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The first two hires I ever made were terrible.

Like, 72% of founders report that the untroubled journey affected their mental health.

Yeah, we've gone from zero and now we're at 71 million AAR.

Hi, I'm James Islay, founder and CEO of Cognism.

So this talk is about how Coggins and Avoid a Scaling Crisis from going zero to 70 million

AER.

When I was thinking about how to tackle that topic, there's many stages of the journey from

zero to 70 million, and the one theme that came back to me again and again was about mentorship and my support network and

And then I and it really reflected on how did that support network grow from what from when you know we were zero a year to 70 million a

I think like that's the biggest difference and that's the biggest thing that's made

Our journey smooth

and so that was what I was going to focus on. How many people here have a mentor? Could you just

put your hand up if you have a mentor? Oh wow, not that many. How many people have a mentor

of a company that's several stages ahead of them? Okay, so like swore. Okay, so this is a really

important talk. So this is our AR and as you can see it's Okay, so this is a really important talk.

So this is our AAR.

And as you can see, it's been a fairly smooth journey.

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