[Troy] You know, people will say, you know, well, when, you know, when my daughter graduates, then I'm gonna start running. Or when my, you know, when this thing happens, I'll start doing you know, and it's like, no. You just gotta just do it. Just tomorrow, wake up and do the thing that you've been putting off because you're going to suck at it. You're gonna suck tomorrow as much as you're gonna suck a year from now if that's your first time. And so the the the faster you can get the the garbage out of the way Mhmm. You know, like, a year from now, you're gonna start, or a year from now, you're gonna be good because you've been doing it a year. [Kamal] Hey, listeners. In the next episode of Tech in 26.2 pod, I'm very excited to bring you the next guest speaker, Troy Bussell, founder and CEO of Athlinks, now part of Lifetime Fitness. Folks who do not know Athlinks, Athlinks is a platform where it aggregates the race results for different endurance sports. For example, I ran Boston in 2018. So if I want to see the key data points of that race, I can go to Athlinks and can find out all the details about my race. So it can be a kinda your track record of your all the races you've run over the years. My conversation with Troy can be split into 3 parts. Part 1, he's starting at links and scaling at links. Part 2 of the conversation focuses on his selling Athlinks to Lifetime Fitness. Part 3 of the conversation focuses on his post lifetime leading to his next venture he started recently called iLoomi. I'm sure he'll enjoy the discussions and nuggets of wisdom Troy shares. Especially, if you're a startup founder, you'll find them very, very valuable. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you do, make sure that you subscribe, like, or share. Thanks for listening. Welcome, Troy, to this podcast. I'm really excited to have you here today. Likewise. [Troy] Thanks for having me, Kamal. [Kamal] Great. So for our audience, Troy is the founder and and CEO of Athlinks, formerly, which he, you know, sold to Lifetime, a very large company, and then transitioned off of Lifetime slash Athlinks now starting his next venture in his life. So we are going to I'm here to, chat, learn about Athlinks, especially for our audience. To kick it off, Troy, what did I miss in the intro? Anything you want to add? [Troy]I think we can probably unpack a few things over the the course of the conversation, but, yeah, I've I've been just to clarify, I'm no longer with Athlinks. Haven't been for, I guess, about a year and a half, 2 years now, sort of in the the heart of the pandemic I left. And so, but, yeah, started it, you know, 15 or so years ago, sold it to lifetime, built a great big team over there, moved to Colorado. Lots of changes that we can talk about. [Kamal] And Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm looking forward to so let's go back to, you know, talk about Athlinks because as I am a runner myself and, you know, you know, run lot of phrases around, you know, all over the, you know, country and outside the country. And I do see that there is a data problem in a sense that their data is so disintegrated with the race organizers, you know, the timers. And when I first came across Athlinks couple of years ago, I was like, wow. Someone already solved for it. It's such such a fascinating idea. They all your race results. You don't have to go to individual race results to check out how did I do on that race 5 years ago. You have all in 1 place. That was an amazing way to solve this problem. If you want to take us back, how did you conceptualize Athlinks, and then finding a product market fit that, hey. I'm into something some point. [Troy] It was a massive pivot, actually. So when I started Athlinks, it was originally called VirtuRACE. Oh, okay. And the idea is really what Strava became. So this was pre smartphones. Everything was web. So this would have been around 2003, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, okay. And, basically, I I would III grew up in Phoenix, and I would do things like hike, Squaw Peak, now Payestoa Peak, and Camelback Mountain. And I would do these, like, not difficult, but, like, hard enough for speed type hikes. And and I just kind of always wondered, like, how my time would stack up with other people who were also doing it competitively. And so I was watching, Mark Burnett who created, Survivor. His original show was Eco Challenge. So he would take these adventure races once a year, and it'd be a week long thing. And I was just hooked, fascinated. I'd never run a race before. I'd actually done, like, a turkey trot. Was not an endurance athlete, grew up football, baseball, wrestling, not running, etcetera. So, so I created this VirtuRACE thing where you could basically put in public courses, and then individuals could post their times manually to it. And I you know? Oh, okay. It it was kind of a product market fit of 1. It was a problem that I wanted to solve for myself. I see. Turned out not many other people wanted to solve it in the way that I was solutioning around it. Yeah. So I would literally, for a month, I launched a rudimentary version of the product. Every single morning, I would climb Camelback Mountain where it's a well traffic. It's right in the middle of Scottsdale Paradise Valley area. Mhmm. So probably a 1000 people a day go hike that, you know, at least. And so I would hand out these little activation cards. I'd have these brief little conversations. Hey. How'd you do? I could tell if somebody really cared about what their time was or not. Okay. And so the people that were interested, I would hand them this activation card, you know, post your time at Virtuase, etcetera. And in 30 days, I think 2 people did it. You know, it was like and I had handed out probably 3 or 400 cards. And so it was just a horrible like, I was just so confused. Like, man, why how did I miss this so badly? And so 1 day, I'm on my way home, and I was talking to, a buddy of mine who'd we had done some other businesses together. And we were you know, I was just sort of venting and, like, I can't figure this out. And, on my way home, I was driving past Tempe Town Lake, which is where all the triathlons in Phoenix happened. Ironman Arizona and all these other ones. So I was kinda fascinated by triathlon, so I stopped and went down and started talking to a bunch of athletes. And the interesting thing was is that was an ITU race, so it was an international race. Oh, okay. And the first group of people that I was talking to were these ITU athletes who were not from Phoenix. And so I was started asking them, like, where do you get your results? Where do you how do you keep your results? And they all had kind of the same story, which was like, I don't even know the name of this race, really. I I don't know what the website is, you know. Oh, wow. Okay. Like, they just kinda shooting they're just following the tour of the year, and they showed up there. And they pointed over at a, at a trailer where the results were taped to the side of the trailer. Interesting. Okay. And they go, that's where we get our results. And so I was like, okay. Well, that's interesting. And I went home that day, so that would have been like a Saturday morning. And by Monday well, probably by Friday, I had basically flipped the whole model upside down. So no longer was it individual results. I built, like, a bulk loader essentially for it. And then I already had the rankings and things like that. So then the following weekend, I went to a little 5 ks. I handed out those same exact activation cards at the finish line and just said, Hey, your results will be available at virtual race. And by the time I got home, And I didn't realize that was like wrong to do, you know, like I'm kind of a ask forgiveness rather than permission. So I didn't talk to the race director or anything. I just did it. And by the time I got home, I think like 50 people had signed up to get the results. So I knew, okay, there's a that was a good pivot. So, and then over the course of the next couple of months, I would just go every single weekend or Thursday night to the splash and dashes or whatever it was. I would just go hand out these activation cards, talk to race directors, talk to athletes, get as much information as possible, and start to understand, like, what the you you know, and I was kinda like you. Like, I I figured somebody had already solved this problem. You know? Right. At the time, there was a big timing company out of Europe called Championship Mhmm. Which is kind of the birth of ChronoTrack then came out of that company. Yeah. But nobody had solved the problem. You know? I mean, there were everything was completely disconnected, disparate. Nobody was tying all this information together. And it proved also to be very good decision on my part to not ask permission as it turned out because it just never would have gotten off the ground. So what I did instead was I would post the results and then grab the email of the race director off the website and then shoot them a web shoot shoot them an email and just say, hey. I pulled your results. They're available here. If you want me to take them down, respond to this email. And over the years, you know, I would say, like, a half dozen times people like, timers would get super upset or race directors would get super upset. I mean, I got cussed out a bunch of times. And Okay. And then within, you know, a couple of minutes of explaining, look, this is what I'm trying to do. I'm not in the timing business. I'm not a race director. I'm not trying to steal your business. I'm just trying to solve a problem with the athletes. Every single 1 of them, I won over with 1 exception, which was, the the Portland marathon. And so he and I, Les, who, there's a there's a he has a colorful past, but, he and I would sort of play a cat and mouse game over the years. And so, ultimately, we won him over, and we've got all the Portland marathon results in the system too. Oh, I see. Now you're talking about early 2000. Was that time the race results are published that you can pull from, or it was more was it a lot They were still online. Was it? Yeah. They were online. And frankly, they were easier to get them because everything was just straight HTML. So if you're if you're at all, a developer, the the JavaScript model that is sort of swept over the web 2.0. Mhmm. Like, the results became harder and harder and harder to pull. But, yeah, I mean, it was really, really simple. Cool Running was a company that active and re acquired, and they had, like, a text version of what we ultimately built. So, like, nothing was linked. You couldn't claim results, but it was just a lot of text results. So that actually made things quite easy. And, so now, Athlinks, I think, 2 weeks ago, just passed 400, 000, 000 race results. I saw it in the reviews. That's the big news. [Kamal] I think RunningUSA also covered that article. I saw it. Yeah. It's pretty amazing accomplishment for sure. Yeah. [Troy] Yeah. I I mean, if you'd asked me then, like, what's your there's no way I thought we'd get to, like, near near a half a 1000000000, but that's you know, it it'll get there. It is. It's and especially after pandemic, things are catching up so fast. I'm sure it's just a matter of time when you get to half a 1000000000 for sure. [Kamal] Yeah. Now you got 50 people sign up from the 5 k. It's great. 1 thing that I'm always curious when you say, okay. I'm into something. From there to someone take out their wallet to pay you for your product or service. I was thinking about what was the journey to get your 1st paying customer or having some revenue generated through your product market fit that identified. [Troy] Yeah. We were advertising driven the whole time, so we've never did a subscription, which I I do regret. I wish that I would have just kind of started from day 1, you know, even even $10 a year or something like that, to to to sort of let myself off the hook, frankly, in 2003, payments were not easy to do at the time. Right. So it wasn't like today where you could just, you know, hook into Apple payments or something like that, and and it'd be easy. So it wasn't impossible, and there was actually a track and field site out of, England, out of the UK. I don't remember the name of it, but they were doing a subscription service. And I talked to those guys just about their experience, and and it wasn't it wasn't a great experience for them. Like, they really weren't, I I figured my bigger upside was gonna be to grow grow the user base big enough to where advertisers would come in. And and that's that's ultimately you know, it it wasn't a massive amount of money. I mean, I think I I think my best year was around a half $1, 000, 000 in sales for the year, which, I mean, it ran a business. So it wasn't necessarily gonna, you know, wasn't gonna be a $100, 000, 000 type of business. So but it was good enough to keep the lights on. I had a team of data people that were pulling the results in. I had great customer service people, and, developers who were who were pushing the features forward. So Oh, that's that's excellent. And and that was pretty quick. I mean, it was it was a, you know, it was a matter of kind of 1 of the benefits of Athlinks being in such a niche niche industry. You have people who are willing to come in and kind of, hey. I like what you're doing. Mhmm. Let me be sort of a pioneer customer. I'll support you on your way up. So, a guy, Robin Thurston, who was the co founder of Mapmyfitness. You know, Matt, my ride, Matt, my run, all of that stuff who now runs outside magazine. He was really generous to come in and, helped on an we we did sort of a, an exclusive data sharing agreement. So Okay. That was 1 way we had revenue coming in. Asics was an early partner, ImmunoVital. There was a bunch of just really good brands who were coming in and probably overpaying a little bit just to be sort of part of the first round. Right. And so never really had to raise money. It was it was pretty self sufficient from day 1, and and, yeah, that was that was kind of the revenue journey. It was never easy. You know, there there were definitely time I remember 1 time I landed I landed in Portland to go, talk to the Hood to Coast folks, and I got off the plane expecting a confirmation of a big deal we were doing with, a shoe brand only to get word as I land that they pulled out. They they had some Not really. Some shake up in their marketing department, and they were cutting all all of their revenue or advertising for that quarter. Mhmm. So, you know, that's the downside of that. When you have a subscription business, you're not going to lose all of your customers or all of your revenue overnight, you know? Right. Even in hard times, some percentage will will be steadfast. And so going into, like, the 2008 recession, you know, our our revenue got cut 80% literally overnight. I mean, it it was stark within within the 30 day window of the advertising revenue coming in, our our revenue was cut 80%. It was it was brutal. So it was really tough to kind of come back from that and, you know, make it back out of that darkness. Because everyone is going in defense mode at that time. So even even the folks who are advertising on your platform, like, in endurance industry, they're also pulling back at that time, it looks like. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. And the the interesting thing about that was, so 2008, we did a a story with the Wall Street Journal. Mhmm. 2008 was the only year on record where race participation and quality as measured by, speed improvements Uh-huh. Both increased. And so meaning more people were racing, and they were racing faster. And the thesis that we had, and I experienced it in my own family where a lot of people were being laid off, they were rather than crying in their cereal. Basically, they were going out there and actually improving their lives. I think 2008 showed a lot of people like, you know, I've given x amount of years to this business. They treated me like crap. I let my health go. You know, I let my family go. I let all these things go. Yeah. And what did I get for it? And so what we found, and we talked to a lot of our members about anecdotally, how did you feel about this? We heard the same story over and over. Mhmm. Was that 2008 really made me wake up to what was important. So so that's kinda how we made it through was as the the economy tanked, but racing exploded. You know, it's when, rock and roll, marathons really had their moment. Ironman sort of took the next jump up. So luckily, within 3 or 4 months, the industry sort of, you know, tottered it to the to the economy's teeter. Mhmm. I see. I see. And what level of, runners were on the platform around that time? Because I know it was probably a couple of years into, right, when you hit the recession in 2, 000 We we probably had a 100, 000 members at the time. And, you know Okay. The cool thing with Athlinks was we always ran the gamut. It wasn't just, like, hardcore runners and triathletes. We got everybody. And Nice. Think the the the cool part about running is there are so many people who will never run up even a sub 45 k Mhmm. That will race 50, 60, 70 times a year. You know? Right. Like, they just love it. They love being out there and whether they're wearing costumes or they're just with their friends or whatever, pushing strollers, whatever it is, they love racing. They don't do it to be faster. They don't do it to, you know, to stand on the podium. They just do it because they love the day. They love the events. Mhmm. And so we always benefited from a an an incredibly diverse group of, of, users, members, customers, whatever you wanna call them. So it was great. You know, there's there's a certain mindset excuse me. There's a certain mindset, of customer, you know, you didn't get much from, like, a really elite runner in terms of, like, product feedback. You know? They just they don't have time. They're they're out there trying to be great at that thing. But it was everybody in between who would just man, they they were so generous with their time, whether we were at race as talking to people or they were answering surveys and emails and things like that. So, I learned so much building that company. Oh, great. Yeah. I I definitely would be curious to get some insight on on those learnings for sure. But 1 aspect of of your career progression, I want to say, you had you are not an athlete when you started Athlinks, though you started to support an endurance athlete. Endurance athlete. But you have been in sports yourself as you said in this school. But during this transition, you've got into Yeah. Running or endurance sports. [Kamal] I'd be curious to learn a little bit about that transition. Yeah. As I said, I pulled over at that triathlon that time because because of 1, 4 athletes or virtual race at the time, but 2 was I was really fascinated by triathlon. And so almost immediately, I got pretty heavily into triathlon when I started started the business. And so part of it was, you know, I believe, you know, in order to build great products, you do have to they have to resonate with you. [Troy] Like, you know, it's it's, and I don't care if it, you know, if you're doing something for for plumbers, like, you better understand that industry pretty well. Right. And to have passion for it, all the better. And so, yeah, it it's it definitely started me on a journey. It's impossible to go to events and not wanna do them. I mean, it's totally impossible. Yeah. Yep. And so I went to a triathlon, and in my mind, the only picture I had of triathlons at the time was Ironman. You know, the and not even the current Ironman. This is the NBC, Julie Moss crawling across the finish line. You know, like the the total like, this is just for other people. This is not for me. Yeah. And then you go to your 1st triathlon and you realize, okay, wait a second. There's levels to this. Mhmm. There's definitely an entry level to it. Yeah. And so, Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I jumped in some splash and dashes. I figured, you know, I can figure out how to ride a bike at some point. You know, I'd grown up riding bikes. But it was like, you know, I had no the first time I jumped in a pool to swim, I thought I knew what I was doing, and I I literally swam 50 yards and had to get out of the pool. I was so white. Okay. I see. Yeah. I had no idea what I was doing in the pool. So, know, it took me a month or so to get some endurance going, and then Phoenix had a lot of a lot of good triathlon markets had, and actually they got wiped out because of the economics of parks and things like that. But, in Phoenix, we had a splash and dash series in the fall and spring Every I think they were Thursday nights. And the cool thing was they were $20. They were varying distances, but usually fairly short. So it was like a 1, 000 meter swim in Tempe Town Lake. You'd get out and run a 5 k. So it was very accessible for people who were totally intimidated by open water swims and that type of thing. Yeah. And so that's really kinda where I cut my teeth was it gave me, you know, 5 weeks in a row or 6 weeks in a row or whatever the series was. Mhmm. Because the other side is when you're starting in any of these things, like, whether it's starting a business, programming, running, whatever it is, like, consistency and repetition and being able to fail really fast and learn and then do it again and again and again. Mhmm. That is so important to progress. And so if I was waiting around, like, once a month or once every 6 weeks to do a full try and I'm paying $100 a pop and I screw up the swim. I've got to sit there for 5 weeks or 6 weeks and agonize over that. Whereas the splash and dash stuff, it was like every week, oh, I could make a mistake, correct it in the pool the next day. And then 6 days later, I'm racing again to fix that thing. So, that was another lesson learned in in in running the business as well, which was just get out there fast, fail super fast, and just, you know, always be looking for that data. Like, what did I do wrong? How can I fix it? Mhmm. Oh, that's that's amazing. III love these pillars of your failed fast, because that's the best way to keep up because things are changing around you all the time. If you are not failing fast, you're not learning, you're not growing for sure. Yeah. Well, I think the key there is people see the fail fast thing going, okay, make mistakes. No. No. No. No. No. You're going to make mistakes. Right. I don't care what you're doing. You're gonna start a business. You're gonna whatever it is, the fail part is built in. Mhmm. That's going to happen 50% of the time at least Uh-huh. Without fail. Half of your assumptions are always wrong. Mhmm. The fast part is the thing you have to build your mindset for. And Absolutely. Too often, you know, people will say, you know, well, when, you know, when my daughter graduates, then I'm gonna start running or when my, you know, when this thing happens, I'll start doing, you know. And it's like, no. You just gotta just do it. Just tomorrow wake up and do the thing that you've been putting off because you're going to suck at it. You're gonna suck tomorrow as much as you're gonna suck a year from now if that's your first time. And so the the the faster you can get the the garbage out of the way Mhmm. You know, like, a year from now, you're gonna start, or a year from now, you're gonna be good because you've been doing it a year. Right. Right. That's that's a great way of putting it there. During this transition, so you got into endurance in sports. You started to build, you know, athletes. And then at some point of time, you know, in this transition, you said, okay. Maybe it's time to think about exit. Mhmm. How was the trends, and when did you start to think about exit and then started to romance potential buyers? Yeah. And, like, talk a little bit more on that too. To be perfectly honest, day 1, I was thinking exit. And and the re okay. Not necessarily like I'm gonna go get, you know, super Uber rich off of this idea. It was more about what am I building? So I didn't build Athlinks to be a standalone business. I built Athlinks really to be a cog in a bigger machine. It's always how I thought about the product. Mhmm. I'd I had built other businesses that I built as businesses, as standalone businesses that, you know, that that really sort of handled everything. Mhmm. Athlinks needed to live in an ecosystem where there was subscription revenue, whether that was race registration or timing chips or some some built in, revenue on that side. And so I had really always built Athlinks to be sold. Okay. And so probably 4 years in is when I started to pursue different suitors. And so 1 of the 1 of the good decisions that I made early on, which was at the behest of of that same friend I was talking to earlier was go to conferences. So get involved in the industry, be be a leader in the industry, be a voice in the industry, you know, that type of thing. So immediately we signed up, we started going to running USA. We got, we built a data partnership with them so that we were the official data providers of running USA. We did the same thing with USA T USA Triathlon. And so we just any opportunity we had to go to conferences, we went to conferences. We would be present at those conferences and and, you know, because, like, people don't just come knocking on your door, typically. You have to build these relationships. And the other side is, you know, selling a business, going with that business, you know, being a leader in that other business, that's a huge decision to make. You know? Right. And and so at the time, you know, we were talking to everybody. We were talking to active and and, competitor group, which ran all the rock and roll races. We were talking to lifetime. Obviously, there were some international people that we were talking to. And so it was really kind of a, you know, I was never in a big rush to exit, you know, so that was good. Right. You know, it was putting, putting dinner on my table as well as, you know, 15 other people or so around the world in different capacities and stuff. So it was a good business. Mhmm. And so it did allow me to to meet the right people, have and grow these relationships organically, and, you know, do business with those people also. So, like, I had done business with active. I had done business with competitor. And and so I kind of knew the players and what life would be like post acquisition. I had friends, you know, virtual race bags had sold to active and, race it had sold to competitor. And so I knew the players and the people that I could talk to about what's life like inside those other businesses. Mhmm. And, and so I met a guy. Actually, I shared a cab home from running USA to the airport Okay. With a guy named Paulie Toi, who was the founder of Basu, which is what ChronoTrack Live became. And so Paul had just sold to lifetime, along with his partners. And so he was, you know, he was asking me kind of similar to your questions about, okay, how does Athlinks work? What's the revenue model, this and that? And he's like, wow. Okay. Wait a second. That that seems to sort of track with some of the things that we're trying to do. Mhmm. And so he and I, over the course of the next year, you know, started working together and and plotting some different ways that we could change the industry and that type of thing. And that's kind of how the groundwork was laid for an acquisition. Oh, wow. That's a great lifetime was like 5th on my list. They were, I didn't really understand why lifetime was in the business. I didn't really get it. And so Yeah. Yeah. I was it was always like a yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, maybe. Do you have some some other 4 folks on top of the list? Looks like. I mean, you know, it it's easy to get, you know, active and competitor were sort of the obvious ones because they were so involved in the industry. They were so central to the industry. Mhmm. And actually going back to, like, MapMyFitness, Robin and Kevin, they had sold to UnderArmour. And so that was an interesting an interesting pivot, and, Runkeeper had sold to Adidas. And so there were some interesting pivots going on. Like, okay. Well, wait a second. Maybe I can maybe I can think about things a little bit differently. You know? I see. And so in lifetime and, you know, meeting this guy, Dave Remick and a buddy of mine, there's a whole side quest here where lifetime had acquired a company called Red Rock Triathlon out of Phoenix. The 2 co founders of that chemo Seymour and, Mike Melly. They were friends of mine from Phoenix and the in sort of the racing industry. And so I had a sort of a front row seat into how lifetime was building that side of the business. So and, you know, and again, these are things that you just. If you're gonna be a halfway decent entrepreneur, networking has gotta be, you know, a priority for you. And it's not really my nature to do so, but just getting out of my comfort zone and, you know, sitting on panels and and doing those things, Like, it opens up massive opportunities for you. Oh, that's great. That's great. And so you found that, okay, lifetime is the right fit to have an exit strategy. And I think you sold around early 20 tens to lifetime? It was, New Year's Eve 2012 is when the deal closed. Oh, wow. What a great time to close a deal. Yeah. Yeah. 2012 or 2013. I think it must have been 20 yeah. It was the funny thing was we were we were both sides were sort of dragging our feet. Obama had announced that they were gonna raise capital gains by 5%, so they were gonna go from, like, 15 to 20%. Uh-huh. And so I just said, hey. Look. If we can't get this deal to get done by, by December 31st, the price goes up 5 percent. And so we were able to So you have a clock ticking. Yeah. Okay. So it worked in my favor. Good. So what are the couple of learnings you would say that, okay, I started to build at links. In the same process, I started to walk the talk becoming an endurance athlete. And you build that, you know, these partnerships with these big companies in endurance industry to where you sold it to, in a lifetime, a big entity. [Kamal] What would be key of the learnings that you gain in this process that you wanna share. Are you wondering more pre acquisition or or post acquisition? I think we'll we'll I will dig that more into the post acquisition because I think it's a different life, I would think, or different set of, the game you have to play being in that industry versus post because he had the full control of how you're gonna shape athletes. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, on the product side, I I had a really strong core set of values, and and there were 3 main things, and they were pretty much from day 1. [Troy] 1 was make the experience really magical for the end users. So I would always say, like, we we aggregate all of your race results and you can, they're sort of automatically attached to your account. So I wanted to make sure that we we solved a huge friction point, which is tracking down your results, but then we also solved a massive friction point, which is they're just there for you. You search your name, and it's like, boom, there's every race I've ever done. Yeah. So that was, like, number 1 is really make the experience magical. And I think we nailed that in spades like that. That was always a really good experience with that. 2 then was allow people to really celebrate their accomplishments. We did a good job on this. There was an initial version of the site for years, red and black, and we had these race reports on it. And, we got rid of them and I always hated that we got rid of them because we never built them back in, which we can get into post acquisition, but we didn't do a great job yet of, like, really letting people truly celebrate. And that's part of what my new business is iLoomi. But really letting people celebrate and then so that 3, they can connect more deeply with the community. And we did an okay job of that. And so I think that's part of this is, like, and kind of like what I was talking about where I built it to be part of a bigger engine is understanding, like, what what product you're building, what business you're building, where you fit in your industry, what your goals are there. You know, you have to be proactive about those things. Not to say that you have to solve every problem from day 1. You have to be open to pivoting, obviously, But you have to sort of approach things very intentionally, or it's very easy to get lost in the mix of things. So where are you positioned in the market? Those types of things. So that's, that's probably the biggest thing, that I learned. And then 2 is, you know, that again, like, half of your assumptions are always going to be wrong. So you have to be open to, you know, don't be pigheaded about things. There, there are times like, you know, sort of overall be pigheaded, be very, very stubborn about your vision, about what it is that you want to accomplish essentially. You know, I wanted to build it. You know, at some point, it sort of occurred to me. I wanted to build this great brand in the endurance industry. Mhmm. But what that existed as, if we had turned into a timing company, if we had turned into a registration company, great. Yeah. Fine. You know, we found our niche, and luckily, it was a successful niche. Yeah. But it it didn't matter. So, like, the pivots, you know, I don't remember what the exact, there's a, there's a great saying where it's like, be stubborn on your vision, but flexible on your I don't remember what exactly what it is, but that's execution. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great. 1 thing I'm, though, curious, when you start when you build something with exit in mind, because, I've been part of and I'm in tech and part of industries or companies, when you're thinking about when the founders or the leadership start to think about, hey. I'm Greg Zinn. There are things goes on, which is more, hey. We have to streamline our processes, operations. You need to have more fiscal responsible for how you operate the business. [Kamal] Was it different for you since you had the exit in mind? Did you build a company in that direction that those learnings so that like, no. It came natural to me as I build it. Yeah. Pretty much. [Troy] I mean, you know, I had I had the benefit of being a very disorganized person in general. Okay. My my my focus, like it my product briefs, my software, very organized. Okay. Like you could see my wife came in this morning and looked at my desk and she was disgusted because I had like this, like 4 stacks of different papers and things like that. Yeah. So I know my biggest weakness as an entrepreneur is, like, the organizational side. Mhmm. I'm really good on the vision stuff. I'm good on the product stuff. I'm good on all those things. And so part of that is I believe very much in hiring for your weaknesses. Like, don't try to solve your weaknesses. You'll fail. You know? If they're weak parts of your strengths, yes. You know, get better at the thing you do well, of course, but something like that. And so, I had a really good team around me who was always keeping those things in line so that, you know, like, our due diligence process with lifetime, you know, they have a team of attorneys. It it was a $2, 000, 000, 000 company at the time. They sent us this very well organized dossier of, like, here you know, here's the 487, 000 documents that we need from you. Yeah. And it was a pretty easy process for us to kinda put those things together and and keep them in line. Yeah. So and that you know, that's true of your product. That's true of your business. Like, you've got a budget some certain amount of time to to work on the business, to keep your software refactored, you know, make sure that it doesn't get too long in the tooth. Make sure that your your business is organized. You have org charts. You have some of these things. Even when you're starting up, you know, it's you know, it just kinda becomes 1 of those decisions of, like, you know, forgo a movie once a month and spend those 2 hours just just organizing things and keeping things together. You know? And if you can't do that, get somebody who can. You know? Right. Whether it's your spouse or or something else or, you know, someone in support, like, give you know, elevate somebody, give them some responsibility in the organization to keep them. Because, yeah, that's the you know, going through an acquisition is, like, 10 times worse than an audit. You know? Like, they're these people are gonna crawl so far up your business. Like, you have to make sure that all of that stuff is really well organized. Yeah. Yeah. Or it's just gonna be a nightmare. You know? Right. If it was not organized to to start with. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Great. Thanks for sharing, that learnings for sure. Now if you're under transition to your next phase of being part of a big company, you sold it to, you know, Life Fitness, and then now you transition to part of the the bigger organization. How was that transition? And I think you stayed there for a couple of years, I believe, till Several years. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So basically, the the the the short story is Lifetime had, at that time, I think their event portfolio was mainly, Leadville. I'd, they they maybe had some small races in in and around Minnesota, but they owned Leadville, and they were starting to get on a buying spree of events. So they bought, they bought Miami Marathon, Chicago Triathlon, New York Triathlon. They bought a, I don't remember the name of the company, but they owned a bunch of half marathon. So that's how they acquired Chicago Half Marathon, and they they acquired, Publix, Half Marathon in Georgia, bunch of other great races. And so they were looking to build or or buy or license. So they were on active.com. They felt like they were just spending way too much money in fees. They didn't have control over the experience. So they bought a company called Basu. Basu was really the first live results engine ever created. So they had created a scoring engine that had race results built in that was coming right off a timing controller to the to the Internet. That was their, innovation. Paul, the 1 of 3 co founders of that business realized very early on. We're at the mercy of the timing companies. ChronoTrack was the largest US timing company at the time, so they convinced Lifetime to go buy ChronoTrack. Oh, okay. So now you had the timing company. You had the registration and scoring engine. Simultaneous to this, my buddy Kim had sold his business into lifetime, and so he was heading up events for lifetime. So I had good coverage within the business. And I ran into chemo at a, at a Starbucks 1 morning. And he said, you know, what's funny is I was in like 3 different meetings the last couple of weeks. And the answer to these questions was always Athlinks does that. And so it's like, how do we market to athletes? How do we how do we reengage athletes as they cross the finish line? Those types of things. And and it was always like, well, Athlinks does this. And at the same time, I had met Paul. So Paul was sort of pushing in from the technology side having the same epiphanies of, like, you can take a registration fee, you can sell an athlete a tag. Those are very fixed costs. How do we get into the more variable revenue side of advertising? And so that's where Affluence fit in with that triumvirate of those. I see. And so when we when we sold into into lifetime, we were 1 of 3 groups of founders. Mhmm. I was in Arizona. The Basu guys were in California, Michigan, and DC. I see. And the ChronoTrack guys were all in Indiana. Okay. And so for about 18 months, we got nothing done. I see. We just could not get we would get together, like, once a month or once a quarter, have these meetings. I'm a big fan of the saying, you don't rise to your goals. You fall to your systems. Mhmm. And so that was a perfect example. We had all these goals. We would get together once a month or once a quarter depending on the time of year. We would have all these platitudes. We're gonna do this. We're gonna do that, but we had no system. And so we would fail fail over and over and over. We just couldn't get out of our own way. And so I was basically ready to walk away. And 1 of the I I told you some of the things that I liked about what I did. 1 of the worst things that I did was when I sold the business, not to get too specific about things, but a lot of it was basically an earn out. So I had to hit targets for the next several years to get the full amount of the sale price. And so I was, you know, I was basically ready to walk away from all of that. And so 1 time it was about a year, year and a half in, we were all extremely frustrated with ourselves, with 1 another. And we we asked Bram, who is the founder and CEO of lifetime Mhmm. Hey. Would you be open to us opening a central office somewhere? Mhmm. And we we wanted Colorado, and so we all happen to be up at a meeting in Colorado. And Bram said, do it. Now Bahram is not the type of guy when he tells you do it, like, if you ask him for something and then he gives you permission. If he sees you a month later and you haven't done that thing Okay. Not a good look. I see. And so this was, like, on a Monday or Tuesday, and I'm in this meeting, and I text my wife, ready to move to Colorado. Oh, wow. And she's like and she was out to dinner with my mom at the time with my kids and was, like, almost in tears. Like, how am I gonna tell my mother-in-law that so she didn't she didn't say anything yet. So long story short, the next weekend, we fly up to Colorado, buy a house. It was just like because I knew, like, there's no way I'm gonna face Bram, or if Bram calls me going, what's going on with Colorado? I better have an answer. So I just bought a house. And I wasn't in a position to go, like, just buy extra houses. You know? Wow. That's you moving from Phoenix. Arizona to Colorado within a Yeah. Period of week. Oh, wow. That's great. And so it was just it was just kinda 1 of those things where it was it was kind of like starting the business in the first place. It's like you can wait you can you can wait for everything in your life to be perfect. I just knew we sucked. We were we were just awful as a business. Like, we just were not doing that. Our customers were getting very frustrated with us. It it was just like, man, like, what did any of us sign up for? This is terrible. You know, we're making lifetime look bad. We're making ourselves look bad. And so I just wanted to do a gesture of just basically like a grand gesture that would sort of get some energy into what it ever was we were doing. And so at that time, then I went back and we, I was talking to Kim. Kim kinda wanted to do a similar thing where he was spending his time going back and forth between Phoenix and Minneapolis because that's, corporate is in Minneapolis. And 1 of the stipulations when I sold to Lifetime was I will never move to Minneapolis. Mhmm. So that was off the table. And so Kimo and I started kind of scheming to say, well, what if we did because out of that meeting, my my intent was, like, we were gonna open a very small, like, a 5 person office to just be organized. Yeah. What it turned into, we moved the entire lifetime events division, events marketing, event technology. At 1 time, we had about a 120 people in that office out there. Build lifetime built us this beautiful office in Lewisville, Colorado. Amazing facility. Mhmm. And that's when that's, you know, sort of mission accomplished in terms of, like, getting that energy. Took us about a year to get out of our own way. Mhmm. But it definitely was the catalyst for sort of what became next or what came next. And were you able to convince other founders also to move along with you? Or No. You're destined. You know? What the thing that always made me sort of chuckle I was ready to move from Phoenix, frankly. I mean, this was something my wife and I had been to a couple weddings in Colorado. We had we were I I my family moved there in 1976, so I'd been there for a long time. I love Phoenix, but I was ready for a change. Mhmm. Nobody wanted to move to Phoenix. So we were looking at all these different places to move the business, and Phoenix was a no brainer because Bram loves Phoenix. Kimo was there. I was there. A handful of us were there. Nobody wanted to move to Phoenix. I'm not moving to Phoenix. Fine. So we were looking at Salt Lake, Austin, and, the Boulder area. Mhmm. We ended up settling on Colorado, and then I'm the only 1 that moved. So none none of the other founders moved. All the Basu guys left the business, and then the ChronoTrack guys. And and look, the ChronoTrack guys didn't need, you know we we went back and forth with that. They had a great setup in Evansville, Indiana. They were all together. Mhmm. Like, it was it was a good it was right for them not to move. We were a little pig headed initially about everybody's gotta move. It's gotta be under 1 roof. We were right about some of that, wrong about some of that. [Kamal] I see. I see. No. That's that's really a bold move, but I don't know what about Colorado, Troy. But I think, you are the 3rd person I'm talking on my podcast Mhmm. Who are endurance sports leaders or founders and CEOs. They are in Colorado. So there's something about Colorado. I talked to, Dark. I think you may know him. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Dark for you. Yeah. Colorado. I think I'm talking to, looking to talk to the Stryd, the founders as well. Mhmm. James and and Gus. So there's something about Colorado and Adrian Sports, especially the Adrian's Tech industry leadership Yeah. Cluster there. [Troy] Yeah. Well, the funny thing, the first time I ever went to Colorado was we were talking to TrainingPeaks, so Dirk here, about acquiring Athlinx. And that was the 1 they were certainly the smallest company we were talking to, and, Gere and I have done a bunch of other business together and, since. And we both it was just like, how why didn't we just do it? Like, that would have been a pure quality of life home run. Yeah. I love those guys. It would have been a great business. We would have been outside the racing industry. We would have been much more on the athlete side of things. Mhmm. And I think it would have been a huge success. I think that would have been, like, lifetime was sort of in a category with active and competitor. It would have been varying degrees of sex success, but it was all the same type of product play. Training pigs would have been a different animal altogether, and it's just kinda 1 of those things where they made an offer. We didn't really know enough about each other to, like, have a good counter offer discussion. I see. And we both just kind of, like, we, you know, we're both the other side of this is, like, when you're starting a business, when you're talking to people about partnerships and those types of things, partnerships require so much energy. Mhmm. Both sides are busy building their businesses. And so, like, I'm not a huge partnership guy in general just because I've had I've had a 150 partnership conversations, and I've had 2 good partnerships because they're just hard to coordinate. Right. So anyway so that's yeah. It's it's interesting. Yeah. I don't know what it is about Colorado. For me, it was I didn't you know, I wanted to stay on the sort of the west side of the country. Mhmm. Air is clear. People are friendly. You know, it's just it it was a lifestyle that I witnessed up here that I was not witnessing in Phoenix. Phoenix Phoenix became a very different place than I grew up in. I see. So I see. Yep. Well, that that's good to know. But you moved into Colorado, the hub of Android stack leadership or, you know, the hub where the lot of innovation came in, in Android stacks, especially. But now after this year, you could convince Bahram that you'll open up a office in Colorado, and you did. Now could you get things done more, faster the way you're anticipating? Yeah. So we we basically, you know, we had the facility. We had the mandate from Lifetime. Get this shit done. Pardon pardon the language. And so we we we did exactly that. Like, we we put a tremendous amount of energy, too much energy, in fact. We we hired way too many people too quickly, so it took us another year to really kind of, like, get it right. You know? We went through some personnel changes. We did some reorgs, some different, you know and these are things that it's like, yeah, were they mistakes? Not really mistakes. You know. Like, we had to go through it to to sort of get to where we were, you know. Like, we had we had employee revolts. We had, you know, there was all sorts of, you know, because it's just hard. It's hard to pull that many people in. Yeah. At a time, especially when the economy was going insane. Mhmm. So, you know, you have a you have a generational shift where you had, like, a lot of sort of gen x, and then you brought in a lot of millennial mindset into that. There wasn't a whole lot of like, I think that's a much more understood mindset now that there's a huge difference in the mindset, especially professionally between those 2 generations. Yeah. So it's just we just made a lot of luckily, no no, critical mistakes in terms of syncing the business, but it took us a while. It really did take us a while to kinda get good at what we were trying to do. Mhmm. And then finally, we we shed a little bit of staff. Like, we again, we the engineering team got up to about product engineering, UX, etcetera. Across that entire division, I think we were up to around 80. We settled down to about 4550, which was a good size. We consolidated some of the management. So we we had product and engineering split across 2 divisions. We put those together, which was a massive, boost. We elevated a, an executive assistant named Shauna Organiscek. We put her in charge of delivery, so she became sort of, like, the quintessential project manager across all of our software and and hardware. Mhmm. And she was just a phenomenal voice and and, energy around that. So we just you know, it was just kind of like and luckily lifetime had the patience to to to allow us to make some of these mistakes and and, you know, being in the same place, being under 1 roof, being under a certain amount of, I think internal scrutiny, we were pretty hard on ourselves. Mhmm. You know, being able to just kind of, like, dig in and make those make those changes really taught me a lot about, you know, becoming a better leader. I was super immature when I started that journey. You know, you sort of bring an entrepreneur mindset into a big group like that. It sometimes it works. Usually it does not work. Like you have to shift, you know, I kinda walked around there, like, you know, as an entrepreneur, you take all the risk typically. And I had I think probably you could best describe it as an arrogance around that, you know, where when you're in a big organization where you have bosses now. I was probably a terrible employee for that year where I was just a little bit, you know, like, wow. You know, like, my vision and all this garbage. It took me a while to sort of mature out of that stuff and and, become a better leader and a better probably as probably more important than being a better leader was being a better employee, like being manageable. And I I don't know that I ever achieved that. I'm sure some of the the people above me within the division in lifetime in general would probably say, look, dude, you you never became a good employee, but Yeah. [Kamal] I did my best. I'm not I'm not great with authority. I I definitely do like being, you know, at as an entrepreneur level. It is a tough transition, especially if you build a company and sold it. And now I have to work with the guard rails. [Troy] It is challenging. The transition can be, you know, as you're saying, you know, nicely that it can be tough sometimes. It can be, you know Yeah. Or the f you just okay. Just leave it, sort of situation as well. Yeah. But, yeah, it can be on both sides. But, yeah, I'm glad that and at some point of time, he spent almost 8 years, right, at at, lifetime. And then he decided, okay, it's time for me to part ways. Yep. How that transition happened. So it was it was 22 main well, really, 3 main things. 1 was, I was turning 50. So I was, you know, 49 at the time, and so I went to my, the CFO of lifetime and said, look. I'm I'm I think I was probably this is probably early in the year. My birthday is in October, and so it's like, look. I'm turning 50 later this year. I'm kinda done with Athlinks. You know? I'm not within the framework of what lifetime wanted out of Athlinks. Mhmm. That was the point too was that lifetime wanted something different out of Athlinks than I was gonna want. They they weren't they were more interested in Athlinks supporting ChronoTrack rather than the other way around. I felt like there was a lot of room for the athlete journey to grow into. I see. And so there was a look. I I don't I don't wanna keep fighting this. I'd rather just let's figure out a transition out of this. Okay. So this would have been December, before the pandemic hit. That's that's that's how this happened. So we were we had just split Athlinks back out of ChronoTrack. So Athlinks was actually now a standalone business within lifetime. Oh, okay. And so I took, like, half the engineers and and and we went and started doing Athlinks on its own. We were working on a product called partner sync that was gonna basically be like a Zapier in the middle of the endurance industry. So we had built an API layer that everybody in the industry could pump results directly into aplink. So that'd be, yeah. So it was really it was amazing process and journey to go through that. Mhmm. And so the plan was for me to leave in October. Well, then the pandemic hits in it kind of hit in January for Endurance because we were seeing where, like, Taiwan marathon, Tokyo marathon, a lot of the Asian marathons were falling quickly, and then it swept across Europe and then took, like, 6 weeks to hit the US, but we certainly knew what was coming. And so around so we just we just basically stayed heads down. The the good thing was when we split Afflynx out, we had all gone remote at the end of summer that year. So we had had 6 months of practice being a fully remote business. Oh, nice. Okay. And so when COVID happened, it was like, yeah, whatever. We we had to lay off a bunch of our staff. We furloughed them for to sort of figure out what was going on that we were able to bring a few of them back. But we had a core group of people. We were heads down. We were cranking partner sync. We were building finally, you know, because that whole time that I'd been there, we really didn't build anything that I would consider Affluence. Everything was basically for timing and scoring and registration. We didn't do any of the athlete journey stuff. So we were finally getting to a bunch of that. And then in May ish, I think it was, it was like we kinda came back together and said, look. Maybe October needs to come a little sooner. You know? Because I mean, the endurance industry was 0. Like, there were no races anywhere in the world. Yeah. Every penny you know, I I belong to a Lifetime Fitness down the street. You know, there were where there's normally 5, 6, 700 people in 1 of those clubs at any given time, there were 30, 40 people. You know? I mean, it was like Goes down. Right? I can't argue with, like you know, it's like, why are you guys even investing in this business? It just doesn't make any sense. Like, save every penny. Make sure the core of lifetime is healthy. So so that's when I left. Great terms. I mean, you know, still good good friends with everybody there. Yeah. But it just didn't make sense anymore. They weren't gonna invest in ATHLEANX the way that I would want them to. So it was just kind of like a a very amicable let's go our separate ways and and sort of be done. So Yeah. Well Yeah. Congratulations on your, transition. I don't know. It must be tough on you because you saw your baby grow, bought into a baby. Yeah. I was ready to send my baby to college. So it was like, there were, I mean, it was literally like I've had several people come out of the woodwork short, you know, right. Hey, let's start this business. Let's do this. Let's you know, And it was like, I'm done. Like, I'm I wanna go to a race and just race and not worry about who's timing, what timing equipment, but, you know, it's like, I I was just done. You know, it's it's weird when you tie you know, my 3 my 3 hobbies when I left, I had the podcast, which is about endurance sports. I write software, but all the software I was writing was endurance software. And then I race, and I trained. And it was like, everything that I have is tied up in this 1 basket. It's like, I need to separate. You know? So Yeah. It was it was not at all there was no bitter to the sweetness. I was ready to rock. I was ready to go and and start, you know, what is now become iLoomi. And and and with a lot of the same core, you know, those 3 core beliefs about, you know, making magical experiences, letting people celebrate their accomplishments, and connecting to community. So Yeah. No. Congratulations on your launch. I know it just launched recently. Yep. Yep. Just this past week. Congratulations. [Kamal] And I I looked into it. I felt like it is a platform to write your own obituary. It's my interpretation. I'm sure you have a different view because I'm having this. Okay. Obituary in the sense, you know, that how I have to shape what I've been told when I'm gone. And I can shape it because I'm inviting my friends and friends share about me and writing my own story. And if I do see something that I want to be told differently, I can shape it Yeah. Or do things differently. Yeah. [Troy] Yeah. Illuminate the core behind Illuminate is allowing people to, basically, leverage a large language model AI to have a chat about a specific memory in their life. The chat does an amazing job of extracting more and more details. You can invite other people in to help with that chat. And so it, it asks you really pointed questions. It's really good at drawing emotion out. And so you have a conversation with this chatbot. It extracts a lot of data, and then it writes the story for you. You can then upload photos. We just launched a feature called story analyzer that rang basically, it rates the story on 5 categories from narrative structure and detail and humor. And then it allows you and then it suggests 5 questions to improve the story. So you can it does a really good job of, like, a guided way for you to memorialize your life. And it's the way that we look at it is, you know, for a boomer, for my parents, they're looking at it as, you know, I have a limited amount of time to catalog the, like, top 100 stories of my life. Mhmm. I'm never gonna have the energy to write that. Right. But it's like using Iloomi, and it's IL00MI. It's like being at a cocktail party and just telling a friend a story. That's what's so cool about it. And so it's just literally, like, you're sitting there having a conversation. It's extracted, oh, you know, what happened with this? Well, where'd you meet this person? And it's it's really amazing how it extracts the right questions. And then you generate these stories, and it ties all these stories together. So if you mention you're married in 1 story, it knows to, you know, like, it remembers that across all your different stories and things like that. So it it does a really good job of kind of pulling all of these things together. Like, a short anecdote. I know we're kind of pressed for time here, but my my family, we did a paddle boarding excursion last summer, and it was like a nothing little thing. But, like, we got rained out at 1 lake. We had lunch under a tree. We ended up going to another lake and then paddle boarding there. It was a mariachi band and all this other stuff. And so, like, this wasn't something that I was gonna sit there and spend 2 or 3 hours of my life writing this story. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought, well, what would Elumie do with this? So I just, you know, in literally a 3 minute chat about all the you know, what did you do next and, you know, blah blah. And it generates this great, like, you know, 5, 6, 700 word story that now just it's done. It lives in my biography now. You know, I uploaded a handful of photos that I had taken with my my kids and my wife. And so shared it with them. They added a couple more details. And now that's this keepsake we have for a family, and then we can build on it as a family and stuff. So it's it's on 1 end of your life. Yes. You could look at it as like how to write this really amazing obituary at the beginning of your life when your kids are first born and you're, you're not just snapping pictures. You're telling the stories about like, what were those first steps like, you know, and it and it just does a really good job of extracting those things. So, again, those core tenants of why I started Afflynx, magical experiences, celebrating accomplishments, connecting the community, It's it's basically what's driving the next phase, which is Illumi. So yesterday, I sat down and wrote my my race report from Chicago Triathlon from several years ago. So there's Yeah. It's a little bit of a so both of my grandmothers died of Alzheimer's disease. So they both, you know, were were were very, mentally broken vessels by the time they passed, which was absolutely heartbreaking. If you've ever dealt with somebody, you know, it's 1 thing to sort of, you know, be bedridden or those types of things. You can at least sit there and hold someone's hand and talk to them and look in their eyes. When that leaves, it's, I mean, it's the worst. You know? Mhmm. And, so last year, I was, I don't wanna be too specific, but I was, I was at a family function. And the next generation, so my parents' generation, I started to see some of those same symptoms, let's say. Wow. And I had been, I'd been working on another project that was very AI heavy. And immediately, it was just like, wow. Wait a second. What if what if we could really use these large language models for, like, a very, very positive? Mhmm. There's so much that they're being used for today that are just so trivial. Like, what if we could use them, you know, to build a a searchable family wiki? So, you know, a generation from now, 2 generations from now, 3 generations from now. Like, I know more about what my friends eat for lunch because they post pictures to Instagram than I know about anything about my great grandparents. I don't know anything about them. That's true. You know? And so can my mom sit there with her phone and start recording these stories and building out her life story so that 1 day my grandkids can just say, you know, where did grand great grandma go or great great grandmother? Where did she go to high school? How did she meet her husband? You know, what is the story of our family? And have these, like, really, really rich narratives narrated in their voice and, you know, those types of things. Yeah. Those are the things that that really make this thing a very magical experience. No. That's so it's definitely, you have emotional connection between the story, how you conceptualize the product. And then, you know, congratulations. I'm sure a lot of people would use it and have relieved those experiences for sure. I'm definitely want to check it out for sure. Cool. [Kamal] Talking about Alzheimer's, I don't know if you heard of, Peter Attia. I don't know if you follow him. Yeah. It's a great book. And I started to practice some of them because as you're saying, if it is in the family history, it can, you know, do whatever it can to prevent ourselves. [Troy] Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting thing where they're looking at it now is basically type 3 diabetes. So there's a there's a sugar component to it that is, you know, hopefully, we'll start making some real progress on on treatment of that because there's you know, take my body. You know? Break it. Do whatever you want to. Just please don't take my mind. Yeah. Yeah. It it it it Don't take my memories. Yeah. I have 1 family member, my my wife's grandfather who has gone through. By the time you know, she was little when he passed away, but I can't even remember who that kid was. I always had this vision for Athlinks where we would make this commercial where there's, like, a granddad with the granddaughter sitting on his lap, and they're looking at a computer screen. And she's like, wow, grandpa. You were fast. And they're looking at his App Links profile, you know. And so that that that image has always stuck with me about, like, you know, I never sat down with any of my grandparents and really had a deep, meaningful conversation about their life. You know? What was it like in the war? What was it? You know, these types of things. I never had an opportunity to do those. And so being able to, like, leverage leverage AI, leverage large language models, leverage the time that they have left to be able to, in a magical frictionless way, tell these stories so that maybe granddaughter's not sitting on the knee. It you know, they're they're able to relive these memories in a different way, you know, but but just as rich and deep with it with as much, if not more, detail than they would have otherwise got. Yeah. Yeah. No. That that is amazing. [Kamal] Well, all the best for iLoomi. I'm sure it will do great, and it was pleasure, you know, chatting with you and learning a lot about, you know, how you build the athletes, you know, post athletes and now a new journey that you started. And I learned a lot. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah. [Troy] Likewise. Thanks for reaching out. It was great to meet you, and best of luck with the Tech in 26.2. I think it's gonna be a hit. Thank you.