Scaling to $5B with Cockroach Labs' CEO Spencer Kimball's Formula for Sustained Growth + Resilience

My name is Spencer Kimball. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of a company called Cockroach Labs. You might wonder why we called it Cockroach Labs. We actually make a database that's extremely resilient called CockroachDB. So that's a big part of my talk today, really building for growth and resilience through maybe seed, pre-seed, through where we are today, Series F. At least that's where I can give any advice. And actually, in this journey that I've been on with Cockroach Labs, it's almost been a decade. On the way, I've done a lot of angel investing, so I've invested in more than 80 different startups. Some of them have already been acquired or went out of business. Many of them are still going. The pace has really picked up recently with AI, so there's a lot of exciting stuff out there. But when I invest, I'm also being looked at to be an advisor, and I take that role pretty seriously. And I found that a lot of the questions I get are repeated. So there's, there's lessons to be drawn there, and I'm just going to share some of that with everyone in the audience. So there's 3 stages of growth I'm going to cover in this talk: 0 to 1, 1 to 10, 10 to 100. Someone early on told me that 0 to 1 is impossible, 1 to 10 is improbable, and 10 to 100 is inevitable. So this is a little bit of a sobering stat here. 90% of startups fail. You know, I think maybe one big question here is What's the single most important bit of advice I could give, especially in those early stages where I think a lot of this stat comes true, to, uh, build from nothing to something that actually has a chance, a real shot at making it? And I think that is avoid building in a bubble. And this is something I learned the hard way. Uh, you know, I, I think it's very tempting when you're very, uh, early on in the journey to believe that idea is precious. And even sometimes you'll be working on an idea with someone, and they don't actually go into building a company with you, and they expect equity. I think that's nonsense. Ideas are not worth the paper or the napkin they're written on. It's actually about execution. Like, that's the— that's the thing that you can really bring to the idea to make it a reality. I'd say that no matter how good your idea is or how novel it seems, the best ideas arrive by multiple people at the same time. And this is even true, for example, in the biggest sort of advances in physics or mathematics. Once an idea sort of gets ripe in the ecosystem, there's a lot of things that are feeding that. So multiple people come up with them. And when you go and you talk to VCs, they've heard of something quite a bit like your idea. I think there's this tendency for people to get very cagey about it. They want the VC to sign an NDA, for example. That's a big mistake. That actually makes you look very naive and somewhat unserious to a venture capitalist when you ask for an NDA. Instead, what you want to do is you want to get as much feedback as you can about your idea. And I'll actually go a step further. If you actually can talk to a potential competitor in the space about your idea, you should do so. You'd be surprised at what you learn. And, you know, it can be a little bit intimidating, certainly, when you go and you talk to a venture capital, you know, set of partners, and you tell them your idea, and they tell you, oh, you know what? That sounds exactly like something I just heard about. Have you heard of company X? And you have not heard of Company X, right? This is a terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach when that situation unfolds. But after that meeting, you go home, you look up the company, and you realize, ooh, that is quite a bit like what we're doing. But actually, we're doing something that I think is better, or I just got an idea of how we need to refine what we're building. And then the next time you have a meeting and that Company X comes up, you've got a very clear description of what the differentiation is. So you really want to open your idea up to all that sunlight so that it evolves quickly. So this is a slightly different view, different data, different time frame, which is why the numbers are different. You can see there's a pretty high probability, relatively speaking, something like 9% at the pre-Series A to get an M&A. So that, that number cumulatively goes up to about 16% in this data set. I think that by the time you get to that Series E, most companies no longer exist. And I think the good case here, many of them have been— I mean, relatively many have been actually acquired. After that stage, you're either going to fail, I guess, or IPO. But the numbers are fairly small. So I'm going to cover this talk in 3 stages, and each one having sort of 3 main ideas. There's a lot I'm not going to cover. But one of the most important bits of advice here is about raising early rounds. And there's often a question I get, should I raise a seed or a pre-seed or a Series A? And I think it really depends. You know, how, how hot is the space? What's the product category? These days, I think if you're doing something in generative AI, you're probably going to get shuttled into doing a Series A. And that might not always be appropriate. And also, how good is the team? How credible? What have they built before? How good is the— how far along, really, is the product or idea? Is there, for example, an open-source product already made on GitHub with a lot of stars? Those kinds of things will really, I think, set the tone of what sort of stage the venture capitalists think that you're in. With seeds, though, they can be extremely expensive if it's a priced round. So I, I will often advise people, try to do a SAFE instead of a seed. Actually getting a priced round has some advantages. But because of the high degree of risk at that early stage, venture capitalists are often expecting more than 20%. And you're going to have to eventually do a Series A. And that's going to be another something like 20%, because the risk is still perceived to be quite high. Again, depending on how hot the product category is, you can control that dilution. That actually brings me to the next point, which I don't think that it makes a lot of sense to optimize for dilution early on. Instead, what I think people should be looking at is just how much money do you really need in order to get to that stage where you get product-market fit. That's the thing you can really trade with a venture capitalist. Typically, that's what they're looking for. They have a sort of percentage in mind, and they're not really very— concerned with how much money is going to go into it. So you can say, well, if you want 20% or whatever it is, we can get there, but let's raise $10 million instead of $7 million or $5 million, and I just need a higher valuation to do that. And that's typically where you're going to get some, some trade there. I think the other really big thing about these early rounds that you should really optimize for is the credibility of the venture capitalists. So it's the firm, and it's also the partner. Because this is going to be a— what I've been told— a lifelong marriage. And that has proven true in my case. That very first investor we had, he's on the board, and he's been an incredible asset to the company through all of the stages. You know, that credibility actually is crucial in the subsequent rounds of funding. It's crucial for the early employees that you hire who are risk takers and actually pay attention to the signal of what the venture capital is, that early lead investor. And also this is true of early customers that are kind of in the innovator, early adopter stage of the crossing the chasm. And they also look, is it Sequoia? That's a really good signal to these kinds of early assets to the company that are crucial to success. So really, if you, if you have your choice here, optimize for the credibility, the intelligence of that initial investor because they're actually going to be an advisor, and that's what you want to select for. And also, if you have a lot of interest, great thing, great thing for negotiation. Don't think that means you just have to settle for the, the, the best, most optimized lead investor and the rest are going to go somewhere else. You can actually, in that sort of a situation, dictate the terms, and you can create a sausage that includes all of the investors that are interested. You give them your lead. As long as you meet sort of their minimum requirement, they're often happy to have other relatively high-tier investors as part of the larger deal. And that actually means you've got more networks, which is always a good thing. It's actually an expectation on the part of those additional investors that they're going to potentially lead subsequent rounds. So you might even have that lead or a price setter built in to your cap table. And also you block competitors. So the extent that you've got a lot of good VCs that want to be part of it, that's going to give you, I think, a bigger advantage as you're going to market. So I want to touch a little bit more on this idea of just ideas and what else is involved here. So, you know, the idea is worthless on its own. I made that point. But execution is everything. So there's blood, sweat, and tears, all of that sweat equity you put in. But then there's this point that you need to work smarter, not harder. And the execution, if it's sort of blind, you're going to end up with a sort of local maximum, if even that. Instead, what you need to do is you need to inform all of that effort with a visionary belief in what you're doing. And that's what you bring as a founder. It's more even than the execution. Do you have belief in what you're doing that sort of borders on foreknowledge? That's what you have to cultivate and even believe. So the second big point here is culture. And this is an intangible, and it's a difficult thing to get right. But it's something that you have to establish early in your journey, because it scales with the company, or it doesn't scale with the company. I really learned this lesson the hard way. I worked at Google for about a decade with my co-founders. And after Google, we did a different startup before Cockroach Labs. And it was called Viewfinder. And we thought, because Google had a pretty cool culture, that that would just come along with us, because we were the founders, and we had really absorbed Google's culture. We thought it would just naturally, you know, take shape. That did not happen. In fact, what we ended up with was a culture where everyone worked really hard and then went their separate ways afterwards. And when things stopped working very well for us, and we ran into some significant difficulties, we didn't have those ties, those human connections that really let us kind of run the marathon, get through the hardships, because we believed in each other and we liked each other fundamentally. So that company eventually had an acquihire. We went to Square, and we saw that Square had a pretty— very different culture from Google, but a good culture as well, which we enjoyed. And so when we decided that we were going to even considered doing another startup, which was Cockroach, we actually sat down, we wrote a manifesto on culture before we even incorporated the company, not having to suffer through, you know, one year, two years, three years, or whatever with a culture where people didn't really like each other. And what did we write in that manifesto? It was kind of like a list of things that we were going to do, like intention, the sort of patterns we were going to set. Like we were going to go every year, take the whole company, go to the Caribbean or something like that. Work for a week from there, and just, you know, have fun together. Every Tuesday we went out to dinner. So not all of those ideas scaled, but when you set those early patterns, you attract people. Like, your very website is kind of— you can't help but communicate some of the excitement that you like each other. So then you attract people that care about culture, and then those people start to run with the culture, and they help to evolve it as time goes by. So also equity. This is an important thing. And I think this actually goes very much to the point of building culture. This is a sort of unique, in my experience so far, way to do early equity for employees. But what we decided to do is create a system. And it had some sort of rules of thumb that I'd heard from venture capitalists about how much equity you should give to the early employees. And what we did was we actually made a model. Basically. I'll give you a little bit more details in the next slide. But the idea here was that it would be very open, transparent. And when we explained it to early employees, they'd believe that it was logical, that it was thoughtful, and that the company was being fair. Kind of the thought experiment in our heads was if everyone compared all of their equity and their positions and it was all put into a spreadsheet by, you know, the, the, the most activist of our employees, and people wouldn't have any surprises. It would kind of make sense, or at least it could be defended. And, and also when you're in those early, uh, conversations with employees, this is a good way to cut down on, on the friction that comes from negotiation. So this is sort of how it worked. There's this fall-off, and what you're trying to do is you're trying to balance the risk that earlier employees take with the equity that they're being awarded. And there was a sort of a 1, 1x factor for the very first employee, and then that falls off to about 0.12. And what we are trying to do— this is sort of empirically determined— is say that the first 20 employees of the company would have 10% of the equity. And the next 20 employees would have an additional 5% of the equity. And then the next 40 employees would have an additional 5% of the equity. So there's this sort of exponential fall-off. And what we did is we said that there was a— I think we listed out maybe 12 different employee roles that would be the ones that we really needed in the first 20. From a VP of engineering to, uh, frontend engineers that were relatively junior and everything in between, uh, that at least we knew about at that time. Uh, that list grew quite long over time. Um, what we did is a Monte Carlo simulation. So we just programmed this in and, uh, we ran this 1,000 times. Sometimes the VP engineering would be first, mostly not. Sometimes it'd be a junior employee first, but they had different sort of base equities. And then you apply this falloff. And the Monte Carlo simulation showed that this is very stable, that almost always we were very close to that 10% for the first 20 employees, and then 5% for the next 20, and 5% for the next 40. So that actually worked out well. And we explained this to people. I've actually given this— the spreadsheet for this to many of the companies that I advise. And it worked really well. I think people certainly appreciated this. You don't last with this model for very long. I don't know if we kept it until the 80th employee. you, you find other mechanisms beyond this, but it's a good way to start early. So let's talk about the next stage. So this would be somewhere around B and C. You're kind of at the product market fit and you are getting your early, uh, customers. And, uh, actually the C level, you're starting to find, uh, the repeatability of your sales motion. So this is a question I get a lot, and maybe I'd ask people to raise their hands again. Who's actually doing anything with open source? In their product? Ah, so there's, there, there's some, uh, but I imagine in 2015, if I asked the question, there'd be a lot more. Uh, CockroachDB is an open source product. In 2015, it was kind of inconceivable to think about a database that was very sophisticated that wasn't open source. That seemed like it would be, uh, counterproductive for us. So we started as open source and we had open core is what it's called. So you have an open source core and then you create enterprise features around it. And that sort of protects the business model. Uh, that really got torpedoed by some of the behavior, for example, of AWS early on. Um, what are the benefits of open source? There's a lot of them. Uh, if you have a well-tended open source community, you can have really an asymmetric information advantage, plus you get a lot of, uh, participation from the community so they can contribute new features. They can do bug fixes for you. Uh, they can actually do integrations for the larger ecosystem and even provide support. In sort of a community forum. And they also attract huge players like these. Open source is often what Meta wants and Apple wants and Goldman Sachs, right? Because they want to, uh, reap a lot of benefits without necessarily, uh, you know, paying for the true scale that they're anticipating. Uh, and actually the companies I invest in are usually in the dev tool space or, uh, infrastructure, uh, machine learning, th— those kinds of areas. And everyone in, in those categories at least is, uh, very tempted by the advantages of open source. But there's also extremely significant costs to doing open source. I mentioned before there's some exploitative behavior from the cloud service providers, uh, in particular AWS. And so you have to be very careful about your license if you're doing open source. I would not just have a, a, a very powerful core that, for example, is with the Apache license. That, uh, that's, uh, shown, been shown to be, um, uh, a, a difficult, uh, sort of business model to protect. It's also actually very difficult to manage one of these open source communities. They can be fragile at first and you have to tend them carefully. It actually takes a significant amount of inputs and attention. And these big players I mentioned before, like Apple, they actually sometimes just want support and they don't want your enterprise features because they really are trying to control their costs at, at massive scales. Uh, or they actually demand huge amounts of leverage over your product roadmap. And sometimes depending on the product category, that can mean each one of these big players, even though they're trying to give you a lot of money, wants to pull your product in a different direction. But the really worst thing about trying to do open source, uh, and, and also of course trying to build a cloud service, which you fundamentally need to do, we're at the SaaS conference here, uh, in 2023, is that you're actually gonna build two different companies, much less two different products. And there's, uh, fundamentally different features. There are different security requirements, different contract— contracting and procurement between these. You're gonna have different roles. You're probably gonna have different ideal customer profiles. It's a lot to keep in everyone's head in a company. Much better to have a more, uh, narrow definition of all of these things. So I'd say that if you're starting from scratch in 2023, you should only ever consider doing both of these things at the same time. If your ICP that, that you just believe is really the, the, the, the sort of narrow set of potential customers out there that really need and want your product, if they're not willing to use a cloud service yet, then I'd say you probably need to start with open source, or at least that's a, a reasonable thing to do. Otherwise, the reality is that cloud services have a faster time to value, which is exactly why open source killed closed source. Now it's the, It's the cloud service that's providing that, that faster route cuz you don't have to learn how to run the software yourself and train that, uh, capability and expertise in-house. And also cloud services are a much better business model. I mean much, much better because you're actually able to capture a lot more of the value as the usage scales. When a customer's self-managing your product, whether it's open source or closed source, uh, you don't get access to all of the potential benefits of having economies of scale, for example, the people that run the, the system or all of the networking and hardware and cloud costs that are associated with running the product. So you actually, you're attaching yourself to a much larger chunk of revenue when you have cloud and it ends up being much more scalable and less discount. So in this stage, you're gonna have to build a go-to-market function from scratch, which can be actually pretty challenging if you're a technical founder. 'cause this is something you might not be very familiar with. I certainly wasn't. And, you know, maybe the first thing to really, I think the most important thing to try to get right, although it's definitely an evolution, is what is your ideal customer profile? So it's very rare that you're gonna be the first product in any kind of category. So to beat all of the incumbents that are there, you have to be 10 times better. It's almost impossible to be 10 times better at everything that an involved product category has. but you can be 10 times better if you define a niche in that product category that you can dominate. So where can you find the 10x improvement? And, and ideally that niche is something that is ascendently valuable. So it's a small part of the, the, uh, larger TAM, but you believe that over time it's gonna become far more important. So this is gonna feel very constrained, right? When you had that initial pitch deck to the investors, you were talking about this massive TAM you were going to attack. Uh, but the reality is that this is a good thing cuz it allows you to crawl and then to walk and then to run. And that progression is extremely valuable for you cuz the narrower your niche, it's easier to define who that ideal customer is. And that means you have better messaging. You can actually prioritize your roadmap so you're directly suiting the needs of, of this ideal customer profile. I think one piece of advice I got early on around marketing, but it applies in, in, in many different domains, is, is really if you're building or trying to talk to everyone, you're not building or talking really to anyone. That's like a, that's, that's a good thing to wrap your head around. Uh, when you, when you know that customer, you can build for them, you can find them, you can communicate with an extremely resonant message, and then you have to practice discipline cuz there's always gonna be a company that comes around that totally busts out of your ICP. Or kind of that niche that you're trying to define. And boy, it looks very lucrative. And I'm only saying this and giving this advice because I've made the mistake countless times. It's so tempting. But every time you do it, you're really bifurcating your efforts, or maybe quite a bit more than that. And that is a very difficult road to go down and to come back from, which you inevitably will. So in these early go-to-market, the founder, CEO, founders, everyone should be involved in, in, in this, all the stages of the process. You need to get out there and understand from the customers what their pain points are. You want to, if you're in those early conversations and you're just talking about your product and selling it and talking about all its features and, and greatness, you're doing it wrong. Uh, you need to be actively listening to what that customer is telling you. And ultimately, you want to be able to walk away if they're not telling you something that actually fits in. You don't want to make a square peg into the round hole. That's very counterproductive. So when you're at this stage, you may do a little bit of this yourself. But when you actually start getting some customers and you feel that you're starting to get a product that is matching with the needs, you're going to want to find an early sales leader. You should probably call this a head of sales. Don't hire a VP of sales. You want to find somebody that actually has done something quite a bit like this stage recently and was successful. This is exploratory motion, and you want someone that's going to roll up their sleeves and actually do the selling. I'll just caution this. It can seem like selling's something that you can do. You understand the product best, but there's a lot of sales skill in this process. So it's kind of like hiring— assuming that if you're not an engineer, you could actually be the VP of Engineering or something like that. It's a mistake I've seen happen occasionally. You really do need to find somebody that's good at this. And often, if you're selling a technical product, they're going to come with a sales engineer. They kind of work as a pair. And that person is really going to intuitively explore the space, find out who will buy your product, how much they're going to spend on it. And actually, most of sales is human relationships, especially if you're talking about an enterprise product of some sort, or you're trending in that direction. And these people are extremely good at this relationship building and actually being so persistent to close one of these deals. It's often tens, hundreds of calls over the course of the cycle. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] And finally, a little bit about board meetings. So I mentioned that this early board is going to be composed typically of investors. I'm sure that's what everyone in this room has found. And that's why it's so important to really select for intelligence and credibility in those early stages, because these VCs, they're actually really good pattern matchers. They've got a huge amount of information. About the larger ecosystem. And in that board meeting, what they can steer you on, I think most successfully, is what are the common patterns of failures and successes? Like, what do they see even within your space? They have intel on your peers and competitors, and they can tell you, does this look good or does this not look good? How's your monthly burn? Is this kind of unhealthy? Uh, what are the expectations for growth? When do you need to raise again? All these kinds of things. That are going to be very difficult, especially if you're a first-time founder, to have any idea on your own. So they also typically don't have operational experience. So they don't have much of it, or it's been a long time. So as your board meetings happen quarter in, quarter out, you need to think about when the right time is to add an independent that's going to start bringing more operational experience to your board. So the best thing about board meetings, I think, is it's an opportunity to sort of stop and take a step back and say, what, what are we doing here? So even if you're not getting necessarily useful advice in a particular board meeting, so this is very true, I think, at the earlier stages where you're just trying to build the product. This is an opportunity to, uh, document, to verbalize what you're working on. So it's really important to set some goals even at the early stages. And you will kind of want to put, if you can, a bit of a, a quantitative metric into, uh, these goals should probably have somewhere between 5 and 10, uh, maybe less in earlier stages and more in later stages. And you set sort of an annual target. So the longer term view, and also you want to break that down into quarterly milestones. And then in each of these board meetings, you create a briefing document. Shouldn't be more than like 6 pages, but it should be an analysis in the first section of what happened in the past quarter. What were the goals we set? How did we measure up against those goals? And what are the hypotheses that we have for why we succeeded or failed to reach those goals? And that should actually be very much informed by the actions you set out to take. And then the next section is the plan for the quarter ahead. And it's sort of similar, but it's, here's what we're going to do. What are the major resource expenditures we're going to contemplate in order to actually meet the next quarter's goals? Quarter's goals. And when you, when you look back on these and you have them quarter after quarter after quarter for years, this is an incredible sort of documentation of the journey you've taken as a company. And it can be great for successive rounds of funding, for due diligence. And when you hire like a very seasoned executive, this is an amazing thing to, to, to give to them because it lets them catch up on the journey of the company. And the last year of those board briefing docs can be really pivotal to their understanding. And you don't want to hide anything in these. This is critically important because you want that new investor or that new executive that comes in to understand what they're getting into, to be excited about the problems. So now we're talking about Series C and beyond. So there's just an evolution of the different— aspects, the board, the leadership, the customers. I'd say that the critical thing in this stage is to really create a sense in the entire company that your customer's success is fundamentally your success. It's always going to be your most important responsibility to inspire a vision internally and externally as the CEO and founder. And that is vital fundamentally, uh, to making your customers successful and understanding what the, the, the problems are that you're solving for them. So a little bit more about the, the sales function. Uh, you know, I, I mentioned before that early on it's very intuitive, but eventually it becomes engineering. So that early go-to-market leader that rolls up their sleeves, they probably won't scale very far with you. Maybe a year, and that's actually pretty good. Uh, next you're gonna look for a leader that's more of a manager. It's gonna, uh, be able to, to, to do the early scaling of the organization. And it's actually a really common mistake to believe that a really successful account executive is gonna make a good VP of sales, uh, or, uh, sales manager. Uh, these are two extremely different things. Uh, one is coaching and one is, uh, being an independent contributor. Uh, The experience that I've had is that there's a new skill set, and there's a real sort of fork in the road that people take in a sales career. And you want to find someone that actually is a coach that's going to reinforce behaviors, hygiene in Salesforce, the active listening skills that every sales process needs to start with, qualification so you walk away from deals that aren't good. The negotiation processes, account mapping, uh, and, and these are, these are specific skills that need to be learned and they're actually continuously reinforced. It's not just a bootcamp that a new seller comes into. This is a constant process of reinforcing these skills, listening to the chorus or gong calls. Uh, so you need to find somebody that has that expertise and that's how you start to scale. When you get to about 10 to 20 sellers, then it starts to change into more of a revenue function. And there's a lot of components to a good revenue function, but the single most important one is a healthy and, and sort of advanced, sophisticated operations function. So you can call it sales ops or revenue ops, but, uh, a good one, a high-performing one means that you have very precisely defined segmentation. So you're, uh, very careful about how many accounts each rep has. And when, when you start to make success in an account, you actually decrease the number of accounts even your best reps have so they go deep in them. Uh, that's just one way to do it, but there needs to be a, a, a process. And you actually have a good forecasting methodology where you're producing accurate, uh, predictions in terms of how each quarter's going to go and, and total visibility so that you can slice and dice all of that segmentation across your customer set and, and see exactly how the business is going. So this is a very high level. I think the most important thing to realize here is that sales ceases to be an intuitive process, and it actually requires that everything cascades in the organization. So there's tight process, accurate forecast, and complete accountability for everyone. [SPEAKING CHINESE] So I mentioned this before. The biggest aspect of the Series C and beyond is to really own your customer's success. Uh, when they're failing, you're failing. And so you're, you're really wanting to understand exactly what problems you're solving for them. Uh, you want to be inspired by your customers. There's really a lot of ways, and I'll just mention 3, that this essential aspect of, of building a business is obscured. Uh, one big one is short-term thinking in sales. And, and this is where the, that sales leader and those sales managers are critically important. Because you want to walk away from deals where your product isn't right for the customer. It does not matter getting a booking, an account booking. Every customer is trying to buy. Like, you need to get them successful with your product before it's actually revenue, especially before it's recurring revenue. Uh, and you also need to make sure that you're not overselling. This is a common thing. Reps, of course, want to supersize their deals and get a big payout in a quarter. Uh, but overselling, uh, leads to more churn and churn is, is, is, is really a, a difficult thing to deal with, uh, in, in building a company. Instead, you wanna undersell and overdeliver wherever possible. Engineering is actually another common area where customer success is, is I think, um, you know, horribly underrepresented. And this is almost by design. You put product managers as a sort of layer of indirection between your engineers and your customers. But the reality is that, uh, it's not fun for engineers if all they hear about is when the customers are having a big failure. Uh, you wanna actually show them the success of the customers. And actually engineers, if they're building in a silo, they build incoherent user experiences for your customers. You want engineers to watch your customers with the friction they're having, where they're failing as they're trying to use the product. And also bottoms-up creativity, which is actually what engineers can be amazing at if they're enabled. That's actually fundamentally enabled with customer empathy. So they have to see these customers, they have to hear these customers. And then last, certainly not least, as the founders, CEO, you need to, uh, avoid getting buried in the increasing complexity of scaling the organization. You need to be out there on these customer calls, early ones, as well as of course the later ones when you're meeting the economic buyers. Uh, you know, this is, I mentioned this before, but your single most important role as a CEO is to sell that vision, and it's internal and it's external. And you really can't do that unless you're understanding your customers. So this starts with the CEO, and it has to cascade to every single employee. And the customers feel the difference. They feel it in terms of how everyone talks about it, how they talk to them, even when they're talking to support. And even when you have egregious product failures, and believe me, when you're building a relational operational database, uh, they can be pretty egregious. Every one of those has the seed of a stronger, more trusting relationship with that customer. So you need to embrace even the failure. And, and the way you do that is you need to believe, and you need to make everyone in your organization believe, that when the customer is failing, you're failing, and that you need to make, uh, your number one priority is ultimately to make them successful. Customers sense that. And so just a little bit about the changing role as you're scaling here. Someone told me early on that there's 3 jobs for the CEO, and this is true when you're Series A and is true when you're Series F. You got to keep money in the bank, you have to sell the vision internally and externally, and you have to fire yourself by hiring people to do jobs better than you when you're not keeping money in the bank and and selling the vision. So, you know, anyone who has kids here, the job of a parent is always to guide your kids, even when they're adults, through life successfully. And that never ends. But when you have bigger kids, you've got bigger problems. And this is exactly how it feels when you're scaling the company. And at a certain point, you get to a stage where you're not doing any actual work anymore. At least that's what it can feel like. You may have started your career as an engineer or as a— product manager. Those are common sort of founder roles, uh, and you get pretty far removed from that. You never get to, you know, roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Some CEOs actually create a week of coding in the year or in the quarter. Uh, so there's ways that you can keep some of that muscle, uh, around from atrophying and also just sort of satisfying an itch that you have. But ultimately, and you have to just take this to heart, Your job is to be the team lead for the executive team. That's your job. And the executive team's job is to define the strategy, to determine the actions which are going to implement the strategy, to apportion resources to achieve the actions, to drive accountability for them, and then to measure success against the strategy and iterate. That's what the executive team does, and you are the leader of that. So you can't get— I know this from my own personal experience. We were building a product before we had customers for about 3 years. And I was programming. And that was somewhat appropriate at that stage. But there came a point where I got advised through people in the company and through the investors, listen, Spencer, you need to stop programming. I know you think you're good at it, but this is not your job anymore. And that was a difficult transition, but it was necessary. So that's a good piece of advice. So 3 takeaways here. Seek advisors, not just investors. These are partners that are going to take you from seed to scale. And it's really important when you choose that you're prioritizing, I think, intelligence. Just raw intelligence is a great one. The experience they have and the reputation they have at picking winners. Culture is a true key. You're going to be running a marathon here, and this is the foundation for it. It takes you through the ups and downs, those human relationships. Treat everyone with respect. I think that's the critical aspect of culture. There's all the little things you do that bring people together, and you want to set that time aside. But respect in an organization is really everything. And one way to do that, of course, is transparency through that and fairness through the Equity Awards. And I said that that does evolve over time. You'll have a chance to continue. And finally, stay curious. And this is really how, by staying close to your customers, close to your product, you inspire that vision internally and externally. And that actually helps you evolve towards your true north, which ultimately is successful customers that are using your product and expanding their usage. Great. Well, thank you, everyone.