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Danny, where did this mission or vision come from?

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It's come out of kind of a conglomeration of my experience throughout my career. So

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I started my career in advertising very quickly got frustrated with the way that companies were

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utilizing advertising to interrupt people's lives to try and sell them things that those people may

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or may not want. And so I made a concerted effort to get out of the world of advertising

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and found myself as one of the earliest team members at an innovation consultancy here in New

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York. And so that was kind of my first exposure to a company that was helping other companies

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think differently about how to do things. And I joined them right in kind of fall of 2007. And

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so it was right around the time when the first iPhone launched. And it was right at a time where

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social media was becoming what we know it as today. So it was becoming more mainstream and,

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you know, a thing that people checked every day. And it opened the doors to new, interesting,

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unique ways for companies to interact with their customers and the people who were championing them

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that previously didn't exist. You know, it used to be that if you had a problem with a company or

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you wanted to rave about a company, you wrote them a letter and hoped that somebody cared enough to

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say, thank you for sending us a letter or somebody cared enough to take care of whatever your problem

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was, or maybe you called them. And, you know, around 2007, 2008, we saw this sudden change in

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the availability and access of companies to the average consumer. And so we had new ways to

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interact with the companies around us. And those companies had new ways to create value

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for their customers. And so that line of thinking was integral to just about everything that we did

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in my work at the Innovation Studio. And then ultimately led me to thinking more and more about

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not only how large brands can interact with customers, but how startups and how new brands

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can live and breathe that mentality from day one. And so after leaving that innovation consultancy,

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I spent the next 12 years of my career bouncing between starting companies and

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serving in senior level roles at startups. And so it kind of all came together there.

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And then in my last startup job, about four years ago, I sort of found myself leading a SWAT team

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that was dedicated to helping our other portfolio companies better utilize technology for anything

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from operations to customer engagement to sales to marketing. And so I was able to get a little

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skills to whatever. And after about a year of doing that, somebody kind of tapped me on the shoulder

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from within our investors and my founding team and basically said, like, hey, you should really go

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think about doing this. And so that led to the birth of Apollo 21.