Rob Gonzalez On Raising $450 Million To Build The Industry’s Only Unified Product Experience Management (PXM) Platform

In the bustling world of tech startups, stories of perseverance, innovation, and global impact abound. Today, we dive into the inspiring journey of Rob Gonzalez, co-founder of Salsify, a trailblazing enterprise software company revolutionizing product experience management.

The company, Salsify, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Permira, Neuberger Berman, Venrock, and Cap Table Coalition.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Rob’s family history, escaping Cuba and rebuilding in the US, exemplifies resilience and the pursuit of the American Dream.
• Moving from engineering at IBM to product management at Endeca marked Rob’s shift towards impactful, customer-focused roles.
• Inspired by market shifts in e-commerce, Salsify aimed to revolutionize product experience management for global brands.
• Initial struggles in Salsify’s first years underscored the difficulty of selling e-commerce solutions pre-market recognition.
• Salsify’s breakthrough came with retailer mandates in 2014, compelling suppliers to enhance their e-commerce capabilities.
• Successful capital raises were built on early relationships with investors and understanding market trends over time.
• Looking forward, Rob envisions Salsify as a global standard for product information management and distribution across major retailers.

 

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About Rob Gonzalez:

Rob Gonzalez, based in Boston, MA, US, is currently a Co-founder and CMO at Salsify, bringing experience from previous roles at The Digital Shelf Institute and _Underscore. VC.

Rob Gonzalez holds a 1999 – 2003 Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Mathematics, Computer Science, Mathematics @ Williams College.

With a robust skill set that includes Product Management, Enterprise Software, Agile Methodologies, E-commerce, Product Marketing, and more, Rob Gonzalez contributes valuable insights to the industry.

Connect with Rob Gonzalez:

• LinkedIn
• RocketReach
• Bloomberg
• Crunchbase

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: alright Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Deal Maker Show. so Today, we have a really amazing story, a story you know of a founder that you know he’s building something remarkable. um i mean They are right now like over 500 employees, ah raised over $450 million. i mean Really remarkable journey. you Talk about you know scale and and also you know like the the growth that they have been able to achieve. But again, you know be prepared today to hear about product market fit, ah enterprise software, how to think about you know a two-sided network, and many, many more you know interesting stuff. so So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Rob Gonzalez. Welcome to the show.

Rob Gonzalez: Thanks for having me.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally, you know a kid from Southern Connecticut, but they but I know that they i mean they the story of the family origins i mean is is quite interesting too. So there’s a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up?

Rob Gonzalez: ah I mean life growing up was fantastic. my My parents are a mixed marriage. My dad’s a Cuban refugee and my mom is a Yankee. and they met at the Financial Management Leadership Program at GE Capital. um so the one One thing people don’t know about the Cubans is a lot of them ended up outside of New York City. There was a big Cuban ghetto in Port Chester, New York, which is the town just over the border from Connecticut. um It’s right next to Greenwich, if you’ve heard of Greenwich. Greenwich is like the richest town in the country, and then Port Chester is absolutely not the richest town in the country, um especially especially back then. A lot of refugee communities find cheap places to live. so They lived there, and GE was a big

Rob Gonzalez: company in that area. that The world capital of GE was in Fairfield. um GE for many years was the biggest company in the world. And so was it was a good place to get to get jobs and build a career. So so my my dad was in that area, got a job in GE Capital, met my mom, and then and then started the family.

Alejandro Cremades: So I know, too, that the um you know talking about the the origins from Cuba, i mean how your dad got into the country you know and the origins, too, you know with your grandfather, i mean that I’m sure that shaped who you are quite a bit, too. So talk to us about this.

Rob Gonzalez: Yeah, that well, the um my dad was a kid when Castro took over. And my grandfather was a police chief in a Havana district under Batista. um And so that’s not a good look, right, when the when the communists first take over. And eventually they they decide they want to escape the country. And the US government in conjunction with with others in Cuba figured out a way that they could get tens of thousands of people out of Cuba kind of under the nose of the way that the Cuban government was keeping track of people that were trying to leave. And the method was effectively that you would get the kids out and the kids would leave with like nothing, you know, literally just two pairs of socks, one pair of underwear,

Rob Gonzalez: They would open your bag and search you to make sure that you just weren’t bringing anything with you. um No valuables of any kind. ah Although my aunt did so, um you know, family gold and jewels and stuff into the hems of her clothing so that she could she could leave with some kind of money. And they would go to the U.S. And the expected thing that and happened next was that they would sit in the U.S. without their parents for a couple months and the parents would come afterwards. um What happened instead is the the borders were closed and the 13,000 odd children, somewhere between 13, 14,000 children were stranded from their parents. And it’s the largest child refugee migration in the Western hemisphere in history. And a lot of the parents never made it over. um I mean, there’s there’s a couple thousand children never saw the parents again. ah My grandfather, because of his association with with the Batista government, was thrown in jail. his All of his friends were shot.

Rob Gonzalez: um People thought he was dead for a year and then they figured out he was still alive. We had a cousin who got promoted up the ranks of the Communist Party, managed to pull some strings and get him out of jail, and then took him and my grandmother to the airport and held a gun to the head of the Communist Party member that was running the airport and got them on a plane to get him out of the country. So he managed to escape my grandparents.

Alejandro Cremades: Well.

Rob Gonzalez: um So my dad and and his sister actually managed to see see their parents again, which was great for me. And so i you know kind of that that that experience in the family history does so shape you. I mean, you see a lot of immigrant families, in particular refugee families in this country, um do really well. You know, they come here with nothing. They just assured on their back, my grandfather was in his fifties. And when he died, he had over 400,000 savings in the bank. And that was just, you know, he didn’t even speak the language. that That was just him working whatever job he could and saving money and just through grit. And so a lot of immigrant families have that. They open up dry cleaners. They open up um Chinese restaurants and stuff like that. You know, my grandfather was a porter. um My grandfather did carpentry.

Rob Gonzalez: my My dad made made whatever money that he could as a kid, doing paper routes and working at restaurants and washing dishes and whatever. And so there’s there’s this sort of, you can actually make things happen. yeah that I grew up hearing. This is a country where you can make a life that you want, or you can start over, where you can start with nothing and become rich. i mean My dad, when he first came over here, he was poor. they my Him and my sister picked food out of trash cans, and he ended up as the chief risk officer for GE Capital Amiya at the end of his career. It’s a senior executive band of of GE Capital, which was the the biggest financial institution at the time. so

Rob Gonzalez: So you made quite a lot of money.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s unbelievable.

Rob Gonzalez: So it’s like, you know you can do that in the in the States and and this whole Horatio Alger rags to riches. Hard work pays off. Story was a big part of what I what i heard all the time.

Alejandro Cremades: the American dream and you got to embrace it. And you know as an immigrant myself, i can totally I can totally see it too. So so that’s unbelievable. Now, in your case, you know obviously you had the family roots and the background that shaped who you are, but then also the fact that your dad, as as as you were alluding to, you know he he moved quite a bit. And I know that you guys moved to London and going there for a couple of years and then coming back,

Rob Gonzalez: Bye.

Alejandro Cremades: It kind of like shifted gears for you when it came you know down to readjusting back here in in the US. So what what happened there?

Rob Gonzalez: I came back to the US in seventh grade, which is just a terrible time. If you’re a little, especially if you’re a little bit awkward, it’s a terrible time to so move. Everyone’s going through adolescence. And this is, what was this, 92, 93. And i man, I just had a real hard time adjusting socially back in the US. And so I wanted something to do with my time because I i didn’t have the friends that I used to have. That’s when I got into computers. I remember in the UK, they had an Apple system at the school, and I used to play games on it, and I also would do math on it. i I was part of this advanced math program, and I really, really liked math. And I thought, well, geez, if I could get a computer, that would be a good use of my time. That would be fun. So I convinced my dad to get an IBM PC.

Rob Gonzalez: um and And so that was you know my my first real exposure to a computer. We had one at home. And I taught myself how to program. I took programming lessons over the summer um and and just loved every bit of it. and And anything that I can get my hands on about computers, yeah I’d go to Barnes & Noble and I’d buy the magazines, I’d buy the books. I bring them home, like I play around with them, and I just had a blast doing it. I and you know i eventually made a lot of friends in the in in the US, but by that point, the kind of bug had caught me with the computers, and and and I kept at it.

Rob Gonzalez: so

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, obviously, you you you kept at it. You went to Williams, you know, to study their computer science and mathematics. But one thing that happened next is is saying interesting. I mean, you went to work for IBM, you know, also Endica. But one thing that is super interesting as part of your career before you actually got started with Salsify is that transition that happened from being on the engineering side to being more on the business side. So how how was that transition for you?

Rob Gonzalez: you You know, it was it was an interesting one. And it was um ah at IBM, I was a software engineer and I was in a research group. And I was there for a few years. And IBM was a great place to work, but I was kind of miserable. And at the end of the day, I didn’t really understand why. But um I think, in in retrospect, I was miserable because the stuff that we were building was never going to see the light of day. It was never going to get used. It was proofs of concept and things like that. And I really desperately wanted to make a difference and have things be used by somebody. And so when when I left IBM, I you know kind of blamed the programming, the software engineering side for for my sort of dissatisfaction and decided I wanted to get away from it. And I got advice from a guy who was a senior guy at IBM that made a ton of money there who said, look, the closer you get to sales,

Rob Gonzalez: the the more of an impact, the better off you’re going to be. And I thought, OK, well, what’s the next step that I can take there? um my One of my best friends from college, Jeremy Redburn, had been had already left IBM. And he was working at Endeca. And he introduced me to Jason Purcell, who who was taking over the product management organization. And Jason gave me a job as a product manager, even though like i like I literally had never heard of a product management job before. It wasn’t something I was exposed to at IBM in the research group. and And DECA sort of hired people just based on pure intellectual bandwidth. how that And that was it. And if you could pass like the IQ test, you could get a job there. And so they hired just absolutely set of brilliant people. And so I passed the IQ test for the for the product management job. So even though I didn’t know what a PM was,

Rob Gonzalez: They gave me a shot and that was my my first step out of there and then ever since that I’ve just moved closer and closer to the customer um you know, I from there I went into product marketing and then and In the early days, it’s all spies kind of doing everything, you know, the sales engineering the sales marketing a whole bit I always wanted to be one.

Alejandro Cremades: so So double clicking on that, how did you how did you get closer and closer then to becoming a founder? And what was that moment where you guys said, let’s let’s go.

Rob Gonzalez: I mean in in the 90s The startups were so awesome and I was so worried that I was born too late to do anything. and I remember in 99, Jeremy and I were were freshmen and at Williams and we would get white Russians and we would drink them and in my dorm room and we would talk about starting a company one day. you know And so it’s something that I always wanted to do. I just wasn’t sure how the hell to do it. you know How do you get money to do it? Starting starting a company back in the early 2000s was extremely expensive because you had to buy all the hardware yourself. and you know Cloud computing wasn’t the thing yet, really. And and so i wasn’t I didn’t know the path from wanting to start a company ah of the type that I was interested in, a software tech company, to actually doing it.

Rob Gonzalez: um And so for me, it was something that was always in my mind, and it was mostly a timing issue. And what allowed for it to happen was – and DECA had an and an exit. They were purchased by Oracle for $1.1 billion in 2011. um Cloud computing had sort of come along, so it made it a lot cheaper to to start companies. Jeremy was freeing up from Endeka. Jason was freeing up from Endeka. I mean, he he had to stay on as part of the transition team for a while. And so it sort of came together where where all of us were we free. We had the time. we Jeremy and I wanted to do it for years and that the setting was right to make a swing at it.

Alejandro Cremades: so Then let’s talk about Salsify. You guys ended up going at it with Salsify and making it happen. you know tremendous Tremendous journey that you guys say you know embarked on you know because now it’s close to 12 years now, which is unbelievable. right now For the people that are listening to get it, what ended up being the business model of Salsify? How do you guys make money?

Rob Gonzalez: We’re just an enterprise software as a service company. So we we charge a typically annual, um increasingly multi-year license fee for for usage of the software. um The category that that we’ve created is called product experience management. And you can think of the product as a way to manage all your content and data related to products and then syndicate that product out into the market. So if you sell, for example, if you’re I mean, most brands are omnichannel brands. Our customers are are folks like a L’Oreal or a Coca-Cola. They sell to many different retailers. They also sell direct. um So you know you might have your own D2C commerce site powered by Shopify or Salesforce, Commerce Cloud or Commerce Tools or whatever, but you also have product detail pages on Amazon, on Walmart, on Target, on Kroger that you have to set up and and maintain and optimize. And so the system allows you to both manage all your content internally, but also get it to Amazon, get it to Walmart, get it to Target, get it to Kroger and so on.

Rob Gonzalez: um And that process exists because e-commerce has become a big thing. I mean, when we founded the company, Amazon was not even a top 10 retailer in the U.S. E-commerce revenue for most of the branded manufacturers. Like if you’re Johnson & Johnson, your 2011 e-commerce gross revenue is less than a point, right? It’s just it’s not it’s not that strategic of a business. um and And our thought was e-commerce was going to grow and become strategic. And if you’re if you’re whatever, if you’re J&J, if you’re Coke, you should care about optimizing the conversion rate and the the search engine um performance on all the big retail sites. It’s just looks the same way that there’s a Google ecosystem where people are doing search engine marketing and search engine optimization. We thought there should be a search engine opt search center marketing, search engine optimization business around Amazon, around Walmart, around Target, around Granger. right

Rob Gonzalez: And all of these websites are different. And the difference between the world of Google search engine optimization and the world of retail search on engine optimization is that with Google, you only have to optimize for one algorithm. With retail, you got to optimize for possibly hundreds of them at the same time because they are all the websites are different. And so if you had a piece of technology that could manage all the content and then play the optimization game on all these retail sites, that would be valuable. So that was that was the original insight, and that’s kind of the the context in which the business was founded.

Alejandro Cremades: So at what point do you guys say, I feel like you were turning a corner and what did that product market fit look like?

Rob Gonzalez: the first The first two years were just freaking hard, man. is There’s no two ways about it. i mean i was on My wife ah was in medical training still, and we didn’t have kids. and So I had basically full freedom to just be anywhere I needed to be at any time. So I was on the road constantly talking to anybody who would take a meeting with me to get this thing off the ground. and we got some initial sales. I mean, 3M was one of the first 10 customers we had, for example. They had a digital center of excellence team that was doing experiments and they they brought us on. And and you know so we we had some initial success, but man, growth was not not not that strong. We raised a Series A

Rob Gonzalez: in 2013, largely from folks that were in town that knew Ndeka, that considered Jason, my co-founder, who was the CEO of Salsify, considered him in particular to be just an absolutely star and vestibule person. And so we we raised an eight million Series A in 2013, despite not having that much market traction yet, um be you know basically faith in in the founding team and and faith in the maybe the direction of the market. But man, I remember having an all hands maybe six months after that and our chief architect, Joel, we still joke about it for this day. Joel raised his hand and said, man, shouldn’t we have more revenue by now? And it it was like that. It was just an absolute crime. We were working our butts off, trying to take any meeting we could, talk to everybody we could, and sales were just sluggish.

Rob Gonzalez: ah Because at that time, people just, like I said before, people did not care that much about e-commerce. The person that was managing Amazon for a you know top 100 CPG company was just some junior person in a basement somewhere that rolled into the sales organization and nobody really paid attention to what they were doing. And they didn’t really have budget to spend on software. So what changed for us? And you know I think if we had founded the company a year earlier, we would have either failed and just shuttered the thing or we would have had to pivot and try something different.

Rob Gonzalez: Now what changed for us fortuitously was around, what’s that?

Alejandro Cremades: So then… not

Rob Gonzalez: So what changed for us fortuitously was in August, September timeframe, 2014, we’re about two years into the business, Walmart and Macy’s and a couple other major retailers not coordinating with each other just on their own started issuing kind of threats to their suppliers saying if you don’t start giving us calm content to power our e-commerce experiences, we’re gonna start finding you. they They call it chargebacks in the business. ah we So if you fail to give us images for the product detail page and a product title and some description that we can use for e-commerce, we’re gonna punish you somehow. Walmart was threatening to de to to take products off the physical shelf if they didn’t have a strong e-commerce presence. Doug McMillan had just taken over there recently and he had told the Walton family, we don’t wanna be Sears.

Rob Gonzalez: You want to not be Sears? We have to take this e-commerce threat seriously. Amazon is going to make a Sears if we don’t change. and do I mean, Doug’s been incredible. well I mean, what a CEO. But ah so all of a sudden you had all these major retailers sending emails to their entire supply base saying you have to shape up. You have to be a better partner for e-commerce or else. And so what the problem that we were solving went from a thing that was Yeah, maybe someday I get the value that you’re providing, but it’s not ah not important to us right now. You know, that type of response to all of a sudden, well, crap, we have to solve this right now for Walmart or we’re gonna be in trouble. um and And from that point forward, things got dramatically easier. The market just changed overnight. Like if we if you look at 2014, we absolutely were not gonna make our number that year. Absolutely not. We we were like 25% of our sales target for the year in August.

Rob Gonzalez: and we We were screwed. And we hit the number on the year by just in the last four months of the year. that like That’s how dramatically it moved. And then we did like back in the day, 10 years ago in in venture capital, they would look at SaaS companies and there was a rule you have to triple, triple, double, double, w once you get to your first million. And that’s what we did. We did the triple, triple, double, double, double thing right afterwards. ah So yeah, i mean we we had the first two years were a grind. They were stressful. It was just stressful the whole time. It just wasn’t clicking. And then the market conditions changed overnight. And and then and then we hit that growth curve. And it was awesome.

Alejandro Cremades: So how was the capital raising effort? you know How was that experience, too? Because I mean, you guys have raised $450 million. I mean, that’s a lot of money. So how has been you know the going through all those cycles, too?

Rob Gonzalez: So the the first cycle, the thing that we did really well the first cycle is ah Because of Indeca, we can we’re in we’re in Boston. like Boston’s a ah great tech town, but in terms of the, you compare it to Silicon Valley in terms of the amount of venture that that’s invested, it’s it’s a lot smaller, right? And you kind of, at some point, it’s possible to know most of the VCs that are in the town. It’s just a smaller smaller set of people. So because of Endeka, we could get meetings with all of them, and we met with all of them early, um way before we wanted to raise, wait way before we even started the company, just to tell them about our idea and get feedback and and all that type of stuff. um this is We were all first-time founders, so we were we we weren’t doing the, like, ask for feedback,

Rob Gonzalez: But really, I want to make money. you know I want to raise money from you someday. We were like legit just looking for advice. um And we built relationships with them. And so when we got time to raise our Series A, like I said, we didn’t have that much traction yet in the market. But we had multiple competing term sheets. And and it was it was based on having built those relationships and having built a conviction within a bunch of venture capitalists that the market that we were going after was a good market. It was going to be it was going to be a big market. It was going to support an IPO scale business. um So a the A round worked well. I mean, it was a it was a pretty easy round. The the B round, we got it in our heads.

Rob Gonzalez: that we wanted to get some of the West Coast money. We thought it would be useful to expand our network. The Boston network, you kind of like I said, it’s ah it’s a smaller community. um you’re go You’re always gonna be maybe one, two degrees of freedom from anyone that you might wanna meet. And Silicon Valley just looked like this giant ecosystem. And we didn’t really know, we didn’t have any connection out there. And we thought it would be useful to have somebody on our board that had deeper connections to Silicon Valley. Now, our A-Round was co-led by Michael Scott and David Scott. And they had invested in demand wear and Acquia and HubSpot. i mean So there were they were known as really good investors out of the Boston area. And based on their reputations, we could get meetings with pretty much the the who’s who of the VC firms in Silicon Valley. So I remember going out there with Jason.

Rob Gonzalez: um And we got like ah media training to do the presentation right. We got this guy who was a producer at CBS for 30 years to you know coach us up on on presenting our story and doing it live in front of in front of ah the people that you’re cold pitching, which is not something that we had ever done. And so we were we were buttoned up, man. We were psyched. We went out there. We went up and down Sand Hill Road. This is back when they were still on Sand Hill Road. And I mean, it was just, it was like a chilly reception. um People were really friendly, but they nobody really wanted to get in on a B round company. There was one one guy who was, I think it was just really funny, he was saying, man, I get the business that you’re trying to build, but it just seems hard. You’ve got this, it seems really grindy. You’ve got this network component to it. So it’s not just that you’ve got to sell

Rob Gonzalez: Coca Cola, but you also have to partner with Walmart. So you’ve got it just it just seems like a hard business. I don’t like hard businesses. And also that red eye flight to Boston sucks. I don’t want to get on that flight for board meetings. it’s This is long before zoom and everything like that. So we got a lot of receptions like that. And Ultimately, the B round was was led by Mike Terrell from Venrock. And and he’s you know he’s out of Boston. And Mike was a board observer for Endeka. So he knew us. And it was a great you know it was a great round for us. And i you know Venrock is its going to do extremely well out of that investment. um But yeah the yeah, the West Coast, is just we you know we were cold pitching. And man, it just did not work at all. And then so from that point forward, for CDEF,

Rob Gonzalez: We said, look, we’re goingnna we are going to keep a list of the next round of investment, even if the next round of investment might be two years out. We’ll we’ll get to know them all now so that when the time it comes to take the investment, we’re not cold pitching. We’re just talking to people who already know us and already know the story and know the value proposition. and and are you know can ah almost opt in or out right at the start of the the fundraising round. And that served us really well. So CDEF were were’re relatively um painless rounds from that perspective because we we had already gotten to know everybody for years. And that’s i mean that’s the biggest advice I tell everyone when they ask me about fundraising. It’s like, in my experience, the cold pitching did not work. I think it’s very hard.

Rob Gonzalez: um I think the the more that you get to know the VCs and they get to know you earlier, um you build conviction on the the team and the market in a way that’s just very hard to do and in one pitch.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously, you know, like with the capital racing, you know, come say a bit on the vision. So if you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of Salsify is fully realized, what does that world look like?

Rob Gonzalez: um it’s Well, Salsify, there’s there’s there’s there’s two aspects to it ah that are part of the vision. One is, it is the system of record for product within every single major manufacturer. So, you you know, if if you’re a business, you’ve got an yeah ERP system, right? and and that’s you know Contains all your financial data you should also have a product system if you’re a manufacturer and the product is your lifeblood you should have a core system that is a number one two or three in your tech stack important system that is your product system of record and

Rob Gonzalez: that’s what ah That’s what the company would look like. It would look like the sales force for product across the across the globe. um The other aspect is that there’s a network component to this, which is ah how do you make sure that the great data that a manufacturer is creating that ah that are in their systems shows up in front of the buyer, shows up in front of the shopper at the time of purchase. And that requires, for example, a relationship with a Walmart, a relationship with a Care4, Woolworth, so whoever, to be able to transmit data across the supply chain and ultimately have it show up on the website. And and I would like that network to be you know global and all encompassing of all the major retailers. And so Salsify becomes, in effect, like the system of record for product and for for product exchange and product training for the globe. um And yeah we’re well on our path there, but I mean i think there’s still

Rob Gonzalez: a significant amount of of world and markets and companies yet yet for us to work with.

Alejandro Cremades: Absolutely. so Rob, we’re talking here about the future, but I want to talk about the past. If you could go back in time, let’s say you go back to 2012 where you guys are thinking about you know a world where you guys would start something of your own, and and right before you know giving the notices and getting going, you know you have the opportunity of having a chat with your younger selves, maybe you know you took that younger self to, you know what is it, quinc Quincy Market or one one of those places there in in in Boston?

Rob Gonzalez: Yeah, maybe.

Alejandro Cremades: And they and and you’re able to sit down and and give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a business. What will what will that be and and why, given what you know now?

Rob Gonzalez: Oh, man, this is this is a tough question, because if I had given myself the advice, like the the things that I learned along the way, what I have with the company have have been have become what it had become, you know what I mean? Like I’ll tell you like a lesson that I’ve learned is to Relax a lot more be be a lot more careful about my the usage of my time ah be a lot more intentional about what tasks I’m doing versus versus not doing, and so on and so forth. And so just so much, like a lot more time management and a lot more space for just thought. In the early days, there was zero space, zero time management, it was just 100% activity, pedal against the ground 100% of the time.

Rob Gonzalez: And for for like the first whole bunch of years, five, six years, it was just all and all consuming for me in a way that probably wasn’t healthy. And you know so i it’s like, I would like to tell myself, um don’t do that. you know’ did see Take a little more time. You don’t have to be in as much of a rush. There’s a lot that you can’t control about this market. um you know It’s like I was saying, the first two years were just absolute grinds. I was pushing with 100% of my energy and it wasn’t moving. And it wasn’t until the um market opened up that that thing started moving. So it’s like not every activity, not every bit of effort is going to yield the results you want. And if you can be clear about what matters and what doesn’t matter and create some space, you’re just going to be happier throughout the whole journey. That would be the thing that I would tell myself. But I you know i don’t know that I would have listened to it. yeah see As a younger man, I don’t think i don’t think i the way I was built, just looking back in time, I don’t think I would have listened to that advice.

Rob Gonzalez: um At all right I think that if I had tried to calm down and cut things off on my calendar I just would have found something else to push on instead and So anyway that that would be the piece of advice, but I don’t think it would stick I

Alejandro Cremades: Well, that’s so profound, so profound. so So I guess that for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say, hi, Rob, what is the best way for them to do so?

Rob Gonzalez: i Like i’m I’m not on the socials really at all. I will check LinkedIn in mails if they’ve got like a message attached to them. Um, that’s probably the best place to find me, but yeah, I’m not, I’m not on, uh, Twitter or X or any, any of those things. I kind of, it’s not my jam.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, hey, Rob, thank you so much for being on The Deal Maker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Rob Gonzalez: Well, thanks so much for having me.

*****

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