Reid Hoffman and John Lilly on Blitzscaling | Greyscale

As an entrepreneur, starting up is just the beginning, but scaling up is how you change the world. This Gray Matter episode is a fireside chat that took place at Grayscale, an event for tech founders hosted by Greylock Partners. Chris Yeh, the co author of the alliance, sits down with Reid Hoffman and John Lilly to discuss how companies go from startup to scale up. Reid, John and Chris taught a course at Stanford centered on the theme of hypergrowth called Technology Enabled Blitzscaling. Here they discuss some of the key themes from that class. For more podcasts, please visit news.greylock.com thank.

You so much for being here for this panel on Blitzscaling. I'm Chris Yeh, the co author of the alliance, along with Reid Hoffman and Ben Kaznoca. And as you heard from Jerry earlier, one of the key elements of growing your companies, your enterprise companies, is this notion of hyper growth. And the thing about hyper growth is, is it just growing faster or is there more to it? Now, as Jerry mentioned, we taught a class at Stanford last fall called Blitzscaling. And in fact, the good news for all of you is that the materials from that class are all available online. So if you go to Greylock's YouTube channel, if you go to Medium, you can actually find the notes from the class, the essays from the class, all, all the videos from the class. But just in case you don't have 30 or 40 spare hours right now as you run your company, we're going to take about half an hour to tease out some of the major themes and the things that you need to think about as you're growing the company. So the first question really is, and I love the fact that we harken back to the dot com era, how is Blitzscaling different from just get big fast, which was something that people talked a lot about during that time, by.

The way, one entertainment that I have personally is clearly Enterprise is also evolving because I went, oh, I'm coming to Enterprise. I'm going to wear a jacket. I think I'll look out in the audience. I think Chris and I may be the only two blazers.

No, no, no, wait, Timothy, thank you so much.

Anyway, so the key thing to think about is Blitzscaling is essentially a relative speed measure. And what you decide to do is that in order to either fully realize an opportunity or to react to market or to react to competitive pressure, you decide that you need to actually move much faster than your compet competitors. Essentially what you do is you deploy capital and techniques in order to scale faster. And usually what that means is people usually tell themselves, oh, it's because I have operational excellence. Usually it means you run somewhat inefficiently. You either hire very fast, you actually build and reorg very fast, and you deal with kind of cultural issues as you're essentially scaling your organization. Because usually in order to get large scale customers or large scale revenue at a fast clip, you also have to scale your organization at a fast clip. And the sort of things that we do in Silicon Valley, which is one of the reasons why we build such industry transforming companies, is in order to realize that opportunity, whether offensively or defensively, you essentially deploy capital and you deploy expertise and a network around you in order to scale much faster your competitors and realize the market niche. And that's a second essentially what blitzscaling is. And there's a set of different techniques around it. We won't be able to capture all of the ones that we had talking to people like, you know, Eric Schmidt and Reed Hastings and Marissa Meyer in the class on the stage this morning. But you essentially go, all right, by getting. It's because first mover is actually really first to scale. First out the gate doesn't really matter. It's the first to scale that matters. And it particularly matters when you're either locking in key areas of like, for example, you have a network effect in your business or key customers, or a key market position such that winning continues to accrue to the leader. One of the things that's actually really important about blitzscaling is to make a decision about is it time or not? Because it's a lot of capital you can misfire. You have to make a decision if it's necessary offensively or defensively. Now, to hearken back to some of the things that Jerry was saying is if you have a big wave, that's a good time to think about, oh, maybe this is the right time to do it.

Back to the analogy. The analogy really came from the idea of blitzkrieging in the Second World War and Germany sort of overrunning a country. And critically, what happened is that they pushed their offense way beyond their supply lines. And so what that meant is that if they had lost, if things had gone wrong, it would have been disastrously bad. And so the thing to understand is that this is not without risks. You have to be intentional and specific about the option. But it does mean you're going to do some things that leave you very, very vulnerable in other ways, team or technology or something considered.

And to elaborate that specifically, the innovation on blitzkrieg was carry only enough munitions for one battle. So previously before it, you advanced only to your supply chain. This was your. You go and you get to the space and you win that battle, and then that helps you win the battlefield. If you lose, you lose big. It's just basically all over. And that's part of the choicing. And so part of the technique in the blitzkrieg was this is somewhat different for companies, but for the army was at the halfway point, you decide whether or not to keep going or not, because you're all in once you keep going.

Yeah. And then a friend of mine, Bryce Roberts from oatv, he tweeted one Sunday morning, he said blitz scaling is sometimes. It's often indistinguishable from blitz failing. And what he meant is that when you're doing that, when you're out in the battle, people who look like they're winning may or may not be winning. And so it's very hard to tell from the outside whether you're doing it in a sensible way or not.

And one of the interesting things that's happened, I think Jerry highlighted in the data, is that the funding climate changed dramatically from the time that we taught the course to today. So what are some of the ways that this kind of funding climate affects the concept of blitzscaling in your minds?

Well, at a high line, you do need to actually have substantial capital in order to make the gameplay work. So what it does is it changes the landscape of which are you going to have the option, but also are your competitors going to have the option. And it also may mean that the actual ultimate sizes of capital you're deploying and the way that you're doing in terms of relative speed. Because again, blitzscaling is a relative measure, and it's kind of a relative to what's happening to the opportunity and a relative to what's happening to your competitive landscape, that you may be much more cautious about the choice to do it. Now, that doesn't, by the way, mean you can raise a big pile of money and not blitzscale yet. Actually, in fact, that can sometimes be an intelligent way of buying optionality, buying time and seeing it. It's the question of when you hit the gas. And again, ideally, you would actually have gotten product market fit, you would have identified the wave, and you're taking much more substantive risks if you don't. But sometimes you do that anyway. I mean, sometimes in these companies you go, okay, I'm going to hit the accelerator, even though I don't know that this is going to work because I need to do it usually from a competitive position.

We had a meeting with a company selling to enterprise, some health stuff to enterprises last night, and they've spent about maybe 10 or $12 million so far. And they want to go raise 20 or 25 now. And you ask them why? Because it's have a fair amount of money in the bank. I said two things. We think we've had to figure out how to acquire our customers efficiently on advertising spend through particular channels. But also we spent the last 90 days, we got our first BD person in. We spent the last 90 days building our pipeline. Here's what the pipeline looks like. Time to close is collapsing. There's a whole bunch of triggers for them that suggests it's time to scale more quickly.

Now, when you have capital markets available, you can actually in fact take them more. Much higher amount of risk. So, for example, when we were pouring on the juice at PayPal in the early days, which is one of a number of different canonical blitzscaling cases, we were giving out $10 bonuses, $10 for me, $10 for John, free credit card processing. And we had no business model. So our cost line was expensiating with no revenue. And yet we were hitting the gas. That's a choice. Because what we felt was we had to. There was an incumbent owned by eBay called Billpoint, which probably no one in this room knows what it is, or maybe the people on stage, but we had to win the ebay market beforehand. And so that was part of that choice.

One of the interesting questions about blitzscaling is the question, I think that boils down to people. And I think it was very appropriate that Jerry sort of talked about the number of people that are involved in the different stages he laid out. I'm curious for the audience members, how many people here are at a company with one to 100 people, raise your hands and how about 100 to 1,000 and over 1,000? So that gives you some sense of where. Yes, yes, you may raise your hand as well. And that's an interesting question because I do think that those are some critical phases along the way. And how many of those people who are in the 1 to 100 phase feel like they've achieved product market fit? Don't worry, you're not being held to this. And that's very illustrative as well. The fact is that is the job of the early stages of blitzscaling, figuring out that product market fit. Now, when it comes to the product side, which is Obviously, very much on the minds of the founders. How should they think about their product strategy evolving as they try to blitzscale? How do they think about it changing as they grow their organizations and as they achieve that product market fit?

Everybody here is going to be going through it right now. So I think everybody here can answer the question in just as good a way as we can. Probably. I think the early days, we're just trying to figure out what product to build that anybody cares about. And getting really strong signal that they care is a big deal. So when we talk to founders, we care more about how much time they're spending with customers, how much time customers are pulling on them to get it out, and how much, candidly, how willing customers are to deploy even when the thing is not ready yet. That's a lot of what we look at. So where's the hair on for our problem for customers?

I think one of the things to do is to list what do you think are the best hypotheses you have about what would demonstrate product market fit and test those as aggressively as possible. And part of the test, obviously best tests, are with customers and with actually that adoption. But part of that test actually goes around asking people to say, well, what do you think of this idea? Because if you go to smart people and they give you a piece of feedback, sometimes one piece of feedback can be erroneous. But if you talk to 10 different smart people and they all give you a similar kind of pattern, that's a form of almost like paper testing product market fit amongst people who are kind of smart and thinking about markets, thinking about how the customers act, thinking about how entrepreneurs build, build companies, and that can actually give you a faster cycle. Because one of the things that I find, you know, it's kind of a corollary to blitzscaling. Silicon Valley is the only place that I know that uses this thing called the OODA loop as part of its business decisioning. And it comes from fighter pilots, which is observe, orient, decide, act. And the faster OODA loop in a fighter pilot wins the combat. That's also very similar to how Silicon Valley works. The fact is, the faster that you find the product market, the faster that you actually identify what that pattern is and have the compounding learnings. That's what essentially leads into essentially blitzscaling. And so you want to actually be focused on how is your OODA loop. And when people talk about failing fast, obviously some people immediately generalize to, oh, failing's great. And it's like, no, no one's trying to fail. What they're actually trying to do is test these hypotheses in order to get to success faster. And that's through a faster OODA loop. And one of the things that you have as startups, as one to 100 person organizations that most big companies, matter of fact, all big companies do not have as fast, is that faster OODA loop. And you have to deploy it as your advantage in terms of what you're doing.

And it's worth saying that this gets harder and harder to do as your organization gets bigger and more complex. Even adding a couple people slows you down because you're trying to go as fast as you can as a founder or product person and you add one or two more people, you have to explore, explain what's in your head, explain what's in the customer's head and it slows everything down. So I think that the other thing, which is you're trying not to blitzcale until you're ready to blitzcale, but until you're there, you want to keep the team as small as you possibly can, even though it feels like you're going agonizingly slow.

And one of the interesting things happens as companies scale is that the role of the founders change. In many cases, founders are. The founders have to be the product people at the outset, but they may not necessarily remember, remain the product people throughout the lifetime of the company. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I think the best company is the founder stays the product person or at least the linkage between the product teams and the customers.

Well, I think they stay very close to the product and they have to be deeply oriented in how product connects the decision. So I think if you're handing off the product and saying, oh, now I have a product person, now I'm doing other stuff, that's most often a failure point. However, you do have to actually hire product people. That's true, Yes.

I think most of the jobs of the founder is the storytelling, product definition and recruiting and financing. That's about it. But I think it really doesn't change very much. Do you think it changes?

I think it evolves in terms of what additional competencies you need that are really key. I think it involves also in terms of storytelling is part of what you mean like recruiting kind of constantly storytelling.

Is recruiting, fundraising, customer. It's all the same stuff.

Exactly. So I do think it evolves somewhat based on kind of what are your particular fits. So, for example, I like product strategy, I like business strategy. I don't like organization running. So my role very specifically did evolve in good ways couple times.

Also on the I'd love to follow up on the evolution of the founder role as well. But before we leave the topic of product, I think one important through line from the class was that oftentimes as companies grow and blitzscale, they need to eventually make a shift from being a single product company to a multi product company. They have to go from a single thread to multiple threads. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think that this is something the founders in this room are going to end up experiencing if they're successful.

First, given the number of people that we have in the room that are 1 to 100, you don't move to multi threaded until you actually have a product market fit that's working. If you're moving to multi threaded before you do that, that's usually a very high prediction of death. Think about that carefully. Now what happens is that there's a couple reasons you might move to multi thread. Your first thread is working, but taps out, it scales and in order to actually get to the real size, you have to actually do a second thing. That's really difficult. Right, because it's kind of like both running the thing that's working and getting the next thing. Most companies at that point actually in fact opt to sell as opposed to keep going.

You can if I lift an Uber, but moving to the UberX lift model.

Lyft and Uber are different. Lyft coming out of the Zimride stuff and that is actually in fact the pure move. Uber is actually more of a classic set of multi threading, which is we continue to run each of them right, but. And there's an alignment between them.

The black car business was not very big though until uberx changed their trajectory a lot.

Yes. And it's Lyft that prompted them. Again, it's a competitive but it's same customer, you know, same app, different kind of supply chain, you know, different configuration. And when you move to multi. Threaded. So as John's pointing out, it can either be an offensive reason for expanding customer base, share of wallet, et cetera, or it can be absolutely necessary competitive. In a newer case, it's both.

And there was a funny moment because AM from Floodgate was one of our speakers and she said that some, some of our founders come and ask her how do you know when you have product market fit? And her answer is if you have to ask, you don't have it. Because when you have product market fit, it's very obvious because everyone in the world is yelling at you to release, release, release.

Got it. Let's shift gears back to the role of the founder now, because I think we started to touch on issues of people and culture and hiring. And I think one of the things that we heard from the class, our guests in talking about Blitzkind is that so much of it boils down to the people issues, which is something that in many cases founders aren't as familiar with when they go in.

One of the questions, when you're scaling an organization fast, you have all kinds of management challenges and cultural challenges, and you have to anticipate that you'll continue to have those. You have to try to lightly set them up in advance. Some of this kind of issue comes to is, you know, when you're in a 15 person organization, most of the people think this organization grows, their role's going to grow, some of the roles are going to grow, some of the roles aren't going to grow. How are you essentially going to navigate that? How are you going to navigate that? Preserving the majority of the key talent being bought in what is the conversation you have with them. So, for example, when I was interviewing Sheryl Sandberg last week, one of the things I asked her about Blitzscaling is what did you learn when you were doing. And this was, I think, at Google, because she was in charge of growing essentially the AdWords ops and sales teams. Basically what she said was, well, we started and I wanted to make everyone feel special. And so we celebrated when they had their birthday, we had it, it's their birthday. Then we got to a place where, okay, we were having birthdays every day of the month and that was too much distracting for the company. So we started doing birthdays by the month and then for everyone, that was that month and then birthdays by the quarter. And part of what that meant is that everyone had this tangible thing of, oh, this place, place isn't like it used to be. It used to be special, right? Et cetera. And that's part of what if she were to phone her younger self, she said, start at doing birthdays by the month or birthdays by the quarter as opposed to the other thing, because still being, you know, engaging them but anticipating that you're going to get to that skill. So people say, oh yeah, it's still the place I know and love and coming. And that's the kind of thing that when you're thinking about how you maintain your culture and how you grow it, I think the Netflix culture deck and we talked to Reed Hastings a bunch about this in the course is also a canonical thing. And one of the things that I've come to realize is actually I think it's useful for companies that are blitzkagging to actually define a culture deck. Because part of what that creates is horizontal accountability, not just top down accountability. And that's really key for how you're scaling organization. Those are the kinds of things you have to look at and anticipate when you're trying to scale a company.

Yeah. And then I think you're, you're trying to go as fast as you can. I think you're trying to pay attention to where massive communication breakdowns happen. So I got to Mozilla when there was about 12 people. It was going fine, but then we got to about 40 people. It was clear that we needed to have a management team meeting every week. And I was not the COO then, but we started spending a couple or three hours together on Mondays. And there were times when we said, shit, do we really need this meeting? Because we're not filling up two or three hours. And then you try not to. You try to skip it a few times, you'd find the communications would start to break down again. And so you just find that just being together in a group every week was a really big help. And then we got to 70 or 80 people and you could see we started to layer a little bit. You started to have communication issues. And so you said, well, let's have every week on Thursdays, let's have a management plus the next layer down meetings. And there was a big jolt to the system because everybody had been used to everything being basically open meetings. And this was not an open meeting, this was a closed meeting. But we just needed it to be able for me to be able to model behavior between me and vice presidents to other people and vice versa. So I think you're looking for where catastrophic communication failures are and you're trying to deal with those in time, but you're trying not to over architect the system as you go because you realize that anything you architect now, if you're growing, doubling or tripling in a year, will break in eight or 12 months. Anyway.

Yeah, you want to set a culture anticipating some change. You want to know the comms will change because like for example, when you're 15 people, when you're 20 people, when you're 50 people, you just put everybody in a room. Right. And that's how you essentially do it. When you begin to get to 100 people 150 people. You begin to go, okay, now we have layering. Now we actually have more kind of pull and distribution. And you have to think about how push, pull on cost work and what people are expecting and trying to say, oh, we're going to operate now, like we're going to operate. A thousand is actually a failure point. You just want to anticipate that you will be changing as you're going.

But there's some cultural things that I think we kept, you know, we kept every Monday at lunchtime, we had lunch together and anybody in the company wanted to ask me, we talked about at whatever length they wanted. And Google still does that. Google still has their Friday night TGIFs. And so I think that there are some cultural things that you want to say. Look, this is a pillar for us being open and accessible. Some things that will persist, but it's hard to predict which one's a priori.

One of the things that you said struck me because you were talking about architecting things and I think that comes from the world of computer science and technology. How many folks in the audience have a technical background? Yeah, exactly. So one of the analogies and metaphors I think was most helpful to me in thinking about blitzscaling is this notion of that the organization has to be refactored with each different stage. Right. You can't just sort of assume that things are going to continue to work. You actually have to actively refactor. Can you talk a little bit about that? Refactoring? How do you know when it's time to refactor? How do you go about doing that?

Personally, I try to refactor on the work, not around titles. I think there are some things that you have to be very, very careful about screwing around with. One is comp. One is like titles and reporting. And so for me personally what I try to do is keep. Keep teams as small as I can. So teams that are clearly responsible for some set of work in the next month or quarter that are like three to seven people. Because I think that most people are driven sort of on this combination of greed and fear. So greed to get respect and attention and notice for the things you do and fear of failing. And if you get much bigger for any core team of bigger than about seven people, you feel like you can hide in the team. If it fails, it's like, well, it's those other fun. Not me. Ooh, this is broadcast. Those other guys, those other people. It's not my perfect. Not my perfect. Not my best self.

I knew it was going to happen at some point.

So did I. And so the other thing to think about when you're look small teams, clear missions, clear responsibilities to other organizations, all good. Part of the challenge that you'll have as you're scaling fast is you will always have messiness on that because new problems are coming along. It falls between teams. Teams are trying to accomplish the work, so they're growing their mandate, how the comms work. So part of what I would say in a hyper growth situation, a blitzscaling situation, is that you should be anticipating that there will be a certain amount of messiness and trying to build in some resilience to your culture and to your management for anticipating that. Because it won't work like a kind of an ocd, very clean supply chain. And then part of the refactoring is that actually, in fact you'll have to think about, okay, and you always reconfigure around the problem. But what's the thing that like as this new problem is happening, what's the way that we solve that? And we may actually have to re architect a lot of the organization in order to do it. And it's kind of the priorities of the problems that you're looking at.

And I think the other thing I would say is that you have to be somewhat intentional about the stuff you're willing to let kind of be on fire and the stuff that you're unwilling to let be on fire. And so for me, if I ever heard, oh, that's somebody else's problem, or this dude that he doesn't understand, he thinks this thing that's wrong, I would always grab the two people and put them in a room and would them and do it. Because it was communication failures almost always that drove me crazy and I was unwilling to let it persist.

Now we're about to shift over into questions and answers. But to give you guys a chance to think of great questions, I'm going to ask one last question of our esteemed panelists here. And so the question I would like to ask is, in your experience, both as founders and executives and as investors, what are some of those processes and tools that you really wish people would bring in sooner rather than later? What are things where if you phoned your younger self, you say, please do this sooner?

I think the establishing the loop of it's not performance reviews, because performance reviews actually frequently have a lot of things that are actually broken with them, but establishing the learning loop of how do we play better together? How do I do better? How do you do better. And actually having a regular content conversation of that, not tied to compensation, tied to how we play the game. Usually what happens in young, early stage companies is that they go, I'm just focused on game. I just focused on the game. I don't have time for that. And actually a little bit of time for it's very helpful. And establishing that as a kind of culture of how you operate as you scale is, I think, very important.

I think the main thing I would say is that I think as soon as you're hiring one person a month, you should hire a recruiter. So every company I've been around, Luke, who've had a recruiter in house, not agency, you'll understand why when Dan talks a little bit. But I think having a recruiter who knows what they're doing changes the whole thing because it means you start to get more aggressive, more ambitious, more outbound. You start to pull better people in. And the recruiting changes a lot. Even just one person a month is worth it.

Excellent. All right, well, now let's open it up to you guys for questions. And I believe we have a microphone so we can make sure we've got everything, everything all set up. I know someone's going to be brave enough to step up. You guys are entrepreneurs after all. There we go. See the man in the blazes.

Porsche coat.

That's why you got to have these jackets. Bring confidence. I'm very interested to hear where you see, like, a freemium model fit into a blitz scaling strategy, especially when you're entering a market where you don't have first mover advantage.

One of the key things, free obviously allows you a frictionless adoption. It's key for virality in the consumer side. There's elements of that on the enterprise side. Frequently one of the interesting areas of competition between tech companies is which architecture of the business model is better. So if you've got a freemium model that's competing against a non freemium model, you can actually, in fact, accomplish a lot of adoption. You have to think, okay, is it growing into the new space and then growing back, or is it competing with people who are already doing the purchase? In which case, if they're already doing the purchase, you may think about how do you essentially get them to do both, if that's possible? Because it's kind of like, oh, both and then one. But free obviously allows you a much broader range of adoption and allows you a funnel and a chain. That's actually very interesting. And then, you know, like, for example, one of the funny Things that we wrestle with for literally must be nine years now is the primary competition to the LinkedIn paid products is the LinkedIn free product? And so you have to maintain this kind of. All right, the people who are in charge of paid always want to say, let's redact features from the free. And you have to actually balance that as you're going now in the initial start, that's not a, is not as much of an issue, but you have to, you want to keep the, the, the vibrancy of the freemium model as you're going.

Next question.

How does partnerships fit into this blitzscaling model?

Are you willing to give away some of the economics up, you know, at.

The beginning in order to win those key partnerships? And then if so, how do you.

Win those economics back in the future? You mean distribution partnerships? Yes. Yeah. My team answer that partnerships almost always look better on paper than they do in real life because almost by definition, the two organizations have different goals and different drivers. I think that economics, you should almost always be willing to give away some significant part when you start to get things. But I think the partnerships and distribution partnerships in particular are a very specific kind of growth that you just really have to understand what they're going to deliver and what your partner's going to deliver and why.

Yeah, for distribution partnerships, essentially the good test is, would they be distributing you anyway without the deal? That's not to say you don't do a deal, but if they wouldn't really, how much is the deal going to actually change that? Because what it's saying is it's not natural behavior for them. And organizations don't tend to, they tend to have gravity away from unnatural behavior even with a contract. So that's the way to test that. And it's very rare. Now economics frequently, if you have something like network effects, like most people really criticized Google for doing its AOL distribution deal because basically it was handing all of the economics from Search back to aol. But part of what the Google folks were actually super smart about is realizing, say, look, X years of handing literally all of the economics back from search to AOL for this helps us build the massive liquidity for AdWords. And the massive liquidity essentially raises all the prices. And then we have a network effect in terms of a lock in and that kind of thing where you say, okay, I'll buy for that. You go, that's a smart play.

Although that wasn't in isolation because they were spending hundreds of millions on Firefox at the same time. They're putting a billion on Dell, a billion on hp. So Google's point of view was we're going to give the economics away forever sorry to everyone for a while and then we're just going to wipe up the whole market. That's when they went from, you know, call it 10% market share to 60% market share in a couple, three years.

Next question.

It was refreshing to hear obviously that.

Things should be bending and cracking along the way. But I'm interested to know especially maybe some specific examples.

But how do you know that you're.

You'Ve gotten past that stage and you're breaking. What are some of those telltale signs?

People quit. That's a good one.

I think you're people you don't want to quit quit.

People who you would like to keep leave. And you can't talk them into staying. So that's a good key. A lot of people will threaten to quit all the time. Everybody gets bent out of shape on something, but that's your job to keep them around.

Not that you've ever experienced that with your people.

I get pissed off, title or pay or some other jackal, whatever. So I know I censored myself. So that's part of it. I think customers leaving is a huge sign that you're screwing something up because it means you're screwing up, means your stuff's in the product. I think the biggest sign you start to see, well, the easiest place to see it is in a consumer product. If you look at Google search now and you search for something like a book, what you'll see is two kinds of, you'll see like three kinds of results. You'll see like videos from YouTube. You'll see, you'll see at least the 10 blue links and you'll see a one box with Wikipedia style structured results in it. And what that is is Google's organization showing through their product. And so I think that if your organization starts to show through your product and you can start to look at your product like, oh, that's this team and that's this team. That means you've screwed up because it means you're not communicating well enough horizontally. And so I think that's a really big sign. You've kind of divisionalized things too much.

Agree with all that. The other thing is, and it's hard to exactly formalize this, but how healthy and resilient is your culture growing if your culture is beating a break? This is like John's earlier points on comms. If you're beginning to think Oh, I actually don't really feel like we're on a mission or this is the team I want to be on the mission with. It's not to say that there aren't fractures and, you know, so and so didn't allow me to do this and. And ended up fine. But if the culture really starts breaking, then you need to steer very hard on that.

Yeah. I think there's two different things that happen. One is that people are starting to make decisions in divergent ways. Cause culture is mostly about how do you line up decision making. And then the second thing is if things break, if things go bad, if you lose a customer, if you lose a hire, if you do this, what's the immediate reaction to people? The healthy one is you have to be able to take responsibility and you want everybody else around them to say, what can we do to help? But the unhealthy one is, oh, well, this guy screwed up, that guy screwed up. I've got my shit together. Nobody else has theirs together. And so I think that there's a culture of recrimination that happens when things are starting to fractionalize too much.

Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for participating and for being on stage. Hopefully you'll enjoy the rest of the day. We've got a lot of great content coming up. And again, I think it's some of us will be around to answer a couple questions during various breaks. Thank you.