Go to Market Strategies That Led To Divvy's $2.5B Exit with Divvy’s Former CRO, Sterling Snow

Excited to be with everybody today, kinda share some of the lessons that we learned as a go-to-market engine along our journey at Divvy. It was very, very quick in a lot of ways. We went from our first institutional round of funding to getting acquired in about 4 years, right? In a $2.5 billion exit. and we're gonna spend some time talking about the things that helped us do that. This is how it looked, right? First institutional money in '18, getting bought by Bill in '21. I joined Divi just a little bit before we raised that Series A, so got to see essentially the entirety of this story play out. I say a lot that I have a multi-billion dollar education, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart because if I could go back to that moment in 2018 with everything that we've learned along the way, we could have added more, we could have added a couple billion more dollars, I believe, to that eventual exit. So the things that I'm gonna talk to you about are lessons and learnings that I hold very dear because they were expensive to me and the people that we built this business with. Okay, one thing that always cracks me up when I kinda talk about the story, and you know, it was quick, it was 4 years, and we did all these things, is people kind of assume that you might have gotten to skip a step. I promise we didn't get to skip any steps. We just got to cram all of the learnings and all of the experiences into a very, condensed timeframe, and that meant that if we were gonna stay on top of it, we had to accelerate our rate of learning. We started with a base and a belief that we wanted to do something very special, very unique, so what kind of a team were we trying to cultivate? We wrote this out as a revenue team, and we lived by it. We believed that everybody deserved to know what it felt like to be part of a high-performing team. And we compared it to sports and running out of the tunnel on a Friday night with the bright lights on. Everybody deserved, in our opinion, to feel what that felt like and to work with people to the left and to the right of you who were absolute experts at what they did. That we believed that we were responsible for helping each other become the best versions of ourselves. That meant we were very high on accountability, and we wouldn't tolerate less than a full effort from ourselves and from our teammates. That all led to us outlining a couple of very important things, and this is important to talk about before we talk about operating models, because you can have the best models in the world, if you don't have the underlying team and the underlying structure, it will do you no good. That is literal lipstick on a pig. So these were the key traits of our high-performing teams. I'm not gonna read 'em all to you, but I wanna highlight a couple of the big ones. We believe that chasing ambitious goals was a fun thing. Sure, it's daunting. Sure, it's stressful, but it's also ambitious. Energizing, invigorating, and we had a blast doing it together. We believed very strongly in Extreme Ownership. If you haven't read the book by Jocko Willink, highly recommend it. We had everybody who joined the revenue team read the book and write a book report because we believed that extreme ownership at the end of the day was what was going to separate us in many regards. And then we also believed that, Speed was of the essence. Every single time, the answer of when to act was now. The time to take an action was now, and we believed in that. Just important as what you, as the traits that you want to have are the ones that you need to avoid. Again, we spelled this out. These were well-published throughout our team in our years at Divvy. So, we do not on our team have excuses. So again, when you write these traits down, you give everybody license to hold themselves and each other accountable. So in many, many meetings, somebody would say something and be like, well, that kinda sounds like an excuse, and we don't make excuses on this team. We believed strongly in a principle that we would not be disloyal to those not present. Meaning if you aren't, if you aren't in the room, you don't get to have a negative conversation about somebody. We will engage in conflict and we will have discussions and debates and disagreements, but we won't do it behind each other's backs. Okay, that was an important one for us. And then the last one that I'll highlight here is that there is no room for passengers. When you're trying to build something really big, when you're trying to do it really quickly, you cannot have passengers. Everybody has to be engaged. Everybody has to be driving. Everybody has to be pushing and moving forward, and so for us, we needed to make sure that there were no passengers on our team. So again, I started with this because operating models can be wildly helpful. They can improve so many parts of your business, and we're gonna talk about 6 that we used at Divi, but they're only great when your team is. And also, as we go through the rest of the presentation here, I wanna make sure everybody knows that what I'm talking about in the successes and the learnings that we've had, they're the result of blood, sweat, and tears poured over years by very talented men and women and they're almost like in spite of me, not because of me, and I'm just telling you what I got to learn along the way. Great team is the foundation of it all. Okay, so these are the 6, and we're gonna spend a little bit of time on each. Aligning the funnel, budget quota goal, shorten the cycle, T3B3, name, number, and north star, sell, design, build. Number 1, align the funnel. In that intro video, you saw a principle that we talked about at Divvy all of the time, It's called swing. So for those of you who aren't familiar with crew or rowing, swing is when the oar, the paddle, of each person in the boat is hitting the water at the exact same time, is pulling back with the exact same amount of force. Because if anything happens in this little boat, if anyone's out of sync, that boat's gonna veer off course, that boat's gonna flip. Not good things are gonna happen. So the first principle, the first operating model we had is aligning the funnel. The way that we started this was actually with me, because as the CRO, I was responsible for marketing, sales, implementation, customer success, customer support, and revenue operations. So it behooved me to make sure that everything was aligned, because if it wasn't working, There was nowhere to hide. There was no excuse that I could make. I couldn't blame the VP of marketing. I couldn't blame our churn problems on customer success. It was ultimately all on me, and this was a very powerful tool for us to align our funnel. Let me give you a specific example of how this model played out. We would take each stage from marketing all the way through customer support, and we would actually measure and compensate the group one stage below where they were actually responsible. So what does that look like? Marketing, we didn't talk about MQLs or SQLs, we actually talked about closed won, new dollars. That's how marketing was measured. That's how they were promoted and compensated, bonused, all of those kinds of things. Sales, it wasn't just on new logos. It was based on what they did during their first 90 days of implementation, okay? So we would force, we would push everybody's accountability one step deeper in the funnel because what does that do? Well, automatically now that sales rep who has responsibility for what goes on when they're at the next stage of the funnel in implementation, well they start to sell a little differently. They start to prep you for onboarding a little differently. They start to care about things that they didn't care about before And bam, you have more alignment in your funnel, which allows you to go much, much faster. Every second that you spend with friction in that funnel is costing you business, and it's costing you time, and it costs you a lot of emotional energy as well. You're supposed to be out there taking on the market. You don't wanna have internal friction within your own funnel, which is wildly common. The second model here is one that we call budget quota goal. A lot of people have a challenge. You want to go to a board meeting, you want to present to the CEO, and you want to have a plan that you can beat, okay? You wanna exceed expectations, right? But on the other hand, you don't want to sandbag, you don't want to leave growth on the table, and so how do you balance this? You're also in the middle of all this trying to manage a culture, and I'm a firm believer that this is a momentum game, and if you can get wins, they turn into more wins, and if you start taking losses, they can quickly spiral into more losses. So what Budget Quote a Goal is, is a financial framework that we would use. The budget number is what we would essentially present on to the board. This is the board number. This is the number that come hell or high water, we are not going to miss. And there is some conservatism baked into this number. This is the number that given all the data that you have, you have a, like I would say, an 80% degree of certainty that you're gonna go out and get this done. I always called this the Sterling keeps his job number. Quota. This is what you build external-facing. This is where every single rep, every manager, every leader, they're built around this quota number, which is a step up from budget, right? And then you wanna make sure that you have what we call a go-get 'em, the goal, which is the stretch, which is something that you're probably only going to do a couple of times a year, but you're gonna celebrate the hell out of it when you do. This framework was incredibly powerful for us because we got to beat and raise at a very high frequency. Most of the time, we would push ourselves and come in between that quota and that goal number, and then we got to raise our expectations. Another thing that this model helps with is, it doesn't matter if you beat your plan if the plan sucked. You can be like, hey, our number was 50 and we hit 51, but if 50 was the wrong number, or if you could've done 60, then you didn't do it right. And so this framework is remarkably helpful for making sure that you protect your downside and make sure you always do what you say you're gonna do, but that you also have upward mobility. And as soon as you go see what's possible, you can reset the expectation very quickly. This allowed us to have remarkable— it allowed us to have a lot of credibility with our investors too, because we'd pitch them one quarter and we'd show them kind of the sensitivity, and we would show them budget, quota, goal, and then we would come back and talk to them 3, 6 months later. They would check in on how that went, and this allowed us to be very consistent and very credible with our board, within our own teams, and with the external people that we were talking to as well. Third one here, shorten the cycle. I am a huge believer in this, and I've debated this with many people internally and externally. One thing that we found out very early on is that if we took our numbers and our targets from quarterly to monthly, we saved ourselves a lot of heartache. The reason I say that is because if I am maniacally paying attention to the month, right, I'm hinging my number and my expectations to the month, I will almost never have a quarterly problem, which is when we're talking to the board and when we have, some accountability kind of outside of the building. So I wanted to shorten the cycle as much as we possibly could. The other thing that shortening the cycle allows you to do is it allows you to have 12 chances to beat and raise during a year instead of just 4. And so when you look at your annual operating plan and you think about how is this gonna look in 12 months, well, A lot can change in 12 months, and when we would focus on a 4-week interval, we had years where we got to raise our annual target 12 times, and that allowed us to grow much faster than if we had operated in any other way. I've got a stack of cards here because there's a fun story with this model. We were, again, we moved, we moved to monthly, and we were reporting on everything weekly, so we were really cruising, and something happened with one of our largest customers at the time. They had their cards get accidentally shipped to HQ, and also in an error at the card manufacturer, we got 4 cards for each one person. But we had 2 days left until the end of that month, and we needed to get those cards in folks' hands because we had shortened the cycle. So myself, our head of product, and our head of implementation worked on a Friday night until about 4 in the morning sorting all these cards, putting them in envelopes, getting the addresses on them, driving them the next morning to FedEx and getting them in customers' hands. And the reason why that story goes with this model is because when you shorten the cycle and you demand more of yourself in less time, you and your entire organization, you get scrappier, you get more creative. Necessity is the mother of creativity. And when you place artificial constraints on yourself and on your team, you have an ability to do a lot more than you thought you could, and it will take you to greater, much, much greater heights. T3B3. This was a very helpful formula for us. So T3B3 stands for top 3 and bottom 3. Every quarter, we would sit down with every person in the organization. We had a little template, top 3, bottom 3, and we would list out the top 3 superpowers that somebody had, and we would coach on how to lean into those more and how to continue to get the most out of their abilities. And then we would have the bottom 3, which were the areas of opportunity. What do we need to be working on? What do you, if you're trying to go from a senior manager to a director, what are those 3 key things that you need to develop to be ready for that kind of a promotion? Right, as an example. Now, there's a trick to T3/B3. You not only do it for your direct reports, you have your direct reports do it for you. So it's bilateral, okay? So I remember the first time that we implemented this and I asked everybody, okay, like you're gonna rank me, you know, T3/B3, and man, I had some great T3s. I was a rock star. And my B3s were pretty wishy-washy. And I went back and I said, like, there is no way that I don't have worse qualities or worse attributes that need to be worked on. Like, got to go back and do it again. And maybe I shouldn't have done that, because when they came back, those were real. Those were a lot of, like, warts. And you got to look in the mirror and figure out what you need to do better. But this created such a healthy thing for us because in a very non-confrontational way, we got to have incredibly direct conversations. And people got to tell their manager what they felt like they needed to work on. It was a very powerful thing because we all knew where we stood at each moment in time. There was no question as to what your leader thought you were doing well and what you thought you were doing poorly, and we were helping each other work on those B3s. We actually would present on them and say like, hey, this is who I am, these are the things that I'm gonna be working on maniacally over the next 3 months, can you help me? So we helped each other, and we got better, and we had a rule if your B3s If they stayed the same quarter over quarter, they'd start getting highlighted in yellow and in red because you really wanted to see those change. We're always gonna have things that we can work on. Hopefully they're not the same things over and over and over again. So T3B3 was a very helpful model for us. Name, number, and north star. A phrase that we circulated all the time was if it doesn't have a name next to it, and it doesn't have a number, it's not going to happen. Just book it. It will not happen. It is a pipe dream. Every single thing that we cared about, we had to be able to say, well, who's the name that's responsible for that, and what is the number? And it is complicated, to have a number for every function. For example, how do you have a number for a creative function in marketing, right? It gets hard. It's easy when it's a pipe number for marketing. It's easy when it's a revenue number for sales. It's easy when it's a usage metric or an NRR metric for customer success. But nonetheless, even with the ones that are tricky, If you want it to happen, for us, we believed it had to have a name and it had to have a number. And then there's the third component to this, which is what's the North Star? What is it that everybody orients themself around in order to make sure that they're prioritizing correctly? So we've got a picture of a whiteboard over here. Quite often would sit down and say that we wanted to raise our targets, we wanted to go and chase. Remember I talked about budget, quota, goal? We would say, hey, we wanna go get goal, and right now we don't like see a great path to it. We would pull in 20 of the most capable people that we had, and we would have a brainstorm, and we would say, okay, Where is there incremental revenue, incremental growth that we can go and chase? And between those 20 people, we would brainstorm tons of ideas. Some of the ideas were awful. Some of the ideas were brilliant. But we would brainstorm them, we would select them, and people would put their name next to their number and their initiative. And it was all oriented around, well, what was our north star? Well, okay, as this group of revenue leaders, we're chasing goal. We're saying screw budget, screw quota, we're going for our stretch goal. And folks, in this particular sprint, we ended up, we set, you see this number that we set, you know, it's 821 million, and then you can see the actuals written vertically there, 821.8, you know, got there just by the skin of our teeth, but the principle of this is you are constantly juggling a series of glass balls. Some of the balls that you're juggling are glass, some of the balls that you're juggling are rubber, And if everybody knows what their North Star is, you won't drop a glass ball. You will understand what the priorities are, and you won't allow a glass ball to hit the floor. So everybody, there's also an incredible power in everybody being able to understand what success looks like for them in their role. So like, your name, your number, and your North Star end up being end up being remarkably powerful agents. The 6th one here, this is sell, design, build. We learned this lesson the hard way. We would set out to launch a new product or a new feature, and we would be met with kind of a lackluster result, right? And we're like, ah, how did we get this wrong? We were so sure. That people were going to be excited about this. We did all the customer interviews, and we looked at everything we feel like we could have. Sell, Design, Build was born out of that frustration and realizing that our resources were precious. So how could we, as a revenue team, make sure that the things that we were advocating for our product and engineering partners to build were the right things? We came up with this framework. So very simply, this framework is when you think you've got the idea for the product or the service, you first go out and you sell it. Put together some duct tape and baling wire version of it. Most of the time it looks like a manual process or service, and you go out and you sell it. And you will find out very quickly, are people actually willing to use this? Are people actually willing to pay for this? If so, how much? And once you figure that out, then you can start designing. By the way, it gives you a head start when you think about designing, because now you've gone and talked to 10 people. You've got 10 people sold on this thing, and they're using it, and it's manual. It's basically a service thing going on in the background with people pushing different things around. and you know what to design because now you're actually like doing the flow, and you know what the actual needs of the customer are, and you know how it kinda looks on the backend, and so you get to design faster. And you go back to those customers who you've sold, and you show them these things like, hey, how does this look? Is this gonna make it better or worse than the way that we're handling this for you today? And then you get a high degree of confidence in the design, and then you go and build. And this saved us so much time and so much energy, and it's precious. Because when you are— again, when you're trying to get big fast, you don't have time for missteps. They're very costly. Sell, design, build minimizes those. The picture here is with myself and our head of product. Because this is what we would spend a lot of our time doing. This particular trip, we went out to Detroit, and we were doing this. We were saying, hey, we have a new idea. We had sort of a target in mind for if we could get enough people sold, if we could get enough folks bought in and actually using the thing, we were gonna go and build it, and we talked to 3 customers in this particular day, and we were getting on the plane, coming back, back home, and we had just barely gotten the last person to commit and go over the goal that we had to set out and actually start designing and building something, and head of product decided that was as good a reason as any to take a nap on the airport floor there. These are all, by design, very simple. There's no Pythagorean theorem up there. There's no rocket science. These things are simple. And that's what makes them powerful. And that's what makes them easy for everybody to understand and operate against. But they are not easy. And they are not easy to do consistently over a long period of time. These things took years for us to get really, really good at and for us to be able to go to any person at any part of the organization and they would be able to operate this exact way. So as you think about, as you think about getting started or implementing any of these models that might be helpful for you, consistency is the key. So let's say that you thought 3 out of those 6 were total crap, but 3 had some merit. And you wanna go work on 3, make sure that you focus on consistency over anything else because it gets very easy to get convoluted and too much just kinda breaks our brains and we don't end up doing any of it. So again, a quick recap here before we get into Q&A. Align the funnel. Figure out how to have a singular owner. Figure out how to reduce friction. Figure out how to create virtuous cycles within your own funnel. Like, here's an interesting thought exercise as you think about aligning the funnel. What could you do today to make marketing care more about what sales cares about? What could you do today to make sales care more about what implementation cares about? And if you start going down that path, you will come up with ideas about how to align your funnel and reduce friction. Budget, quota, goal. Make sure that you are protecting your business. Another very virtuous part of budget, quota, goal is you build a finance plan around that budget number. It prevents you from over-hiring, prevents you from over-spending, and again, creates sort of a safe environment for you to go and chase the upside. Go do something very, very aggressive, very, very hard, but do it in a way that protects your culture because you're gonna be winning. Do it in a way that protects your reputation because the board and your investors, they're going to see you beat and raise, but do it within this framework because otherwise you're simply choosing between sort of the lesser of two evils. Shorten the cycle. To make sure you never drop a glass ball as you're juggling all these important things, make sure you never drop a glass ball, shorten that cycle. If your business today runs on quarters, figure out how to run it in months. You give yourself 12 chances to beat and raise. You give yourself 12 chances to correct mistakes. You give yourself 12 chances to have a higher growth rate at the end of the year, shorten the cycle. By the way, I'd be totally remiss if I didn't mention, if something is getting really hard, if you're behind, you need to shorten the cycle even more. So if you're forecasting and you're saying, hey, I don't think we're gonna get there in whatever time period you've chosen, we're not gonna get there this month, then you better be meeting on a weekly basis. The scorecards that your team is sending you better be coming in every night at the end of the night, because you need to shorten the cycle to give you more chances to figure out what's working and what's not, and to get those feedbacks loop— those feedback loops faster so that you can actually correct the problem before it's a real problem. Again, put those constraints on yourself and nobody else will have to. T3B3, give everybody in the organization a chance to give very valid feedback to their leaders and to their team, but also give them a chance to know where they stand. It's an easy way to have this conversation every quarter and then set out to maximize strengths and work on weaknesses. and nobody has to wonder, well, how does my boss feel about me? There's a lot of your high performers that, believe it or not, they walk around every day wondering if you hate them, if you're gonna fire them, and you're like, whoa, I think the world of you. They don't know that unless you're having these kinds of conversations. This is a model that forces that into your normal rhythms. Name, number, and north star. Again, if it doesn't have someone's name and a number, it's not going to happen. So don't go promise it to a customer, don't go promise it to your board, don't promise it to your CEO. But if it does, then you can have ultimate accountability and you can prioritize against the things that the organization deems most important. Sell, design, build. When you have an idea, when you have a product, when you have a new channel, when you have anything that's worth testing, go out and sell it first. And if you can do it in sort of its most nascent form, then you can design something, then you can build something, then you can have a level of confidence in what you're doing, and you will have a lot more success, and you can snuff out bad ideas well before they cost you tons of time and tons of money. So those are 6 of the go-to-market operating models that we used, and we've got some time for questions if anyone wants to dive into any of them. Thank you.

Thank you very much for fantastic presentation. I had one question about the shorten the cycle, and my learning is that the customers move in the kind of purchase process in their own schedule. So how did you use this to kind of look at the different leads and cases that you have?

Yeah, it's a great question. Basically, the idea is, well, the customers have, They're the ones who set what their timing is on all of these things. But what I've learned is that we can influence that a lot more than we think we can. And there's only one way to find out, right? And so you try it. And I remember, especially with our mid-market team, the whole argument was, well, Sterling, these are much larger customers. They need a lot more time. They have a lot more processes we have to get through from procurement to all these different things. And the truth is, is once we moved, it was hard. I'm not saying it's easy. It was very hard, but we could influence that and we could take more control of that than we thought previously.

So.

Thank you.

Yep.

Hey, when we think about goal achievement, you talk about hitting, budget, hitting quota target, which is OTE. How do you remunerate or do you remunerate against hitting goal or is it just the celebration you mentioned?

No, no, we definitely built in mechanisms for that to be more advantageous for what we were chasing. Here's an interesting point. We sort of had classic accelerators and decelerators once, you know, based off of the quota line, right? But when we would go after those stretch goals, a lot of times we used it as an opportunity to take the money that we would have spent and put that into like some kind of a really cool, almost extravagant activity that we did as an entire team. And they became these pushes that we really looked forward to and we wanted to hit because that was when everyone would bring their plus ones and we'd go to a really nice, you know, ski lodge or we would do something special. But the simple answer to your question is yes, we would change, you know, the compensation obviously changed. You'd get into your accelerators once you got over goal and you'd be in decelerators at certain percents below quota.

So thank you. So when someone is, so the whole team basically?

Yeah.

So the goal requires the whole team to hit? If the whole team hits, then everyone goes?

Well, the goal is sort of a raw number. So it's not like everybody would hit their goal. Some people are coming in at quota or budget, but when it rolls up, it would actually like when you looked at our plan for the month or the quarter, we had to be above that. Thank you. Yep.

Hey, nice to meet you. I like the part where you say that marketing has to be accountable for extreme ownership as well as like sales, right?

Yeah.

And for me, the interesting part is that how to make marketing more accountable and you were mentioning the, creative roles in marketing, what sort of goals maybe you can uncover did you use for marketing to, you know, like, hey guys, you have to stay put?

Yeah, so marketing had a quota for us from the beginning of time, and the quota was essentially based in two parts. So we had the pipe, right? The like, by the way, this is converted opportunities. So it's actually like a sales rep would convert the opportunity then that counts towards the marketing goal. So again, you're driving the alignment, but then marketing was again based on closed one, right? Closed one, new revenue. And so they have that number and they have that responsibility and you need to set that up. And in my experience, great marketers love that and bad marketers run away from that very, very fast. I talk about it a ton in the interview, like, hey, this is how we structure it. You know, you're gonna be a demand gen person here and like this is how we run it. And it was a very good sorting function because the bad ones are like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm working on other stuff. So when you talk about the creative roles, well they're doing a lot of other things, right? They're working on brand, they're working on different things. You still have to figure out how to tie that back into those things as best as you can. It's not perfect, but you have to work on it, and sitting down, having smart people talk about it and debate it, you figure out what works for you.

How did you measure brand?

What's that?

How did you measure brand?

Well, so like, we would have brand would like have a number. I know that's like heresy to a lot of people, but brand would have a number, and their number was the organic number, okay? So like I'm saying, okay, you want credit for basically everything, that's fine, The organic number, right? So everything we didn't use performance marketing dollars for, that starts to get wrapped into that. Yep.

Quick question. So completely agree on ops towards pipeline. Agree on marketing revenue towards however you measure your yearly goals. Our struggle is, how do you ensure that when that lead closes, and it closed one, How do you determine marketing or sales, right? Because I feel like, well, marketing brought it in for you as an inbound lead. Yeah, but we were already chasing it ahead of time, and then that causes friction between the two teams.

Yeah.

And so managing through that, because what we don't want is everyone has to participate in the final goal. How do you make sure that you don't drive that friction between the two teams?

So it's a really good question. The first thing you have to do is to make that matter just a little bit less. Make it more about the overall goal that you're chasing together than about what portion of this is marketing source, what portion of this is coming from outbound, what portion of this is coming from channel. That stuff matters, but you have to make it matter less than the overall goal. Then you're getting into things like, well, do you want to do last-touch attribution? Like, what, what model best suits you? and you kinda just have to set those rules as best you can and live with there being some gaps and some inconsistencies. But the underlying principle is make it way more about the overall goal that you're chasing. Put people on the same team instead of splitting them out and saying, well, you know, like marketing's over here and like we did our job, but sales, you know, outbound missed this month and they didn't do it, so marketing, good job, sales, bad job. There's no such thing. We either got the job done together or we didn't, and sometimes that's gonna mean that marketing sourced is gonna beat by a lot and sales is gonna struggle. Sometimes it's gonna mean the exact opposite. So just work on making sure everybody's aligned to the right north star, and then when you're splitting things out by line item, that should be secondary.

Hi, I really like the model of name, number, and North Star. What would be kind of bringing that to life, a couple of examples of, would that be Sam, your job is 812 million this month, and the North Star is what? And then also how do you avoid having, we've got like 20 different things all under Sam.

Yeah, it's a great question. So here's what it looks like in practice. okay? In practice, people can have their name next to several different numbers. For example, a VP of customer success, like let's say they have an expansion number that, that has their name next to it. Let's say that they have an NRR, an NDR number that, that their name is next to it, and you're going to have multiple, but you do have to like clearly define the north star for the entire organization. So, Most of the time, that's like an ARR number, that's a usage number, that's new logos, like what is the model driver for your business? And that is the North Star. And that's why it's so important to have a North Star is because you will have your name next to several different numbers. You will be responsible for multiple things at once. We can't simplify it down to just one and one. So you have to know what the North Star is so that you can prioritize appropriately and know which is a glass ball that you won't drop under any circumstances.

Hi. I love the concept of swing that you introduced. I'm not sure I— in my experience, the water surface is the same because I work with sales teams and it often feels like whitewater rafting rather than being on a smooth surface.

Yeah.

How do you look for swing when it often feels like all you want to do is for everyone to stay in the boat and to negotiate the river?

Yeah, great analogy. It is a lot— it was a lot like whitewater rafting. The way that I think about swing is not necessarily that like there's no variations and, you know, we're in smooth waters just going as fast as we can. I think about it as, is everybody who has an oar, is everybody who has a paddle, are they in sync with each other? Because I don't, you know, if you're going like this or if you're going like that, I need to make sure that you're all in sync, that you're not turned around yelling at somebody over there, that I'm not like that, because a lot of times you'll have to play policeman if this, if this goes poorly. You have someone's data set over here telling one story, you have a different person's telling another, and you're trying to mediate a dispute and see whose fault it is and who's in trouble. That is what we're trying to completely get rid of. We're all focused, we all know where we're going, we're all rowing in the same direction, and we're all doing it with the the same amount of force, whether you're going over some waves or whether it's smooth sailing. And to be— I don't know what smooth sailing is either. I don't think that exists. But you want those teams to be rowing in the same direction together. That's what it means. On the B3, C3? Yep. What were the actual questions that you were—

asked, that you were asking?

Yes. So top 3, bottom 3. So if you and me were having this, I would have a template and it would say, what are your top 3 strengths? The things that I'm noticing in you this particular quarter that, that are just amazing. You're a great hire. You're a great recruiter, whatever. What, and then bottom 3 is what are the things that I, as your manager, am identifying that you need to work on? Okay, well, you're not organized enough, or you're not, like, whatever it is. But the questions are, what are your top 3 superpowers, and what are your bottom 3 weaknesses? And we're gonna write those out, we're gonna talk about 'em, and we're gonna make those the subject of our one-on-ones for this quarter.

So I wanted to pick up, there was this one image, and you mentioned the head of product was taking a nap at the airport, and you were on, like, the sales tour, and—

Freaking head of products, man.

So how do you basically get the product on doing like a crazy tour like this with you?

That is a great question. And the answer is you have to make sure that his or her North Star is the same as yours. Because our North Stars are the exact same, right? And that is we need to get here by the end of the year, right? We have to expand. We have to launch new things. We have to get there. and our North Star is the same. So you're on the same flights, you're talking to the same customers. Again, you have different jobs. I'm not trying to make it seem like you don't, but you have to be aligned with that person. By the way, it goes for finance in particular too. And if you can align those functions with the same North Star, they'll be on the plane, they'll be on the plane right next to you.

Good stuff, thanks.

Yep. Okay, I think that's it. Thanks everybody.