Episode 439 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Ben Katz, CEO & Co-Founder of HYBRD.
Did you know that Y Combinator originated right here in Boston back in 2005? It was a legendary cohort with names like Sam Altman, Alexis Ohanian (yes, Reddit started in Boston), and Justin Kan all working on startups in Cambridge for the summer.
While the accelerator decided to keep the program exclusive to Silicon Valley long ago, Ben Katz and his team at HYBRD are proving that Boston founders can still break through YC’s ultra-competitive admissions process and leverage that momentum, learnings, and network to build a high-growth startup in Boston.
Ben is a WHOOP alum and a lifelong athlete who realized that existing fitness apps were limited and didn’t tell the full picture. To solve this, he co-founded HYBRD, an AI-powered fitness coach that integrates with your wearable devices and apps like Apple, WHOOP, Garmin, and many others. It takes the data from all these sources to create personalized, adaptive training plans that automatically adjust around your life, recovery, and daily schedule.
In this episode, we cover:
- All the details about how HYBRD was accepted into Y Combinator, and Ben’s advice for Boston founders applying to the program.
- Ben’s background growing up in Massachusetts, early entrepreneurial ventures in high school, and his athletic roots.
- His career path through sales initially, getting into product management at Wayfair, leading growth product initiatives at WHOOP, and his time running the health + fitness category Appex.
- How the founding team (Ben Katz, Matthew Ruiters, Caroline “Shoe” Shoemaker, & Mats Terwiesch) came together and built the initial version of HYBRD during their YC batch.
- How HYBRD leverages AI and wearable data to deliver personalized fitness coaching at scale.
- Guerrilla marketing strategies, including acquiring users at HYROX fitness races.
- Why Boston is a premier hub for performance, health, and fitness tech, and Ben’s take on building consumer companies locally.
- And, so much more!
Transcript:
Here is the cleaned-up transcript of your interview with Ben Katz, polished to match the formatting, punctuation, and smooth style of your previous podcast episodes. All filler words, awkward pauses, and transcript artifacts have been removed while keeping every word, nuance, and piece of context completely intact.
Transcript
Keith Cline: Ben, thanks so much for joining us.
Ben Katz: Pumped to be here. Thanks for having me.
Keith Cline: Well, I’m excited to talk to you because I feel like this conversation is long overdue. You’ve been a very active, visible member of the Boston tech community. I’d be at an event, I’d see you, and I’d think, I need to go say hi to Ben, I haven’t met him yet. Finally, our worlds collided at an event, and I was like, Finally, I can ask you to come on my podcast! So I was excited that we were able to do this today.
One of the things that I think is really cool that you’ve been leading—and there are a number of things you’re involved in to help bolster the Boston tech ecosystem—is the Y Combinator connection. I want to talk about that first, but before we get into that, maybe you can give people context. What does your company, HYBRD, do? What’s the quick elevator pitch before we launch into the Y Combinator stuff?
Ben Katz: Yeah, we’re building an AI-powered fitness coach in your pocket. When you think about the future of health and fitness, fitness is one of the most personalized things in the world. With all of the advancements in AI and technology, it’s the first time that personalization at scale has truly been unlocked. We’re trying to build on top of wearable datasets to help give people training that adapts around them in their life, as opposed to feeling like you need to follow a 16-week training plan to a T or else you’re not going to make it on race day.
Keith Cline: All right, so that’s a perfect primer because we’re going to dig deeper into HYBRD, what you guys do, the whole story of the company, and how it works.
You and your co-founders were participants in Y Combinator, right? Now there’s this buzz and interest in having Y Combinator back. If somebody’s listening and doesn’t know, Y Combinator originated in Boston. The first class actually had Alexis Ohanian, Sam Altman, Justin Kan… heavy hitters! If you look at that photo, all those people were together in Boston building Reddit and lots of other great things. So we need Y Combinator back. Come on, Paul Graham, bring it back!
Anyways, what you’ve been doing that I think is really cool is helping Boston entrepreneurs understand how to apply and get accepted. Let’s use this time to talk a little bit about that. How did you go through the process and get accepted?
Ben Katz: We kind of shot in an application on a whim. We figured it’s a 30-minute task, like taking a lottery ticket and hoping for the best type of situation for us. We didn’t expect anything to come of it, and we were super fortunate that it did.
One of the reasons why I’m so vocal in the Boston community about it now is that I think YC gives you basically every advantage that you can possibly have as an early-stage startup. I think Boston founders don’t apply often enough—not because they’re not the right caliber, but because there aren’t that many YC founders here, so it’s an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing.
Whereas when you walk around San Francisco, because that’s where the batch is and they encourage founders to stick around afterwards, everybody in the tech ecosystem knows a handful of YC founders. All of those YC founders do a good job of being vocal and encouraging people, saying, “Yeah, this is a great program, you’ll get a lot of advantages, and you should apply.” So the volume of applicants tends to be more condensed around San Francisco to begin with.
We applied not thinking we would get in because I didn’t know any Boston YC founders before going through the program myself. Now I’m trying to be that Boston YC founder people know so it doesn’t feel as unapproachable or impossible for the average founder here.
Keith Cline: For people who haven’t applied, what happens? What do you do?
Ben Katz: It’s pretty intense. The application process is a series of open-ended questions. My biggest piece of advice around the questions in general is: don’t overthink it. Answer it in one to two sentences if you can. If you cannot, use bullet points. You have to imagine that the partner reading this is going to read a ton of them in a given day, and you want to get the point across very quickly.
It’s open-ended questions, then a one-minute video recording explaining who you are, what you’re building, why, what problem it’s solving, etc. If you make it past that, it’s a 10-minute interview with you, your team, and a YC group partner. That 10-minute interview is capped to 10 minutes—it’s rapid-fire questions, and they make the decision of whether you’re in or not based on just that experience. It’s pretty intense and high pressure. You should definitely do some practicing and make sure you have your ducks in a row before you get into that room.
Keith Cline: There’s a common theme on my podcast that every founder needs to practice their pitch, regardless of Y Combinator. Any event, any investor—it just needs to be your flow, repetitive in your mind. I think you mentioned in another podcast that that was something they worked on with you when you were actually in the program, like a two-sentence description type of approach.
Ben Katz: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s one of the first things that they help you refine when you get in. Even through the application process, I find that having people apply forces them to ask and think about hard questions regarding their business and articulate them in short sentences.
Keith Cline: One thing I also learned was that the partner reading your application and doing the interview is the decision-maker. It’s that one YC partner who is really going to accept you or not.
Ben Katz: Yeah, and this is one of the things that I think a lot of young folks in particular don’t fully understand. Up until that point, a lot of folks think about everything as an academic achievement, like, I need to qualify to get into this thing, and I’m trying to illustrate how smart I am.
With YC, the group partner who reads your application is the same person who interviews you and works with you in the batch. You are going to be a line item on their P&L as a venture capitalist. Obviously, they want to back really smart people, but it’s a business decision. It’s not a question necessarily of, What is the intellect of this one person? It’s a question of, Do we believe this person can make me money? That often correlates with intelligence, but not always.
Keith Cline: Dalton Caldwell was your partner, and he worked closely with you once you went through the program. What were your takeaways from the experience—meeting other founders, the dinners, the programming? What stuck out for you?
Ben Katz: YC is a 10 out of 10 for a lot of different reasons. There are a lot of benefits, and it’s hard to underplay how important some of them are. Your fundraising experience is going to be fundamentally different if you’re in YC versus not.
Very candidly, we are building a consumer fitness application. When we went through the fundraising process at Demo Day, we had like 150 paying subscribers. That’s not exactly the type of thing VCs clamor to invest in. But when you say you’re a YC company, all of a sudden you get 100-plus investor leads coming to you saying, “Hey, let’s have a conversation, I want to learn more about what you’re doing.”
When early-stage founders think about fundraising, I tell them there are two separate parts of the game: getting the conversations and closing the deals. I never even had to play the first part, which is a massive advantage that came solely because of YC.
Beyond that, the guidance and general perspective the partners share is fantastic, and the network of peers is amazing. One of the biggest aha moments for me early on was—having never known a YC founder, but knowing the resume of YC—I had always put YC founders on a pedestal. I thought, These guys are the best of the best, they know something I don’t, they have this edge.
Then once you end up in the room, there’s almost a Wizard of Oz moment where you pull the curtain back and realize, Wait a minute, none of us have any clue what we’re doing! We’re all just figuring it out as we go.
Especially when you’re an early-stage founder in a place that doesn’t have a super high density of early-stage founders vocally talking about their companies, that realization is mentally pretty powerful. There are a lot of other benefits in terms of credits, as well as the distribution network of being posted on their social media. That’s how a lot of companies get their first couple thousand dollars of MRR. Overall, the experience was everything I hoped for and more, and I’m really glad we got a chance to do it.
Keith Cline: There’s a gap or an opening in Boston for somebody to swoop in and build something like that, especially since Techstars is not operating in Boston as we speak.
All right, let’s talk about your background story. Where did you grow up, and what were you like as a child?
Ben Katz: I grew up in Westford, Massachusetts, and the only thing I really cared about was sports. I’m a lifelong athlete. I played college lacrosse, and I was on the lacrosse, wrestling, and cross-country teams in high school. I hated cross-country, but it was good for keeping my weight down for wrestling, and it was definitely better than football because I had bad knees. I’m a huge football fan, but I never got to play myself.
I was always just active. My parents didn’t let me have video games until high school—great parenting! I played some Pokémon on a Game Boy, but I didn’t get an Xbox until high school. I spent my entire childhood running around playing sports, running around in the woods, and biking around town. It was a ton of fun.
Very early on, I realized entrepreneurship was what I wanted to do long-term. Growing up in Westford, the standard thing to do as a young person was either work at the local Market Basket grocery store or work at Kimball Farm scooping ice cream. I didn’t really want to do either.
What I ended up doing was mowing lawns. The first couple of years in early high school, I did it all myself for my parents, neighbors, and friends of parents. Slowly, more people asked for lawn mowing, and I realized I had so many requests that I didn’t have time to do it all myself.
I realized I had access to underclassmen from the wrestling and lacrosse teams. I thought, You guys are good at manual labor, you need money, let’s make a deal. I ended up creating a rudimentary, low-level landscaping company that was just local high school kids doing manual labor. I paid them $12 to $15 an hour and charged the client $30 an hour. That’s basically what I did all through high school and even into the first year or two of college. It was fun.
Keith Cline: That’s awesome. How did you get your career started after Babson?
Ben Katz: Originally, my plan when I got to college was to go into investment banking, so I majored in finance. I did that because all the smart people I knew told me investment banking was the best thing to do, that I’d make a lot of money, and learn how to run a business. About halfway through, I realized I didn’t actually think that was the best way to learn how to run a business.
I hard-pivoted. I didn’t know the exact right move, but I knew my goal was to start and run my own business, though I didn’t feel ready yet. So I went into sales my first year out because no matter what I do, I have to learn how to sell—sell customers, sell investors, sell people to join as co-founders.
I did sales for a year, and then felt like the learning had begun to plateau. I didn’t have something I was passionate or confident enough about to take a swing on yet, but I wanted to acquire a new skillset. My thought process was: I want to figure out how to make smarter business decisions based on data.
I took a substantial pay cut coming out of sales to take an entry-level analyst role at Wayfair. Three to four months in, I got my first glimpse of what product management was, and I thought, That’s what I should be doing.
I spent the next two and a half years trying to get a product management job, both at Wayfair and externally. But product management is an insider’s game where the core of the job is making decisions, and nobody wants to hire someone to make decisions who has never made them before. I’d get pretty far in interview processes and lose out to someone with actual PM experience—which was totally valid.
Then I got super lucky. WHOOP posted an Associate PM role. One of the PMs I had networked with two years prior at Wayfair was working at WHOOP. I reached out to her and said, “Remember how I wanted your job two years ago? I still want it, and I’ve been trying to get it. Would you be willing to refer me for this APM position?” She did, I went through the process, and the cards fell just right. I ended up on a great team with a great mentor and grew my career there for a number of years.
Keith Cline: At WHOOP, you were part of the growth team. What were you working on?
Ben Katz: If you close your eyes and think about all the things that make WHOOP an awesome product, I didn’t touch a single one of those! Anything that touched money rolled up into my team: customer acquisition flows, the website, checkout, subscription logic, retention offers, churn management, the accessory store, and the Shopify integration.
Keith Cline: That was a great parallel with what you learned at Wayfair.
Ben Katz: 100%. All PMs should be analytical, but this was probably the most analytical PM role imaginable, with a very analytical boss who helped refine that skillset and taught me how to apply transferable skills.
Keith Cline: What did you do next?
Ben Katz: My original plan was to stay at WHOOP until I had an idea to pursue. My now co-founder, Caroline Shoemaker (AKA Shoe), left WHOOP six months before I did and joined an early-stage company in Boston called Appex. Appex was a mobile app portfolio aggregation company. Their thesis was that there are a bunch of mobile apps doing $1M to $3M a year in revenue. If you acquire them and implement standard paywall pricing, onboarding, and paid user acquisition, you can grow them by 20% to 40%, pay down acquisition debt, and build cash flow PE-style.
A couple of months after Shoe joined, they decided to double down on fitness and needed someone to run that book of business. She recommended me. At first, I wasn’t convinced it was the right move. I had conversations with their team and put it on the wayside. A couple of months later, they came back and said, “It’s now or never.”
Shoe made a good argument: “You say you want to learn skills to build a company, like full P&L ownership and managing growth from $2M to $5M versus $5M to $10M. Which of those do you think will actually help you do that?”
I made the hard decision to leave WHOOP. To this day, WHOOP was the best corporate job I’ve ever had. I loved my team, believed in the product, and enjoyed the high-energy growth phase. But from a career learning perspective, moving to Appex was the right next step.
Keith Cline: What were the different apps in the fitness and health category that you oversaw?
Ben Katz: The crown jewel was Fitness AI. This was before AI was cool—it was an app giving strength training recommendations based on personal preferences. It was one of the earlier adaptable workout companies, competing with Fitbod. There were also companies like StepBet, where people tracked steps and pooled money, along with a couple of other cash-flowing businesses.
Keith Cline: How did you get to the point of having the idea for HYBRD, and how did the founding team come together?
Ben Katz: The idea came during the transition from WHOOP to Appex. I had been tracking my workouts in a spreadsheet for two years. As an athlete, I considered myself a strength-first athlete with fast-twitch muscles for sprinting and short distances. All of my co-founders were endurance athletes doing marathons and Half Ironmans, and they pushed me to start doing those with them.
I realized I sucked at endurance, but I needed data and didn’t want to lose the strength I had built. Trying to mesh strength and endurance together on my own was really difficult. That core insight led to extensive user research before we took the plunge to leave Appex and build HYBRD.
When I was at Appex, I needed help managing the fitness portfolio, so I brought in Mats—my other co-founder—who was at WHOOP at the time. That made three of us from the “WHOOP mafia” at Appex.
Our fourth co-founder, Matt Ruiters, was a close friend of Shoe’s from college and part of our triathlon and book club group. He was a senior technical lead at AWS and a killer engineer. The Venn diagram of a really good engineer and a really good athlete has a very small center, so he was the golden ticket.
Keith Cline: How did you get started? From what I gathered, the first line of code for HYBRD was written on the plane to YC. You didn’t even have a full product yet. That ties back into pitching YC without a finished app to show the partner. How did you launch?
Ben Katz: Because three of us worked at a fitness app portfolio company and wanted to leave to build a fitness app, there was natural tension regarding non-competes and contracts. We came to an agreement with the CEO of Appex: we did an extended three-month notice to hire and train our replacements, make the transition smooth, and ensure no bad blood. We had nothing against the company and wanted everyone to succeed.
To keep things super black-and-white, we held off on creating any IP until that period ended. We applied to YC during that window, found out we got in during our last week at Appex, and flew across the country a week later to live in San Francisco for three months. It was a fast turnaround!
As a side note, I do not recommend proposing to your fiancee, quitting your job, and moving across the country without her a month later—that was definitely mentioned eight different times by speakers at our wedding during the roast!
Keith Cline: That’s a great story!
You have experience building sports performance apps. Why did you feel HYBRD was going to be a difference-maker when there are so many fitness apps out there? Did you get any naysayers asking why you’d enter that category?
Ben Katz: 100%. From the beginning, we knew as founders that there were two paths: classic B2B SaaS (higher statistical likelihood of success, but lower personal passion) or consumer tech (lower statistical likelihood of success, but much higher passion). We chose the latter.
We wouldn’t have started HYBRD if we didn’t feel the pain deeply ourselves. Everything on the market fell into one of two camps: strength-training oriented or cardio-oriented. Yet the average athlete does something in the middle because those two modalities are complementary. We saw a gap in the market for athletes like us.
At the same time, two macro trends made this possible:
- Wearable adoption skyrocketed—34% of Americans now own a wearable, and that percentage is higher among people who work out.
- AI unlocked personalization at scale for the first time.
Over the last 18 months, AI functionality has progressed rapidly. We built the infrastructure knowing that as new AI models released, we could plug them into our existing framework, and the product would get better automatically without us lifting a finger on model development.
Keith Cline: Boston has a lot of performance-tracking expertise. We have HYBRD, WHOOP, PlayerData, Catapult, Perch, Pison, and Output Sports. It’s a fascinating category that Boston is deeply rich in.
People often complain that there are no consumer companies in Boston, but there are massive consumer companies here at scale and exciting upstarts. Boston needs to retrain its thinking and celebrate the cool stuff going on.
Ben Katz: I totally agree. There’s a bit of natural pessimism in the air here as opposed to a default to optimism. We don’t give ourselves enough credit for how excellent our ecosystem actually is.
Keith Cline: Looking at your website, it shows different screens of the app. As a consumer signing up, what can I expect?
Ben Katz: When you sign up, we ask what you’re training for—anything from overall general fitness to an Ironman while lifting weights. We take you through standard onboarding: goals, strength vs. cardio ratio, workout hours, and rest days.
Then we ask for open-ended feedback to understand your specific context. For my first marathon, my goal was breaking four hours without losing strength. Now I’m training for mixed martial arts and carrying heavy loads on backpacking trips.
HYBRD takes that context, combines it with your wearable data and preferences, and builds a personalized training plan. That plan adapts as you go. If you miss workouts or your wearable reports high strain, it reschedules automatically. You can tell our AI agent, “I’m traveling next week and only have access to a hotel gym,” and it updates your plan to bodyweight exercises while maintaining the same training stimulus.
Imagine using Claude or ChatGPT to make a workout plan—there’s no feedback loop. You have to manually update it. HYBRD comes with your wearable data pre-integrated, adapts automatically, and pushes the workouts directly to your Garmin or Apple Watch. You just press start.
Keith Cline: That’s the key! Integrating with all these apps and devices aggregates everything into an operating system for your workouts. That’s your moat. Asking ChatGPT or Claude requires manual effort.
Ben Katz: Exactly. My favorite analogy is cooking. People have been able to cook for themselves for hundreds of years, but I still prefer it when someone who is actually good at cooking makes dinner for me. You can build a workout plan in Claude, but would you rather make yourself dinner or have someone make you a really nice dinner? That’s the difference. HYBRD wakes up, looks at your recovery, knows you skipped three days or went to a bachelor party, and adapts the optimal workout for you automatically.
Keith Cline: One of the biggest challenges in this category is old habits—people signing up for an app and stopping a month later. How do you retrain the consumer, or are you targeting a specific athlete?
Ben Katz: We talk internally about our core user as a “vibe trainer.” They have enough experience to know generally what they want, but want help putting the structure together. They see the forest, but need help defining the trees—like running three days a week and doing two full-body lifts.
Our job is to meet users where they are and not punish them for being human. A lot of our athletes are training for an event, but life, career, and family come first. Perfection isn’t possible because they aren’t pro athletes, so our plans flex around their lives.
Keith Cline: What have been your best channels for customer acquisition?
Ben Katz: We do organic marketing and affiliates, but the most consistent strategy is going to HYROX races. For listeners who don’t know, HYROX is a functional fitness race with eight stations (burpee broad jumps, sled pushes, ski erg) interspersed with 1-kilometer runs.
We created a free HYROX race analysis tool as a lead magnet. You enter your bib number, and it shows what percentile you scored in for each station compared to your division. We put up flyers with QR codes at HYROX events—specifically in front of urinals, inside stall doors, and above water fountains. It works like a charm! They scan the code, enter their bib number, give us their email to view their results, and enter our trial funnel.
Keith Cline: How has the company been funded to date?
Ben Katz: We received the standard $500K from YC, plus a bit of funding coming out of Demo Day. That’s all we’ve taken on. We focus on building a high-retaining, high-quality product first, rather than relying on constant capital raises for growth at all costs. We’re self-aware that consumer fitness apps can be harder to raise VC money for unless growth is explosive, so we built the business to be sustainable long-term.
Keith Cline: What is the team size right now?
Ben Katz: It’s the four co-founders plus our VP of Technology, who rowed with Mats in college and worked with us at WHOOP as a senior iOS engineer.
Keith Cline: That’s a great lesson in building scrappy and prioritizing retention. What advice do you have for building a consumer company generally?
Ben Katz: Talk to users incessantly. We thought we were building a product strictly for ourselves, but talking to users daily revealed unexpected shifts.
Second, shipping fast is the only advantage you have as a small company.
Finally, retention comes first. The ultimate source of truth is whether customers actually pay for what you build and stick around. Everything else is downstream of that.
Keith Cline: What do you think makes a great product manager?
Ben Katz: A combination of being highly analytical, understanding the user, and above all, being curious without tying your pride to your ideas. I often look for reasons why I’m wrong rather than reasons why I’m right. That mindset allows you to be self-critical and recognize when you’re building the wrong thing rather than just fixing a flow issue.
Keith Cline: You have a strong presence on social media and do a lot of speaking engagements. How did you land those opportunities, and why do you prioritize them?
Ben Katz: I haven’t done outreach for media; it’s largely been inbound from me yelling on LinkedIn! One of my superpowers is that I don’t really care what people think about me, and I’m willing to share what I learn along the way without letting pride get in the way.
As for why I do it: when you work at a company like WHOOP surrounded by world-class talent, it’s easy to suffer from imposter syndrome and feel like you aren’t ready to build a company. When I went to Appex and spoke to founders running multi-million dollar app businesses, I realized, These people aren’t mythical geniuses—they’re just normal people who took the plunge.
I want to illustrate that I’m just a normal guy and that anybody can do this. Boston is an academic city focused on accreditation, whereas San Francisco treats starting a company as a badge of honor. If I can encourage a few people to take the risk and start a company, it’s worth it.
Keith Cline: What’s your LinkedIn creation strategy?
Ben Katz: I keep a running list of topics in my notes. Each morning, I pick one, speak into Whisper Flow, and send the transcript into a custom Claude project. It cleans up my stream of consciousness into a readable post while keeping my authentic voice.
Keith Cline: Why did you choose to build HYBRD in Boston rather than staying in San Francisco after YC?
Ben Katz: YC definitely encourages you to stay in San Francisco, and for B2B companies, the case to stay there is strong. But when deciding where to locate, you have to look at customers, talent, personal happiness, and capital.
For a consumer company, our customers are global. Boston is the best sports city in the world, our networks are here, and there’s a deep concentration of fitness and health tech talent. This is also where we want to live and raise families.
As Jason Kelly says, “Money travels easily. You don’t need a Brinks truck—you can get the capital in San Francisco and bring it back to Boston.” Every company that goes public does so in New York, but they don’t all live there. You can raise capital in SF and build where you want to be.
Keith Cline: In Boston, you can stand out, build a brand, and contribute to the ecosystem, whereas in San Francisco, there’s so much noise.
Ben Katz: I totally agree. We need more early-stage founders willing to talk publicly about what they’re building, their mistakes, and their learnings.
Keith Cline: What are three apps you can’t live without—excluding HYBRD, Slack, email, or calendar?
Ben Katz:
- YouTube: Great for learning and content.
- WHOOP: Still use it daily for data.
- Claude: My primary AI assistant.
A wildcard fourth is Apple Maps. My GPS glitched recently in the suburbs, and I realized how helpless I am without it! It made me remember when we used to keep printed paper maps on the car floor.
Keith Cline: What is a book or podcast recommendation for entrepreneurs?
Ben Katz: Build by Tony Fadell is my favorite book to recommend. It’s excellent.
Another great one is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Tactical advice in tech changes quickly with AI, but the story of Nike in Shoe Dog illustrates pure grit. Grit never goes out of style.
Keith Cline: Shoe Dog is incredible—it’s all about failure, grit, and hustling through impossible odds.
Outside of building HYBRD and training, how do you spend your time?
Ben Katz: I spend a lot of time with my family, my wife, and a lot of time out in the woods. Between those and building HYBRD, that’s pretty much my entire life!
Keith Cline: That’s awesome. Ben, thanks so much for taking the time to share your background, your journey with HYBRD, and your great advice for founders.
Ben Katz: Yeah, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun!