Automated Fund Operations with Eric Faw from Entrilia
Eric Faw of Entrilia addressing Automated Fund Operations

Making Money Move Efficiently within the Private Capital World with Eric Faw of Entrilia

Episode Overview

Episode Topic:

In this episode of PayPod, we dive into the world of private capital and alternative investments, tracing their evolution and discussing the impact of fintech innovation, notably, the birth of Entrilia, co-founded by Eric Faw, Explore how Entrilia’s offerings empower financial participants while addressing challenges in automating payments. Discover the keys to successful financial collaborations, the significance of “cloud-native” in fintech, and the transformative role of AI and ML technologies. Get insights into the success factors driving the ever-evolving fintech industry.

Lessons You’ll Learn:

Discover the evolution of private capital and alternative investments, delve into fintech innovation driving Entrilia’s creation, and learn how their services empower financial participants. Explore the challenges in automating payments, the keys to successful financial collaborations, the significance of being “cloud-native” in fintech, and the role of AI and ML technologies. Uncover the success factors in the ever-evolving fintech industry.

About Our Guest:

Eric Faw, co-founded Entrilia, a prominent fintech company specializing in private capital and alternative investments. With his extensive experience and deep knowledge of the financial technology sector, Eric has played a pivotal role in shaping the future of financial services. His dedication to innovation and improving the financial ecosystem has positioned him as a thought leader in the industry.

Topics Covered:

Eric guides us through the private capital and alternative investments evolution, highlighting key developments. Explore the inspiration behind Entrilia’s creation, their empowering products for financial stakeholders, and how they tackle payment automation challenges. Understand successful collaboration dynamics in the financial ecosystem, the importance of being “cloud-native” in fintech, and how AI and ML are shaping the industry’s future success.

Our Guest: Eric Faw Revolutionizing Automated Fund Operations

Eric Faw is the CEO and Co-founder of Entrilia, a futuristic fintech company based in Miami Beach, Florida. With over 15 years of experience in the alternative asset industry, Eric has emerged as a respected advisor in this domain. He brings in a colossal wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective, having worked with over 300 private equity, venture capital, hedge fund, family office, real estate, and other fund managers. His expertise ranges over direct operations, third-party administration, and software providers in the alternative asset space.

Eric’s journey in the fintech world led him to co-found Entrilia, where he combines market insights with practical business strategies. Entrilia focuses on modern SaaS products tailored for private equity and alternative asset firms, offering solutions in fund accounting, investor insights, portals, and more. Eric’s commitment to delivering efficiency to growing organizations through innovative no-code tools sets Entrilia apart in the industry.

A recent milestone for Entrilia is achieving SOC 2 Type II certification, underscoring the company’s dedication to high-quality software and information security. Eric’s leadership and vision are driving Entrilia toward a future where technology transforms private equity finance and operations, making it more efficient and user-centered.

Entrilia Automated Fund Operations

Episode Transcript

Eric Faw: Sometimes you just have to find your early clients that are really good partners and you’re trying to build a business, but you’re trying to also be a little bit choosy in who you build that business with. And your early clients are really important so that you’re not getting too many demands of custom this custom that, and it doesn’t just impact the ability for you to scale up your tech. The operation side of your software business is also impacted. The ability to build a really high baseline of standardized features that everyone’s using similarly and managing that technical debt both on the customer side and on your side, is really going to be something that ensures long-term success. 

Jacob Hollabaugh: Welcome to PayPod, the payments industry podcast. Each week we’ll bring you in-depth conversations with leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world from payment processing to risk management and from new technology to entirely new payment types. If you want to know what’s happening in the world of fintech and payments, you’re in the right place.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to PayPod. I’m your host, Jacob Hollabaugh. Today on the show, we’re going to take a look at the world of private capital and alternative assets where a lot of money is moving around at any given moment. Yet historically doesn’t always move around the most efficiently. And at the end of the day, if I could narrow down our core focus on this podcast, it is just that how do we make money move more efficiently? So I’m excited to get into this conversation. As always, I’ve got an expert on the matter here to help us break these topics down. I’m pleased to be joined today by Eric Faw, co-founder and CEO of Entrilia, the company building the future of Software for private capital. Eric, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Eric Faw: Absolutely, thanks for having me.

Jacob Hollabaugh: My pleasure, I always want to start by getting a lay of the land, so to speak, to make sure we’re all on the same page throughout the conversation. So can you quickly just define exactly who we are talking about when we say private capital or alternative assets throughout this conversation? And then maybe give some insight into how this industry has been changing over the last decade. 

Eric Faw: Absolutely, so really what we’re talking about are vehicles for investing in Illiquid assets. Commonly we think about venture capital and private equity buyout firms, growth capital, but it can range all the way through real estate investing. Private credit is blowing up right now all the way to hard assets. I’ve worked with firms that invest in large container ships so all of that there’s opportunity in there. And when we think about that, we really look at a fund manager who goes out and raises funds or raises a fund, pools the capital, and then deploys it into investments. I think what people probably don’t understand is what it looks like behind the scenes. There’s not just one entity. You’re talking about a partnership. You’re talking about a partnership with general partners. You’re talking about incentive programs. You have investors that might have side letter agreements. But a lot of times what you have is a nesting of many legal entities that make up the entirety of that fund that evolves over time. You could have a real estate fund, let’s say, that goes out and raises $1 billion, right? They go and collect that capital. But the legal entity structure behind that fund, you could have 80 entities, you could have 100 entities. So when we think about the complexities of that and the transactional activity within those fund structures, you’ve got cash and non-cash transactions and you’ve got to flow cash through that org. structure, whether it’s in the real estate example, you’ve got a Propco that sits 12 entities below the fund that’s actually calling the capital or you’re looking at a buyout fund that’s calling it into an Aiven and it’s going into a completely separate structure.
 
That’s where the operations really kick in. And that’s what makes it difficult for firms to really get a handle one on data, automating the outputs, automating the reports, but also just how are we going to get all of the different reporting requirements for regulators, for banks, for lenders and so forth out, but primarily for investors, right? Those are your customers. And that’s where Entrilia really comes in and adds value. We’re providing more or less a standardized framework to automate the conversion of all of these transactional events into a unified, ledger-based database. And then clients use our tools to create all of the different reports that they need in order to run their business. And a lot of the behind-the-scenes that’s interesting, that is very complex. I think as far as what’s changed, over the I would say last 5 to 10 years, there’s been a lot of additional sophistication. Fundraising has recently gotten very difficult. There’s a lot more funds in the general landscape. So how do you separate yourself from everyone else? It’s complex fund structures. It’s going in raising from a wider array of investors. There’s a big trend to pull in more retail investors. What does that mean and what’s going to be required on the reporting side in order to meet their demands and just deal structures, right? How do I get the best portfolio companies? Well, I need to be a little bit more creative on how we do that.
 
And in doing that and getting more investor profiles in the door you’re talking about now I’ve got taxable US investors nontaxable, I’ve got foreign investors, I’ve got all of these different things that I have to worry about and that’s where all of the flows in how these events and transactions really go through that structure and all of the different reporting requirements that you might have. I have a luxe entity. So now I’ve got a different style of reporting for that entity, IFRS versus GAAP. And and so both the cash, the non-cash transactions, they have different kinds of needs, but they all have to operate within that same structure. So just recently came out with a ton of additional regulations. We talk about regulatory frameworks and what is demanded on these fund managers and one, it’s from LPs. Institutional LPs are really. Finding their voice in how we can make demands of all of the GPs that we’re investing in, but the governments now coming in and saying, regardless of what the LPs say, this is the level of detail that you guys need to deliver, and that level of detail just requires more input data and more capture of additional kind of elements and calculations and all of that. On top of the fact that the industry, we’re seeing shrinking pool of accounting talent. And so we’re going out, we’re trying to exponentially increase the overall industry, but the accounting talent is shrinking. So how do we do that? It comes down to technology. So a lot of opportunity.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, it’s fascinating. And I want to remind me to come back later to the shrinking accounting talent because that is something I’m interested in. But to quickly recap there, like it does make a lot of sense, just this is a big complex web that you’re working with. It is not as straightforward as maybe it way long ago would have been of like, I’ve got money, here’s a person who knows where to put it to make money one transaction back and forth that is now incredibly complex. Would I be correct in thinking from the outside of this world over the last decade that there’s also just been a proliferation in both the types of alternative assets that could be invested and the kind of opening up the access to more people? Where I would envision I always look through everything through the lens of I grew up in a really small town and through the lens of like, would my parents have known about this as a middle-class family in a small town 20 years ago when I was a kid versus like now and being, they would have never they would not have had necessarily access to actually do a lot of these things. Whereas now I feel we’re slowly taking down barriers of access. So would I be correct that those two things are also adding more complexity, that there’s a lot more people who have access to bring money into these types of things and there’s a lot more types of assets to be putting these monies into? 

Eric Faw: A 100%, and I think really when we think about the trends of and leaders in private capital are always thinking growth. And that’s just the nature of private capital. How do we grow companies? Well, how do we grow our funds? And when you’re seeing larger and larger funds, well, how are they attracting more dollars? And people are seeing the new frontier as more retail investors. So whereas historically you might have been able to raise a fund with 100 investors, 50 investors, now you’re talking about multiple thousands of investors coming into these really complex structures and you’ve got folks that have requirements where they can’t invest in certain types of companies, right? Or different pools of capital with different fee preferences and things that just all impact how the back office or how the operators of these fund structures really are able to do what they do. And your other point, more asset classes, I think certainly seeing that shifts constantly, rate changes are moving things. From what I just read an article the other day, moving things from maybe more buyout-focused investing to credit-focused investing and opportunities that funds are seeing there. And I think that’s the interesting thing about private capital. You’re not just investing in public companies where you’re buying a stock, you’re selling a stock option, and there’s a lot of complexity in that world. Don’t want to diminish it. But in the private asset side, the the world is your oyster. And I think that people are finding new jurisdictions to go in and invest in. So whether they’re investing in farms in Africa or they’re out in South America and, okay, how do we hedge the currency risk or what do we do with reducing unnecessary tax impact and all of that? So yeah, just a lot of really interesting things in this industry for sure.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah and you earlier gave us a nice rundown of who Entrilia is, what the products and offerings are. So then let’s double click for a second on kind of the fund accounting and movement of money portion of the offerings for a minute when it comes to automating payments and the movement of all this money in this huge complex web that you’ve laid out, what’s the biggest obstacle that you face from the tech side or maybe the biggest friction you’ve seen in the market when trying to reduce or overcome and trying to make those things move faster and into the correct places?

Eric Faw: Unfortunately, this is an easy question. It is. It’s integrating with banks specifically in the US and for an accounting platform, the white whale that everyone’s trying to find is something that will give you straight-through processing, right, is the closest we can come to straight-through processing, going back to the shrinking accounting pool of talent and now needing to, I would say, expand your funnel for who you’re going to be hiring for these roles. You need the software to do more for you. And as we think about the two different types of transactions, cash, and non-cash, the closer we can get to banks and the more qualitative data we can pull from the banks from the transactions. Understanding at the very beginning, why was this wire created or where did this cash come from? We can then automate more of your KYC, AML types of things we can close the loop on. Okay, we just issued a capital call and now the investors are starting to pay that capital call in. And so we’re streaming your cash transactions and then we’re automatically applying them to open receivable buckets. So when it comes to cash movement, it’s all about integrating with banks. And I think Fednow is an interesting opportunity here on the outbound side.

Eric Faw: But I’d say one of the specific problems that we ran into just to, you know, really get into it is in private capital, a lot of firms were using SVB and FRB. And earlier this year when the the kind of two major collapses in our industry, I think a lot of focus was on the companies. And then we kind of like, oh yeah, the funds like they’ll be fine. But people were calling capital into their funds in large amounts and they just happen to be sitting in these accounts when that happened and it was really scary. I think we take a lot for granted. And now firms are out diversifying what banking relationships that they’re using. So for us as an accounting-centric platform, we’ve got to go and integrate with more banks. So we’re investing a lot in partnerships and in just our own stack to go directly integrate with these guys. But it’s difficult. I mean, it’s old platforms. It is not modern technology that we’re dealing with, and a lot of this is just out of our control until the kind of the banking platforms can start to catch up here in the US.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, that makes total sense. Unfortunately is not the first time we’ve heard that. A similar refrain on this show before from different folks working within this ecosystem. Let’s flip that then around to the positive side. If that’s the more the struggle side or where the player within the ecosystem that is the hardest to integrate with or it has the most difficulties flipping that around, having the perspective you do of working with all the different players within the payments and financial ecosystem, the facilitators, the infrastructure systems themselves, et cetera. What makes for a great partner or an easy integration within that ecosystem? Maybe looking back, when you first setting up the company, what were you looking for in partners as you built out everything that you do?

Eric Faw: So we’ve taken kind of a couple of different approaches. We work with firms that do some of the kind of pre-aggregation work, and so we can reach out. You’ve got Yodels and Plaid and, and a lot of players in that space, but just an openness from the bank and what was nice and we were building direct integrations with SVB and FRB before the collapse and they had teams that were specifically oriented to working with downstream software applications, right? They recognize that this was something that was important. The pace was slow, right? You always were more paced. But there was a recognition that this is quickly moving away from just this kind of relationship-driven banking style of operating. And now we need to be more digitally driven. We need opportunity, not just, okay, let’s build a nice front end. And so that when they log in the MFA and all this stuff, but how do we get the back end piping more automated so we neobanks and things like there’s a lot of progress. I think what we’re waiting to see and just going back to just insured balances and sweeps and all of that, that can bog down an accountant’s role because they’re seeing money leaving. But it’s like, oh, do I have to account for that or not? But with that, I think it’s just an openness on the banking side. And there are some players out there that do have that. They’re really, I think, more forward-thinking in what needs to change in the industry and just on the platform side. So I mean, we obviously look for folks that have APIs. That’s the first question. We find it rarely. So then we got to jump down to like SFTP, and that at least gives us some level of automation that we can at least build on our side. But yeah, think it’s changing. We’re starting to see more trends moving in that direction. I think Neobanks and things are definitely challenging the older incumbent platforms to pick up their game.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, makes total sense. Let’s move to the reporting data communication side of your product offerings. You’ve got investor insights reporting and data tools. You referenced some of them earlier. On a lot of very useful tools within your platform that seem to, from the outside, essentially boil down to gathering and processing all of this data and then making it readily available to your clientele in a meaningful and beneficial way. And data and the power of proper data use has been a frequent topic, to say the least, on this show throughout the year. And while I know the simple answer to the question of how important is data is, it’s very important. I know that’s the simple answer. So if we go beyond that, I’d be interested in your perspective on just how important the level of importance that smart data analysis and communication tools of that analysis are and using some of your own offerings as example, how or if having such tools as part of your offering is kind of a requirement now, or is the key to finding success in 2023 and fintech and beyond?

Eric Faw: Yeah, it’s a really good question. And I think the way that I look at the way that our industry has evolved from an operation model over the last, I would say, five years, Covid has certainly pushed things in a much more accelerated pace. But where does your team sit today and who’s actually doing the work? Are you outsourcing components of the work? I just raised a new fund. I can’t find talent to, you know, handle the accounting. So I’m going to outsource that fund. I’m going to have other funds in-house. How do I aggregate all of that data? Because historically, when you outsourced your operations, your accounting, you were outsourcing the data and the fund admin was accounting for all of your funds on their systems and you had no access, and they might send you an Excel file or they might at best send you an Excel file. At worst, they’re just sending you PDFs. But there’s this need for a collaborative workspace, one where both operators can be inside the same system and you can digest that data together and you have real-time access to data on the stakeholder side, whether you’re outsourcing or not. That is becoming like a fundamental need. And especially now that the SEC is coming in with these governmental regulations.

Eric Faw: It’s not just an LP that says, Hey, I really wish that you could send me this piece of data every quarter. Now you’re mandated to, and that requires a lot of what they’re asking for, requires robust data inputs and creation of that data. In order to get you to that detail on the output side. So fund managers are definitely realizing what their data is, not just the importance of owning the data, but the importance of what they can do with it without needing duplicative work. And okay, the accountants doing this and we’re doing that, oh, this happens to be the same thing that we’re doing. Maybe we can just draw off of that data that they’re using. So some of the tools that we’ve got, you know, we built our data warehouse on top of Snowflake, right? So options off of that, you can take advantage of their zero-copy clone and get a copy of your real-time data database, all structured data, and pull that out and aggregate more element things. But just a tremendous amount of kind of connectivity. But also when I look at connectivity between your your investment manager and the investor, that’s traditionally been a really broken process. On the investment manager side, we go and create essentially PDFs, right? The primary medium of data transfer in the private capital industry is email, Excel, and PDF.

Eric Faw: And when we’re sending out PCAPs or capital account statements to investors in a PDF, they’re getting tools that scrape that PDF and re-digitize it. We’re spending a lot of time on the fund manager side creating that PDF out of digital data. So we’re building tools that streamline that, starting with just the creation of the data all the way through to the consumption on the side, and then we can digest that on the LP side and reprocess that on their operations because a lot of times it’s very similar when you look at institutional family offices and things like that. So I think the theme is really about collaboration and around enterprise management platforms. It doesn’t matter what type of company you are, that becomes a big need and in private capital, it’s just been heightened over. I think the last few years where operations models are changing and you don’t have people that can sit in a seat, print off a reporting deck, and walk down the hall and get a wet signature on it. And that’s your operating procedure. It’s something that has to be more digital, certainly.

Jacob Hollabaugh: And I love the word collaboration. And then the great example that you give, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit out there. If we are willing to collaborate like I spent all this time to make this PDF and when you got it, you literally took it back apart and put it to what I had previously had. So like, why are we both doing those steps when we neither of us needs to be? So there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that comes and then there’s a lot of complex things that can be solved as well. If we’re willing to work with the data and collaborate with all sides of it. So love all of that to pivot slightly. I was reading one of Trulia’s blog posts, I think it was from your co-founder, Yuri, after about choosing cloud-native services over cloud-enabled. And those words or that idea has been expressed on this show before, but we’ve never actually stopped to define them in the past or explain the reasoning behind that. It’s just come up and went a few times before. So I saw that blog post and I thought it might be something worth asking you to have since your company is on that side of the argument. Could you define for us the difference in cloud-native versus cloud-enabled and then share the importance in your mind or the reasoning behind why you’re so bullish on or wanted to make sure you built your company cloud-native?

Eric Faw: I’m really glad you bring this up because especially in the operations of sales cycle you’re dealing with, folks that aren’t necessarily don’t have technical backgrounds, not typically in these firms. Do they have a CTO or a CIO? And so a CFO really has to make a lot of decisions off of acronyms right there in that checklist. Is it SaaS? Yes, okay. Do you have an API? Yes. And I’ve talked with my co-founder and it’s like we need to educate people on what is the difference between bad SaaS and good or bad API and a good API. Well, you could have an API and one company is just outbound, one company is outbound inbound plus event triggers. Well, that’s there’s a significant difference in opportunity there. And we think about cloud-enabled versus cloud-native. But at the end of the day, I think it comes down to two things. One is your ability to innovate and your ability to innovate based on the talent that you have in-house. I’m not developing any of our code. We have really talented engineers that are doing that, and if you’re not working on the modern architecture, you’re not going to attract the best talent, right? The best engineer does not want to go and work for a bank on a 20-year-old on-premise system. So what is your ability to innovate and how can you keep pace with just the broader technology world? And then if you are innovating, what’s your ability to speed and consistency of delivery? And within kind of the difference between cloud-native and cloud-enabled cloud native is built in a way that from a core architecture, it’s built around CI, CD, and this idea of just continuously delivering innovation, and without someone sitting on the other side or without a kind of a human that needs to apply that update, or it is going to, I think, significantly shift the trajectory of what’s possible.

Eric Faw: The problem that we’re facing is I don’t think there’s been a long enough time period where we’ve seen the differences of these two styles of deployment. And getting back to your actual core question, cloud-enabled is basically just on-premise installation that’s offered as SaaS. So it’s an on-premise application that someone’s accessing via maybe a Windows client and it’s not really built for, I would say the modern constantly delivering updates in how you interact with your clients. Whereas cloud-native is just from an architectural standpoint, you build something, it goes through automated test cases and it goes straight out to the clients, but you need things like feature flagging and a lot of other kinds of things along with that. But from a kind of opportunity standpoint, I think the trajectory of the two options are on completely different planes. So from our perspective, it’s about educating people on how do you break down some of these acronyms or some of these terms you’re not always going to appreciate fully.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, certainly. And especially with given we’ve referenced in the industry, there’s there’s older parts. There’s a lot of tradition in the industry. There’s a lot of folks that have been around for a long time. And so I appreciate you breaking those down because the thing I’ve seen noticed in the past is that someone might just see the word cloud and think like, that’s my checklist, the way you said, like, all right, I know I have to check like SAS. Yes. But like, we’re beyond that. You can see the word cloud-like, okay, good. What about the word behind it? And what do those actually mean and what does that actually mean with you being able to keep pace and always be able to iterate? Because like we were saying, before we actually turn the recording on, talking about the pace of this industry somehow getting faster and faster out of an industry that has traditionally been very fast-moving and evolving, It’s never going to stop. It keeps getting more so being on the front lines or being able to have that dexterity to keep moving, be nimble, and keep innovating is very important. So appreciate you breaking that down for us. We’ve hit data now, we’ve hit cloud tech, so it’s only right we round out our 2023 bingo card here with a little AI and machine learning discussion. How does Antilia currently leverage new tech like AI or ML within your company? And then even more broadly across your company or the fintech world, where do you see these technologies having the greatest impact in the near term future as we continue to adopt everything that they’re bringing to us?

Eric Faw: Great question. When we look at these opportunities and this has been major seismic event this year and adoption of LMS and different types of opportunities in software. Our problem in our industry specifically is going to be in access to data in order to train models. Typically, when the financial services industry, they’re not really wanting you to get access to these things in order to be able to not necessarily thinking long term. And okay, how can this benefit the world? No, you can’t have access to the data to do this stuff. But I think in the nearest term, one of the things that is probably most impactful to our users is really just what’s the client support experience, your ability to digest information and from our perspective, us being able to run telemetry on how our clients are interacting with our application and then being able to digest all of that information so that we can make changes so that we can improve the experience without needing to have people involved in that relationship, constantly trying to say, okay, hey, what worked? What didn’t work today? You can’t do that. So there’s a lot of tools that we’re doing on our using on our side in order to create better experience and create more cohesive kind of user relationships, but also just simple searching. We’ve got embedded support wizard on our applications, right? So getting away from these on-premise Windows applications, you can do stuff like this and giving the user more real-time support. They can chat, we can answer, we can add additional layers on top of that. These are all things going back to the low-hanging fruit. It’s like, okay, we want to jump to like DLT or how is this going to impact everything? Whereas there’s just so much opportunity at the bottom that we’re still taking advantage of.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, and I like that idea of being able to be more proactive is how I would summarize, especially that first half where you’re saying of like, you don’t have to wait for 100 clients or customers to come to us and say, hey, this part of this thing isn’t working. Like we can proactively be ciphering through all that data and seeing this in real-time, there seems to continually be a little hiccup in this process this year. And the customer hasn’t come to us and said it yet, but we’re seeing it happen. We can actually get in front of that and solve it and be proactive with that. So love that. The final question then, I have for you a favorite of mine to end on and ask of those who have found success in multiple types of companies and stops in the fintech world, which it seems like you have from what you’ve seen with companies, you’ve been a part of, companies you’ve partnered with, worked with, maybe just observed throughout the industry. What would you say are some characteristics of a company that have been the most important in the past to a fintech being successful and then looking forward? What characteristics in this ever-evolving world would you say a company should be most focused on cultivating to help them be successful in this fast-moving industry?

Eric Faw: I love this topic. It’s something that we obviously think a lot about here at Entrilia. It’s in our experience. I think what makes a successful company in the long term is your ability early to manage technical debt. And when we say technical debt, we’re talking about things that you build, features that you build, but you don’t fill out all of the components around it. You’re just building something because somebody needed it, whether it was an issue or somebody needed something and you built it for them. An early client, early partnership. You’re doing things specifically for clients, and even if it’s not a customization, it could be something that you’re just building to maintain the relationship. And early companies are the most susceptible to this because you sign that first big client and they’re going to come in and they’re going to act like a big client. So your ability to manage that, but still building really complex solutions and that is a little bit experience. So when somebody comes in and they say, Hey, I want you to do this, you can say actually, we’ve already done that before. No one ever used it or we did that before. We didn’t do it that well. So now we have an opportunity to do it better so we can take that experience and and that works.

It’s a little bit luck sometimes you just have to find your early clients that are really good partners and you’re trying to build a business, but you’re trying to also be a little bit choosy in who you build that business with. And your early clients are really important and you’ve got to be very intentional around who you’re working with so that you’re not getting too many demands of custom, this custom that. And it doesn’t just impact the ability for you to scale up your tech. The operation side of your software business is also impacted. Your ability to support tech. There’s so many people out there that are using incumbent solutions that complain about support. It’s the same kind of problem that if you build a lot of that technical debt and a lot of noise, it adds a lot of weight and people don’t really know how you’re using the system. So it’s very difficult to support those folks. So the ability to build a really high baseline of standardized features that everyone’s using similarly and managing that technical debt both on the customer side and on your side is really going to be something that ensures long-term success and you have to be a little bit conservative on your own growth in order to really keep a tight grip on what that ultimately ends up looking like.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Absolutely. I think that’s really sound advice and a great place to end on, Eric. This has been a real pleasure. For those listening who may want to follow you, learn more about Entrilia, keep up with everything you and the company have going on. Where would be the best place for them to go to do so?

Eric Faw: We post a lot on LinkedIn. We also are trying to up our game on our blog and things, but if you come to entrilia.com, that’s a great place to start.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Wonderful and can recommend the blog content as I mentioned reading a good deal of it in prep for this conversation. So we’ll link to that the LinkedIn everything below. Eric, thank you so much for your time and knowledge today. I’ve greatly enjoyed the conversation and hope to speak again sometime soon.

Eric Faw: Likewise. Thank you very much, Jacob.

Jacob Hollabaugh: If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, head on over to soarpay.com/podcast to subscribe on your podcast listening platform of choice. That’s soarpay.com/podcast.