Season 4, Ep. 37 – Founder to Founder: with Marc Taverner, Co-founder and CEO of XEROF

(THE FRONTIER THEME PLAYS)

Bill, via previous recording (00:05):

Welcome to another Founder to Founder interview from Gun.io, your source for hiring world-class tech talent. Today, Gun.io’s CEO and co-founder, Teja Yenamandra sits down with Marc Taverner, CEO and co-founder of XEROF, a Swiss financial services company specializing in crypto assets, who brings more than 30 years of experience to the role. Okay, here’s Teja. (THE FRONTIER THEME ENDS)

Teja (00:38):

Well, I mean, we’re super privileged to have you today, Marc. Really excited to learn about you, your story, your company, and maybe that’s a good place to start. So why don’t you tell the audience about your company, how you arrived at the opportunity to solve this problem, and just kind of walk us through that journey.

Marc (00:57):

Yeah, sure. I don’t mind doing that, Teja. Firstly, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. It’s great to be here. The company that I’ve founded with my co-founder is called XEROF. The easiest way to have that stick in your mind is that it’s “Forex” backwards, and that’s a pretty good descriptor of what we do. So we are a Swiss crypto asset business, and we provide a bridge between the traditional world of finance and the emerging world of crypto assets, and the reason why a bridge is needed, is because these two worlds don’t play nicely together, and when you try, for example, and move crypto assets, say Bitcoin, just as an example, and convert that into a traditional financial store of value, that US dollar, though some would argue the US dollar isn’t a store of value, those entities don’t necessarily play nicely together.

Marc (01:57):

So we step in to remove that friction for high net worth individuals and businesses, and our big differentiators, as well as being based here in a beautiful Switzerland with wonderful mountains, clean air, and wonderful outdoor life, is that we have a really strong and forward-looking regulator, and we are a business that went and sought regulation, got a license, and operates in a fully compliant and professional way, which differentiates us a little in this Marcet, because it’s hard to get licenses. It’s hard to act as a regulated business, even though the vast majority of actors do want to act in a professional way, and in Switzerland, it would appear, as you can see, that at 11 minutes past the hour, one is not allowed to work in the office any longer. The lighting just shuts down. So let me just hit the lighting, if I can find it. (Teja: Yeah.) The auxiliary lighting. There we go. (Teja: Yes.) So you know, it’s as natural as you like. (Teja: <Laugh>. Okay, okay.) As I’ve just said, “The regulation’s important,” at that very moment, you know what? The regulator cut the electricity <laugh>.

Teja (03:13):

<Laugh>. So you know what’s super interesting, is like, yeah, not many businesses, I mean really, I mean, I guess especially so in this industry would go out and seek regulation, but certainly as a consumer of services, that’s a huge advantage to working with XEROF. Like, how did you guys even think through that being like, perhaps a competitive dimension?

Marc (03:41):

That was at the very essence of why we started XEROF. It was to lead with regulation and compliance first, and how this came about, I need to tell you a bit more about the story of my co-founder and I, Nick Ntigrintakis, and for any of you that wonder about the spelling of that or how I can pronounce it, you just go to our website, XEROF.com, and it’s written up there. Plus, there’s a great picture of Nick just to prove that he’s a lot more handsome and younger than me. Anyway, Nick and I met when we were both in the Bitcoin industry. I was working for one of the world’s largest miners of Bitcoin. We developed and manufactured semiconductor chips, or full custom semiconductor chips, which is genuine rocket science. We put those on motherboards, we put them in units, and we manufactured this really robust and highly sought after Bitcoin mining machine.

Marc (04:35):

Nick turned up one day wanting to buy some equipment from me, and the way in which we sold those equipments in those days was a hundred percent cash payment upfront, and then we would tell you when the machines would be ready at some point and then ship them to you. So, you know, Nick wanted to buy machines. He was a little cautious about giving this company he didn’t know a very, very large amount of money, multiples of millions upfront, but he trusted us. He gave us the money, we delivered the machines, and he made a good amount of Bitcoin out of it. So we built this relationship on trust from the early days, and then fast forward, maybe I know three or four years later, he came back to me and said, “Marc, I have a real problem. You know, we’ve scaled up our Bitcoin mining operations, and we’ve got a fair amount of coin, but we can’t find anywhere that we believe is trustworthy or professional enough to help us either bank those coins,” or convert those coins into euros, US dollars, or whatever it was they wanted to use them for.

Marc (05:40):

“Have you got any suggestions for us?” And, you know, I thought about this, for once, I said, “You know what, Nick, beyond one or two names,” which I won’t go into now, because they probably haven’t weathered that well with time, those brands and those names, you know, “you know, there aren’t too many other places.” So we carried on this conversation backwards and forwards, you know, for about a year, two years, something like that, and, you know, eventually, I was curious about what Nick had ended up doing. He still hadn’t found a great solution, and nor had I, so, you know, long story, super, super short, we said, “Well, we need to solve our own problem here then. If it doesn’t exist, we need to solve it ourselves, and maybe we’re not the only ones that have this problem,” and that was really where the, the genesis, the kernel of the idea for XEROF was born, was around a recognition that for holders of Bitcoin and other digital assets who wanted to have an exchange into fiat, US dollars, euros, whatever the currency may be, that there weren’t really too many trusted professional and compliance solutions that you could turn to, And so we built XEROF to fill that gap.

Teja (06:54):

Hmm <affirmative>. That’s powerful. It’s interesting, sort of in the first part of the story, you mentioned that like, the transaction had to immediately be conducted, paid in cash in full. Is that generally typical? Like, is credit not something that…yeah, I mean, I’m just curious about that. Like, you seem to like, describe that dimension of the transaction. I’m just curious why like, maybe there wasn’t like, some sort of like, I don’t know, credit or something like that, or just like, you buy the machine in cash all the time, and that’s like, what you do.

Marc (07:32):

I think it, I mean, it’s a great question. It’s one that pauses me to reflect, to be honest with you, because I don’t have a stock answer. I’ve never really been asked that before <laugh>. (Teja: <Laugh>.) So you’ve kind of paused me in my tracks and forced me to tread water whilst I think. But look, it was the standard in the industry, which is a very lame answer, you know. Just because everyone else is doing this, it’s what we do, but thinking about it on my feet here, I realized that the supply chain was set up to deal with cash payments upfront. So most of the components, most of the suppliers that we were seeking or needing to buy components from, wanted cash payments upfront, for no other reason than, frankly, the crypto asset industry at that point in time just wasn’t very trustworthy and didn’t feel like it was gonna be around forever. (Teja: Yeah.)

Marc (08:31):

So if you are the manufacturer of a bunch of power supply units or fans that go into these mining machines, and these little upstarts turn up with this new thing called “Bitcoin”, you know, most of them in their mid twenties, wearing, you know, typical attire, black sweatshirts, trainers, you know, unshaven, and say, “Hey, I’d like to place an order with you for $5 million worth of fans, and then I need $25 million worth of power supply units, and I’d like them all, well, next week, if possible, because you know what, there’s a Bitcoin block mined every 10 minutes, and if I don’t have more machines pointing at that than anyone else, I’m losing Marcet share, so could we go?” You know, the supply chain kind of response to that, which has been established over many decades, is, “Whoa, okay. This sounds less than normal. So maybe letters of credit to these guys is not something we should do. We should ask for cash upfront, A, to see how serious they are and if they have the cash, and B, just to make sure if tomorrow they decide that, I dunno, you know, pink chickens is the next big thing, and they dissolve their company, at least we’ve got the cash.”

Teja (09:42):

Yeah, and it seems like, really difficult to do, like, credit risk modeling on top of a set of assets that are a little bit more, they have a little bit more inherent variability maybe in the price action (Marc: Yeah.) like, day-to-day. You know, that seems tricky. Yeah. That’s interesting.

Marc (09:59):

The other thing to mention, Teja, in that, you know, in that same stream of logic that I’m stepping through right now, is that some of the components that the Bitcoin mining industry and the crypto asset industry need access to are in supreme high demand. So when you talk about semiconductors, (Teja: Yeah.) which are really the essence of those machines that mine Bitcoin and process the algorithm. You are competing with mobile phone manufacturers, very big names, you know, that I won’t mention, car manufacturers, and all the other electronic goods. So you’re trying to displace years and years of relationships and financial contracts in a supply chain that is producing very, very limited amounts of silicon as output through, you know, arguably only one or two or maybe three fabrication plants of silicon that are the biggest in the world. Therefore, to command your place and try and take a slot, perhaps one of the big advantages is to go with a cash payment rather than doing, you know, regular payment on invoice or anything else to see if you can buy your way into that supply chain.

Teja (11:18):

Yep. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I mean, as a consumer of like, gaming technology, I remember like, GP prices being insane, and it’s like <laugh>, I just want this to have fun.

Marc (11:32):

Yeah. You just want to play your games and a bunch of kids somewhere are just consuming all the silicon that they can get their hands on.

Teja (11:41):

Yeah. Why can not sort of high net worth individuals and businesses use, let’s say traditional direct-to-consumer portals? I don’t know what the, maybe like, the industry terminology for this would be, but an example of this is, let’s say, just to put a name on it, Coinbase, right? Like, why are they barred from doing so? Just in case people are not familiar with this industry and maybe some of the difficulties.

Marc (12:11):

Yeah, absolutely, and great question. And then we get into the complexities of both regulation and the plumbing, the guts of the traditional finance industry, (Teja: Yeah.) and it goes something like this, as well as, you know, I guess an element of trust and the access point. So let’s assume I’m a high net worth holder of crypto, for example, and I decide I want to use, you know, one of many very successful and very well regarded online crypto exchanges of which, you know, Coinbase is one. It typically goes something like this. I log onto my account, and let’s say I’m fortunate enough to have a million dollars worth of Bitcoin, and I decide I want to sell that Bitcoin, which my personal opinion will be a very foolish move, but some people do. So let’s say, you know, they wanna sell a million dollars worth of Bitcoin.

Marc (13:00):

You’re in your account, you’ve got your computer screen in front of you, and you place the order to sell, and you see that the order to sell is fulfilled, meaning that someone has both offered and accepted to buy your Bitcoin, and here comes your million dollars. Your million dollars flows into your Coinbase, your Binance, your Kraken, your OKX. We won’t say FTX, because you know, that’s a little bit of a swear word, but it flows into your account, right? You see it pop up on your screen if you’re lucky. Oftentimes what you see is, yeah, they’ve been sold, and then your fiat accounts just doesn’t show as with a million dollars, ’cause there’s a delay. So you’re frantically hitting F5, refresh, F5, refresh, you know, “Where the hell has my million dollars gone?” 

Marc (13:46):

Okay, that’s quite a worrying, it’s quite a worrying process to go through, but eventually your million dollars shows up, because thankfully, even though you don’t know where that online provider is necessarily regulated, and therefore what recourse you might have if it didn’t show up, it shows up. You think, you breathe the sigh of relief, you go, “Right, okay, I’m gonna put my bank details in so I can get this money off this platform quickly before I have another F5 screen refresh moment and, you know, lose five years of my life again.” You put your bank details in, you hit send, it shows on the screen that that success, that transaction has now been successfully launched. So you sit there looking at your banking portal thinking, “Okay, well, either my bank manager is gonna call me and say, ‘Hey, Marc, great! Million dollars in your account. Wonderful work. Where can we invest that for you?’” 

Marc (14:38):

Or, on your portal, you get notification that the million dollars is there, and it doesn’t turn up, and it doesn’t turn up for day two, and it doesn’t turn up for day three. Okay, you get a little nervous. You call up your bank, if you’re able to get through to your bank these days, and you know, don’t have to suffer a chatbot, and you start asking the questions, “Well, where’s my million dollars gone?” And eventually you’ll find out perhaps, unfortunately, that they can’t accept it, that either the correspondent bank or your bank has reversed the transaction, because it’s either come from a known crypto source, or it’s been Marced as a transaction which has flowed from crypto to US dollars, and therefore that bank can’t accept it. The correspondent bank or your bank can’t accept it, because it creates all sorts of automated red flags, anti-money laundering risks, and places the bank at a certain amount of risk if they accept or receive those coins, if indeed they’re able to, because most often, the messaging system in the traditional banking world won’t allow them to receive it, because it’s flagged as a transaction that they should not touch.

Marc (15:50):

So that then gets reversed, gets sent back to the platform of your choice, and you’re back to that F5 screen refresh going, “When are these funds gonna land back?” and if you’re really unlucky, that crypto exchange now has a red flag moment itself, because that transaction’s coming back red flagged in a traditional banking system, and the crypto exchange wants nothing to do with anything that raises their business up anywhere on that scale of, “Hey, there is a red flagged, anti-money laundering suspected transaction associated with your account.” So you, as the consumer, end up in what I call this kind of spiral of death. You will get your money back. You will get your money back.

Marc (16:34):

That’s the good news, but the bad news, is it’ll take a lot of frustration probably, and take a lot of time. So what we’ve done, is we’ve stepped in and understanding how these two different industries don’t talk to each other, largely because of a lack of regulatory agreement about how they can work, and using our license, using our understanding of how to fulfill anti-money laundering and know your customer and compliance work, we bridge the gap, we provide the relevance information between the two parties on behalf of our client, give them just enough to allow the transaction to work smoothly without the automated red flags coming up, but not so much that we breach the privacy of our clients, and therefore by doing that, we allow the transaction to run smoothly, end to end.

Teja (17:25):

What an emotional rollercoaster it must be to be transacting like, that large sum of money and not be quite sure like, when you have access to the liquidity (Marc: Yeah.) for whatever reason, and to your point, it seems to be more, I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen this based on your experience, but my intuition suggests that that’s more common with really high amounts in per transaction. Right? It may not happen with a $1,000 transaction, but it certainly probably is more likely to happen as you step up in order of magnitude.

Marc (18:04):

Yeah. You’re absolutely right there, Teja. I think, you know, were we talking about, were we doing this discussion, what, 10 years ago, then yeah. A $1000 US transaction like that would be massively problematic. We’ve made a lot of advances as an industry, and you know, here we are now, so, you know, a few thousands, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 maybe up to 50,000 works pretty nicely these days. You know, I don’t wanna overdramatize. The point I’m making, is on those really high value amounts where you need to make sure it works well, and you don’t lose access to your liquidity for a period of time, because cash has real value short term as we all know these days. That’s where we step in (Teja: Absolutely.) and just walk those transactions through a white glove service end to end, as I described, to try and take some of that stress, to try and take some of that, you know, emotional negativity out of it, and ultimately just make sure that the high net worth or the business that we’re representing and acting on behalf of doesn’t suffer that that delay in access to their liquidity.

Teja (19:17):

So from a, let’s say, value add standpoint, are you guys partnering or exploring partnering primarily with the…I’m struggling with the right verbiage, ’cause this is like, not an industry that I’m in, so pardon me, and please feel free to correct me if I’m saying anything like, you know, incorrectly. Like, I guess the owners of the money, are you guys working directly with them or the financial institutions typically to facilitate transactions across like, their infrastructure, or, I mean like, what sort of part of the Marcet do you guys typically work with?

Marc (19:59):

So we’ve got great relationships, and all of your descriptors were absolutely on the money, so there you go <laugh>. (Teja: <Laugh>.) We work with traditional banks, and the way in which we’re able to make this flow happen, is we have great relationships with what we call “tier one” banks. So these are proper bricks and mortar banks, not, you know, what they refer to as “neobanks” or digital banks that are just using services from other banks with a brand wrapped around them. So we work with tier one banks, and we built this relationship whereby these tier one banks who have these very stringent and well-rehearsed and well practiced regulatory requirements around compliance, know your customer and anti-money laundering information, we show them that we gather the right amounts of information to allow those banks to work with us on behalf of our clients within the regulatory framework that they’re happy with, so they can attest to the authorities who have responsibility for overseeing their action, which oftentimes the regulators, sometimes the central banks, they can demonstrate that they’re within the parameters within which they need to operate under the body which is responsible for oversight to them.

Marc (21:21):

So we work very closely with those guys, but we also work really closely with the crypto asset industry, the exchanges, the liquidity providers who provide us with those coins when people want to come in the other direction and bring, say, $10 million worth of USD and buy a crypto asset like USDT, which is, you know, a form of crypto asset. We have to source that particular crypto asset from a provider of liquidity, and we work very closely with those providers of liquidity, again, to reassure them that we’re genuine. We’re providing funds that have gone through all of the checks and therefore not creating an exposure for them as a counterparty, but also we wanna know that those assets, those crypto assets when they come back are also of high grade, comply with all of the regulatory requirements so that our ultimate end customer, when we do the exchange, is getting back coins that we regard as clean in compliance and not that have been used for illicit activities or anything that might place that customer at risk.

Teja (22:31):

It’s interesting, ’cause it’s like, I mean, I imagine once cryptocurrency gets converted into fiat, you are now subject to a whole host of nation-specific or geographic specific regulations that then have downstream effects that people have to manage for and to. (Marc: Yeah.) In terms of where you see the future of, let’s say regulation going, what, it’s a broad question, but what are your views on, let’s say the global regulatory framework? Like, do you think it will continue to be kind of nation by nation, and it’ll kind of, you know, align to a standard way of doing things, or like, are there different geographies that have very different nation-specific paths and regulatory apparati?

Marc (23:25):

You know, another good question <laugh>. So look, I spent two and a half years working with the European Commission, European Parliament to help them take evidence from 170 blockchain companies as they were building their regulatory framework that spans 27 countries in Europe. (Teja: Yeah.) So I have quite a jaded view <laugh> of dealing with regulators and politicians. Where I think things will end up, is inevitably with regulatory frameworks in most of the major jurisdictions, and the inevitability of those regulatory frameworks I think is important to acknowledge, but the real piece of inevitability is that there will need to be some degree of compatibility established between those different regulatory frameworks. That is going to be very, very hard to achieve, very hard to achieve, because this is a space that is highly appealing for countries, for geographies, as (Teja: Yeah.) it is innovative, it has the opportunity to create new economies.

Marc (24:41):

You may have heard of the term Web3. Well, at the very heart of Web3 is this, you know, beautiful, beautiful simplistic delivery that Bitcoin allowed us to create, which is to send a unit of value from one place to the other over the internet, and have it leave the place of sending, and arrive at the place of destination over the internet, almost like teleportation, and that’s a really underpinning part of Web3 is being able to have payment rails that don’t require intermediaries that allow you to send a unit of value with finality over the internet that support some of these wonderful Web3 applications that are being built. So the prize on offer for the countries that build supportive and attractive regulatory environments is, they hope, that they get more innovators turning up, building more valuable companies that contribute towards further still the success of their country, and therefore to give up some of those competitive advantages in, I guess, a trade-off move to satisfy harmonization, so your regulatory framework can work with another regulatory framework when you might be wanting to retain that competitive advantage is a very difficult situation to imagine.

Teja (26:07):

The layman’s view, the middle brow view on FTX is sort of this notion that if there were tight regulations, let’s say on FTX, then therefore, this scale of fraud could not happen. Is that true? I mean, let me just pose that as a question before stating my viewpoint. Like, do you feel that that’s true, or do you think that was a case of like, straightforward fraud basically?

Marc (26:34):

You know, so I’m gonna, I’ll answer this. It’s a personal opinion. It’s not an opinion of XEROF. It’s a straightforward case of fraud. This was not…(Teja: Yeah.) FTX was not a crypto related crime. This was a financial crime, (Teja: Yeah.) and the vehicle that was used just happened to be crypto. In the same way as in the past, vehicles that have been used, or asset classes that have been used, have been US dollar, the GB pounds, the euro, stocks and bonds, shares, pension schemes, whatever it may be. It was straightforward fraud, and the burden of oversight was not just and should not just be placed on the regulator, because there were other checks and balances, many of which are very well established, such as the investment community with lead investors needing to do due diligence, (Teja: Yep.) the banking sector, because, you know, this was not an entity that was not banked.

Marc (27:39):

It had bank accounts, insurance providers, accountants auditors, you name it. So the oversight responsibility was not just with the world of regulation or the regulators, and therefore, I think it’s a little simplistic to assume that merely the lack of well-developed regulation allowed this fraud to be perpetuated. It was a contributing factor, of course, but there were other adults in the room that should have been looking at what the children were doing (Teja: Yeah.) whilst the regulator was busy making themselves a cup of coffee, for example, if you don’t mind me using that analogy. (Teja: <Laugh>.) You know, it’s not good enough to say that, (Teja: No.) “Oh, all the adults were away making coffee, and so, you know, hey, it’s no one’s fault that the infants decided to play with a box of matches and a can of petrol and set the nursery on fire.”

Teja (28:35):

It’s, yeah, I share that view. You know, it’s easy to pin this on the newness of cryptocurrency, and therefore blah, blah, blah, dangers, but it seems like that was a straightforward case of fraud that, you know, I don’t know, many people were unfortunately subject to.

Marc (28:56):

Yeah, we do have the benefit of hindsight, (Teja: Yeah, totally agree.) because, as you know, we’ve been through a high profile trial. The jury found, you know, an individual guilty, and then the legal process is probably going to find the, you know, the other participants guilty as well. So I think what the benefit of hindsight shows us, is that going through a well-established legal process, the verdict has been that this was outright fraud. It’s not crypto that was in the dock. It was an individual and a bunch of individuals who intentionally chose to act in a fraudulent way.

Teja (29:36):

If I’m a developer, and I want to get interested, and I’m interested, because I think, like, among my friends that are into this industry, a lot of them are actually very interested in like, making it, to use your metaphor, more adult, and to make it, you know, like, less sort of, I don’t wanna use the “cryptobro” term, ’cause maybe it’s like, pejorative, but like, make it more mature, and maybe accessible, and safe, you know, for consumers to use, big and small, high net worth, and you know, average consumers. What would your advice be to them if they’re an aspiring developer? You know, like, can they come work for XEROF? Where would you have them cut their teeth, you know, to get started in this industry?

Marc (30:29):

Our industry, generally speaking, the crypto asset industry is a wonderful place for developers, because so much of the technology that’s being built is being built in an open source way, (Teja: Mm-hmm  <affirmative>.) and this is one of the things that really, really gives me high energy about this industry, is it makes, if you are a developer, you know, if you’re a regular Joe like me who can’t read a line of code to save his life, it’s very opaque, but if you are a developer, you can dig into tools like GitHub, you can access the code, you can have a look at the discussions between different developers, you can have a look at the commits, you can have a look at the reviews. It is there as a wonderful treasure trove to show you not only what’s going on right now, but also the path along which has been traveled to get to the point that we’re at.

Marc (31:19):

So if you’re a developer, right now is a super exciting time to be in our industry, because the vast majority of projects that are achieving scale, that are building very interesting things, are using open source approaches, open source code very deliberately, because they wanna attract talent. They want inquisitive minds that think differently to come along and imagine things that we can’t imagine at the moment and work with them on those projects. So the best advice I would give would be to jump in, do some basic research yourself, find those projects that are developing use cases, and applications, and utility that resonate with you, and then find how you can access the code bases they’re using, the developer meetups that they’re having, the community they’re building around these particular projects, and just jump in and be very frank about your interests and ask if you can join in, learn, and maybe through doing that, find yourself a position that might appeal to you.

Marc (32:24):

It’s just a very, very accessible industry, and what I’m very enthusiastic about, and what gives me a, again, I’ll say it, a huge amount of positive energy, is the fact that most of the information you want to understand is there if you put some effort in, unlike you know, (Teja: Mmm <affirmative>.) perhaps in the ‘90s, when we were building you know, the initial web applications, and in the 2000s, where we were trying to all build businesses and get rich quick off of, you know, dotcoms, where we’d been taught that the proprietary code, the source code was what created the value in your company. We’re in an age now where it’s not the code that creates the value on its own. It’s the team that can realize the vision and plug all the pieces together to deliver real utility for something that we can’t imagine, yet is going to have a tremendous appeal to, you know, as you look about half the age of me, but you know, the people that are coming, the youngsters that are the coming behind of us. It’s that audience that you are building for. (Teja: Yeah, yeah.) It’s just a wonderful time. So if you’re a developer at the moment, I think, you know, you’re in the right age. You really are in the right age, because with a relatively cheap machine that you’ve probably already got, a relatively solid internet connection, you have access to everything.

Teja (33:49):

Awesome, Marc. Well, where can people find you on the internet? Where can people find your company? Do you like to connect with people on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or anything like that, or do you wanna send them to XEROF? You know, (Marc: <Laugh>.) you mentioned this at the top, but just again…

Marc (34:04):

Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity to shout that out, Teja. So people can always find me on LinkedIn. You just look for my name, it’s on the screen: Marc Taverner. You can find me at email Marc@XEROF, that’s X-E-R-O-F.com, or you can go to the website, which is XEROF.com, so think Forex backwards, and you’ll be able to connect with me on there through email, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Always delighted to hear from anyone that is interested in this industry. (THE FRONTIER THEME FADES IN) Not looking to sell to anyone that’s interested, but will be super happy to connect you with any of the projects that might appeal to you. We’ve been around, both Nick and myself, have been around quite a while, so it’s very highly likely that we know someone at the project that might appeal to you, and if you want to reach out, we’ll certainly be delighted to give you those introductions.

Teja (34:59):

Awesome. Thanks, Marc. What a pleasure.

Marc (35:02):

Ah, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Abbey, via previous recording (35:04):

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(THE FRONTIER THEME ENDS)