Hello and welcome to a very special edition of the Punch Bowl News Readback podcast. We have the three

co-founders joining me today, Anna Palmer, Jake Sherman, and John Bresnahan to talk about all things

five-year anniversary of the founding of Punch Bowl News.

It's wild.

500 years.

It is insane that we're here now.

We're in the Fly-Out Day studio, I should note, which is another example of how much this

company has grown in a very short time. And I want to have you guys on to talk about the growth of Punch Bowl and also

reminisce a bit on where we started. So first question for the group, what's one memory from the

early days of Punch Bowl? We're talking 2021, that era that stands out to you. I'll take it to

2020 when Anna and it was COVID and Anna and I, um, we were kind of like, we wanted to do our own thing and, uh, we asked Brez and he's like, yeah, sure, I'll do it. And we all remember, I don't remember, yeah, like nothing quite that. No, no, no, it wasn't that smooth. But we, we were in my backyard because it was COVID. And it was raining. And it was cold. It was about this time of year, to be honest with you, right? It was like November. November, December. And we, we, it was really, it's really interesting thinking back in it because, and I tell

this to people when we, when we start new verticals or when we hire people in the, in the policy

space, like the first thing we said, Anna, we, Anna said, we have to own the leadership first.

And then once we do that, like, we could think more broadly about how we want to own different

areas. And we kind of all decided, first we'd

get into financial services taxes, then we'd get into tech and then defense. I mean, it was actually,

we actually, I don't know that we knew that we would stick to that, but we definitely had that

in mind when we started. Yeah, it's interesting and look back. I think the best part about a startup is like not knowing what you don't know, right? We didn't know a lot. We didn't know a lot. And everybody had a lot of confidence that we could do it. And I, you know, when we started, again, it was COVID. And so, you know, Jake and Bres were on the hill. I was in my townhouse on Capitol Hill.

And all I remember, I mean, we were trying to act like we were so much bigger than we were, right?

We're four people.

And I wanted to do VIP gift bags.

And all I remember is my husband likes to call himself an employee negative one.

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