Escaped Belarus, Built $100M ARR Business | PandaDoc, Mikita Mikado

EO31:09Added Aug 31, 2026

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  1. 00:00belus is a totalitarian state I wanted to be free the guy worked in it advised
  2. 00:05me if you get that job you will be free you can get out of belus you won't be dependent on rules of the country where
  3. 00:11your parents are where your relatives are and and you were looking to get free so that worked totally work everything
  4. 00:17is working out I'm so happy in my life but that changed dramatically with Revolution B we had a raid in our office
  5. 00:23government took four people hostage how did I navigate that so you recently crossed 100 million of AR how did that
  6. 00:30feel when you notice that actually happening there's a brand value of the 100 million brand value of becoming a
  7. 00:37unicorn company yeah you feel good but my name is Taye I'm a partner at
  8. 00:44altto ventures we are very excited to have Makita here with us today such a pleasure to have you here and to hear
  9. 00:50your story so thank you for being here thank you Tay maybe just a quick introduction of yourself and Pad do my
  10. 00:56name is mik Mikado I'm the CEO and co-founder of Pand benad do helps dozens
  11. 01:02of thousands of companies to streamline their work with contract quotes proposals forms get those documents sent
  12. 01:08to customers signed electronically hundreds of thousands of people that use our product Makita tell us the story of
  13. 01:16starting padon it wasn't even called pandadoc in the beginning when was it what were your observations why did you
  14. 01:22decide to start the company pandadoc is a step function of web design business
  15. 01:27I've run Landing in America some thing like oh my God it's been such a long time 22 years ago it started as very
  16. 01:35simple tool to address an internal need transformed into something bigger as we learned along the way so let's just
  17. 01:41start with the very early days actually even before the 22-year Journey of panda do you're from Eastern Europe where were
  18. 01:49you born what was your upbringing like I was born and raised in bellarus which is a small country between Poland and
  19. 01:55Russia I always wanted to have an opportunity to using my passion energy
  20. 02:01to try to build something Belarus is a totalitarian state I want it to be free
  21. 02:07I wanted to be able to unleash my energy maybe my creativity at the age of 19 I
  22. 02:14got an opportunity to enroll into a student Exchange program and I came to
  23. 02:19us to flip burgers at Han airport that was the first place where I landed to do
  24. 02:25variety of random jobs I also learned to design and build website that was my
  25. 02:30first small business in America that small business helped to pay for college
  26. 02:35here in the US it also funded with later became our first software service company and then kedu wow so much unpack
  27. 02:42there you said you wanted to be free was that something that was unique in your
  28. 02:48yearning that even your friends or your families notice where they were like H Makita is a little different than most
  29. 02:54people in bellarus or was that a common sentiment in your community I think most teenagers just want to be free so
  30. 03:01therefore it's not unique maybe what was unique and different is timeline of circumstances that happen in my life the
  31. 03:08people that I met along the way that helped me to believe that sort of the sky is the limit anything is possible so
  32. 03:14I wouldn't say there's something way different in my character there are likely certain things that help me to
  33. 03:20make the move give me that energy give me that to leave at anything's possible but there's also a lot of luck and a lot
  34. 03:26of circumstances LED my path the way it yeah were some of those examples let's
  35. 03:31say when I was 15 years old for a long time I've been I've been getting really sick and my mom decided to send me to
  36. 03:39Crimea so that I can get exposed to the Sun and hopefully not be sick anymore a
  37. 03:45guy who was her colleague he was an intern at the place where she worked was actually going to Crimea she asked
  38. 03:52whether I can tag along the guy worked in it it was his first job he was an intern he over the course of the month
  39. 04:00being there in Crimea became my role model I loved computers my entire childhood he pursued me to learn to
  40. 04:05coach try to become software engineer the pitch that worked with me at the time was like if you get that job you
  41. 04:12will be free you can go anywhere and you'll be in demand and you can get a job anywhere in the world you can get
  42. 04:17out of bellus you won't be dependent on rules of the country who your parents are or who your relatives are and and
  43. 04:24you were looking to get free I was looking to get free so that worked that totally worked how old was this person
  44. 04:29he was 19 at that time maybe 20 at that time something like that I was 15 turning 16 we went to Crimea did you
  45. 04:36live together with them yes we were roommates most importantly like I've seen a role model who was just like a
  46. 04:43few years ahead of me was already able to pay his own bills and travel and be
  47. 04:48free that's what I was looking for so that was one Turning Point yeah why was he going there oh just to have a good
  48. 04:53time vacation vacation for it was was total happen stance yeah then I think the next Turning Point point when I got
  49. 05:01a US Visa and was able to come here for summer it was a mind-blowing experience
  50. 05:06which is a wonderful program that allowed a lot of Eastern European kids to come to America work for summer and
  51. 05:13see what America is all about maybe some of the propaganda I've seen on like belus and TV it just has shown a
  52. 05:20different side of America not Hollywood but hardworking and Earnest down to
  53. 05:25earth the side of it that I really really liked do you remember how you heard of the program yes it was a big deal in Belarus like
  54. 05:32all friends of my friends who I thought are really cool they all either wanted to get into the program or have gone
  55. 05:38through the program but yeah a lot of kids participated a lot of people went to us so yeah I've seen how big America
  56. 05:45is compared to Belarus how much opportunity is here the second pivotal meeting at the time for me was meeting
  57. 05:53my first landlord in America this Japanese guy he rented his house to
  58. 05:58exchange two three students per room we were all cramped in that place but it was wonderful time 14 16 hours a day but
  59. 06:04somehow we also found time to see the US the place where we work and have a good time he was the first guy who said look
  60. 06:11if you somehow stay in this country you will be very successful you will become a millionaire at the time it all felt
  61. 06:17like a bit of a BS cuz I was flipping burgers and cleaning toilets and I was making
  62. 06:23$725 an hour his whole rationale was like as long as you work hard as hard as
  63. 06:29you do you will be successful in this country he just kept repeating and repeating and repeating and at some
  64. 06:35point I started believing it I think that was the second the second kind of big pivot and he was saying this to
  65. 06:42everybody or just to you in a side conversation to all the exchange
  66. 06:47students that did work H 14 16 hours a day got it so he saw something in some
  67. 06:53of the folks there who are like working really hard maybe he was able to relate
  68. 06:59you grow up on a farm he worked really hard growing up maybe there was something else but yeah there were a few
  69. 07:04folks whom he kept repeating this to who he helped I remember there were many many times when he had someone got sick
  70. 07:11he took us to a pharmacy or he drove us to work but he was helping here and there and yeah that was the only support
  71. 07:18system we had coming here so that was for a full summer yeah that was the first summer and then the second summer
  72. 07:23I came with a goal to transition from an exchange student to a student through
  73. 07:28the summer I made me enough money to pay for a community college it was $3,500 and I stayed I went to school onah in
  74. 07:36Hawaii okay so this is back in Hawaii I was back in Hawaii I studied for about a year I learned to actually speak English
  75. 07:43versus just read and then I started building website I connected with a few of my former classmates from Belarus we
  76. 07:50built little software products we put them online and people started buying
  77. 07:55those little things at that point I thought okay we buil five or 10 of them what if we build hundreds of them I pack
  78. 08:02my things move back to bellus so you go back to belus you have this initial idea that was kind of like a side project but
  79. 08:08it was working do you remember like how many sales you made or how many products you had like what was the scale of that
  80. 08:15quote unquote business that gave you the light bubb of oh this could maybe work it's a very small business the first
  81. 08:21little Adon we built that was back in Hawaii cost was 10 bucks $9.99 to be per
  82. 08:27genius marketers we sold d thousands of copies of this thing but the peculiar thing for us at the time was that we
  83. 08:34didn't have to do anything for this thing to sell and generate Revenue prior
  84. 08:40to that I built websites it was a service I was paid on an hourly basis therefore in order to earn money I had
  85. 08:46to put in the time now we built something and it just sold it crazy was
  86. 08:52unbelievable yeah today we live in this app economy software economy this is not a novice type of thing but for a kid
  87. 08:59from bellarus that doesn't really know much about business that was a mindblowing expl we sold thousands of
  88. 09:06those copies of the software then we built another thing and another thing that was like okay I'm getting a passive
  89. 09:12income of $5,000 a month maybe $10,000 a month that was more than enough to fly
  90. 09:18back to belus rante a studio sleep in that studio and wake up make my bed and
  91. 09:24then transform it into an office which was frequented by my former thean classmate who we partnered with to build
  92. 09:31more of those little software pieces little addons we were employing some like 35 people and the business was
  93. 09:38generating $700,000 per year which again is not much for the us but it was a lot of
  94. 09:45money back Ben in Belarus why I decide to go back to belus to do this rather than stay in Oahu talent I would be able
  95. 09:53to hire engineers in us to do this for like $220,000 a year those is too expensive so you rationally thought it
  96. 09:59was better to go back to bellarus did you have any like personal reasons that you wanted to go back to your home
  97. 10:04country at that time primary reason was I didn't see a path towards building a software business I had no idea how the
  98. 10:10like this whole Adventure ecosystem operates and works I didn't know Venture funds exist so in order to build a
  99. 10:18software company that sell online which is amazing yeah I thought I
  100. 10:24have to go back try to hire my friends that's what I did wow what was the best
  101. 10:29selling or the most used app in that initial software like what was the actual software supposed to do I can
  102. 10:35tell you what the first thing did yeah was the first one it was an extension for webcon management system exported
  103. 10:41data what I mean by webcon management system imagine something that sits behind a website and then updates
  104. 10:47content y y they just didn't build something that was needed by a lot of
  105. 10:53other web designers or user we created a little extension little adult it exported data into CSV format the idea
  106. 11:01was on the surface it was not something incredibly smart kind of like Plumbing with that CMS system then we created a
  107. 11:07bunch of like designs for it so that you can install a new design into your website then we created a bunch of
  108. 11:14little addons that integrate things like Twitter that just came out or Facebook
  109. 11:20that at the time just came out and yada y yada we didn't really have an overnight success or like brilliant idea
  110. 11:26little software product that got us rich fast everything was like a little step function little stair so there's not
  111. 11:33much to Brock about you know it's just big boring business so you're back in bellarus 700k Revenue per year 35 people
  112. 11:40life is pretty good oh yeah life was wonderful and what year was this we started this business in 2007 we
  113. 11:47operated it for 3 and A2 years so that's through the financial crisis anything that happened there we service very low
  114. 11:54end of the market with very cheap product although we did have Microsoft as a client wow we got lucky with tell
  115. 12:00us about that somebody within Microsoft bought one of those little extensions wanted a customization they came to us I
  116. 12:07tried my best to present ourselves something bigger that we really were we were a 15 people two-bedroom apartment
  117. 12:14turned into an office that's what it was if they knew that they' never do any business with us yeah we powered part of
  118. 12:22microsoft.com did they also pay $9.99 a month we build them maybe $10,000 wow so 2010 you have Microsoft
  119. 12:30as a client 700k 35 people and then what happened whenever vendors of that con
  120. 12:35management system that would built for changed something without thinking things through our software broke our
  121. 12:42extensions broke clients thought it's our fault so we were getting PS in the
  122. 12:48middle of the night whenever that happened that just started to become at least once in a couple of months we had
  123. 12:54that search we had to wake up try to fix things at the time there was a Blog by
  124. 13:00one of the pioneers of software as a service company called 37 signals which built software that was Standalone and
  125. 13:07had a credit card swipe form and my co-founder was like oh my God it would be so wonderful not to be dependent on
  126. 13:14anyone just be dependent on ourselves so that whenever our stuff goes down it's on US versus it's because of someone
  127. 13:21else that never happened because you know we're hosting AWS now and at the time that was a good enough idea and we
  128. 13:28wanted to build tool pool where user can swipe their credit card use software
  129. 13:33online and we get paid that sounded like a dream again we had no idea that
  130. 13:39software as a service is going to explode we didn't think we're going to be able to raise money at any point in
  131. 13:45the future we had no idea we're going to this little thing is going to progress into padoc is today but we decided to
  132. 13:51pursue that path of Independence we got really really lucky so there's this
  133. 13:57existing business though so how did did you balance this new initiative with was already generating oh poor we hired a
  134. 14:04CEO who's a former client from a highly profitable business within a year became a highly unprofitable with a lot of
  135. 14:11internal turmoil and conflict at some point we were bleeding cast this first business and then we were bleeding cash
  136. 14:18in what later became pad do it was a really stressful time the original team
  137. 14:23in this first business which consisted of our friends former classmates like folks that we were in trenches with they
  138. 14:30were Fed Up the new management our decision to kind of step aside and start this new thing they put an ultimatum in
  139. 14:37front of us saying like look if you guys are going to keep the new management you're not going to fix this thing we're
  140. 14:43out when a company is like 35 employees and your core team like five seven people exits then the company's done we
  141. 14:51ask like okayy do you know how to fix it they said yes we do we asked whether they want to run it they said yes we do
  142. 14:57we asked whether they want to buy it they said we have money to buy it and we asked what if you were to make that
  143. 15:02money over the course of next however many years we settled on a price of $40,000 for that business wow which is
  144. 15:08not much but it was bleeding cash and those were our friends and they turned it around and turned this company into
  145. 15:15successful operation with at this point more than 100 employees so it's still going it's still going yeah it has a
  146. 15:20different name but it is still going this like founding team who we worked with at the time has done really well
  147. 15:26for themselves we're still friends yeah the story had a happy ending so you
  148. 15:31decide to start P roller effectively sold or hand it off the original business to your other colleague tell us
  149. 15:38about origin of that idea like what did you see in the market why that specific problem we had a few ideas running
  150. 15:45actually in parallel me and my co-founder and I got to mention you asked me what were the pivotal Moment In
  151. 15:50the Journey I think pivotal moment was actually starting to work with my co-founder we are very different people
  152. 15:57but I got really lucky meeting this guy we met back in University in bellarus
  153. 16:03played in the same band he was a drummer I was base over the Journey of going to
  154. 16:09us and coming down he was brightest of all my friends not just one of those very smart Engineers but also a very
  155. 16:15empathetic person very down to earth and very leveled very balanced the third pivotal moment was actually meeting him
  156. 16:23and persuading him to go into business with me he had a great career at a large company I was able to convince him to to
  157. 16:31go into starting a company with me so he wasn't involved in the first he was oh he was he started the first company oh
  158. 16:37okay so he was already involved he was part of the 35 yeah the two of you took the lead of hey we got to try this new
  159. 16:43thing we were looking at a bunch of different ideas some of the ideas were my ideas some of the ideas were his
  160. 16:49ideas there were a few things we were trying to like tickle with quot troller which later became Panda do was among
  161. 16:55all probably the most feasible to execute it just made them all sense I'm on everything we we Tred to pursue we
  162. 17:02tried to build Airbnb for Eastern Europe Airbnb I want to say it was at the time
  163. 17:08was launching here okay it was a really tough business we tried to build a scheduling system for small businesses
  164. 17:15like brick and mortar businesses it was a good business but Michaela didn't like the code base there and he just trashed
  165. 17:21it was trying to do a project management system and I trashed that one because at
  166. 17:26the time there were just too many other options felt it's a red ocean type of market and we shouldn't do that and then
  167. 17:31there was a summer I had to go to the US he had to stay in bellus and and hold a fortress D got him into sales because he
  168. 17:39needed to build sales proposals and he hated how much time that process take originally qu troller was his idea and
  169. 17:46later I translated into pandadoc we expanded it Beyond sales proposals into all kinds of standard bureaucratic
  170. 17:53document that we can automate that idea kind of just kept at it what was the existing process that he and most people
  171. 17:59in this field took take a Boer plate agreement copy paste back and forth forever and then send it out never
  172. 18:05knowing whether it gets open the recipient really cares and really spends time on that on that document that was
  173. 18:11the process that preceded creation of quad roller and some of the pains that we experienced in that sales process we
  174. 18:18Tred to Sol so it was really built for his own use case and then there must have been a moment where you and he were
  175. 18:23like we should productize this or sell this to others we were looking for something to productize from the get
  176. 18:30therefore we've been sort of looking inwards at problems that existed in our business at the time this was one of the
  177. 18:36problems and we were building it as a product and The Way We Were building it is it's the wrong way to do things we
  178. 18:43know everything we're going to build it they're going to come and they'll pay us a lot of money that was wrong we we spend countless hours arguing about the
  179. 18:51colors of the buttons or the where this tab goes or whatever some nonsense I
  180. 18:58remember spending all of our money draining all of our savings to launch this thing then see how people that come
  181. 19:06to the appication end up paying that was Soul wrecking but it helped us to learn that we know nothing about like the the
  182. 19:14market the problem the pain points have to check our egos go talk to the market
  183. 19:20go talk to customers tell them their ideas and their pains and then their thoughts I think that first failure was
  184. 19:26in this particular product was very impactful very helpful towards building the the bigger Vision way it was set up
  185. 19:32was similar to your prior version where people could just come in sign up download get access to it and just start
  186. 19:37using with the credit cards it was first just a free tool and we thought okay the moment we're going to attach billing to
  187. 19:43it people are going to pay us that was not the case we had okay some like 3,000 premium users only six ended up paying
  188. 19:51some like 9 or 18 bucks a month which considering the money we spent to build
  189. 19:56this thing was was nothing how are they even finding out about this though like the 3000 do you remember how they even
  190. 20:02came myod of different techniques that were the result of the natural anxiety I
  191. 20:07had at the time Su I was in a constant fear and I was
  192. 20:13trying to run different experiments and get the word out there was this uh targeted to the Bellis Community or was
  193. 20:20it Global from day one it was Global from the day one in fact we were building a tool for sales proposals it
  194. 20:25wasn't applicable to belus Market in any way we didn't build it in native language it was English from the day w
  195. 20:32got it and so no real funding yet right you were self-funding it at that point I didn't know that funding that it exists
  196. 20:40I only later learned that it exists weend kind of a Meetup that we randomly
  197. 20:46read about online and we decided to show up oh where was it it was in bellarus it was in men I remember that a bunch of
  198. 20:53people told us that what we're working on is DS um but there were people called
  199. 20:59investors at this thing and I was like oh wow that's how things could work but
  200. 21:05it's been at least a year between that and our first financing when was that our first financing happened 11 and 1/2
  201. 21:12years ago do you remember the moment you decided that you should raise I presume there was some inklings of the idea from
  202. 21:18meetups like that but then from a business standpoint you probably wanted to get to a certain point before tapping
  203. 21:24that opportunity we needed the money we on a Ramen diet for sure I've been trying to fundraise for at least a year
  204. 21:32we're talking like hundreds of conversations hundreds of leads hundreds of investors dozens of trips to here or
  205. 21:40there because B doesn't have any Venture scene it all kind of came together I had
  206. 21:45a baby on the way I really wanted my daughter to have a passport of a free
  207. 21:51country so I really wanted to make a move here I really wanted to be able to
  208. 21:57start learning the Bay Area and growing the business here the business was on a CP to hit break even so all of this
  209. 22:04happened sort of at the same time but first I made a move I had to sell everything in valo so that the baby can
  210. 22:10be born here it was very stressful like short period of time but there was a happy ending eight investors chipped in
  211. 22:16a little bit which amounted to $650,000 which at the time I thought they're crazy you can't even touch it
  212. 22:25some piece of software a bunch of kids in a third world country put together it's somewhere out there in the cloud it
  213. 22:30can break it can be hacked so many things can go wrong why would they do this I didn't misrepresent anything but
  214. 22:36you tell some facts but then in the back of your mind my mind was still not
  215. 22:42really exposed to everything that's possible the world of software in
  216. 22:47Silicon Valley I was still a belarusan kid that didn't know much so 650k do you
  217. 22:53remember the pre-money post money I do remember the post money what was it valuation cap it was 3 and half million
  218. 22:59do you remember how big the company was at that time both from a p&l financial standpoint as well as Personnel wise we
  219. 23:05were making 20 grand a month we were growing fast and we were a team of I
  220. 23:10want to say 10 people at the time maybe seven people at the time but definitely less than 20 got it all in bellus still
  221. 23:17somewhere outside of barus those were remote contractor types that were with the company so it seems like you already
  222. 23:23knew that you wanted to build a global company building business in bellus is is I don't think it's feasible in the
  223. 23:31software or Hightech sphere B is kind of like Estonia or Israel internal Market
  224. 23:37is Tiny there's so much bureaucracy and so much corruption there was a lot of talent but there's not much Market
  225. 23:43therefore if you want to build a software business you have to do something globally so you had that and
  226. 23:48then from a employee standpoint there was some concentration in belus but you already employing people from outside
  227. 23:55how did you manage that because that's a very intentional decision to have a remote Workforce even at that stage of a
  228. 24:02company well we didn't have money to rent an office didn't have a know how to
  229. 24:07run a payroll again didn't have money and brand to recruit very tough Talent
  230. 24:12so we had to be hacky and figure out how do we find good people that for whatever
  231. 24:18reason ended up being in place where can't get a full-time job at a great
  232. 24:24software company employing full-time and we found them wow so you moved to San Francisco where's your co-founder at
  233. 24:31this time belus so he stayed yeah is he still there he moved 2 years after me
  234. 24:36okay so he followed suit so you both come to San Francisco and then share with us the journey from there so what
  235. 24:42is the quote roller journey and then when does the panda do name come into play started our first office was
  236. 24:50townhouse I rent it in s Francisco okay pretty much the same as like the way we
  237. 24:55started our affer business in bellaro during the night that's where we flap during the day that was where we worked
  238. 25:01our first sales guy was trying to pursue customers that that called in that it's
  239. 25:07not the baby crying on the background it's something oh cuz you had a baby yeah it that was the case the baby was
  240. 25:14crying in the background and then we were sitting in the living room trying to be the m h or write some code then
  241. 25:20that progressed into a small office in the middle of nowhere then it progressed
  242. 25:25into a small office San Francisco one of those live work Apartments townhouse
  243. 25:30then that progressed to a tiny office on cnie Street then AG Gro so you're
  244. 25:36starting to have some center of gravity in San Francisco was that intentional you were hiring here and you have a
  245. 25:42separate team in bellus and you wanted this to be the center I read a lot of dech crunch and um they said that's
  246. 25:48where software companies in retrospective I think that was another good decision because it put me into
  247. 25:55environment where I was able to learn so much so quickly from so many people that
  248. 26:03had experience that I didn't have or had a Kno how that never exposed to it was
  249. 26:09so much easier to surround myself with people smarter than I am here in the Bay Area compared to Belarus I stayed here
  250. 26:16however we kept hiring people all around the United States we had American living
  251. 26:22in Europe who worked for us we try to scramble and figure out all kinds of like hacky Solutions towards Talent as
  252. 26:29you're scaling you have a global team and you've had some very interesting and tricky situations to navigate Wars are
  253. 26:36involved tell us about some of those big struggles or challenges that you faced
  254. 26:41over the years I think the first struggle is what is I'm supposed to do
  255. 26:46in my role it was rough trying to hire people here in America it was rough trying to lead people I made so many
  256. 26:53mistakes if I was to go back I would do a lot of things differently what is one thing you would do differently the
  257. 26:58biggest mistake you probably made I micromanaged so many times yeah you know
  258. 27:05what I'd leave you with this too um I think lack of patience is a lot of
  259. 27:10mistakes a lot of challenges came from maybe at times some Bor headedness I
  260. 27:15know like how to do better Clos mindness there's a lot I got to learn and I have to learn while doing while keeping an
  261. 27:22open mind that helped quite a bit there are some challenges outside of our domain our control there was covid which
  262. 27:29happened to to everyone but then during Co there was a revolution in Belarus we
  263. 27:34sided with the Democratic side of it a video that I posted in response to
  264. 27:41violence at the government induced on people got way more Abus than I expected
  265. 27:47we had a raid in our office a way to retaliate the government took four people hostage the last one was released
  266. 27:54after 11 months in prison that was a really really hard time we had to exit
  267. 27:59bellus we survived and the team there has shown so much resilience how many
  268. 28:05people in Bel at the time at the time we had 220 people in B wow what are you
  269. 28:10actually doing to get them out we had to employ lobbyist here in the US that was hard that was a process it was really
  270. 28:17tough so they leave where did they go Ukraine we scale operations out of Ukraine and then the war in Ukraine
  271. 28:23breaks out and for another year and a half we become a migration company which enables people to migrate to Poland
  272. 28:31Portugal then in belus and Ukraine completely changed our pnl we had to do a lot of catchup it's been a tough year
  273. 28:37and a half but we migrated to over 300 people out of sight of dictators out of
  274. 28:43sight of the war how do you balance like perspectives on life you're running a software company it's growing well
  275. 28:49things are going well and you have all these people hundreds of employees contributing to that and you're like very grateful for their contributions
  276. 28:55and then you're also faced with this situation where you're the leader of hundreds of people who are going through a war actually in this case two separate
  277. 29:02types of Wars right how do you navigate that it feels like a very tricky in the
  278. 29:07summer of 2020 at the time I was here in the US and I was for the first time visiting Yellowstone and as I walk into
  279. 29:14a lake into the lake with kids I'm thinking oh my God life is so wonderful
  280. 29:20I am so lucky everything is working out I'm so happy in my life and that's changed dramatically with Revolution B
  281. 29:28about 2 weeks after that I started doing therapy but it was a pretty rough time yes one last question so you recently
  282. 29:34crossed 100 million of AR how did that feel when you noticed that actually happening it did feel good it was not
  283. 29:41something that kind of blew my mind pan back is a very repeatable and predictable business so we knew when
  284. 29:48we're going to hit that Milestone there's a brand value of this like 100 million AR there's a brand value of the
  285. 29:54Unicorn company but it's a you know it's a short dopamin head yeah you feel good but for a much longer period of time is
  286. 30:02having a positive impact on people that surround me I be that customers or customers try your product and you use
  287. 30:09it and they love it and they say thank you that has a more impact Milestones Milestones are Milestones they feel good
  288. 30:15what's your next big milestone that you're looking forward to I millions of people to use our product and I love it
  289. 30:20that's what I really really want we've been at it for like 14 years at this point with this business and we've built
  290. 30:26so much I want more people to use it to like it there is a recent research we've done on like how many trees we save
  291. 30:33because but door paper list with pad do and they get to sign electronically or notorized documents electronically we
  292. 30:39discover there like dozens of thousands of Acres of forest that are saved uh thanks to that that's cool you know
  293. 30:45imagine 10 Xing that that's wonderful but what it feels even better is millions of people using the thing and
  294. 30:52benefiting from the thing and enjoying the product that's great thank you Makita really appreciate it