Well, I think like a lot of careers. It's a bit of a random walk. Yeah, I'm very achievement oriented and like doing things. And, uh and I'm probably less concerned about money than I am concerned about, Uh, you know, doing things that sort of matter. And I started on Wall Street, was kind of a molecular geneticist by training. I started out for work and, uh, wrote for genetic engineering news. And I saw John and Techo public in 1980 and the stock gapped open. And and I kind of put together that you know, that the access to capital was an important driver of of social impact and, uh, an innovation and eso I shifted directions and when got a business degree and went to Wall Street.Yeah, I I wrote a a You know, a series of papers when I was vice chairman of NASDAQ for a while, Andi, I saw the A collapse in in Mark in market, uh, in small AIPO markets. And so when I left his vice chairman, we started writing papers and those papers got picked up in Washington. Read to the Jobs Act, which gave birth the crowd funding and of securities regulation, A plus offerings, emerging growth companies, a range of things. And so what I what I hadn't counted on is that because I have been wise chairman of NASDAQ, when I started writing that people down in Washington that felt compelled to read what I wrote and and they circulated it, it was never kind of my intent to get acts passed in Congress, But they were thirsting for ideas that would improve job formation. And so but part of the outgrowth of that work is we noticed that there was a collapse in investment banks in the middle market. And so way put together the fact that there was there had been a big fixed revenue source. Um, that was the trading which was gutted when they changed regulation and eso that put all these middle market investment banks out of business. So we just re imagined the new investment bank to fill the void that was variable cost model dealing with independent contractors as opposed to employ people directly, which then you could scale much more quickly. You weren't You weren't shouldering the risk, if you will, because you were not, you know, paying salaries and incurring all those fixed costs on dso. You know that we started doing that in in in August of 2000 and 16 and we're up to 90 professionals now and we're we're growing. I think covitz probably are inflection point in some regards because we're seeing a lot. We're seeing an even higher inquiry, if you will, than we thought Prior Thio Kobeway have professional secure on and in 18 straight, you know, including, uh, obviously pen Pennsylvania and Utah, you know.

way recruit our average investment bankers about 45 years old and some of them well into their seventies. Right? These were people that have lots of relationships and lots of experience. And so to a large degree, investment banking products said that we do in private markets follows what they feel that they bring to the table. And so, you know, we're kind of still in a fairly early stage of development because, you know, investment banks, you know, do well if you study network effects, right? There's something called Reads Law that that says that the number of nodes increases if you create clusters of that excellence that you start to see growth that have had an exponential, not linear rate, if you will, Right. And so, you know, we want to take our platform from 90 professionals up to 1000 over five years and what happens within that cluster of you start to develop these clusters of excellence or expertise and they will end up, you know, delivering higher. You know, higher revenue production, higher margins and so on and so forth. But so right now way do. If you think about investment banks there, there there. They're divided into three, uh, sort of gross areas. One is one is the products and services I'll talk about that in the second one is industry expertise, and the third is sales initiatives. And when you're small, you're sort of the chief cook and bottle washer, and you're doing all three of those things. And that's been banker, right? But as you get bigger and there are people you can collaborate with on the network, you thought you kind of fall out into the areas which you are your most most naturally qualified to do. And so, you know, right now we've got a Blockchain initiative that's kind of, you know, coalesced around a number of people that have common interests. You have an insurance practice we do secondaries in, get out in Silicon Valley. So, for instance, we're still selling the A very rapidly growing B two b b two c b e commerce company. We're selling the CEO stay because he left the company, turned it over to his two founding partners and is going to start another venture. And he wants the liquidity now to be able Thio, you know, finance his current venture so that za business. But we're now doing, uh, private placements. Both of primary and secondary shares were doing private placements of venture capital funds, and private equity funds were doing work and acquisitions. Advisory. We do some public markets advisory. At some point, we'll buy another broker dealer to create some institutional infrastructure will get into doing. You know, public deals probably start out with Sfax, which have some synergy with investment banking, the investment banking.

um well, so first of all, we did a pivot, right? We had a different business model was beginning and prior to 2000 and August 2000 and 16 than what happened Waas We were looking at that, trying to do long tail distribution on new issue activities because our basic thesis is Is you collapsed trading spreads and commissions in public markets. The big Wall Street firms were not doing a good bonified job of distributing I pose. And so we naively thought that they would embrace our service and and in the process of embracing it, you know, we would we would be earned some money that they would be our sales channel. What we didn't understand is that they really you know, they were under pricing deal with the 20 institutions they didn't value long brought distribution. They were, and they were generating commissions for those accounts. And by were Alfa for those accounts. And we're shaking those 20 institutions down for incremental commission. So So we had a sales channel that really didn't want what we were offering on. Even though the ultimate corporate client, it was highly valuable. So we had to reimagine how are we getting to the corporate client? And the way you get the corporate clients is by aggregating investment bankers. And we've been turning away investment bankers that wanted support. Um, this whole time and so we just decided to stop saying no to the investment banking community and allow them to start joining our broker dealer on that's and the rest is history.um, well, I mean, I think that that's that's exactly right. I think, you know, way you know, the real issue is we have You know, we have a vision that we want to get Thio, and it's very hard in the early stages because this is a high margin, low payout model. And so, you know, you end up spreading yourself incredibly thin and working like an absolute dog to kind of get something off the ground. And because of the revenue in this business and very lumpy and hard to predict when you have a small sample set of deals, you'll get easier if you have a larger and larger sample set of deals because you scale the network. But in the early days, it's a very it's a very difficult business to pull off, and you find yourself, you know, doing jobs that you know. You you you ultimately wanna pay somebody else to dio, to put it, put it mildly.