EXPERIENCE 129 | Making Leave Not Suck at Work with Jen Henderson, Founder and CEO of Tilt

Jen Henderson is the founder and c e o of Tilt, a software as a service platform and team that provide companies with professional, consistent, and compliant leave management. As with many founding stories, Jen's mission developed from her own experience, a fast rising manager with Starbucks and later Noodles and company. She had promotions and trajectories twice interrupted by the birth of her children and decided to do something about the vagaries she experienced when she shared the news of her expanding family. Tilt has been on a fantastic run of growth in recent years, growing from a core team of four and a dozen clients in early 2020 to a team of over 80 and over 200 clients at current time. They're approaching a fifth round of funding, have a much improved platform to build upon and expectations of continued growth. Jen's journey is an inspiring one. Tilt mixes, empathy and technology in a way that helps companies of all sizes excel at making leave not suck. So please enjoy as I did my conversation with Jen Henderson. Welcome back to the Loco Experience Podcast. I'm joined today by Jen Henderson, the founder and c e o at Tilt. Excited to be here. Thanks for coming. Yeah. Uh, what's Tilt? Tell us, tell me about it. Tilt is an acronym, I'll start off there. So it stands for Talent in Leave Technology. We are a B two B HR Tech SaaS platform. Said simply we sell to organizations who are looking to do leave of absence differently. Okay. So if you think about parental leave, probably the most common. Sure. Um, but there's all sorts of other varieties of leave, military disability, caregiver, mental wellness. Um, so we created a technology platform that. Systematizes leave, but most importantly brings the human back to leave. Yeah. Yeah. So that people can focus on life. It reminds me, uh, back, gosh, I guess like 2005 or so. Mm-hmm. I, I was moving to a different bank in Colorado Springs. Yep. And before I got there, like eight months out, I had planned a one month trip to Greece and Italy. Nice. And the president of the bank that was down there, he was kind of a jerk anyway, but yeah. He basically said, you know, I've always kind of thought if you could do without somebody for a month, you could do without'em. Oof. I was like, well, thank you very much. Yikes. But, uh, like having, actually, you, you, you supported actually having policies mm-hmm. Especially for those. Mm-hmm. Unusual or maybe more usual, like we're having a child. Mm-hmm. Can we get some extra time or whatever. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we could talk about the, um, bias, both in both implicit and explicit that exists out there around leave of absence, like your story. Um, that's not a rarity, unfortunately. Um, in regards to how people perceive leave of absence, you know, all the way from parental leave is a three month vacation. That's probably one of my favorites. Um, to those who don't recognize mental wellness as something that's legitimate and absolutely needs time away, um, to everything in between. So we are working really intentionally on, again, systemically creating a space for relief so that there's no, we had one of our first customers tell us, unless I win the manager jackpot, it doesn't matter what the policy of this company is. My manager decides similar to your experience, if they perceive my time away as a lack of, um, Connected engagement. Exactly. Or whatever, or commitment to the organization or whatever it might be. So our belief is that if you create one way that everyone goes through a leave of absence, you remove a lot of opportunity for managers and coworkers and others to insert their own bias experience. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. So it's a, it's kind of a justice for all Yeah. Kind of thing by having a policy and having a system by which we Yeah. Do this and make decisions and you know, is the paternity leave exactly the same as the maternity leave? Or for obvious reasons, do we think moms need a little more time or whatever, right. Yeah. Yeah. But it's all about the values and the decisions of that employer Exactly. To implement it. You just help them make it. Systematized exactly. Each one of our 241, I think I checked today, uh, customers that we support. So companies have variations on their leave policies and we welcome that and we are just the vehicle to facilitate it. So do you go direct to the customers or do you work through like HR consultancies or frac, you know, things like that to help be part of their toolkit? Or is it both? We sell directly to the customer. Okay. The way that we get to the customer varies. Yeah. So sometimes it's a referral through an hr, um, consultancy or benefit broker. We love our benefit brokers. Oh, right. But we interact directly with the HR teams in the organizations themselves. And then is it like a monthly subscription based on how many employees kind of thing? Is that the, the monetization? Pretty much. Yeah. We sell what's called a pepm. It's popular in the world of hr, which is price per employee per month. Sure. Uh, and they sign annual contracts. Typically we have multi-year contracts as well. Mm-hmm. But, um, we get one year right out of the gate. Fair enough. Yeah. And then, um, Like how much is that? Depends, I suppose, on how complicated it's gonna be. Well, no, not really. I mean, our pricing's on our website. Okay. Yeah. We're really transparent about that. We strike somewhere between four and$6 price per employee per month. Okay. So most of our customers are around$25,000 a year. Oh, that's not a terrible amount. Yeah. Mostly it's automated. It's just the software does all the work. You just gotta find salespeople to go sling it around and, and yeah. Operations people. What's the servicing model look like? Like, yeah. Is it plug and play? Not really. So what's unique about us is that leaves are fundamentally there for human beings and humans are messy. So we haven't set out to, um, allow the technology to do everything. So what I mean by that is, The best, most heartbreaking ex example is as long as I'm the founder and c e o of Tilt, we will not allow someone who loses a baby to enter our technology and press a button. When you go from a parental leave to a bereavement leave, you need a beating heart to interact with, and that's where our team, our, we call'em leave success managers, that's where they step in and they're able to say, all right, you were available for these benefits. Now this has transitioned to a bereavement. Here's now what's available to you. Mm-hmm. Both internally with your organization. We also have periphery support as well, so there's a very, um, real case for technology to be removed and human services to come in and surround that individual. Sure. Are you a data gatherer too? Like Oh yeah. Are you starting to develop like best practices and like Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. The data that we ingest is kind somewhat mind blowing and we're still trying to figure out how we can provide that data for good back to society. As an example, Colorado was the first state in the union to pass paid leave legislation by popular vote, which we're very proud of to be a Colorado based company. But in that instance, we were very much at our early days and now we could provide data to the state of Colorado that really would help craft that P M F M L program. Mm. And there's only 13 states in the union that have done this. Yeah. So there's a lot more states that can use our data Yeah. To continue to build better paid leave programs.'cause they've all done it different. Yeah. That's uh, like. How, how do you feel about our Paid, paid leave program and if they had your data, what would you change about it? How would you make it better? Well, it hasn't come out yet, so Oh, okay. Next year is when you'll start to see the family is what it's called here in Colorado. Yeah, I remember. Yeah. Family leave program. So even little guys like me with three employees. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I knew I, I saw it on the radar. I was like, I gotta have to do something. We just, I confessed, we have kind of a non leave, like my employees have probably both had more than 20 days off this year. Yeah. For family travels and one got married and one took a road trip and yeah. I kind of, I. I'm a little looser than I should be. Uh, but it's also, you know, if you're contributing to the team really well and you have yourself set up to be gone for yeah. Two weeks mm-hmm. Then mm-hmm. We're cool. You know, you're part of my team, you know? Totally. We're gonna take care of you. Totally. But now we thought, you know what, if somebody got really sick or a car accident and I took'em out for four months. Yeah. Am I still the same? You know, and I don't really have a policy, so I can't really Yeah. Say what I could do. Most of these, the states that have ruled this out, have an opportunity to show that you're better than, so as long as there's. Um, especially for, uh, small Main street, uh, businesses, if you can demonstrate that you take care of your employees at, if not better than what the family policy requires, then you have an opt-out capability. Can you sketch out for me, even just thinking or, or listeners even, do you know that what the family policy is gonna be or not enough to be oof like an expert? Probably enough to be dangerous, not enough to be giving advice in the legal capacity. Fair. My c o o in my ear who is an attorney would say, don't say that. Um, but we are certainly a resource and certainly for our fellow, for Collins team, um, or community members that we were a phone call away. We have brilliant attorneys in our company that can help. And you probably are a information hub far before you monetize with a lot of your clients. We. Absolutely operate from a share information, share openly. We don't gate anything. We just think that that's bullshit. And I don't know if they're spraying rules, but No, there's none. We, uh, fuck that kind of rule. Yeah. We, we give it first. We just want leave. Truly, the, the origin story of Tilt was my really hard leave experience, and so we just cra crossed over our 10000th leave supported in our history as an organization. Wow. Cool. That's our North Star. Like we just wanna help people, whether you, you get help. By being a paying client or not leave can be absolutely catastrophic to people. Mm-hmm. And we just wanna start to unwind that reality actually. Interesting. Yeah. Um, tell me about Tilt Today a little bit. Like what's your job, what's your c o o do? Mm-hmm. How many people? You already mentioned you've got 260 customers, but, uh, and by the way, what, what we got acquainted like through some biz West event or something? Probably. What was that? I don't remember. It's been, we don't really know each other for the listener's behalf. We're barely acquainted. Yeah. I met your son just now, which is awesome. Yeah. Uh, we've probably bumped in many, many times, but love my friends over at Bizz West, but Yes. In passing and different events and things. Mm-hmm. I've never obviously had a chance to sit down with you for two hours Yeah. And drink coffee and water. Laura Collins is too small in a great way, um, to not have bumped in many times. We are 82 full-time, fully remote distributed employees in the software business. I guess software in a lot of sales probably. No, we only have six sales individuals. Okay, cool. That's a lot bigger than I might have imagined. It's very expensive job. Do you wanna high five? Have that big of a company? Yeah, I know they all wanna get paid every month. They do. They do. You probably have a generous leave program. Yes, it's true. We do. There's a lot of babies out there in to land. Um, we are certainly, our biggest hub is Colorado, so we have the most amount of tilts based here. Myself and my c o O sit in Fort Collins. Okay. Um, a large contingency sits in Denver. My C t o for example, I'm a VP of engineering, et cetera. Um, so we have a lot of filters represented in the state, but we were, we were remote before it was cool. We came out of the earth by necessity at that time when it was still sweat equity days. I was here. My c o O was in US Virgin Islands because her husband worked on an oil rig. Yeah. And my third employee, who's now a product manager, but at that time she did everything. She was r and d. That's school. Your first two employees are still with you? Oh yeah. She was in Australia finishing her master's degree. So we were in all the time zones and all the zooms. Again, this was before Covid o Sure. So, uh, we've continued that build as we've scaled and we fully believe that the best talent sits anywhere and can do the job anywhere. Yeah. And, um, we'll, we'll always be remote as long as I'm a C E O. So are you like 50 in Colorado and 30? No, I think we're like 20 to five. Probably two five. Okay. So a lot of remote employees really at this point. Mm-hmm. Awesome. Yeah. So, um, What do the different types of people do? It's just a lot of programmers then, and just making it better all the time. And then customer service. Mm-hmm. And sales. Mm-hmm. Mostly. And then the, the back of the house, the ops and the finance and whatnot. Yeah. Generally our two biggest teams are product and engineering. We call them dope DevOps, product and engineering. Okay. And customer success. Okay. Again, what's unique about our business model is we built. Things that don't scale to learn what needed to be, uh, written in code, basically. Mm-hmm. So in practicality, that meant we had humans helping Aleve through the determination of benefit eligibility to the payroll calculation. Mm-hmm. To um, the example I gave earlier where leaves go sideways and it comes from a parental to bereave all people were doing that first, the first version of Tilt is an, is a, a manual always. It's in my file at home. Right. It is 10 pages stapled together. It's a playbook that I sat side by side with a, a mom that was expecting here in Fort Collins and said, can we make this better? Huh. So that Oh, that's so cool. So it was kinda like training wheels. You had like a lot of people Yeah. As training wheels to make sure whatever softwares you were developing over time and stuff were taking in the right inputs and, yeah. Because code is fucking expensive. I've heard. Yeah. Really? I'm terrified. Really expensive. I would really love a loco think tank app. And you know what? Oh yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Uhhuh, I, I said that to somebody yesterday. He is like, uh, yeah, I could do that for 50 grand. It's just gonna be buggy for like, at least six months. Oh, that's pretty cheap actually. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm sure I'm a lot simpler, uh, taste than, but what's, what's actually happened in that, um, maturation of Tilt is that we cracked a code, meaning we found a problem that when Covid, so in March, 2020, we were sitting in a war room as a very small but mighty team, figuring out how we supported our less than 10 customers at that time. Wow. With legislation that was being written overnight that impacted c Ovid 19 related leaves of absence. Mm-hmm. So if you remember. We were all of a sudden as employers having to allow people to take leave of absence when they got covid. Sure. And there were requirements in terms of documentation to get the pay, all the things. So that was completely and totally a skyrocket for us. Wow. It was a moment in time that we never looked back. Yeah. Yeah. So what happened is the demand, thank God for covid, right? For just kidding. No, I'm playing silver lining. Silver lining, silver linings. That's better. But, uh, we, we got to a point where the demand on our sale, we were outselling the automation. Right. So the people needed to be added to because the product couldn't catch up. So we have our, a very large, um, Customer success team who is helping service the leads. But now what they're starting to do more than anything is inform the development team. Hmm. So they're able to say, here's what needs to be automated. Here's the logic, here's the if then statements. Um, not necessarily automating theirselves out of a job. That's a narrative. We work really hard to not create internally. Sure. But to allow the product to do what product should do. Right. Like there is so much, the best analogy I can give is it's like TurboTax for relieves. Sure. So it's compliance ridden, it's very jargon based, and it is perfect for technology Right. To say if this, then that. And that's the part we want the product to do. The brilliant humans that we have in customer success are there to be the empathy warriors. Yeah. And they can take all the data that you gather and be informed about. Oh my gosh. Like the whole, like all those stories that come out and, and Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. They can do so much so, so, so much. I feel like we. Could talk a lot more about what it is now, but like there's probably investors maybe and things like that. Yep. I feel like if we kind of flow it out chronologically it would be Yeah. More understandable for the listeners, so. Sure. Are you ready to jump in the time machine? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. You are four years old. Yeah. Where are you? Uh, Arlington Heights, Illinois. Okay. Mm-hmm. Is that a Chicago suburb? Mm-hmm. I guess Northwest Suburb. Okay. Mm-hmm. Uh, gosh. I'm trying to Naperville. I've been in Naperville. Oh yeah. And to like Oak Park and different things right there. Yeah. Yep. Sweet. Okay. So, uh, what were you doing there? You were, well, I mean, you were just living with your parents I assume, or whatever, but Yeah. Hanging in the room and what, uh, what was the environment? What was your family? Did you have siblings at four years old? We had just moved from England. Oh. I was, I was born in the uk, no doubt. Mm-hmm. So we came back across the pond at that time. Um, I have an older brother who's five years older than me, so he would've been nine. So we were re acclimating to the US Yeah. At that time, all my family are US citizens. I'm the only one that has the dual citizenship because of where I happen to be born. Yeah. Um, But your dad was a professor or something, or what was he doing in uk? No, he worked in sales for Motorola. Okay. And his biggest client was, uh, in Saudi Arabia. Okay. And then my mom was an international flight attendant for Pan Am. Wow. Back in the days of the weigh-ins and the uniforms and whole thing, what a, a. Very international, uh, place to sprout. Yeah. For you. Yep. I definitely was born with travel and my blood, um, from both my mom and my dad and then Chicago. You know, it, I don't really understand or I, I don't know why that is where we came back to. When we came back to the us they had so many choices. I had a office there, right. Is my assumption. Um, and then within the next handful of years, my parents divorced and my mom and I moved to Colorado and my dad and my brother moved to Michigan. Oh, wow. Mm-hmm. How was that like, were you close with your brother even though he was five years older or was it just like, okay, this is the way it is now, or? I don't think it was the, the, uh, years gap that made us not close. I think it was some ridiculous judge that decided that it was okay to separate siblings, really. So we are not close. You didn't really have any buy-in into the conversation or nothing like that? I was young. How, how old? Um, at that point I was eight. Yeah, seven. But he was. 12, 13. Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm. And yeah, I don't know. Yeah. It seems like an interesting Yeah. Decision. Not a, not a great decision in hindsight, but here we are, we're grownups now. He still lives in Michigan and I and But you, you have a relationship, but it's not close.'cause he just never really had the requirement to be close. Yep. Well, not contentious, not bad. Just not close. Yeah. Interesting. Um, so you had a normal Colorado growing up after that or was your mom single for a lot of your growing up years? All of'em. Uhhuh. Yep. She had to go back to work and turns out a stewardess is what it was called back in the day. Right. Um, not that many transferable skills, so she struggled. Um, so I was a latchkey kid, very, very young. And she would go off on flights and stuff? No. She entered workforce? No, she had to. Oh, gotcha. Back in those days you got fired when you became pregnant. Oh, wow. From the, uh, airline industry. So she was done flying and just found a bunch of administrative jobs and retail jobs and. We were, I was raised by a single mom and Yeah. You know, pinch pinched a lot of pennies. Yeah. Um, but she always made it work and I never felt, uh, like we were impoverished. Yeah. We just never had excess and. Why do you think she never just liked to protect you or never really found a, a fella again or was hurt by the situation too much? No. No. Not that, no. She was the driving force of the divorce. Uh, she got very comfortable being independent. Yeah. And she just really didn't want anyone to cramp her style. That's fair. And she worked her ass off, I mean, Being a single mom. She worked all the time. When we moved to Fort Collins originally we lived in Boulder when we moved to Colorado and then realized we're not rich so we can't live in Boulder. Right. Um, especially that was about the time people were realizing that in a big way. Uhhuh. Yeah. Yeah. So we came up to Fort Collins and um, she had a job in Boulder, so she would commute to Boulder. Wow. And I would be alone. Like, I would spend the night alone. I would have to make myself dinner and breakfast. And you're like 11 or nine or something? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I was raised pretty independently, kind of free range style. I was making eggs for my siblings when I was 10 years old or something. Yeah. Nine probably. Mm-hmm. But I had, you know, both parents there. It was just, yeah. Given that opportunity. So That's interesting. I probably made you strong like you are today. A lot of my independence for sure. Sprouted there. Um, and, you know, had the party occasionally when she was there. Right. Hopefully you were a little older by that time. Yeah. High school was fun. So, uh, which, uh, which high school, Rocky. And what kind of a young lady were you becoming? Were you a good student, an athlete, a sassafras? Uh, I lettered in debate if that tells you anything. Oh, yes, it does. I enjoyed debate myself. Yep. Back in the day. Yep. I loved that. Um, straight a student honor roll. Um, high achiever type. Yep. My chosen sport was actually dressage, which is a horseback riding. Oh. Um, it's what you see in the Olympics if you see equestrian events in the Olympics. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What, what's the, tell me about the difference of it or what, what does that really mean? Because I know there's different, like English riding styles and different things. Mm-hmm. What's, what's dressage, how is it defined if you'll, it's kind of the fanciest kind of English riding is how I would define it. Okay. Um, and I got into horses by blood. Really. My grandfather had horses and I always was that little girl that loved horses, which is most, but I was so determined to have my own horse that I falsified my age on my first job application to earn money to buy my own horse, which I did. And then I shoveled shit in the stalls to pay for the board and the hay and, uh, every day after school you gotta school. Yeah. That's, That's where I would go. That's awesome. Good for you. Yeah. And train. We showed, and then when I graduated high school, it was a decision. It was do I look for a sponsor and go the Olympic route with dressage or do I go to college? Wow. Wow. So elite dress, very expensive to go that route. Right. So I sold my horse and I, I went, I went on the equestrian team in college for a bit and then, yeah. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I, uh, do you horse now? You know, it's funny, my husband and I have been married 19 years and when we got married he said, I promise you'll have horses again someday. And we moved up to Livermore in the middle of the pandemic. Okay. And got five acres and two horses. Oh, yay. Yeah. Another, uh, silver lining of the pandemic. There you go. Do you love it or is it too far away? And It's far. Yeah. We love aspects of it. Um, but we really enjoy the solitude and peace and quiet and yeah. One of my good friends has a property up in Red Feather Crystal Lakes. Really? Yeah. But we've been going up there, eh? Like two, two times a month probably. Yep. And it's just nice, especially when it's 97 in Fort Collins. Yeah. Yes. To be up there. Yes. It's a good time of year right now. So what'd you, you went to college here locally at C S U or where'd you go to school? Oh, no, I flew the coop as soon as I could. Okay. I, uh, backpacked around Australia for six months until I ran outta money. Yeah. And then went to Michigan State originally. Was that your horse money? Yeah, pretty much everything I had. Um, so Michigan State, I was pre-vet and Michigan State and C S U were the two best in the country, but I just wanted to get away. Right. And then ended up coming back to C SS U and changing to communications and I got my degree here. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And I saw there was some like, uh, Starbucks and something else. Mm-hmm. You were a Yeah. A pretty rapidly ascending employee in those organizations. Mm-hmm. I forget. Mm-hmm. But tell me about your mm-hmm. Like first job. What was that? I. Oh, my first job that I falsified my age for, um, was Kenny Rogers Roasters. If you all locals remember it was on college and horse, or excuse me, college and yeah, horse juice. The Arby's building really used to be Kenny Rogers roasters. Like a coffee shop? No, no, a chicken shop. Oh, duh. It was the worst smell. Um, when I came home, my clothes. Right. You had to put your clothes in like a plastic bag. Yep. Couldn't wash it with anything else. Yeah. That was my first W two job, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but before that, my dad owned a restaurant in Michigan, so I was, um, prepping and cooking and dish washing dishes from age nine on. So you spent some time with him too in the summertime. I see. So to see him. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Um, and how about the, uh, college first job after college? Well, I ended up taking my finals early my senior year because of Starbucks. Oh. So at that point in time, they were opening. So many locations so quickly mm-hmm. That they had these management training programs that happened a set day of the month, you know, in a certain cadence. And I had gotten accepted to one, and so I needed, I went to all my professors and I said, I got accepted. I need to take my finals early. And so I did that and um, in hindsight, I spent my first 12 years professionally under the Starbucks umbrella, and it was the best learning experience I could have ever asked for. Yeah. Awesome. That brand has figured out so many things in the world of work that companies even to this day struggle with. Sure. And to put a finer point on that, it's their training and investment in the whole employee is second to none. Yeah. So things like their tuition reimbursement program, the stock options they give employees, you can get healthcare at 20 hours a week. I mean, it's just, it's second to none. That's cool. So I learned. Firsthand two things primarily with Starbucks. How you treat people matters. It matters big time. Um, but not just how managers treat people like the entire organization, how you treat people. Mm-hmm. And then the other thing is really what is coming out with Tilt, which is what does it mean to operationalize things? So the reason you get a vanilla latte in Denver, the same way you get a vanilla latte in Tokyo is because they have operationalized every single aspect of making a latte. Hmm. They have a book for everything. They have a, a job aid, a steps to success, uh, first do this, then do that. And they have created an this airtight replicatable process that allowed them to scale. Hmm. So the numbers that they have today. So I really had that front row seat to man, if you create a simple replicatable process, You are able to fly. Yeah. And that's really what Till is doing. So is it replicatable or replicable? Mm, that was a good question. Tomato. Tomato. Huh? I think it replicable. Yeah. Replicatable. I know. Niche or niche? Maybe both. Okay. That's really cool. No, and I, I, I think, uh, I believe that project Self-sufficiency, uh, Tracy actually came outta the Starbucks organization as well. We worked together. Oh, is that right? We did Break and Shields. Yep. We worked together. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Hey, Tracy, if you're listening, Hey Tracy. I've been in Rotary Club with Tracy for many years. Yeah. She's an awesome human. Yeah, she is. Mm-hmm. Um, and so any highlights, other things that really stood out to you that you learned and especially applied at Tilt from your Starbucks time? Uh, I still dip into that. Well, every day it feels like, I mean, I've. Look to Howard Schultz. Um, he's not an infallible human, but I think he has shown what it means to be an inspirational leader. Yeah. They used to say, you drink the Kool-Aid, you bleed green when you're a Starbuck ian. Yeah. And you feel that way. You absolutely feel this, uh, connective tissue to the mission. And one of the things that I'll never forget with learning about Starbucks in the very early days is that they spent more, at this time, I don't know if it's still true, but they spent more on health insurance for their employees than they did on coffee, coffee beans. And for a bright-eyed bushy-tailed 20 something professional, I looked at that and I was like, wait a minute. You're a coffee company and you spend more on the healthcare of your employees. That's fascinating. So yeah, that's like burned into my brain again as a demonstration of. How you take care of people matters. Yeah. Yeah. So that's really interesting. And then you moved to another kind of a corporate thing. I, I'm sorry, I scoped your LinkedIn when I was getting ready for you to show up here. No, I was recruited, um, to another operational role under some other umbrellas, and I've always had an operational theme to my job career. So I've led teams, developed teams, um, project managed, that's always been my jam, is people Tell me about when you, when you talk about operations Yeah. Like in those environments, in the Starbucks environments. Mm-hmm. Like what? Does that role look like on a day-to-day? Or how would you divide up your time in a, in a, a work week? Yeah. Making sure the trains run on time is the easiest way to talk about operations. Yeah. Yeah. So what needs to be in place to get the job done that you were hired to do? So it's anything from, in a, in a Starbucks situation, it's, um, our operational excellence is the term that was thrown around there a lot. So our specs, where they're supposed to be, our drinks, how they made, how they're supposed to be made, our, um, employees, and again, they call each other partners there'cause they all own a part of the company. Yeah. Um, are they greeting people how they're supposed to or the stores clean if you're overseeing 20 stores. Mm-hmm. And you're just kind of like kind of a, a excellence overseer, but also the, are you the hire of these people mm-hmm. And manager of these people generally? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. So as a district manager, is that role for a very long time and that we'd oversee anywhere from. Five to 15 stores and then regional director and your span gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Gotcha. But you've got all, all hiring, training, firing authority. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Um, and so really in a lot of ways the, like an operations in, in this environment is especially both the, like the, the, the, the spin, the mix of the people and the systems. Mm-hmm. Like keeping the systems better, give people the, the, the rights and autonomy and ability to make the system better because they're the ones with the boots on the ground. Yep. And then make sure you got the right boots on the ground and the right cheeks in the right seats. Mm-hmm. That's a good one. I'm gonna steal that cheeks in the right seats. Yeah. You haven't heard that before? I haven't, but I'm gonna steal it. Awesome. You can steal it. I just stole it from somebody. I have no idea who, so, um, I guess, are we getting close to founding Tilton, by the way? Did you like fall in love along the way? Uh, Brian's not that old yet. So you're not quite there yet? Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. My husband and I met in high school. Oh, wow. We didn't date in high school. Okay. Um, but we got married in college or shortly thereafter, so 2004. Okay. Um, while you were in Michigan or after you got back here? No, here. Yep. Graduated. We both graduated from C S U. He's a firefighter and got his degree in wildland, um, fire science. Okay. Uh, so he right now actually presently works for the state of Colorado in their wild end division after we'll come back to him, but do you wanna say hi right now? What's his name? Hi. Peter. Peter. Peter. Hi Peter. Yeah. What's happening? Yeah, he's, uh, the brilliance behind Tilt that doesn't get enough credit. Is that right? Is my husband? Yeah. Not, not a paid employee, but Influencer along the way. Every way, shape, and I wouldn't be here. Tilt would not be here without his support. Awesome. In every way. Yeah. That, you know, same thing I would say in some ways. I mean, it was my wife getting a promotion that gave us health insurance that allowed me to. Quit trying to do other things and focus on local think tank, finally. Nice, nice. So yeah. Church Jill, although we're way smaller, we got three employees. You got 82. Oh. But those partners don't get enough credit, in my opinion. Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's an important thing. It's so galvanizing, right? Mm-hmm. Like I'm sure there was tough times when you hadn't made any money really, in two years or three years or something. Yeah. When he was like, you know, Jed, you're really smart. Like, remember how much money you used to make when you worked for Starbucks? Mm-hmm. A lot of those conversations. Mm-hmm. You're like, we're, we're gonna get there. Mm-hmm. We just need a little bit more and without spending any more expenses. And then to get that little bit more, you spend more goes. Yep. Goes, I promised him two things. I said, I'll never second mortgage our house and I'll never drain our savings. Hmm. If, if Tilts meant to be in the world, it'll be in the world another way. So I guess, yeah, that was important not to have to put your family, but you pretty much live maybe off of your husband's salary for a while, or We did some You were funded though, right? Did you get funding early or No, not for a long time. No, no, no, no. So I jumped outta corporate America and my very nice paycheck in twenty seventeen, four months before I gave birth to my daughter. Okay. And I, and that was because of the leave situation, right? The second time. So let's, let's go back. Okay. Let's go back there. There's, there's some, some founding story stuff, some juicy stuff back here. So my husband and I went through seven years of in vitro fertilization trying to get pregnant. Oh wow. Yeah. And um, all of that lack of control and frustration of not being able to get pregnant. I funneled into my career'cause I could control that. Yeah. So I doubled down on everything I could career-wise. I got very accustomed to the top of the nine box and getting promoted every two years and every stretch assignment I volunteered for, et cetera. How many hours a week were you working? A lot. A lot. Yeah. Everything was a self-described career, woman through and through. And, uh, when we got lucky and we had a cycle that was successful, which is my son that's sitting out there. Awesome. Um, I announced that I was pregnant and overnight all those opportunities evaporated, so I stopped getting quite literally invited to the table and nothing had changed except for the fact that I was now pregnant. So that was my first lived experience at Lake. What do you mean? I don't understand. You mean the table being like the board or the leadership table that you had been a part of and then you were kind of disinvited from it? Yeah. Basically the the gold student top person. Yeah. Um, all of that just evaporated. Hmm. So, but you weren't with Starbucks at this time? I was. I was. Oh, you were? I was. And this is an example of the, the manager jackpot phenomenon. So I had a pretty rotten boss at that time. Yeah. And, um, she did not believe that I was committed anymore and I was kind of put in this boss, oh, you're just gonna raise a family now and I'm not gonna depend on you anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So I turned the other cheek after that journey to being pregnant, I just was elated to be pregnant. So I, uh, you know, had my maternity leave and I came back and got back on the proverbial horse and back at it. And then when I was recruited to another organization and. Um, uh, same situation in terms of I grew very quickly, promoted very fast. Um, same, you know, dedication, stretch, assignments, all the things. And this time when I became pregnant with my daughter, all the talks about promotion were rescinded. So that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I, um, went from, again, this promotion to, uh, not promotion. Yeah, yeah. Almost to at risk. Like was that a conversation? It was a conversation like you were on the slate to be the district manager, but now I'm vice president. Oh, yes. I walked into a conversation expecting to talk about the planning for my parental leave, and had a conversation about not only was a promotion no longer on the chopping block or on the table, but I was now questioned. Because I was, you had the audacity to get knocked up. Yeah. So, or something. Sorry, that's Yeah. Rude language. Yeah. But it's kind of rude. It was, it was beyond rude. So I, I actually saw a counsel at this time, I got an attorney and presented what had happened, and we absolutely had a case. However, what people don't talk about with pursuing legal action in that scenario is you have to sign a release. I basically had to sign a release saying I'd never talk about what happened to me again, and they'd pay me hush money. I saw it to be hush money. Okay. So I wasn't willing to do that. Yeah. So I chose to not pursue legal action, hold onto my story and my narrative, and walk away from my career Wow. And my paycheck and everything else that came with it. Wow. How old was Brian? He would've been six, seven at this time. Okay. Uh, maybe a little bit younger, maybe five. Um, and so I went and had my daughter and I, uh, would take her. She was, I call her employee. Point five because she was with me in every single meeting I could get in Fort Collins at this point in time, pre C O V I, first time entrepreneur, first time female entrepreneur with young kids. That's like the trifecta of headwinds. Yeah. I didn't know what I was getting myself into and I truly believe naivete was to my advantage'cause I would not have had the courage to jump had I known how hard this was gonna be. Yeah. And you were going to like some of the Techstars events and different startup things and at that time in for Cols it was, or tell, tell me about what's the first things that you're doing? Yeah. What did you, did you, how long before you had a customer? Things like that. Long time is the answer. Um, so I went to 1 million Cups quite a bit. Mm-hmm. Met some of the brilliant Fort Collins community there. I went to Fort Collins Startup Week. I went to Boulder Startup Week. I went to Denver Startup Week. I would buy anyone who would listen to me. A cup of coffee in town. Yeah. Um, my friends over at Vortec watch, they won a pitch competition that I saw Oh yeah. On very early on. I remember when that happened and I bought him a cup of coffee to be like, tell, tell me everything you know, what do I not know? Uh, and there I had my daughter in a baby carrier with me the whole time. Yeah. And so this is 2017. Um, again, the first version of Tilt was a stack of paper that I still have in my, um, in my file cabinet. And I found I needed to find someone pregnant and I found her and she was wonderful. Yeah. And I found her organization was willing to let me try this with her for free. Yeah. Like let me try to make her leave better. And so I partnered with them. Um, actually Ho Hartman was, oh, the endorser at that time is okay. She wasn't expecting. She supported me and endorsed me and connected me. And, um, we've just stayed friends this whole time and fascinating in her new role at S B C. She's just wonderful. Yeah. You must've saw that she was on the podcast as well. Absolutely. A lot of my friends. Yeah. So, Uh, went through that first version of like, what, what do we need to help with? What do we not need to help with? What's the employer's role? And then I went out on the pitch circuit and I swear I pitched 60 times in six months every stage I could get on. And the Monfort School of Business Pitch Competition. Sure. All the startup weeks around the area. Um, I pitched to California. Yeah. I pitched to investors. Yep. This was my first trial at getting some money and some funding. Yeah. And if you're in Fort Collins, there's not a tremendous amount of access to funds and capital. No. There's very, very few people that have actually made a successful Yeah. Venture in that way. And so they're predisposed just to buy a piece of real estate uhhuh. Yeah, sure. They're pretty, pretty accurate. But there is R vvc. Yeah. And Rocky's Venture Club used to put on, um, presentations at the Inosphere. Mm-hmm. On random topics. So you could just come like lunch and learn. Yeah. So I got to meet some of the R V C folks and um, yeah. Dwayne. Dwayne, Dwayne Peterson. Yeah, he's on my cap table. Oh, is he? Yeah. He's a cool guy. One of the smarter Oh, old guys I've known. That's an understatement. Yeah. Um, Dave Harris at the time was a big part of the Rockies Venture Club ecosystem. Um, Peter Adams. So they were the ones that I started to work with to put a fund or to put a raise together. Yeah. I pitched it there. They have two, um, events twice a year. Okay. And I pitched it one of their events and it took nine months to get$170,000 in angel investment. Um, and it was, Painful. Painful. Did you give up capital right away then? Is that what Angel investment looks like or? I gave up equity. Equity, I mean, yeah. So, yeah. Not capital, but Yep. They got a part of the company. Mm-hmm. Um, based on what we valued at it at that time. And at that time we had no revenue. So it was like Right. You know, betting on a dream and a napkin. Yeah. And, uh, but you had a lot of sweat equity created. Had a lot of sweat equity. And can you tell me about this like program or, or whatever, what, like what are the questions that go into mm-hmm. Dev, assuming you're not gonna sell your, or give away your special sauce here, but what, like, what's that foundational element of finding that win-win, win-win? Mm-hmm. For the employee and the company. Well, the technology is really a digital creation of the first version of the pen to paper, which is we break leaves into three chapters, pre leave on leave and return to work. Okay. So every single leave follows that lifecycle in some way, shape, or form. Mm-hmm. And depending on the type of leave, you have steps that you need to complete in the pre leave on leave and return to work. Mm-hmm. And some of those steps are what we call must do. Those are compliance based. You legally have to do them to protect your job or to get paid or as an employer in, in most instances, the HR representative, you legally have to do these steps to be compliant with F M L A or your state lead program or something like that. And then the other par part of those chapters is, should do steps. And those are proven to be, um, uh, steps that you can take as an employee, as a manager, or as an HR rep to increase the efficacy of the leave. Hmm. Most. Um, important is people come back like, that's what I was gonna say is that what increasing the efficacy means is they actually come back. People come back. Yeah. People come back and through the leave, you don't have an experience that I say rings a bell. That can't be un rung. So there's a lot of research out there that shows when people are in it, when they're going through life, when they're really in a high stress environment, when their employer does something that they interpret to be nefarious or out of bounds, hostile, kind of whatever. There is a seven x scrutiny that the employee holds their employer accountable to. And anytime thereafter, you're basically on watch every, it's so interesting. So it's critical that employers and managers in particular are aware that this human is going through a pressure cooker of some way, shape and form. You've gotta be so, so, so careful what you say, how you say it, what you do, et cetera. So those should do steps comprise a lot of that guidance. Mm-hmm. Like asking a woman as an example. Oh, are you gonna come back to work after your leave rings bells in her head. That is very difficult to unring. Very, very, very difficult.'cause she will infer, oh my gosh, you don't think I'm coming back? Oh my gosh, I'm not gonna be looked at for that promotion. Why would you think I'm not coming back? Like there's just so much, um, unintended damage sometimes intended, but mostly we like to think unintended. So we're very prescriptive and we're very, uh, what we call just in time training to be able to have a manager get into a piece of information that's applicable to that moment in the leave. Mm-hmm. And then have the guidance around it. Yeah.'cause I could totally see myself asking somebody. Yeah. So you're gonna come back after you have a baby. Yeah, absolutely. It happens all the time. All the time. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So, uh, those are the three chapters that every leave really follows, both in the pen to paper version and now the technology version. Um, and from there again, the layers of complexity astound people. To this day, investors still just don't quite understand how there are so many nuances to every single specific leave of absence that you can't peanut butter spread this thing, which is what most people do. Yeah, which is what most carriers do. Most leave of absence vendors. It matters. It matters. If you have a pre-existing condition and you're going on a pregnancy leave, it matters if you're going on a mental wellness leave. And what state you do your work. Like there's just so much that matters. Yeah, yeah. In terms of the leave determination, so, oh, that's probably where a lot of the complexity of the software comes into Exactly. Is just making it 50 state. Exactly. Are you 50 state approved now? And Canada. Okay. Yep. Cool. Yeah. So at this moment in time, back in the R V C days, 170 K was able to allow an M V P to be written. Mm-hmm. So I had a clickable version of the product that I could go raise more money against and get the first early adopter customers to sign with. And by the first few, I took the really, really bad advice that if you can't be your company's first sales person, you should never expect anyone else to sell your product. And I did that because I didn't know any better. Um, and then we hired our first sales person who was my fourth employee, and they totally kicked your ass in sales. I mean, it's such a beautiful art and science and I have so much. So much admiration for people in the art of sales. I know that I could hire a way better salesperson. Oh my gosh. I mean, I would've been calling on you a bunch. Oh my gosh. Last few years for local think tank. Uh, if I was a decent salesperson, honestly, I mean, I've always, yeah, I've always had to shine toward what you were doing and thought you were pretty impressive and just thank you. Never really pursued. So we can talk about that later in the show. Yes. Sales is, is an art forum, but, um, we did it. We got the first couple contracts signed. It was no one in my network. Nobody did me any favors to sign a contract. My network was all in corporate America. Who were those first com companies that signed on? Um, you wanna give'em some kudos? Uh, yes. One of our, um, one of our very first and wonderfully small beautiful companies is here in Northern Colorado and they're called Radian. And they've remained very small and don't need our help anymore. Oh. Because they haven't had any leaves. And they were on a, they were on an early, um, customer pay per leave model. So, um, we understand and supported the leaves that they had come up, but, We're still huge fans. Yeah. They took a leap with us. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so we're beyond that. You know, I'm, I'm very, um, sad to say we don't have any other Fort Collins businesses from way back. Not at all. Not at all as customers. Oh, wow. We've never signed a Fort Collins. Now. I was And who are your main customer? I'm sorry. I, no, I, Kurt, Kurt Richardson has been on my radar for a very long time. Okay. And I've talked to him many times and we've talked to the Otter team many times and we know we need to be with Otter and we'll get there. But, uh, it, it has hurt our hearts a little bit. We're Fort Collins based and founded and that has been very intentional and with a lot of. Hardships. Yeah. Um, especially with access to capital being up here. Sure. And it's just, it's a mismatch that we don't have a Fort Collins company. Yeah. Yeah. In our portfolio. So are your customers companies like that kind of middle market or I. Above, or do you have all sizes still? Like little 10 person, 20 person companies all the way up to Yeah, thousands. The good news for us is leave happens everywhere. Yeah. So three person organizations and 3000. And because of that, we have all sizes in our portfolio. So we have less than 50 and we have over 5,000. So we signed the boot barn recently, the RealReal Duckhorn Wine Company. Um, we've got some big logos on there that, those, interestingly enough came to us because there's such a desperate need in the market to do this better, that they were willing to say, all right, we're gonna work with, we're gonna be partners with you and we're gonna help you grow this to an enterprise solution, which is ultimately where we're going. Wow. Yeah. What, what's that mean? What's enterprise solution means? It's like fully baked in SaaS stuff, or No, it just means big company. Oh. So some people say a thousand choice for those. Those larger companies. My, my VP of sales says the day that she gets on a plane to go sell in Bentonville to Walmart is the day we've made it. It's the largest employer in the us. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So, um, let's see, where did we jump off the fundraising? Oh yeah. So you got this first Buck 75. What did you do with that? Like basically dump it all into, uh, technology tech, software development. Yeah. I wrote my, one of those first three employees I talked about earlier. I wrote one of them a very small salary, um, in the early days. Mm-hmm. We paid her far before myself and my C o O. Um, and then we went out and got those early customers and then, like I said, March, 2020 happened. Yeah. And all of a sudden, um, we had the walls blown off our door and we just needed to sell and we needed to move faster. And we went and raised. Yeah, we've raised five times. Oh, wow. Mm-hmm. Um, and so what's that's, uh, like, is that, that's a round, that's B round or whatever kind of thing? Mm-hmm. We raise our series A, we're moving towards our Series B, actually just today, we sent the note today. So in March of 2020, you were like four of you or something? Mm-hmm. Or six of you. March of 20, 24. Wow. And you're 80? Mm-hmm. 83. Oh, you've been, mm-hmm. Are you hiring everybody now or do you have Oh, no. Pros that do most of that? Yeah. No, I, uh, hold myself accountable to having a virtual coffee with everyone in their first 30 to 90 days. Yeah. Um, so I can see them and their face and who they are and why they're here, most importantly. But we come together once a year, um, for a retreat in person. Yeah. That's how we nurture our remote culture. Yeah. So we'll do that in October up in Estes. Um, I guess you've got like a board and stuff. Mm-hmm. And like people that have been here before.'cause it seems like if somebody said, oh, go do a capital raise, I'd be like, I don't even know where to start. Yeah. Yeah. We have a board of five, um, with five additional observers. So we have, we have a big boardroom. Yeah. But I've never been an entrepreneur. I've met so many fellow entrepreneurs that are like, I got into this. I don't want a boss. I don't want people telling me what to do. I just have a different perspective on a board. I really see them as helpful thought partners and Sure. And um, able to see the forest from the trees when we're two in it to see it. Yeah. Yeah. And I am very, very, very, very lucky in that I'm one of the few, if not the only entrepreneur I know who wouldn't edit my cap table if I could. I have the best investors. Yeah. And I really truly believe that that number one is a little bit of luck.'cause we dodged a couple bullets, but number two, I hold my investors right under my marriage in terms of relationship importance in my life. Yeah. So, I've got some pretty cool humans. How, uh, you could say it's none of my business. But do you have a pretty substantial chunk then? Are you the, do you have control? Mm-hmm. I do. I do have the majority ownership of the company. Okay. Um, but every raise that gets smaller and smaller. Yeah. Understood. Understood. Do you think you'll need more? Yeah. Yeah. We, yep. We just opened a new round today. Yeah. I guess you already said that. Yeah. So, um, like what's your, like, do you want to rule the world or like, do you wanna grow it for another few years and be acquired by some bigger fish or what's your kind of, what's, what are your, yours and your investors' intentions in this? Yeah. Before I knew what, you know, in the world of business, in, in startups we say Tam Sam, so total addressable markets, or before I knew what that even meant. Right. I learned that this was a problem worldwide. So my hypothesis was in the back of the napkin days when I jumped from corporate America, if somebody was doing this better, and by this I mean leave, if somebody was doing this better, it was probably abroad because the US is so painfully behind the rest of the industrialized world. Sure. As it relates, we, it's us in Papua New Guinea that don't have, for sure Denmark has to have something better. Right. Or whatever. Right. Literally any country but the United States. So I went out and I researched that and I had, you know, still a lot of contacts over in Europe from our days when we lived in the UK and Australia. And so I come, I came to find out that while there's more progressive policies, That does not mean that the bias doesn't exist. It doesn't mean that the managers still don't step outta bounds. It doesn't mean that it's still not confusing. So basically the same problems still existed minus not even having a policy. Yeah. So I learned that this really was a global problem. Yeah. And that has always been our north star is we will bring this to a global scale. Now, whether that's us independently and we go the path of I P O or whether we lock arms with a bigger player that can get us there faster. Yeah. The most important thing to me is speed. Yeah. That we can help people. As fast as humanly possible. I, I, I apologize'cause I'd say this stat and every time I say it, I know people can't unhear it. And it's a pretty devastating one. But one in four women in the United States go back to work 10 days after giving birth. Ugh. Because they can't literally afford not to. Well, and we need more babies. I just wrote in my blog recently. Yeah. How I think part of why North Korea and South Korea will reunite Yeah. Is South Korea doesn't have a birth rate. Yeah. Right now they need Yeah. Low price labor to take care of their children that they don't aren't having because they can't afford it. And, and North Korea obviously needs a lot of things. Yeah. Uh, as well as to be developed. Mm-hmm. You know, and South Korea's pretty much built out. Mm-hmm. Whatcha are you gonna do with it? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Anyway, I digress. That's a big picture. Picture, but Yeah. But the world needs more babies. Yeah. You know, that's why Elon Musk has 11. He's trying to do his part or nine or whatever he's got. I don't know. Yes. We have heard the declining birth rate phenomenon for sure. And we absolutely see the, um, connective tissue to the work that we do and not having access to paid leave and not having reproductive infertility support. Mm-hmm. You know, my journey through I V F I V F is insanely expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and my folks. My, my wife's parents, we don't have any children. Mm-hmm. Um, but after, after a couple of miscarriages and then her folks were like, Hey, we'll chip in on I V F if you want to, and I was like 42 already, or 44 plus I was broke. Yeah. Launched local think tank, you know, whatever. And I was like, ah, you know, we're just gonna be great aunts and uncles. Yeah. Um, and yeah, like I could, it's an interesting thing, like is it the company's role to invest in having more babies? Is it government supported elements? Mm-hmm. Is that part of your mission mm-hmm. As well is to be an advocate of better policies? Yes. Yes. When I'm able to be in Washington and able to help architect, continued policy creation will be a really great day. Cool. We just don't have the resources right now. Sure. No, you don't have the time. Yeah. Um, are you making any money yet? Yeah, we got a little bit coming in. Yeah. Got some revenue. I mean, you got, yeah. Sometimes we have more revenues than expenses for a little while. Then we hire a bunch more dev people, that kind of thing. Yeah. We are certainly not profitable yet, but um, we have continued to double every single year since we've come outta the box. Yeah. And in this current economic climate, it's something that we're very proud of because again, it's a demonstration that we're passing the recession test is what I call it. Right, right. Every company, ourselves included, are looking at their tech stack and bifurcating nice to have versus have to have. Right. And we continually get put in the have to have bucket. And I very much believe it's because of the risk reduction in compliance components of what we do. But that's our Trojan horse. We'll help you not get sued employer, but we are going to help people humanely navigate a leave of absence once we're in there. Yeah. So we're very proud at our renewal rates this year and our continued sales this year, more than any year. It's been astounding. That's really cool. Yeah. Congratulations. I got a little fist bump here for you. Thank you. Um, and tell me about like, A capital raise? Like, like for somebody that's never done it, like now that you've already done it five times or whatever, like walk me through the mechanics of it, kind of like from a, a founder's perspective. Well, I can tell you from a female founder's perspective, which is very different, um, than a male founder's perspective, but a capital raise mechanically is, um, you open a process essentially you say, we're going to fundraise right now, and we provide something called a data room. And our data room is our legal and business hygiene. So it's our articles of incorporation, it's our contracts, it's our, um, employment agreements. It's basically everything we have my, that, my C O O. Organizes manages and make sure that we're, um, compliant across the board. Mm-hmm. But at this stage that we're at right now, marching towards a series B, it's far more intensive because it's looking at things like our sales pipeline, right? What are the contracts that we're getting? How are we getting them? What's our close rate? What's our close rate? What's the trend on that? All of that, all those things. Where does this start to really pay off for the investors? Yep. And then on the product and technology side, with this particular raise, we anticipate a technical audit where we'll have people come into our code and actually look at the brains behind the ip. Yeah. Um, make sure your special sauce tastes good. Yep. Absolutely. It doesn't break too much. It's defensible. Yep, yep. We didn't do any shortcuts. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's very invasive. It's very time consuming. So once you provide all of that data, essentially you have a bunch of investors that you've talked to, and I know every single, I keep track every round. So this last round, I talked to 110 investors between January and today. Okay. Of those 110, I selected 30 who are moving into what we call our favorite, our tilt favorite round. Okay. They're getting access to that data. Yep. The, of those 30, we'll probably have a 50% attrition rate, if we're lucky. Yep. That we'll have more conversations with myself and my team, and then we'll talk numbers, and then we'll say, how much do you wanna write? What valuation would you send? So you really are like selecting them more for their character than for their money? A hundred percent. Yeah. All money's green. Mm-hmm. Yeah. How do you, what's the, like, is it like having successfully invested before connections to industry components? Like what are those selection criteria other than having green money? We do reverse diligence. So we talk to their portfolio companies. Mm. What are they like when they're in the boardroom? Yeah. When you're having a really hard time, they talk a good game, but then they're really a bunch of assholes. Yeah. Yeah. When you see their name pop up on your phone, what's, what do you think? Right. All right. We all have those reactions. Um, we also always meet in person. I need to see this human being in person and, and meet and, um, get to know who they are and how they operate. Um, and then they've got to be helping change the narrative. So 2% of founders in the Alphabet series A and beyond are female. Wow. And 2% means something is very, very broken. Yeah. So if we are engaging with a fund, and that's part of this 30, so you didn't make it to our 30 list, if you're not intentionally trying to change that, if you haven't already invested in a woman, you're probably not gonna make us your first. And don't even get started on Diversity Founder. Like, it's, it's really, really bad. So, so why, why do you think like, I, like I don't really read you as a. Man hating, feminazi kind of style type. No. You just want to see more equity in the conversation and, but why do, like, I love it when I see women founders mm-hmm. Succeeding. Mm-hmm. Partly because it's the David and Goliath kind of thing. Mm-hmm. And I love it when, you know, small companies like Green Ride. Yeah. Knock big companies like, uh, super Shuttle outta the marketplace Yeah. And things like that. Yeah. So tell me why, why aren't there more of those? It's a pattern matching phenomenon. It's my hypothesis. So VCs have an algorithm where they go and see, you know, what are the Ubers of the world, what are the Teslas of the world, and how do we go find more of those? We've already had 45, 46 presidents that are all men. We might as well just keep doing that. So yeah, it's, it's pattern. I mean, not to say it, but it super simplistically put, I think it's pattern matching. I think there's way too much that goes into the algorithm and the anticipated outputs and the measurement of success. Mm-hmm. So when you look at what a VC is saying in terms of, you know, what metrics do I want to see in a company, in what amount of time to refill my LPs? Basically make them whole. There's, um, not enough, uh, ability in my very biased opinion and, and of one that they can be more situational about it. So, Female founders, statistically and proven time and time again, provide better returns, have better retention numbers, have better run businesses top to bottom. It's been proven like you can't deny the data, but when a VC goes and looks at an investment opportunity, they're looking at it through a lens. There's, there's promotive versus preventative research that's been done on this proof. They look at the KPIs of a female founded company and they're looking at all the reasons why a Goliath will come and eat them. Hmm. They'll say in our space, what's gonna prevent Workday from coming to building? She's not enough to, yeah. Why can't, um, a d P come in and build this on their own? Like, right. All these reasons why will die. Same exact. They've, I, I'm fascinated by this research. Same exact pitch given by a male founder. And the questions are all about how big can you get? Right. How can you take over the world? Yeah. What do you need? How are you gonna keep the, the big bad companies from eating you little lady. Exactly. Versus how rich can I get with this guy? Exactly. Interesting. Exactly. Fascinating. Preventative versus promotive is very real. Oh, if I had any money, I'd invest in you. Well, I appreciate that. For what it's worth. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. We, we fight that bias every day. And eventually when Tilt is taken over the world and I'm ready for my next adventure, I'll come back on the other side of the table. Will you do another adventure? No. I'll be an investor. Yeah. Yeah. I, I've got to be part of changing this phenomenon. I, I want my daughter to wanna be an entrepreneur. You wanna stay focused in the general space you're in. Uh, I don't know about that. I mean, there's just making the world in the workplace better. I don't want more widgets. I don't care about a faster widget making machine. I. But I do care about social good. Hmm. And I think social good can be profitable. Yeah. I think can be a really good business. I don't disagree. Yeah. Well obviously, I think, yeah. Yeah. So what else on the, the business journey is worthy of particular mention? Uh, I don't think people talk enough about the mental wellness of entrepreneurs. Oh yeah. I noticed that was, you founded another thing or something like, uh, mental wellness for founders kind of thing. Didn't found it, but, oh, early adopter. Big part of it. Okay. Yeah. Early adopter. Um, I, I don't, um, recommend entrepreneurship too many. Right. If I've ever actually. Um, because it is really hard. Sure. Yeah. It's really hard. Agreed. Yeah. And there's just not enough conversation about taking care of yourself through the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur. I'll never forget an entrepreneur who's a few stages ahead of me at one point a couple years ago, said, Jen, unless you've been in the bathtub at 2:00 PM with a bottle of whiskey, you haven't hit rock bottom yet. Yeah, I, I haven't been there, but I've Yeah. You know, stepped outside. I have, yeah. I've now been there and they were right. And that's just, that's just crazy hard. Um, and I just think that there just needs to be a reckoning of, um, entrepreneurs who are in this for the right reasons, put their. Not blood, sweat, and tears. They put their soul into this. Yeah. Have you, outside of your, your investors and your board, have you done any kind of peer advisory element along the way? Have you been part of mm-hmm. The dames maybe, or the Vistage or the Renaissance? Every chance I get, I try to give back. I had so many amazing people, especially in Fort Collins, give me their time and give me their brilliance, gimme their advice. So every time I get asked, I'm, I'm there for it. Whatever stage you're at, if I can provide value or try to, I'm there. In terms of committing to groups or mentorship structure, I'm a little less, um, Uh, aptt to do that these days by self-discipline, not interest because yeah. I am busy. Yeah. Fair. And I really have to provide my time for my employees right now. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. Well, our, have you seen her newest, uh, facilitator for Loco, by the way? No, it's Kim O'Neill from, uh, encompass. Oh, great. Technologies. So a very large SaaS scale company. A few stages ahead of you. Yeah, not just a few. So we could talk more offline about, uh, this new chapter, what we just launched a few months ago. And, uh, you're really at about the right scale that I'd love to take with your interest. Cool, cool. Um, so don't recommend it. Micro and mental health stuff. You, you talk publicly about. Your own challenges? Um, oh, I, I, I, uh, I recruited my marriage counselor to my second local think tank chapter. Nice. Because he wanted to kind of professionalize his practice and I definitely didn't have any money, but I wanted to keep my marriage together. Mm-hmm. So that was good. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thanks Josh. Yeah. My husband and I had been in marriage counseling for damn near our whole marriage, and I truly don't believe we would still be together had we not. No. I think marriage counseling is like going to the dentist. Do you up and down, like if things are kind of shaky, you go more often or you just get a tune up every month whether you need it or not, or how does that work? No, I think it has spikes for sure over our, the evolution. I mean, you don't go through seven years of in vitro and not have it test every inch of your right. Of your relationship. Um, and plus a founding of a company and that all the, and being a firefighter and all the things. Yeah. So, um, well, he's a wildland firefighter too. He's done both. He was a structural city firefighter for 15 years. So that comes with it, its own mental wellness concerns. Yeah. So I just, I'm just a big believer, proponent and pretty loud about therapy. Yeah. And it's on my calendar that all my company can see when I have my therapy visits. I talk about my struggles with, with mental wellness openly, honestly, and candidly because I just much in the same way, I don't feel that the stigma around infertility is fair. Mm. I don't think that the stigma around mental wellness is fair. When we miscarried, I told just about a lot of, not everybody, but a lot of people. And it was amazing how many people I. Or open back with me. Yep. Upon hearing. And it was so obvious to me, uh, in that, that the stigma is there. Yeah. You know, and, and I guess I'm a stigma breaker too, or I try to, or whatever, you know, like it just happens, you know? I absolutely, I, I refuse to feel shame and I just want others to try to shed that too. Yeah. There's things to feel shame over. Yeah. Like, unfortunately, in our world today, there seems like that's almost a controversial statement. Mm-hmm. Uh, and there's things not to feel shame over. Totally. And so agreed there. So, um, I think it's time to move into our closing segments. Let's do it. Faith, family, politics we always talk about. Mm-hmm. Uh, where would you like to start? Family. Okay. Yeah. Uh, let's talk about, uh, the first, uh, time that you started having a, a more than just friends feeling about Peter. That's a funny question. Uh, we were walking Old Town, um, out with a group of friends and we walked by, um, Pendleton that's still there mm-hmm. In downtown, and there was a really pretty dress in the window. And I looked at him as a buddy and I said, Hey, if I buy that dress, will you take me out on a date? And he goes, sure, let's do it next weekend. And then he's an avid Bears fan. The Bears had a game on and he postponed. So I think it was a mix of butterflies. And then I just got really pissed off that he delayed our date and then, uh, he made good and we ended up going out on a date. And the rest is history, just like that. Mm-hmm. Were you guys pretty good friends or it was kind of a distant friend group or, um, it was more satellite friends. Yeah. We had friends of friends. He was roommates with one of my closer friends. So. So once you were together, you were really getting to know each other that whole time? Yeah. We knew we weren't serial killers. What was he, uh, most drawn to in you, would you suspect? Oh God, I wish I knew the answer he, that he would give you. Um, we are both very big outdoor lovers, so our, um, hobbies together are really aligned, which is fun, that we love the same things. Um, recreationally he probably would say, um, my tenacity and independent spirit. Yeah. Um, You might not have known about that at first, but Oh, he knew it developed already. And how about vice versa? Why did you, uh, why did you ask him that? Uh, leading question. Yeah. There's a lot of things to love about my husband that I've grown more in love as we've been together. That's a big blessing, huh? It really is. And, and it's in a different way, but in those days he was very cute. So that was helpful. Not anymore, though. Mature. Now it's funny. I do have to tell a story about that. When we were at Rocky together, he was a late bloomer. So when we graduated high school, he maybe weighed a hundred pounds wet, maybe. And here I was, as I said, the debate, peer counselor on a roll. Outgoing, gregarious, um, dated upper class. All right? You were way out of his league. I just scared him. Right? I learned Now I scared him. And then he went and became a firefighter and put on 75 pounds of muscle. And I remember coming back from Michigan State and seeing him Whoa. For the first time. And I was like, what happened to Peter Henderson? Um, that's funny. So yes, he changed quite a bit, but I honestly then, and now he is one of the most, um, giving humans. Yeah. And not monetarily, not gift giving. He gives to others in such an authentic way of care and time and attention. If you ever asked, he's the type of person you call at 2:00 AM from Token and say into say, I need help your, and he's like, I'll be right there. So I love that. Yeah, I love that. Um, you've got two kids? Yes. Mm-hmm. Uh, a uh, younger daughter. Mm-hmm. And, uh, Brian out here, we do a, uh, one word description of the children. Brian Overachiever. Oh yeah. He came out after his mom, actually. Quinn, independent spirit. Oh, I love it. Mm-hmm. That's two words, but we'll hyphenate it for you. Yeah. You wanna talk more about either or, or both? I, um, they are so fascinatingly different as I know all parents probably would say, but having the path to parenthood that we had, Um, I never take a day for granted that much more precious. Yeah. But I am so, I love being a parent so much, so much. And I know that I would be the worst stay at home mom ever created in the history of time, so I know what good parenting to me feels like. Have you, are you guys done? Oh yeah. Thoughts? Very, very done. No, no. Nope, nope, nope. Definitely. No, we're complete. Anything else to say on the family topic that's really significant? Where, where's uh, Peter's family come from here? Was he Fort Collins based too? Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, they're just, they're my why. I don't know how founders who don't have a daily reminder like I do, keep going. I would've quit 10 times over. And is your mom still, uh, she's here in your life? Mm-hmm. And what Yeah. Here in nor Northern Fort Collins as well? Yep. Or Northern Colorado. At least Fort Collins. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. That's the most common. Not that your folks did or your mom did, but. People coming here for their grandkids. Mm-hmm. About your kids' age. Mm-hmm. I'm at the Rotary Club too, so I meet a lot of people in that demographic and they're like, yeah, I'm out from Nebraska or Texas or wherever their family's from. Such a blessing. Yeah, no, those three generations, three, four generations sometimes can happen. And that's a beautiful thing too. It really is. Um, politics or faith? Faith. Okay. What's, uh, I didn't hear too much mention, although you heard some Q words that perhaps you came from a, a church background a little bit at least. I was raised Catholic. Okay. I went to Catholic school. Um, my husband, bless him, um, converted for me to get married at St. Joe's. Okay. So we got married at St. Joe's and then we've, um, found faith. Here and there through our marriage when we've moved and tried to find new communities. And then when we welcomed our kids, they were both baptized at, at St. Joe's. Um, where we are in this season of our life is, um, teaching our children faith in a much more general term than we were raised with it. Hmm. So a connection to something bigger than yourself For my husband, that's nature. And he's imprinted that on my children big time. Yeah. So they find peace and solitude hunting together, him and my son. Sure. Um, and my daughter's too young to know anything other than we talk about God. Um, sure. And my dad has passed, so she has a rough idea of what that means. Okay. Um, but I have seen, does that mean heaven for you? You have that, that notation? It does for me. However, I don't know how that that relationship will continue to matriculate as I age. I just continue to see demonstrations of people in my life go through the hardest. Moments and find their way through because of faith. Yeah. So I'm, I'm, I agree, inspired and it doesn't really matter what faith in a lot of ways something if, if you're the most important thing Yeah. In your own world. Yeah. It's hard to, uh, get through when you're struggling. Agree. Or like some people say, you know, uh, if, if God isn't the boss of all things, then it's the state or nothing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. And I don't want either one of those things really. Yeah. Yeah. I think I like the humility that you highlight there. There's just a, um, There's a beautiful part to that. I don't have a good answer, but So are, you're not very active, but you maybe sometimes still go to Mass or Christmas or Easter or things like that, or not really? Yeah. At this moment in time we're probably on a holiday rotation. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. Mm-hmm. Um, anything else to say in that general topic? Is it something that you wanna pick up and explore as the kids get older for the community element? Or are you happy happy to potentially, yeah. Potentially have them interact in whatever fashion. It's harder on them. Find their own leading. Yeah. It's, it's harder based on where we live geographically, but I want to at least, um, let them see the possibilities. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. Um, politics, What do you want? What do you wanna talk about? Uh, gosh, we've got an election heating up here with a multi-time indicted orange man. Bad. Uh, we've got a dementia laal laden mm-hmm. President with a really crazy bitch. Vice president. It's, pardon my language. I mean, there ain't no good pass, it seems like. Yeah. I, this feels like a, a bit of a landmine conversation. uh, where would you put your personal politic? I mean, are you kind of, uh, on that authoritarian to libertarian field? You know, we should, uh, the nanny state versus the chaotic, uh, yeah. Uh, what do they call that when there's no real order at all? The anarchy? Yeah. I fall somewhere in the middle, not to out, seems about right. Pop out. But, um, I find that getting spun up about things I can't control. Causes more mental harm than good. Yeah. Fair. So you're not like, uh, clicking through the internet and like freaking out about active things or Sometimes you do and that's why I hold myself accountable to voting and being an informed voter. So when I have the opportunity to have a voice, I have it and teach that to my children. Yeah. But beyond that, I tend to lean pretty far away from contentious topics. However, when it interacts with my space and leave Right. I lean in pretty heavily. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Um, who are your favorite local politicians? Well, I have had the absolute pleasure of getting to know our local government pretty well, being a female founder in the alphabet Fort Collins. Yeah. There's not a lot of us, to put it mildly. Um, so you know, Darren, when he was in his role as city manager, was lucky, I was lucky to sit down and have coffee with him. Jenny and I have sat down and had coffee, so I really appreciate the, um, intentions of the city leadership and their, um, aspirations for Fort Collins in particular to be more of a magnet for entrepreneurs and to make that path easier. Right now I'm working really closely with C S U, um, and Amy and what she visions for the world, given her entrepreneurial background. Yeah, I'm very excited to see her. She just came to our rotary club last week and uh, I had a few minutes with her right hand gal. I'm pretty sure she's gonna be on a podcast soon. Awesome. So I'm excited for that. Good, good. I'll keep an eye out for that. Yeah. I'm excited to see what happens with her at the helm, but, Um, I, I really do think Fort Collins is primed to start to stand up to its Boulder and Denver neighbors in the startup space. I hope so. I hope so too. Yeah, I think that'd be great. Yeah. Um, did we do all three faith, family politics? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, we're ready then for the loco experience. Okay. The craziest experience of your life that you're willing to share with our listeners. Could be a moment, could be a week or a year, or swimming naked in Australia with strangers. I don't know. You got the local experiences, not me. Peter covered your ears. Um, just kidding. My goodness. I have done a lot of crazy things. Um, We had a near death experience from, uh, Amy Lindgren the other week. Yeah. Uh, where she like fell out off a cliff basically in a, oh my gosh. Hiking incident in high school. Shoot. I'm lucky to not have any of those experiences. No near death there. No near deaths. Thank goodness. I'm knock on some sort of wood here. I've got four near death actually. Not to brag. Um, I, I mean it's just, uh, I think this is a cop out, but being here with you talking about a company that was an idea. Yeah. Is fucking crazy. Well, and you've been on a rocket ship. I mean, you've hired like an average of three people a month. Yeah, every month for the last three years or something. It's gotten beyond a pinch me moment. I, I really don't have the vocabulary to articulate how this is. Bent my brain that this is real. Yeah. Yeah. I don't doubt it. Did you buy a Lamborghini yet? Nope. Next Capital Race. Got my Toyota Highlander parked out in the driveway. Nope. Fair enough. No. Do you have any questions for me? What's, what is one of the near death experiences? One of the near death experiences? Yeah. The craziest, the most loco, uh, probably the closest to dying was, um, on my first anniversary trip we went to, my wife and I took our 88 Jeep Cherokee down to, uh, we went down to Lake City and we were trying to go from Lake City over engineer, pass down to Burray. Yeah. And, uh, the road had actually, there was, had been an avalanche and we ended up having to turn back and go. But on the way over the top of the pass when we were like at least a thousand feet above tree line, um, I didn't, I was a rookie and I didn't have it locked in low range, even though I had it in low gear. I didn't have it in low range. And it was a non, uh, antilock break. Version. Yeah. And we started sliding and I was going to, if I hit the brakes, we would've slid off the edge of the mountain and dropped like 2000 feet to our almost certain death. But I was able to get off the brake and accelerate and do basically do a 270 degree drift like on this banked Oh my God. And Jill didn't know for five years probably how close we were, like as far as she could tell. I just kinda got a little faster than she needed to there. But yeah, we were like riding this like. Banked turn and just looking down at this tremendous prop. Yeah, my hair's steadying in my arms right now, so Wow. Thank God. None of the near death actually made it to there, but yeah, you're meant to be here, so. Sure. Hope guys. That applied for me, so Wow. Wow. Um, thank you. Uh, if people wanna thank you, sign up, look up Snoop out tilt. Yeah. Uh, where do they find you? Oh, we're not very hidden. So I'm on LinkedIn, Jennifer Henderson. Um, hello. tilt.com is our U rl. Okay. Uh, yeah, everything else there. I'm excited to, uh, see the continued evolution. It's great to, it's great to have one of the few funded startups in our region of a proper basis. Yeah. And you're a woman. Yes. I dig it. Yes. Proud of you. Thank you. I'm sure your husband and your children's and thank you. And your mom are too. Yeah, they're all right with us. Thanks for taking time. Tired of hearing. Share this with your friends. Thanks. Alright. Bye Jeff. Appreciate it.