I rebuilt his financial model.

I restructured his cap table so it was not an embarrassment.

I introduced him to the group that led his Series A in 2016, because the managing partner had been my second-year mentor.

I negotiated that term sheet myself, at my own kitchen table, over eleven days, and I got him a valuation about forty percent above what he had been told to expect.

And in the spring of 2017, when a distribution partner collapsed and took four months of receivables with it and no bank would touch him, I took the house in Point Loma that my parents had left me — the house I grew up in, which my father bought in 1979 — and I put a lien on it, and I put four hundred and ten thousand dollars into Vextor Dynamics.