Where Won’t You Compromise?

You got to be clear on your values and you have to be vocal about them. You are starting something. And part of the beauty of building something, and I wish I was even more courageous around this, you know, in retrospect, is you get to set the game board more than you think as an entrepreneur. Right. And so you, you know, sometimes, not always, you'll get to pick your investors. And we were fortunate. And so I think to the heart of your question, what we did is we were very clear about what mattered to us and what we would not compromise on. Right. And like we knew we would not compromise on the individual confidentiality of data. Right. So it's just not going to happen. In fact, Ryan, our CTO joined me from VMware better up on the condition we would never be an enterprise company because we were just so convinced based on our enterprise data experience that like no company would let us help their people and not want to see like, what did they talk about? Right? And it turns out when we just told companies we will not compromise on that, the people were like, that's awesome. We, we wouldn't want you to. That's, we actually want that confidentiality. And so we found that same went with our investors. So as we thought about investors, we were fortunate in our rounds to really pick who we got to partner with. And then it was a question for Eddie and I, and what matters most and what mattered most to us was the alignment around. Our moral mission in the world is to. It's the mission to help people flourish and that we need to be aligned to doing that in an efficacious way, an honest way, and, and data and science can help us have integrity there. And so the litmus test we used to always know, ask ourselves is, hey, if we found out, if I had to show up to a board meeting one day with a big report from our labs team that said, hey, guess what? We actually found out that everything we're doing, people love, they use the heck out of, but it's bad for them. But they don't know that. They'll just keep paying us. They think this is amazing. Would that investor say, we support you in hitting stop and rebuilding the whole company? If that investor would say, like, well, I mean, is it really that bad? Like, it's your MRR looks pretty nice right now. Can we just, you know, use that to fund. We wouldn't work with that person. And so it was kind of litmus tests like that where we really were saying, is this person thinking about long term value for the business? By thinking about long term helping people. And there's almost a Hippocratic lens to our business that we were able to optimize for. And so we've been very fortunate and I think just having, like, the greatest board in the world. But I think part of that, to be fair to Eddie and I, is that we really made sure that they were aligned with our goals. Not just those goals, I would say from ethics, but even economically, like Eddie and I were clear from day one, you know, we're not interested in acquisitions. We are. We think we need to be an independent company to have the moral agency to do what we want to do in the world. Are our investors aligned with that? And that's a really serious conversation I have with every new investor, that this is a very binary outcome. We could go public one day or you could lose all your money. I don't really see a lot in between there. And are you okay with that? And if they're okay with that, great. And I find that just taking that time as an entrepreneur to be very crystalline and clear, it can be a little intimidating. But what you find is it's almost cathartic for the investors and the board members, and it just removes all these like, oh, I thought you meant that. But I get now that you meant that everyone on the board's aligned around that. They all know.