Danny, where did this mission or vision come from?
It's come out of kind of a conglomeration of my experience throughout my career. So
I started my career in advertising very quickly got frustrated with the way that companies were
utilizing advertising to interrupt people's lives to try and sell them things that those people may
or may not want. And so I made a concerted effort to get out of the world of advertising
and found myself as one of the earliest team members at an innovation consultancy here in New
York. And so that was kind of my first exposure to a company that was helping other companies
think differently about how to do things. And I joined them right in kind of fall of 2007. And
so it was right around the time when the first iPhone launched. And it was right at a time where
social media was becoming what we know it as today. So it was becoming more mainstream and,
you know, a thing that people checked every day. And it opened the doors to new, interesting,
unique ways for companies to interact with their customers and the people who were championing them
that previously didn't exist. You know, it used to be that if you had a problem with a company or
you wanted to rave about a company, you wrote them a letter and hoped that somebody cared enough to
say, thank you for sending us a letter or somebody cared enough to take care of whatever your problem
was, or maybe you called them. And, you know, around 2007, 2008, we saw this sudden change in
the availability and access of companies to the average consumer. And so we had new ways to
interact with the companies around us. And those companies had new ways to create value
for their customers. And so that line of thinking was integral to just about everything that we did
in my work at the Innovation Studio. And then ultimately led me to thinking more and more about
not only how large brands can interact with customers, but how startups and how new brands
can live and breathe that mentality from day one. And so after leaving that innovation consultancy,
I spent the next 12 years of my career bouncing between starting companies and
serving in senior level roles at startups. And so it kind of all came together there.
And then in my last startup job, about four years ago, I sort of found myself leading a SWAT team
that was dedicated to helping our other portfolio companies better utilize technology for anything
from operations to customer engagement to sales to marketing. And so I was able to get a little
skills to whatever. And after about a year of doing that, somebody kind of tapped me on the shoulder
from within our investors and my founding team and basically said, like, hey, you should really go
think about doing this. And so that led to the birth of Apollo 21.