So I'm now gonna pass the proverbial mic on to Leonora Valvo, who's Swoogo's founder.

She couldn't be with us here today, but I believe she's joining us virtually. Leonora, are you there?

I'm here.

Welcome.

Thank you. Thank you. That was awesome, Chris. That was great to hear.

So, I just wanted to say a quick hello. I'm really sorry that I can't be there in-person. I was planning to be, but my next crazy venture has had snags, as will happen.

And I'm really sorry that I won't get a chance to talk with some old friends, and meet some new ones. And of course I'm gonna miss the food truck.

So, I saw that there were about eleven companies attending UnCon this year, who were with us when I was still CEO of Swoogo, so welcome and really excited. Awesome to see Alyssa here from Mansueto. I think Inc. was probably our first Swoogo customer. So really cool. But by the way, when Jihan was talking about how many years you'd worked with Swoogo, I found myself counting back to figure out whether we'd actually been in business that long.

So, kind of cool to be reminded of that. And of course, some people that I saw on the list with new companies, but knew them from a different company. So Chris, you know that I'm talking about you. I also noticed that Box is in the room.

I hope in the room. Was certainly on the list. And that's sort of a really nice affirmation for me, because one of my stories about the ending days in my previous software life, before Swoogo, was doing a meeting and demo with some of the senior people in marketing at Box. And we were really excited to get to that demo and went through our went through our pitch and showed them all around our technology, and and the final comment was "Yikes, this looks really so nineties." And the sad thing about it was that we knew ... we knew that he was right.

So really great to see that Box has sort of joined the Swoogo mission.

So, when we created Swoogo, we set out to sort of re-envision our place in the event technology world. But we never really lost sight of our true ambition from the early days in events and software, which is to create love-love relationships with our customers.

So, we set out to figure out how we were going to do that, and I think our conclusions were first, we needed our customers to be able to build sites faster.

Second, who were we to decide when conditions are done being logical? So having that ability to keep driving down on questions with customers.

Third, or maybe this was really always first, I think it's part of my DNA, which is service, service, service.

I've always believed if you take care of your customers, you can work together through most things.

And then fourth, events are a vast playground. And we didn't think we should be the ones to decide who you play with. So we wanted to make it versatile, and have the ability to connect all kinds of things. And I hope, well, and I should say, and finally, and probably this was one of the biggest revolutions at the time, we were SaaS, so we couldn't really understand why we weren't charging by user, and decided to launch in that vein and very successfully.

And actually, I wanted to give a shout out to SpotMe as well, because I started working with them a very, very, very long time ago, and it's good to see them involved with Swoogo.

So, of course, you already know what Swoogo's value and value proposition is, or you wouldn't be in the room today. So, really awesome that you're all joining the team there.

And I'm just delighted to have the opportunity to say hello, welcome to the Swoogo family.

And hope you have a great, UnCon. Wish I could be there.

Thanks a lot, Leonora.

I wish you were here, and best of luck with the boat.

Thank you.

Alright. I'm gonna invite Patrick to the stage, and Patrick's gonna tee off our first session.