Revolutionizing Gifting How Giftly Redefines Personalization and Choice

Episode Overview

Tim Bentley is the visionary founder and CEO of Giftly, a platform that reimagines the traditional gift card by offering personalized and flexible gifting experiences. His journey into entrepreneurship began with a desire to make gift-giving more meaningful and convenient. This inspiration led to the creation of Giftly, which allows users to send customized gifts that recipients can redeem at their preferred locations, enhancing the personal connection between giver and receiver.

Before establishing Giftly, Tim gained valuable experience in the tech industry. He was the first employee at Aardvark, a pioneering social search startup that built the first social search engine, connecting users with people rather than web pages. Aardvark was acquired by Google in February 2010 for $50 million. Additionally, Tim founded 1-800-Know-Now, a mobile search company that provided users with information through human operators.

Tim’s diverse background also includes roles in investment banking, project management, and laboratory research. This multifaceted experience has equipped him with a unique perspective on business and technology, enabling him to innovate in the gifting industry. Under his leadership, Giftly continues to evolve, offering users a seamless and personalized gifting experience that bridges the gap between digital convenience and heartfelt gestures.

Episode Transcript

Timothy Bentley : We saw a lot of gifts being given for, you know, various types of support,  you know, giving gifts for meals, giving gifts for, you know, just wanting to reconnect with your friends and family because you couldn’t be there in person for a birthday.

Kevin Rosenquist : Hey, welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist  and thanks for listening. My birthday and my brother’s birthday are very close. We used to give each other gifts, but in recent years I’ve been telling him we should stop. It was getting kind of silly. He would give me a Visa or Amazon gift card for 50 or 100 bucks, and then a couple weeks later, I would feel obligated to match that. So I would give him a Visa or Amazon gift card for the same amount. I mean, we may as well have just kept our money, right? Well, Tim Bentley founded giftly. With stories like that in mind, he set out to take the impersonal nature of gift cards and make them personal. You can send people gifts either digitally or physically, with personalized messages, and for specific restaurants, coffee shops, you name it. But the cool thing is they can still use it wherever they want. The idea is for the entire experience to build a better connection between the giver and receiver, instead of feeling like an obligation like I was feeling in my story earlier anyway. I’ve talked long enough. Please welcome Tim Bentley. So we got to get this out of the way. We were talking before I hit record about Commodore 64, as you referenced that. I’ve talked about it with a couple of my guests. I love it, I absolutely love it. That’s great. What got you into deciding to pick up a, you know, get in front of a Commodore and start programming?

 Timothy Bentley :  my dad, my dad always had this intuition that computers were going to be important. So he got computers in front of us right away. He loved tinkering with them.  and then introduced that you could actually just write. You could actually, you know, line by line, write a little program and it would do something. So I just remember like the first hello world moment where you’re like, , you can actually tell it what to say. And trying to make little chatbots where, you know, just using if this, then this, then this, then this. And I just thought that was so fun to be able to have the computer do something. And I remember,  my dad wrote a program to quiz us on state capitals in third grade, and that, for me was like, wow, okay, I know randomized which state, which capital would you would ask you? And I thought, this is great, I want to do this.

Kevin Rosenquist : That’s really cool. Yeah. My dad was the same way. And I think the other people I’ve talked to were the same way. That seems to be the theme. It’s like if a parent sees the potential, sees the future of computers, then you were more likely to have something to play around with when you were young.

 Timothy Bentley : Yeah. Back in those days, you know, you started with the Commodore 64, but then after that you might have been building your computer, you know, 86,  you know, 286 first. 386 and you had to actually want to get your hands dirty in that. But,  that’s where it started. The Commodore 64 lived in the living room, and it was like right near the TV. So one of us would be on one device or the other.

Kevin Rosenquist : Yeah, I remember that.  Then I still remember first getting a mac and seeing the visual interface, and that was like. That was a mind blowing experience. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It was so weird.

 Timothy Bentley : Right. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that, too.

Kevin Rosenquist : All right, so let’s talk about gifts. All right.

Speaker3: So.

Kevin Rosenquist : If I want to give someone a gift, I can hand them a gift card or Venmo and say something like, enjoy a dinner out, maybe suggest a restaurant. Tell me how sending something through gift is different.

 Timothy Bentley : So I’m excited to be on your podcast because I know that you have a lot of B2B companies and founders talk about their businesses and talk about rewards programs, etc. but this is like a direct to consumer offering. So every one of your listeners can go online to giphy.com and, and, and maybe buy  gift cards for them,  for their friends, for family, for their birthdays, for Christmas. And,  gifts are different because we’re different compared to other gift cards, because we put people at the center of the experience and gift cards have a history of they really started as being proprietary currency for merchants. So merchants wanted to have, you know, be able to give out money that could only be used at their store. And then they realized at some point that people actually want to buy those and give them to other people as gifts. And that’s where the gift card was born. And I remember.

Kevin Rosenquist : Getting gift certificates to Sam Goody and Musicland. I think it was or whatever. And that was kind of my first foray into gift gift certificates when I was a kid.

 Timothy Bentley : Yeah, mine was,  Spieler as a local,  record store record and CD and tape store in Montpelier, Vermont. And they write out, you know, how much it was. You get it for, you know, birthday, and then you have to bring it in and they deduct they.

Kevin Rosenquist : Just like they write on it and just minus. Yeah, I totally remember that too.

Speaker3: And  and.

 Timothy Bentley : Gift cards continue to have a bit of merchant centric ness to them. You go and you see on a rack in a store like gift cards and even the branding, it’s all about the merchant for the most part. You know, you’re going to buy a Home Depot gift card or Starbucks gift card or McDonald’s gift card. And you know, most of these gift cards work at one place and in some ways accidentally puts the merchant really in the middle of an important moment between two people who are giving a gift or exchanging gifts. So if I were giving you a gift, you know, that’s like I’m trying to communicate something to you.  You know, if I were to give you a gift for, you know, $25 for coffee,  that would feel very different than if I gave you $25 for shoes. If I gave you a gift card for a local cafe. That would feel very different than a gift card for Starbucks. So there’s a lot being conveyed in a gift card that most gift cards don’t miss. And so we basically allow for that sort of personalization and customization so that you can really say what you want with the gift.

Kevin Rosenquist : So it.

Speaker3: Can.

Kevin Rosenquist : But to be clear, like if you give me that gift card, that $25 gift card to the local coffee shop, I don’t have to use it at the local coffee shop. Right?

 Timothy Bentley : Right. Yeah. So today when you get that gift through a gift, the recipient is actually given options for how they want to receive the value that’s associated with it. So you receive a gift for $25 to a local coffee shop. But in your mind you’re like, that’s sweet. I get the idea that you’re trying to convey that you remember that I live in San Francisco, that I like coffee, and that maybe he picked out a coffee at a coffee shop in my neighborhood. Like I get the sentiment and the sweetness of all that, but then maybe I don’t go. Maybe my favorite coffee shop is actually another one in the neighborhood. And instead of having that gift, then go unused, sort of akin to receiving a sweater that you like and you’re like, , thank you so much. Like, it’s sweet, but it’s going in the dresser drawer and it’s never going to be used. We have the flexibility. So you can actually use that gift, that gift card, and have more flexibility to where you get to use it.

Kevin Rosenquist : And tell me more about personalization. So is it you know, I think you I think I read you can you know, do email, text, physical all that. How does that work and how does the personalization aspect of it work from for like is there a card. Like how does that part work?

 Timothy Bentley : Yeah. So when you give a gift card, you’re giving the money that you want the person to have. You’re giving a greeting card that comes with a, you know, card face note inside and you can customize that. And then the gift card itself. Not only are you selecting a merchant, you actually have the ability to select multiple merchants and add them to a gift card. So you have an opportunity to really create a gift package for the person. That can convey a lot of what you know about the person, or something about your relationship with them.  so you could go in and create a gift card that works at,  top the top restaurants in San Francisco and pick those restaurants out. Or we, of course, have catalogs, and you can go through and say, I have a friend who likes restaurants, lives in San Francisco, and that gift card would actually be pre-made for you.  but you could also go in and completely customize that gift package for the person. And then and then we allow you to deliver it electronically, text or email, print something out at home, and they get a certificate that then they have to enter a code online to receive the sort of digital package, or you can even send something in the mail. So if you want something there on Christmas morning, you know there will be a card, open it up and it tells the person a preview of the gift. And then they enter a code and go online to really get the unveiling of the whole thing.

Kevin Rosenquist : Very cool, very cool. So does it if it does it say on there, hey, this is what I think this would be a great option for you. But just, you know, you can also use it wherever you want. Is it pretty clear on that?

 Timothy Bentley : We found that.

 Timothy Bentley : The sentiment coming from the buyer is important. Like, that’s like the initial framing. And then once we’re in the sort of nuts and bolts of like, okay, now we’re talking about do you want to receive that money as an ACH to your bank account. Do you want your PayPod? Do you want to be sent? Do you want a physical card that you get in the mail a couple of days later? Do you want a virtual card that you could add to your Apple Wallet or Google? Google pay? You know, we give you options so you can choose how you want to use that money. And we find our user base is super diverse. We have parents giving to children, charities giving to parents, children giving to parents, children giving to grandparents, grandparents giving to children. And so you want to.

 Timothy Bentley : Let.

 Timothy Bentley : Everyone at that on the point of the recipient. You want them to be able to just have something convenient that works for them. If you use a phone and use a digital wallet, a lot of people put the money there and then they can tap to pay there. It allows people to just want a card. They just want that feeling like gift card, put in the wallet, go to the cafe, spend down the card. And so we found that like by giving the recipient that choice, we found that people are much happier to have that when they’re recipient, rather than being forced to have another card that goes in their wallet,  or, or being forced to, like, hold on to a printed certificate or something, that they’d have to maybe get scanned or present to the merchant so people can choose how they redeem.

Kevin Rosenquist : I can’t tell.

Kevin Rosenquist : You know how many times I’ve gotten gift cards, and I just hand it to the person and I’m like, I don’t know if anything’s on here. Can you check for me? I have no idea what’s on this, you know? And yeah, yeah, if I had it in my Google Wallet, I would know exactly what I had on there.

 Timothy Bentley : Exactly.

Kevin Rosenquist : Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned the,  the, you know, different restaurants and all that. So do the restaurants. Do the merchants have anything to do with this? Are they involved in this process at all?

 Timothy Bentley : So the way that,  so our core tenant of gift, by being people, being people at the center of this, and we wanted that personalization from the beginning was that we couldn’t limit ourselves by going out and needing to go and sign up,  every merchant under the sun to, to get started with merchants to customize their listings on gift. Some of them do advertise gifts as basically being their gift card provider. And there are. But there’s no direct relationship. When you go in, the merchant basically gets a full,  like a customer paying full freight, and they don’t have any additional complexity or training that they need to do with their staff. And the card that ultimately gets run runs through one of the normal payment networks, and so they’re none the wiser.

Kevin Rosenquist : Interesting. Okay. Yeah, because I went on and put in, I went on to the website and put in my zip code and looked for restaurants, and it came up with a whole bunch of them, a whole bunch of small, like, just not chains, but like legit like like breweries and and little pubs and things like that. And yeah. So I was curious. So, they, they get notified that they’re on there and then they can go in and adjust their listing.

 Timothy Bentley : Yeah. Any merchant can claim their listing and can then  customize, customize that if that’s if they’d like to. And we have listings for merchants all across the country.

Kevin Rosenquist : That’s really cool. Really cool. I come from a marketing background, so words like experience and personalization, you know, have just become more and more common. People want that personal touch. The connection I feel like that need definitely intensified during and after the pandemic. How much did the pandemic change people’s desire for a more personalized e gift option? From what you’ve seen.

 Timothy Bentley : So there’s this general trend towards personalization and people being able to you know, you can you can get uh you know everything from your, your uh the mug that you’re drinking out. You can get one custom made for you. You can get different color,  you know, cases for your phone with your initials branded in them. And so there’s this broad trend towards that level of personalization, and that actually makes gift giving a little bit more challenging, because if I want to give you a gift, I don’t I may not even know whether you use an Android phone or an iPhone. I may not know what color you exactly want, given that there’s a rainbow of options out there.  if I want to, you know, gift someone, you know, a podcast that you know, I wouldn’t know a platform to start with,  for them. And so what we want to do is give people the ability to give this sort of underlying intention of that gift, which is like, hey, like, I know you got a new phone. You know, go pick yourself up a case. You can really decide where that is or which case you exactly want to get. So the pandemic accelerated that because you had people who weren’t seeing each other, so they weren’t up to speed on, like, what exactly do you have or know exactly what to get there? Yeah. And also.

Kevin Rosenquist : Were you into these days? I haven’t seen you in a year and a half. Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally.

 Timothy Bentley : Exactly. And then we saw a lot of gifts being given for, you know, various types of support.  you know, giving gifts for meals, giving gifts for, you know, just wanting to reconnect with your friends and family because you couldn’t be there in person for a birthday. And, you know, people still, you know, gifts are important in terms of strengthening,  maintaining relationships with your friends and family. And so we saw a lot of people, you know, give digital gifting a try that, uh.

 Timothy Bentley : You know.

 Timothy Bentley : Wouldn’t have previously. We also saw a lot of corporate activity.  we are mainly direct to consumers, but we have companies who come in and really just started with them using the consumer product. We saw a lot of companies also come in and say, you know what, we want to send this type of gift to our employees.  and, and that side of the business also really took off during Covid as businesses wanted to reach out and provide some, you know, help support and connect with their employees who are then remote.

Kevin Rosenquist : The next thing I want to talk about is corporate gifting, because that’s a big part of what a gift lead does. What do you see as the most, you know, the the, the best use case that corporations use gifts for?

 Timothy Bentley : So,  gift lead corporate is actually a small fraction of our overall business. Um. We do? Yeah, maybe it’s 8020. Wow.

Kevin Rosenquist : That surprises me. I would have thought it’d be higher.

Kevin Rosenquist : On consumer side.

 Timothy Bentley : Yeah, we really have a continue to have a focus on the consumer side. There are a lot of great companies out there who will help you as a company. Build a rewards program, bill incentive program, etc.. Giftly is best at this point for companies where they want the recipient to have that choice of redemption options. It’s also best usually in more of a.

 Timothy Bentley : Either a one off. We have a lot of people at companies like Microsoft. They come in, they’re a manager. They want to thank their team for a job that was well done. They don’t want it to go through payroll. They want it to feel different than some of the internal tools that are available. And so we see people using Giftly.

 Timothy Bentley : For the sort of one off gifts, one off rewards, or for people who are like, I really want to make sure that the recipient has the flexibility. I want to be able to customize, like, I want you to go to dinner and, you know, and they want it to feel more meaningful than maybe just sending the person cash, but then they also want the recipient to be able to choose how they receive that funds those funds have ultimately.

Kevin Rosenquist : Okay. Yeah, that’s cool. I remember I had a job where we would get crazy every once in a while and sometimes my boss would. He was the owner and I was his second in command. And he would just hand me his credit card and be like, hey, take the wife out for dinner this weekend because you guys worked your butts off and that was cool. But it is like but there is kind of a cool personalization that you can do. Like if he had just given me a gift card and said, like, hey, go out to dinner, I think you should go here or here or here. I just went there. It was really good, blah, blah, blah because we were in Chicago, lots of great food choices. So,  I totally could see that being a little more. I mean, it was, don’t get me wrong, it was cool when he handed me his American Express, but at the same time, it’s like it’s kind of cool when you get like, it feels a little more like a gift. Like you’ve done. Well when someone hands you something that’s like, a little more personal.

 Timothy Bentley : And that feeling is really, I think, important. That’s why we continue to focus on the consumer side.  because and then basically offer that type of experience, that rich experience to Companies in situations where they’re like, we want to have that level of high touch or, you know, that sort of high touch experience in some ways,  like one of our competitors,  that we joke about this, but this was real was is,  honeybaked hams. So,  we were in a conversation. Maybe this was a year ago or maybe two, where the company was thinking, we’re going to send out Honeybaked hams to our employees. And for some reason,  well, we’re on a sales call with them, and it becomes a conversation around, like, are you sure that your employees want a ham?

Kevin Rosenquist : Do they like that they’re vegetarian? Do they like ham?

Kevin Rosenquist : Is it like that?

 Timothy Bentley : Exactly all those considerations that I think sometimes when you’re trying to give a gift, you know, you can sometimes lose,  you know, lose sight of the other person, lose their memory of like, , yeah, that’s right. I ultimately want them to get something that they want.  and so sometimes we’re on calls.  You know, pitching is just like, this is the way to ensure that the recipients get something that they want, rather than maybe you thinking, okay, everyone wants to go to Starbucks. That’s not that’s not the case. A lot of people don’t want to go to Starbucks. And by giving them a coffee gift, then they have the flexibility to choose exactly,  you know, where they want to go for coffee.

Kevin Rosenquist : That’s a good point. I only go to Starbucks when I get a gift card because I’m not that big of a fan overall, other than they’re crazy, like 1000 calorie, 100g of sugar drinks. They are delicious. But generally just coffee is not really my thing. Theirs isn’t my thing. I don’t really like it, so yeah, I guess you’re right. Not everybody wants that Starbucks gift card. I don’t like to get one of those. And I’m like, well, I guess I’m getting a Frappuccino soon, right?

 Timothy Bentley : And like, once you start getting that feeling of like, , I need to use this right then then you’re starting. That’s like, that’s not what either party wanted in the transaction. Sometimes a restricted experience can be fun. Like instead of, you know, it’s like when you’re given money and sometimes when you just put it in your bank account, that can lose luster as well. But,  sometimes you want to make the person go and go and do something different. You want them to take the trip, you want them to stay in a certain hotel. You want them to go to a certain cafe, but not a lot like sometimes, but sometimes with people, you’re just trying to say, you know, I want to, I want to pay for your flight home for Christmas. And I don’t want you to have to take JetBlue. You don’t have to take Delta, you know. But I want to give that. And so that’s another example of a gift that’s very easy to give through a gift of, you know, packages it up. Let the person know, you know, what you know what the person wanted,  to gift it to you. And then you’re given the flexibility to redeem that the way that you want. Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist : Do you see all you said or it’s 2010 you guys were founded. So you’ve been, you’ve been around for a little while. Like as we get more obsessed with social media and people working from home. People are generally more isolated than they used to be. Have you noticed a trend going in the direction of wanting to see not just the pandemic, but even before that of personalization being a priority?

 Timothy Bentley : So actually we actually went remote in 2016. So we had a jump on the pandemic in terms of adapting to being a remote team. That also gave us experience both, you know, giving gifts to each other,  you know, learning how to connect as a team. And,  I think that clearly there’s a lot of changes that are happening just as people went remote. Now they’re coming back and there’s just the reestablishing of how do these relationships work in the workplace? And the reality of, like a lot of preference is changing. Going out for happy hour used to be the name of the game, but it’s when we founded the company. But now people want alternatives to that. And so I think that’s sort of personalization and sort of group personalization is something that’s only going to continue for sure. And I think that we’re going to need just new tools to give to people, to reward people, to get people together and different ways to communicate to each other that like, hey, you’re a valued member of this team and we need to be thinking, you know, just doing that empathy building to know, like, okay, I may not know them and to give them a gift that like.

 Timothy Bentley : You know, sir.

 Timothy Bentley : Still works for them. And there are a number of reward platforms out there that let people choose from a catalog of gift cards. And there’s obviously something that works and is very powerful about that model, and that is giving the recipient some choice. We want to bring that down, like all the way to the local level and just even further. It’s like having that element of personalization. So you can say have a coffee and then the person gets the choice of really they can use it wherever they want.

Kevin Rosenquist : If you have a degree in engineering and physics, right? And I noticed you said you had thought you would end up as a theoretical physicist originally, which struck a chord with me because I’m endlessly fascinated by theoretical physics. Admittedly, much of it goes right over my head, but what drew you to that field initially, and how did you pivot into the business world and become a founder?

 Timothy Bentley : So I was always interested in just sort of the cutting edge, cutting edge technologies. I was always interested in, like, where does this puck going? I watched tons of Star Trek growing up, and I was like, wow, like, I want to make things like that a reality. And that really drove my imagination to think about, like, okay, where are we now? Where could we go? How could I be a part of getting there? And I thought, studying engineering, physics. I remember reading the course catalog and it was like, dad, if you’re interested in, you know, really advanced cutting edge technology, Optoelectronics. Nanotechnology. At that point in time, or things that were really,  you know, were technologies people were talking a lot about,  you know, this was a course of study for you. I jumped into it and loved it. And while I was at Brown, I met for the first time people who had, you know, parents who had started companies. And it was the first time that dawned on me like, , people start companies. Like, that’s.

Kevin Rosenquist : Someone starts.

Kevin Rosenquist : These things.

 Timothy Bentley : Someone starts.

 Timothy Bentley : These things. Like someone who started the company that,  and I met,  and then through meeting people’s parents and then through some courses at Brown started to realize like, okay, that’s something that normal people do. I just had never met people like that before. And people who I liked to like, I, I met these people and I was like, , you can run a business with integrity, you can run a business you believe in, you can run a business and treat your employees and your customers really well. And that sort of started to open my eyes. And then as I was doing projects, I would find that I could see how these, even these relatively small engineering projects require a group of people working together. And I found like I was happy to do some of the project management there. And then when it came to presenting the project to the class, I was willing to raise my hand and said, sure, I’ll be the one to talk about it. And I found that I could play a good role where I could understand a lot of the science and the, you know, the engineering of what’s going on. And I could also communicate around it. And I felt that there was this big gap for me where I didn’t know anything about economics or business economics, how business is actually run. I took one entrepreneurship class at Brown, and we ended up winning.

 Timothy Bentley : The like.

 Timothy Bentley : That year’s business plan competition, and we went to a couple other schools and did well there, and that really fueled my excitement. But every time I’d get questions around cash flow analysis or, you know, financial statements, I would freeze. I would try to answer, but I just didn’t know. So that’s why after school, I decided to go into investment banking to, like, really understand how the business is run and how the businesses get financed. And so I did that for a couple of years in New York to really understand that. But the entire time I knew I wanted to leave, to start a business. And so that’s what I did. So I did that for a couple of years, left and then started my first business, and then effectively sold that business to a business out in California. That’s what got me to San Francisco, ran that business, sold that business, and then here I am, actually.

Kevin Rosenquist : That’s really cool. Like instead of just going like, , I’m going to take a class or get a book on how to run a business. You got into the weeds with it. You went and got a job doing it, knowing full well that you’re taking it. You were working, obviously, but you’re also using it as an education.

 Timothy Bentley : Yeah, exactly. Exactly.  having that sort of goal of where this is going really got me through it. I mean,  those jobs are very, very difficult and,  you know, take up all your time, all your energy. It’s stressful. And,  just knowing where it’s leading really helps me get through it. Just having that goal. I think that’s something that,  people, when they’re thinking about those early jobs after college, they’re sometimes I think it can be helpful to like, know that this is just the beginning of your career arc, just the beginning of where it’s going. And to have someone in mind, like, I want to get, you know, somewhere a couple steps down the line, I’m not going to get that job today, but I can like start putting building blocks in place to get there eventually.

Kevin Rosenquist : That’s really good advice. Yeah, you don’t have to commit right out of college, but just to have something in mind that you want to work towards that can make your early career a lot less mundane, tedious, whatever word you want to use.

 Timothy Bentley : Yeah. And then when times are tough, just to know, like, okay, this is going somewhere. This is not about just today. This is about like, okay, doing this for, you know, a some amount of time that’s going to get me somewhere that I really do want to be. And, and I think I was pretty open with people I was working with. I would keep a notebook around all the time and like any sort of business idea would come, I’d spend time every week writing out ideas just like, you know, idea, sort of thinking about business model, thinking about how this could work. And then, you know, you flip over the page, do another one. I would just like to have this stack of business ideas. And I was really happy to share those with anyone who asked. And so people were aware like, , Tim’s like Tim’s going to start a business someday, which created, you know, both personal accountability. And then also people knew, like, okay, you know what? Let’s invite Tim into this meeting because there’s a CEO and founder here who he might be interested in hearing from, and they would introduce me as this specimen analyst who’d be like, here’s our analyst who put together your pitch deck, but is also interested in starting a business one day. And it’s.

Kevin Rosenquist : Also cool that they did.

Kevin Rosenquist : That. That’s really.

 Timothy Bentley : Cool. Yeah.

 Timothy Bentley : Yeah. I was very lucky that I was in a group of people with people who were very open minded. As long as you worked your tail off for them, they were comfortable with the fact that, like, yeah, this may not be your long term career, but as long as you’re delivering results now and I think it can be helpful to have other people know, like what those hopes, dreams and ambitions are.  As long as you can have that out there but then still be delivering in the job today, I encourage my employees and in previous companies we would openly talk about like,  yeah, I want to do this, and then I want to go start a company.  and the last company that my company merged into,  was called Aardvark. And boy, out of that company, I mean, maybe out of 30 people, there were probably 12 founders that came out of it and by giving people, you know, even when you’re interviewing people, I ask people like, okay, what do you where do you want your career to go? You’re coming in as a designer today, but like, where do you want to build? And so that it’s much more realistic because none of us are holding down jobs that we’re going to be in for 30 years. You know, we should have a sense of change and progression. And I think being more open about that is good for everyone as a management manager, as a team member, etc..

Kevin Rosenquist : Yeah, I totally agree with that. I really like that a lot. Well, the website is gift. Com. Tim Bentley, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate your time.

 Timothy Bentley : Great. Thanks, Kevin.