Going Long: The 20-year Journey of Being a CEO + Founder with BlackLine Founder Therese Tucker

Excited to have one of our all-time most beloved and upvoted speakers and CEOs back, Therese Tucker, founder and CEO of BlackLine. I did not know that much about BlackLine back in the day. I should have, but I didn't. I am interested in anything about buy-side, sell-side, accounting, finance. I didn't know much about BlackLine, but then I saw in 2016 you'd filed to go public, something like that. And I immediately reached out. I said, well, can Therese please come to SAS Annual? And the team said, she really wants, but she hasn't had a vacation in 15 years, and she needs to go on a cruise, and we're not allowing her to come. I'm like, OK, well, maybe she's deserved it after 17 years, whatever. She needs a cruise. But we begged her to come back, and she came back in 2018 Annual, which after this pandemic seems like 20 years ago or something, doesn't it? It seems like a decade ago, but it was— It was 2 and a half years ago, and people's jaws dropped at this session. It's one of the— she was the number one rated speaker this year, and people still watch it today, talking about how everything's sort of the same building a unicorn, and yet it's different, right? And the differences, and people love it. The craziness, how to bootstrap, how to hire people when you have no money, how to break the rules, how to be a single mother starting something at the time, right? A lot of things in this speech still resonates, so I'm super happy to have Teresa, back, and this will be a very interesting time because after 19 years or something, you're moving upstairs to chairperson. Is that what's happening next year?

Executive chair, yes.

So how do you know? How do you know when it's— it's only been 19 years.

How do you know when it's time? I think there's a couple of ways to know. First off, you know, When, if you have an honest self-assessment, you can say, I'm a little tired. I have been going full board, 200% for a very long time, and I'm a little tired.

Yep.

When you also recognize that you don't really have the right skillset to take the company through its next phase. We believe that BlackLine can have a billion in revenue. Our market's that big. I'm not a person who has scaled a SaaS company before.

Yes.

And then, you know, most importantly, it's when you find the right person. I hired Mark Huffman almost 3 years ago. Yeah. And he and I have worked together very closely during this past several years, and I'm completely convinced that he's the right person. But having the right skills and having the values that don't mess up the cultural DNA of the company is critically important when you think about when is it time to hand it over, hand over that mantle to someone else.

Yeah, and Mark came from NetSuite, um, and has worked at scale, right?

Um, he was there from $3 million to over a billion in revenue. Yeah, so he's got the whole broad spectrum. And he came in, it was so great, Jason. He came in and it was like, "Oh, I see what's happening here. We had that problem at NetSuite. Here's how we handled it." And he did that over and over because the needs of a company, I mean, it's, you know, when we were very small, you take incredible care of your customers, right? I mean, I'll pick up the phone with any of them. When you have more than several thousand customers, That's no longer sustainable. How do you still deliver that quality in a way that is efficient, is cost-efficient, but also still personal?

Yes.

I don't know. So his skill set is completely— well, now I do because I've learned. But his skill set is very different than mine. So super critical in that regard.

Yep. And let me just— the first one, let me challenge you a little bit because that One of the most honest things that I think founders don't— we don't talk about enough, but is getting tired. It is. There's nothing harder than being a founder CEO, is there? There's nothing harder on planet Earth. There's nothing.

It's, it's, uh, 24/7.

I do think that being a parent is maybe more important, right? Um, but I actually think it's easier than being a founder CEO. You could challenge me, we could have a little fun, but, but you get these breaks as a parent. You get the— we were talking about your 1-year-old grandson. You get these breaks when things are— the pressure is lower, right? When you can just go enjoy yourself at Disneyland or whatever it is, but as a founder CEO, it's always with you, right? But you have to find a way. So you've been doing this almost 20 years. What have you done to reinvent yourself or not get tired, not get burned out? Because I think 4 to 5 years is when everyone hits a wall, right? And this might be your 4th time, right, as you're going to chairperson.

Oh, 4th time? I would say more like 20th time.

20th time. Right?

Well. I mean, you know, and in the early days, those, you hit the wall a lot more often. Yeah, I can remember going on walks with my husband and saying, I just don't think I can keep doing this. And he would say, I think you're almost there, just, just give it a few more months. So having someone who encourages you, especially if you have great mentors, those are super invaluable. Just people that can encourage but also they have the wisdom of having done it. That's a big, big deal just to keep you going. Okay, this is not all for naught. I'm not going to be homeless when I'm 45, right? I mean, that's kind of a, you know, like, all right, I can keep doing this as long as it's got somewhere, it's going somewhere. So the encouragement piece is big.

So your husband gave you a little bit of a kick to keep going, or encouragement, and then mentors. It's so This is so key to breaking through that wall, isn't it? Is getting mentors. And it's different than advisors. It's different than helpers. It's different than people that will answer an email. It's someone who— what type of mentors did you find that have helped you at the different stage? Like, what backgrounds and how much time did you get from them, or what did you seek out from them?

You know, it's interesting because there's not a lot of women in technology. All of my mentors are kind of God bless them, I hope they don't mind me saying this, middle-aged white guys, okay? And who had been very successful in business on their own, who were not, they're measured, they're wise, they're honest, right? I mean, I have one particular board member who is still my mentor. And he, you know, when we brought on private equity, in '14, he would absolutely say to me, oh, '13, sorry. He would absolutely say to me when I would get all wound around the axle, like, "Look, they're being very reasonable. This is how private equity operates. Stop, essentially stop being so hysterical." And because I trusted him, that allowed my relationship with the private equity people to be really healthy. Right? I mean, you know, and other times he would say, "No, you're right, stick to your guns." And I'd be like, "Okay, I'm digging in," you know, because I think this is the right thing. So having that wise view that, because so often we get down in the weeds, right? And we can't really, and we get, I don't know about other people, I'll get emotionally attached to a certain outcome or a certain approach. And to really have somebody just say, "You know what, you need to set that aside." for the benefit of the company.

That's a good—

and having that person be someone you trust is phenomenal.

I think many of us, certainly you and I both, we're, we're so passionate about what we do, right? Sometimes our mistakes can come out of that passion, right? And when you go think like a private equity buyout or an M&A or even an IPO, and you all of a sudden you have all these stakeholders that have no passion, right? They have belief, they have belief and faith, but they don't have that passion. And I've made some of my biggest almost mistakes dealing with that, that when they come into, when they, they butt heads, these two things, your passion and the private equity folks come in, and now they kind of are telling you what to do, and their ideas are very, they're very nuts and bolts, and they're very spreadsheet-oriented, and you're like, but it won't work. And without a mentor, um, I've said things I shouldn't have said. I've gotten frustrated. I've expressed only out of passion, right? Only out of passion. But you— that's one— getting a mentor to ground you as you have more stakeholders is alone is high value, isn't it?

Incredibly high value. And I cannot underemphasize how great it is when you do have a really healthy relationship with your investors.

Yeah.

I mean, our private equity groups that were involved with Blackline They added tremendous value. I mean, just, they helped me scale. They helped me grow. They helped the company grow. They were, they earned their money.

Yeah.

Maybe not quite as much as they made, but they earned a lot.

We always look back when you have a good outcome and feel like they had it a little bit easy, right? At the time, maybe it didn't seem that way. I mean, they invested in one 2013, right? And so things were— we knew things were good again, right, because we could see it in the numbers, but there were no cloud IPOs. None of this had come back. Box IPO'd shortly after, and people thought SaaS was terrible. It was a dud, right? They didn't know. So in all fairness, maybe they didn't get quite it. Maybe they got a better deal than any of us thought, right, on either side of the table. You know, that comment about trusting your investors, it's an interesting one. I certainly say the same thing, and I made I made bad decisions as a founder when I didn't trust investors, and I've— and as an investor, I've tried to do that too. But do you really know? Did you have enough time? You did a private equity transaction where you sold the majority interest, right? It's great to hear that, but do you really have that— were you really able to make that determination at the time that this was a trusting relationship that you had?

Well, one of the things that I did in the private— in the whole process was I decided that I was going to be extraordinarily transparent about what I thought was good about the company and what I thought were its challenges. And so I, you know, many times people are trying to put lipstick on a pig, right? They're trying to cover up everything that might be bad and, you know, just present perfection. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have a very clear understanding on what was going to happen right after the document signed. And so in order to do that, I showed all the warts. I highlighted the problems. I had in-depth discussions about the problems. Now, we had 14 bidders for BlackLine.

So no, you did— it was a real process. You had 14 offers. I see.

Yeah, yeah, we had 14 offers, sealed offers. And so it was a real process. And we did not— I did not have that level of conversations with all of them, but there were several that, you know, immediately they had done their due diligence, they understood the business, they had called customers. I mean, there were a few out of those where I had those— a lot of in-depth conversations. And it was sort of like, you know, paring it down to, you know, you're only going to date 3 guys until you figure out which one you want to marry. And so, yeah, it was a little bit of a bachelor thing. But, you know, once we did that and really, really spent a lot of time with those, just several, it was a really good process. And even the ones that I did not pick, I still have good relationships with today.

Your comment about— I found that the very best founder CEOs, the very best ones, are very transparent about their weaknesses and their gaps and the issues, right? For a whole bunch of reasons. Maybe it's honesty and passion. It's simpler to be transparent, right? And it inspires trust and confidence. But I, you know, I think— curious if you've got anything to add to the story, but I think for advice for folks, sometimes especially early-stage founders want to hide things, right? They want to hide bad things. They want— they make up numbers. Like a lot of times I think see things like quarterly MRR and sort of churn excluding big customers. Like, yeah, all right, my churn's low, but I lost Blackline. But apart from these, apart from Blackline, Slack, it goes At Google, our churn is almost non-existent. It's natural, or even sometimes misleading how small you are to big customers, right? That's natural. Like a big customer asks you for your balance sheet, you're bootstrapped, what's your balance sheet look like at BlackLine? There's nothing in my credit card statement. It never pays to hide it, does it? It never pays, does it?

It never pays, and most people hide it out of insecurity.

Yeah.

Right? So, and that is a failing in and of itself. Because if I can go to you and say, I have this great business, we have a huge market in front of us, and by the way, we really stink in these 4 areas, can you help us?

Yeah.

We're gonna, we're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna respect that, you're gonna teach me what you know and show me how to get through that, and we're all gonna learn and be stronger as a result. But if you've got that insecurity, like, I've got to look bigger, I've got to look better, I've got to look perfect, you're never going to overcome those things.

Let's chat about something related. Just after 19 years of running Blackline, you started in 2001, right? Which I think was a black swan event, right? When the internet ended, right? Today we have another black swan event. I reflected on this. I found in my career they happen about every 5 years. So these black swan events are not quite— the individual ones don't seem to recur, right? This recession we're in now didn't happen to software, did it? It happened to other categories. We all thought in March software would dip for a day. But how do we— how do we— how have you thought about dealing with black swan events? Do you even plan for them in contingencies? How do you get the team through these black swan events?

Well, you know, if it was precisely every 5 years, it'd be so much easier, wouldn't it?

I haven't found us that far off, but I'm with you. Yeah.

It's not precise. I think about the one that really hit us was the 2008 financial crisis. I bet.

Yeah.

And we just decided at the end of 2007 that we were going to be SaaS only going forward, which actually turned out to be a great decision. But I would say there's a few things around this. Nimbleness is key.

Yeah.

All right. The ability to react and address customer needs and cut costs as you might have to, but that nimbleness, you can't just sit there paralyzed. You've gotta be able to address it and deal with it. A cash buffer is going to reduce stress for hard times. Now, I've often said, you know, I don't think it's a great idea to go out and raise a bunch of money just for the sake of raising it if you don't have to, because you give up control, you give up ownership. But having a little extra cash in the bank is such a blessing in hard times, because even at the scale that BlackLine's at now, with this pandemic, we saw customers take a lot longer to pay. Period.

Just to pay.

Right?

Just to pay. Yeah.

Just to pay. Yes. And I mean, completely understandable. Everybody's focused on cash because we don't know what the macro environment's gonna do. So having a cash buffer is really very helpful when you have one of these events. And then lastly, I would say look for opportunities. Okay? I mean, we saw a couple in this last pandemic. One was we saw an opportunity to build tremendous goodwill with our customers. We did customer relief, we did additional customer training, we gave away free products, we worked with people to do a better job of closing their books remotely. We had all kinds of ways of building goodwill with customers. And we viewed that as a very valuable outcome. All right. And secondly, because we have a very healthy balance sheet, we viewed it as a tremendous opportunity to invest heavily in R&D. Where many of our smaller competitors sort of pulled back, right, because they were very worried about where the future was going. We said, great, let's double down. Let's make sure that we get some great product development done. Let's, let's increase our lead during this time because we have the resources to do that. So look for the opportunities in the black swan events. They're definitely there.

Let's dig in on just a couple of those points. One on the relief side, right? You guys, I should know more of the details, we can chat about it, but when COVID hit, you provided customer relief. If you need longer to pay, if you need more time, we'll give it to you, right? And now, now that we're a ways into this and we can see what's happened with public companies, Shopify just released their numbers and they went from a 14-day trial to 90 or longer, as long as you needed during the pandemic to use Shopify, and they grew faster. They grew faster from it. We talked with Stuart Butterfield a while back. They had better conversions from free-to-pay because of extending it. Zoom's seen it, right? So we've learned that being hyper customer-centric works, but sometimes it's scary because the sales team, the CS team, there is a theoretical impact on the spreadsheet, isn't there, for doing these things? Like theoretically it's scary, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, outside of going for it, any advice to founders that are struggling between that, those, those short-term impacts and the longer-term gains?

We actually, I have just a world-class CFO in Mark Parton, and he did all the modeling ahead of time. I mean, he modeled all the different ways that we could do relief.

Yeah.

All right. You know, and he, we didn't necessarily in every case do it without any benefit besides goodwill. So for example, you know, let's say that somebody was on a 1-year contract and didn't want to handle, have a price increase or needed to drop something, and they would go back and go, okay, great, let's make this a 4-year contract in exchange for this.

Got it.

So he actually, having a really savvy CFO to model what the impact is ahead of time, to figure out, you know, if you can afford it, right? If you can't afford it, it's not scary. But if you don't know, then yeah, it's scary. So we knew ahead of time going into this what we could offer, what we should offer, how much, you know, how many. About 25% of our customers are in impacted industries like travel and entertainment and others.

Yeah.

Okay. So it is, um, our customers have had some real difficulties with this. And we want them to be customers for the next 15, 20 years. So this is just a short-term trade-off for that longer benefit.

It is. It's good learning. And to model it thoughtfully. Related one, on the— you talked about having an extra cash buffer during tough times, which is advice a lot of folks will give. How did you do that as a bootstrap company though? Where are you getting this extra cash? Are you hitting up your long-lost uncle? Or where did you get this rainy day fund when you were bootstrapping?

Oh my God, you know, during the financial crisis, we, as I mentioned a minute ago, decided not to sell any more on-prem software. Now, the beautiful thing about on-prem software is you get a big chunk of money right up front.

Big chunk up front.

Yeah, and so we also had to forego that. One of the decisions that we made at that time to help bridge that was we build a year in advance. For the SaaS subscription. And so that was a help with cash. But frankly, you know, the reason I say it'll reduce stress in hard times to have a cash buffer is because I've had a lot of sleepless nights.

Yeah.

Okay, I never had in the early days the buffer that I wanted. And, you know, I'd probably look 15 years younger right now if I hadn't had those hard days in the beginning.

Well, it's funny, two follow-ups on that. My rule or my advice is to founders is figure out how much money you need bootstrapped, venture-backed, whatever. Do it on a spreadsheet, do it carefully, then be conservative, then add 25%.

Yeah.

If you raise that extra 25% and then it's the right amount. It's the right amount. I need $4 million, well then raise $5. I need $10, raise $12.5. That's the conservative version. And then it forces you to take that little bit of extra dilution, lose that little bit of control, but it's the right amount, right? That buffer.

Yeah. Or another way, when we used to do sales forecasts, I had a very wise board member who would say, Cut it in half and take it out twice as long.

That's conservative, but yeah.

Well, with sales, you know.

No, no, that works for sales, right? Yeah, for how much to raise an extra bit, but yeah, I'm with you. Um, yeah, it's interesting on the— on not, you know, the— on the— on, on learning this from not having the buffer. Um, now that you think back, for founders today, I mean, SaaS is so much hotter, right? There's so many more startups. I am— the founder that I've invested in that maybe has been the most successful, almost bootstrapped, raised almost no money and was proud of it, managed to become a billion-dollar company being a majority owner, and then raised after that and said, "Boy, I should have raised more earlier." And it was the stress, and it was not making the hires, especially the enterprise-level hires, right? So do you have any more nuanced views of if you're doing Blackline today, would you have invested more, raised more versus today? To go bigger, to reduce the stress? Any thoughts? Because bootstrapping isn't always a choice. It wasn't a choice for you in the early days. You had no choice, right?

That's right.

I had no choice. It wasn't a lifestyle decision.

Yeah, exactly. You know, I love the fact that I retained an enormous ownership percentage of BlackLine. Yeah. To this day. Right? To this day, I'm still the largest shareholder. Frankly, that would not have happened had I raised money much earlier.

It wouldn't have happened, right? You would have— especially then, we've taken so much dilution, so much dilution, right?

So, um, I'm— I am not displeased with that.

Okay.

That level of stress is not for everyone. Okay. I mean, it really isn't. I mean, just being able to, um, you know, deal with that. Here's the other thing though, when people go to raise money, they put so much time and energy into the raising of the money. I mean, the books and the travel, and I mean, my God, I must have gone to, you know, at one point, 200 offices along Sand Hill Road, right?

I mean, sounds like everyone, right?

I mean, and, and, but the amount of energy that went into that you know, you should put that into building your business and making something that customers want to pay for. So it's not like you can do them both at the same time and get the same results. Nobody has that kind of bandwidth. All right, so if you've got the opportunity, if you can— if you cannot take the money, wait as long as you can.

Yeah, it's sometimes when I meet with a founder that's early stage but post-revenue, one of the One of the flags, the saddest things I hear is when they say, I'm just like, well, we had 3 great months, but the last couple months have been rough. I'm like, why? I've been fundraising. I'm like, well, it's not an excuse. No. It's not an excuse. And you're right, it's very distracting, right? Especially if you're not hot. When you went to raise the private equity round, you had 13 offers, so it was easier. I mean, it was work, but they came to you, right? You were established. But yeah. Yeah. Okay, 2 things I want to make sure we hit with the time we have. One is recruiting and evangelizing in a, in maybe a more pedestrian space like accounting. I've done it, I've lived this life early in e-signatures and contracts, which is hot now, but back then certainly wasn't. SaaS alone wasn't even hot until a couple years ago, right? It was even hard to get folks to go to SaaS instead of a consumer company, especially in Southern California, until just a few years ago. Now we look at Zoom and Slack and the kids all want to do, business software, right? Especially accounting. How do you, how do you, how do you get folks excited? Who do you recruit if you're not a hot company in a hot space, right? It's almost a 2x2. Are you a hot company? You can be a hot company in a boring space and still get people excited, right? But you almost have to be in that 2x2 to get the average mercenary hire to want to join you, right? You have to be a hot company in a hot— you have to be the Airbnb or the Slack at the right moment in time. So what have you learned here?

But wasn't that an interesting term that you just used, the mercenary hire?

Yeah, the mercenary hire.

Okay. Because that's not the guy that's going to be there when things do get tough, when you do need somebody to work on the weekends to fix a problem. Yeah. And I would say we don't go after the mercenary hires. One of the benefits of being in Southern California is that there are less places for software engineers to work, but better weather.

Yeah.

And I think that we've always focused on, we want our employees to be long-term employees. And so you provide the great pay, the great benefits, the stock options, the great culture, you know, a growth path of how they're going to learn and grow and get better and a career path. I mean, by being a great employer, you don't attract the mercenary, hires, you attract the younger talent and they stick around and they grow. And they end up having enormous amounts of tribal knowledge that they can share with others. And so that's been our approach. It's, it's, we've tried to stay away from the mercenary hires.

And who, for your eStaff over time, your direct reports, you're very charismatic, but every CEO is distinctive, right? We all have distinct distinctive styles. Who, what edge did you have? Who did you try to recruit to work directly for you? Selling accounting software, right? Maybe there are folks that just wanted to sell accounting software, but it's probably more, right? They wanted to work for you.

I don't know about that either, but you know, after we did the private equity in 2013, at the end of '13, one of the first things that I was tasked with doing was hiring a whole executive team, frankly. Um, a CRO, a CMO, a CTO, a Chief Legal Officer, a CFO.

So you had none of these for the first 12 years of the company? You had no C-level officers?

Not really. I had people filling those roles, but they were not, um, they sort of, you know, might have been the receptionist that I met at Starbucks or the Baristas, Starbucks.

Well, that's interesting. You were late to build out a traditional management team. Actually, you were very late, very late given the scale. I was. Very late to build out a traditional management team. I really was.

Yeah. So, we did, and having the private equity there really helped with being able to recruit that team. Yeah. Okay. And, but what's super interesting even about that, now, I think they probably came for the options and the potential, and they've all done very well over time. Which is great, I want them to. But what's really interesting is that even that team from 4 years ago, most of them are not here, okay? 4 or 5 years ago. And—

They're not, most of them are not there.

No, yes, we've subsequently in 2018, we essentially rebuilt the executive team again, okay? And it's super interesting because the group that gets you to $25 million is not necessarily the group If it gets you to $100 million—

I see, it's stage-based. They got you the 4-year schedule, but then you needed a different set of skills to get to $1 billion and $100 million, right? Yeah.

Yep.

And how do you know if someone— it's that, that's such a— I mean, we all go— it sounds like your first team you maybe stuck with too long, right? Which is a mistake a lot of us make. 12 years. I mean, not all of them, but you waited, right? Then you learned to stage appropriate them. How do you know if someone can go the distance? What do you look for? What do you look for whether they have the capabilities to run or whether they're hitting too many limits? How do you know where that line is? Do you have any insights to share?

You know, it would be very interesting because over the years, you know, you can see when a particular area isn't functioning as it should.

Yeah, the laggard area, the lagging area.

And so you have that conversation with the leader of that area. You say, "Hey, you know, this doesn't seem to be working quite, you know, what are we going to do about that?" And to a person, I knew that we had outgrown the executive when the answer was, "Do more of the same." Didn't have the ideas.

No. Didn't have the ideas.

Didn't have the ideas. Had sort of reached the end of their creative road. And, you know, let's throw more bodies at it. Well, wow, we did that last year. It didn't quite work. What are we going to do instead? And so, and that's across all areas. And so, you know, and I've often said to my board, how do we know that you haven't outgrown me? All right, I've said that many times over the years. You know, is it, am I, a dinosaur here. And one of the things that they always said was, you know, look, as long as you keep asking that question, then you're probably not. I mean, you know, how do I continue to grow, lead better, you know, see a little further, you know, do something more creatively that will add value? How do I do those things? So it's truly, you kind of know that you've outgrown someone when, you know, it's sort of like the definition of insanity, right? Keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, and of course you don't get different results.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah, that's a powerful insight. When they don't have ideas to get to the next level, and when the answer is people. Just more bodies. That's a— one last one on this, the one I add to the list, but maybe, maybe you would disagree, but I see is when I smell too much fear in the role. When I see that they don't believe. Let's say I'm at $10 million this year and the goal is $20 million next year. And they just, even though they did an incredible job this year getting you from $3 to $10, they don't believe they can do it, right? And as a leader, your job is to make them believe they can. But if they don't believe, it's impossible, isn't it?

Yeah. Oh my goodness, as soon as you said that, Jason M. Lemkin, I just flashed back to a couple of conversations where people were fearful.

Fearful.

Like, I can't— yeah. And the smell of fear, that's a great way to put it.

Yeah, I feel bad. And when I smell that, I want them to stay. They just need to be topped or be in a different role. It doesn't mean they're not great. Maybe they're a director, that's right, right? Or more junior VP. Um, but that fear, it's— I've never seen it cured. I've never seen that fear of the next year's number. Uh, you should have anxiety, but that's not fear. Anxiety is, I don't know if these 5 ideas will work. But I'm going to try them. They should work. Yeah.

Yeah.

Alright. The last one I want to hit with you because it ties back to your first SaaStr annual presentation was rules. What rules can you have to keep and break? And you talked a lot about versions of this when you spoke about rules. And now you see more companies go public, right? We see Zoom, one founder, right? I'm not even sure if Blackline's one founder. Did you have co-founders or? Another one founded. Slack's a gaming company, right? Mailchimp not only bootstrapped all the way to— Mailchimp will bootstrap to infinity, right? And so a lot of these rules we have, we're seeing them broken more and more. Where you need to start companies, right? I mean, forget— you started in LA, which was hard enough. The Bay Area— what does the Bay Area even mean? Maybe the Bay Area is a way of thinking today. I don't, I don't know. So, um, what advice can you give folks? What rules should be broken? Maybe what shouldn't? Any, any, any, any, any extra thoughts you want to add here about rules?

You know, I always, I have never been a big fan of any rule, so I've never been good at following rules. So it's great to listen to everybody else. It's great to listen to this podcast and learn what you can. But at the end of the day, you've got to trust your own gut. You've got to believe in what you're trying to accomplish and you've gotta be all in on that. And so, you know, it's great, like I said, it's great to spend your time listening to podcasts, but if you're not doing it while you're commuting, then you're not really focused on what you should be focused on. I mean, it's, you know, don't, and that goes along with the raising of the money, which we already talked about, right? Wait as long as you can, and then know that it's gonna be an enormous distraction and take up a lot of time and energy, and that's gonna hurt hurt the business. So again, wait. You'll have more ownership, more control. Don't— you know, one of the things that's great about entrepreneurs in general is that they identify a need that is not being addressed commercially, right? Now, if— and you will get many people that sort of poo-poo your idea. In early days, we talked to—

It's hard to hear that.

Yeah. Well, we would talk to VCs and they would be like, what is that and who cares, right? And it would be like, no, no, this is really important to companies' financials. And they'd be like, yeah, no, you know. So I think it's really important to hear what the experts have to say, but the reason you're an entrepreneur is because you have an idea about something that nobody else has actually developed.

Yeah.

And you can't listen to their rules or their poo-pooing if you ever want to get anywhere. In fact, if you do, you should just go get a paycheck somewhere.

You probably should, right? It's easier at the end of the day.

Yeah.

Or actually, the best job of all is to be the number 2 or number 3. That's the best job of all. You get a lot of the benefits without the next level stress of the founder CEO, right? That's the smart play. You want to be the SVP or the COO. Um, Therese, this has been great. Is there any last thoughts we should hit or that you want to share?

Nope. I think— well, I will say this. I think that actually having a successful enterprise is really the epitome of the American dream, right? To build something out of nothing and to build it into this vibrant enterprise that has employees that make livings and are joyful and customers that are happy, that is about the most satisfying thing that you could possibly do. And that's true whether there's a pandemic or a black swan event or whatever. So, you know, words of encouragement to the people that are really trying to do something hard. It's hard, but it's so wildly enriching when you get through it.

It's a great inspiration. You're coming up on 20 years of doing this, right, at BlackLine, and the reward of building an enterprise, right, in this society, of providing thousands of jobs, and of the story not ending, right? How long do you want BlackLine to go on for? Another 100— 20 years? 50 years? 100 years?

At least another 30, I would hope.

At least another 30? That's a good reminder, and I'm personally— I remain haunted a little bit of selling both my startups, right? It has pros and cons, right? But the benefits, they last forever, don't they? As long as your— if your enterprise grows, then the reason we did it is as relevant to you 20 years on as it was in 2001, right? Is the takeaway, right? So keep— go long, right? If you can, go long, right?

And I'm having a blast right now mentoring some Gen Z women tech founders. It's a ball. Right? To just see the up-and-coming generation who are fierce about doing some cool things. Very fun.

Are we— and I know we're almost over, but since you brought up the mentoring of the next generation women, how are we doing? Are we doing any better than 2 years ago when you were at SASTA? Are we making progress? I sometimes even worry we've lost a little bit during the pandemic because there's less serendipity, right? And there's more a flight to knownness, to known brands, to known people, but are you optimistic that we're doing better on inclusion? Are you optimistic in 10 years from— for my daughter, for your grandson? How are you feeling? How are we doing? How are we trending?

You know, I am optimistic. I am probably more optimistic about the younger generation. Yeah. I see millennials have a lot of angst, which is, you know, difficult. The Gen Zs, they've also lived through some incredibly difficult times, right? I mean, if you think about millennials, they've had 9/11, they've had the financial crisis, they've had the pandemic. I mean, life is difficult. Um, Gen Zers tend to be super fierce. They're not more optimistic, they're just fierce about what they're going to accomplish. And that gives me great optimism.

It's good. Okay, well, thank you, Therese. This is great. We're, we're super grateful. Any way Saster can help you, or anytime you want to come back and join us in any capacity, we are here for you. And thanks and congratulations on the first almost 20 years. And no matter what, I want to check in in 2040, and we'll chat, and we'll look back, and we'll see what we learned back then. Blackline will be here, but it may be a very different company then, right? It may be very, very different, right? Well, it may not even be SaaS. We don't know. We'll find out. But all right, we'll check in.