Arik Shtilman On Building A $15 Billion Business By Disrupting Traditional Banking With An API

Arik Shtilman is the cofounder and CEO of Rapyd which is a payments platform that inserts fintech services into any app and simplifies the complex offering of local payment methods. The company has raised over $700 million from top tier investors such as FJ Labs, General Catalyst, or Spark Capital to name a few. Prior to this he built a company that he sold for over $100 million.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Managing company culture across international offices
• Why you need to invest more in marketing at the beginning
• The future of financial services
• The two responses from investors that mean you won’t get any funding

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About Arik Shtilman:

Arik Shtilman is CEO and co-founder of Rapyd, the leading fintech-as-a-service platform. Arik founded Rapyd in 2016 with a singular goal in mind: to provide all the tools businesses need to create payment, payout and fintech experiences anywhere in the world.

Prior to starting Rapyd, Arik realized there was a massive need to create a way for fintech applications to scale globally so businesses could invest in expansion – not spend critical time attempting to build complex payments infrastructure. To solve this glaring challenge hindering growth in the payments space, Arik launched Rapyd as the first “Fintech-as-a-Service” product in the industry, the category-leading full stack of integrated payments, commerce and financial services capabilities that can be seamlessly embedded into any application. Now, by partnering with Rapyd, businesses and consumers anywhere in the world can easily engage in local and cross-border transactions in any market.

Before Rapyd, Arik founded ITNavigator, a cloud-based contact center and unified communications platform which was acquired by Avaya in 2013. Arik’s expertise in building high-growth companies leveraging cutting-edge technologies to meet global customer demand is proven in Rapyd’s fast-paced yet steady growth. Since Rapyd’s launch in 2016, Arik has taken the company global with offices in Dubai, Tel Aviv, London, San Francisco, Singapore, Reykjavi, Amsterdam and Miami.

Rapyd lets you build bold. Liberate global commerce with all the tools your business needs to create payment, payout and fintech experiences everywhere. From Fortune 500s to ambitious business and technology upstarts, our payments network and powerful fintech platform make it easy to pay suppliers and get paid by customers—locally or internationally.

With offices worldwide, including Tel Aviv, Dubai, London, Iceland, San Francisco, Miami and Singapore, we know what it takes to make cross-border commerce as easy as being next door. Rapyd simplifies payments so you can focus on building your business.

Connect with Arik Shtilman:

• Crunchbase
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Instagram
• American Banker

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro: Alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we have ah we have a serial entrepreneur. You know those founders that I call tirs 0 founders because they’re are hard to come across. You know they’re hard to come across and they’re one of a kind you know. Those that and really have been through the whole full cycle. You know, building scaling financing. You know in this case, our foundry the first company that he did bootstrapped the whole thing. You know, sold it for over 100,000,000 and now he’s in a rocket ship a rocket ship that has raced over 700,000,000 and we’re going to really. Get into it. But again you know you’re going to find his journey his story quite inspiring so without farther ado let’s welcome our guest today Aric Stillman welcome to the show. So originally born in startup nation.

Arik Shtilman: Yay! Thank you very much for having me.

Alejandro: So there in Israel so give us a little walkthrough memory lane. How was life growing up.

Arik Shtilman: Whereup was amazing. Israel you know I was born in 1980 s so Israel in the 80 s was a completely different country from what it is today much more simpler before the high-tech boom before a lot of different things that changed the country in the late 1990 s you know the end of the 90 s the big stoutup nation high-tech things started to emerge I remember the first days when high-tech companies started to pop up like mushrooms after the rain and it ohho actually created this each on my side also at the end of the 90 s to start my own company one day. And I did it wait too long I started in 2002 right after I was released from the military and actually seeing you know this entire high tech boom going from mushrooms to a huge forest you know who were full of everything that you want to see around you.

Alejandro: Now the military. You know it’s quite the ah quite the program and quite the training that you guys have there in Israel because you know I’m sure that that gave you you know a different lens a different perspective on things you know from the. Prior Eric to the post Eric after that experience how how would you say that you came out of that. So.

Arik Shtilman: So one of the important things to understand about the israeli military is that you get in as 18 year old kid a lot of people at the age of 18. They go to college they have you know these drinking parties and they and they have 4 years of going to college in Israel. It’s a little bit the opposite right at the age of 18 you go to military and a lot of a lot of the people go into combat and you get out of the military at the age of 21 or 22 and then you go to university so the reality is that you have to turn from a kid into a man or a woman like an overnight thing from the age of 18 and it really shapes you to the adult that you are because you understand what is responsibility what is actually important in life and also you understand that like when you you need to go to school or when you need to build a company or need to job like how important it is and you know what type of level of focus. You need to put into it because you’re already done similar things. While you’re being in the army for 3 years

Alejandro: So then after you were in the army for for 3 years you know then you know you you come out of there and then I’m sure that you were like wondering you know like what I want to do next? What’s the next chapter. So how was that process of discovery for you to really understand what was going to be next for you.

Arik Shtilman: So it was a bit funny because you know I came out of the military and my parents wanted me to go to university my father was a professor here in in the local university so I registered for school. But after one semester I understood that university is not for me and I dropped out of university after my semester when my parents. Keep telling me that you know if I’m not going to finish school I’m going to be a failure and I’m going to be a bump and I’m going to live in a carton box in the street corner. But then very quickly I decided to start my own company and I started the company in the beginning of 2002 and build it for 10 years as a bootsstep stout up and ended up selling it for above $100000000 in 2013.

Alejandro: And I mean not a not a bad way to ah tell and that perhaps you know going you know, getting out of school was not a bad idea after all now now in this case, what were you guys doing with I T Navigator What was the um, what was the deal there.

Arik Shtilman: So it was. It’s a bit of a a journey because when we started a company in the beginning of 2002 you know cloud computing didn’t exist so we built a company that the goal of the company was to create what we call unified management for contact centers and unified communication equipment back in that days. Cisco via and these type of companies control the world with their own unified communication equipment say you know it was ip phones switches, routers and stuff like that and we created this unified management software that we placed the black screens and telnet and stuff like this that people used to use with a very nice ui. But it was what we call an on-premise software so people actually bought software from us at around 2008 2009 cloud computing kicked in and the entire saas model started to be very popular and then we migrated this platform into a saas play and that really allowed the company to scale and sell globally and then it turned into a saas company. That sold in 2013 to a via.

Alejandro:  And and and for this journey I mean you guys were there pushing it for about 11 years or so and your role also changed. You know over time I I guess I as as the company was growing and and also you were transforming yourself. You know like how was that.

Arik Shtilman: But.

Alejandro: You know journey of going from. You know, obviously co-founding the thing you know and just like being you know like there in the trenches you know like wearing multiple hats to all of a sudden you go more on the marketing business development side and then you know more on the corporate side as ah as the chair of the business right

Arik Shtilman: So it allowed me actually to learn everything about a business. So at the beginning I was focused on the tech and and a lot of things that are super technical and into the details and product oriented then I had to get involved with marketing sales finance and a lot of other things because the company was small. It went you know from 50 up to fifty sixty seventy and etc so you know over the years I touched literally every single job that somebody needs to do in a company including by the way cleaning the office because we didn’t have money in the early days of cleaning the office or used to come on Fridays to clean the office together with my cofounders. And it really allowed me to understand how a business need to be ran and what type of Kpis and things you need to look at at different types of positions. You know in a company and it really prepared me to running a company in a much bigger scale like I do today because when I have a conversation with anyone. Of my vps or department leads I actually can understand you know what they’re measuring and what they’re looking at on a day-to-day basis.

Alejandro: So Talk to us about metrics then you know like what you understood about metrics because obviously now you know you’ve raised money for rapid and we’re going to talk about that in just a little bit but with it navigator I mean basically was fully bootstrapped and the problem with being bootstrapped. Is that any step in the wrong direction could be lethal because you don’t have that extra oxygen to kind of like pick up things around. So What did you guys learn about you know metrics and how to keep your eye on the ball.

Arik Shtilman: So we learned something that people again learned in 2022 that profitability matters. So when you’re running a bootsstep company. You take only profitable business like you do not have an option to take something that is not profitable and spend money on things that do not generate immediate revenue. And I think that one of the main things that we learned is to call the bullshit very early on you know products that you want to build or services that you want to give that are not making money and you’re spending more money from the money that that you actually need to make so you know cost margins profitability and stuff like this even though we didn’t measure it. This way back in the days we just wanted to see how much money we have in the bank. How much cash we gained month over month and that basically led to be super profitability focuseds and very laser focused on what things actually will move the needle without taking any risk because like you said any mistake and your business is dead. 1 of your 1 of your clients is late in paying an invoice. You might not be able to pay a salary. So all these things led us to manage a business for 10 years in a very very accurate and measured way. So when later on when we came into rapid and you know where we raise capital. We also implemented a lot of these methods in the early days of wapit

Alejandro: Now then in this case, you know like with with I navigator I know it was quite a funny story on how the acquisition came about because I mean after 11 after 11 years you know I’m sure it was not easy to try. You know what? you know like maybe we’re gonna we’re gonna go through ah through this transaction. So how did that.

Arik Shtilman: So the the story was following we we were very involved in the unified communication and contact center market for 10 years and we started to see the beginning of twilio as a new company that emerged that started to provide this. You know api capabilities and Amazon started to come into this business.

Alejandro: Come about.

Arik Shtilman: And basically cloud computing started to become a thing for ip telephony and contact until you know up until 2010. It was nothing like it was everything on-premise and we started to see it coming and we understood that that the market that we’re selling to the type of companies that we were selling to this market is going to crash in a 3 hree -year timeframe and that was something that we saw in 2010 so we said okay, we need to hit the eject button like if you’re you’re a pilot in a plane and you see the plane crashing. You don’t want to crash with the plane you want to either land it or you want to hit the eject button so we were looking for a way to basically eject from the business before. It crashes it and the business was continuing to grow like Year -over-year basis but we already saw the cliff it was clear that in a certain stage. It would go down it. We go down very aggressively so we were looking for a buyer and we were talking you know to all the typical suspects but nobody wanted to give us day time and one one time in 2011 it was. Late 2011. We went to a conference in madrid and this conference is huge. It had like 8000 people and there was a Galladino and I got delayed to the Galladino I got stuck in the hotel I got late I got to the gallade dinner late and basically my seat was taken. So the students in the event told me listen I’m sorry your city’s taken I will take you to another table. She took me to another table I sat down in the table and the guy next to me says hello nice to meet you I’m the chief product officer of a via what’s your name and and that’s basically I said oh you’re the guy that I’ve been looking for for the last several years and said what do you guys? do.

Alejandro: My God wow.

Arik Shtilman: I told him listen we do this this and that and he said oh my god you guys do that to more 6 a m in the morning I want the demo and the next day 6 am in the morning I met the guy in the lobby of the hotel showing him a demo and from there everything take took off.

Alejandro: My God So then obviously out of all places Madrid you know I’m a little bit biased because I was raised to Madrid so beautiful city. But but but I guess you know when you guys did the demo. You know, like what. How how does acquisition like this really really develop and and and and and starts to take form.

Arik Shtilman: So it took okay it took a year and a half right acquisitions typically are not do not happen overnight so it started with the demo. He was very impressed from the demo from there. We basically build an oem relationship where we started to sell the product under the brain of a via. This thing or took also like eighteen months then they started to sell it to their install base under their own brand but it was our product so we build this tight relationship with them and after another year that we saw they saw that the sales are picking up and they’re selling quality. A lot of it. They made a clear decision that it’s better to buy them than to pay them the royalties and this is how the deal went through so it took overall between a year and a half to 2 years to to complete this thing and to end from that initial accidental meeting you know in in the madrid gala dinner.

Alejandro: So then finally you know the acquisition happens you know over one ah hundred million I mean that’s a lot of money. Especially if it’s fully bootstrapped when you don’t have to like give proceeds to to investors from that I mean. Anything that you did you know that you were hoping that you would do one day that finally you know like you had you know a little bit of money to do or no.

Arik Shtilman: Ah, bought cars like the first thing that I wanted to do always. It was to buy cars. It was you know the the story is when you’re young and you’re starting the company. You always have the dreams about buying fest cars taking private jets going on a yach buying a big house but all this blah blah. So yeah, this checklist was checked very quickly. You know after thatition including with some other things that were checked that are not allowed to say you know on the podcast and and you know that was the first thing that we’ve done but then very quickly we settled down because we’re understood that.

Alejandro: I Love yeah.

Arik Shtilman: We can spend this money very quickly and you know we we need to to basically still ah, do something with our lives.

Alejandro: So then and and obviously as they say you know once an entrepreneur entrepreneur is an entrepreneur So Then let’s talk about the um, what happened next because I’m sure that you know you guys need the integration and all of that stuff and then you know it’s say a time you know to to think about what’s next. So. What was that thought process like and how did the idea of rapid come knocking.

Arik Shtilman: So actually it’s interesting after we got acquired we we had to spend the 2 years with the company that acquired us to basically do this integration process hand over the company. The team the product etc and it was the but 2 most miserable years of my life. It was like I really hated this time It’s like you sold your baby. You don’t own it anymore. Other people tell you what you do and a lot of times you don’t agree with what they say they don’t want to listen to you because they think that they acquire the company. So now they know better. And it was a very hard time especially with the fact that every day the amount of emails and questions that you get is going down like day after day after day after day and I remember at a certain stage after a year and a half I had no emails and it put me into a panic mode like I used to be. 500 emails a day phone call 24 hours a day clients employees and etc and I went all the way to 0 nobody talks to me except of you know friends that are talking to me in the office and I started to think okay I need to do something different but it took me six months to to understand that it’s mandatory for me to quickly do something different because my brain started to get into this maintenance mode like I was not doing anything and I was not able to think about new things. Everything became so slow and then me and and a couple of other cofounders. We went on a trip.

Arik Shtilman: And as part of the trip we went to to East Europe up to Czech Republic and then you know as part of the trip we were constantly getting annoyed from the fact that we were charged very high fx fees like every error we paid effects. Huge fees. We came back. We sat in the office and we were talking about it then we said okay. Let’s try to understand why the hell do we pay so much effects fees. Why does money cost so much money and we started to sketch it up on the whiteboard and from there it turned into an idea. Okay, so maybe we need to build a company that will try to you know to reduce the cost of effects and then we started basically lapid. But. Under a different name the name of the company back then was cash dash and the goal of the initial company that we started was to create this consumer-facing e wallet that saves for on foreign exchange fees for travelers that was the original idea and this is how we started the company and this is what we actually did. For the first year from end of 2015 until beginning of 2017 we were building a consumer facing product and in this process we basically went through every single problem that exists on planet earth that is related to financial services. We had to get regulated. We needed compliance teams we needed legal teams we needed to. To get special bank accounts for custodian money we had to integrate to a lot of different banks. A lot of other institutions. Do kycky b all these crazy things that you don’t even think about suddenly they’re mandatory and then you know one day we’re sitting and we we said listen cannot be.

Arik Shtilman: There are no platforms that allow you plug and play to do this thing that every single company that wants to build this needs to build all this infrastructure from the beginning because it is equivalent of going and building your own data center nobody does it like people go to Amazon Google compute cloud Microsoft Azure nobody but is building a data center but we were actually building a data center for financial services so we decided to pivot the company into an infrastructure play because we we thought it’s going to be much more valuable and then we changed the company name from cashdash to rapid. And from there it completely took off all the way that what rapid is today.

Alejandro: So for the people that are listening to really get it. You know what ended up being the business model of rapid. How do you guys make money today.

Arik Shtilman: So rapid is what we call a fintech as a service company a company that basically provides an infrastructure for other companies to build on top of us financial services. We have 4 main products payment collection disbursements of funds. Issuing of cards and storing money in custodian accounts in 55 different currencies which is at the end of the day as a type of a virtual bank account and basically these capabilities are wrapped with an api that allows developers to build on top of us different type of use cases. We’re a type of a unique company in this space because we’re not only providing the tech capabilities. But we also do the money movement and we’re fully regulateulated so when you want to build some kind of an offering on top of us doesn’t matter if it is a checkout page on shopify or you’re trying to build the neobank you can actually plug into our Api. And level job capabilities to do it and we do it in a hundred and six countries across the globe.

Alejandro: And now we see you know you’re in this rocket ship but you know the seat round you guys were a little stuck So how did you un stuck the whole thing. What what? Why were you guys stuck.

Arik Shtilman: How we were stuck because we’re not able to do 2 things a we were not able to articulate in 1 sentence like I will say to you in a minute What do we do? And second thing is that all the investors that we talk to. Told us that we were lacking focus because we came in and we said okay we want to build this infrastructure that is completely global that we allow companies to collect money this burst money it will do. It will be some kind of a network play. It will have a white label paypal so people told us a we don’t understand what you’re talking about and b. Why are trying to build something global. Go first to one country the us the uk the eu whatever pick one country and implement it and we try to explain to people from the get-go you don’t understand if you don’t build it in multiple countries from day one. It’s not going to be scalable. Nobody will need you only for one country people. Always need to build stuff that is multi-region multi-country. Whatever it is and we were very. You know we were. We were stuck. We raised only $3,000,000 at the beginning and invested several millions of our own money and nobody was able to understand what do we do up until 1 time we came back from another exhausting meeting with the vc. And I told my co-founder I do not understand what these people don’t get. We’re doing something like Amazon Aws but for the fintech space and that was the tagline that changed completely. The history of the company because the next time we went into a meeting and people asked us what do we do and he said we’re the Amazon aws of the fintech space.

Arik Shtilman: And then everybody said whoa. Okay I get it. So it’s an infa stock channel for financial services and it’s global and it’s robust and it’s scalable and from there 3000000 up until that sentence another 767,000,000 something like that after this sentence because really. The ability to articulate. What do you do in early stage is super important for fundraising.

Alejandro: And also you know what you were stuck I’m sure that you experienced the 2 biggest bullshit phrases that you get typically from vcs. You know what are those.

Arik Shtilman: It’s very interesting. It’s number 1 in the second one is I’m going to talk to my partners and I will come back to you so when you hear when you hear these 2 sentences from a vsd it means no no, no and no and you’re never going to get money from us.

Alejandro: That’s incredible now. Now you were alluding to it I mean you guys have raised over 700000000 I mean that’s a lot of money. So why did you guys raise so much money and what has been the journey of going through all these different rounds. So.

Arik Shtilman:  So everything around has its own thing right? The first round will see 3000000 then we went into a $10000000 lound to scale the business then we got another 40000000 to scale the business and then we got another 100000000 because you need to cover more and more countries like every single country you want to go to requires the effort from a product biz dev engineering and a lot of other things and of course you want to grow sales and then came in basically the need to start doing acquisitions because we believed that the companies to do acquisitions in order to scale faster. So we raised another 2 big rounds of 300000000 and that were almost back to back in order to do acquisitions and up until today we deployed almost half of the money into acquisitions. There are still more acquisitions that we’re planning to do so basically the big chunk of the money. Was really really responsible for the acquisition strategy that we have.

Alejandro: And also when it comes to acquisitions most acquisitions failed fail really because of integration. So how do you guys think about integration to make sure that you don’t have that. Yeah.

Arik Shtilman: So we did 3 3 acquisitions 2 of them are super successful. One of them is okay plus but in all of them. We were able to do a very good acquisition because we have only 1 criteria for an acquired company and at the end of the days. How fast can we throw the tech into the toilet and switch it with our own tech if we cannot switch it to our own tech in less than nine months. We’re not interested because we’re not buying technology. We have our own text tech. We don’t believe that we need a third -party tech tech to do any one of the things that we need to do. And basically the main criteria in any new diligence that we do is how fast can we switch the tech and I think that because this was the criteria and this is what we were focus on. We’re able to do quite good integrations as part of an m a process.

Alejandro: And what about people you know because 1 thing is to you know obviously throw the take in and you know throw the other you know legacy take out, but how do you go about people too. So.

Arik Shtilman: So the most important thing is the management team right? You want to know that the management team that is part of an acquisition is is people that will stick around and will provide you added value I think if you’re if you’re interested in buying company that everybody wants to hit the jacket button and disappear the next day you never going to do the deal. Because you cannot do the integration and everything that is related to it on your own all the acquisitions that we’ve done we were able to keep the management teams up until today they are as part of rapidind and they have different types of walls inside the company and then of course when you start going down in the chain. You need mid-level management is good, but from my perspective the top management is the most important thing as part of an acquisition.

Alejandro: That’s amazing now I guess for the people that are listening. You know to really get it. You know how big is rapid today you know in terms of maybe like number of employees or anything else that you feel comfortable sharing.

Arik Shtilman: So up it is a company with around 850 employees operates in 106 markets has offices in 12 different countries has a revenue in 2022 of above $300,000,000 and continue to scale ah in a very high space.

Alejandro: And you were you were alluding to the different offices that you guys have and you know as we’re talking about the topic of people. How do you guys go about culture because when you have all these different offices too. You know like every office to a certain degree has its own culture. So how how does that translate.

Arik Shtilman: So it’s It’s very hard to to manage it so we have a slogan in the company that actually is accompanied with a t-shirt that everybody has that is called one rapid and it is something that we started to do right after the acquisitions because it’s very important after you.

Alejandro: To wrap it.

Arik Shtilman: You have all these cultures all these offices all these acquisitions you need to merge somehow everybody under the same hoof into the same goal. So 1 rapid is basically our um internal program to explain to people from different offices and different cultures. How do you work with people from other offices and other cultures and it actually goes down all the way to How do you write an email because for example for Israelis when they write an email It’s quick and delty and sometimes it looks very you know offensive but on the other hand you know when you you’re on the other side and you receive this email. You need to understand what actually the person meant when they send it to you. So we have you know israelis we have singapuans we have americans we have europeans it’s a mix and we’re trying constantly to allow people to to get educated How do you work with other cultures and it works quite well yes, they are still. Once in a while you know all these different types of fights between you know, different offices, different types of cultures. But I think that you know if you’re comparing it to 2018 which was the year where we started to have these offices globally it really the the chart is going down very fast and you know we’re managing it quite well.

Alejandro: So let’s say you go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of rapid is fully realized what does that world look like okay.

Arik Shtilman: It’s a world that basically embedded finances inside almost any product that you use not only inside your phone as Google pay or Apple pay but everywhere that you go any inside your television inside your car any device that you use any brand. That you communicate with doesn’t matter if it is uber for ride hailing or it’s Zara for for buying you know something all of them. They basically have embedded financial services inside their consumer offerings because this is the wall that we believe that everybody’s going to. Everybody at the end of the day wants to monetize their consumer base with financial services because they understand there is stickiness and loyalty behind it and this is a big opportunity for all the big brands and this is why you see everybody one way or another going into this type of consumer facing or business facingcing financial services offering even though they’re not.

Alejandro: And how how far away we are from from getting there Eric.

Arik Shtilman: Financial services companies. I think we’re 5 years away and you know we’ve seen the big brains doing it. You’ve seen it with Apple. You’ve seen it with Google you’ve seen it with Amazon you’ve seen it with uber in some countries where with their wallet you’ve seen it with some song. You see it with some buy now pay later products that some of the big rents are offering I think that we’re pretty much 5 years away from this seamless financial embedded financial services vision.

Alejandro: So We’re talking about the future here. So I Want to talk about the past but being able to do so with a list of reflection Imagine I put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time to perhaps that moment that you were coming out of the army and you were wondering you know. What to do next? Um, and let’s say you’re able to sit down that younger self maybe that younger self that was a little bit down because you had dropped out of school and you had your parents you know, like like say hey what the hell are you doing with your life and I’m sure that those were not easy days but let’s say you were able to sit down with that younger self and. You’re able to give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why given what you know now.

Arik Shtilman: So 2 advices which I took with me from the previous business into rapid first advice always invest in marketing like a lot of times when you’re building a company. You think that okay marketing is the less important thing and you need to invest in product tech sales. But you forget the marketing piece. Because you don’t have money and you think that it’s not important enough I think that investing in marketing early days building a brand especially around brand not really like online acquisition of clients. But even when you’re very small. You need to start building your brand because brand awareness reduces significantly the friction. And reduces the customer acquisition and second thing is raise money from investors. Even if you think that you want to do bootstrap still find a way to raise some money from investors because when you’re going to sell the company or you’re going to exit it at the end of the day you need some kind of a watermark. That says this is the minimum price of the company and the price cannot be will bootstrap. We want 100000000 like if an investor came in and put a price take of 200 then the buyer knows they need to buy to pay more than 200 so raising money and at the right time to create this external watermark which is not coming from the founders. Is very important if you’re building a bootstrap which is not common but it’s it’s another important thing.

Alejandro: I mean obviously I think it makes total sense that outside validation you know I think that going back now. Perhaps to ITNetwork do you think that would have been helpful to push the price a little bit up.

Arik Shtilman: Ah, it would have been 5 x more expensive like this is the number like we’ve done 2 mistakes the marketing piece and the investors if we would have done both of them. We would have sold 5 x more.

Alejandro: Wow! Wow! Unbelievable! Well live and learn Eric may do without a doubt what you guys are doing now. It’s unbelievable and I’m and I’m very much looking forward to what to what happens next. So I guess say aric for the people that are listening that will love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so.

Arik Shtilman: Reach up say hi Linkedin.

Alejandro: There you go easy see enough. Well hey Eric thank you so much for being on the deal maker show. It has been an honor to have you with us today. Thanks.

Arik Shtilman: Thank you very much for having me had a great time.

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