Simple Mills

“I mean, we ended up raising our first round about four months later. And when they, when we raised the first round, I actually asked that half of it get paid back because it was just, it's so stressful having your family's money on the line like that.”

“To give you a sense, in our first, call it eight years of business, I think we raised less than ten million dollars.”

“We maintained something like a 96% fill rate when competition was happy to be at 80.”

“It's also it's become a lot easier to get funded as a consumer business in the past 10 years than it was then but at the time, just, everyone just wants the tech unicorn, and so, like, why am I gonna invest in a baking mix company?”

“All of our initial investors, and in fact for a long time like our first three rounds were all angel investors.”

“My parents end up they were really upset about this because they've been a long time family friend, and I come home and tell them this, and they decide to mortgage their house and give me 200,000 dollars.”

“This is a time where nothing in the grocery store is made out of almond flour. I think it had just shown up as an ingredient on shelves”

“Getting into Whole Foods at the time took, Four months just to get into that one store.”

“I ended up selling my car and maxing out all my credit cards and getting, spending all my savings just pretty much on working capital.”