William Leonard
Hey, ladies and gents. Welcome back to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. I’m William Leonard, your host, and investor at Valor Ventures, a leading seed-stage VC firm here in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, it’s my pleasure to welcome Graham Gintz, CEO and Founder of Knightley. Graham, welcome to the podcast, man.
Graham Gintz
Awesome. Thanks for having me, William. I’m excited to be here.
William Leonard
Awesome, man. Let’s kick it off here and give our listeners a high-level overview of Knightley.
Graham Gintz
Knightley started off in the beginning as just trying to solve the problem of founders not knowing how to structure their data room. We’ve evolved into being a dynamic data room platform that helps founders get organized for diligence, but also angels and micro VC. Basically, our whole idea is that founders are always dealing with this, “How am I supposed to know what I don’t know?” And for me, in my past career, fundraising was always that biggest just like a full stop brick wall experience. Having been in the game for a little bit, I figured out that there are some tricks to the trade and Knightley tries to bring those breadcrumbs to founders so they can be more efficient with their time and can actually be working and not just busy. I think that’s an important distinction. We try to price it in a way that we know that anybody can afford so it’s inclusive of all
William Leonard
Got it. Awesome. You touched on it a little bit but you know, your upbringing and you’ve been in entrepreneurship for a little bit, can you walk our listeners through your journey from your teenage years to where you are now?
Graham Gintz
I was born in Houston, Texas. My dad was a super early employee at Compaq computer. That obviously worked out very well for them. I don’t hear it as much as Compaq these days but for those that don’t know, they were one of the first companies to really market and build laptop computers and raised a ton of money from people like Kleiner Perkins and had a very successful exit. Later they were acquired by HP that absorbed the brand. My dad was someone who’d been through startup land and was a non-Silicon Valley guy who went to the University of South Carolina, grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania. He was a pretty average, middle-class guy that was super smart in the right place at the right time learning about computers in the 60s and 70s. He was definitely more of the classic inventor type where he was always tinkering and exploring. After his exit from Compaq, he got super interested in nanotech. I’m talking ‘99, the early 2000s, he’s getting super interested in nano. He got together with some of his colleagues and they started angel investing around some of the leading scientists from some of the leading universities in the world. They raised close to a $30 million fund and their whole thesis was investing in basic scientists that were trying to monetize and turn nanotech from something that was just exploratory research into a whole bunch of products. Like many kids in middle school and high school, you go to the occasional business dinner with your parents, you hang out in their office after school, and that was a lot of my experience meeting some of these people. I was visiting universities when my dad would bring me sometimes. I got to go and be in these meetings. One of my jobs was taking minutes at board meetings which none of this really clicked in my brain until I was in my late 20s where I was like, “Oh, that’s what I was doing at 15 years old, orchestrating Robert’s Rules of Order, listening through all these things, hearing all the problems, seeing how the investors thought through, and had conversations with the CEO and watch some of those battles happen.” Ultimately, there was just a lot ingrained in me at an early age, and having all that, I didn’t know a ton about venture capital and that stuff but that was in my roots. When it came time to do a science fair project, I went to my dad and I was like, “Hey, I’ve passively learned a good bit about these materials that you’re working with.” At the time I was living down in Lowcountry, South Carolina, which is near Parris Island, and timing-wise, this is 2001-2005, we’re entering Iraq and Afghanistan, and so a lot of the soldiers, a lot of the Marines are coming through there. We’re just seeing our local news talking about what’s happening in the Middle East. There just seems to be this huge problem that soldiers weren’t protected. Their bulletproof vests weren’t great, they were too heavy, they broke down with sweat, and they didn’t do great in the heat, and Kevlar may not be the right material. This wasn’t like a deep, white paper idea. This was an eighth-grader, over dinner, one night of, “Hey, what if we put your really strong particles in some glue and shot it?” That was the thesis and at 13, that was super exciting, because I was intrigued by the use of guns. My dad was a deputy sheriff and was actually drafted to go to Vietnam, although he never went because of some health reasons. It was just one of those things that growing up in South Carolina at 13, guns were of interest. He was so super supportive. He was my first angel investor, we went to Home Depot, got some UPS store-bought epoxy. When we were out visiting my grandparents over the summer outside of Dallas, Texas, he had some contacts there at one of the universities, and we met up with a Ph.D. student and made some samples. That Ph.D. student was a former Army Ranger and he was also interested in the idea. We went out to one of his friend’s farms and the two of them shot up samples. In the beginning, it was super funny because it felt like both of them were missing. We started at 50 feet. You have a former deputy sheriff, a former US Army Ranger missing from 50 feet with small arms. And then we moved to 40 feet and then 30 feet, and I have pretty good eyesight but by the time we were at 25 feet, I was like, “No, no, it definitely hit.” And we actually went in there. We found that the bullet had shattered. It was that holy shit moment where it just immediately went from like, “Oh, this is like a fun eighth-grade science fair project to dollar signs, where it’s like, what do we do now?” At that moment, we had discussions, we formed the proper IP, and that was my full-time job all throughout high school. I was working on that project and raising a little bit of angel money through the family. From that fund, nothing crazy, maybe a little over $100,000 over the course of five years of research, and just kept developing that prototype. It took us a year to replicate the experiment because literally something had been left in the room next door that caused a chemical reaction that we didn’t know about, and that was my first real experience with learning about products. My dad, managed all the business side, my job was just inventing, keep exploring, keep figuring out how to make a product, and we had a whole bunch of ideas. We got on the radar of a big defense contractor. Ultimately, when it was time for me to go to college, I had been doing research at different universities with different professors as a guest throughout that five-year time. One place clicked, they were connected to a defense contractor, it gave us an exit strategy. We were still super hopeful and figured that “Hey, they could take this to the moon. The patents could have a great royalty.” That’s what we did. We’ve licensed and sold to a Fortune 200 company that was very well known in the defense space and I went working for them for a year as a freshman. Ultimately, what the reality of that was, they bought our patents, and things changed and the government, future funding didn’t look as promising and they shut us down after eight weeks. I was 18 and I didn’t have any other skills yet. They didn’t really seem invested in me and my development, so I awkwardly did homework at their office for a year. Which taught me I didn’t want to be a corporate scientist. It taught me I didn’t want to work at a big corporation. But it did show me that I wanted to have the autonomy to control what I was working on. I was super interested in the entrepreneurial side. “Great, we have a cool idea. How are we going to monetize it?” I’m super grateful at that early age to have that experience.
William Leonard
You were 18 at the time freshmen in college?
Graham Gintz
Yeah.
William Leonard
During this time when you were working for this company, or “working for them”, what was your life like outside of work? Did you have friends? Were you involved on campus and things like that? Because it feels like you were so involved in the business side of things, what were things like outside of that for you?
Graham Gintz
Work-life balance was always something just was natural. I’ve not known that my dad always did a really good job with that. I figured out as I got older, that’s because he was a workaholic, who was on an airplane 250 days a year and he lived overseas a whole bunch away from his family. When I was born, he made a decision that that was going to change. I had friends. I wasn’t a pretty good baseball player. I was an all-state baseball player and so I did traveling baseball. Normal school, normal friends normal like that. Going out to parties and that stuff. I just would work on it after school and a lot on weekends, and got pretty good. Because these experiences take a long time, it just didn’t necessarily take a long time for me to do anything. I would just get a nice camcorder and record the experiments once they were underway. It was like Monday morning quarterback where you just go back and watch the film to see what happened.
William Leonard
It was primarily you and your father working on this project, did you have any other co-founders who were more on the technical side or on the business side or anything like that?
Graham Gintz
There were times where we would go work with specific university labs. I remember I went for a couple of weeks up to MIT, spent some time at Rice University, and the University of South Carolina. The University of Texas at Dallas where I ultimately went to undergrad. I got to go and do a lot of science fairs. I went to the International Science Fair, six times as an observer, three as a contestant. That was my job. Going around, and winning science fairs the way that you hear founders winning pitch competitions now. I was making, I mean, not like crazy money, but $10-25,000 a year winning the science fair competitions. It got me to cool places. I got to present a paper in St. Petersburg, Russia as a teenager. That was wild at some conference, took me out to the Bay, to Berkeley, and all over the country just to talk to other people my age, and then also these great professors that were doing cool stuff.
William Leonard
Let’s fast forward a little bit. You went to The University of Texas at Dallas for undergrad then recently, you were working for Techstars as a fundraising associate. When did the idea for Knightley pop into your head?
Graham Gintz
I’ll do one quick story and we’ll get to Techstars. In my mind, I was a hotshot founder. I had a successful exit as a teenager, stepped away from startups for a little bit in college, got back into one with my dad right as I was coming out, more of like an employee working on business development. Ultimately, that led to me doing a lot of the marketing and fundraising docs. It worked out, we were still doing a lot of government contract stuff. And then a couple of years later, after my first Master’s, there was an opportunity to go work at a startup that I just fell in love with. We’re trying to build a breathalyzer for cancer. On so many levels, that checks so many boxes that can make a lot of money, it solves a big world problem, it’s easy for people to understand, so we worked on that for two years. And again, I fell in the role of being the person putting together the marketing materials, working on pitching, doing the fundraising. I moved to Manhattan to try to raise venture money for this idea and got crushed. This is 2015/2016, outside of a couple of Paul Graham’s essays, there is no knowledge base on how to do this anywhere that I could find. I thought I knew my company in and out and I just got acronym to death by these VCs. At 24, I checked all the boxes, I’ve already done this before, I have a great idea, super venture scale, and just didn’t have that playbook. That’s when the original idea of Knightley entered my brain. It wasn’t formed, but if I want to be a founder, I need to learn how to fundraise, right? That was a very clear thesis. I went back to Business school at Georgia Tech to improve my network here in Atlanta, and also to learn how to be a VC just so that I could have that playbook. In my time, that’s when I discovered TechStars. I was an employee seven at a TechStars company here. We went and we raised a little over two and a half million dollars. That was my first time seeing that experience. There is the playbook, they had been so well trained by Techstars on how to leverage their PhDs from Georgia Tech, showcase the big vision, get these meetings in the bay, and leverage them against one another. This is a club and that’s where the idea for Knightley started kicking in. I went to work for Techstars after that startup. The idea for Knightley was definitely forming so TechStars just exacerbated the idea even further.
William Leonard
That’s awesome, man. You were able to see both ends of the spectrum when it came to fundraising, you got crushed at 24, and then you were humbled a little bit. You went on to work with Techstars, and you were able to see how to successfully raise capital. Can you talk to us about the origins of Knightley and how it really began to come off the ground?
Graham Gintz
I was introduced to my co-founder through a classmate in business school. His brother was a finance guy, we were taking a couple of startup classes together and just had good chemistry. He was like, “Hey, what are you doodling?” Because I got the reputation at Georgia MBA program and I was the startup guy. I have this idea of trying to make fundraising easier but I’m not even going to commit to starting anything new until I can find a technical co-founder. I just had done enough things where I had a good idea and wasn’t able to execute it. I just needed to find that person. I was committed to building a 50/50 partnership. And he was like, “Well, my brother is actually looking for his next thing. He’s ready to move on. He’s been teaching at this boot camp for a number of years and likes teaching, but I think he’s ready to go build something that users touch again.” And we went and had pizza across the street from Atlanta Tech Village and pitched the original idea. And he’s like, “Do you care how I build it?” And I was like, “Nope, I know how I want it to feel and work. But from an architecture standpoint, you’d have full autonomy and control of that.” What I told him was, “Hey, I know that this is a big commitment to just come in, and you don’t know me. Let’s go to a hackathon together.” Techstars Startup Weekend was that next weekend, I paid the entry fee, and I was like, “Hey, let’s just spend three days working on this idea. You can see how other people react to it, you can see how it feels how our chemistry is.” We went and there were actually a couple of angel investors that were working on stuff as well. We got some good feedback and the chemistry between Rob and I was really good. We still didn’t have a great full vision and plan beyond just Dropbox data rooms, and the relationship built there. At the same time, I was working at Techstars. I had been helping to recruit the class for Barry. When we started the program, it was really clear and I kind of expected when you go through a big accelerator program, that you’re just going to be given all these templates and tools. There’s some of that, but it just wasn’t as robust as I would have anticipated. The network is there, the coaching is there, but as a founder, I’m getting pulled in all these different directions. I just wish I had something that I could ride on top of that would make everything a lot easier where I can still do the work but it takes away a lot of the thinking. As I like to put it, the last thing I need is another blank sheet of paper for me to go figure out, and that’s where the idea really clicked for Knightley. We’re gonna build tools for founders that are coming out of an accelerator. That’s where we’re gonna focus and Rob and I have been communicating every day since.
William Leonard
That’s really awesome man. Can you give our listeners a software or product overview that Knightley offers founders?
Graham Gintz
When you’re preparing to fundraise, whether it’s when you have an idea or you have a company that is kicking butt, basically, there is a due diligence process. This is the minimum amount of work that you can do to maximize the amount of trust with potential investors, and that’s really all the due diligence is. It is, “Okay, I need to see a plan. I need to see a vision, I need unique insight. I also need to validate that everything that you just pitched me in your 10-minute presentation is backed by proof of execution. Prove to me that you’re an incorporated company, prove to me that you have a bank account, prove to me that you have these relationships and that you have these customer testimonials, and you have all this.” We package all of that into basically a simple data room that comes with training wheels, folders that are already labeled, and is already organized in a way that’s super easy. You hear founders say, “Oh, I have to go pitch 100 people before I am going to raise money. So I’ll go do that.” You put everything in Dropbox or Google Drive, you now have 100 different data rooms that you’re managing for each one of those relationships where they’ve asked me for different things. Mainly, we make it really simple where you can just clone, toggle, and give permissions to the documents that those investors particularly want. We’re just working to integrate with places like Stripe, Google Analytics, and Plaid for your banking information so there is something that proves that the source of this data and information is real. We’re working on a lot of those integrations and a lot of the templates to help tell your story in a way that’s investor-friendly. We’re also working on leveraging video so it feels real because not everyone is a great writer. A lot of times, it’s easier for me to just hop on something like Zoom, or just hop on video and tell my story in two minutes, and it’ll have all the data that somebody needs. That’s the product side. We’re just launching a community piece, because we found that there’s a bunch of founders that lack the confidence to feel like, “I don’t know if I’m fundraising ready, and I don’t want to invest in tools. I’m not ready yet.” We also talk to a lot of new angel investors that are feeling the same thing where it’s like, “I don’t feel confident writing that $10,000 check yet. Can I just give my time? Can I just share? Can I just coach? Can I watch other angels? Can I learn from them?” And so we’re like, “Man, we’re missing an opportunity here, let’s build a community where it uses these video tools. Where people can get that peer feedback that rewards you for doing the work and trying, but also then is that immediate, constructive feedback that you get at a place like an accelerator. Without the vacuum of 13 weeks, here’s Demo Day, best of luck in the world, take these tools and prosper.” You never stop running out of things that are like a challenge. Whether you’re a Day 1 startup, a Day 100, a Day 1000, Day 10,000, you are doing something for the first time ever as the leader of that organization. There are people that have done it before that you can learn from and that’s what our new Knightleyville Community is. Plus, it’s a cool way for us to test out the asynchronous video which we’ve been dying to explore. We’re going to bring that into the data rooms as well. Ultimately, communication is why most deals don’t happen. If something’s not communicated well, something is misunderstood. There’s just not enough trust that’s built in the communication process. There’s something about looking folks in the eyes, and telling them without having scheduled something on Zoom and blocking off 30 minutes and eating their calendar. Just going back and forth, three minutes snippets, whenever you have time to check-in getting that email update on your schedule, when you’re ready, can try it a couple of times to make sure you get it right. This helps founders get better leverage and be better positioned in those conversations. The power dynamic between an investor and a founder, you guys get to do this every single day, we do it a handful of times in a lifetime. We’re just trying to help with that overall feeling of just what is normal because I think that’s what founders and investors are looking for. Nobody wants to look stupid, everyone wants to be falling in line with what’s normal to be expected, and just hit those growth targets.
William Leonard
You built out the core Knightley solution and then you recently added on the community piece as more of a support group as well as an education group for angels who are looking to begin writing checks and deploying capital. As you think about the community, how mature is it right now? What is your end goal for the community piece?
Graham Gintz
We just launched. We’ve introduced some friendly advisors and a couple of founders that can give us the real harsh criticism but do it in a nice friendly way that is helpful and not just immediately turned. We expect to have the community in a super stable, great place by the end of the month. We have a waitlist right now. You just go to knightleyville.com. I can give you the link. People can sign up, and it’ll be free. It’s for anyone who’s just looking to be entrepreneurial. At Knightley, our core focus right now is on venture-scale founders. But the bigger thesis is that I think every small business should be run the same way as someone who’s starting up for a venture scale. You should think about customer acquisition costs, you should think about organization, you should think about all of these different data points. That’s the big vision for Knightley. We can just be that platform for entrepreneurs, whether it’s your grandma’s little bakery that’s trying to figure out how to pass it down from generation to generation or a hotshot from an engineering department that has cracked the code on new market insight and thinks they’ve got the next 100 billion-dollar can come in. The fundamentals are pretty much the same and having a place where people can come in and just figure out what’s normal to learn at the rate that you’re expected to learn as a venture scale CEO, think it’s awesome.
William Leonard
That is great, man. We’ll definitely be sure to share knightleyville.com in the show notes. Our listeners can go sign up there. And so transitioning here, you’ve been building Knightley for almost two years now. Reflecting back, what is one insight or piece of advice that you wish you knew back when you started the company?
Graham Gintz
This is a firehose of learning, just by nature of being a startup founder. Robin and I made the decision super early on that we were going to try to bootstrap as long as possible. I think the thing that I would go back and tell Graham from 2019 is I would get like one of those little wristbands that just says, “Be patient.” This is a process, it takes time to build chemistry with a new business partner, it takes time to engineer, we’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to do stuff, and know that you’re supposed to be making these micro pivots. But I think I would reach back out and I’d say, “Hey, do a little bit more prep work and be a little bit more patient in your research.” The big theme is just to be more patient. It’s okay that this is happening at the rate that it’s happening. You’re making all these trade-offs and a lot of the trade-offs we made earlier on to be slower and more methodical in our process are now paying off huge dividends now because we have this really stable platform. We’ve been able to do that completely bootstrapped up until 2021 where we could come in, Rob and I, we’re just building and we are slowly acquiring customers. We were doing it in a very organic way where our burn rate was 10s of dollars. At its height, we were spending a couple of $100 a month to keep Knightley up. We were doing what we needed to be doing in the outside world to live that lifestyle but just be patient. Now where we are today, where we’ve got a little over 100 companies using the platform, and we’ve got everything in position for that venture scale growth if we want to go that way. That’s all a result of that past patience and I wish I’d been more patient, but I can’t stress being patient enough to new founders.
William Leonard
I think that’s great advice. You mentioned something interesting. You said it’s important to build chemistry with new business partners. For some founders out there who may be looking for a technical co-founder right now, what are some insights that you can share about building up a communication cadence, or any type of way that they can structure a relationship to learn more about each other to see if they want to undertake this business together?
Graham Gintz
Rob and I kind of dated for a couple of months before we went all in and actually filed paperwork. We had three months where we were doing things not business-related. We went to baseball games, we played board games, and just like, “Hey, is this somebody that I can have a philosophical conversation with?” I got told so much more interesting stuff about Rob that has no relevance at all to Knightley or the business. He wrote a fancy novel and turned down going to Oxford to do a Ph.D. I have a pretty eccentric, eclectic background and I found someone who also matches that. Rob played college football. If you look at Rob now, you would not have thought, “Oh, that was a college football player at the University of Northern Iowa.” It’s one of those where I think going through that process and actually getting to know someone and knowing what their incentives are. Rob was a 40-year-old software architect that could get any well into the six-figure job that he wanted to do but he wanted to go build something. He wanted to experiment with architecture, he was pretty transparent and clear on why he was drawn to this. He didn’t particularly care at that moment in time about the customer’s needs and that stuff. He was more attracted to what he would get to work on and what his day-to-day would be as an engineer. For me to understand that, frame the working relationship, and have a cadence where it’s like, “Okay, this is what excites him. I need to go out of my way to make sure that we talk about this stuff, and he has an opportunity to geek out, and I can learn about it.” He cared about entrepreneurs because his father was also an entrepreneur and so he related to the problem. But if I were to ask Robin, in May of 2019, why he was excited to go do this, it was, “Oh, this could have a huge impact. I get to go build, and think through this awesome problem and go into it.” And now, Rob is the first person I talk to when I wake up, besides my romantic partner. He is my business partner, we hop on Slack or a call pretty much every day at 9 am. We figure out what we’re going to accomplish that day, and then Slack is always happening. We then close the day with a wind-down call with what did we get done, what do we need to keep working on, what are we going to do tomorrow, where do we need to be to hit our next milestone goal, and how are we ahead of schedule or behind schedule. I think that we just naturally got to really good cadence and norms to where we can pick up if one’s having a bad day and call each other and say, “Hey, this is off of the clock time. Let’s chat about whether it’s depression, or what’s going on, or life events, or money.” Having that trust in a business partner is like the closest I can equivalent to marriage. Again, be patient, take those extra steps to think about the person, not just the engineer on the other side of the screen.
William Leonard
That is excellent advice. Graham. One thing you said at the end, there was trust and trust is so foundational to all relationships, especially building a startup together. The excellent insight there, man. You’ve been an entrepreneur since a very young age And so you’ve seen the spectrum of the entrepreneur evolution. What have you seen really evolve and change? And how do you think the entrepreneur will be different, or more so the same going throughout this decade?
Graham Gintz
I think we’re entering into a gold rush. I mean that’s part of how we want to position Knightley, that we’re selling pickaxes to this new rush of entrepreneurs. But I think more and more people, and whether it’s a result of COVID or not, or just the boredom of being at home, but I think there’s a combination of tools and education that are so readily available. I think a huge wave of people are going to be attracted to, “Oh, I can go do this and make X dollars on the side.” We saw this with the gig economy in the last decade. It’s like, “I literally own a car. If I want to go make some side money, I can just sign up for Uber or Lyft. And then, boom, that’s 50 to 100 bucks a day driving people.” I think that there’s about to be all of this new wave of stuff. Gen Z is in this world of content creators their whole life. That’s appealing, and they’re going to figure out ways to monetize that. We’re seeing it in the numbers. 1.5 million people started a company in the third quarter of 2020. That’s double the number two years ago. If millions of Americans are starting companies every quarter, a whole bunch of those are going to fail, but a bunch of those are going to succeed. I don’t think that they all have to be mega million super corporations. I think we’re gotta go back to the time of our grandparents where everybody was either the proprietor or one of 10 employees supporting the proprietor at a small local business. Big corporations aren’t going anywhere but I think a lot more people are going to have side mom and pop shops that they sell whatever. They could be selling candles, or they could be writing content, or they could be an influencer selling ads on their own social media. We’re going to be attracted to that. I don’t know exactly where it’s gonna go. I’ve been fortunate to travel all over the world and I fundamentally believe that entrepreneurship is human. Whether I’m in Ghana and it’s at a stoplight and someone’s trying to sell bananas and peanuts, or I’m in Cambodia someone’s selling cell phone plans, I think there is this innate hustle that is global. I think that we’re now getting to a point where there are tools and infrastructure to support those people from it is a hard grind to make $100 a day to where, though, I can optimize and I can turn on some machines, and I can passively draw in a couple $100 a month just by giving access to my computer when I’m not using it. There are so many possibilities of recycling assets especially as the next 5 billion people come on the internet, what are they going to buy? What are they going to be interested in? How are we going to use those resources? What problems are they going to go solve?
William Leonard
I think there’s a lot of opportunities like you mentioned, especially now with the rise of e-commerce and people are monetizing through social media channels like TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, things like that. There’s a ton of opportunity out there. Man, great insight. Lastly, wrapping up here as a founder, what is one tool, one app, or software that you use day-to-day that is critical to your productivity?
Graham Gintz
It’s Zoom. I’ve been on the same train pre COVID and as soon as COVID hit, I became a paying subscriber. It is funny thinking back in the early days of Knightley, we were on the free plan. Now that anytime Rob and I have a miscommunication, or like we’re just struggling to Slack, it’s just like, “Zoom?” We pop in and we’re seeing face to face, we’re having a conversation, we’re sharing screens, and we’re just working together. I do think that Zoom is the reason why we’re strongly considering Knightley being a remote-first company, and potentially never having a corporate office. Rob and I had lunch for the first time Friday in a year. We’ve been able to build Knightley without being in the same room this entire process. I definitely think that there are a lot of pros to working in an office, but I think there are some cons as well. I think it puts extra anxiety and stress. Like, if I’m having a bad day, Rob doesn’t immediately know I’m having a bad day because he doesn’t see me in the same physical space and he doesn’t throw off his productivity. I would say Zoom. I think that this world where we just pop in, open up a camera, and we’re now in the same space where I have my own custom office that’s designed for me with my own snacks and everything around me, I don’t see ever going away from having that as a tool.
William Leonard
I love it, man. Love it. And lastly, what are you like outside of work? Where can we catch you doing it on the weekends or with family and friends?
Graham Gintz
In a non-COVID world? You can definitely catch me playing kickball with some friends from business school. That is my one ritual every week that I so dearly miss. I think we’ve all agreed we’re going to start back up in the summer once we’re all vaccinated. A whole bunch of 30 year-olds playing kickball down in Old Fourth Ward is definitely my vibe. Like the patio scene, I like drinking beer and wine. My girlfriend and I will go to vineyards, to breweries, we’ll play card games. Definitely grew up in a big card family. She comes from a card-playing family. That’s one of our rituals. People want to get into board games and card games.
William Leonard
Cool, man. That’s awesome. Well, Graham, it’s been a great episode, man. I appreciate you joining me and I’ll definitely link below to our listeners so they can join KnightleyVille, join the community for free, test it out, and see if it’s a fit for them. We’d love to have you back on the show in a few years, man.
Graham Gintz
Anytime, man. You gotta support here in Atlanta. Hopefully, we’ll be more of a household name here sooner than later with Knightley.
William Leonard
Amen. That’s the goal. Graham, thank you for your time, man, and have a great day.
Graham Gintz
Thanks, William.
Lisa
Thank you for listening to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. You know, we’re not just a podcast, we’re a community, and we’d love to see you at one of our digital or physical events, go to valor.VC and sign up for an event that makes sense for you. We have events for founders and the investors who back them. Another event you might enjoy is Startup Runway. The Startup Runway Foundation is a Valor organization that provides $10,000 grants to founders who are women or people of color building next-generation software products. Applications are free and we’d love to hear from you at startuprunway.org. And as always, thank you so much to the organizations that make this podcast possible. Not only Valor Ventures, but also Write2Market, a tech marketing and PR agency in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Startup Runway Foundation and Atlanta Tech Park Valley’s headquarters, and also headquarters for over 100 local entrepreneurs, building global businesses. See you next week. Please bookmark the podcast and join us.
