231: The New Rules of Building a $100M Company with Roger Neel

Roger Neel sold his SaaS company at $100M+ ARR, took three hours off, and dove straight into a health tech startup backed by Google Ventures and Dexcom.

In this conversation, Roger breaks down the full arc — from founding Mavenlink in the teeth of the 2008 financial crash, to grinding through 13 years of customer base churn, fundraising rounds, and eventually selling to PE. He also shares what he’d do completely differently if he were starting today with AI tools at his disposal to build a 9-figure business.

We get into his framework for evaluating whether a business is actually defensible (he calls it the 3 Ds), why most SaaS companies don’t need a moat until they’re past $10M, what really happens when you sell to a PE firm, and how a regulatory curveball nearly killed his new company Signos right before launch.

Mic Drop Moments

• “I think where SaaS really wins is if you have a data moat.” – Roger Neel

• “Whatever is difficult to execute, those are going to be the things that have a moat.” – Roger Neel

• “If you manage your blood sugar and you manage your metabolism for all intents and purposes, you can actually manage your weight.” – Roger Neel

• “If you know that you’re trying to build a billion-dollar company, much less a trillion-dollar company, there’s no chance that you’re going to do that deliberately without fundraising in today’s market because you need speed to do it, because somebody will come in and be competitive and crush you with money.” – Roger Neel

• “When you think about capital raising, you ought to be thinking about exit as well. If you’re going to raise every two to three years, that’s about the lifecycle of capital in the business, you should be kind of looking at strategic outcomes too.” – Roger Neel

• 01:06 Building A $100M Company In The AI Era
• 04:08 The Origin Story Of Mavenlink
• 07:22 The Future Of SaaS And Custom Software
• 10:20 The Three Ds: Demand, Differentiation, Defensibility
• 8:24 Why He Jumped Into Health Tech
• 20:23 Finding Your Actual Passion In Business
• 23:27 How Signos Revolutionized Continuous Glucose Monitoring
• 29:59 When A Regulatory Shift Breaks Your Model
• 36:22 Bootstrapping Vs. Raising Capital
• 42:37 The 13-Year Growth Arc To Exit
• 46:54 Going Up Market Faster With AI
• 52:07 Selling To PE: How The Deal Actually Works
• 54:33 Why Keep Raising Instead Of Selling Earlier
• 56:35 PE vs. IPO
• 57:29 Picking The Right PE Firm
• 01:03:40 Advice For Raising Capital Today
• 01:06:02 AI Tools Entrepreneurs Should Be Using

Brad Weimert: Roger Neel, welcome to Beyond a Million.

Roger Neel: Brad, great to be here. It’s been a long time coming.

Brad Weimert: It has been a long time coming. It’s exciting. We’ve done a lot of snowboarding together while you ski because you’re…

Roger Neel: Yeah. I lay down tracks for you.

Brad Weimert: That’s actually very true.

Roger Neel: That is very true.

Brad Weimert: You pull me through the woods. You have also built a 100 million ARR company, exited it, and now you’re onto some other crazy continuous glucose monitor, health, live data tracking stuff. And you are CTO by trade on to now, what are you, the f*cking CMO of the company?

Roger Neel: Both CTO and CMO at the moment. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Crazy. So, I want to talk about all sorts of stuff. I want to start with you had a very traditional software company that you built up as the CTO, 200 million ARR. It’s now, what is it? May of 2026. How would you change your approach to building that company now, in the era of AI that we’re in, versus how you built it then?

Roger Neel: Holy cow. Yeah. Starting with a banger here. I mean, the world has drastically changed, and I’ve listened to a few of your recent episodes, too. And I know you guys have touched on this a little bit, and we’re seeing in the market too, between Brian Armstrong’s Coinbase announcement just a couple of days ago to, I mean, pick your poison, Jack Dorsey, et cetera, what Square did, or I guess Block now, doing their restructuring. I mean, the amount of leverage you can get out of AI, out of cloud code out of different things if your workforce is really trained to use them, it doesn’t necessarily mean, and I know a lot of these big companies are compressing, doesn’t necessarily mean you need to kind of compress the size of your talent pool, but it does mean that you can just get a lot more out of each individual person.

We’re seeing it on the engineering side. We’re seeing it on the marketing side. So, I mean, I would say there’s an old motorcyclism, “Go slow to go fast. Smooth is fast, fast is smooth.” We probably would’ve grown a little bit less precipitously at Mavenlink. At exit, we’re about 450, 500 people. We still have a pretty traditional large sales force, but I would say across all other roles and functions in the company, you could probably get by with fewer headcount.

Brad Weimert: So, the core thing there is probably scaling with less people.

Roger Neel: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: How do you think about, sort of, I mean, we can talk like the tactical stuff that’s happening with AI and development. But how do you think about software in general right now? I mean, you built this traditional per-seat company.

Roger Neel: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, traditional SaaS company, is that going to go away?

Roger Neel: Start with another banger. So, let’s rewind the clock first a little bit just for context. So, we started Mavenlink in 2008 with two co-founders. So, I mean, this is like, I think we’re starting to measure ourselves in dinosaur years at this point. So, 2008, the world was really different. That was a fun founding story. We can get there later, but we essentially started it right in the teeth of the financial crash. So, that’s 2008.

Brad Weimert: I was investing in real estate then.

Roger Neel: Nice. Also, a tough place to be. A tough place to be.

Brad Weimert: It’s perfect.

Roger Neel: Yeah. So, like, things have really changed from a software development standpoint. And when we started Mavenlink, you got to hand it to Benioff, Salesforce, et cetera. SaaS was still not really the mainstream. You had client-server software, as we used to call it. Especially if you were selling into the enterprise or kind of even in the larger mid-market segment, man, I mean, you were installing, you know, they were buying Dell servers. You’d be screwing in the software. You might even hire Accenture to do it. And that was the world. So, we essentially drafted off Salesforce and a number of other players at the time to really modernize the infrastructure for these companies using cloud. But that was still a little bit of a dirty word.

And I remember countless RFPs, all that kind of stuff in the early days, where we were actually having to say, “No, no, no, no, you can’t have your own instance. This is multi-tenant SaaS. You just buy seats.” Now, back to your question, and you’re going to be paying on a per-seat basis. Our solution, we’re selling really into the kind of agency space, into the consulting industry, basically any fee-for-service business. So, what a great model for them, right? If you think about a traditional marketing agency, design agency, something like that, even at the higher end, more kind of big consulting, these guys are flexing their workforce all the time.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Spin it up, spin it down.

Roger Neal: Exactly. And to spin up a $3 million solution only to sort of use it sometimes, not use it other times, have this many seats sometimes, not that many seats the other times, that was kind of an impediment to sales. But we had to break through, kind of with the CIOs and kind of like the real IT folks saying, “No, no, no, we need governance over our software and that kind of thing.” So, obviously, that from 2008 to call it 2015, 2018, that world just totally shifted, and it was just, “You’re not SaaS, you mean?” So, really, kind of the 2010s were kind of like the mainstreaming of SaaS. Now, what is really fascinating, at least in my mind, when we think about AI, the amount of personal tools that people can build just on their own.

Brad Weimert: Insane.

Roger Neel: You don’t necessarily need to go buy Asana. If you have like a really specific project-based workflow like at your business, you could homebrew something. You could kind of get exactly what you want. That’s all possible. I think the big thing that still is kind of out there, unanswered, history kind of has some lessons for us, but no one really wants to be in the software maintenance business. And if there’s one thing I know as an engineer, it’s really easy to get a V1 out. But to get a V2 out, a V3 out, and then have like the staffing to maintain it over time, it’s a bit rough. So, I don’t see people totally customizing their own. Like, you don’t want to build HR software. You don’t want to build billing software. You’re not going to go build QuickBooks.

Brad Weimert: I mean, I want to build billing software.

Roger Neel: You want to build billing software for your clients.

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Roger Neel: So, that’s where I do think that there’s some boundary condition there of like, what, what people are actually going to do. Still a big world for SaaS. I think where SaaS really wins is if you have a data moat. And if you can actually provide your customers’ insights, maybe even population-based insights, if that fits your world, where you’re saying, “Hey, you’re operating at this level, benchmark is that level,” insights like that, now, it actually provides a little bit more value than just anyone can just layer on some software onto a database and call it a day.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, as somebody that’s running development all day, every day, and in building sh*t, both in the no-code tools personally and through a traditional development team, yeah, I echo all of that. Also, I think that there’s a question of what that all looks like five years from now, right? And so, right now, yeah, if you build it yourself, if you can, maybe you get the view one out. Usually, it’s going to have all sorts of privacy issues and security issues. You have to be very careful without doing that. And then you’re going to break it all the time. Like, it’s going to work for a while. You’re going to try to add a feature, and you’re going to break it doing it. But I think that where we’re going potentially leads us to a different place.

And so, you talk about maintenance, and then you look at sort of some of these recursive patterns that people are attempting to put in place now. And you think, “Okay. Well, could an agent maintain a system moving forward? Right? So, two questions. One, do you think that’s going to happen? And two, what are the other moats outside of data, if any?

Roger Neel: Yeah. So, touch on the second part first. So, what are the moats? There’s a framework that I’ve used that hopefully interests your audience here. We used to say demand, differentiation, and defensibility. So, when you’re thinking about building a product, is there demand? Easiest when you’re building something that already exists, right? Does CRM, Brad, have demand?

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Roger Neel: Yes, right? So, if we were like, “Hey, man. Let’s start something together. Maybe it’s our next gig. We’ll do something together. Let’s go into the CRM space.” Clearly, there’s demand for CRM solutions, right? Differentiation. Okay. Well, so now we’ve got our new business together. Cool. There’s demand. What’s the differentiation in the world? Like, how are we differentiating ourselves from Salesforce, say? I don’t know. All right. Well, I think we just failed. We just failed at our enterprise together, right? But so, let’s say you get some sort of…

Brad Weimert: Oh, you can do that in differentiation. In the CRM space is vertical specificity. Right?

Roger Neel: Great idea.

Brad Weimert: So, landscaping company, you’re a head shop, you’re a marketing agency, whatever.

Roger Neel: Perfect. So, let’s say we want to do landscaping CRM, hey, well, maybe now we just went back into business, right? So, demand and differentiation. But those two things don’t create a company because once you’re differentiated, great. Now, somebody can copycat. And now it’s undifferentiated. So, then you get into defensibility. And I believe that there are two forms of defensibility. One is what we were just talking about, and that’s a data moat. The other one is network effects. So, if you have network effects, and network effects can come in different forms, but a key network effect is Facebook and LinkedIn, right? Just any social network. That’s a key. Like, you and I could sit down and build LinkedIn probably this weekend, but it wouldn’t be very useful because there’s no network there.

So, I think when we look at the future of SaaS, and kind of bringing it back around, the SaaS that has some sort of network effect and some sort of data moat where they can actually provide insights is probably the SaaS that people will get the most value out of versus kind of, it was Greenfield in 2008, 2010, just essentially coming up with a SaaS differentiated solution. You know, another hero, Dave Duffield, started PeopleSoft. Before that, he had done other things with HR software, so he had a playbook. Now, PeopleSoft becomes PeopleSoft, because he SaaSified it, right?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think about that in a lot of ways. I mean, one, we are now moving into the same era where you can AI-fy things. So, you can pick a vertical, pick a space, pick a business model, and if you leverage AI appropriately, then you can do the same thing that people were doing with SaaS. And you just throw it at the wall. But back to your point about defensibility, so can everybody else. So, now I think it’s worth noting that the idea of defensibility being necessary to create a business, I believe, that to only be true at scale. So, I think that you can very, very, very much create a completely not defensible business that’s $1 million, $5 million, $10 million a year.

Roger Neel: A hundred percent. And that’s such a great distinction, too. I mean, instead of talking about the CRM for landscapers, let’s just talk about landscapers. Are landscapers differentiated? Not really, right? Like, you can be really good at the craft, and you can get well known, and you can start getting, “Who’s your landscaper? I love what they’ve done. It seems like they do a super ship-shaped job. I’m going to use them too.” SaaS is no different. Yeah, like, “Hey, seems like you guys use a great product for X. Like, what are you guys using? All right. I’ll use that too.”

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well then, the other is when I do think about defensibility, and so I think first of all, that’s a really good takeaway for anybody that’s in the sub-10 million space, right?

Roger Neel: Big time.

Brad Weimert: Trying to get going in entrepreneurship, like don’t worry about, depending on what your goals are, don’t worry about creating this super unique product. In fact, if you want to create a $10 million or less company or something around there, you probably want to see that the roadmap is there.

Roger Neel: I believe that’s where the demand comes in.

Brad Weimert: A hundred percent. Yeah, exactly. Demand and some differentiation, and you can create a sizable business doing that. But you’re not going to create a truly scaled business doing that without the last element.

Roger Neel: The differentiation. Yeah. Defensibility.

Brad Weimert: Defensibility, that was it. Yeah.

Roger Neel: It’s the three Ds. Yes. I used to just always point at my slide when we were talking to people about that.

Brad Weimert: Well, I want to move off this, but the last thing that I want to hit on there is what the moat is. So, you said data and network effects and the nature of my business, the other thing that I think about is regulations, security, big time, right? And so, my vision of the future here is that you’re going to end up with these things that it’s whatever is difficult to execute, those are going to be the things that have a moat. Because the easy stuff, everybody’s doing it. The robot’s going to do it for you. And if it’s easier for the robot to link to something that took three months to put together, or three years to put together, they’re going to link to it instead of trying to recreate it themselves.

Roger Neel: Yep. And I mean, no moat is completely… No moat is like scalable.

Brad Weimert: Can’t be crossed.

Roger Neel: Yeah. Or no moat can’t be crossed, right? Every castle got stormed at some point, but the wider your moat, the better. I think you bring up a great one, regulation. I mean, it’s my current company, Signos. We have a continuous glucose monitor. We are literally FDA-regulated, and we are FDA-cleared for glucose management. You can’t just go do that, right? You need to run a clinical trial or a number of them.

Brad Weimert: Well, let’s run forward to that.

Roger Neel: All that kind of stuff, but it was a huge add on your part. That’s part of defensibility.

Brad Weimert: Well, let’s run forward on that then. So, we’ll skip Mavenlink and come back to it. Mavenlink obviously facilitated a lot of things in your life. That was the big project that you built forever. Most of the time that I knew you, you were involved in Mavenlink, doing things, and then in ‘21 you sold it.

Roger Neel: Yep. November ‘21.

Brad Weimert: Sold it to PE. We’ll get back to that story.

Roger Neel: Little teaser. You’ve got to keep listening.

Brad Weimert: But you sat on your hands for three days before you were like, “Sh*t, I need to do something else.”

Roger Neel: It was actually three hours. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: And so, you aligned with… Every time I see it, I look at Sign-OS, which is not what it is. I see Sign OS. Signos is the name of the company.

Roger Neel: Well, it’s funny. This is a total aside, and I’m completely interrupting. We have an internal code project called glucoS, i.e., glucose, because we’re measuring blood glucose. So, Sign-OS, we can go with it, but it is Signos.

Brad Weimert: I’m going to spin up a separate site for you that’s Sign-OS, and it’s going to be ridiculous. Why did you do that? So, like, I mean, first and foremost, let me frame this through the lens of you sell a company, you’re done for life, you can do whatever you want, and three hours later you’re like, “I need to fill all my time with the startup right now.” What are you thinking?

Roger Neel: Well, I wasn’t, okay? So, next topic. So, yeah, I mean, it’s kind of can’t touch on this without going origin story. You and I are both great Midwesterners. I come from the slightly better M State, Minnesota, but only slightly better.

Brad Weimert: It is significantly colder.

Roger Neel: It is significantly colder. We’ve got a nice jet stream in the winter. But I came from a place in Rochester, Minnesota. Yeah, a little bit. A little bit.

Brad Weimert: Not you in particular, but…

Roger Neel: Yeah. Everyone thinks I sound like McConaughey.

Brad Weimert: Is that right?

Roger Neel: I’m glad I’m here in Austin.

Brad Weimert: And my mom’s from Hibbing, and they talk funny.

Roger Neel: Yeah. First, they definitely talk funny. Yeah. Northern Minnesota, they say things like for neat.

Brad Weimert: I don’t know what that is.

Roger Neel: Yeah, exactly. So, I grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, and kind of long history of physicians in the family. Mayo Clinic is headquartered in Rochester. Mayo Brothers founded it. It’s Mayo, Mayo, Mayo in Rochester. But it happens to also have the second largest, at least at the time when I was growing up, in the 80s and 90s, second largest IBM plant outside of New York. So, IBM, I think everyone knows, headquartered in Armonk, New York. They spooled up their supercomputer division in my hometown. So, literally, my middle school/high school experience was you had like all the Mayo kids and the IBM kids, right? And I was always a computer nerd. But I come from physicians, and I really appreciate the medical practice and all that kind of thing. And I always wanted to find kind of my calling to fuse those two things together.

So, once we got Mavenlink done, I thought I might stay all that, but I said, “Hey, now’s the time for me to join some sort of health tech startup.” Didn’t really want to go to like a big company like Medtronic or something like that to work on medical devices, but I wanted to fuse my software experience together with hardware and try to go consumer. So, there you go.

Brad Weimert: Dude, I really appreciate anytime somebody finds like an actual sort of passionate pull towards something, because I think it’s such a rarity. Everybody talks about it as if it’s like a necessity for business, but like nobody actually finds it. Like, very, very rarely do people actually do things that they’re pulled to do. It’s sort of like their gameplay narrative. Like, they watch the tape, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s what I was doing.” Yeah. When I was a child, when I was eight, my father asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I was like, “I don’t know. A bird.” I said some stupid sh*t, right? A fireman. And he was like, “Oh, would you ever want to be a doctor?” And I was like, “I don’t know.” My family is also all medicine. And it didn’t hit me until later how this impacted my life. But he said, “Well, if you want to make money, don’t be a doctor.”

Roger Neel: Dad said the exact same thing.

Brad Weimert: Did he really?

Roger Neel: Yes, he did.

Brad Weimert: And I think that that really settled in. And I have no desire to touch it as a result.

Roger Neel: Well, what’s wild to me and what I didn’t even realize at the time, and hey, I always loved science, all that kind of stuff, thought surgery. I mean, that sounds amazing. Like, being highly skilled at something sounds really cool to me. What I didn’t realize, and obviously the medical field’s changed now, but what I didn’t realize is you’re like literally in a nine-to-five job. And that is a huge difference from our world, where we can be working anytime. But it’s also not just like a structured nine-to-five. There’s a huge amount of creativity. I mean, imagine waking up every morning and appreciate all the doctors in the audience here and everything like that. Don’t get me wrong.

But for me, waking up to a calendar full of patients back to back, nine to five, and that’s just my day every day, that doesn’t really fit with like, essentially, how I’ve structured a career.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Or how you want to live.

Roger Neel: Yeah. How I want to live.

Brad Weimert: Well, yeah. Look, and I think that the… Yeah. I don’t want to belabor the point, but my father was seeing 70 people a day. What the f*ck? You know what I mean? Like, if I have 10 meetings in a day, it is a crazy day. 70? That’s just insane. It’s an insane proposition. And there are tons of other paths. So, you got into the continuous glucose monitor, CGM.

Roger Neel: Yep. Yep.

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome why you did that. Tell me about the mechanics of growth in that company, because this was from beginning, from like ambition of what you wanted it to be to what it turned into, to now, there’s this super interesting arc of, “Oh, sh*t,” and to now what looks like clear runway again.

Roger Neel: Yeah. So…

Brad Weimert: Also, pause on that. Do you want to try this bourbon?

Roger Neel: Sure.

Brad Weimert: Great. We’re going to have Garrison Brothers Guadalupe finished in a port cask. It’s a special Garrison Brothers, 53.5%. For anybody that likes bourbon and isn’t from Texas, Garrison is a homegrown Texas bourbon that is the sh*t.

Roger Neel: I’m excited.

Brad Weimert: I’m not sorry to interrupt, but I would like you to continue.

Roger Neel: Yeah, I’ll let you do the pouring.

Brad Weimert: Great.

Roger Neel: So, kudos to my good friend and founder, Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer. He really had the idea. He grew up as an obese kid, almost played in the NHL. I will tell a very brief version of his story since it’s not my own, but he struggled with weight, saw kind of what other hockey players on his team were doing, weren’t working for him, all that kind of thing. Always struggled with just a little bit of, little bit of extra weight, right? So, this notion, and we’re seeing it now with the GLP1 industry too. So, we’re a little bit ahead of that game. If you manage your blood sugar and you manage your metabolism for all intents and purposes, you can actually manage your weight. And so, that was the big idea.

The continuous glucose monitoring space really largely kind of started by Dexcom and Abbott, two traditional pharmaceutical companies. They were really attacking type 1 diabetes, which is the really unfortunate form of diabetes that you get, genetically. So, this is six-year-olds, eight-year-olds. They all of a sudden start degrading for all intents and purposes, and they become type 1 diabetics. Super important technology for them. Instead of finger sticking every 15 minutes, every hour, after meals, all that kind of thing, what a continuous glucose monitor does is it essentially gives you every five-minute updates on exactly what your blood glucose is doing.

And the cool part of the tech for the diabetic population is if you have an 8-year-old, he or she is probably not as Johnny on the spot with it as like you or I might be. They don’t necessarily understand the implications. Parents can monitor them.

Brad Weimert: It’s a night-and-day difference.

Roger Neel: Night and day difference.

Brad Weimert: You went from the CGM allowed us to go from being diabetic, being a condemnation to lifestyle, who you were, being sort of isolated as a person publicly, because you had to run away and do things all the time to having this thing in your arm that just got tracked on an iPhone big time. So, not what you’re doing.

Roger Neel: Not what we’re doing. Cheers to that. So, we said, “Hey, there is, and so type…” I’ll just back up one second again. Type 2 diabetes is largely obesity related, so it’s not genetic. It’s you’re 35, 40 BMI, you enter a pre-diabetic condition, which…

Brad Weimert: At what percentage of diabetics type 2 versus 1?

Roger Neel: I don’t have that off the top.

Brad Weimert: In the US, I feel like it’s significantly more.

Roger Neel: It is significantly more. It’s significantly more, and there are even significantly more than that number, pre-diabetics, which isn’t technically a condition, but your doctor will say, “Hey, you have what’s called an A1C value. Your A1C is getting to a place where you’re starting to get much, much more insulin resistant.” So, what Sharam and I we’ve been doing since 2021 is we said, “Hey, this technology could be a game changer for weight loss, weight management, understanding metabolism, and allowing people to understand what exactly the impact of the food is on their body. So, they can see their own insulin resistance or lack thereof when they’re eating a sandwich, when they’re doing this, when they’re doing that.

And they can really understand how food, activity, movement, all have interplay, so that they can live healthier lives. And I wanted to touch on one thing that I was saying before, so the mother who might be monitoring her 8-year-old think about the entire industry of health professionals who right now don’t have real-time access to their patients’ data to understand exactly what those patients are doing. So, the same tech that can save an eight-year-old’s life, life can also be used as a monitoring tool for a PCP.

Brad Weimert: Allow a doctor to pay attention.

Roger Neel: Allow a doctor to pay attention, or a nutritionist to pay attention, or any functional medicine center to pay attention. So, basically, kind of like what we’re talking about with demand, differentiation, defensibility, hey, what’s the vertical here that we can go into? Rather than being in the diabetic vertical, we’re kind of in the general health vertical and just kind of general non-vertical. So, that’s just kind of reframing the same solution for something else.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. That’s super interesting, and you were showing me earlier, I think one of the things that I’m really excited about in the era of AI is the ability to draw causal correlations between data sets that we were unaware of. Let me say that a different way, which is there’s a lot of sh*t that’s connected in the world that we’re not aware of, and we have an opportunity through big sets of data and really smart robots to link those things and say, “Oh, actually when you do this thing, it results in this.” And this is functionally what I see you doing with the product.

Roger Neel: Absolutely. You nailed it.

Brad Weimert: Love that. But when you launched the product, you ran into some problems.

Roger Neel: What specifically?

Brad Weimert: That Abbott just went head-to-head.

Roger Neel: Oh, okay. Let’s talk about this. So, what was interesting is so when we started CGMs, at least in the US, are only insurance-covered devices. So, you had to go to your doctor and say, “Hey, I think I have diabetes.” “Hey, yes, you do.” “Okay, cool. Prescribe me a CGM.” They still end up being quite expensive, and not necessarily a broad market. Dexcom and Abbott are both really working on that, but we essentially had to run our own clinical study in order to prove out our effectiveness for the general population, which is what we did. But just as that study was essentially finalizing, both Dexcom and Abbott, and Dexcom’s a good partner of ours.

Brad Weimert: Hold on, pause on that. You had to run the study. Why?

Roger Neel: We had to run the study for the FDA, and this is back to our regulatory comments, right?

Brad Weimert: So, you couldn’t get approved as a device until you ran the study.

Roger Neel: That’s right.

Brad Weimert: And right when you’re going through the study, before you get to the end of the study, which is what allows you to sell your product…?

Roger Neel: CGMs went over the counter. So, you can go on Amazon today and just buy a raw CGM. Dexcom has their Stelo product. Abbott has their Lingo product. It also brought the price point down by at least for the first-party CGMs by 50%.

Brad Weimert: Which just totally f*cks your margin.

Roger Neel: Totally screwed our margins, right? So, we went into high gear. We worked with Dexcom, and they continue to be our supplier. And so, now we’re essentially packaging Stelo. We were packaging the G7 product, which is the pharmaceutical grade product. Now, we’re packaging the Stelo product and much, much more price competitive. But that was a really scary moment in the business in terms of just, “Okay. Well, we’re selling at 199. They, in a few months, are releasing a $99 product. We are still kind of regulated, and this is maybe where regulation can go wrong, too. We’re still clinically studied and regulated against the pharmaceutical product, i.e., the G7 sensor.

And meanwhile, people are just going to be able to go to Amazon, Walmart, and buy these. So, we thought we had a real moat and an edge from a software perspective, which we do, but man, that’s a totally different value proposition for the market, too. It’s like, “Hey, Brad, you’ve used the CGM before. Did you know that there’s this other product that exists that has all these other bells and whistles that actually would’ve been beneficial to you? If you don’t…” that’s now my sales job, right, and also as the chief marketing officer of the company.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, there are a bunch of lessons within that, but so that people have an idea of sort of size, scope, frame. Did Signos raise? Is it a funded company?

Roger Neel: Yeah. So, Dexcom Ventures is one of our capital partners. And then Google Ventures is our other major capital partner.

Brad Weimert: So, you raised a bunch of money to do this. And the way you raise money is by modeling things out and showing what you’re going to do. And then some period of time, fairly shortly into it, before you really hit good revenue, the entire model breaks because the cost of the product gets cut in half through a regulatory change.

Roger Neel: Right. Scary time, right?

Brad Weimert: So, what do you do? How do you navigate through that? How do you communicate with the people that gave you money through that situation? And what do you do with your staff?

Roger Neel: Yeah. So, we actually call us crazy, but we hung on to all staff. We obviously engaged with Dexcom’s leadership to help them understand, hey, this might be a left hand and a right hand that’s dancing separately. This is what it means for our business. And also, the metabolic space, the obesity space, and if you listen to Dexcom’s quarterly calls today, that’s still not their major focus, right? That’s our major focus. And that’s something we’ve talked to them about.

So, if you look at market segmentation, we have a pretty good segmentation map between kind of what they are doing as our supplier and what we intend to do as a company. Do those things converge over time? Certainly. But there’s a huge market for all of us. So, we’ve been really lucky to have great capital partners, both with Google/Dexcom themselves, and then another venture company, Cheyenne. And we basically just put up a big plan together, where we knew we wanted to use the OTC product.

We ended up filing without getting into all the boring regulation stuff. We ended up filing, because the prior product that we ran our clinical study on and Stelo, the new CGM, are demonstrably similar. They both follow the same standard. We were actually able to file with the FDA, despite running a clinical trial on one device with the new device, get approval with the new device, and then by August of just this past year, so essentially, we were out of market for about six months. August of this past year, we reentered the market with our new offering.

Brad Weimert: So, now, you’re moving.

Roger Neel: So, now, we moved.

Brad Weimert: Okay, let me back out to Mavenlink. So, I’m curious about so many things with this one. I’m bootstrapped, which I talk about all the time on the show and I love it. Have no experience raising money at all. And I now have had a chance to know and follow and interact with and track and dig into the details of a lot of people that have raised. When you started the company, was bootstrapping a choice? Why did you go that direction? And what was sort of the fundraising path?

Roger Neel: Yeah, it’s a good question. So, like, I’m going to have to stammer through this a little bit from a little bit of ancient history, but essentially what…

Brad Weimert: Let me frame it a little further then, because…

Roger Neel: Of course.

Brad Weimert: I think part of it is like…

Roger Neel: It’s half joking.

Brad Weimert: Well, no, no, but part of it is just, what’s the goal, right? And so, I think that if you know that you’re trying to build a billion-dollar company, much less a trillion-dollar company, there’s no chance that you’re going to do that deliberately without fundraising in today’s market because you need speed to do it, because somebody will come in and be competitive and crush you with money.

Roger Neel: Exactly.

Brad Weimert: But most people aren’t clear on what their targets are when they start a business anyway. So, how did the origin point of like, oh, I know that we’re going to do this, we’re going to build this marketing SaaS company. Do we need money? Do we not need money? How did you approach it in the beginning? And would it be different today if you did it?

Roger Neel: Yeah. I mean, it really is, and I love your framing from earlier too. I mean, growing a business is not easy no matter what you do. Growing a $10 million business, bootstrapped or non-bootstrapped, is still difficult, right? So, we can just, I think the audience is quite clear on that as a bunch of operators, right? There’s nothing easy about the path at all. But when we sat down and really penciled out Mavenlink, we wanted to attack, as I said before, the fee for service market, all the companies that are essentially out there operating on their own human capital. And we knew that there was a window. There were other players in the client server space, as we talked about before. We knew there was a window to really execute, and essentially, be the SaaS company in that space, just as Salesforce essentially destroyed Siebel, just as Workday destroyed the client server counterpart before it, all that kind of stuff. We knew that there was a window of time that we could go execute.

And so, we were going to do that, and it was just a different goal. And so, the way I look at fundraising, I don’t think there’s a right and wrong answer. The way I look at fundraising is just purely on a return on invested capital basis. So, if you can give me a million dollars right now, and now I have a million dollars that I otherwise wouldn’t have had to put into some growth engine, whether that’s hiring a salesperson or two, doing direct marketing, going to conferences, whatever it is, to provide lift on the business, that’s the only difference between growing a little bit faster and nut. If I can say, wow, I’ve got some opportunities here, both from a software development/R&D execution standpoint, where I can accelerate our road map by X and we can get two more salespeople and that’s what that million dollars is going to do, I can accelerate the outcome of the business. And actually, now, my 50% of the business, 20% of the business, 5% of the business, whatever you in the audience personally hold, I can essentially 2x that faster than I would just kind of hanging on and even despite the dilution. And that’s really the only way to look at that equation.

Brad Weimert: Well, it’s not the only way to look at it, it’s a productive way to look at it after, but– I mean, the number of people that I know that have taken on money, that then figure out what to do with the money is it far outweighs the people that deliberately take on money because they have a purpose for the money, for sure. So, your stance is that you deliberately took on money knowing what you were going to do.

Roger Neel: You have to have a plan, because otherwise, I mean, the dark side of this is a venture firm loves to give you more money, right? I mean, they don’t want to throw good money after bad, like you have to be operating and executing. But if every capital raise dilutes the founders and the company 20% to 25% approximately, which is kind of like the gold standard benchmark. I mean, if you kind of misuse the capital, but hey, a company looks good and they’re sharp enough investors to say like, hey, this thing actually has some real legs, they just kind of had some execution issues, let’s give them a series B, a series C, a series D and take another 20% or 25%. You owe it to yourself to really have an operating plan that actually leverages the capital because they want you to just spend money. It’s not a big deal for them. And I mean, you’re somewhat aligned, but you’re also, I mean, every relationship has some misalignment in terms of just goal.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, I think that that’s probably universally true.

Roger Neel: Exactly.

Brad Weimert: Great. So, you raised money. What was the arc like here? I mean, I knew you for many years through the process where you talked about selling. Do you want to sell? Yeah, you want to go there? Ultimately, you did to PE and I want to talk about the exit, but before we talk about that, like what was the growth path? How much did you have to raise? How did you think about new raises versus exiting earlier?

Roger Neel: Yeah, I mean long, long arc, 2008 to 2021, just to reframe it for the audience, so about 13 years of time and money and opportunity costs and everything like that. So, everyone’s an overnight success on exit.

Brad Weimert: In 2021.

Roger Neel: Yeah. It’s only ‘21, but I mean, we were in the meat grinder for 13 years, really just trying to grow a great business and have a great piece of usable, like useful software for the industry. What was interesting for us is, and I have to imagine this is still useful, but when we decided to build a business, we said, all right, because we’re building a piece of SaaS software that kind of scales up in the business, we need to start with the SMB first.

Brad Weimert: Small businesses.

Roger Neel: Small, medium businesses. We even started like our roots, and this was Mavenlink. Maven is another word for expert, link. We were actually trying to develop a freelancer marketplace where you could connect freelancers with clients. That was one of the original ideas where, as a freelancer, I have a set of skills. I want to put a little profile together, similar to, let’s say, like a LinkedIn, just roughly speaking, or like an Elance at the time, if you remember those guys, Elance, oDesk.

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah. We call Upwork, oDesk.

Roger Neel: There you go. Actually, I even forgot that it’s called Upwork, man. So, we wanted to be a high-end version of that, but then also have the tools to let you run a good business. We ended up ultimately shutting the market down, but that gives you a window into– we were actually trying to go after the single folks, single freelancers because our capabilities were suited for them because I just hadn’t had a whole lot of time to build yet. So, the first really year, we were focusing on onesie-twosie partnerships while we kind of built up the capabilities.

Then as the product really started to mature, we were able to go after the five-person agencies, the 10-person agencies, the 20-person agencies. Sooner or later, we had a mid-market sales team, right? Then keep going, keep going, all these enterprise grade features. We get a SOC 2 compliance certification, like all that kind of stuff. So, now, it’s a bit regulated. Now, we’re going after the enterprise.

So, without talking about the capital story of the business to talk about the actual customer led growth story of the business, we wanted to create little flywheels as we went and doing that was, I think, a great strategy for capital preservation, but it did create a 13-year arc. Because if we just sat down, particularly now with AI, and said, we need the enterprise grade capabilities because we’re only interested in enterprise customers or we want, hey, we’re only interested in the SMB, like what are their unique challenges? Because there’s unique challenges in all three of these tiers. You could just get the answers and go and do it, whereas we wanted to do this sort of build on and then kind of retain our customer base throughout, which proved very difficult.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, you have the opportunity to do whatever you want to do in business. And I mean, I find social media today irritating as f*ck because we all know that what’s going to hit is polarizing content. And so, definitive statements of what is and what isn’t are the things that people latch onto. And they’re never right because there’s always, like, one of the few absolutes is that there’s always variance and there’s always another way to do it. And very rarely is there one, if ever way to do it, to do Mavenlink over again. A hundred million ARR company would you have gone all SMB or all enterprise, or do you think the mix is what you should have done?

Roger Neel: We could have gone up the market much faster. That’s, I think, probably my conclusion on arc. So, if you think about software development back then versus now, one, it was non-viable to go after enterprises in 2009, in my shoes, for two reasons. One, they weren’t buying SaaS yet, right? They were still buying the old stuff, so we needed that market to mature. And then two, we didn’t have the software capabilities yet. We’re now in a world where AI can help us essentially develop features much more quickly, spike things out, understand a road map a little bit better, more quickly, meet specific client requirements more quickly, because as you and I both know, any software company, it’s often the salespeople who are saying, man, if we just had this feature, I’d be getting this million-dollar deal done. And so then, R&D gets kind of fed those requirements despite their best road mapping efforts and all that kind of thing.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. We need this immediately. Do it now.

Roger Neel: Exactly. If we’re going to make this quarter, we got to have it, right. So, to get those unique little requirements done, much, much faster now. And that doesn’t mean throw a road map out the window and just kind of Claude Code your way to success, but it does speed the process. So, I think you can be much more deliberate in picking the market segment that you want. So, we would’ve accelerated the business by years because by the end, many of the onesie-twosie businesses churned out and even up to the 20. So, we started having minimum ARR of 15,000, 25,000. It just started like laddering up over time. And then, we were really kind of big whale hunting at that point.

Brad Weimert: So, I want to say a different way for all businesses that are, like, under a million or under 10 million, you made a choice well past that point when you were at, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 million, where you were like, why are we serving people that are small? Because we spend a bunch of time and energy to get them on board, they make no money for us, and then they quit. And so, you just said we’re chopping off the bottom half. Chopping off the bottom half because it’s a waste of our time and energy and we’re not going to serve them or onboard them at all.

Roger Neel: That’s right. And they were high churn. Most of your smallest customers required just as much time as your largest customers or more. And there’s probably, if you’re really being honest with yourself and they’re certainly churning for a reason, whether they’re going out of business or, unfortunately, small companies go out of business more often than large companies aside from 2008, right? Like large companies are a little bit too big to fail. A two-person consulting firm could get gobbled up, and that’s what we were seeing in our base too.

So, it wasn’t just a, you can’t use this anymore. I’m sorry, we’re turning your license off. It was natural churn, and then natural detargeting of that customer segment over time too. Had the lucky opportunities to talk to a lot of different, large SaaS executives, and all of them said the same thing to me, whether it be folks from NetSuite or Salesforce or whatever. You have no idea how many times we’ve churned our customer base.

And as we grew, you either graduate out of segments or those segments naturally fall by the wayside because you’re targeting new segments, and that’s where you’re putting your sales force. So, if you really, honestly look at your customer base, it churns four or five times in the lifetime of the company as you grow to 60, 80, 100 million ARR. It’s just natural and you just got to saddle up. You just got to saddle up.

Brad Weimert: So, let’s talk about the exit. In 2021, you’re doing a hundred plus million a year ARR. First and foremost, I know that you were looking at, at least you were talking about the proposition of exit for a couple years.

Roger Neel: Yeah. And it kind of goes back to the capital raise too, Brad. Like, when you think about capital raising, you ought to be thinking about exit as well. If you’re going to raise every two to three years, that’s about the lifecycle of capital in the business, you should be kind of looking at strategic outcomes too. So, as we did our Cs, as we did our D, even into the E round, we were always kind of looking out for, hey, is this a strategic acquisition by somebody else?

But to kind of polish off the story, we ended up, in 2021, selling to a PE firm. So, we were slightly smaller than the largest company in the space and this PE firm owned the third largest company in the space, one behind us, but they were about, just to show you market stratification, we were slightly smaller than the number one guy. They were about a third our size.

Brad Weimert: Oh, damn.

Roger Neel: So, this is kind of classic Hertz, Avis, and everybody else. And I thought rental car industries changed a bit, but Avis used to run ads. We’re number two, but it’s tough to name the number two company in any space. So, what we decided with our PE partner was let’s create the number one company in the space by combining forces with the number three guy and doing a three, two combination that helped us usurp the number one company and go create true market leadership over time. The company is now named Kantata as a result of Mavenlink and Kimble coming together as the two companies. So, it’s been renamed, if anyone in the audience is aware the of the company, but it’s been Kantata since 2021.

Brad Weimert: Why not look at sale at series D or E instead? Why do you keep bringing on capital at that point? I mean, you’re multiple rounds in.

Roger Neel: At some level, there’s opportunity there. There’s often opportunity to sell, but are you getting the right price given what you know is true about the market? So, part of this is belief, part of it is opportunity. Are we getting the right price? Part of it is sort of, when you’re operating a business at that level and you’re in it every day and you understand the market, boom, you actually have information that other people don’t have about how that market is evolving and that kind of thing. And so, if you see opportunity in that, even if your thesis ends up being wrong, which it can in many cases, fortunately for us, it wasn’t. If your market segment is changing, you can delay your outcome, get some return on invested capital, and then really have an even larger outcome.

We actually thought at some point, in the history of just operating the business that we had a pretty decent shot at going public. And we always operated the business with that outcome in mind. And if the train stopped at a station before that, which it ended up, we operated essentially an IPO-ready business once we crossed about the $40, $50 million barrier.

Brad Weimert: Why go PE versus IPF?

Roger Neel: It was just too good of an opportunity to combine the forces. So, that’s really what kind of helped make the decision for us. And ultimately, that meant many of us, but the founders all left and that kind of thing. And we handed the management of the business over to the PE firm and the pros they brought in who have real scale experience and I think they’ve been doing a nice job with the business. And that gave us opportunities to go do some other things too.

Brad Weimert: Certainly, gave you an opportunity to do another thing.

Roger Neel: Playing with blood and sugar and stuff.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, yeah. Interstitial fluid, don’t get that. What does that look like when you sell the PE? I mean, the PE sale is very commonly, the deal is you take some money off the table, you roll the rest of the money into whatever they’re rolling up, and then you have maybe some earnout with that. Maybe you have responsibility in the new company, maybe you don’t. How did that break down?

Roger Neel: Yeah, great. I mean, it can come in a lot of different forms, but you hit a common one and one that really applies to us. So, in our case, we’re big believers in the future of Kantata. So, we kept a significant chunk of change behind, and essentially, almost operating like an LP, limited partner, in the PE firm because we’re primary investors in the company still. But then you’re also given an opportunity to take 50%, 70%, whatever the number ends up being, off the table. And thanks for the 13 years, right?

But they’d be thrilled if you said, hey, listen, I don’t need it. You keep it. Let’s keep operating. And I’m going to just stay as a majority investor in the business or minority investor in the business. So, that can play out in a variety of ways. I think what happens to the management team is often really at play. So, one thing that I understand about PE firms is they often have a playbook, right?

And unfortunately, I got to say just in my experience, and I’m sure they have their reasons, I’m an operator. I think about operating a business. I do operate businesses. I understand that an operational playbook isn’t necessarily a playbook. You might have SOPs. You might have a few things. You might have some tools and tactics and techniques that you want to follow, but every day is a new day and there’s always new challenges. And I guarantee everyone’s SOPs from two years ago are a little bit different in the age of AI. And that AI comes around, you got to change how you practice and how you operate.

PE firms are a little bit more, because they’re a bunch of finance guys often. They’re pretty static and they have operational team members. But they have their playbooks and they want to put their people in place. And I think that that’s largely true for any PE purchase business where it’s like we’re going to bring in some professionals. We might keep some of you around. We might kind of re-amalgamate the team to kind of fit the profile, but largely, here’s our playbook. If you want to get on board with the playbook and just run it as such, then you’re good.

We run a West Coast offense if you like short passes, like you’re in. Otherwise, we might have misalignment. I’d say that that’s the toughest part of doing a deal, and I don’t think that there’s really a great way to get ahead of any of that. But if your intention is to stay at the company and you’re going through a process like this, you do need to have that conversation with firm.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. When you look at picking a firm for acquisition, did you shop it? Did you get solicited? Was it like one opportunity was there and it made sense? Some people are very deliberate about the process, and most people just get presented with some opportunity and take it and go.

Roger Neel: Yeah, I mean, we were super deliberate. We had kind of three finalists, all with sort of different numbers, different opportunities. Ultimately, we partnered with who we did because of the kind of Mavenlink-Kimble consolidation ended up being a good number and that benefit to go create the market leadership that we thought we would want to invest in. Like, literally, if I saw that company and I knew what I did about the space, and I could just go to the NYSE and buy MVN or something like that, like, I would’ve been a buyer at the time because I just knew what was possible in that space.

So, for us, another common thing, we engaged a banker. Bankers obviously take a fee, but they are quite literally M&A bankers. They have all the connections to all the PE firms. And it ended up being much like a fundraise. When you’re capital raising and you’re talking to Sequoia and Andreessen and anybody else, you’re out there and they might have a portfolio conflict where they have a different payments company. So, I’m sorry, we’re investors in Stripe. We can’t do that. So, then we love the business, but we can’t, right? So, there’s conflict. There’s all sorts of stuff that comes up.

PE firms are no different. Oh, we already have somebody like you in our portfolio. I don’t think we’re a good fit, or we have a company in our portfolio and we’ve been considering going into that space. So, I think where engaging a banker can really help is like kind of getting the breadth into the pipeline too. But at the end of the day, we were super deliberate, went through the process, had a big data room, and kind of went through the whole thing with multiple firms, yeah.

Brad Weimert: What advice do you have for somebody trying to raise money today?

Roger Neel: I’d say, there are two things you need to think about when going into a capital raise process and it’s a little bit stage independent. One is what we were talking about earlier. You have to be able to describe your moat and strategy because, otherwise, I mean, you’re just going to get eaten alive. These guys see pitches all day long. If there isn’t something compelling about the pitch, something compelling about the market, something compelling about the growth of that market, and why you’re unique to that story, you’re going to be dead in the water.

The number two thing you need to think about, especially as you’re going into, let’s say, a series B, C, maybe later stage is probably where I can really talk the best, angel investments are just a completely different animal. It’s often friends and family, people who have belief in you, connections, former colleagues, that kind of thing. If you’re trying to raise your first round, this is just kind of a napkin and a dream at that point. There aren’t real numbers. There just has to be belief in you, right?

Once you get into B and C, man, I can’t tell you, it’s always about churn. If you think that you can get by in a capital raise process without talking about churn, you’re just fooling yourself. And that actually ends up being the number one excuse not to invest. It’s, well, we’d like to see your churn come down. Can we give this another quarter? It sounds like you’re on it. That’s great, but can we give this another quarter?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, look, I mean, that’s security, right? I mean, of course, that’s what they talk about. Your churn is the product. It is the stabilization of cash flow in the future. Yeah, if you have terrible churn, then you can’t count on money coming in, in the future. And if you don’t have churn, then you can’t. What advice do you have for a brand-new entrepreneur starting out today in 2026?

Roger Neel: If you’re sitting on ChatGPT.com or Claude.ai in your browser, you are doing it wrong. If you’re not getting your own leverage out of AI, man, I mean, God help you.

Brad Weimert: Say more about that.

Roger Neel: Yeah. The amount that you can do, particularly yourself, and I mean, it used to be a meme in Silicon Valley. You go to any conference and it’s always people looking for their technical co-founder. And it’s like, hey, I’m a really good business guy.

Brad Weimert: Are you technical?

Roger Neel: Are you technical? I got great business ideas. So, you should work with me, right? If you’re technical, come code for me, right? That was always the meme. Now, really, anybody and everybody should be able to prototype something. You should be able to get ideas out. it doesn’t need to look good, but it needs to be somewhat functional. You need to be able to essentially demonstrate what you’re trying to do. That doesn’t mean that you don’t then need an engineering team, and as somebody who leads engineering teams, I completely understand the value of that. But if you’re just a chat guy, like, you are not using AI to the fullest at all, you need to be using the hardcore tools and really kind of diving in.

Brad Weimert: Well, I hate to talk about tools because they’re limited, right? So, you date yourself in a moment of time. Well, we can just talk about both and we’ll wrap on that. But what tools are you currently encouraging people to use in May of 2026? And how do you think about the use of tools relative to the architecture of how you execute with AI?

Roger Neel: Yeah. So, we have our whole company at Signos essentially using native Claude Code. And for those unfamiliar, Claude is kind of what everyone’s talking about, but there’s a big difference between going to Claude.ai in your browser and using it as we have been using ChatGPT and that kind of thing for some number of years now with just a little prompt box. So, Claude Code is something, and there’s different ways to grab it, but you’re downloading it onto your computer. You’re either using it in a terminal if you’re a little bit more technical, you’re using Cowork or whatever they call it. I’m a terminal guy.

But if you’re using it on your desktop, you’re able to produce files, you’re able to produce plans, and you’re even able to build prototypes and other things like that just based on your ideas. I’m assuming most of who we’re talking about, if you’re trying to start a landscaping business, I guarantee there’s probably leverage there too. If you’re trying to start a software company, there’s clear leverage. But if you’re trying to start a landscaping business or something like that, why aren’t you doing SEO research? Why aren’t you building your own website, your own presence, like that kind of thing, getting all that stood up?

So, I just think, if you’re not operating kind of on the desktop, you’re not doing it right. That I think won’t change. So, we can revisit this episode in a couple of years. It might not be called Claude Code, and there’s Codex that’s OpenAI’s product. There’s all sorts of competing products out there. But you need to be using AI integrated on your desktop, looking through files, doing market research for you, and that kind of thing.

Brad Weimert: So, as you pointed out, in the future, it might not be Claude, it might not be Codex, it might not be Perplexity or Manus or whatever. How do you structure your files, your data, your information, so that as those tools change, you don’t lose all your sh*t and have to start over?

Roger Neel: Yeah, it’s great. So, I mean, one of the key tips here is a lot of what gets structured these days is what’s called a markdown file, but that’s just a really fancy word for being a text file, right? So, not that fancy, but yeah, it’s not that fancy, those little .md pounds and H1s, H2s, that kind of thing. So, I think, and I’ve experienced this firsthand, I can work in Claude, do some things. Maybe a pro tip for the crew here is if you’re not telling Claude, hey, just document what we’ve done, that can be one of the best things that you do.

So, you do something with Claude, you like the outcome, or with any AI tool of choice. And you say, what was our thought process? What were our decisions? What did we not do? What did we decide not to do? What did we do? And then you get that documented because then, any other tool, whether it be Codex or anything else, can just read that in. And so, I often like go between different tools just to see, like, if there’s a new model out, that kind of thing, how’s this thing going to operate, and you can get it up to speed with your projects super quick. So, that’s maybe another pro tip.

If you have a directory of projects and you’re working on a few different things, and maybe you’re working on a capital raise, just given some of our topics here, maybe you’re working on a capital raise and you want lists of VCs that might be investing in you. So, you have one project for that. You might be working on your prototype. You have another project or directory for that. And you just kind of organize your world a little bit. Then when you’re pointing the Claude Code or whatever it is at it, you can just be in that directory and kind of like working on that, almost think about it like a little workspace.

Brad Weimert: I love that. Well, Roger Neel, I see that your bourbon is not being consumed at the rate that it should be. I think it’s time that we transition to that.

Roger Neel: Sounds good.

Brad Weimert: But I’m grateful for you coming out and looking forward to tonight.

Roger Neel: It’s been a pleasure.

Brad Weimert: Likewise. Thank you.