Lessons Learned from Scaling GTM Teams and Ops at Notion, Asana, and Dropbox with Notion's GM

Please welcome to the stage Robbie O'Connor, GM of EMEA at Notion. I'd like to kick off this morning's conversation by talking about something that I think everybody in this room has, and that's a builder's mindset. This is something that I've scanned for a lot when helping to build our teams during my career, and it's been hard to ascertain whether a builder's mindset is natural, whether someone is born with a builder's mindset, or whether it's something that's taught, whether you can train people to have that builder's mindset. Now, I'm Irish, as I called out earlier on, and there's probably a lot of clichés that you would think about Irish people. One of them is probably that you come from a very large family. Terrible cliché, but happens to be absolutely correct in my regard. I'm actually the youngest of 6 children, so I've got 5 siblings. And the interesting thing about being in a large family is it's a lot like a startup. The dynamics of being the youngest of 6 siblings is quite similar in dynamics to having a large family. Negotiation is crucial. Resilience is really important. There's a high level of collaboration that's needed all the time. We were a relatively middle-class family, but resources with 6 kids are always a little bit scant. You have to really fight for your resourcing. You gotta have a loud voice in a very competitive environment. But what I learned is that with a lot of older siblings there, I also got to watch how they did things before and learn from some of the great progress that they made and some of the mistakes that they made as well as I was navigating my life as well. I think it's very similar to startups and to scaleups and to organizations within larger teams. You get to observe from those who've come before you and take learnings from that and progress. Notion loves Lego. That's why we have this up here. In many senses, sees its product as being a digital version of Lego. It's got a lot of building blocks. And I know many founders here and early-stage team members in this group are building their teams. You're building your processes, you're building your product, you're building your go-to-market approach, you're building your teams. And so we always like to use the paradigm of Lego to, to underline the way that Notion operates as well. And so I thought it'd be a good idea just to share with you some examples of what I've learned in my career across the paradigm of building, which I think would be useful today. So let's talk a little bit about my journey. I didn't really wanna work in tech as a career when I was going through university. I actually wanted to work in the EU. I trained to be a European diplomat. I studied political science and I studied French with a view to having a job in Belgium. But like many people, as I got closer to the end of my degree, I realized that's absolutely not what I wanted to do. But I was so lucky that it turns out there's many transferable skills between being a diplomat and working in tech. You need strong communication skills, you need strong problem-solving skills, you need to be adaptable, you need to be a strategic thinker. And so I pivoted to the next coolest thing, which was technology. I got an internship in Microsoft when I was much younger, which was great. That helped me fall in love with, with the idea of tech. I worked for an American company for the very first time, and I understood the ambitions that American companies work with as well. I then worked in Google for 4 and a half years, where I was part of the team that built the licensing application, the go-to-market model for the Google Maps platform. At the time, uh, 12 APIs that needed to be turned into some form of a monetization strategy, which was a lot of fun. I got a lot of learning around how product teams and go-to-market teams interact, and I got to see a go-to-market team built from early inception in a very safe, well-funded environment, um, to being a billion-dollar business over 4 and a half years. However, two of my older brothers are entrepreneurs, and they're my heroes, and they're the people I look to most in the world because they're really brave. And I always felt that I wanted to work for a smaller organization where I could drive a high level of impact. So working in tech, having some pretty good logos on my CV early on, and then wanting to drive impact, all roads lead to early-stage startups. So I was really fortunate to have been the first European hire 3 times within Dropbox, within Asana, and within Notion. 3 very different stories, 3 very different journeys. Dropbox, about $200 million to $1 billion, over 4.5 years, about 200 employees up to about 2,000 by the time my journey had finished. The story of a product that had mass market appeal that was challenged by having a strong consumer-based self-service model to trying to build a B2B model on top of that. A time where they were hiring world-class talent and trying to scale teams exponentially across the world at the time. Fast forward a little bit into my time in Asana, I worked with an incredible CRO, a guy called Oliver J. If anyone's read The PLG Trap, that was his work. Based off many learnings that we'd had in Dropbox that we tried to transfer into Asana. A very different journey, a very niche category, and a small problem that a founder was incredibly passionate about that they wanted to bring to the world. Asana's viral growth story was effectively bringing the power of lightweight project management and task management to the masses on the back of the proliferation of lots of tools spinning up within the workspace. Fast forward onto Notion then. I was a huge product of collaborative technology all the way through my career. And when I first got my glance at Notion around 5 years ago, I felt this was a product that could genuinely change the world. Starting with innovators and starting with disruptors. Notion was about 10 million users when I joined around 4 years ago, and today we're tipping around 100 million users today. The story in Notion's a little bit different as opposed to product-led growth or sales-led growth. I think this chapter is— today for Notion has been community-led growth, and that's something that we're incredibly proud of, uh, at the moment. So very different journeys, but I often think of scaling, uh, a journey as a real relay race with one team often handing the baton on to the next team who takes the company into the next phase of growth. Each time that I've been joining an organization, there's been some real heroes who were there early, the the first people on board, the first engineering team, the first product team, the first sales heroes who they bring on board, that they're passing the baton on to the next generation as they come through, who can take the company to the next levels. Um, there's so many startups here in the audience today that are on the first lap of the track, and I commend you more so than anything else. Having worked in Notion for the time that I have, and knowing how popular Notion is with early-stage organizations, I've had the fortune of spending a lot of time with founders and early leaders within these companies to learn what their aspirations and dreams are, how they think about strategy, and how they turn those strategies into reality. I have to say, I've never been on that first lap of the track, so I'm actually in awe of all of you, those who have the braveness to set something up, some to take something from an idea to a product, to bring a product to market and to grow from there. I think when discussing what we would, what we'd present in terms of content for this presentation today, With those companies that I've worked for before, you might get the sentiment that there is a golden formula to make this all work, to make this all happen, to bring it to the next level. But the fact of the reality is that there isn't really one. There's no golden bullet. Every company is a little bit different, every product is a bit different, every audience is quite different as well. But what I can teach you today, hopefully, is just some learnings across 3 different vectors that I found to be a common thread through the companies that I've worked with. And my hope is that you're able to take away some of these learnings and bring it back to your companies. And I love to network as well. I'd love to connect with everybody here afterwards, and I'm happy to give more advice on some of these, on some of these teachings and learnings as well. So the areas I'm going to be talking about, the scaling journey, fall into 3 foundational layers: building your product, building a product that works, building your go-to-market strategy, and your operations as well. And as importantly as anything is building talent. You need a great product, products need to work, products need to be needed. You need a very clever strategy. You can have an awesome product and have a poor strategy to bring it to market, it might not work. You could have a great product and a pretty good strategy, but if you don't have the ability to hire and grow and develop the best talent, then those things aren't going to come together either. So let's start with the product, because that's at the core of Absolutely. Everything. Before thinking about your sales motions or even your go-to-market motion, you need to start with your product market fit. There's many paths to building a product that really fits as well, and the most important thing that I think to keep on board is that it's important to build a product that's a solution to a problem. There's many problems out there. And there's a lot of founders here who've thought about what are the problems that they need to build a solution for. Some of those problems are mass, they're scale, they're very obvious. Some of those problems are mass and scaled, but they mightn't be that obvious. There are some problems that are very specific and very niche, but I think founders and early teams will feel very passionate that there's a solution that's required for them as well. And then it's really important to understand, is that product big enough? That you can build a business around. As mentioned there, there are some products that are— some problems that are relatively niche, and you might create the most elegant solution to address that issue, but if the problem is not big enough for you to be able to scale an entire business around, then it mightn't go too far. Timing can be everything as well. When I look back to my time in Dropbox, it was a very interesting period. Oh, actually, another one. The rise of the iPhone and smartphones meant that there was an exponential proliferation in the amount of user-generated content that was being produced. Users in the workplace went from creating 2 or 3 artifacts of work, a PowerPoint presentation, a Word doc or an Excel, per week, to creating tens and twenties of them. We went from taking 3 to 4 photos every month that were produced in hard copy to producing hundreds of photos on your iPhone or your smartphone. And the problem that was created there was, where does all this data go? Where does all this information live? Companies were struggling with databases, with mainframes. Phone companies were struggling to understand where in the cloud are they going to store all this data. And then Dropbox took an old way of doing things— file sync and share— and created an elegant cloud-based simple solution. Started with a very user-specific use case, and then it grew into being a pretty decent B2C to B2B use case as well. As companies began to see that there's easy ways that you can store and share this information, Dropbox had to build a business model to support those businesses, uh, who were leveraging what was effectively a consumer tool. Look at Asana's use case as well. Again, the rise of tools in the workplace, the proliferation of SaaS tools similar to what we see here today. Meant that many companies were seeing information silos. The task of getting work done for product teams, for sales teams, for engineering teams became that little bit more intricate as you're pulling information from lots of different sources. Asana, as I mentioned, brought project management to the masses by producing a very simple, elegant tool. The founder of Asana, Dustin Moskovitz, he's very close to product. He's effectively a walking task list himself, for any Asana users that are there. I just felt really passionate that this very niche way of doing things, creating a task management system, turning it into a project management system, would be something that would benefit the world. At the right time, society decided that there was a strong need for that tooling as well. I think the most important part when you're designing out and you're building out your product, when you're thinking of the problems that you want to solve for, when you're thinking of the business model that supports those products, is that customer centricity and feedback loops and fast iterations become incredibly important as well. If you're lucky enough to have found a problem that's big enough to build a business around and you've put your first iteration of your product in place, I think there's a very strong way that you can put your users effectively on your team. This is where I think Notion has done a really good job. Excuse me. Notion was a tool designed by a designer and an engineer effectively for themselves. They spotted a gap in how they were collaborating and how they wanted to centralize all the data that they were working on, and they built a really great tool to help them, to help them house and collaborate together. Very quickly, their first other users were their friends, were other designers and other engineers. People who shared a similar problem. And very quickly, it started the first initial feedback loop. So those first friends of our founders were the ones who were initially saying, no, we should do this, how about we include a toggle feature, how we include a new, a new user interface. And very quickly, that started a process where Notion's community became part of the team. We know that designers and engineering teams are incredibly networked globally, and very quickly Notion had this viral growth effect where it became a must-have tool for designers and engineers. And what was most adored by that grouping was that as soon as there was a suggestion on something that could be changed or iterated on, that feedback loop went really fast back to our founders who were able to make changes on the fly really well. And I think that's always been something as we've been scaling that we've tried to keep as part of our own process as well. The story of Notion today might necessarily be product-led growth or sales-led growth. In fact, the chapter is really oriented around community-led growth, and that's been the essence of the viral growth model that Notion's been able to groom. On top of that as well, our community has become incredibly vibrant and has grown into thousands and thousands worldwide. Your community can develop advocates, people who are really advocating for your product out there in the market. People who are advocating for your brand, and we look to nurture that community as much as possible. We provide early access to our advocates and our community members to Notion. We give them direct access to engineering and our product teams to provide direct feedback. We give them a 3 to 4 month initial early run on our product before we launch anything out to GA as well. I think there's a great story here on this customer centricity. On these feedback loops and the fast iterations that we experienced in the last year alone. In 2022, we introduced Notion AI just before ChatGPT became widely known and effectively changed the whole market. When other companies were sharing future concepts and screenshots of what might be possible, Notion had a ready-to-use product that was out there in alpha in the market. But our quick launch required trade-offs, and we learned a ton from those trade-offs as well. Based on our experience that our customers should be helping create our roadmap for us, and that our community should be very much a part on, on how we iterate our product quickly, we made the decision to launch super, super fast our AI product. Knowing that getting our product in the hands of users and customers would create so much more feedback for our engineers and our product teams to iterate on the product versus traditional methods of research and turnaround times and cycles like that. But it had a huge trade-off to it as well. In 2022, I don't think anyone really knew what they were doing when it came to AI. People had a general concept of what it could look like, but everybody was feeling in the dark across the board. I think many here will, will know what that looks like as well. We didn't really have a go-to-market strategy around how we would sell AI, how we would position AI. We didn't know how we would position AI. We didn't know what messaging we would use. We didn't have a ton of evidence of what the business value or a would be beyond some general intuition. I think where a lot of companies have waited or wanted to figure out exactly what that golden message was to enable your sales team or position your product, we took the decision to move fast. In this day and age, when there is groundbreaking new technology that gets released, being first or being early or being fast, it does make the difference. So we chose speed over certainty. And we launched quickly to learn from real user feedback. And we learned to deal with those trade-offs. The next piece then that we learned was it's really important to listen to those customers. When you're moving fast and you're learning on the fly, you hear a lot when you're listening correctly. And that allows you to make changes as you need to make them as well. When we launched, we initially aimed for 200,000 users. That's what we were aiming for. But after 5 weeks, we had a million people on our waitlist. Fast forward another 5 weeks, that had grown to 2 million users on the waitlist already. So you can imagine the apprehension as we were ready to launch this, when we— 2 million people who are ready to try the product, which is interesting. And when we did release it, so much of it was unfinished, so much of it was underdone. We were missing loads of pieces, and we got a lot of feedback from those 2 million users who came through. We didn't even know what pricing we were going to lever as well. I don't think anybody had figured that out, and companies are still grappling with this as well. I was part of the team that had an early idea that we should create a three-tier pricing system where we would launch AI similar to a phone cell plan. We'd have a very low barrier to entry and make it really cheap, but then charge on a consumption model. Based on how much people were leveraging the tool. We thought it was a great idea. We didn't think anybody should be paying for AI if they're not going to be using it. So it'll almost be like a cell plan. However, in our first few months when this was launched out, we got a lot of feedback from our community as well that people are leveraging AI in their tool, they don't want to be looking at how many credits they have left. They don't want to necessarily feel like they've got some time on the clock that they're going to be using up within a little while. And ultimately found that pricing model was going to be restrictive to usage. We want people to be tinkering with this tool. We want people to be playing around with, with AI. But we found that our pricing model actually was going to be stifling and restricting innovation versus, versus including more. Just a week before we went GA on our product, we totally changed the pricing model and we went for a monthly flat structure where you can have all-you-can-eat AI within the tool versus the Atlanta. That Created chaos and havoc internally. You can imagine the fin plan teams and everything going a bit crazy, but it was the right thing to do and it helped us learn on the fly. We also learned around how people were going to be using our tool as well. We imagined that people would want to let Notion do the heavy work, let the AI product do the work. So let Notion take your first spin at creating that draft. Let Notion take the first spin at writing that blog for you, and then you can correct it afterwards. We thought it would be a huge productivity save for companies, for businesses who were leveraging AI. However, what we found is that in the early instances of Notion, of, of AI launches, people were using it for much more personalized use cases. They were writing poetry with Notion AI. They were building personalized plans. They were sharing it with their family and friends. They hadn't yet learned to lever this tool within the workplace. Fast forward a year and I think companies are really only beginning to figure out now what their generative AI strategy needs to be and how AI can be part of the core workflows that they're developing as well. And so the last thing on this piece I thought was relevant to share in terms of our product is we should never stop learning. If you get a great product, you bring it to market, that's only the beginning. You need to stay on your toes all the time. You need to make customer centricity an incredibly integral part of what you do. You need to be able to iterate and learn on the fly, and don't be afraid to rip up the roadmap if you get feedback in the wrong direction. And ultimately, you should be creating, if you don't have one already, some form of strong feedback loop. Both informally, you should be keeping an eye on your Twitter feed, see what people are saying about your product. You should be listening to your users with your tickets that are coming through. Where's the product broken? Where's there consistently issues that are coming through? What are the people who are not buying your product saying? How can you take information from your sales team or from your marketing website of why people are not buying your product? And then you should also be listening to your really trusted customers, the people who are deep into your product and can help you understand what comes next, what needs to come next in order for you to retain them and to grow them as well. And if you get that balance right of those feedback points, then I think you're gonna be in a great position to continue to curate a really strong product. Moving forward then, another key learning from the product side is that it's so important— might seem obvious— to align your go-to-market strategy with your product. Huge learning that I've generated from my career most recently in the last 5 or 6 years has been that your, your product strategy and your go-to-market strategy must be incredibly complementary. There can be a degree of distance and a little bit of rope, but the tighter you can align your product vision with your marketing positioning and ultimately your sales focus, the more that you're gonna be able to unlock frictionless growth as well. And there's gonna be some key tensions there. The 3 companies that I've been with have been B2C2B motions. We are initially trying to capture the hearts and minds of end users. Hope that product proliferates within teams, within functions, within divisions, and ultimately you're gearing up for a conversation with your CTO type or your heads of IT who are going to be backing your product or not. There's going to be tensions there. Are you building the product for end users or are you building the product for your CTOs and your heads of IT? Do you put a product team on making cool new features that are going to delight and please your end users, Or do you want to invest some engineering resourcing on those really critical security and administrative features that are going to really please the CISO at the end of the day? Do you fuel your PLG motion? Are you driving for revenue through self-service? Because your whole marketing site, your whole brand is going to be slightly different versus whether you're trying to generate leads for your sales team in a B2B motion. Meaning some critical tensions there, really strong tensions that are really important to understand and to lever. I think the companies that I've been part of, it's been a fun tension that's been there. Again, if we're pulling people to our website, are we trying to get them to sign up to get into the product? Are we going to try and get them to have a value-based conversation with our sales team a little bit later on? And ultimately, all those conversations and trade-offs lead to you being able to put together a form of a product roadmap. A lot of that back and forth helps you understand what you're going to be building, who you're building it for, what's the prioritization going to be of those products as well. But you can get this wrong. If your sales team is out of whack with your product vision, if your sales team is in full-on outbound execution mode but your product team is still trying to ascertain who are the end users that you're trying to build a product for, that's when companies can make mistakes. I think that's when you can overgrow an expensive sales org, or you can have a product team that's continuously moving in circles. So that's the major lesson on the product side that I found incredibly valuable. How best can your leadership ensure that your product vision is well matched to where you're pointing your guns from a sales perspective as well? So moving forward to go-to-market, I think it's really important to set a very, very strong foundational plan. As a business leader to ensure that your go-to-market has a degree of clarity. This became incredibly pertinent to me during my time in Asana, where our founder, Justin Moskovitz, and our CRO at the time, Oliver J., and our COO, Chris Farnacci, became very purposeful around something that they called the Pyramid of Clarity. So many people have seen a paradigm like this before. You've probably written something down to this effect, or you have some doc that has a version of this. But I think one of my biggest learning has been how to build a robust strategic plan. And it's not easy to do, it's pretty hard. You need to be a really effective leader to make this happen. You need the smarts to be able to build a really good plan. Although if you use some AI products now, it does it for you as well. Little plug for Notion AI there too. You need the hustle and you need the savvy to bring this strategy and this plan to life. You also need the self-awareness and the motivation and the finesse and the politics to communicate to a broad group of stakeholders— leadership, middle management, IC groupings as well— to keep this strategy alive, keep it surviving, and ultimately keep it thriving and keep it moving. Some really good advice that I was given by another mentor of mine, a man called Johan Butting. Johan was was my leader in Dropbox, and he subsequently led Slack after that. He's a VC now, he could be around here somewhere. Was, was 3 things in communication: be brief, be brilliant, and be gone, and get out of there. And if you're in a position then to brilliantly, briefly, and gone-ly create a very compelling vision and mission that everybody buys into, if you can then underline that mission with a clear and concise strategy, not a generic one, but quite a concise strategy. If you can then tie your company-wide objectives into being quite clearly articulating how you're going to achieve that strategy, and then supplement those company-wide objectives with department-level objectives. I think many people here might use OKRs for something like that. And then you're regularly communicating what are the key results and the projects that are progressing to help drive those business objectives, to help drive those company-wide objectives, which ultimately is influencing how your strategy is performing. Not easy. In the early stage of a team, in the early stage of an organization, these things can often be muddled. Your business objectives might be superseding your strategy. Your mission mightn't be really clear to everybody. It mightn't be super inspiring. Might be, be mixed up for where it is. Your key results can be very hard to measure, but people might get overly focused on one specific key result which might be overweighted and unbalanced. So that's why there's a huge skill to your leadership within your go-to-market organizations to be able to build a very robust and a very clear strategic plan. Let's dig into a little bit more around the strategy piece as well. So I think once you've built a product, you have a go-to-market motion. I found it really important in my career to be very clear around what the customer journey looks like. If you put your COO hats on at the moment, if you're covering all your go-to-market functions from your marketing organization through to your sales teams, through to your support and retention teams as well, and every mini team that goes into those broad divisions, your brand, your communications, your digital marketing teams, your community and startups-focused teams. In sales, your sales development teams, your— say you have a new business team and say an account management team, say you have a customer success team as well, all the way through to your CX teams as well, to your support teams, whether that's in-house or whether you're using external agencies as well. It's really important to continue to map all of those functions along what you're understanding to be your classic customer journey. Let's take Notion for an example. We focus a lot on ensuring that we have a very likable brand. We think that Notion has hit the— has hit a trend with our— hit a nerve with, with many of our ICP, with people who are in disruptive, fast-moving companies, people who require less complication in the workplace and more simplicity. With an all-in-one work tool. But very rarely do we play to the CTO or to the CIO. More so than anything, we want Notion to be incredibly valuable to users, to individual users, to people who identify with our brand. We try to find ways all the time to help people discover our product. We invest heavily in our community, we invest heavily in our brand, and we invest heavily in influencers that can help distribute Notion to the masses. How do we measure that successfully? Can we measure whether people have a strong sentiment around our product? It's very debatable. Any marketers here will always know that conundrum. Can you measure your market impact? Can you measure the number of tweets that you're getting? Can you measure your market sentiment? We do keep an eye on how many people are signing up for our startups programs. We keep a very close eye on our collaborations with VCs, with incubators, anywhere that there's new business is starting. Ultimately, if we're doing a really good job at the top of funnel with these pieces, that should naturally pull people towards our websites, right? That should naturally pull people towards where we're having them land in our product. So we measure the amount of web sessions. From there, your digital marketing team should be in a good position to track people, how they're behaving, what they're doing on your website. Are they converting? Are they converting into new users? Are they converting into paid users? Are these in are they smaller businesses, are they larger businesses? What sort of websites and web pages should you be attracting them to? When you grow a bit bigger, what do you do with French customers? What do you do with German customers? How can you ensure that you're optimizing that journey? So we work pretty closely on knowing that there's a very specific way that our customers discover our product, and we try to play to that as much as we can. From there, we look at what I call the seeding motion as well. So how do you ensure that your early users, once they've— once you spend a lot of money to make them aware that your product exists and pull them into the product, how do you ensure that they have a great experience that they stay in there? Anyone here who runs a self-service business knows that you can lose customers after the first 2 days if they don't get good value for your product almost immediately. So it's important you have a very strong ability for people to get into your product. Your UX is cool, it works. your growth marketing team and your growth product teams are ensuring that there's stickiness in your product straight away, and ultimately that you're setting up these new signups for better monetization a little bit further down the line. In Notion's case, that's our self-service business. That's how we drive millions and millions of dollars in revenue in pulling people to our product and making it really seamless for them. That's even before a human has even touched them or has even spoken to them. This is where our sales teams come into play. Again, a B to C to B motion. Our sales teams really only work with customers who are beginning to use Notion so seriously that they're going to require a lot more handholding, that there's a much more enterprise requirement for the way that they're leveraging the product. So we call it our land, our new business sales. We look to attract customers that are spending over a certain amount over to annualized revenue from monthly revenue as well. And it's here that we measure the ARR that we're driving from our sales assistant business versus our self-service business. And once you get your product over the line to an annualized spend, the battle only starts there. With a product like Notion, it can grow wildly within an organization, or it can be kept in to a small pocket of usage. It's where our account management team, our expansion focus kicks into gear. How do we underline the value of the product as it's been utilized within teams? How do we help build internal business cases? To justify that people should continue spending, continue using your team. And there's a strong combination there between our customer experience teams, customer success, and our sales team that are looking to expand within accounts as well. And ultimately, what you're looking to measure there is how much utilization, how much adoption is happening in your product, and ultimately, how many of your customers you're able to retain as well as grow. So you measure your CSAT, you measure your usage metrics And that's just very specific to this company. That's just very specific to how this product is understood, to how this product is discovered, to how it seeds within organizations, to how it lands to more regularized revenue, and ultimately to how you retain and you expand your customer base as well. So the last part I'll talk about in the golden trifecta of product, go-to-market, and talent is the talent part. And this is the foundation layer that I think you most need to get right. When sharing advice for hypergrowth companies, I oftentimes use the paradigm of Jedis and stormtroopers. I'm a little bit nerdy, I really like Star Wars, and I did when I was younger anyway, so this is one that always stuck well to me. And having hired hundreds of people across the different organizations that I was talking about there, It's become very clear to me that there's different phases in the company and in terms of team maturity as well. And there's a lot of growth, a lot of learnings that I've had from this growth as well. I find that in the early days, you need your Jedis, you need builders, people who can flex to cover many functions. And ultimately, they set the DNA for your team and ultimately your company. These Jedis are capable and they're curious. They can oftentimes make something from nothing, and more so than anything, they enjoy the experience of doing that as well. They like to work in building sites. They really appreciate building as they're doing things as well. I've often found that, that smart people, curious people, can be your best salespeople by far. They can outperform dyed-in-the-wool trained salespeople. In any case, that being said, Jedis can't stay in the same place forever. Jedis will want to be building the next thing pretty soon. As soon as there's structure and order put in place that they've oftentimes built themselves, it's time for a new generation or a new group of workers to come in place as well. And this is where your stormtroopers come in. Stormtroopers are great, they're excellent. They don't necessarily want to do as much innovation as, say, your Jedis do, but I'll tell you what, once you have a structure in place for them, they want to go and they want to smash it, they really want to achieve. And there's a balance there in terms of timing. You keep your Jedis in a role too long, they're going to get bored, they're going to start looking for the next thing. You put Stormtroopers in too early into an unstructured environment, and they're going to struggle. They're going to— they're not going to want to be able to provide a lot of that innovation. So there's a balance in terms of finding the next building site for your Jedis. And there's always going to be a building site within your company. There's always a new team or a new function, or a new way of doing things, that's going to need that builder mindset that you can push people towards. At the same time, once you have your structure well in place, once you've got a decent foundation to start from, that's when your stormtroopers really start to deliver. Give them a quota, they're going to want to hit 150%. Give them a SPIFF, they're going to want to absolutely obliterate that and take that home. Mightn't be as motivating, say, for your Jedis as well. The next piece I'll mention, and it can be a little bit of a cliché, but I found it to be incredibly incredibly important as I've been building our teams is to ensure that you're hiring for balance. Diversity comes in many forms. Who you are and what you think defines you. And it's not just a tick-the-box metric to ensure that you're hiring for balance. It's a way to ensure that you're setting your teams up for success. I think as a hiring manager, as a leader, you should be looking at your bench, you should be looking at your people, and And you should be seeing where you have strengths, and you should be seeing where you have gaps. You should be hiring optimists, and you should be hiring realists. You should be hiring pessimists, and you should be hiring dreamers as well. You should be hiring some really on-paper book-smart people who come with very strong credentials, and you should be hiring some hustlers. You should be hiring some people with real street smarts. Your intellectual people are going to be able to spin up a strategy doc really fast. Going to be no problem to them. They're going to really enjoy the effort. They might struggle when it comes to a sales conversation with a customer interaction. You might have some incredibly gifted natural salesy people, and they just don't want to do that OKR, that end of quarter review, because they're going to be focused on different things. So it's really important that you're hiring for teams that have a lot of different strengths that complement each other. You might get Myers-Briggs fans here, you might get Insight Insights fans, you might get some other hokey personality test. I love them. I absolutely love them all. I'm a red-blue on Insights. Anyone can guess that? I'm a little bit spicy, but I like to reflect on things. I'm an explorer and investigator on the other study. I can't remember exactly what it is. And I look at my teams, I look at my leaders, and I look at their teams, and I ask them to deliberately go and hire people that are different to each other. I have a great experience in this in my career. When I was early stage in Microsoft, I worked in a team that was just all Irish people, and it was great. It was such a great place to be. What a great place to do an internship. But I looked around me, and there was a lot of guys. Pretty much everybody went to the same university. Everybody played rugby. And whenever a problem came up, we were thinking about things in almost the exact same way. And I didn't notice it. I didn't have a clue. I just thought we were going with the flow. It was great. It was only then when I switched teams, or when I moved company over to Google, that I was in a very international environment. And I saw that when a problem arose within the team, we had our very skeptical German who took a very definitive line on stuff, a very passionata Italian who was thinking about things in a very different way, and quite a realistic English person who was coming at it from a very different angle. And you know what? We found the best solution because we had people who were wired a little bit differently, who were thinking about a problem and ultimately seeing all the potential issues, seeing all the potential opportunities, and able to navigate through that. It's not easy to do because hiring is tough. It's a very competitive talent market at the moment, but ultimately, if you try to instill into your hiring practices this from the beginning, I think you're going to be setting your teams up for success ultimately. I think it's really important for your leaders as well, if you're a leader yourself or you have a group of leaders, to ensure that they're threading a growth mindset when teams all the time. I can't underline the importance of, of building a growth mindset, particularly in your early SaaS teams. A growth mindset fosters adaptability, it fosters continuous improvement. Teams are embracing that mindset are much more likely to innovate and to overcome challenges than teams that fall out of the cycle of having a growth mindset as well. I think being part of an early-stage team and an early-stage organization has trade-offs. It can be stressful, The plan might not always be there. You're going to be burdened with a lot more operational depth and strategic depth than you would anywhere else. However, that's an enormous blessing as well. I've always found that being part of early teams has been really like having a street MBA. I've learned so much about marketing, even though I'm not a marketer, by just having a strong level of proximity to early marketing plans. I've learned a lot around product, even though I'm not a product person, just by having a lot of proximity to how the product team thinks. And I think when your people are coming on board to your early-stage teams, it's such a privilege. Pressure is a privilege to have this exposure to so many functions. Where you could be in a bigger company, you could be in a much bigger company, and you're in your little swim lane, and you just got to execute on your— you're a little stormtrooper, you're going to execute on your goals. Whereas in these early-stage teams, you get this MBA effect by learning everything about the business and contributing to your part from it as well. I like to implement a 10% rule as well with my leaders. I like to ensure that our leaders are spending at least 10% of their time every month dedicated to learning and development programs for themselves and ultimately for their teams. If you're in a big company, you might have a really big L&D budget. You might be able to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales methodology or trainers to come in to work with your teams. Or you could be a bootstrap startup where that 10% can just be buying a book a month and ensuring that everybody reads that book and then creating space within that team to share learnings from that book as well. I think it's really important that from the outset, the quicker you start instilling this 10% rule of learning and development and growth within your teams, it just compounds and it pays dividends as time goes by. And if managed correctly, you're able to thread your growth mindset cross-functional learning pieces with everybody's ongoing learning and development as well. So those pieces are always super important to me. So I think I'm just at time before we run into the Q&A. Just to sum it all up from my end, I think 3 foundational layers that I can impart onto all of you is from a product side, building a solution to a problem, maintaining customer centricity and feedback loops, aligning your go-to-market strategy and your product. From the go-to-market side, building and communicating a strategic plan, such a vital skill. Don't let that go by the wayside. And then understanding your customer journey and aligning your sales and go-to-market motions against them. And then finally, your talent. Understand and be very mindful around that early team that sets the DNA. Hire for balance as quickly and early as you possibly can to double down on your strengths and cover off any gaps that exist within your teams. And then finally, to ensure that you're building from the very outset a growth mindset within your teams. Thank you very much, everybody. Really appreciate it.