7 Drivers in Building to a $7 Billion Company with 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner

So please make sure to drop your questions throughout the session using the Q&A button within your bottom menu bar. These sessions are recorded and posted, so please go to SaaStr's YouTube page and you can subscribe to them there. Okey dokey. Carrie Lu, Jeff, take it away.

Great, thanks so much. And thanks to the SaaStr team for organizing these great conferences. Always a lot of good content. I'm so excited to be here today with Jeff Scheiner, CEO of the password and secrets management leader 1Password. I myself am a former CEO— I'm sorry, CMO, most notably the head of marketing for Atlassian, who took them public. Now I do advisory for hypergrowth unicorns, including 1Password, Miro, and Segment. 1Password is a really unique company. It's been remote since the beginning. It's been profitable since the beginning. It serves both the B2C and B2B markets, and it has grown grew in its early days virally, excuse me, it grew in its early days virally, and now it's seen tremendous growth. Today we're going to talk about 7 drivers that 1Password has seen to get them to this great level of business accomplishment, which is still just the beginning. So Jeff, can you tell us a little bit just about the founding story of 1Password?

Yeah, absolutely. 1Password has been around for 16 years now, and we've got 2 founding families in Dave and Sarah and Rustam and Natalia. Dave and Rustam were working at the time time building websites. And one of the challenges they had was they actually couldn't build them fast enough and cost-effective enough. And a lot of them were e-commerce sites. And so they wanted a solution where they could have something that would autofill in a lot of the credentials for them from a testing purpose. And that, you know, that quickly turned into the main focus as they started to see just from customers that they started showing it to that the customers are really interested, but looking at it for storing credentials for themselves. And so that started to turn into 1Password. Now, from the very, very beginning, Dave and Sarah and Rishman will tell you, they were very focused on the customer, and that's how it grew. And it's grown ever since. And I would say the first 10 years we were B2C, and then after that we've been both, as you say, B2C and B2B.

I think we got a late start there. Just for those who are joining us with the recording, this is Jeff Scheiner, the CEO of Password and Secrets Management leader 1Password, and I'm Carrie Lou Dietrich from an advisor. Okay, great. So the 7 drivers that we're talking about today are building a great product, which you already hit on, your choice to be profitable, which is really unique in tech, selecting the right investors, growing your team from generalists to specialists, bridging both B2B and B2C by thinking about the people behind that, that buy the software behind it, being remote but keeping your company connected, and looking after your people. So we'll go through these one at a time. First is about building a great product, and this is an area where I've really been brainwashed to believe that it's, you know, the way, the truth, and the light. At Atlassian, we spent twice as much on product development as other companies do and really had a deep focus on if the product was so wonderful that people would buy it themselves, you don't have to sell it to them, they come to you. And 1Password is really like this. Since I've been working for 1Password, so many people, when you mention the name, say, "Oh, I love it and I use it for this." Jeff, that doesn't just happen by chance though. Like, tell us a little bit more about how you guys have approached prioritizing product and actually customer service over some other business priorities?

Yeah, it's something that I've said a lot, which is, you know, build a great product and support the heck out of your customers. And that's something we've lived by since the very first day, as I mentioned, and it's something that we try very hard to continue to live by. We grew by, you know, we grew by building 1Password through our customers, listening to their needs, trying to understand their use cases, keeping the product simple so people could use it. It doesn't mean that you're going to do everything that your customers ask, and it doesn't mean you're going to please everyone, but you should listen to them. Look, we've got a large and very dedicated customer support team, but beyond that, it's important that everyone in the company get involved with, with the customer, directly involved with the customer in one way or another. Only then will they truly understand where we are helping them and where, where we need to improve. I remember early on, Dave Serarusso, Natalia, and I, we'd all be answering support tickets, trying to clear the queues each and every day. And since then, we've tried a number of different approaches over the years to get everybody involved. You know, we've tried Customer Support Mondays where everyone, regardless of their role, everyone in the company spent the day helping customers in the support queues or the forums or so on. So there's many different ways that you can approach it, but you need to get everybody involved in customer support over and above anything else. And so regardless of your size, getting the product right and supporting your customer should be your first order of business. Now, we might have taken that a little too far, or done that, you know, we got to the point where, where all we were as a company, or I should say all we were, but the main focus as a company is, is engineering and customer support. And you can, you know, be very proud of that as we were. But at the same time, at some point, you need to also introduce world-class go-to-market and marketing and the other capabilities as well. But again, focus on the product and supporting your customers as your first order of business.

And one of the things that I think is interesting is that your approach has kind of changed over the years. So all 500 or 600 employees aren't doing customer service on Mondays anymore. But recently, I think one of the goals last quarter was to talk to 40 or 60 different customers as we were thinking through a new product development. So, you know, I guess it's been interesting to see how you incorporate customer feedback at different sizes of scale.

Yeah, and it's something that gets more formal as we grow, right? We have a product org now, and the product org has customer panels and customer sessions. We do an awful lot with you know, with betas and try and get an awful lot of feedback early from our customers on new features we're trying to release. We've got usability groups that are constantly working with the customers on the usability aspects of 1Password, because you get a little too used to your own app and everything becomes natural, but if you give it to somebody new, you start to see where the challenges are. So there's many different ways that you can continue to, ensure that you're getting the feedback from the customer.

I am seeing a couple of great customer questions in the Q&A. We're going to go on a little bit farther, and I'll infuse them as we go, and then also answer them at the end. So just a quick note to the folks asking questions. So moving along here, and this kind of preempts one of the questions. So you focused on product. You focused on customer support to really get this virality, which I'll say, you know, so I focus on advising hypergrowth companies. Companies growing 50% or more. And what I see in common between them is the interest in the customers in buying them. So much, 60%, 70%, 80% of the interest has to be inbound. It's really not paid, because you can't pay enough to grow at that rate when you're a small company. It's just too expensive. So that product and customer support really is the driver of that, I think, the hypergrowth and virality. The second thing, which is super unique to 1Password and different than most folks on this call, but similar to Atlassian actually, is that you've, you've been profitable. Tell us a little bit about that choice to be profitable and stay profitable so long.

Yeah, and if you look on the slide here, you see a quote from our Series A that we took, you know, our first ever round in 2019. We'd been in business for 14 years, had been profitable, had never taken funding or debt or any of those. And there's a lot of advantages there. It seems that many companies are too focused on growing in size without necessarily understanding if they have a viable business model. And clearly, there's cases where this works. But there's often significant negatives to this approach, you can really start to lose your focus on your mission and goals and instead focus on raising funds or hitting milestones that have been imposed upon you as a company. You can struggle to adapt your product or your service when the time eventually comes, which inevitably will, that you need to be profitable. So being profitable from the beginning can be a choice. Yes, it will very likely slow down the pace at which you grow. But the growth will be more thoughtful. And it really helps you focus on what the customers truly value in what you're doing. You know, what, what part of what you're providing do they value and they're willing to spend their hard-earned dollars on. And that's something that I think has a lot of value. So That's one aspect of it and one real benefit of staying profitable. And again, it does have to be a decision and you have to decide when you want to stay profitable. And then in certain cases, it may make sense not to. But one of the other real benefits is when you do decide to raise capital, it really helps ensure that you stay in a position of strength. For instance, we've got a number of fantastic and very well-respected investors, but we've got no dates we must hit, metrics we must achieve, paths we must follow. We still own a majority stake of one password. Like, we believe in what we're doing. Our investors believe in what we're doing. And that's why we're partnered. And that's why they want to help us. And that's why we want their advice as well. So again, it can be something that's really very beneficial to a company and not something I think that companies spend enough time deciding if that's a path they want to take.

So let's talk about the third topic. Let's see if it changes here in a moment. It is not changing right this second.

I think the third one was around selecting investors with purpose, selecting your investors, right?

Back to back. So when you went into your A round, you didn't need any funding, and then your C round, you were really intentional and chose between a number of different folks. Folks. So tell us, you chose Excel for the first round, really to get some business guidance and introductions to more executives. But tell us, when you were looking at that first stage, how were you thinking about your Series A?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. So here it was, the middle of 2019. And as I said, we'd been around for about 14 years, had been profitable each year. And we were still engineering and customer support was who we were as a company. And so when I looked at it, I had built relationships with many different investors over the years because they'd come to me and say, "Hey, I don't really need your money. Don't know what I'd do with it if I had it, but you're smart people and I can learn from you." And so I built a lot of good relationships, in particular with Arun at Accel was one. And I remember in the middle of 2019, I was sitting there and saying, okay, we're still growing, we're doing really well. But I feel like we're leaving something on the table by not having world-class go-to-market, by not having world-class finance, by not having, you know, some of the other orgs that we should have. And yet at the same time, because of our, you know, the fact that we were bootstrapped and the fact that we were had never taken funding in any way. Nobody really understood our story. So there were sort of two challenges, big challenges that I had. One, I don't know how to attract world-class leaders that would come and join 1Password. And two, if I did know how to find them, they're unlikely to join when truthfully as a company publicly, nobody had a clue. Are we making money? Are we losing money? Do we have customers? And that sort of thing. So The purpose behind the A round for us was, don't get me wrong, it's an investment from Accel's point of view, a very big one, but the purpose from our point of view was to go out and partner with a company like Accel that was a growth investor that could guide us through sort of where we were and had about 150 people at the time, and also who could build the relationships with the people that we were trying to attract to 1Password. We've seen since then, I've hired effectively the bulk of my C-suite. I hired— Jeanne was my first exec hire and she was my CFO, and then Julian is my go-to-market leader, and then a number of others. And now we've got a team of 7 at the C-suite, all that have joined in large part because they understand and of course believe in our story, and a part of that storytelling was very much through our investors.

And then your B round was kind of an add-on— oh, sorry, Brian, we're going to go back a slide. Your B round was kind of an add-on fundraise also with Accel. But in your C round, you picked between a number of different new firms and also added a number of celebrities to your roster. Tell us about that experience.

Yeah, certainly the latter half of it was a lot of fun. So yes, when we looked at the C round, again, we had a purpose. So now we had built, you know, I choose a theme for each year, good, bad, or otherwise. So, you know, 2020 was our year of growing and growing up. And that's when I really focused on hiring the C-suite, getting in a lot of the tools that, you know, larger companies use and that, and that took a good year, year and a half. And so here we were, you know, in mid 2021 and saying, okay, we're now ready sort of for our next phase of growth. We were hitting, I think, 500 people at the time, and, you know, we'd grown from 170 at the beginning of 2020 to 500. And we had put in a lot of processes, we put in a lot in the org, and it was how do we now get to that next phase of, of growth and, and help us determine what is our path from here? Because there are a number of paths that, that we can take, whether that's going public, staying private, or others. And so we wanted to focus on now a set of investors and partners that would help guide us through that next phase, to the next 3 to 5 years and beyond, but really the next 3 to 5 years. And so we spent a lot of time. We had originally narrowed it down to, I think it was 13, and then narrowed it down even further to 5. And the entire C-suite and the founders and I spent quite a bit of time with each of them. Again, sure, it's absolutely an investment from their point of view, and taking some courage capital was part of the plan. Like, how do we take— again, we're profitable, so it's for us courage capital that we can then use on some of the big bets we plan to make, but we're also looking at specific investors, not just who's going to have the funds, who can guide us through that next phase of growth. And that was really where Iconiq and Tiger and Lightspeed came in. And that was sort of the main ones. Now, the fun part was the Ryan Reynolds, the Trevor Noah, and the other celebrities, and some of the big name folks in business, the Mary Barra and that. For the most part, there's sort of two sides of what was exciting about that. One, in many cases, so these were largely people that ICONIQ had relationships with, or as you see with the folks that are really big stars, it's like that ICONIQ had relations with the people who had relations with the people who had relations with them. So it was always kind of fun to navigate the 8 people to get to the end person. But it was fun because I actually got to talk to a number of these folks and they use 1Password. That's why they were interested. That's why they're excited to participate. And it makes sense if you are somebody who is very, very public, privacy and security is even more important to you than perhaps the average person. And so it makes sense that they would use 1Password, but it's also a thrill. So yeah, I got to speak with a number of these folks and, you know, in many cases hear how they're using 1Password and just, like, it's just cool to be able to sit there and say, hey, I had a call with Ryan Reynolds.

Right?

He's an awesome, awesome, awesome person. And a Canadian. Just saying. So yeah, that was good. Now, in terms of the purpose to us as a company, aside from just being fun and exciting to be able to tell our own team, they also serve a purpose in that it does help get the word out about 1Password in a way that simply raising funds and talking about Iconiq and Tiger won't do. The average human being who's not, you know, not in our sort of, of, of world of fundraising and that won't know who those companies are, they'll know who Trevor Noah is, they'll know who Ryan Reynolds and others are. So it does serve a purpose there as well.

Yeah, it really helps to build awareness. And again, this kind of any, any kind of awareness that you don't have to pay for in advertising and Super Bowl ads makes a really big difference to small and growing companies. Yeah.

So, um, also the 49ers, then I might then I might want a Super Bowl ad.

Right, right. Okay, we'll hold out for the 49ers. Changing topics a little bit, I think our next, the fourth driver of getting to $7 billion is really growing your team from generalists to specialists. And as I advise different hypergrowth companies, there's a lot of pain I see in this growth because there's people who are fantastically amazing who helped you along the way, but maybe aren't the right fit for the next stage of growth. And you've talked about this, especially in your early days at you had some amazing generalists. Take us on this journey of growing your team, kind of from zero all the way up.

Yeah, and it is a painful part of growing. It's necessary, and I see some companies trying to avoid it, but it is, it is necessary. It's painful. So typically, I see this starting somewhere between 50 and 100 employees, or 50 and, you know, 50 and 100 people on your team. And what I call it is the B+ every B+ everybody, the B+ at everything person is that person that when you're small and your company is doing everything, like everybody in the company is doing everything, they are the most valuable person they have. They can write the code, they can go in and do some of the engineering ops work, they can then turn around and write the customer support FAQs, and they can even answer the customer and things like that. They can do everything, and that's super, super valuable. And then at some point, you grow and you say, well, you know, we really need this to look super professional, so we're gonna hire the A+ designer who just does design. And a little later on, you're gonna say, well, you know, we're too big to be doing this ad hoc, so we're gonna go and hire an engineering ops specialist who's gonna, you know, manage all of our infrastructure. And they're gonna be an A+ person at that and only that. And then we're going to hire, you know, some, some engineers who are A+ at development. And all of a sudden, what starts to happen is that B+ every, every, you know, everything player, that person who was the most valuable person you had in the core of your team, is now finding less and less that they, that they can do. And you're finding less and less you want to give them. And so that's a challenging for two main reasons in my mind. One is, you know, the former leaders become followers or become, you know, almost the— I don't know what the word is, but the people that aren't getting the, you know, the best, you know, the best roles.

Contributors maybe instead of leaders, right?

Yeah, and they're just sort of on the sideline, which is really tough for them. But it's also really challenging emotionally for, you know, for everybody involved, certainly for myself, because these are the people that helped grow your company from a very early stage. And now they're struggling to find where to fit. And so in some cases, they do leave. In some cases, to be honest with you, that's just best. Like, that's the world they thrive in, is the, you know, is the 10 to 40 or 50 range. The one thing I would suggest for companies, and I suggest this largely because it's something we didn't do, and I think it would have been better in hindsight if we had, and that is start a formal learning and development plan earlier, as your company's a little bit younger. So, you know, we've had quite a bit of success at 1Password taking people, especially from customer support, and growing them into engineering or growing them into other roles. And that's something that we did quite a lot of early on, but was never formalized. And so, you know, the people who had sort of the B+ everything role didn't really realize that they should be, you know, maybe, maybe if they spent a bit of time in learning and development, they would grow into the A+ player in one of those areas. And maybe that would be, you know, something that they would really enjoy and excel at. We didn't really provide those opportunities, not knowingly, we just— it just didn't occur to us. And I think that was a missed opportunity that caused some pain. But it is going to happen, you know, you are going to have to go through that path. And I think you should do your best to do it humanely, but just recognize that in the end, it is going to— it is going to be best for everyone.

I mean, hiring and firing absolutely has to be the hardest part of hypergrowth. One, trying to find the right people, especially in this market right now. But transitioning people through different stages of growth. You know, when I ran awareness advertising for Oracle, the growth wasn't so significant. So you could optimize everything and really get things and do the same thing over and over again. But in hypergrowth, it's a different company almost every year, where You also don't have the chance to hire people two steps ahead because they're not interested in your company. When no one had heard of you and you hadn't had any investments, you weren't going to get some of the top executives from Facebook and Malwarebytes and Atlassian and all the different places of great companies that have joined. And you're always playing with this game of you don't want to hire too far ahead because people are too hands-off and they're not scrappy enough to get you where you need to be. So Yeah, it just seems like it takes so much courage in hypergrowth to hire and fire the right people and hopefully give them great skills and opportunity to go on to other great opportunities.

It's also a case where during hyper— like, I remember one of my, you know, one of the VPs that I worked for way back when I worked at IBM always sort of had the, you know, grow your company really, really ambitiously and then you know, let it pause for a bit. We haven't, we haven't done the pausing yet. But his rationale behind that was when you're, when you're just focused on growing, you start to live with things that are hurting your business. For instance, people who aren't performing, and it's like, well, but we just need more, more people, we need more people, we need more people. And so if you let the business, you know, contract every once in a while, all of a sudden, those are the people that are like, well, this is, this is probably the right person to, to let go. Now, again, to your point, in hypergrowth, there's usually, there's rarely a contraction, certainly rarely a small one, you know. And so from that regard, I think it's something to be mindful of is, you know, and again, we don't do it perfectly by any means, but there are people that should be let go even as you're, as you're growing very quickly. And taking, taking time to focus on that as well is really difficult, because to your point, nobody likes to do it, but it is important.

No one wants to do it. I find that there's not any contractions and kind of the Jeff Bezos Amazon everything story. There's a story about it where one of the distribution managers was like, let's just bring the goals down this year and let me get the software right in the distribution centers. And Jeff Bezos was like, no, growth at all costs in that, you know, in his scenario. But I do find that one of the things that happens is as you raise the bar with these specialists who are really exceptional, the team itself kind of gets a sense because the bar of excellence has been raised. About who's fitting in and raising the bar and who's maybe not as great a fit anymore. Let's keep going, 'cause the next, we've still got, we've got 7, 7 to get to 7 billion. So the next was around this bridging B2B and B2C. Now you guys are pretty unique. Most companies are squarely in B2B or squarely in B2C, but the way that you think about the user, the person, the human behind them, I think applies to most of the people on this call. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, look, businesses increasingly need to serve both consumer and business audiences. You know, we started off selling to consumers, and for many years, that, that's, that was our focus. And then over, I guess, in 2016, we transitioned to have both a B2C and a B2B offering. And now, you know, over the last couple of years, we've really started to change that focus again to focus on people. To look less at the end user as a business person or a consumer and say the end person is a person. And it's great for our business. I mean, more than half of our revenue now comes from sales to businesses, but even more so, it's a huge advantage to our customers. And so it's kind of interesting. I talk an awful lot with investors and partners and everything else. One of the first questions I'm almost always asked is whether or not we are a consumer app or a business app. And I always found that a really odd question. I get there's, there's sort of like, you know, the revenue split, and people want to understand how much of the revenue or growth is coming from the B2C and B2B. But to say, are we a consumer app or a business app, always found odd. And sort of, here's why. Like, I'll look at myself, like, I'm Jeff. Often I'm Jeff doing work. Sometimes I'm Jeff doing family stuff. Sometimes I'm, I'm Jeff doing Jeff stuff. I may be in the middle of doing work when I switch and pay a bill or answer a text from my son or vice versa, like, but I'm Jeff, I'm a person. And, you know, I'm not a B2C or a B2B. And so once we start to think of customers as people, as real human beings, instead of segments, we start to realize that we need to provide solutions that fit the lives are real human beings. And so then we start to sit there and say, what does Jeff need? Not what does consumer need, or what does B2B need? So at 1Password, we're focusing really heavily on what we're calling human-centric security for just this reason. Look, and obviously it's specific to us, but like in general, people are not good at security. I think we can all probably relate to that. If we make it easy for people to have proper security hygiene and make it a habit at work and at home, we can, we can protect that person. And by doing so, we can protect the businesses that they work for. So ultimately, like, recognizing your customers are people and not just segments can make your app simpler for the end users to adopt. They start to love it, they become ambassadors, which is tremendous benefits for you. But they're also really benefits for the businesses that they sell to, because those businesses need their people to adopt the software they're trying to get them to use, or that software isn't just isn't a value to the business.

And that's kind of the, you know, our expectations and the consumerization of IT, that how sexy consumer apps are and how easy they are to use, everyone expects that in the business anyway, and that ease of use makes the business apps more effective, which is just what you already said. But I think that there's a lot there. So moving along to slide 6, which is talking a little bit about some questions that we're getting on the Q&A as well. Tell us more about being a remote company. Since the beginning, really without any forced world events, you chose— you started in Ontario, you hired people around the world. I know there's like a pretty big contingency across Europe, non-Silicon Valley cities. Tell us about kind of what drove you to start that business model and then, you know, how you think you've made it successful.

Yeah, I mean, at the— yeah, it's been 16 years now that we've been remote. And to be honest, like at the very, very beginning, you know, I don't think it was a plan to be remote. It was a case of, you know, Dave and Rustem saying, hey, we need a designer. Dan, who happened to live in Chicago, and I'm trying to remember how Dan— I think it was a Macworld event or something where they met. And it was just Dan was a designer, we needed a designer, we hired Dan. Dan's still with us, which is awesome, you know, um, love you, Dan. Um, and so, you know, when I look at it, like, it's, it's, that's what we started to do. And then as we had a forum, we started to see the people in our forums that were answering our customers' questions. And so then we're like, hey, would you like a job in customer support for us? You know, we'll actually pay you to do that. And so it sort of started off by just sitting there and saying, who are the best people, without looking at where they lived. And as we grew, we started to realize this is an actual benefit to us. And instead of— as you start to get larger, you start to make more pointed decisions. Okay, are we going to stay remote? Are we not going to stay remote? We decided, yeah, we're going to stay remote. And so it's really allowed us to hire incredible people all over the world. We've got now about 650 folks. I think there's something on the order of I don't know, low 200s in Canada, low 200s in the United States, somewhere close to 100 in the UK, and a small group in the Netherlands. And all over the place. Like, you know, if I look at my exec team, there's 2 of us in Toronto, 2 in Montreal, and 3 in the broader San Francisco area. And that's the exec team. It's awesome. You know, now, it's been kind of interesting, because over the last couple of years, companies were forced into being remote, but I think they're also now seeing the benefits of at least a hybrid approach to work, allowing employees freedom to work from home or in the office. And I think that's a great mix, right? We used to have an office in Toronto that we would bring teams in. Even sometimes we just bring them over, you know, bring a team over and they'll work in whatever location. We'll go to New York and work, go to Roo's home for the week. you know, at different parts of the projects, because there are times when you want to have people all together in one location. What we don't have is, is the here's the office, you know, be there, you know, 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. And I think that offers an awful lot of flexibility for the people.

But you do have cruises.

And this is so funny.

So you started by having executive cruises, right, for offsites, but then you have these big company cruises.

We have what we call AG Conf. And AG Conf comes from, you know, AgileBits Group, which is so, you know, company name, we go by 1Password, of course, but company name is AgileBits. So we had AgileBits Group conference. And so once a year we brought everybody together. It was typically on a cruise, almost every year on a cruise, just because cruises are so easy to grab a bunch of people. Did that the last time in, well, yeah, it would've been February of 2020. And then obviously for obvious reasons, for the last couple of years, we've not been able to do that in person. And so we've had virtual cruises for AEGConf and we've partnered with a production company and they've created a big virtual cruise ship this year. It was a space cruise ship. And we've used it as our year kickoff and more importantly, as an opportunity to get everybody in the company together in virtual person, right? So, you know, when you work with people in person, you start to understand the human behind the Slack message or the human behind the email, and that, that makes a big difference. And so, you know, this year, we had the virtual cruise ship, we had morning yoga, we had Korean cooking classes, we had top-notch speakers, a real-life astronaut, and she came and spoke to us, and customer panels and celebrity hosts and singers and interactive games. It was wonderful. It was a wonderful time for us to get to know each other as people. So we're still planning to have offices so that we can bring people together for important points in the project. But remote, it works for us and has worked for us for a long time. It's a viable model in the long term for a lot of companies.

And if we can skip 2 slides ahead, we'll come back to number 7, 7 of our 7 billion. But I think we had a bonus around just being yourself. One of the things as kind of an outsider insider, right? I'm part of 1Password in terms of having an email and going to AGConf and having Slack. But I'm not an everyday part as an advisor. I really see that your Slack community Slack community is incredibly vibrant. And I remember a long time ago, Atlassian had a HipChat product that competed with Slack, and Slack was promising the future of work where people wouldn't be using email, they would be only using Slack. And I'll say you and a couple of my other customers have realized this world where almost everything happens on Slack. A lot of it is business, but a lot of it is social as well. There's parenting channels, there's activities channels, there's a general water cooler. You know, in 1Password, there's a security chats where people are just debating about security topics. And you yourself share a lot of your own personal life, of your love of tractors. And this was something that I had picked up on the all-hands channel right after the Series C funding, where someone had made this meme teasing you about, you know, maybe you had made some money now at Series C, so were you going to get this amazing car? No, no, no, I'm going for my tractor. Tell us a little bit about just sharing who you really are with the company and and that approach that you take?

Yeah, so the first thing I'll mention is we have an all-hands channel in Slack. I strongly encourage everybody to do that. So whenever we have an all-hands call, in this case it was, I think that was like you said, part of AGConf, or if I have the AMAs, so I hold AMAs every few weeks.

Ask me anythings.

Yeah, the ask me anythings and things like that. Whenever you do that, encourage everybody to go into the all-hands channel in Slack. It's an absolute hoot. People are following along, they're asking questions, they're making jokes, is such a human experience. It's wonderful. So I really strongly encourage that. And yes, now that tractor is the wrong color. It should be John Deere green. But I do indeed have a compact tractor. It's a small tractor because I don't have a farm, but I live out in the country and have some land. But yeah, one of the biggest challenges I have is getting people to reach out to me. And so when I look at it and and I know we're running a bit short on time, so I'll try and do this quickly. But when somebody joins 1Password, I think they get a box of swag. And in there, I made sure there was a card that's a hello from me. And at the bottom, I say, "Reach out if you ever think I can help." But it's rare that people do. And so one of the things I think is important for all of us, especially in leadership positions, is to allow people to connect with us as humans, not as a title. That's why I use Chief Eliminator of Obstacles instead of the more formal title. It's why I talk about the tractor. It's why I join our coffee chats, which is sort of one-on-one chats that are brought up. Because look, it's our folks that make our company, not me. It's the 650 folks that are building, supporting, selling, marketing, and everything else 1Password. And I want them to be able to come to me and not, you know, be intimidated by a title, but, oh, it's Jeff the tractor person. And I think this is an easy way to do so. And I just love tractors.

Only surpassed by Jeff the Lego person, who, after jokes about Legos— and we had rocket ship Legos delivered with some of our swag for the offsite— and I've now become deeply into Legos over again and subscribed to the Lego channels where All the 1Password folks are talking about the expensive Legos they've bought and pictures of their Lego closets. So again, quirky things making things a lot more fun. I'm going back a slide to slide 7, which is our 7th driver of getting to $7 billion is pretty interrelated here, looking after your people. And you've done a lot of things this year from a 7% inflation raise across the company, a lot of diversity, a lot of investments in mental health. It's been a really big year for you. What, you know, what has kind of driven this investment at 1Password this year and before?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I look at it, we're trying to grow, we're trying to double the size of our company this year. It's a huge challenge for any company, I think, in any year. And this year, as we all know, like, people are really hard to find, like they're in demand everywhere. So How do we accomplish that? That's a big challenge. We are not going to be able to compete on comp alone against the Facebooks of the world. We're just not. We're a successful company. We're a growing company, but we don't have the pockets that, let's say, Facebook has or Google has if they really just want to sit there and say, "Here's a whole whackload of money." But there are things we can do that I think are even more powerful and more important. There's, there's sort of 3 that I focus on. One is focus on culture. Culture doesn't come from policies, it doesn't come from mottos or signs or reminder emails or things you put on your wall. Your company's culture will be defined by the leaders and in general by the people you hire. And so I've always tried to hire first and foremost for attitude and aptitude. And then secondly, for experience and know-how. That especially for leadership and senior roles, you have to hire people based on the culture of the company you want to have. And so that, that's one. The second is communication. If everybody at the company understands what you're trying to accomplish, and why you're trying to accomplish it, it raises everybody's spirits, it gives them purpose. Now, quite honestly, this is an area we're still struggling to get better at. It's not an area we do, we do great at. It's a huge focus of ours, but we can see the impact, we can see the value. And then finally, of course, benefits and compensation. Is important. So here again, we're trying to do, you know, what's right, and it's ever-changing. We're constantly going through reviews of pay bands so we can pay competitively. As you mentioned, we gave a blanket 7.5% cost of living raise in addition to our normal merit and promotion cycles. We've got a really good benefits program. So for instance, in the US, we pay the full copay that employees typically pay. Why? Because we want to take another worry away from our folks. The other thing we do is really try hard to provide a mentally healthy workspace. That's important. Focus on mental health as part of our benefits packages, apps and services like Headspace and that for the teams to use. Wellness days sprinkled throughout the year. We just had a wellness day on last Friday. It's a day that the entire company takes off, and we have a few of them sprinkled throughout the year. And the entire company takes it off to relax and recharge. And, you know, I tease a lot or about my tractor, but that's my happy space. I go, I'm in Canada, I plowed. I took my tractor and I plowed. I might be the only person in the world that finds that relaxing and recharging, but I did. So, you know, we can provide good comp, we can provide good benefits, and you combine that with a mission to help people, a mission to keep them secure, a wonderful, friendly, inclusive company culture, an opportunity to grow and learn, we're gonna win 9 times outta 10. And that's, I think, the magic sauce.

[Speaker] I mean, it's also helped you retain a lot, right? The turnover is pretty low as well. So, I mean, again, it's interesting as we've gone through these 7, and we can move ahead to the slide that summarizes them, which I think is right there. As we go through these, there's nothing that's super secret about them. To have a great product, to pick the right investors, don't pick someone who corners you, to think about growing the team in a really thoughtful way, to think about what really drives your customer behind their surface-level needs, you know, to get the best people and to keep them engaged. There's nothing that's really secret there. It's just, it seems like it's A, the devil's in the details, B, it's kind of consistent diligence and prioritization in an environment where you can be distracted every day.

Yeah. Are you doing those 7, or are you just talking about them and saying they're important, right? And that's, that's tough even for us. Sometimes we're like, you know, we've, we've said that a few times, how about we actually do it? So that's, that's always the tough part because as you say, there's, there's always a million and one things that are going to distract you, right?

And it'd be— thank you. And, and some of them might even be world events that were beyond our control. Um, so with that, let's go into some of the Q&A. Um, Let's see here. One is about getting customers to trust, trust you. So 1Password makes life 10 times easier, does, but does it require more vendor trust than other SaaS products? And how do you communicate trust to customers? And I think this can apply to a lot of businesses where your software and services become mission critical to what they do. How do you express that trust?

Yeah, again, I think it's communication with the customers. Like, we try very hard to respond to every customer regardless of where it's at, whether it's a, you know, a tweet, whether it's in the forums, the customers will trust you. I think if you're honest with them, then they may not like your answer all the time. But I think if you give them an honest answer, that will build that trust. And I think if you give them too much of the business wishy-washy answer, it almost does the opposite, even if you're not saying anything untrue, there's often a sense of, well, that sounds an awful lot like they're trying to hide something. So I think it's hard to do. It's easy to say it's hard to do, but you just have to go out there. You just have to be honest. Here's what we're doing. Here's why. And not everybody's going to be happy with that, with your answer, but they will appreciate the fact that you gave them an answer and you're being straight with them.

It seems like there's also a lot of internal consistency that you need to have. I know, like, within 1Password, privacy is a huge issue. And actually, as a marketer, it's a huge issue because we're so diligent about some privacy that we won't track some things that make it easy to see if your marketing dollars are effective. But, but you've— it seems like you really infuse the culture internally with this commitment of trustworthiness? Because you feel like any cracks internally then would, like, for sure multiply externally. Is there something special that you did do around that, or it's just taking the responsibility so seriously?

I think it's about telling— like, especially internally, if we look at, like, to your example, would I love to have a whole bunch of analytics inside of our apps? Of course, that'd be fascinating to see how our customers use it. We're not going to do it for obvious reasons. We're not going to have, have, you know, all of these analytics that say, here's, here's what Careloo is currently doing. And I think it's just about explaining internally first, why that helps us, why that benefits us. It benefits us because, you know, our customers expect and demand and deserve privacy. And so if we give that to them, they will find value in what we're doing. And so all of a sudden internally, we're like, okay, and I look at everything as a teeter-totter, right? Effort and value, right? And we can sit there and say, sure, there's some value in getting all of whatever it is, you know, whether it's in-app analytics or otherwise, but then all of a sudden the cost to that is tremendous. And so I think once you explain internally to, you know, the folks who work here, why it's so valuable that we don't do it, then they're like, oh, well, maybe we should go put that on our website and tell everybody we don't do it. Because now from a marketing point of view, it's changed from, oh, we want this data, to, oh, we want everybody to understand we don't collect this data and here's why. So there's different things like that that I think you can do, and that will quickly get out.

Next question is around product-led growth. So you started out as a product-led growth company, as did Atlassian and a lot of these viral products on the market right now. But now you've changed into this enterprise motion. And so there's a question around how those are working together. And whether enterprise customers were starting with free trials, or how you see product-led growth and enterprise sales working together.

Yeah, I mean, I always want to lead with product, build a good product, support the heck out of their customers, it's not going to change. And so one of the things, so for instance, one of the things we've done is anybody at a company, so if you've got a Company 1Password account, every employee in that company gets a free family account. And so that's great because a couple of things happen. One, it becomes habit-forming. Again, help the human, help the person, right? And we're not just Jeff at work. And so now the person can, can help, but at the same time, it helps us as a business from a standpoint of if, if that person or their significant other or family members really like 1Password, they're going to bring that into the next business that they work at, and they're going to eventually advocate for it on our behalf. And so you do have a flywheel approach, um, from a, from a go-to-market perspective. Perspective, that's very, very powerful as well.

Okay, next question. Um, would you have hired people sooner knowing what you know today? What's one role people might look over today that you couldn't have scaled without? So thinking kind of more about your hiring strategy.

Yeah, oddly enough, finance, because, you know, it was like 3 years ago we were doing cash accounting in QuickBooks. It was horrifying. We didn't realize it was horrifying at the time. And I think we looked at finance as something that is there to do the books. Boy, are they tremendously helpful from a business point of view, helping you understand what's working, what's not, where you can focus your everything from hiring to product. So oddly enough, finance is something that I would have done much sooner had I known what I know today.

There was a question before about how you hire people internationally and how that's worked as a Canadian company. I don't think we want to get into too much detail with that. But I do know I know you guys have spent a huge amount of time trying to get all of your entities and taxes right in all of the different countries as a remote company. Any quick tips on that? It kind of fits with like, get your accountants and get your tax people to get set up as a global remote company.

Goes back to finance, hard work and effort, entities in the countries where you have people. I wish there was a magic bullet there. There just isn't. It's just work you got to do. Well, on that, I'm going to step in and say this was a fantastic session. Kari Lou, Jeff, thank you so much. Thank you for all the effort and time put into this today. We have lots of great content ahead for you all, so make sure you check it out and check out the next session in SAST or Build. See you there. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks so much. Thanks, Jeff.

Bye-bye.