The Path to a Billion Dollars: How to Create Multi-Revenue Streams with Bill.com CRO Tom Clayton

Hi, I'm Tom Clayton, CRO of Bill.com, and I'm here today to talk to you about the path to $1 billion. Specifically, I'm going to focus on the $100 million to $1 billion. The path, obviously, from $0 to $100 million is very different. Usually at $0 to $100 million, you might have a couple of sales motions, maybe a few marketing channels. It's much simpler. You focus. But then after, sometimes, sometime around $100 million, you tend to start hitting diminishing returns and have to diversify out of those sales motions and add more marketing channels and so forth. So I'm going to focus on that. I've been fortunate enough in my career to catch lightning in a bottle 3 times now. So I will reference a lot of those past experiences. It is an amalgamation of my career. It is only 3 data points, so take with it what you want. You can take it with a grain of salt. Some of it might be applicable to you, some of it might not. Different industries. And it— some of it I'll be transparent with, some of it I will white label just to protect the innocent, and some of it might be painfully obvious, and I apologize in advance if that's the case. So without further ado, let's jump into it. I've broken this into— sort of 3 sections. The first section, what I tried to do is go back and just think about, of the 3 different times, you know, once with an enterprise software company, once with a B2C and a B2C2B company, and now with, with Build.com and a fintech SaaS company, I tried to think about what were the commonalities amongst them. They were all SaaS in a way, they were all subscription revenue, but, They were very different businesses. And so I tried to think of what were the common levers that I used, what were the common themes that I saw that knew I was inside the tornado at the time, and what were sort of lessons learned along the way. And so that's the way I've structured it. Key levers for growth. I'm just going to go into the ones that I'm familiar with. There's lots of other levers you can use out there. And some of you will likely be using a lot of these already. Then the clear signs of success. Some of these are, I admit, painfully obvious, but I just wanted to state the obvious and talk a little bit about what I've seen along these different times where I've seen that sort of hypergrowth cycle. And then just some lessons learned along the way. I just learned that I have a little more time than I thought, so we should be able to get through that. And let's go ahead and jump into it. 5 key growth levers. So I tried to sum up some of the things that I've seen. I tend to run the organization much like Moneyball, you know, Billy Beane, everything on analytics and numbers. I know Marc Robichet was up here speaking. He wrote the book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. Big believer in it. His philosophy and mine are very tightly aligned. His is focusing more on that $0 to $100 million, mine more on the $100 to $1 billion. but the same principles apply and run everything by the numbers. So when you, you come in, say you're at $100 million in revenue, uh, $50 million, $650 million, whatever it is, just you're at some sort of scale, right? You got product market fit, customers are buying. Um, if you're focused on enterprise, I'm gonna talk mostly to B2B. Uh, if you're focused on enterprise, maybe you have 500 customers. If you're focused on mid-market, maybe you have, 5,000 customers. If you're focused on SMB, you might have 50,000 customers. So very different problems. But the one thing that's common across all of those is the lowest hanging fruit to grow revenue beyond that is squeezing more lemon juice out of those lemons, no pun intended. But, and here's some ways I've done that in the past. Subscription pricing, obviously most of you are on subscription pricing, but the more you can get into pricing in general and just dive into it, You know, Bill.com's been able to grow its revenues just by increasing price, very basic stuff, but then you can do more things around tiering pricing. Basically, whatever you can do to try to capture more of the value derived and the willingness to pay of the different segments of customers you're going after, the more you can maximize revenue. Premium services, a lot of you guys do this, but usually has a huge impact, especially if they're high value-added services. Adjacent products, So if you could think of other products, preferably going into the same buyer. So if you're selling into the CFO or the CPO or the CRO, the more adjacent products you can load in there. I mean, think about Salesforce is a great example. They sell into the CRO, right? And they're always loading in more and more products or the CMO, more and more products that they can sell into you. And you can do it organically by launching your own products or inorganically. And I'll get into that a little bit more later. Transaction-based pricing. I admit I knew very little about this one before I came to Bill.com and entered the fintech world, but this is a beautiful way to grow revenue. If you looked at our quarter last quarter, we have now surpassed our revenue, subscription pricing revenue has now been surpassed by transaction-based pricing revenue. We just acquired a company called Divvy. They're here if you haven't seen them. Phenomenal company, phenomenal business model, And it's 100% free product to the customer, and they make money off the transaction. So as you— the different types of transactions, depending on what you're using to pay. So if you're using credit card, which has a much higher take rate, which is what the Divi team leverages, there's call it 200 to 300 basis points depending on your credit card deal there to capture. You subtract out costs like rewards and fraud and so forth. And you usually have a really good chunk of change at the bottom line in terms of revenue from that model, so much more that I guarantee that Divi or other companies like them make more money in that revenue model than they would if they tried to just charge a flat subscription fee. And so it's sort of a win-win for them and the customer. And then monetizing all sides of the network. So example here, My last company, Houzz, it's a large online platform for home remodeling. We had a triple-sided network. So we had homeowners and clients on one end. We had the professionals, SMBs, the architects, interior designers, GCs on one end. And then on the other end, we had the brands and the manufacturers of goods. And we figured out ways to monetize them all. For the consumers, it was e-commerce and selling them maybe sometimes online design services and other things. On the pro side, we offered 'em a bunch of SaaS services, very lucrative, very predictable revenue models that were specific to that vertical. And for the brands and the manufacturers, we offered ad services and other premium services associated with the marketplace. So just think about how you can monetize all the different sides of the network if you have a multifaceted network. And then lastly, I'll get more into this specific to what we do at Build.com, but white labeling the product, Sometimes it's a snafu, but once you get past $100 million, it's definitely an area where you can really scale revenue really fast if you do it with the right players. And I don't mean doing it to everybody, being more targeted. Don't spray and pray. Be more of a sniper and focus in on the big guys that'll really move the needle for you. So second one, and usually when you start the company, you start with a horizontal play or a vertical play. Uh, Bill.com was a horizontal play from the beginning, going after a very wide, wide swath of companies, whereas Houzz was very much a vertical play in the housing industry. At Bill.com, you know, I think getting to $100 million, $200 million with the horizontal play is very doable, but when you step back and you look at our customer base, we're very strong in the tech vertical with companies like you, very strong in nonprofit, very strong in healthcare. And we started to think if we want, as we cross the chasm and we want to go deeper in these areas and get past early adopters into pragmatists and late adopters, we really have to have a go-to-market skin that's more vertical, whether that's marketing messaging for that vertical, whether it's marketing into the channels where those, you know, who goes to an SMB magazine? No, they go to the vertical that they're in or the industry they're in. They go to conferences in a vertical that they're in. So thinking about a go-to-market skin that's verticalized from messaging standpoint, from customer references, even segmenting customer sales teams so that they're calling specific verticals, just makes you much more effective. You're not even changing the product. Down the road, you could change the product and decide to go more vertical, but in the beginning, it could just be a facade, and that, that will really resonate well with customers. I'm also a big fan of efficient channels. I don't pay much attention to them on the road from $0 to $100 million. That's where you really control your own destiny. You have a direct sales force. If you don't have a direct sales force, then you're really dependent on someone else for your success. If you want to control your own sales— control your own destiny, you either have a great self-serve platform or you have your own sales force. Past $100 million, people will start listening to you. You've got real product fit and demand, and then there's efficient channels out there. There's lots of them. I'll just list the ones that I've leveraged. So you can look at other like companies in similar space, other SaaS companies, and bundle the products together to go to market together. Obviously, once again, a no-brainer, and lots of you guys are probably trying that. It works if you're like-sized companies. and you have a very complimentary offering that's selling into the same buyer persona. Um, clear value-added upsell for large platforms. I'll give you an example in the bill.com context. Uh, we are AP and AR automation, totally un— unsexy space. Uh, but it happens to be growing extremely fast, and I'll talk a little bit more later about that. But we are a bolt-on to the quick the NetSuits, the Intacs, all the accounting software in the back office, and it's a great upsell for them. They share in the unit economics. We obviously get great distribution from it, and so it's, it's a great channel partner where we can be a part of their platform. They make money, we make money. And then other massive service providers that could white label your product for us and in our industry, the example of this would be the large financial services companies. Companies, the Wells Fargos, B of As, Chase, you name it. They want to offer this to their SMB client base. They want it to be under their brand. These are $100+ million deals. They're very big, so they're very lucrative. Obviously, it's like an enterprise deal. It takes a long time. It's a year to 18-month sales cycle. But who wouldn't do that for a $100+ million deal? It makes a lot of sense. It just takes patience. And then there's another area that I've explored, and I would say I've had a few strikes and a few home runs off of it. But when you're looking at, get creative and think about adjacent players, maybe not in the same industry, but serving the same customer base. So we have a few hundred thousand SMB customers if you add up our recent acquisitions. and if we are, um, thinking about other large players who have large SMB bases, it's Amazon, Shopify. I mean, there's a bunch of 'em out there, and if we could think of how, how to add value and offer something to their customer base, it's a win-win for both them and us as well. Uh, and then a slightly more controversial one is, is VARs or SIs. I think we've all been burned by them. Some of us had some success with them. I think the reason most are burned by them is just because they try to go after them too early. They're like little kids on a soccer field. They go where the ball is. And if you're just starting out or you're sub-$100 million, you're not the ball yet. And so, you know, once you cross a certain threshold where their clients are coming to them and asking about you and there's a real market pool, then they listen. Before that, they might be just grin shagging you, for lack of a better term. And so I would really focus on the VARs post $100 million because then there's gonna be real market pull. You know, there's been a lot of companies that have built successful businesses off the back of VARs. In our space, you got the NetSuits, the Intacs, Microsoft has done it for last 30+ years. And so Adobe's done it. So the VARs are valuable, but they're just, It's all about timing when it comes to VARs, SIs as well, even more so. And then last but not least, this is obvious, we all think about it, although surprisingly I've lived, you know, half of my life abroad and when I came back to the Valley, I was surprised how little people think about international expansion. And when we think about international expansion in the Valley, we often say, oh yeah, UK or Australia or Canada. It's, or sometimes we'll get really aggressive and we'll say, let's go after Europe. We rarely think, I spent 10 years of my life in Asia, massive markets, diversified markets, a lot of other opportunities that are there from China to India to Southeast Asia as a whole, Japan still. So it depends if you're a B2B SaaS, if you're a B2C company with strong global network effects or feel fear of local copycats taking over the market, you might move a lot more aggressively internationally. That was Houzz, that was Airbnb, that was Uber. Less is the case, less so is the case in the B2B world. Maybe if you're enterprise, you'll be forced to think internationally for those big deals earlier on. If you're SMB, you tend to go later. And so this is gonna be in the $100 million to billion range, but it's gonna vary on where on that spectrum you go. Maybe if you're enterprise B2B, it might be before $100 million. Maybe, and I don't count Canada, UK, and Australia. So I'm talking real international, not English-speaking international. OK, so now this is the section that probably has some of the most painfully obvious points, but I'll explain why. First, it's probably 3 decades-plus old where Geoffrey Moore wrote his book Crossing the Chasm. It never grows old with me. I go back and I read it, and there's those 4 points, and every time I've been inside that tornado, which was the subsequent book, I look at those and I say, like even Build.com today, I look at it and say, demonstrated market leadership, yep. Dominate 1 to 2, 3 or 4 vertical markets, yep. Competitors set you as a target all over the web. References becoming a part of the decision-making process. Absolutely. You read through that and you're like, OK, we're crossing the chasm. We're hitting the pragmatists. And that in itself is bringing— is just increasing the TAM you're going after. And then this one is often overlooked, but when I look back at the 3 times that I've been on this journey, there's always been a massive seismic shift that's really changed the game. Obviously, we all just lived through one, and we're still living through one with masks and COVID tests, we did work from home. The pandemic had massive tailwinds for many of us and massive headwinds for others. In the Build.com case, it was a massive tailwind, and I'll tell you why. All of a sudden, the world shuts down, everyone goes to work from home. We in the SaaS industry for the last 2 decades have been focused predominantly on the front office, CRM, marketing automation, everything that touches the customer. We've largely ignored the back office. And you go home, we're all working from home, and unless some of you guys are in finance, you didn't see this pain, but the controller's then still driving to the office every day under lockdown, getting the mail, driving home, buys a scanner on the way home, has to order on Amazon because everything's closed down, He's scanning all the bills, emailing them out one by one to the people that need to approve them, making a spreadsheet to track it all and what's approved, buying a printer to print the checks, printing the checks, driving over every other day to the CFO and the CEO's house to have them sign the checks. And I mean, it was such an antiquated process. You know, once the tide went out, everyone saw what was under the ocean and they said like, we just, there's gotta be a better way to do this. And so, It probably accelerated our market by 3 to 4, 5 years. I mean, your guess is as good as mine, but everyone's paying attention to the back office now so they could be more efficient and we can work in this distributed work-from-home environment. And so that's the build.com case. And Houzz, Houzz is born right after the housing market crisis where everyone stopped buying new houses and everyone wanted to renovate their current home. And so we had this huge house— housing renovation boom and Houzz was built on the back of that. My first company, BEA, Java software, Java took off, the internet took off. It was a seismic shift in the way everyone thought about things. And so there's always gonna be something, maybe not always, but 9 times outta 10, there's gonna be something that really sort of changes, it changes the rules of the game that allows you to accelerate from that $100 million to a billion. OK, I know this on first glance looks like no duh, really. Accelerating revenue growth. And what I mean by this is it's very rare that you get to $100 million, or in our case, you get to become a public company and your revenue acceler— the growth rate accelerates after that. Not the revenue continues to grow. The growth rate itself continues to accelerate. If you look at our last 4 quarters since we've been public, Every quarter it's accelerated in terms of growth. It's rare because law of large numbers, it just gets harder and harder to grow. But when you're firing all cylinders, adding a portfolio of different channels and they're very efficient, your LTV to CACs are so high that you can just pour more money into it, you will see accelerating revenue growth. And that's a very clear sign that something's going right. And not anyone can grow, not anyone, but a lot of people can grow past $100 million, but to grow past $100 million and then get that hockey stick, that, that's a tough thing to do. Am I going too fast? Okay, sorry, I talk fast. So next is increased revenue retention, often in the Valley called net revenue retention. A lot of early SaaS companies focus on it. VCs focus on it. I've seen inflated net revenue retention numbers all the time. Someone comes to me like, oh, I've got 190%, 150%, 180% net revenue retention. Great. And then I start diving into the details with them and it's like, yeah, we just did a deal with Facebook for $200,000 and it's easily a $20 million customer in Facebook. But what they're doing is they're hunting for logos, big logos, which is great. And then they're selling them to their actual capacity later. And so it's great net revenue retention. It's a land and expand model, right? But it's a lot harder when you're at scale and you have sales teams that are selling those customers, especially in SMB where, you know, there's a specific amount you can sell and you can't go far above that. And then to grow the revenue on top of that, that's a lot more of a challenging problem. Or even the enterprise, once you've grown that customer to a certain scale, growing revenue from there on a per customer basis is a lot more difficult. And so obviously, you gotta control the logo churn. So keep that above 80% if possible, and there's lots of levers to do that. And then grow revenue, expand revenue beyond that, and I'll talk about some different— I've already talked about a bunch of ways to do that, but I'll talk about some others. And then organic and inorganic fuel. Yeah, I love cars, and so I thought a car would be a good analogy. Who knows what a Dodge Challenger Demon is? 800-horsepower car comes with one seat standard. If you want the other seats, it's a dollar each. Obviously they don't ship it with just one seat. It's a marketing ploy, a great marketing ploy. If you're able to find one of these on the lots, give me a call because I haven't seen one in over a year. They'll have a $50,000 markup on MSRP. So it's a $90,000 MSRP car. You're paying $140,000 if you want this car, if you can find it. You can get one level down. You can get the Dodge Challenger SRT for about $50,000. You can pay about $20,000 for all the aftermarket parts that will make this as fast as a Demon. So for $70,000, you can get the same car that would cost you $140,000, and you can find that car on every lot in the Bay Area. And so I think about this the same way I think about inorganic and organic growth. Like we at Bill.com, we've just went out and started acquiring companies like Divvy, like Invoice2go, perfect complements. We have a customer base going into, I think we had 120,000 customers. Not only do we add more customers, but we cross-sell their products to our customers. They cross-sell our products to their customers. It's perfect, the same buyer persona, et cetera. I first did this playbook way back when at a company called BA Systems. Is anyone here familiar with BA Systems or am I dating myself? All right, so BA Systems back in the day, dot-com 1.0, was the fastest software company to hit $1 billion in revenue. It took us about 2.5 years, skyrocket. It was a great ride. Oracle later bought it for like $8.5 billion after it dropped from a $20+ billion market cap. When the dot-com boom crashed. But what we did, we joked BEA stood for Built Entirely on Acquisitions. We just acquired companies by the dozens. We had a channel and we dominated all the largest enterprises, whether it was AT&Ts and Verizons and telcos, JPMorgans and B of As on the banking side. You know, we dominated the sort of IT spend of those large enterprise customers. And then we would go out and buy other products and plug them into the channel. So we would take a Verizon or a Chase from a $2 million account to a $5 million account to a $10 million account to— a lot of them were like $30 million accounts when Oracle acquired us. So it's a tried and true method. Oracle has done it for years. Salesforce is doing it now in the latest iteration. The more you can acquire those products— and yes, it's always going to be cheaper to build. Your VP of engineering, your CTO, Oh, I could build that. Just give me 20 heads and blah. It's time to market. It's customer base. It's so much more than just what's the cost to build. And so we've really leaned forward, and I've really leaned forward everywhere I've gone on adding inorganic growth to fuel that path from specifically from $100 million to $1 billion. Before $100 million, it's just a distraction. All right, so to sum up the first two sections, pursuing a path to the perfect 10, These are some of the levers that I've leveraged. Like I said, it's just my perspective. It's just 3 data points. So take with it— hopefully there's 1 or 2 nuggets in there that's valuable to each of you. And I apologize if I totally wasted your time on this. But diverse revenue models, trying to squeeze more lemon juice out of the lemon, Horizontal versus vertical and thinking about how to maybe pivot slightly to one or the other. Looking at different efficient channels out there and getting creative. Leverage reseller channels if it's applicable in your space. And look at international expansion, but do it when the timing is right for your business. I'll give you an example right now. Bill.com. It's almost, outside of one recent acquisition, it's almost 100% domestic. We have, depending on how you count it, if you count all our acquisitions, yeah, maybe we have 300,000 customers. There's 6 million SMBs in the US alone, 30 million if you count sole props, which a large part of that 300,000 is. So it's a distraction for us to go international right now. Whereas Houzz, which was both a B2B and B2C play, we had a ton of copycats and we didn't have the luxury to sit around and wait for the hows of China and the hows of Russia and the hows of India to— we had to go and go quickly. And so there we were launching— I was launching 6 countries every 6 months and doing them waves of 6 months. And so it just depends on your business and sort of the competitive dynamics. And then signs along the way. Crossing the chasm evidence, those rules have been tried and true for 30 years now. That seismic shift, I think we've all fortunately or unfortunately benefited from the latest change, accelerating revenue growth, increased revenue retention, very important metric, and don't forget inorganic growth. I'm a big believer in that. So just some lessons from the journey. How am I doing on time? Good? Okay, once again, just my lessons. They may be right, they may be wrong. Hopefully some are applicable to you. Get the playbook right. I see too many people trying to scale and build out and hire teams. I've seen companies that have hired 50-person sales teams and they don't even really have the messaging, the product market fit or anything down and they sort of have to downsize. Like the classic example here is McDonald's, right? McDonald's didn't add 500 restaurants and then say, oh shit, we've got the cooktop wrong that costs $50,000. That's a very expensive mistake. You need to be disciplined about making sure that the model's right and then scaling it out. Like, Howes really got it right in the US. And then we took that playbook and rinse, wash, and repeat in other countries. But we waited till we got it right in the US before we just started going everywhere. And I've seen other companies go faster and they've had to pull back from their international activities. I'm breaking stuff, guys. All right. Hiring. I'm a big, big proponent of hiring. This actually should be number 1. I spend a lot of time on hiring. I wrote here just sort of my 5 golden rules that I always share with my teams when it comes to hiring. One is be involved. I interview every single person, even to this day. And when I first start, the teams hate it. They think it's overbearing, controlling. But like, if you want to— showing that you're involved in the hiring helps with the conversion rate, showing It helps keep the bar up. It helps control culture. There's just so many positives to it that outweigh it. And make your schedule available. Block off time so that you can have interviews. And it's also nice that every new person that joins, you know who they are. That helps from a culture perspective too. But it really just helps. If you're going to raise the bar, you got to be super involved in hiring. Make them work for it. So this comes from very early in my career, long before all this. Tech mumbo jumbo. I interviewed coming out of college with McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, and man, did they make you work for it. It was like 4 rounds. I don't know what it's like today. Maybe they've changed. And I understand in this market you're probably saying you're crazy. As soon as someone comes, if they have a pulse, I've got to hire them because it's so hard to find talent. But I'm telling you, like, don't do it. The McKinseys and the BCGs of the world, they'll do 4 rounds of interviews and it gets You get more and more senior people as you go, and each round is 3 or 4 case studies. You're sweating, you're drinking 4 cups of coffee, you're studying the night before, and they make you work so much that when I remember I was driving back across the Bay Bridge back over to Berkeley from San Francisco, and they called me with the offer, and I was like, yes! They didn't even finish giving me the offer. They didn't tell me how much. They didn't tell me anything. I just said, yes! Yes, because I had felt like, yes, I finally— it was like getting an acceptance letter to a university. And it's not just that you— the conversion rate goes up. And then you get there, and it's like you're amongst a bunch of other people, and you're almost brainwashed. You're like, wow, we're all the smartest people in the world because we worked so hard to get this job. And this is the best job ever. And I'd go to bed thinking, I want to be the CEO of BCG someday. Like, that's what I want in that sort of— Attitude is what I try to instill in our recruiting process so that when they come to Build.com or Houzz or whatever it is, they feel like they really worked for it. It's not like trick or treat, here's your offer, and then like 2 weeks later they resign because it was just an offer they got and it wasn't a big deal. Or it's, hey, you're only paying $120,000. I want $150,000. I want more options. And it becomes mercenary, right? I want missionaries, not mercenaries. And so I would just really think about the interview process and make them work for it. People will respect you more. I know for me in my career, the ones that made me work for it, I take so much more serious than the ones— and I also respect my peers more because I know they went through that same process than the ones where they didn't test me at all. I had a couple of interviews, and they gave me an offer, and I just— I didn't think highly of it. I'm a big believer also in getting people where their arrow's pointing north versus journeymen. So, you know, don't hire someone like me who's been a CRO several times and, or along the journey, hire someone that's like that VP of sales that's like skyrocketed through their career. They're gonna come in, they're gonna work 24/7, they're gonna, you know, just totally kill it. Maybe they've had good mentors in their career. Like that's the person that you want, that raw horsepower, I've had such tremendous success with that versus someone that's been that C-level exec many times over. And it's hard. I also didn't write it here, but don't, I don't know a better term, but like don't be a brand bitch. Don't look at just like certain companies and certain brands and say, I want someone from Salesforce, right? Because Salesforce has how many employees now? At that scale, you start mapping to the average of society. Like, really look at when they were at the company. And some of the people that you hire, they'll be the best hires I've made. They've been at companies I've never heard of, or they've failed miserably, but they've learned so— you learn so much more in a failure than you learn in a success. And if they could tell you what they learned, that's a very mature person. So, just think about that. I see too much of a, "I want a person from XYZ company." Or sometimes I'll hear on a board or on boards or advising CEOs, they'll say, I want X, Y, Z. They want industry knowledge, functional knowledge, someone that's done this, scaled revenue from here. Look, guys, the guy that walks on water died 2,000 years ago. There's some give and take. Be a little flexible on what you're looking for. Referrals are great. And I've seen recruiting teams get really addicted to them. They'll do internal competitions, $500 for every referral, $25 for every interview, successful hire, et cetera. I'm a big believer in them. They're great acceleration. They're great going back to the car. That's where you could put it in hyperdrive in a time of real need. But they're also like crack. They get really addicting. And you don't want to get addicted to it because what happens is then you start forgetting how to hunt and feed for yourself. Your recruiting team is more focused on the referral channel than scouring LinkedIn and going to different places to find good talent, A. B, your workforce becomes very homogeneous. How many of you guys have built out an engineering team relying solely on referrals? And then all of a sudden you step back and look and say, my engineering team looks exactly the same. And now we have clicks and they're all on Blind or one of these other things. Trashing the company because you created little power centers, right? Diversification is a good thing. And if you've got an engineering team like that and you try to bring someone else that doesn't map to that mold, they feel uncomfortable and they don't want to accept your offer. So keep the diversity. Don't get addicted to the crack, and that's referrals. Last but not least, stating the obvious, you can't scale if you don't hire well. Every hire you make as an individual that's reporting to you should be better than you. I know there's insecure people in this world. It's natural. But the reality is they will make you look good. Don't be afraid of it. Be a team captain, not a coach. And I learn more from the people southbound of me. If I'm hiring a head of sales or a head of marketing, I want the absolute best. I want to learn from them. They will make you look good. The right thing for the company. And so, just, that's the only way you're going to scale. Once again, stating the obvious, rally around top line growth. Some of you might be saying, yeah, that's great if you have it. I agree. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you have cyclical growth. But the more you can rally around it, the better. Rising tides raise all boats. It's less about how do we do this, and it's more about how fast can we do this. The faster you grow, the more excited, the better commitment there is internally. If you're a public company, if you're a private company, the stock price, the stock options, and the inherent value in those lock people in longer. You can recruit better. I always think, oh wow, we're a $20 billion, $30 billion market cap company. Who's gonna be attracted to us now? They're gonna think all the growth is there. I thought that when I joined and we were a $3 billion company, right? So it's a lot more people err towards wanting to be on winners than are concerned about how much more growth is left there in the company. Many of you, if you don't know BEA, probably don't remember this. Maybe you've heard the lore and the stories, but dot-com 1.0, these were my neighbors down on Where was it? 800 Brandon, I think Airbnb's down there now. You know, we, I still remember the chain link fence going up around the building. Webvan was down the street. Everyone was spending big on above the line advertising. Super Bowl commercials were all tech. I, all I gotta say is I've never been on the road from $100 million to $1 billion with a TV commercial at one, any above the line, any, not even a, Billboard on 101, which has become in vogue and some have done okay, but then there's way more stories of that not paying off. And the reality is if you're a B2C company, maybe. If you're past $1 billion and you're doing big branding, brand awareness, maybe. But, and I'm not talking about growth or performance marketing, SCM, SEO, all the other stuff that goes into like growth hacking, that's all got positive ROI, solid LTV to CAC. That absolutely makes sense. Above-the-line marketing, not so much. Don't worry about it. It's a distraction, and it just feeds egos. Last but not least, do right by your customer. We live in a world today where it's very easy to get quick feedback from your customer in real time over social media and different channels that whether you're on the App Store and they're rating you there, or you're looking at— trust radius or Capterra or whatever. We have all these channels, NPS scores, ways to see how we're doing as a company. You know, when I look back on it, I think back of the business school story way back when of the guy that walked into Nordstrom's with 8 or 4 tires and he wanted to return them. And they were like, sir, you didn't buy those tires here. He's like, I'm damn sure I bought these tires here. And it turns out that Sears used to be there and went out of business and Nordstrom's opened up. But Nordstrom had a policy of like, no questions, customer's always right. Sure, how much did you pay for them? Here's your money back. We take the tires. Those tires sit behind the CEO in his office now as an example of the customer's always right. There's plenty of those examples of those stories in tech. Just do right by the customer. It will, with social media especially, it will go viral and it will pay off in spades.