Deep Dive with Max Yoder

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, Co- Founder and CEO of Bolster. I am here today to go in deep with Max Yoder. Max was the Founder and CEO of Lessonly, which was a SaaS company that I will let him talk about a little bit more in a couple of minutes. Max, it's great to have you here.

Max Yoder: Matt, we're doing it again. Good to hear your voice.

Matt Blumberg: Why don't we start, Max, with a little bit of your journey. I know you were a relatively young first- time founder, which of course is super commonplace now. I would love to hear about the experiences you had that led to starting to Lessonly, including what gave you the idea for Lessonly, and then you can talk for a second about what Lessonly was too.

Max Yoder: I interned with a gentleman named Kristian Anderson when I was in college, and he had a company called Studio Science that really helped people get businesses off the ground. So, I saw a ton of people coming in to his office and pitching ideas, and he would help shape them. I was like, " Hey, this is not the magic that I thought it was," in a really good way. Like, hey, these are just people working a process. When I graduated, I worked for another person named Chris Baggott who is one of the co- founders at ExactTarget. Two just great people to work with, right before I even got out to college, and then right when I am out of college.

Matt Blumberg: By the way, two great people to have in your early career.

Max Yoder: Mentors my whole existence after that. What a gift. Chris encourages me to start a business, and I start one maybe a year and a half out of college. My company was not Lessonly. It was a software called Quipple, and it was polling software. That polling software didn't really serve any market because I built it thinking I knew exactly what it should do, and I launched it, and then it turns out that what I thought it should do is not really what people wanted it to do. Just market mismatch. I had a lot of hubris. I believed that I knew that the software needed, and it turns out I was wrong. I ran that company for about a year and nine months. I tried to sell Quipple to individuals, to companies, to use it to gain insight on the Internet. Again, it wasn't what people needed. And so, that was a tough road because I got some publications. I was fortunate enough to get some publications to write about Quipple. People in my hometown knew about it. My friends knew about it. And then it doesn't work out. I'd see somebody in the grocery store, and they're like, " How's that thing going?" I'm like, " Not great."

Matt Blumberg: Not great. Yeah, that's tough.

Max Yoder: Not great. So I'm laying in bed, shutting this thing down, laying in bed crying. My mom tells me she still loves me. My dad tells me he still loves me. Then Kristian, the gentleman I mentioned earlier, tells me he still loves me. He's like, " You should do it again." I'm like, " Really?" He's like, " Oh yeah, you just learned a lot. Why don't you go double- down? I'll do it with you." So, Kristian helped with Quipple. Kristian helps me with Lessonly-

Matt Blumberg: That's an interesting part of it. I don't know if you know, but Studio Science was our agency at Return Path.

Max Yoder: There we go. I did know that, because I remember seeing the logo, yeah. It was after I was there, but I'd come in and visit and I remember you all were a client.

Matt Blumberg: Absolutely. And then Kristian, obviously now at High Alpha, is one of our investors. He's done some sort of informal consulting work with us on brand and development. I get it.

Max Yoder: Yeah, he's a force. He loved on me, and he loved on me so much he ended up marrying my wife and I. He was our officiant at our wedding.

Matt Blumberg: No way.

Max Yoder: Just the mentor of all mentors for me. He's like, " Hey, you should do it again." I'm like, this guy doesn't have to tell me that. My mom, I'm fortunate enough, she loves me. I'm fortunate enough my dad loves me. And that is just a solid foundation, but Kristian doesn't have to stick around. So, when he did, I was pretty motivated and encouraged. Kristian and Mike Fitzgerald, and Eric Tobias, three guys who went on to co- found High Alpha, they all helped me start Lessonly. So, it's 2012 and Eric's like, " Hey, I think I've got an idea around training." Mike's like, " I think I have an idea around training." I'm like, " I'm open to anything because I've got time. You've got experience, I've got time." These guys are maybe 15 years older than me, 10 years older than me. They are gainfully employed, and I am not. I'm like, " I will go out and vet any business idea that sounds interesting." So, we look in the training space, and we look B2C, we look B2B, and we find out that business- to- business is the way to go. Actually, I had this really wonderful thing happen to me. I'm vetting the business- to- consumer route for training software, and Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures shares in a blog post the Google Drive folder that shows all of their research on that specific sector. So, I get all of Union Square Venture's research on this specific sector that I am trying to do my own research on, and it just fast- forwards the process for me. It's very clear to me reading this research that it's not the direction for me. The business- to- consumer route is going to take way too much money. I go to B2B, and the big idea was we're talking to all these companies about training software, and very few of them are over the moon or even slightly satisfied with what they have. They think it's pretty expensive. They think it's hard to use. They don't really know what it's doing. And so, we were like, " Hey, this is a kind of disinfected market, but it's a market." It's already an established market. People are already spending money here. They already see the problems here. But they're not satisfied with their solutions. What if we were a satisfying solution? Because we don't have the dogma of the space, and when I say" dogma", it's built around learning and development, and there are some really traditional views of what should be done in training software and what should not be done. We came in with very little of that, which was both a hindrance an and accelerator. We just started the training software we would want to use, instead of maybe the one that we thought we were supposed to make. One customer at a time, until we had about I think 1, 100 when Seismic, which was the best and biggest partner that we had, go- to- market partner that we had, acquired us in 2021. Just this really slow, never felt like we were... What's the word for it? Never felt like we were having any non- linear growth. It was just this linear growth that stacked on top of one another for about nine years.

Matt Blumberg: Look, I think that's the way that most successful B2B SaaS companies in particular grow.

Max Yoder: Okay.

Matt Blumberg: It's hard to be a hockey stick when you're in the SaaS business.

Max Yoder: I'm not sure I would have been able to do it, man, if it would have been a hockey stick. I think I would have lost my mind.

Matt Blumberg: I think even Salesforce. com in its first few years, it was one brick at a time, one customer at a time.

Max Yoder: Yes, so we did that in training, and it was quite the ride.

Matt Blumberg: At the end, you were how big?

Max Yoder: 300 employees, about$ 30 million in revenue, about 1, 100 customers.

Matt Blumberg: That's amazing. I'd love to dig in a little bit on you as a leader. You were not a first- time founder, which I had forgotten about, but Quipple didn't last very long.

Max Yoder: No, no. It was really my... Yeah, I didn't have any teammates on Quipple, so this was my first time actually growing a team with Lessonly.

Matt Blumberg: So second time- ish founder, relatively early career. It's not like you had seen three journeys at other places. I would love to hear a little bit about how you thought about growing your own career and scaling yourself as a leader while you scaled the company. A lot of founders don't make it to the finish line. A lot of founders get it started, either they get it going and they find out that they're kind of flamed out, or they're not up for the task of managing a business as much as starting a business. But you were there all the way to the end. I would love to hear a little bit about sort of how you thought about growing your career, scaling yourself, what things work, what things didn't work.

Max Yoder: Sure. Sure. Career is such an interesting thing for me because of my route. I was 23 when I started Lessonly, and so I was the CEO until I was 32 or 33. So, career trajectory and things was not something that was really on my mind, which kind of is an alienating thing because it's such a common thing to be thinking about, which is career. I had to grow myself in my job, but I wasn't really thinking about what is my career trajectory because I was always going to be the CEO if this thing was working out. I always knew I wasn't going to be the guy who could take it the distance to distance, like going IPO. If Seismic wasn't going to come along and partner up with us in a big way like they did in 2021 and buy the business, I don't think I was going to be able to go that much longer, Matt. I was getting to my headroom of just 300 people is a lot, it's a lot, a lot, a lot, and I'm overwhelmed at a regular basis, and I don't want to be anymore.

Matt Blumberg: We can debate that some other time, of whether you could have gotten the 600, or 900, or 1,200, because I think you could have.

Max Yoder: I appreciate that.

Matt Blumberg: But you have to do things differently.

Max Yoder: Yes, you do.

Matt Blumberg: That's sort of the question, from zero to 300, you have to do things differently a few different times along the way. What was that like?

Max Yoder: Okay, thank you. Thanks for that, that rephrase I like, doing things different along the way. In the early days, being a player/ coach was really fun for me. Then I was the first person in the company who got to just be a coach, who I'm only coaching. That was probably... It sticks out in my head as one of the most difficult shifts for me, going from having this to- do list where I get this energy from checking things off, and I've got the wind at my back as I check things off. Now, the things I check off the to- do list might have started in conversations three or four months ago. I'm not really checking them off. I'm helping them guide, but I'm not really doing the activity. That kind of left this dopamine deficiency for me. I was like, " Where do I get it? Where do I get that wind at my back?" So I had to figure out a way to manufacture a bit of that as I did more strategic stuff, as I was more doing guidance. The way I manufactured it was, I started writing a note to the team each week. It was a note that was very special to me about things that I cared about, that I thought we should be thinking about. Largely, it was a vulnerable note about something that I had learned the hard way, maybe that my teammates might benefit from. That was my dopamine hit each week if I got that note done, and it was so fulfilling and so life- giving that it allowed me to be present for all the stuff that didn't feel like a hit of dopamine because there was no real checkbox, just conversation, after conversation, after conversation. What I realized as we grew the business though, was I really needed to level up around my what I'll call emotional liberation. There's this guy named Marshall Rosenberg. He passed away in 2015, but he was a psychiatrist and a guy who I just absolutely love and would love to sit down with for breakfast, but unfortunately cannot. He talks about emotional slavery, which was something that I really struggle with, which is this idea of if somebody brings me a feeling or a judgment, I would carry it. I would think that it was true, and that it was my responsibility. So, somebody comes in and says, " This place sucks," that would hurt me. Or, " This place is not run well." That would hurt me. They would come to me with a feeling, " I'm really sad and I don't know what to do." I would carry all of that. I didn't have distance. I didn't have this healthy detachment from it.

Matt Blumberg: It's so hard not to take it personally.

Max Yoder: Oh my gosh.

Matt Blumberg: It's so hard. And yet, there are times where actually taking it personally is helpful, but you got to be able to figure out when it's helpful and when it's harmful.

Max Yoder: Amen, because I can't just straight up detach. I can't detach from feedback. I can't detach from the emotions of my teammates because part of that is fuel for me. Part of that is why I'm there. I want to help other people. But I also can't carry it. We got it to about 50 people, and it was just too many feelings, too many judgements. I was like, " What do I do?" So, I went to the opposite end of the spectrum and tried to detach completely and said, "I don't care about anybody's feelings or judgements," which did not work very long. I was like, " We're going to hire an HR leader. They'll take care of it." But that was not fun for me at all, because I like to be near people. That's a part of why I wanted to do this. So, I had to find this middle ground, which Marshall Rosenberg calls" emotional liberation", which is where we can be present with people's pain, we can be present with their frustrations, we can be present with whatever they're bringing us and not necessarily have to carry it. We can learn from it here, but not bring it on as our own burden. That was probably the most powerful accelerator for me, learning how to do that, because I could grow the business past 50 people at that point. Otherwise, I was going to have to hide, and I think this happens to a lot of... My suspicion is this happens to a lot of CEOs and they don't get as lucky as I did. They don't have the support that I did. And they go and they kind of hide in the corner office, and they have other people maybe do their bidding with all the emotions and all the feelings. They kind of think the detachment makes them maybe wiser or something, but it detaches them from the emotional core of the business. I don't know how to run a business and be detached from the emotional core of it. I think you're going to get a Frankenstein or something kind of ugly doing that. I have a feeling... Go ahead. Go ahead.

Matt Blumberg: No, no I think that's right. You know what's interesting is, one of the talks that I do regularly is to either new independent board members or aspiring independent board members. One of the things that I tell them about how to be a great board member is that they have to recognize that the problems aren't theirs to own. The problems aren't theirs to solve because they're on the board. So, their job is to advise, to consult, to suggest, but they don't have to internalize everything. What you're describing is the next level down from that. When you're the CEO, actually the problems of the business are yours, but the problems of the people aren't yours.

Max Yoder: Right. Right. Right. It was very difficult for me to learn. I was not raised that way. I was raised in an environment where somebody's in pain, help them. Even if they're not asking for it. I couldn't handle it anymore, so learning about emotional liberation and then learning to practice it, I can be present for people now. I can be present for people in a different way, and I was actually better at being helpful because my whole job was just to remain calm, be a calming force in front of them. Sometimes they didn't need to do anything other than that. We'd just be like, " I hear you." And learning that people are always bringing me their history, like something is frustrating, a decision that we made, they think it's frustrating just because they think it's frustrating. But it's actually frustrating because it reminds them of their last job, or it reminds them of something their mom would do. They might not know that, and so they're just bringing me the full force of it, so just detaching a bit from that, being compassionate, being loving to them, but not caring, what a gift. It was an accelerator for me in my personal and professional life.

Matt Blumberg: Did you get that from Marshall Rosenberg or from a coach, or a mentor-

Max Yoder: I did. I got it from a lot of people.

Matt Blumberg: A lot of people.

Max Yoder: Yeah, the idea from Marshall Rosenberg, like the" Oh, that's what I need. There it is. There's the divine middle that I've been looking for," and then coaches and therapists, anybody who I could find I would want to talk to them about this and get guidance from people.

Matt Blumberg: Let's talk more practically. How did you learn how to be a CEO? How did you learn how to be a CEO of a bigger company, and a bigger company, and a bigger company? Because there are things that are more on the emotional intelligence side, like what we just talked about, but you actually have to go out there every day and do the job, and the job of running a 300 person company is really different than the job of running a three person company.

Max Yoder: Yeah. My wisdom for anybody would be, partner with your best friend, Connor Burt, and have him be the operational genius and strategic genius of the business, and it'll be easier if you can find somebody like that. I had a partner named Connor. He was my roommate when I started Lessonly, and ended up joining forces with me and taking it the distance. His operational and strategic savvy saved me I think from having to be the whole thing. The executive team in general was that, it was this ensemble around me, that allowed me just to be strong on my strengths and not necessarily have to fix every weakness that I have. I was able to very early on in the business have this executive team that I could trust and verify every now and then, but generally just be like, " Hey, I trust you to do this job. You can come to me whenever you have a question, but I'm not going to hover over you. I'm just going to tell you what to me is culturally really important, and it is this style of treating of people. If you can treat people in this style, anything else, I really don't care how you get it done. So long as you're treating people with dignity and respect in the certain ways." I'm not trying to dodge your question, Matt. I just don't have specifics of how I grew with it, other than I hired people around me who were just really, really, really good at doing the stuff that I did not know how to do.

Matt Blumberg: But that's the answer, right?

Max Yoder: That's the answer, yeah.

Matt Blumberg: You're willing to hire, I am guessing... I know a couple of the people, but I'm guessing that you are hiring people more experienced than you are.

Max Yoder: Yeah, more experienced and more passionate about those areas. Our finance leader, Brian Mottmany, he was our CFO. That man knows things and cares about things that I am just so glad he cares about, because I couldn't begin to get excited about the same things Brian cares about. Connor, too. But thank God they do, because we just balance one another out. We just had this really healthy dynamic of loving one another and having so much respect for one another's talents that it ended up just being a really healthy dynamic.

Matt Blumberg: Hey you know, revenue recognition policies can be very exciting.

Max Yoder: Well, I'm glad somebody's doing them, Matt. What I learned is, if I'm not clearly communicating the cultural norms again, and again, and again all the time, and then of course embodying them, and then apologizing when I don't embody them, which I think is probably the most important part, I'm not doing my job and I just made that my sole focus. Okay, if this is a healthy organization, we probably could hit our numbers. How do we make it a healthy organization? Well, there's certain relationship dynamics that really help that. We have to have difficult conversations. We have to highlight what's working. We have to share before we're ready. We have to ask clarifying questions. Okay, how do I make those basically the only things I'm talking about, which is the fundamental stuff that if we do it, we're accelerated, and if we don't do it, we're going to slow down? Then everybody else could take care of what are our quarter goals going to be next year? I never, never made a decision on that. Connor would come to me and say, " Here's what I think we should do next year." Brian would say the same. I'd be like, " Okay." I never was the CEO who could do it all, and I don't know if there is one of those, but I definitely wasn't.

Matt Blumberg: Let me ask you a tough question, and then we'll shift gears to a couple of other things. You said a few minutes ago that you were about tapped out, like you couldn't imagine growing to the next level and the next level. I'm trying to figure out why, because everything I've heard so far says to me that you had the tools, both the emotional tools as well as the practical business- building tools, to do just that, that if when you were at 300 people and thinking about how to get to 600. If you didn't have the right leaders in place, you got got the right leaders in place. You'd have the difficult conversations. You'd figure what you are equipped to do and what you weren't equipped to do. That's all the stuff that usually prevents someone from getting from medium size to large. Why did you feel like you were tapped out?

Max Yoder: My body told me. About seven years in, my body was not showing any interest. When I say" my body", I maybe should say my mind, which is not just my brain. It is my body, it's my space. My mind is bigger than my brain, and my mind was finding itself distracted by a business after about seven years. We did nine years with Lessonly. Seven years in, I found myself gravitating toward different things. I found my interests gravitating toward stuff that was not anything close to the business. I would just kind of realize, oh I'm not naturally going back to the business. It's not something that I'm enjoying thinking about. I'm losing my love for it, and I think what it was, was that cycle of seven years, 28 quarters, being like" Hey, I understand this to my satisfaction. Not perfectly and not to the highest level, and not in all the ways. But I understand it to my satisfaction." There are other things in the world that I don't understand to my satisfaction, and that's when my body is going. I think it just said, " Hey, we feel like we've done this." Those quarters are so... They beat me down. Every quarter, it's like" Hey great job. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again."

Matt Blumberg: That's right, everything goes back to zero.

Max Yoder: Forever. Forever. There's never like, " Oh, but in four quarters more then you can stop for a couple of quarters." It's like no, forever. I think I got overwhelmed by that and my body decided it wanted to do other stuff, and I wanted to respect that.

Matt Blumberg: That's an incredible amount of self awareness. I give you a lot of credit for that.

Max Yoder: I appreciate that, man. I love this guy name Gabor Mate, G- A- B- O- R M- A- T- E. He wrote this book called When the Body Says No, which had me aware of the signals. Bodies are constantly... We're constantly ignoring our minds and maybe our bodies, and what they're saying, because we can think that it's in our frontal cortex, and whatever our frontal cortex says we need to do is what we really need to do. But our body might have different needs than our ego does. He just helped me pay attention to cues, what might it feel like if the body is saying no. My body was saying a lot of nos once I learned to listen to it.

Matt Blumberg: That's a good skill to have.

Max Yoder: I've been very grateful.

Matt Blumberg: Let me shift gears a little bit. You're a really creative person. I know one of the things that's a creative outlet for you is music.

Max Yoder: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: I think, we don't know each other super well, but enough for me to know that you're one of the more artistically creative CEOs I've met in my career. What I'm wondering is, is how you found enough outlets for that creativity in building Lessonly, and let's say post the first two years? I get the first two years is nothing but creativity. When you're starting a business, you're trying to have product market fit. You're a player/ coach so you're working on designing this, and designing... I get that. After that, once you had a thing, and a SaaS business is kind of your rinse and repeat mode at some point, how did you find outlets for creativity?

Max Yoder: I was drawn to pianos and guitars from an early age, and was never pushed to learn them in any traditional way, which I think is a great gift. My brother and my sister, older brother, younger sister, both took piano lessons. I did not. I'm the only one who plays piano. I think it's just because I was able to naturally be drawn to it. Between writing songs and writing words, those are the two most abundantly creative sources for me. If I'm writing something on the page, or if I'm recording something, I am just in a different place. And so, there was a point, like you said, where the business was too much creativity. I didn't have a lot of creativity to give, and I just kind of stepped away from the instruments. Slowly over time, five, six years in the business is more stable, and I'm able to spend more time making music. What I find is, if my wellbeing is a circle, business can only support my wellbeing in a certain slice. It's not the whole pie. It's just a certain slice. There's other outlets that I need, like physical outlets and emotional and spiritual outlets. The emotional and spiritual outlets came often from these creative things that I'd make something that was a reflection of myself or my experience, or just a reflection of the fact that I'm human. I would tend to do that with friends. I played music with other CEOs who are musically inclined. I wish meetings were more like jamming, because I would do meetings all the dang time. What I just found was it was filling my body in a certain way, and it was something that I would learn something in music that I could then apply to work. It's something about harmony. In the music, you need tension in order to appreciate the resolution. If I just have music songs that have no tension, they are not very interesting. There's something I can make of that in the working world. The tension and release, tension and release is this constant cadence that I'm going to be going through at work. It's going to be tension. We're going to have these moments of it's all working, and then it's going to be tension again, and that is music. I guess what I found was I like to play music and I like to write, and so I made space for those things in my work day, and I did not have any... I didn't want to say this yet, but I wouldn't make time at 11:00 AM. I would make time at 10: 00 AM to pick up the guitar or to write. And I would consider it my duty to the rest of the business for me to spend that time because I knew I'd show up differently if I didn't in a way that was not necessarily productive.

Matt Blumberg: It's such an interesting answer to that question. Did you ever find yourself, and the answer may be no because you figured out that you needed to blend that work into your day to day, but did you ever find yourself either creating chaos internally because you wanted to bring creativity to the business that didn't require creativity at that level anymore? Or did you find yourself trying to apply creativity to things that were sort of inherently less creative in the business? Or did you just say, " Hey, I got to scratch that itch. That comes with guitar, and it's happening at 10:00 in the morning."

Max Yoder: Yeah, I'd say that second... I resonated with both of those things. I sometimes do try to create stress in my life, more when I was younger, just to feel alive. I think moreso, I was looking for these" Hey, there's art in the business world. There's a ton of art in the business world." The way that we engage is where I found the most art and creativity. I appreciate psychology. I appreciate spirituality. I'm like, these things are in the business world whether we pay attention to them or not, and it became very creatively rewarding for me to read books about things that I could then apply to work or to do my own writing about, " Hey, what is the human dynamic? When relationships are working, what is happening? What is wellbeing?" That was very intellectually stimulating for me, and creatively stimulating for me. I would find things in the business that aligned to things I already wanted to do, and I'd figure out how can I make this useful to the business. I think that pays off. These things, I'm intrinsically motivated to go do them. How do I make them pay off for the business? Generally, there's a way because the business is people and I'm interested in people.

Matt Blumberg: That's so interesting. I'm guessing, as part of my answer to my last question-

Max Yoder: Sorry if I'm not answering your question. I'm not trying to avoid them.

Matt Blumberg: Not only you're answering questions, you're leading me to the next one.

Max Yoder: Okay.

Matt Blumberg: One of the things I love about your story is that you started a nonprofit in the context of Lessonly.

Max Yoder: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: Other companies have done that. We did that at Return Path with Path Forward, and the ExactTarget team, and Scott Dorsey started Nextech. Talk a little bit about Brighter Indy. Where did it come from? What impact has it had, and how did kind of relate to or motivate the team at Lessonly?

Max Yoder: When we started Brighter Indy, I think it was 2016 or '17, and the idea was net new revenues. We're generating new revenue every quarter. What if we take a percent of net new revenues and give it to local nonprofits? People would come to us and say, " Hey, can you help out a local nonprofit?" We would want to help everybody, but by definition could not. So, we created a process that said, " Hey, if you're a local Indianapolis nonprofit, you can apply to Brighter Indy." We're going to go through a vetting process. We're going to pick four nonprofits each year, and we're going to give them 20 grand for the year and as the company got bigger, it was 30 grand, 40 grand. That's a big deal to a nonprofit to be like, " Oh my gosh, we just got$ 40,000.00 from Lessonly." It was tied to our growth. As we grew more, as we landed our first $1 million deal, that was money in the pockets to our local community. What we focused on were local nonprofits that were giving youth experiences. We wanted to make sure that the youth of Indianapolis were getting rich, rewarding experiences. Maybe they were in robotics. Maybe they were in drama. Maybe it was in music. Maybe it was just in school. We worked with a group called Elevate Indy almost every year of Brighter Indianapolis that was all about bringing new experiences to kids in school, and then bringing mentorship and support to kids in school that they don't necessarily get from the common school curriculum. It was rewarding because we could volunteer with these groups. We could give them money. We knew that we were putting it right back in our local community. Because at the time, 90% of Lessonly was in Indianapolis. That started to change a lot with COVID, where we started to hire more remotely, and I'm not really sure what we would have done had we stayed independent longterm. That Indianapolis tie was pretty potent, but I'm sure it was going to be less potent over time. Anyhow, it was a motivating force that hey, this isn't just about the bottom line of the business. It's also about the bottom line of our city.

Matt Blumberg: I love that. It probably gives people on the team one extra thing to be proud of, one extra thing to connect with.

Max Yoder: Yes, and we can invite those groups in and they could share with us what are they doing with the money. That was always just like, ugh, what a motivating force to have somebody come in and be like, " You gave us this money. Here is what we did with it in your community," and we were just like... It made our hearts swell. Now that we have those relationships, many teammates at Lessonly, and myself included, now have our personal relationships with some Brighter Indy nonprofits that we wouldn't have found about without Brighter Indy were like, " I didn't even know that Indy existed," and now it's an organization I'm very engaged with. That's the case with many of my teammates too because we just got more awareness of what our local community needed.

Matt Blumberg: Amazing part of the story.

Max Yoder: Thanks for asking.

Matt Blumberg: Max, thank you for being here. This is a great conversation. I will say, I come away from this inspired by a lot of what you said, and I know a lot of the founders who are listening will as well. So, thank you for joining me today.

Max Yoder: Matt, thank you. You were very gracious to me many times in the Lessonly experience, and not because you needed to be, but just because you were. You made time for me. You mentored me. You gave me guidance. You always treated me with dignity and respect, so I'm very grateful to you and thanks for having me on today.

Matt Blumberg: All right, we'll talk to you again soon.

Max Yoder: Thanks, my friend.