Leading Across Cultures | SVP of Global Operations at Ripple, Eric Van Miltenburg (Podcast 80)

The good news is that we are growing quickly. The challenges are plentiful. So there's lots of interesting, meaty problems, both business and technical, that we can put talented, aggressive people against. It's nice in that we don't have to search high and low for the next challenge for somebody, it's usually right in front of them and you'll actually see the folks rise to the occasion and proactively take that challenge without even us necessarily pointing them at it.

Eric is the SVP of Global Operations at Ripple. He has 20 years of leadership experience in the business development, strategic planning and business operations and corporate development areas. Prior to joining Ripple, Eric has held senior positions in high growth startups and Fortune 500 companies including Adobe, Yahoo. Hightail, Red Swoosh, Work.com and Excite.home.com he's also known for his extensive experience in solving complex business problems and executing strategies that help technology companies systematically accelerate growth. He's also lived in the bay area for 25 years, so he's seen the entire startup ecosystem happen and the maturity of the that whole system. So Eric, welcome to the Second Command podcast.

Hey Cameron, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

So Excite, that was when like 98.

99 excited home was the merger of both Excite at home. I started on the at home side. I joined in 97 97.

Okay. We were buying banner ads back then I think on some of your properties way back when, long time ago. Tell us really briefly about Ripple so we understand what Ripple is and then we'll dive into some of the background.

Yeah, Ripple's a fintech company and we provide a software solution to financial institutions that could be banks, payment providers, money service businesses where we leverage blockchain technology to help them send money cross border far more efficiently than they can using the kind of legacy technology. If you think about a personal experience where you're sending money as well, or a remittance to a friend or colleague overseas, or even a small medium business up to a large enterprise. Sending money cross border tends to be incredibly difficult, far more so than you realize on the surface. And part of that stems from the fact that we're still using technology that is decades and decades old. Really. Even pre Internet, we've come in with a different approach. We leverage blockchain technology and our customers are these banks and financial institutions and we deploy that software and once they have that, they are able to see far faster, cheaper and more reliable cross border payment experiences than they have historically with Ripple itself.

What's the size of Your operation in terms of number of employees or where you're operating. Are you all. Are you remote? Is it one centralized team?

For the most part, we're based here in our headquarters in San Francisco. We have about 360 and counting people around the world. I'd say about two thirds of those are here in San Francisco. But we have offices in London, Singapore, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Dubai, New York. So we're actually quite distributed. And that's largely a function of the fact that our business, to my earlier point, is it's about helping people move money cross borders. There's no domestic version of Ripple. As a result, we've needed to get closer to the markets we serve, get closer to our customers, understanding the regulatory environment, the partner prospects, the media relations, et cetera, et cetera. So we've actually made a concerted effort over the last several years to open up those businesses around the world and achieve that intimacy with the market.

Ripple was one of the biggest kind of ICOs in the last bunch of years, wasn't it? Was it an ico?

That's a common misperception. It wasn't an ico. I think there's one thing maybe to clarify is there's oftentimes confusion between Ripple, which is the company I work for, and we produce the software solution that I just described, and a digital asset called xrp. Xrp. Not unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, it's a digital asset that run on top of a distributed, decentralized, permissionless blockchain. That blockchain is called the XRP ledger. There's common roots in terms of the folks that actually created the XRP ledger are the same people that later created the company Ripple. In that process, Ripple happens to hold quite a bit of xrp. We actually never went through ICO process, which was all the rage a couple of years ago. We're very distinct and separate. The company is very distinct and separate from that digital asset.

So there is some similar ownership or core ties in. But not an ICO in terms of its launch.

Correct?

Okay, makes sense. So I'm really curious about. You talked about moving currency between countries. I'm really curious about what it's like moving ideas between countries with the people that you have in. You mentioned Mumbai and London and Singapore and Dubai. Those were the four that I. And Sao Paulo. What's it like with working with different leaderships in different countries? And what do you think they're doing better in some of these countries or regions than we are in North America? And what are they doing differently It's.

A lot of what I spend my time working on. So part of my role is a subset of global operations. I call it international operations. It's identifying our target markets, where we want to launch these new entities. We started in Mumbai, launching an Indian entity about two and a half years ago. I hired a country manager there. His remit has expanded through all of South Asia and we saw a lot of success. Repeated that in, in Sao Paulo, Dubai, as mentioned, we had an office in Singapore and we have for a little over two years. And I'm now adding somebody to be our head of Southeast Asia based out of Singapore. So I think it's a fantastic asset and luxury to have folks that really are intimate with the market. They understand everything from the specifics of how the payments world works in their part of the world, but also the cultural sensitivities and realities. I think one error I know I made earlier in my career was you go in and you don't mean to, but you can't help but almost impose your way of doing things, sort of the American style style of business in other cultures. And it doesn't play that way. So you have to take a little bit of a step back. I think what we're getting better as a company, back to your question of sharing ideas, is making sure that we take full advantage of the fact these folks are in the field. They're all domain experts in payments of some sort. That's why we've hired them. But also as they get up to speed on what Ripple can do, they added kind of a really unique perspective. They can be a source of new ideas that we can then propagate around the world. And sometimes it's very purposeful and it sounds like we were brilliant, smart, the strategy works. At other times you happen to run into things we're having great success. In South America, for example, we targeted that along with many other regions. We sold a few customers and after being there for a while, we have a large fraction of the payments that are running over Ripplenet, which is this global network that we're creating. All these financial institutions, a large fraction are touching on Brazil specifically, but South America more generally. And we're learning the pain points associated with moving money in and out of that part of the world are acute. Our solution, while it's effective locally, it's even more pronounced the degree to which we can make an impact in Brazil. And so we're really leaning into that. We're investing more and we're seeing it as a place where we can Try out some new ideas and other product offerings. So when you're moving fast and you have people all around the world, oftentimes your native instinct is to tell, inform and keep people up to date. Try to create a unified culture. It's also so important to listen curious.

Like, give us some specific examples of how does a leader manage differently in Sao Paulo and Brazil than they would in Mumbai or than they would in in Dubai, or how did they recruit differently or how do they solve conflicts differently? Like what are some things that you've done? Wow, that's really unique. One example I had, I've been to India four times working with CEOs over there, and they hire 10 people to solve one problem because they can just hire so many at such a low cost. In Thailand, they would never tell the superior anything wrong. It's all about saving face. And you know, they almost bow down every time they talk to a superior. What do you see that's different that we could learn from that?

I think in South America, for example, there's a different pace and developing that relationship in a certain way. You can come in and I'll stereotype as an American. So for hard charging, you figure if you have the best product and a real tight pitch from commercial standpoint, you just want to get right to closing the deal and making it happen. Pace at which you develop a relationship, I think varies around the world. I see. Not. I mean, our folks that work at Ripple around the world, they're all incredibly diligent and hardworking, but there is a different cadence that I see evolving in different areas. India, to your point, the drive and the push and the work ethic is incredible. And there is the ability to put more cycles against it and maybe a little bit more of a directness, at least in terms of the folks that we're dealing with. You know, we have a fantastic joint venture partner in Japan. There. There's definitely a hierarchy and a process Love. And again, you. Sometimes you can't help but fall back on your. Your natural instincts of doing things a certain way. And you quickly realize, wait a second, they seem to like what I said. The product solved their needs, and yet I haven't heard from them. And it's a matter of it's all fine. You just have to go back and spend some more time. And it's just being attuned to that. And I'll confess, I don't tend to be an expert on how that cultural reality plays out around the world. But you know, hiring people that do that are credible Locally and then also making sure to listen to them and not just if something isn't going right in a part of the world, you can't just assume, oh I'm going to tell them how we do it here and sort of impose that perspective. You have to say, well wait a second, I hired these folks for a reason. They're infinitely smarter around how business works in that part of the world and let them, let them do their job. It's a bit of a balance.

Do you move people around from countries to country or is it pretty much hiring people locally in their countries and keeping them and growing within?

We're just reaching up to a point in our company we're starting to do that. For example, I'll speak personally. Back in January I put myself on assignment. I moved for five months to Singapore. We had a small but growing office in Southeast Asia. And there's so much change happening in payment fintechs in that part of the world. I said I need to eat my own dog food. My wife and I packed up on January 1st. We got on a plane, landed in Singapore and spent the next five months there, which was a fantastic. Meet the team and support them. Meet our partners, our customers and witness firsthand the pace of change going on in the region. We're actually starting to push on that a little bit more. There's another woman who's going to be moving for headquarters and spending six months in another office. Once I got back, I got a renewed augmented passion around sort of mobility, mobility programs. One level you say you're a 350 person company. You're just at that stage where you're trying to make sure you keep all plates spinning in the air and not letting them fall. It's a great time to start developing that habit of allowing people to be more, more mobile and the benefit of cross pollinating I think is huge. So we're at the cusp of it. When we talk in a year, hopefully I'll be able to tell you a lot.

How many people were at Ripple when you joined about three years ago?

About 120.

So 100 and twenty. So you've kind of tripled in terms of the headcount. Has revenue been similar?

We don't go into specific numbers but core thing we track is how well we're doing and growing this network, Ripplenet. We had a handful, let's say less than 20 production contracts signed with financial institutions when I joined and we announced earlier this year we crested 200 production contracts in place when I joined. We hadn't yet really been operational. Financial institutions move money over our network. I think I saw the stats recently. There's over $3 billion have been moving over Ripple net aggregate since I've been here. So still a relatively small drop in the bucket when you're talking about global cross border payments. Yeah.

But huge growth to. To manage in that growth. I had lunch about a year ago with Clayton, the founder of infusionsoft. Then I was reading some stuff that Ben Horowitz had written in terms of leadership's ability to scale and it talked about mid to senior level managers find it, it's hard for them to go through two doubles in terms of revenue or headcount and it's tough for them to go through one triple. How have you managed that and how are you managing and kind of growing people through those transition points?

I think we've been somewhat proactive just in terms of really creating a discipline around learning and development here at Ripple. Again you could say for a company of our size that seems to be a little premature. But. But I think we anticipated the growth and we're creating forums where the folks at that level, kind of the key lieutenants to the senior leadership team and that super important mid to upper mid tier of management have a chance to interact with each other. Given we're relatively distributed around the world, these folks don't always have impromptu opportunities to get together. So we do. I think it's now twice a year where we bring that team together in one place and hold like multiple day off sites. Some of it's skill development but a lot of it is just frankly making sure that they get a chance to connect and have that shared experience. And I think we see dividends paid and see these connections forming and you know, some issues that maybe would take a lot longer to get resolved. People, it's not rocket science, right? You make sure that those bonds are formed and there's sort of a common empathy. As with a lot of companies there are people that are great and I've seen this not only Ripple but in past lives that are great, great at that zero to one stage but aren't as impactful or don't even enjoy it as much going from 1 to 100 or 100 to 1000. And I think a lot of those folks self select and they're on. They want to do the next startup where they're employee number four and then others really love the journey, right. And they love the growth that comes with it and a new set of challenges and they, they're well suited to it and we find those people, we nurture them and we're thrilled that they still find Ripple an exciting place to.

Be curious on on the tech side. And, and women, I mean it's been tough in the last number of years. Women in the technology sector, they getting a bigger voice today I saw an article that Forbes just came out with the top 100 innovative thinkers and one woman on the list of a hundred which is they're going to get decimated in the media for releasing that which they should. How are women doing in, in the global markets in. In leadership and are they, I mean India's always had a problem with it. Are they being accepted more? Are they, are they catching up with North America there? What's going on in that side?

I think in tech in general we've done a far less than stellar job of making sure there's the right representation of women and frankly diversity in general amongst our leadership and certainly it' focus of ours here. You know, about a third to 40% of folks at Ripple overall are women and we think about recruiting. You know, amongst our leadership team we have four members of leadership are female.

Would you have a similar percentage globally?

Probably say yes. And I'm doing that more from memory than having any stats that I've seen recently.

I'd almost guess like yes, more in Singapore, yes more in Sao Paulo. No more in India, yes more in Dubai.

Having spent time in Singapore, I know we definitely the mix in that office healthy. The team in Sao Paulo as an example is still really small. So the sample size isn't really big enough for me to it's representative. You know, we have a couple handful of women on our team in India. So I think that's probably directionally correct. You know, in our London office, New York office, San Francisco office, I think we're certainly much more well represented.

What's changing in the, in the technology or tech sector right now in terms of especially in the Bay Area with recruiting, it seems like it's a bloodbath down there and the ability to try to attract and retain talent. Everybody just is pay more, pay more. Is that changing at all or.

It's still a challenging market. I mean especially if you're talking about engineers. There's a ton of demands and a lot of capital that's been infused into this market and people are able to and therefore willing to dig into their pockets and pay up. So you know, is it changing? You know, more and more companies are looking for other places beyond Silicon Valley certainly to, to locate Tech teams and you see some of that maybe rationalize a little bit. But we're fortunate enough to be in a position where Ripple is in an incredibly interest industry. And incredibly interesting point of time. We're probably the only enterprise blockchain company that actually has a commercial product that is in production and up and running. You know, we're very focused on a particular use case and that's this cross border payments challenge that I think people almost unanimously believe is a real pain point and we have a solution that addresses it. So we're able to offer some pretty compelling business challenges to employees. And I think as a result we're seeing great interest in joining ripple. We've grown 3x since I've been here in a little under 3 years and even this year our growth is going to be substantial. That's not to say we don't have a lot of open recs and don't want more people checking us out. There's lots to be done and I don't see it changing anytime.

Yeah, I think you touched on one which is a lot of companies are looking to open offices outside of the Bay Area finally as well. I have a friend who's got a client or he's a technology company based in Indianapolis and he's got like a couple hundred employees there now and he's just like, you know what, I was from here and I thought I'd run a company here and I found out that a lot of really smart people moved away and they wanted to come home. Makes sense, right? What have you had to do as a company to grow your team? Where do you focus on the soft skills? Where do you guys focus on growing your leadership team and managers?

Being able to engage and identify some of the folks you think are well suited to the next level and then investing time there wisely. I referenced this real effort on that kind of second tier of leadership and we've made investments there to really double down, if you will, on growing them, you know, and we have a whole variety of programs, everything informal like lunch and learns, where people can get smarter on new topics. We have a program where we pay people if they're interested in learning a new skill, be it formally like take a class code in another language, et cetera, et cetera, or simply go to a conference to build a personal network, which obviously is an important aspect and asset to have as you move forward. I don't know if there's any one particular approach we obviously love promoting from within. Our space is relatively new. Been here and invested A couple years to get that sort of domain expertise. It's a pretty scarce commodity, right There aren't.

Yeah, for sure.

Blockchain, cross border payments. For 10 years people have been doing payments. There's been people who are doing fintech. But we love the opportunity to kind of nurture and promote from within. The good news is that we are growing quickly. The challenges are plentiful. So there's lots of interesting meaty problems, both business and technical that we can put talented, aggressive people against. It's nice in that we don't have to search high and low for the next challenge for somebody. It's usually right in front of them and you'll actually see the folks rise to the occasion and proactively take that challenge without even us necessarily pointing them at it. And we're nothing but supportive when that happens.

How about funding? How are you guys funded?

We are funded both from sort of the traditional venture route. We've raised a little over $90 million in venture capital early days back in our seed rounds from some more kind of traditional valley names like Google Ventures or TV or whatever they're calling themselves these days. Beyond that, we're really proud that some of our early customers, large financial institutions like Standard Charter or Santander wanted to participate in our second round of funding. That's really, really exciting and I think underscores the fact that we're on something and they want to be along for the ride in more than just capacity of a customer. We as I mentioned, we do hold a significant amount of this digital asset called XRP and we will on occasion we will sell some of that into the market. That one generates some incremental funding for us, but it also helps create more liquidity in the whole ecosystem for that digital asset. I won't get into the weeds in terms of how some of our products work, but having liquidity in markets around the world for XRP is a big part of what will make our products over time successful. Serves a dual purpose.

What do you focus on day to day?

You know, I think there's two core elements. One, I have a business operations team. We're there to try to ensure that the communication and focus, especially across the leadership team is crisp and that we don't get easily distracted by all the other things that could happen in our space in our company. So tactically we run our weekly leadership team staff meeting, we do quarterly business reviews, we hold twice a year multi day leadership off sites. It's sort of the cadence of communication to make sure that that team is really in sync, aligned and staying focused on the things that we've identified as our top priorities. And that's probably especially critical given that we are this international company. Some of our senior leaders are not in San Francisco and so we don't have as much time to see them in the halls and just catch up. So having a predictable cadence, meetings, communication is really important. Beyond that, that team also my business operations team either champions or inherits other sort of cross functional initiatives that we drive. They don't fit neatly into any one function. Ripple as a company is functionally organized. Head of sales, head of marketing, head of engineering, cfo, et cetera, et cetera. So we try to jump in and play that role of get a little bit of utility into the other to make sure that we're giving the right level of senior attention on problems. So I spent a good chunk of my day helping to manage that initiative or that set of initiatives. Beyond that, having a team that is geographically distributed. I'm, I'm on the phone a lot sometimes, you know, early morning on the drive in or late at night on the drive home. Just trying to make sure that we are staying in sync as a team, understanding where the opportunities and the issues lie around the world and trying to figure out where best we can double down our attention and investment to take advantage of that. And that could range from issues related to customers could be obviously moving money around the world is highly regulated. So we work with regulators around the world and make sure we're compliant. They understand what we're doing. So it's really kind of a broad array of topics and depending on the day can vary quite a bit.

What makes a really good business area review meeting?

As I said, we do QBRs every, every quarter. I think that their part just hey, it's not a super complicated formula. So what each senior leaders ask to do is what did you promise you were going to do in the prior quarter? What did you do? How did you do against your stated okrs, so to speak? What did you learn as a result? Both positive lessons and tough lessons and therefore what are you going to do next quarter? We also make sure to have conversation about how the team is doing. Who are the stars? Are there any challenges? Are there any cultural things we need to make? So those are kind of meant to be or that sequence of questions is meant to really tee up conversations. I think the real compelling, meaningful, impactful quarterly business reviews are ones where you're not just rotely going through a set of facts and figures. People's eyes Kind of glaze over, but it's where you're having real authentic conversations about both opportunities and things you want to lean into, but also challenges and being intellectually honest about what's going on. Realizing we're all probably facing similar things in our different slices of the company and trying to get the collective wisdom, if you will, of the team around the table to see how we can do better going forward.

Do business areas challenge each other at those meetings? Or is it more leadership challenging each business area in front of the rest?

The meetings that we have, those core business reviews are just among leadership. We will invite kind of guest speakers in if we're deep diving on a particular topic. But one of the things we want to ensure is we have real candid conversations amongst the leadership team without necessarily creating any other byproduct turbulence. I think it's challenging each other, right? And not in a accusatory or trying to make somebody feel inadequate way. It's, hey, we're all really on the same team. You know, as my boss, our CEO said, see, @ the end of the day, we all wear the same jersey, right? I mean, it's not as if we're, somebody wins, somebody loses, it doesn't mean we're all winning. It's really trying to instill the sense of alignment and, you know, not being afraid to say, hey, this, I tried this, and it failed. Here's how I'm going to do something differently next quarter, but also then getting hopefully some real authentic and direct feedback from your colleagues. We don't realize it, but we all have blind spots we don't see. And having somebody else who might be able to point that out to you is great. You know, feedback is a gift. Being able to embrace, it's really important.

How do you get all your business areas to work together as a team versus, you know, the silos forming?

I think we do a better than average job of it. Given that I've been around the valley for a while, I've seen a lot of different approaches, but I wouldn't say it's perfect. Right. I think we have to constantly be diligent looking for the emergence of silos, especially when you're growing so quickly and there's a lot of pressure every quarter to hit those objectives. We're actually having a conversation almost real time about how to set up our objectives as we look to 2020 in a way that ensures we're not pitting one against the other, one function, one department against the other. And obviously you never do that intentionally. And I think it's just a matter of being willing to call it out, been around areas or companies. Oftentimes when you're public that you have to hit the quarterly number at all costs. Part of the benefit of being private is you can say, wait a second, I know this was the number we were supposed to hit, but we hit it. It's a little bit of, sure, we can jam something through and hit a sales number or hit a deployment number or whatever metric in question might be, but is that really setting us up for sustainable, meaningful growth going forward? We're all mature leaders and we can say, you know what, if we don't hit that this target this quarter, we're not thrilled about it, but we're doing it for a reason, which is that it's going to give us a higher probability of winning, being willing to, to have those conversations, not being too embarrassed to say, hey, I'm not going to be able to deliver what I said, I'm going to deliver this quarter, but here's the plan to make it better and I think best for us as a company if we stay on that track. I think that willingness helps to, to prevent a situation where you're just going to do something regardless if it's truly the best long term decision, which oftentimes can create tension obviously between two departments.

How did you select Ripple? How did you get involved with them?

I've been in tech for a long time, always in the business side. I've been in tech for well over 20 years and I knew nothing about cross border payment. The initial awareness of Ripple really comes from the guy who's currently our CEO, guy named Brad Garlinghouse. And Brad and I had worked together in companies over the past 15 years on and off. So he and I had a strong relationship. And he was here at Ripple for a couple years and was transitioning from being the company's COO to becoming the CEO. And he gave me a call and said, hey Eric, as a result of this transition, I'm going to have to spend my time and days and hours focused on a different set of things. And I need somebody who can help me make sure that as we scale, somebody's making sure the trains are running on time and thinking about how we scale efficiently. And at first I was like, yeah, but I don't know anything about crossflow, payment, et cetera, et cetera. But I've been following the space. Obviously blockchain wasn't quite off the charts in terms of awareness and hype, but for something truly special Happening with this technology. And having known Brad from past lives, I followed Ripple and that was the initial, the initial touch point.

It was hard enough for me. I've owned a lot of Ethereum over the years and Bitcoin for the last five or probably five or six years. You went through the massive upswing with XRP and then the complete decimation of the entire industry and they're coming back again. But how did you manage people and their emotions and their psyche through that? Even though you're not the same company, but there's like that you're holding on lot of that digital asset, how did you manage people through that?

And it's absolutely a fair point, it was pretty crazy two plus years ago is the prices of digital assets were going through the roof. We stay focused on our mission which is solving this cross border payments use case. Certainly the value of XRP is an important factor for us. We're a big champion of the digital asset. It serves a very specific purpose in our long term product strategy. It's a far more efficient digital asset for a payments use case in terms of the settlement fees, the speed of settlement, the number of transactions you can do per second. So if you're looking to do payments, it's well suited to address the liquidity challenge associated there. So we view it as a component of our broader solution. And what we really emphasize to the team is this is a long game. This isn't a game that we measure in days or weeks or months. It's really a matter of years. You know, just as a point of comparison, when I started at Ripple, the price of XRP was well under a penny. Now it's somewhere between 25, 27 cents relatively speaking. Oh my God. It's gone up a ton now compared to where it was in late or mid 2017. It's come down a lot. But it's all a matter of perspectives. It's about looking at the long game and we measure our success not on the price of XRP but on how much value we're delivering to these financial institutions. That's largely a function of are they using our technology to move money around the world. And that curve is going up into the right really nicely. So that's what really gives us a lot of energy.

And if you're to look back at your career the last 20 odd years, where do you think you've really focused your growth in terms of being a leader or second in command?

I think I've prided myself in being a bit of a generalist. It doesn't always seem intuitive or like the best path, but I've always invested the time to really understand all aspects of the business and be able to look at a process problem from different angles. And as a result, as I engage with my peers or with the CEO, I can often bring a slightly different or nuanced perspective to a conversation. And so I've sort of made a concerted effort to invest the time to do that, and I think it's paid off well for me. You know, I may not be the deepest when it comes to marketing strategy or funding strategies, et cetera, et cetera, but I can kind of see the whole picture. And I think some of that is just something I try to do often is also being a good listener, engaging people around the company, being really responsive and hopefully present so that you hear certain things and you sense patterns. Way back when, before Tag, I was a consultant, and a lot of that was just about looking for patterns, making sure that you're being diligent around what's going on and not minimize blind spots so that you can bring that perspective to the table. So I think it served me well. You know, the good thing is you never stop learnings. It's not something that you say, great, I'm done, I'm gonna get. There's always new challenges.

I love Ray Kroc from McDonald's. Quote, he said, when you're green, you're growing. When you're ripe, you're rotting, or it better not be done. So if you were Eric, if you were to lean back to, you know, just graduating college, just starting out in your business career, what word of advice would you give yourself that now you know to be true, but you wish you'd known back then?

I think enjoy the journey. Back then, I probably thought everything had to be so scripted and the reality is, and maybe it's somewhat a function of being in this part of the world, in Silicon Valley and tech, part of the fun is just you don't know what's going to happen next. And I think early in my career, I probably was resistant to that, trying to force it and trying to predetermine outcomes. And I think some of the best experiences have been going into things where you really weren't sure exactly how it was going to turn out. Not that you were just rolling the dice and didn't care. You know, even as I look entering here at Ripple again, I'm not a payments expert per se. What in the hell are you doing? Like, there's a lot of people who've been doing payments for 20 years and blah, blah. I understand how to help scale tech companies in an efficient way and a lot interesting growth opportunities. And that's a skill that you can apply to different areas. And it's just, it's great learning from other people and you add another dimension to hopefully what you bring to the next venture. So I guess just enjoy the journey and don't try to get too hung up on what's supposed to be happening or what path you're supposed to be.

Don't be by the ride.

Yeah, exactly.

Eric Van Miltenberg, the SVP for Global Operations for Ripple, thanks very much for joining us today on the second grand podcast.

I make time for them, simple as that. I think we have to make ourselves accessible, more accessible, because we're not seeing each other in the office. I'm not passing you in the hallway. It does take more energy, it does take more discipline, but it makes such a huge impact that investment of time is very, very important.