SaaStr Live! with Jason Lemkin and Courtney Rogin: What to Get Excited About at SaaStr Annual 2018

Hello everyone, thanks so much for joining us on SaaStr Annual Live, the webinar today.

I'm Jason M.

Lemkin and I'm Courtney, Head of Content here at SaaStr.

And, uh, we thought we had a great idea from, uh, one of the folks working at the co-selling space, which was to do this webinar to talk about things that have changed and new. Uh, we're constantly— this is our fourth year and we're constantly trying new things and learning, and this is a little bit of an experiment. And I think what we thought we would do is probably most people that are on this, and thanks, we had over 300 folks register, we're gonna treat it for folks as if they've been before, but I think everyone will learn from that. And we've spent the better part of the last 351 days, whatever it's been since the last one, trying to make everything, everything better. So let me kick off with the first one about content, and then Courtney could talk about networking. But one of the biggest changes this year, which is mostly good but will also be overwhelming, so be prepared, is last year we had 3 and 3/4 stages. We had 3 downstairs and 1 upstairs we called the deep dive stage. And it turned out it wasn't enough. It turned out for several reasons it wasn't enough. Almost all the sessions, they were too good, they were overcrowded. So one, people couldn't register for sessions, so they were frustrated they couldn't get into some of them. And they needed more. So we've done two important things this year, and we'll, we'll give you some examples. But Courtney's expanded it to 5 stages. Every stage is bigger, and I don't quite know how it works, but we do have pre-registration for the sessions. So there'll be 30% to 40% more content that will be able to fit twice as many people and pre-register. So The biggest issue you should have is that there'll be 3, 2 or 3 sessions at the same time that you both want to go to, which was the flip side of last year. We can't solve that this year.

Yeah. And there's 3 full days of content now, and you'll be able to, within our mobile app and when you're logged in on the desktop, be able to build your preferred agenda of what you want to go to. So you're not flying through the agenda trying to look at all the sessions on site. You can build what your agenda is. And so that you can quickly and easily keep organized of what content you want to visit.

And then— Sorry, go ahead.

No, go ahead.

And then what you'll see, we'll just pick one and then let's talk about some other things we'll improve. We've tried, there'll be 5 stages. They're sort of called Studio B, C, D, and E and the Fireside Stage, but they're— the aesthetics will be different, but they're more similar in their sound. But we're trying to mix them up on each stage. So assume— Most slots, you'll have some sort of like a unicorn that we look up to, whether it's on Tuesday, we just added Stewart Butterfield from Slack. We've got the CEOs of Coupa and Qualtrics, which will all be amazing. On Wednesday, we've got CEO of Atlassian. We've got Aaron Levy from Box back, but at the same time, we'll have folks at all different stages. You know, just looking at the schedule on Wednesday, we'll have the CEO of ServiceTitan, who's great. I don't know what they're at, $50 or $60 million, but this is one that, is changing the rules for SaaS for SMB. You might not have heard of it, but in 2 to 3 years you'll have heard of the IPO. We'll have folks like HashiCorp, we'll have folks that— and then we try to have a bunch of more folks that are bootstrapping or freemium or that you didn't even know, like Grammarly. Grammarly is on the same time as ServiceTitan and HashiCorp and a bunch of other greats. But Grammarly, we all use it at Zaster. but then they just raised $100 million like a couple months ago. We'll learn their journey from sort of pseudo bootstrapping to $100 million. So they'll all be mixed up. There'll be too much, but you'll see CEOs and founders at different stages. And then at different times we'll have also lots of CROs, CMOs, VPs of sales speaking. And most importantly on that, and it is a big event, it's 3 days, it's a lot. It may be 3 days is a lot. It's possible we'll do 2+1 next year. But come early and stay late, even if you leave in the middle. This is the number one advice. So if you look at our schedule, if you, if you go on the website, it's sort of on the website sasterano.com, download the mobile app which came out the other day. The schedule's still evolving there. What you can see is to help you scale, some of the best sessions are at the beginning and the end. So you'll come in at 10 AM on Tuesday, or come at 9, because you'll be able to meet people. Courtney will talk about that, that at next for networking. Come at 9:00 and immediately you'll have great kickoff sessions on what you care about. You'll hear from one of the best VPs of sales out there, Sam Blonde, talking about how to double sales in 30 days. You'll hear from one of the best marketers, Xbox, from Menka, having some of the best marketers on how to get more leads. You'll have Phil Fernandez, who was the CEO and co-founder of Marketo. Now he sold it for $2 billion and he's, he's very thoughtful about what to do better next time. So whatever level you want to learn more about, uh, marketing, sales, and others, we're going to kick it off with a bang in terms of hands-on sessions. And then you'll see a million things— TechCrunch, Stuart Butterfield, Intercom, Coupa— but skipping all of that to the end, and then at the end is money, money, money, money, and scaling. So even if you play in Union Square and go shopping or go on the cable cars, the rest of it I strong— for most of you, especially founders, come at 9 and stay to the end. And then we're gonna add a final, final party at the end where everyone will get together, including all the Team Saastr and all the VIPs, so that there's a great last chance to get together after the last money session. So, so come in the beginning to learn how to grow and stay at the end to learn about how to get more money.

Yeah, yeah. Um, and for all of that content, we The way to think about it, I worked really hard to make sure that if you are a marketing leader, that you can still, if you really want to, go to pretty much every single marketing session. Same goes with product and engineering and operations and even diversity and inclusion this year too, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But heading over to networking, we, if you remember from last year, if you attended last year, we didn't have a ton of networking on site or space for it. There was very little lounge area and our parties on Tuesday night were really far away. And this year, we've brought a lot of that in-house. There's going to be a Saastr Square Park and a huge lounge for you guys to come and network. And then within the sponsor hall, which is huge this year, we're going to be having Brain Date, where you can go and log in with your registered email and sign up to have one-on-one conversations with the leaders in SaaS and about whatever topic you want to talk about. And then you can also sign up for group ones, so you can meet more than one person any sessions. Well, our Tuesday night parties are now going to be—

And just on the Brain Date, how do people sign up for that?

You log on to Brain Date within the app, the mobile app.

Within the mobile app. So download the mobile app. And then there's a session. What's it called? Other stuff or something like that?

I actually think Brain Date has its own little section.

Find the Brain Date and it will drive you to the Brain Date site and sign up for the mentoring sessions you want to have.

Yes. Yeah. Some of our Brain Date champions have already logged in and offered their time and their expertise. For our attendees. So go in and I'm even in there if you wanna talk content strategy, you can go in and send an invite to your Brain Date champion about the topic you're interested in and set up a time to meet with them. And then from the party perspective, we're gonna be at the City View at Metreon and we'll have 3 different—

On Tuesday night?

Tuesday night.

City View Metreon.

Yeah, right down the street, walkable distance from the Hilton Union Square. And we'll have 3 different parties there. Those are, information for that is also in the mobile app and you can RSVP to attend as well. All attendees are welcome. —will also—

And they'll be basically broken up between sales and marketing, product from Workday, product and engineering from Mapbox, and then emergence capital for CEOs and founders scaling, right? There'll be 3 different parties all on the same site. It's a beautiful site. And so it should be easier to meet more people. And the parties will also— if you went last year, they weren't official. So the qualities were varied. This year they will be mellower on Tuesday night so you can talk more. And meet more people and not get sort of a vendor blitz that you might have gotten last year at a cool but rogue party. So this should be better. So go Tuesday night. It should be mellower and a better networking opportunity.

Yes. Yeah. And then if you're in— once you've downloaded the mobile app, I would recommend looking in the ancillary events too for our things that are going on also in the venue outside of just our content. We'll have a course Writing workshops, you can learn and also network of how to be a better writer and build a personal brand online. We'll play Plato Mentoring for product engineering and management professionals on Wednesday. Yes, and that's great.

On Wednesday, if you— for many folks, just to spend— Plato's a, uh, it's a company that works out of the SaaStr co-selling space. They're a Slack tool to connect, uh, new engineering managers with seasoned VPs of engineering. But you should go if you're a CEO. Like, how many CEOs out here have ever had a chance to talk with the VP of engineering or director of from Box or Slack or SugarCRM or Datadog. I mean, some of the very, very best engineering leaders are going to be there. Go ask them why your site goes down. Go ask them why you can't— why you can only get out 2 releases a quarter. Go ask them if the VP of engineering you just hired is actually good enough. This is probably one of the greatest opportunities. I wish I had that. I needed a great VP. I had one. But I needed someone to share that. Most of you don't have that. Most of you have never met a great VP of engineering, and it's separate from the Brain Date. The Brain Date, you'll meet VPs and CEOs of all different folks, but the Plaido mentoring is just around VP of engineering.

Yeah, and you can RSVP for that through the app, and then Plaido reaches out to you directly to set up the best match for those one-on-one mentoring sessions. And that's only on Wednesday, but that runs pretty much the entire length of the day. So you should— you should be able to get in and schedule a time. And then we've also got, as I mentioned earlier, Saster Square Park, so you can go and meet people. And there's a really awesome huge expo hall this year with way more booths than last year. So you can go in and network and meet all of our vendors and our awesome sponsors.

And the Brain Date's inside the sponsor expo, right? As is all the food. Yes. So this will be— last year we had, it was hard at the— the program was very cool, but it was very hard. We broke the sponsors up into two areas. It was weird. Half was behind the stage, half was on the second stage. This year, this— we will have this— the hub will be the sponsor hub. Brain Dates will be there mentoring, food. We'll have a jumbotron to show the show. There'll be lots of fun stuff to do. So that and the Sassafras Square Park next year, we'll have an entire floor put differently. There'll be two areas you can hang out. We'll have an entire floor to hang out, whereas last year there was nowhere. And the lobby of the Hilton has tons of hangout space. It has a bar, there's a restaurant next door, and I imagine— we'll see, it's all an experiment— I bet the lobby will be packed at all times too, right? So there'll be many more— you won't have to try to go through the Tenderloin finding somewhere to have a coffee like last year. You will be able to meet everyone and have all the coffees and meetings you want in the Hilton, in the Sasser Tower, which is a big upgrade.

There's way more space to hang out this year right on site, and it's all indoors. So there will be no chance of getting rained on while trying to also hang out. And then on that note with rain and being indoors, our registration, if you came last year, we had an issue with lines. Being outside and it taking forever to log in. We've got multiple kiosks, self-service ones where you go and you put in your email, sign up, and you print your badge. And if you are a hotel guest and staying on site at the Hilton for the event, you get to check in on Monday. You can come by and pick up your badge the day before, so you don't even have to stand in the line on Tuesday.

If you're not at the Hilton, can you do it too? You can probably get still registered, don't you think? Yes. Yes, if you're in the area Monday and pick up your ticket, if your office is in near Union Square, drop by and you have time drop by Monday afternoon and grab your badge.

Yes, you should drop by Monday.

Whatever happens, it will be better than last year. Yes. Registration was challenging last year, but our goal is you can come at 9 AM sharp, register, meet some people before a 10 o'clock session, and hopefully in 5 to 10 minutes you'll be through it and you'll be ready to meet that other great VP or CEO. Yes.

Yeah, so it should be much more streamlined and easier and get you out and over to your content and networking that you need. And then the one other big change this year, and super new for SASTR, and we're really proud of it, of what we've been able to accomplish on our team, is our diversity and inclusion program. Do you want to— do you want to talk about kind of an overview a little bit?

Uh, sure, I can. You've done a lot of the work. Um, a couple different things. Um, there's several elements to it. Um, first, as an aside, Kleiner Perkins and PagerDuty are sponsors, so we can bring about 350 founders and VPs from underrepresented groups that we otherwise wouldn't have. We're doing pretty well there, but you can find the application on SaaStr. So if you know folks that are great, great, great founders or executives, but they still have to have revenue, it's gotta be post-revenue good SaaStr startups, please have them apply because we've got room for about 80 more slots. We've invested about $300,000 to make that happen, which is great. So that should, we do have a goal of trying to have about 50% more women and diverse attendees than we had last year. It's gonna be hard, we're gonna hit it. At the speaker level, Courtney's done all this work. We'll have 65% diverse speakers, which we think blows out anything this industry's ever seen. So we're pretty proud about that.

Yeah, and on we, not just bringing all these new and great diverse voices, We're also bringing diverse, uh, diversity and inclusion content. So I think we have 5 or 6, uh, D&I sessions, uh, across the 3 days. We've brought in the head of D&I at Lyft, Pinterest, the former head at Dropbox, um, and more. And we've got the Leader of Change Catalyst, who they put on their amazing event, uh, diversity inclusion event. They're gonna all be on stage this year talking about diversity and inclusion, which is awesome.

Um, and we've asked them, it's an experiment, but we've asked, this is SaaStr. So the real goal for all these diversity, we have great sessions is tips and learnings so you can do better. The goals of the year are not to— we're all struggling to do better. You know, the SaaS list, which is probably the biggest industry, is 81% men, 19% women. That's not good enough. The point of these talks is not to, is not to tell us that we're not doing great. We do know that. The point is, if you're a VP, a founder, CEO, how can I do better? What are some 3 tips I can take back so that by the end of 2018 I truly have a more diverse team so I can grow faster and I can recruit better and I can do better and I can achieve our goals. So it's an experiment. We're going to keep investing it, but hopefully you will actually learn how to do better, which is the whole goal of all, all of this.

Yes. Yeah. And it's really, it's very much along the SaaStr lines of content, super actionable. They're sharing their experiences and they have their data and their learnings to back up their tactics that they're bringing to the stage. So it'll be really great sessions, and they're all slightly different topics and focuses, so you'll get a lot out of all 5 and 6 of them.

Two more quick things, maybe just for 3 minutes, then we can dig into some questions. Just to dig in a little bit more, because it's important to a lot of folks, the last years, if you've been, we did different things with VCs. So lunch on, basically, maybe all day Thursday, we'll have tons of VC and fundraising content. How to raise money, how it works, the tricks, the tips, all that. And then we did two things to do more than just the content. Last year we had this thing called Lunch with the VCs where the VCs would sort of reverse pitch you. And I can't remember how big these rooms, 20 to 40 people.

Yeah, I think the biggest one was 60.

60. And it was an experiment. We threw it together like in January, maybe even February last year. We didn't know if anyone would come. And if you went, you realized it was overloaded. Like you just couldn't— like I didn't know if anyone wanted to go to these things because I find money so boring, but people loved it. And then the year before, we did one-on-ones with VCs. So we're trying to do both and do them better. So we'll have 50% more Lunch with a VC sessions with 5 times the space. So sign up for them, but you'll get into the ones you want. They'll pitch you. So we'll have much more of that. And we're adding VCs to the Brain Dates. So we should— that hope is we triple this, this experience to get feedback, interact with VCs, meet them. And especially for folks that don't happen to work in San Francisco and didn't go through Y Combinator or 500 Startups. We know how important this is and there will be hundreds and hundreds of VCs and our goal is to nudge and control them into all helping you. So there'll be, hopefully there'll be more of this than ever in the history of SaaS. So on the VC, and then one last thing that, one last upgrade and then we'll take questions. We talked about networking important. Every year we do a big party on Wednesday night. It's really fun. This year we have the English beat and we have lots of, cool elements and Burning Man-esque stuff. And, but most importantly, what we learned from the last 2 years is it's great to have a cool entertainment, but it's been loud and cramped. So this year we're moving to the Masonic, which is where we did the event last year. It will be huge and we'll still have a band, but there'll be entire main room where it will be quiet and an upstairs. So you won't be overwhelmed. You'll be able to meet people. And our goal is the party is 50 to 100% better than last year. So it's not just a party, it remains a great time to meet people. So I think we've tripled between adding the Thursday one, making the Tuesday ones better, upgrading Wednesday. I think we've sort of doubled the quality of the evenings. And save up your energy. I get tired, but I know most people love it. Go to all of them because they'll all be better than they were last year.

Yeah, you can make it to all the parties. I definitely recommend it. It's probably going to be our best ones yet. So do you want to go ahead and move into questions? So I have a few questions that you guys have been sending in. How do we book one-on-one mentoring sessions? That's through Brain Date in the mobile app. And then how do you register for sessions and build your agenda? That's going to be opening later today, and that— since you guys are all attendees, you'll be getting an email from us detailing exactly how to do it and how to get registered. How do you—

just to relate to that, just because it is— we're doing the best we can. We're a small group with a big event. You are going to get multiple emails from multiple vendors. The registration is going to come from SWOGO, right, which is our, which is our application for registration. The one-on-one is going to be from Brain Date. That's a different vendor, right, that's doing the mentoring. The venturing mentoring, if you do that on Wednesday, that'll be from Play-Doh. And I'm probably missing a fourth one. So our apologies in advance. It would be great if we had a single source of truth where you just get one email for this event and magically you can do everything. But that doesn't quite exist. But the good news is, if you're overwhelmed with the emails, log into the mobile app, download it, because everything— you can get to everything from the mobile app. When you're overwhelmed with emails, or they go into your promotions, which they better not, the mobile app is the way to find everything.

Everything's in the mobile app. You can go and drill down there if you don't want to read a couple different emails. You can go and see what's going on. There'll be a map, there'll be all of the other events, figure out where the parties are, how to RSVP for those, which was another question, is how do you RSVP for the parties? During session picking, which is currently on the desktop, but on the Wednesday party, if you're unable to RSVP and you just bring your badge, bring your badge to all the parties.

Bring your badge. Hold on, let's just stop. We will solve it if you forget, but bring your badge to all the off-site parties. Bring your badge. Last year, uh, sometimes people couldn't even get in if they didn't bring the badge. That will not happen this year, but you will have to go to a truancy line and wait and bring— you have to bring a passport and, uh, you'll have to bring something. And just bring your ID to the Tuesday and Wednesday night parties. Bring your badge. Yeah, sorry, bring your badge. Bring your badge. Bring it. Yeah, keep going.

Sorry, no worries. And then how do you log into the app? Uh, use the same email and password you use to register for the annual. If you don't know that, go online to our registration and reset your password. Um, what is the best way for to meet other co-founders or get feedback on early pitch decks? I would highly recommend finding some people that have signed up on Brain Date, but if not, go to Saster Square Park during the day, go to the VC afternoon, sign up for some of the VC sessions. Everyone that's going to be looking to get funding, what to do once you've got funding, will be there. So you can get some feedback on, meet people to get feedback there. What kind of topics are in Brain Date? Anything you could think of. You— we basically Braindate, you can go on and do super targeted ones. So I have one about how to build in your initial content strategy for your startup, but then you can do something about best hikes in Northern California or ways to get involved in volunteering in your, in your city. So it can be everything from role and function based or more personal passion and hobby based. So it can be It's, oh, it's the full spectrum of content. Some more questions. All right. Does anyone have last chance for any questions that anyone has? We have a couple of minutes left. What are two sessions not on the main stage that you're really excited about? Two sessions?

Boy, I'm excited about a lot. Okay. Let me look. Let me throw out a few fun ones. 'Cause that's a fun one. I am getting a little tired this year, but let's point out some particularly fun ones 'cause I know these people.

The—

good, very good question. Okay, so on Wednesday, I don't wanna pick favorites, but these two sessions are gonna be really good. And the stages in the afternoon are all the same. There isn't really a main stage. But folks I know, Tom Hale, president of SurveyMonkey. I've known him since, since I started in SaaS. He was, he was very senior at Macromedia, then Adobe, where I got to know him. Then he was at HomeAway. Now he's at SurveyMonkey, which is whatever, doing $250 million. He's one of the best speakers in the industry. I love him. I viewed him as a mentor in the early days. That's Wednesday at 4:20. Obviously SurveyMonkey is an iconic and very interesting, but he, Tom, is so good. So I just asked him to reach out. So he's the president. Go to that one. Go to the CMO of SendGrid right before that. I mean, SendGrid is just, it's a force of nature. So that's one I definitely would want to go to. When's Brian Brackeen on that? Because that's going to be a fun one. 11 AM on Wednesday. On Wednesday. Boy, there's some tough competition on this session. So I don't want to— the 11 AM slot's really, really good. But Brian Brackeen is the CEO of Kairos. We actually did the Miami meetup. If anyone was gonna go in December. But not only does he run a B2D SaaS company, he's just finishing an ICO right now. And what do you do with an ICO in SaaS? I don't know, but Brian's gonna tell us. He's super charismatic, he's super transparent. People don't wanna share this stuff, but you know, if there's any way you can use an ICO just to get an extra 10, 20, 100 million into your SaaS startup, you might as well do it. Literally, there was a company in the CSS that ICO'd last week and raised 10 million. Like amazing stuff. So this one, this one's going to be super fun. Um, we talked about ServiceTitan, a few others, and then just a couple others. They're all, uh, I'm excited personally. There's so many I'm excited, but two on Thursday, because you're gonna have heard a lot of— three of these on Thursday. I'm super excited. There's all— every year we have one session that we slot early, and then like events overtake it. So like last year we had Michael Pryor for Trello, but we didn't know Atlassian was going to buy it for $450 million. So that what made that one extra fun. On Thursday, we've got Jason M. Lemkin, who founded WP Engine, which Saastr runs on. And WP Engine's great, but you know, they just raised $250 million, which is, and they're profitable, I'm sure, and $100-something million in revenue. So to hear the founder, and the topic's epic, From Burnout to $100 Million in ARR. This, like, I'm going to this one. The one after that, and then just two others, then I really will be quiet, 'cause I love all this. We spent a year on this. The next one with Jason M. Lemkin and David Yarnold from ServiceMax. So ServiceMax got bought by GE, which is not Google, it's not Salesforce, for $1 billion last year. That's a good story. But I met David Yarnold very early at EchoSign. He was, I think, SVP of sales at SuccessFactors. I'm probably getting it wrong. And he was enterprise software, his whole thing. He is one of these guys that just see— that is one of the best CEOs in SaaS. We've got him, we've got David Kellogg. I mean, I could talk about all these times. So just folks that see I had Peter Gassner from Viva last year who just sees things crisply. Whatever Dave Yarnold has to say, these are some of the best takeaways in the business. Go to this. It's not just that he sold for a billion. You know, a couple years ago, a billion was like a big deal. Now it's like a Series C round. I'm just kidding. It's an amazing outcome. But Dave Yarnold is just— he's the original group of the best folks. So go to that one. And then, sorry, last one, then I'll be quiet, that you might— you should know about this one. But at 2:10, and boy, the competition's brutal again on Thursday, but I really want to hear from Eric Gunderson from Mapbox and the managing director of SoftBank. So SoftBank raised the largest fund in the history of all of the world going back to the caveman era. And Mapbox, I love everything B2D, everything— Mapbox is an amazing story. I actually don't know Eric, but I followed him for a long time, and I reached out early, and I know this is going to be The combination of whatever they just raised. How do you raise $170 million from SoftBank? But how did Mapbox come to dominate sort of API for mapping? Why is it big? How do you make money off of this? Why is this a huge business? I think this is— I would go to this session wherever it was, and I'm rambling, but go through this and you're going to be overwhelmed with how special a lot of these sessions are. But these are ones I'll be sitting in the audience. And I'm going to moderate a bunch this year, but not as many last year, so I can go to more.

Yes, really great session. Yeah, there's a lot of content on there. We had— like, I, I very recommend going through the app, looking through the session descriptions. That's another big thing that we've changed from the past years is we have session descriptions this year, so you can learn about the sessions beforehand, um, and really kind of learn what the learnings are going to be and what to expect. Um, I have a couple of last questions with the last 2 minutes here, um, for you. If you're a sponsor, what is the— from a sponsor perspective, what is the number one thing sponsors can do that boosts this year to really kind of get their ROI? And then what do you recommend for attendees, the first, the number one thing they should conquer in the expo hall?

Well, my number one, boy, that's— we should let our events team dig on that topic, but I'll provide the best advice I can. Um, uh, it's not— it's quality, not quantity. Uh, you can scan the heck out of everybody and go for it, and please scan everybody, get their information, drop them into your Marketo and HubSpot and do all that kind of stuff. It does work. We do it. Amelia is running this. She's amazing, Dimension Marketer. She's running this for us. It does work. But the thing is, especially almost all the sponsors are here to meet buyers. They're here, they're here to meet buyers, and they are there. There will— it won't be perfect, we will make mistakes, but this is the largest non-vendor event in the industry. If you can't get enough leads from your booth to make this event ROI positive, you know what it means? Honestly, you're bad at field marketing. And I was bad at field marketing. It's okay. Like, I didn't know how to do this myself, right? I was, I was good at creating inbound leads. That's what I was good at. I didn't know how to do a booth. I didn't— I could tell you my stories I mean, the first trade show I ever did, I was so tired I went the wrong day. I showed up, I was there, I was, I was there the whole day, and then I had to build the booth myself because we saved so much money. And I brought an X-Acto knife and I cut my hand open trying to assemble the booth, so there was blood all over the back of our booth. And I'm sitting there on a Tuesday at San Diego Convention Center and there's no one there. Like, I'm sitting in my blood, bloodstained backdrop, and literally, like, I'm like, why is there not— I look, I go to the people next to me, what's happening? They're like, oh, it doesn't start till tomorrow, we're just doing emails. I'm like, oh. Oh, the only person that helped me had to go back. She had to leave that night. So don't ask me, but here's the real thing. Your buyer's there, so try to have fewer, better conversations. Um, it's great to meet everybody, um, but bring— and, and so me, make sure the folks there can have good conversation. Get— I know business— I don't even have business cards, but guess business cards. Keep notes. It's better to find out who are the best 10 people that came by this day, um, than the 500 people you can scan. Do both. That's my number one advice. And if you look at everyone that's written that makes money off this It's been, it's been more concentrated on meeting the best folks. So that's number one. Number two, don't forget if you have any scale, your customers are here. Your customers are here. And if you ask, you know, I should ask the team, but if you ask Intercom why they've been back 3 years in a row, Intercom's doing pretty well. They're really not here for the leads anymore. They're here to meet their customers. And yes, if you're sub-$1 million ARR, you don't have enough customers to meet, but don't forget, and it took me a while to learn this at Dreamforce, the ROI is also meeting your customers. So make sure spend more time with their existing customers, get them to buy more, get them to renew, and that, that's tip 2. And for attendees, just meet as many folks as you can. I think there's the good with our sponsors, if you look at it, the vast majority are best-of-breed SaaS vendors. I wish we had, you know, more random folks that just are there for their brand. We have very few that are there for brand building, right? And so Really, almost all the vendors are best of breed. So for you, these are products you should be buying. The reason they're here is they are either their next generation or the current generation. Take it seriously, um, because these literally are the, the best vendors. Um, and, and since the Sponsor Expo is better, you will have a better chance to meet them. Also, a last point, it's kind of funky but related to that. This is an experiment. We're going to have more passing times between sessions. There are more 30-minute breaks between sessions And go— the goal is the food, the snacks, the brain dates, everything will be in the center of the sponsor expo hall. So you'll end up spending more time there. So between that and the adjacent Sassafras Square Park, it'll be where you, where you hang out.

Really good answer for that. I think we're out of time. And then if you didn't— if your question didn't get answered, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter with the hashtag #SaastrAnnual and our team will definitely get back to you. And then with that, thank you everyone for joining today. Great time, and we'll see you in 13 days.

We'll see you there. Thanks, everybody.