filled with things and you’d be like, you’d be like, oh, you want a shirt?
You want a Patagonia? And like, you would hand out swag. And we’re like, we’re like, I wonder, like, how do you send this stuff out? And then I had a buddy who basically during the holidays, they’d be like, hey, here’s 50 water bottles. Go hand those out to your clients.
So you meet face to face. And he never would. He would just have all these water bottles. So I was like, does anyone?
John Corcoran: 13:41
Try to make.
Braydan Young: 13:41
Is it easier? Yeah.
John Corcoran: 13:42
Light bulb moment goes on.
Braydan Young: 13:43
Yeah. Like, is anyone tracking this? Is anyone, like, figuring out, like, where this stuff goes? And so. No.
So, like, we would start our calls with, like, hey, like, do you do holiday gifting? And every client said yes. And I was like, great. How do you track that? How do you prove success there?
And no one had a good answer. And then everyone wanted account-based marketing. And so we were like the answer to that was like we can do physical things, we could do digital things, and we happen to run a warehouse where we can get really customized. So that was sort of the light bulb moment of like, I can do all of this and just, you know, make it easier for them and plug it into Salesforce. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 14:13
And so when you first mentioned the warehouse, I sensed in a little bit of maybe it was a tinge of regret or something. It did.
Braydan Young: 14:20
A lot of work. Yeah. It was, it was a lot of late nights because.
John Corcoran: 14:24
All of a sudden you’re going from a tech startup to managing a warehouse, which is a totally different animal.
Braydan Young: 14:29
Yeah. We had to raise a lot of money to figure out how to build. Like, I knew what a CRM was, but I didn’t know what a WMS was. like a warehouse management system, and we ended up owning and operating five warehouses. And so we had to build a system that controlled like where items were, but almost like a mini Amazon.
Yeah. And there weren’t a lot of processes out there or systems that you could customize enough or Frankenstein enough to work. So we had to become experts in that really quickly. And we hired a lot of people that were amazing. But we didn’t hire like the person who set up Amazon warehouses. We eventually found them, but it took a long time to figure out who that person was.
John Corcoran: 15:07
And so did you eventually decide that there was a better way?
Braydan Young: 15:12
We got really good at the warehousing side. And so I mean through a lot of pain. Now that’s very much a moat at Sendoso where if you bring on like an enterprise customer, we control the whole process from start to finish at Sendoso. Employee is putting something in a box. It’s not a three PL. And so you can control who sees your product, who sees your messaging. So like now, it’s a moat. But it would definitely be painful to get there.
John Corcoran: 15:36
A painful note. Got it. Okay. And you actually did 500 startups.
Braydan Young: 15:41
We did. We weren’t in it long enough. We were in it for probably half the time because we were. So myself and my co-founder Chris, were both from San Francisco, and 500 was great for if you weren’t from San Francisco. So I had so many friends that were in from out of the area that went into 500 who were getting introduced to like, you know, different entrepreneurs and VCs, and we already knew we already knew them.
So we were spending the majority of our time doing sales. And so, like they allowed us to leave also, that was when 500 was going through the whole do you remember the whole like epidemic, epidemic. But they had an issue with their founder.
John Corcoran: 16:18
And not really. No. I have a friend who did fiber startups and funny enough he’s not from San Francisco. He was from Europe. And that’s why he did it.
Braydan Young: 16:26
Yeah, it’s great for that. I think that like if you’re from Europe, I think that those people I met made some amazing friends in it. in it. We just were at a different stage. And so we did.
John Corcoran: 16:35
It for an earlier stage would have been better. Or if you didn’t have the network already that you did.
Braydan Young: 16:39
Yeah. Correct. I think like 2016, San Francisco, being from there like we were in it and like I think if you’re moving to the Bay area and like trying to learn how it worked, I think it would be perfect for you.
John Corcoran: 16:49
Yeah. So obviously it’s about an eight-year period or a nine-year period. You’re at Sendoso, and we’re recording this in April of 2025, and you’ve just actually made the announcement that you’re leaving Sendoso and that you’re focusing on SlashExperts. But any other like highs and lows, obviously during that period Covid was about five years ago. What was that like for you when you knew when Covid hit?
Braydan Young: 17:12
That was fantastic. We were scaling the building pretty fast at Sendoso. Then Covid happened and we blew up. It was like we doubled in size probably month after month. The reason why everybody went home.
Yeah. And everyone was like, how do I send things to not only my customers and my prospects, but to my employees. So we became almost like a system of like air sending stuff. And like that was so we I mean, it was like Covid. And then we had this feature we were working on.
This is a good story. So we had this feature we were working on where we knew when we sent something to a CEO or C-level, they would never like where their office was, if you’re like, oh, I’m targeting snowflakes. And like, their office was in Bozeman, but their but their, you know, their headquarters is somewhere else or like whatever or their, their CEO is in Bozeman, but headquarters was like Pleasanton. And so we had this feature we were building where you could do address verification. So like I send you a gift and you’re like, hey, like, let us know in the world where are you?
And Covid hit. Everyone went home. We pushed that day one. We’re like, hey, like address verification, which we did not. It was wild timing.
So like, we had this feature before any of our competition and it was an explosive growth for us. Learned a ton, sent a ton of stuff for a ton of people. I think that that helped us get a very large series C, which helped us scale to Europe and helped us to scale to.
John Corcoran: 18:29
How did you actually ask this question after. In a second. But you raised a lot of money from a lot of different investors, some of which are notable. I think, you know, you can talk about whichever ones are notable or not. Yeah, yeah.
Talk a little bit about that process of raising money and some of the people that you had, you raised money from.
Braydan Young: 18:49
Yeah. So we did early days as it was a lot of the same like the storm ventures helped us like they did Marketo. So they helped us get into those partnerships. We raised some craft ventures. We were one of their first investments. David Sacks is the one that runs Craft ventures. He’s very much in the news right now and is a famous podcast.
John Corcoran: 19:07
All in podcast, podcast.
Braydan Young: 19:08
Yeah, that was a fun one because we were an early investment. We had a he had he would always have a party at his house and for Fleet Week. And so we went to his house.
John Corcoran: 19:18
He must have a good view though.
Braydan Young: 19:19
Yeah. Pacific Heights, you know, overlooks the whole bay. But I remember I walked in with my wife and I, and we walked in and like, the very first person we hit was Elon Musk. This is before all the. Before our current Elon Musk. This was like he was just like Tesla was just coming out with the model Y. And I remember what I was like.
John Corcoran: 19:36
17.
Braydan Young: 19:37
Or something like and I looked. I looked at him and I was like, I was like, hey, I’m really excited about the model y coming out. And he was like, yeah, me too. And like, that was it. And I walked away and my wife was like, I’m so embarrassed about you. I’m like, what do you say to a guy like that?
And I just like, that was one of those parties where, like, Serena Williams was there because she’s married to, like, the Reddit guy and like, all these, like, crazy celebrities. So that was a really cool one. Like, rub shoulders with some pretty, like, crazy tech people. But Kraft was one race from SoftBank. SoftBank was a ton of fun.
We got to have a phone call with masa. That was a cool experience of, you know, having him on a phone call. So it was a good raising. It helped us grow for sure. I mean, like we.
John Corcoran: 20:19
If it’ll make you feel better. When I met Elon Musk, which was when the Model S was coming out, I came to a, it was the northern, California unveiling of the Model S, and I asked him two questions, one of which was definitely worse than your question or your comment. The question was, and keep in mind, this was like 2010. So it was a while ago now. Yeah.
But I said, Will it have a backup camera? ” I don’t know why I asked him that. He looked at me like, you stupid, freaking idiot. I mean, he’s probably thinking at this point, reusable rockets. He’s thinking, you know, autonomous vehicles will have a frickin back. Yeah, whatever. Yeah.
Braydan Young: 20:54
You’re like, yeah, man.
John Corcoran: 20:55
Yeah. Second question was a better question, though. This was before the iPad came out, and they had just unveiled the model S with the touch screen and all that kind of stuff. And I said, Will it have an app store? In fact, I think it might have been even before the iPhone had an app store. And he said, yes, but they’ve never really had an app store.
Braydan Young: 21:13
They’ve never had an app store.
John Corcoran: 21:14
Tesla’s had yeah, they’ve had like an arcade. They’ve never had something where you could like skin it and stuff. And I think that was the original vision. I don’t know if they have security concerns or whatever, but they never did.
Braydan Young: 21:24
That the second one’s good. I like the second one.
John Corcoran: 21:26
I tried to make up for it with the second question. Yeah, yeah. He still didn’t offer me a job or anything like that. So all right, so.
Braydan Young: 21:34
2020 ten and Tesla would have been like this , like you know a couple hundred bucks on their stock back then.
John Corcoran: 21:41
Well I did actually. So. Oh fantastic. Yeah yeah yeah yeah I actually bought it on its IPO day $19 a share. So.
All right. So. Oh I was going to ask you about also on the down slope. So then you know a lot of companies that thrived during Covid then struggled around 2022 or so when the kind of the funding ran out, when PGP money ran out, or when just your companies, the clients that you served, went back to the office or started doing things differently. So how was that for you?
Braydan Young: 22:12
Yeah, I mean, we went from raising from SoftBank and like the model was like, hey, like if you need more, just let us know. And like I remember when we announced our series C which was 100 million. We received phone calls from other venture funds that are like, let us like we’re also and let us know if you need more money. It was like that was crazy in terms of like rounds of funding. And it was like, just burn it as fast as you can and buy the market.
Then when that pivoted to like, hey, like, now you got to be profitable. That was a big pivot for us as a company because we were growing super quick, like we were hiring an insane amount of salespeople. And the pipeline grew. Basically, this dried up fast. It was a change. So I think I learned this.
John Corcoran: 22:52
What when was this 2020?
Braydan Young: 22:54
22 okay. 2022? Yeah. End of 2021 2022, I mean, like, that’s when we learned as a company, like we needed to figure out how to become profitable. I mean, I learned a ton during those times.
They were hard times. But yeah, I think you learn how to one, talk to people and treat people like especially like people that are that stick with you through those times. I mean also has amazing people who are with us, like through all those times, like they’re still there. It was just like, hey, like, trust me, I think I know what I’m doing. But no one really.
It was all guesswork. It was all based on like, you hope the economy turns around and you hope that it becomes like money becomes cheaper again. But that was a big learning for sure.
John Corcoran: 23:33
What sorts of things did you have to do? What sorts of tough decisions did you have to make during that time period?
Braydan Young: 23:39
We had to cut. We had to cut. I think at the time we were 500 and 500 or 600 people. So, we had to cut a couple hundred people and like it was, we wanted that.
John Corcoran: 23:48
What was that day like?
Braydan Young: 23:50
It was a hard day. We wanted to be more human with it, where we did individual phone calls with each person. And this was at the time when, like people were doing, do you remember the big famous conference call where the guy was having lunch and he was laid off?
John Corcoran: 24:04
That’s what I was going to say. Yeah. Like, yeah, there was like there was a lot of attention to the layoffs and that during that time period. Yeah.
Braydan Young: 24:10
Which is not. So we did individual calls with like 200 ish people, like letting them go. Granted they were five minutes each, but like it was, and then like after like after you go through all that. They could call me or Chris and have conversations around like, hey, like what’s going on as a company and we helped them find other jobs, which was tough. But I think being human is the most important thing there. I mean, even today, like you’re seeing layoffs happen where people just send an email and like, I just I think that sucks. I think that.
John Corcoran: 24:39
That’s all I mean, I think it’s kind of a reaction to some of that, too, because people are afraid of being captured in the moment, you know, not defending what happened with that story or anything like that. But I think people are afraid of it. And so they think, well, I pushed send on an email and it’ll be easier that way.
Braydan Young: 24:56
I mean, I get it and I think it’s a, it’s a time suck to have like like that day was an entire day of like just phone calls and like. And then that evening was the entire evening of phone calls of, like, being like, hey, I can help you find something new. So, I mean, it definitely sucks a lot of time, but I think these people, they still believed in your vision and your story, and so you owe it to them, even if you’re letting them go? I think that there’s been some unfortunate, you know, folks that have been let go from big tech companies who have this, like, right now, it’s almost like a scarlet letter where it’s like, oh, man, like you were laid off. I don’t know if I want to hire you.
And I think that that is not a good thing for tech. Yeah, I think I think there’s amazing people that maybe sometimes just aren’t built right for a certain company or a certain ICP, and they might be great in something else. And so I think that like, that’s so yeah, it was hard. Learned a lot, learned a lot about people, learned a lot about the scaling strategy type of companies. I think that the first cut that we did three cuts, the first cut that we did was not big enough.
We should have gone deeper, which is what our board said. We pushed against that. We learned that and we were really early on it. So I think we could have probably gotten away with the bigger, with a deeper cut and just pivoted from there because you kind of destroy culture each time you do it. And so that was a big learning that we should have won.
John Corcoran: 26:12
What was your message? I mean, probably the message was different each time. But after you’d done this layout, what was your message to the rest of the company? To try and restore that faith and try and retain the culture?
Braydan Young: 26:23
Yeah. It was a lot like transparency as to, hey, here’s how much money we’re burning, here’s where we want to get to. We need to be profitable as a company if we want to survive. Yeah. And everyone we let go has stock still.
So we owe it to those people to make this stock worth something. Yeah, like and like that. That’s why that cut needs like. That’s why we did what we did. Yeah.
I think that you lose trust when you do it three times. And so that message changed a lot. The third time it was like, hey, we think we got it now. I think you learn a lot about what your leaders also like or kind of learn as they go along. And I think that helped with transparency being like, hey, like we don’t know where the economy is going.
We don’t know, like we sell the tech. Tech is heavily our users. If tech’s not in a good spot you know back then. And so like we did we guessed and we were wrong. Yeah I, I think that like having leaders that are willing to admit that, not that they know everything is important no matter where you work or if you want to build a company with that culture, I think it’s important that you stay true to that. If you think it’s important to you, I guess it was to me.
John Corcoran: 27:26
Yeah. So at this point, and this was about three years ago that this happened. But this is a much larger company. Now, did you at some point decide or think, you know, maybe it’s time for me to move on or, you know, maybe I just enjoy it because you and I were talking beforehand about how much, how excited you are about your new company. But there’s a lot of founders who, you know, I’ve got friends like this who built big companies, you know, and then they realize they’re not enjoying that as much. And they kind of crave getting back to the early foundational stage. Did you go through some kind of revelation like that?
Braydan Young: 28:00
Yeah, absolutely. I really like Sendoso. The last three years have been a lot about process and strategy, which is great. I’m not good at that. The first three years of Sendoso where every penny dollar move you make is so important is what I. I love and like.
I think that there were times where I was going to go build something new, but the idea wasn’t right. I have a I, we had a kid, so I needed to stick around for the long run.
John Corcoran: 28:27
Oh yeah. Yeah, I’m three years old now. Yeah yeah.
Braydan Young: 28:31
Yeah. That’s sticking around too.
John Corcoran: 28:32
Yeah.
Braydan Young: 28:33
So but I would say over the holidays I knew that it was time to go and do something new. And we had an idea that worked really well. And like we were, we were testing it on Sendoso, and we’re like, oh, like, this is something that I think is going to work. And so like it was, it made sense to jump and see what I can, what I can do and like to go through the first three years again. I think it is what I’m looking most forward to.
John Corcoran: 28:56
Because you kind of incubated it inside of Sendoso.
Braydan Young: 29:00
\Yeah, we tested it like we sell it to the exact same ICP. The exact same. So like selling to marketing and sales is what I’ve been doing for so long that we tested it by talking to folks, being like, hey, like, would this help at all? Like, so what it does is like basically you go to a website and like the only play on most sites now is to take a demo. That’s your only play, like take a demo, like go talk to sales.
Yeah, but a lot of people don’t want to do that because they’re like, I don’t know if I even want to use the system yet. So you go and read reviews of SaaS software and you’re like, I don’t know if I trust these reviews. So we built this thing where this expert page, where it’s all these people that are on there that you can book time with, and these folks that are on this expert page, we call them experts, are current customers of that software. And so as a prospect, you can book time with them directly. And like that’s your first step in the sales cycle rather than talk to sales. So it’s almost like taking the back channel and putting it on top of the funnel. And which is kind of the goal.
John Corcoran: 29:54
Yeah, an interesting idea.
Braydan Young: 29:56
Yeah. And then we have a gifting component of like if someone does a phone call then we of course the gift, the person doing the referral, which no one’s good at that gifting side of thanking people. So we automate that and then we take all that data from the phone calls, etc. and push it into Salesforce so you can build marketing and all that stuff off of that motion. So it’s almost like a GLG meets G2 meets Calendly type thing, which is what we’re excited about.
John Corcoran: 30:21
You write in your kind of wheelhouse, right? Taking a couple of different disparate pieces, putting them together, mashing them together, and then creating kind of a diamond out of it.
Braydan Young: 30:29
Yeah, that’s that’s the goal. So I’ve been selling it for a couple weeks now. So we’ll see how it goes hopefully in a year. You’re talking to me like it’s you know we have 100 plus customers but only only have a few now.
John Corcoran: 30:39
I’m a bit fascinated by companies that are founders that their subsequent company is a reaction in many ways to their previous company and the constraints that they experienced in the previous company. So you mentioned some of the pain points being like, you know, building out a, you know, warehouse system and integrating all that kind of stuff. Are there any ways that you think that you are building this company now that it’s going to, in some ways avoid challenges you’ve experienced with your previous company?
Braydan Young: 31:10
Yeah, the biggest one. And we put this in place right away. So it’s me and my co-founder, and we had a couple engineers from Pakistan. The biggest one is like if you have a need like, like a project in need, the first step would be like, can we find a contractor who can do this rather than hire full time? There’s so many people that are more like temporary CFOs, temporary customer marketers that come in and do a project and then leave.
And like, I think that’s really cool. So the first step is like, can I find a contractor for it? And if I can’t, the next step is like, can I find an AI that can do it? And if you can’t do that, then like I’m going to hire you for it. So like we kind of like and I would say like five years ago even more recently, the first step was like, I guess I gotta hire a CFO.
But now it’s like, can I find a contractor who can help me do the CFO side? Because I only need a couple hours a week right now. So we’re going to try to scale the company more efficiently by not hiring right off the bat, which I’m excited about and hopefully can give us a longer runway.
John Corcoran: 32:11
And are you going to, I assume you’re going to raise venture capital again?
Braydan Young: 32:15
We did. Yeah. We just came off and signed all of that a week ago. So raise from a lot of the same investors that did Sendoso, which was great. I mean like yeah, it’s much easier to do the second company around.
Like yeah, like I didn’t have to meet with as many VCs. And so it was exciting to get a seed or Pre-seed done. And then we’re going to use that to scale and grow.
John Corcoran: 32:35
Yeah. Yeah. Well this has been really cool. Any other thoughts? Any other things you’re excited about with the new company with SlashExperts before we wrap things up.
Braydan Young: 32:43
I’m excited to build it. I mean like please like me I’m the only Braydan Young on all LinkedIn. So my parents got creative with me.
John Corcoran: 32:50
They sure did b r a y d a n.
Braydan Young: 32:52
Yeah, yeah. So if you my dad thought I wanted to go by Dan at some point. That’s why it ends in Dan. So. Got it.
So the only Braydan Young there. So find me I mean if you have questions if you want to take a look at what I’m doing, I think the best part about entrepreneurship is most people are willing to help or offer advice, and that’s where I have the most fun. So if you are building something or you’re thinking about something like, please ping me.
John Corcoran: 33:14
All right. And last question, Braydan. So I’m a big fan of gratitude and practicing gratitude and giving my guests a little bit of space at the end here to acknowledge people that have helped them in their journey. So yeah, who would you want to acknowledge any peers, contemporaries? Mentors?
Braydan Young: 33:28
This is the most cliche answer of all time, but I think it’s an important one. I don’t think any founder or entrepreneur really makes it without their spouse on the other side. And like mine, when I had the idea of Sendoso, like, I’m like, hey, I’m going to leave and not make any money for a while. She was like, go do it. We’re fine.
And like, she was like, I don’t want to live with you if you don’t do something like this. So like, go and see if you can make it happen and then do it again as of today. And her being like, yeah, like go make it happen again. I think that like, it’s important with your partner that you just have a clear like, hey, this like, my partner needs to go and try this or they’re going to regret it forever. So yeah, I think that is a cliché answer, but I think that it is so important to have someone who pushes you to go and do it, and is like, hey, like, I’ll take care of health care. I’ll. It’s easy if we’re there at a big company. But like, so like I, you know, went on her insurance and stayed there. Yeah. Which is great.
John Corcoran: 34:22
So it.
Braydan Young: 34:23
Helps.
John Corcoran: 34:23
Yeah. My wife works for a community college, so I know what that’s like. Exactly. Yeah.
Braydan Young: 34:27
But I, I think that that’s very helpful in terms of whatever you start. And to have that person push you for sure.
John Corcoran: 34:34
For sure. Braydan SlashExperts. It’s SlashExperts.com.
Braydan Young: 34:39
Yep.
John Corcoran: 34:39
Okay. And Braydan Braydan Young B R A Y D A N Young on LinkedIn. Braydan, thanks so much for your time.
Braydan Young: 34:46
Thank you, John.
Outro: 34:50
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