Travis Hedge - Co-founder and CRO of Vouch: Startup Secrets - Conquering Adversity and Mastering Product-Market Fit

Travis Hedge  00:00

I remember it was like week four post-launch, or something—week four or five. We hadn't sold a single policy, and I just remember that existential feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, right? But you find out what you're made of. You find out what your team is made of in those moments.

Callan Harrington  00:35

You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out the key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Travis Hedge. Travis is the co-founder and CRO of Vouch. Vouch is the insurance company for the technology industry. Since 2019, Vouch has underwritten billions in risk on behalf of over 4,000 clients, backed by A-rated reinsurers and $165 million from Ribbit Capital, YC, Redpoint, and others. Previously, Travis helped Nationwide Insurance launch Nationwide Ventures before joining Silicon Valley Bank's Venture Capital Group. There, he raised over $1 billion from institutional investors to invest in FinTech and digital health startups, including Root Insurance, Ladder Life, and Earnin. Travis is an open book, and he gave so many good examples throughout the episode in a couple of areas that I thought were really interesting.  One, how to execute a community-led growth strategy, including how to host your own group dinners. This is an area that I'm personally excited about and found myself taking notes when going back and listening to the episode. He also talked about the adversity they experienced at Vouch throughout different moments in time. Some of those examples include launching the company when COVID hit and when Silicon Valley Bank came into trouble. I have a ton of respect for how they handled the SVB situation, and Travis walked us through that, which I thought was excellent. That would typically be my favorite part of the conversation, but I loved talking about how Travis has bridged Ohio and Silicon Valley. I've known Travis for a while, and he's a very modest guy, but I will tell you this: he has had a really big impact on the startup community in Ohio, and I have personally heard this from many people within the community. I never knew the backstory on how he made this happen, and he walked us through that, and I thought it was super interesting. So with that, let's get to the show. Travis, welcome to the show, man.

Travis Hedge  02:55

Callan, it’s awesome to be here. Thanks for having me.

Callan Harrington  02:57

I'm really excited. We've known each other since college, and you've had an amazing career, which is why I want to start it out. Tell us a little bit about the business that you started in college.

Travis Hedge  03:08

Yeah, so I did pull the plug on this before you and I met. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had time for both of those lives. It actually started in high school. I was really fortunate when I was in high school to start working full-time for the U.S. congressman in my district, and, you know, working with him and some candidates for bigger offices—I’ll leave the names out of it—they had asked me to start building a youth coalition. And very quickly, I realized, by talking to users as one does, that there was just a bigger opportunity. Also, my own personal passions played into this. I pitched them on building out a platform that gamifies politics for young people, rewarding them with points for knocking doors, making phone calls. But the key was that it was for candidates on both sides of the aisle. I increasingly felt that young people cared less about the party and more about the ideas they were passionate about. So the idea was to say, “Hey, if you care about entrepreneurship and innovation like I did, or if others care about social issues or whatever, find the candidates that care most about your cause. Go activate for them—make phone calls, knock doors—and then you get rewarded with face time with your favorite candidate, or what have you.” I made three big mistakes. Thing number one: classic startup tropes—I tried to build all the features on day one, like a video interview feature and all that, which was ridiculous. Thing number two: my idea of building a team was just going around the dorm my freshman year and saying, “Hey, who wants to help?”—with no thought behind that. And thing number three was the bipartisan platform. The politicians that were in the fold on this were very supportive of that approach. These are people that I still really respect to this day, and I don’t really respect many politicians, but they said, “Hey, let me connect you with my money people.” Their money people were like, “Yeah, but you’re only going to support one party, right?” And I was like, “Uh, no, that’s kind of the whole point.”

Callan Harrington  05:07

We’re about following ideas, just mostly our ideas.

Travis Hedge  05:12

Yeah, I always say I started a bipartisan political platform, and you can imagine how that worked out.

Callan Harrington  05:16

Yeah, it worked out just how we kind of thought it would. But I love it. So walk us through now—when you graduated, what did you do right after that? Where did your early career start out?

Travis Hedge  05:26

Well, post that experience, I decided I wanted to get out of politics. I had seen how ugly it can be and how the sausage is made, and I realized that people who really cared about ideas and actually having an impact needed to go, frankly, build influence in other ways outside of politics. This was at the time when Mike Bloomberg was kind of the mayor of New York, and I looked at that as a great example to follow. So I knew that I needed to go get a lot more experience to be a good entrepreneur someday. I studied finance and ops, which were my two weaknesses. In hindsight, I don’t think I’d give anyone the advice to study their weaknesses in college as their majors. So I didn’t love studying in college, but I ended up doing a co-op at Unilever, and then I got an internship at Nationwide working on this M&A transaction they were doing at the time. I ended up in the rotational program at Nationwide after school. I was lucky and unlucky that my first rotation was in internal audit. I graduated off-cycle in the winter, and so I got into the internal audit rotation, which gave me some good foundational skills, but I was also bored out of my mind. So I started pitching. As part of this rotation, you got to pitch the next manager to bring you into their team. The private equity team had the most coveted rotation, typically only for MBAs. So I got in front of this guy, walked him through my 30-slide pitch deck on why Nationwide should have a ventures arm. Of the 30 execs I talked to, all but one said, “Okay, get the hell out of here, kid.” But this guy, David Verbance, said, “I’ve been looking for someone like you to work with. Let’s go.” And it really gave me the springboard I needed. He allowed me to build out the pitch to their CIO about why they should allocate part of their balance sheet to venture. Here I was thinking I had this brilliant idea, like a lot of other people were thinking about this, but I was fortunate to get to work on it. We ended up making our first investment as an LP into SVB Capital, the venture arm of Silicon Valley Bank. We were going up and down Sand Hill Road. I was having the time of my life, loving this trip. We were in a meeting with SVB, and they were walking us through everything. As we were walking out, my boss said, “They’ve got an analyst opening on their team. I know that’s what you want to do, so you should throw your hat in the ring.” First of all, having a mentor or someone like that who will take a go and really go out of their way to help you out is huge. It wasn’t entirely altruistic because I got to be his eyes and ears on the ground in the Valley for the next five years. So I ended up joining the SVB Capital team as an analyst, just responsible for crunching numbers and making pitch decks. The first six months on the job, I was flailing. The number crunching—I could do it, but I didn’t love it. So I was sitting there telling them, “Hey guys, I’m really passionate about AR/VR and all this cool stuff going on. Can I go source some deals?” They were like, “Explicitly, your job is not to source deals. Stay behind the desk.”

Callan Harrington  08:32

One of the things I’m curious about is, was it more that you wanted to be in this venture-type space, or was it that you wanted to be where this was happening, in San Francisco? Or both?

Travis Hedge  08:46

It’s a little bit of both. Two things informed that for me. One was my parents had a small business here in Columbus—a benefits and payroll agency for other small businesses—and the dinner table was the boardroom growing up. My brothers and I all have a deep passion for entrepreneurship. Our dad never let a day go by without reminding us how lucky we were to have all our opportunities in life. I was the first one in my family to graduate from college, and that’s probably why I was interested in politics—to pay it forward to other people. I felt this real obligation. My dad, in 1998, was talking about getting his business on the internet, and for an insurance agent, he was pretty forward-thinking at the time. So it was always something in the DNA and conversation in our family. And actually, a lot of it is due to my now wife and some friends I made in college. She was in a program at Miami of Ohio where her last semester, she got to spend it in San Francisco working for a startup—a startup that now today is actually a Vouch client, very full circle. So I got to go spend some time with her out there. I also spent some time with my good friend Andy Sparks, who was living out there—another Ohio State guy. I actually pitched him on that trip, on my brand coin startup idea. This was like in 2013, when Bitcoin was becoming a thing. In hindsight, it was way too early for that idea. But anyway...

Callan Harrington  10:05

Have you considered bipartisan politics?

Travis Hedge  10:09

You can see how I went from big, crazy stuff to, you know what, I know insurance, and everybody needs it, so let’s do that. So to answer your question more directly, I needed to be there because that’s where the things I care about were coming to life. But from day one in that job, I was known as the “Ohio guy,” and I was very passionate about helping to be that bridge between the things happening in Ohio and the talent and capital in Silicon Valley that could help make it happen.

Callan Harrington  10:41

Yeah, I think that’s come up on the show, and of course, it’s come up around the community that you’ve made a lot of those connections. You’ve connected a lot of the Silicon Valley investors and such to the companies and startups coming here. I guess the question I’m pretty curious about is, do you think you could have done that without being in San Francisco—not so much the giving back, but making the connections? Do you think you could have had the success you’ve had, at the pace you’ve had, if you didn’t move your location?

Travis Hedge  11:11

No. I think the world has changed in the last 10 to 15 years, but that network density is a very real thing. Just the people I got to meet by chance, through the normal course of life—they’ve changed my life. And I think that talent has gotten more dispersed, and those opportunities are a lot more available to entrepreneurs in Columbus today. But there’s this mentality that I’ve been working to defeat for the last 10 years, which is, for good reason, a lot of folks here in Columbus are very proud. But there’s also this mentality of, “Well, no one else is any better than us; we can build it ourselves.” And I’ve seen people turn away resources from other parts of the country and the world because it wasn’t built here. And I think that’s a very constrained mentality. Great things only happen because there’s rare talent and rare people all over the place. We owe it to ourselves, and to this community, to broaden that reach and broaden our network. It’s not just, “If it wasn’t built here, it doesn’t matter.” I think that’s a small way to think about things.

Callan Harrington  12:11

I 100% agree with that. I’ve even seen this with companies, whether it’s here or anywhere—this could be in San Francisco, New York, doesn’t really matter where—who say, “We have to have them here, in the office.” Of course, during COVID, everybody was like, “Yeah, no, we’ve got a remote plan and everything else.” But if you want to compete—and I mean this for San Francisco—if you want to get good salespeople, it’s going to be tough. It’s going to be a tough market. It doesn’t mean there aren’t really good salespeople in San Francisco; it’s just going to be tough to recruit them at the cost you need to be able to get them to be effective, especially if you’re an early-stage company. If you limit yourself just to your geo-location, it’s going to be a challenge. Some parts of the business may be just fine, right? You’ve got engineers all day in San Francisco; of course, you’ll be fine in that part. But in other parts, whether it’s Ohio, San Francisco—I mean, I totally agree with that. You have to use everything at your disposal. Why put a self-limitation on it?

Travis Hedge  13:07

Well, and I’m not saying we have this totally figured out, because I don’t think anybody does the location strategy, but that does inform a little bit of how we built it out at Vouch. I really believe that in-person collaboration matters. In-person relationships matter, both for sales and internally. There’s a study I saw where trust in family members goes down by 30% if you haven’t seen them in 30 days—family. So if that’s true for family, I can only imagine what it looks like in a work context. So I do think it’s really important that we’ve got people all over the country. Our biggest office is in Chicago, followed by San Francisco, followed by New York, and then actually Columbus. We have 15 engineers here in Columbus. We actually just brought our entire engineering team to Columbus for their off-site, and that was a good time. But the point is, I think being able to tap into global networks and those resources anywhere, but then being really intentional about getting those people together in person on a regular basis, is the balance that’s worked for us.

Callan Harrington  14:05

I personally believe it’s going to be 10 times more important. One of the things I think is going to happen—and I’ll speak from a go-to-market and sales perspective—is AI is going to create so much content, so many emails, so many messages. Automation is already there; it’s just going to get on a whole other level. It almost feels like you’re not going to trust anything unless you talk with someone face to face. I was saying the exact opposite just a few years ago, so I think it’s a really interesting insight. I’d love to get that study from you on the 30 days—that’s really interesting. So let’s fast forward. I know that it’s really cool how Nationwide invested in SVB Capital and you moved over there. So tell us about founding Vouch. How did that come together? What brought that about, and what did it look like?

Travis Hedge  14:53

When I joined SVB Capital, I told them from day one, “Hey, I think I want to go start a business again someday, or be part of building a company.” About six months in, I realized, “Okay, I need to do things a little differently here if I want this to work.” Thing number one: I got lucky to become a little bit of the person that entrepreneurs from Ohio would come to see when they were in town raising money. Partly to raise money, but partly just to go out for dinner and drinks and be that sounding board. So I built a lot of really good relationships, and that led to a couple of the first investments I was able to source directly, which ended up being some of our most successful bets in the portfolio at the time. So I say that to say it’s what gave me the credibility to even have these conversations. So actually, that Ohio bridge thing was a big step for me. Thing number two: I thought, “Hey, as cool as those drones, AR/VR, and all that stuff I’m looking at is, this insurance thing is still really broken.” So the first thing I did was I called the smartest person I knew in insurance, which was Alex Timm, who I worked with at Nationwide. And he was like, “Actually, I just left last week. Drive Capital just gave me $5 million to go start this new company that would go on to become Root.” I’ll come back to that in a second. So I started this InsurTech practice at SVB with a couple of other folks. We started hosting these quarterly dinners of investors, entrepreneurs, and corporates coming together. At the time, it was called the insurance technology dinner, before InsurTech was a phrase. That allowed me to start building that awareness, brand, and credibility in this space. I ended up spending a lot of time with Alex every time I came back to Columbus for Olive board meetings at the time. When he was thinking about raising his Series B, I had already started introducing him to the people I thought were the best investors in the category. He was like, “I think I might raise the Series B in the next 12 months.” I asked him, “Who’s your favorite of the people we’ve talked to so far?” He said, “Nick Shalek at Ribbit Capital.” I thought, great. Nick and I had been doing these dinners together, so I met up with him, pitched him on the idea of doing this Root deal together. We came out to Columbus, and we ended up co-leading the Series B for Root. I spent the next couple of years talking about other ideas we wanted to pursue. Early on in my time at SVB, my dad’s business had a cyber threat that almost destroyed their business. Luckily, they got through it, and they’re doing great, but it got me thinking a lot about how entrepreneurs—even my dad, who was an insurance guy—didn’t necessarily have the right cyber coverage. He had one IT guy doing security for laptops, but the businesses I was investing in were competing on a global scale. They had the same risks and exposures as Fortune 500 companies in a lot of ways, but a fraction of the resources to manage those risks. I started talking to some friends and asked how they handled insurance and cyber protection. They sent me their 15-page PDFs with the most irrelevant questions, which nobody knows how to read. It was ridiculous. So I had two ideas at the time. One was what would go on to become Vouch, thinking about not just providing the coverage but providing risk protection directly to companies, like the SVB of insurance—what would that look like? But I was also very passionate about mental health and started thinking about what kind of mental health therapies could be developed through virtual and augmented reality. I remember I pulled Sean Lane aside from Olive at one point and told him I was thinking about this. He said, “The fact that you’re not convinced on one of these two ideas enough yet means you need to stay doing what you’re doing.” It was really good advice. I also had that conversation the same week I went to my partners at the fund and said, “Hey guys, I think I want to go start this company.” It was the insurance company that I was focused on with them. They were like, “You know what? Great. I know you want to do that, but why don’t you take a week off and think about what it would take for you to be here for the next 10 years?” So I went up to my aunt’s lake house. She had a spin studio and a brewery on a lake in Wisconsin. So I just worked out, drank beer, and thought about life for a week. I came back with this whole framework of like, “Okay, guys, I think I want to do this. You’re giving me an awesome opportunity, but I want to try to make this Silicon Valley Bank for insurance idea happen.” So we tried to make it happen internally. We didn’t have the tech resources to make it happen internally, so they said, “Why don’t you find a company to go partner with and invest in?” Every time I talked to Nick at Ribbit, I asked if he had seen this company yet, and he said, “No, I think we might just incubate it.” Everyone wanted to build a digital broker, but that wasn’t solving the core problem. Fast forward a couple of years, and finally, Nick and Ribbit had really moved the ball forward and said, “Yeah, we want to incubate this. Travis, do you know anyone who’s really good with startups and insurance that could run it?” I said, “Let me think about that.” I came back to him, and after talking to another mutual friend of ours, he said, “Dude, this is the thing you’ve been talking about for years. What are you doing? This is you. Call him.”

Callan Harrington  20:18

Why didn’t you say that right out of the gate? What prevented you from saying that right out of the gate?

Travis Hedge  20:22

I think maybe a little bit of it was that Nick and Ribbit are these giants in the FinTech world, and I didn’t think that he could possibly be thinking of me in that way. It took a little bit of encouragement from a friend to think of myself in that light. I don’t know why, but that’s just—I thought, “Oh, clearly, he wants someone more important than me,” and I kind of put that on the shelf. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. A week later, I called him and said, “Dude, I can’t stop thinking about this. I would love to do this.”

Callan Harrington  20:54

How heavy was that phone when you picked it up before making that call?

Travis Hedge  20:59

Yeah, it was heavy. We’re an LP in his fund; we sit on boards together. It felt like a risky thing. In hindsight, I wish I’d done it sooner.

Callan Harrington  21:07

How did the call go?

Travis Hedge  21:07

Great. He was like, “Yeah, let’s talk about it.” He introduced me to my co-founder, Sam, who they had invested in at Sam’s last company. Sam and I spent the next few weeks doing the co-founder dating thing, and ultimately, it ended up being a three-way partnership: Sam, myself, Ribbit, and SVB as our anchor investors and partners to get this thing off the ground.

Callan Harrington  21:30

What did those conversations look like? What made you decide that this was the right fit? I mean, I’m sure a lot of people go through this, trying to find a good co-founder. What needed to be there for you?

Travis Hedge  21:42

This goes back to one of those lessons I learned with the bipartisan political thing in college, where I thought, “Oh my gosh, I have to have someone who complements my strengths and weaknesses.” On paper, it’s like Sam and I bring some similar things to the table. At first, I thought, “Oh, this needs to be a technical co-founder; I’m the business guy.” But in practice, as I got to know Sam, I found out he and I are the opposite in a lot of ways. He’s the experienced, pragmatic one who will make sure that we are building a durable business in a thoughtful way. I’m the one who’s going to push us to do some crazy stuff and think big. That pairing has worked really well for us.

Callan Harrington  22:21

Vouch has had a lot of success, both in fundraising and, more importantly, in financial success. What was the early spark that led to that?

Travis Hedge  22:34

Thing number one: we’re very lucky to buy a product that people already need. We weren’t creating a new category or a new motion asking buyers to change behaviors. We were dramatically improving the things they were already doing. In the early days, I was going up and down Utah—our first launch market. I was camped out there for six months, knocking on doors in co-working spaces and doing all those things, not sure if we’d have product-market fit. I remember it was like week four post-launch, or something—week four or five—and we hadn’t sold a single policy. I just remember that existential feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, right? But you find out what you’re made of. You find out what your team is made of in those moments. We went back and challenged ourselves, and I’ll tell you, it was when we launched in California. We made a couple of tweaks to the product and the positioning, and it just started taking off. Then two months later, COVID happened, and it was like, pause everything—let’s see what’s going on here. Two weeks after that, demand was even higher than ever before because people had seen how this weird edge case can happen, and insurance all of a sudden made a lot more sense. From there, it was like any product-market fit story—it’s a little bit of effort and a little bit of luck, being in the right place, and it all kind of came together.

Callan Harrington  23:56

One of the things I think Vouch has done a phenomenal job of is your community-led growth strategy. Can you talk about that a little bit? Where did that start? How did you do that? Walk us through that.

Travis Hedge  24:09

It actually started when I was at SVB. We could probably have a whole other conversation on SVB, but back in the late 90s, they started this venture advisory board, which I think was version two. I think the first one started in the late 80s, early 90s, where they took the very best general partners at the very best firms and said, “We’re going to have a dinner once a quarter of the most important investors in Silicon Valley.” So the heads of Sequoia, NEA, Kleiner Perkins—all there. I was really lucky, in 2016 or so, 2015, something like that, they asked me to build out the next version for my generation. I got to go to each of the top firms and say, “Hey, who do you want to nominate for this?” and get that group together. For a group of people who are insanely competitive with each other, very ambitious, it was creating this vulnerable space where we could just be really honest with each other. It was really powerful.

Callan Harrington  25:14

How did you set the stage for that? A lot of these people don’t want to share, and a lot of times they’re at each other’s throats. This could be any group. What did you do to make sure this was going to be a conversation where people were going to be very real, very honest, very vulnerable?

Travis Hedge  25:30

Thing number one: start by being very vulnerable myself. You have to set that tone upfront. I think setting those expectations like, “Hey, nothing we talk about here leaves this room.” By the end of it, people were talking about the offers they were getting from other firms and other really personal stuff. It was cool to see that happen. Matter of fact, not keeping that group going after I left SVB is one of my biggest regrets. I wish I had. But I think once you set that expectation and give people the chance, you’d be shocked at how many people who seem guarded end up seeking those opportunities to open up and learn from each other.

Callan Harrington  26:18

I love that. I’ve seen similar myself, and I think it’s fantastic. One question I want to touch on a little bit—you mentioned you’ve had to deal with some adversity. You dealt with adversity with COVID, and then you were looped into the SVB situation by the sake of partnership. But one of the things I thought was phenomenal was how you guys responded to that. Can you walk us through that a little bit?

Travis Hedge  26:47

Yeah, I think one thing about the community-led strategy that I want to make sure we hit on real quick is that one of our theses about this business is that the number one sign of preventable risk is the quality of management and leadership. We all know that the journey of leading a startup can be really lonely. So whether you’re a founder or an operator, I almost think about it as how do we help give people that MBA for building their company? You do that by getting peers together to learn from each other. It’s not just a business development strategy for us; it ties to the risk management component of the business, too. Now, there are a couple of leaps to get there, but that’s part of the approach for us. As it relates to the SVB situation—gosh, I was sitting there feeding my three-week-old son at the time, and I see these texts start rolling in about SVB. I thought, “I’m sure it’ll be fine.” No, definitely not. We were fortunate to have some backup bank accounts elsewhere and very quickly realized, “Okay, we’ll be fine as a business.” But we immediately shifted gears to focus on our clients. At least a third of our client base was banking with SVB. We were lucky that we already had some legal partnerships and resources in place. We were able to call those folks and say, “Hey, could we expand our offering here and offer up a free legal hotline to our clients?” Great. We put all these resources together, sent the email out, got a great response, and clients took advantage of it. We did a similar thing around COVID. When COVID happened, we sent a whole care package and playbook on how to deal with it to our clients. That’s the best part of my job. We work with awesome companies, people who are building amazing things, and we get to play a small role in helping them do that. That’s what makes it rewarding.

Callan Harrington  28:32

Just for our listeners who may not know, specifically, there was a competitor that essentially said, “Hey, Vouch is tied to SVB. They’ve taken investment from SVB, so if you feel nervous or at risk, come over to us.” At the exact same time that this email was going out—and I don’t have the specifics on when these were sent—you guys sent out an email that said, “Here are personal phone numbers and who to call. Here’s where you can get information. Respond back,” and it was just kind of a tale of two different cities there.

Travis Hedge  29:04

We had sent that email the weekend everything was going down, when no one knew what was going to happen with SVB. Two weeks later, someone forwarded me an email and said, “Hey, did you know your competitor is sending this around?” I thought for a couple of days about what to do, and ultimately just said, “Let’s let it speak for itself.” So I did do a little LinkedIn post: “What you get from Vouch vs. what you see from them.” It was well received. I wasn’t going to bring that up, but I appreciate you flagging it.

Callan Harrington  29:29

I think it kind of gets back to those core values, right? I don’t know the core values of the other company, so I’m not necessarily trying to throw stones, but it goes back to what you’re saying: who are these people we’re building this with from the beginning? What are we trying to build, and can we stick to that when our backs are against the wall? I thought it was a great example of that. So it was pretty cool to see. Last question I have for you—actually, second to last question—where are you going with this? What does the future of Vouch look like long term?

Travis Hedge  29:59

My aspiration is to build a financial institution that’s going to be here for decades to come. If you look back, it’s our clients who are consistently moving the world forward, creating new risks, and changing the world. Insurance doesn’t always keep up with that. If you look back since the industrial revolution, we’ve had to build financial institutions to accommodate these changes, and institutions like Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan have played a really important role over the last 100 years. I think our opportunity is to understand innovation risk better than anybody else and move faster at addressing it. In doing so, I think we can create an institution that helps the world keep up with the pace of change and volatility that our clients are often driving. That’s the big-picture aspiration. Ultimately, the goal is to get the company to about a billion dollars in premium over the next few years. In doing so, that means nailing the core early-stage component of our business, which is on track and doing great. Then, we continue to grow and go-to-market. We serve FinTech, health and life sciences, AI companies—you name it. We’ve kind of divided the business up into these verticals, and we serve companies from Series B through IPO. That’s the big focus for the next couple of years: continuing to scale with our companies through IPO and beyond. From there, we’ll see how we expand the platform into other categories, geographies, and products. There’s a lot of opportunity, but right now, we’re very focused on that core mission.

Callan Harrington  31:27

Last question: if you could have a conversation with your younger self—age totally up to you—what would that conversation be? What advice would you give them?

Travis Hedge  31:36

Yeah, you know, I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, and it hasn’t been easy, but I feel very fortunate to be where I am today, and I wouldn’t change a thing. What I’d tell myself is to enjoy the ride. I’ve had way too many sleepless nights worrying about stuff that, in hindsight, didn’t really matter. I’ve had to develop habits to be happier and healthier in the journey, and I kind of wish I’d had those habits 10 years ago. But really, it’s just to enjoy the ride—that’s what I’d tell myself.

Callan Harrington  32:09

I love that. Something I’ve had to remind myself is to celebrate those small wins, right? Those small wins compound into big wins, so I think that’s excellent advice. Travis, this has been great, man. Thanks for coming on.

Travis Hedge  32:20

tCallan, thanks for having me, man. I’ll see you at dinner.

Callan Harrington  32:26

I hope you enjoyed Travis and I's conversation. Travis is a community builder in so many different ways. If you want to learn more about Travis, you can find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you can find me on LinkedIn to let me know, and if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and I'll see you next week.