I started very idealistically, I think, with this mental model that people want and need to borrow money, right? Like, I think that's why many of us are drawn to this industry, right? Because we see that if you need to borrow money, it's good to have options.

That was my mental model coming into it.

Overtime, I started to see really that so much of what was happening to consumers wasn't driven by how much they wanted to borrow, it was really driven by how much the bank wanted to lend. And I really wanted to understand those dynamics more.

But when I started talking to other people and reaching out to other real estate platforms, there just wasn't a lot of information out there about private lending. Ironically enough, you know, Brandon Turner with BiggerPockets, his big thing was to go find a private lender to fund your deals. But then there wasn't any discussion on how to do that funding of the deal, which is why we ended up doing a book with bigger pockets, because there was that gap in the marketplace. And then also during COVID, the world shut down. You can't get together with people, you know, the RIA meetings that I had been attending, we're now posted on Zoom. But for anybody who's gone to a RIA meeting, you're not likely going to bump into somebody else who's also doing private lending. Because first off, you don't say that in public, because instantly you become the most popular person in the room and RIA meeting. So we kind of have to be a little bit of lurking happening there. But, you know, during COVID, not even that was happening. So I went out looking for community.