Airtable’s Ryan Marks Talks Tech Tools for More Efficient Legal Ops

Foreign.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Pearls on Gloves. Off with me today is Ryan Marks, co head of legal at airtable, which is a connected apps platform that enables users to build customized business software without having to learn how to code. Ryan was Airtable's first legal hire in May of 2020, and since then, he has helped grow the legal team to 10 professionals. He joined Airtable from AMN Healthcare, a publicly traded healthcare services company where he oversaw complex litigation and ran legal for the company's technology businesses. Before that, he was a litigator with Aiken Gump in New York and practiced employment and trade secret law with Jackson Lewis in San Diego. Today, Ryan lives in San Diego with his wife and two daughters and a big shaggy poodle mix. And thank you so much for being with us today here, Brian.

So great to be with you, Mary. Thank you.

Yeah, so let's just go all the way back to your background. Kind of talk us through the beginning and the early days and how did you get to where you are today at airtable?

Yeah, so I think throughout my career there's been a few common threads, and one of them is that I've really tried to use the law to help businesses solve their challenges and make an impact. And I think the roles that I've taken on throughout my career sort of brought me closer and closer to those challenges and to making that impact more directly. So as you mentioned, I started in big law. I worked as a litigation associate with Aiken Gump in New York, had the opportunity to work on a variety of different types of cases in a variety of contexts, and really got some amazing training as to how to think like a lawyer, how to solve problems as a lawyer. Ultimately, I got married and my family decided to move back to San Diego, which is where I grew up. And as you mentioned, I transitioned into employment law and trade secret non compete litigation for about four years. But over time, I started to get a little bit frustrated with litigation as a way to solve business challenges. And I started to feel increasingly detached from the problems that I felt that my business clients were most focused on that they were thinking about day to day. And so rather than thinking backwards on those challenges like you tend to do in litigation, I really felt the urge to take them on proactively and to use legal thinking to move through them successfully and strategically before they turned into anything close to litigation. And so that's when I really decided to explore a transition in house.

Interesting. And did you always want to be a lawyer? Was that kind of the childhood Dream?

No, I don't think. You know, I think I was one of those kids who other people probably said, oh my gosh, this guy knows how to argue, likes to argue. And I think a lot of people who spec that might be what lawyering is all about might have kind of told me that would have been a good call. But no, I think most of my childhood I wanted to be a shortstop for the San Diego Padres. So law was quite far from my plans. But over time it got more and more interesting to me. I think as I learned more about legal theory and about the capacity for law to actually be a creative endeavor, it started to feel more and more like a calling. But really, it was only when I transitioned in house that I really figured out what it was that I love about practicing law. I think in house practice really includes the thing I love, the things I love most about practicing law and honestly omit some of the things I love least, which, which I left on the law firm side.

Yeah, well, let's, let's dive into that a little because I think it is very different in house than it is at a law firm. And having experienced that move from the operations side and, and then just talking to lawyers and seeing how their roles are very different. Tell me how that transition was for you and I love that you kind of found yourself when that happened.

Yeah, so as you mentioned, I started with a company called AMN Healthcare here in San Diego. And AMN is a 30 plus year old business. It's been publicly traded for I think more than 20 years at this point. And when I arrived there, they had a really well established legal department. There were very few questions that hadn't already been answered, very few processes that had not already been built out. And so it was a really nice landing spot for me to just figure out what in house practice is all about. You know, that transition for me was really a transition from specialist to generalist. You know, in the law firm you're not just a litigator. You often are pigeonholed as a litigator for this specific type of issue. And when I became an employment lawyer, there's, there's a drive within the law firm to really specialize because in law firms there's a value on perfection, precision, deliberation and kind of analyzing every problem to, to, to its end. But when I came in house, there really wasn't time for that. And I understood very quickly that there was a premium on decisiveness, on speed of execution.

Yes.

Relentless prioritization and a focus on business impact. And, and I really love that. And so, you know, in 2020, I had the opportunity to come to Airtable as the first legal hire and to really build our legal identity from the ground up. And I've been here working to do that for the past two and a half years or so.

And airtable is just a tremendous company. Anyone who's been watching it has seen the meteoric rise in recent times. And I know you guys were recently listed as the number six company on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. So it's a big deal. Congratulations on that. And what, what was it that kind of drew you to airtable, which is a very different company than. Than where you were before.

Yeah. And thank you. We are, we are very proud of that. That recent accolade. And that's just it. What was most exciting for me was the airtable product itself and getting a glimpse into the incredible way that our customers have responded to it. So for those who might be less familiar, airtable is a connected apps platform. It allows business users to create customized software that makes their job easier. And they do that even if they don't know how to code, perhaps not without even realizing that they're actually creating software. And so instead of the old reality where you buy a piece of software and then mold your business practices around that software, airtable users can mold airtable to fit their existing ways of getting things done. So working for a company that was really helping to redefine the relationship between people and technology in that way was truly thrilling for me. And I think more specifically to this role, I was really happy and really fulfilled in my last job. But this really was the chance to come in and think about what airtable Legal should be, not based on what's there already, because the legal department was just starting when I arrived and not based on what I had seen elsewhere or some notion of what an air. What a legal department should be really on, what makes sense for airtable, given our unique values and constraints and priorities. And that sort of opportunity to develop a set of priorities, to develop a set of strategic goals and then execute that, execute on them over time in a really high growth, exciting environment was really thrilling to me.

Yeah, there's something to be said about high growth and scale and that time in a company where you're really able to build and shape what it's going to look like in the future. That's awesome. So what does the department look like now? I think we said there's about 10 people in the legal department.

Yeah. So we have 10 right now, airtable itself is now over a thousand employees compared to something around 200 when I joined in mid 2020. So it feels like it changes by the week. We have seven lawyers, a legal operations professional, two contract managers, and we're continuing to grow. We recently hired a co head of legal who manages the department with me, and I couldn't be more thrilled about that. I think you see the co head model in some places, but I haven't really seen it in legal departments. And I've really started to wonder why that is. Just because we've had such a great experience, because I have a partner who I can bounce ideas off of, who I can strategize with about where we want to take this department, who helps fill in some blind spots and experience gaps that I may have. And I think I do the same for her. And we're just really aligned in our focus on doing what's right for the business and supporting each other along the way. And I think our partnership is really a sort of microcosm of how we want the department to look and feel more generally. We've tried really hard to develop a team that is collaborative, that's humble, diverse, that's passionate about what we're trying to do and what Airtable is trying to do more generally. And I think the result is a really, you know, a really great team. We're pretty flat. We have experts in a variety of different areas that really own those areas as much as they're comfortable doing so. And, you know, it's a pretty fun place to work.

Yeah. We've talked several times, and every time I hear about your department, I'm envious. I mean, a, you're. You're building it, you're growing it, you're creating the culture, you're creating the processes and the mindset there. And it sounds like a great place to work. Now, we were first introduced a while back from, through a mutual friend who worked at Google with me, but I think she met you through networking in the industry as well. And I know that you had wanted to chat first about scaling and operations and tech and really kind of the. The legal ops side of things, which of course I appreciate and love that you thought about that early on in your journey. So tell me kind of how you got there. Why was ops and tech a priority for you? And, you know, how did you know that? Did you see that in a previous company? Had you heard it through other GCs? Like what. What made you want to get into this?

I think it's a Combination, definitely. One aspect of it is that, as I mentioned before, that opportunity to really think about systems, to think about process, to develop a vision for where the department was going to go, was a big reason I joined airtable to begin with. So I felt like I had those creative juices flowing from the start. But also in my last company, we hired our first dedicated legal ops professional, I think 20 years or so after the legal department was formed. And so, you know, I saw right as I was leaving how, how valuable a legal operations mindset was. And when I joined airtable, I started to have some exciting ideas about how we could use technology, and in particular our own technology, airtable, to scale our processes, to develop data driven insights into what we're doing, to measure our effectiveness. And so I ultimately decided that I wanted to bring in an ops professional as soon as possible, which we ultimately did, I think. About 10 months into my time at Airtable and Peter, who's the legal ops manager for Airtable, joined our team from another role within the company. And so what that meant was that he was new to legal operations but incredibly fluent in the airtable product and in our company operations more generally. And so the result, I think, is a legal operations manager and role that is a little bit different from a traditional ops role in that he is less pure legal Ops and more of a low code app developer. So he uses airtable and he uses some of our other tools to really build customized workflows that meet the specific needs of our team and our internal stakeholders. I think, you know, our department really runs on airtable. It's the centralized source of truth for all of the information that we work with and track and create. And it really helps us break down information silos throughout the company and get information to the people that need it.

So you, I mean, obviously someone who is not a lawyer that, that you hired into the legal ops role and, and someone who has sounds like very strong technical expertise and background, obviously knows your product, but is able to work probably with other systems and tools as well. And also interestingly, sounds like he has the ability to look across your current processes and identify where you can leverage tools to improve the processes and the efficiency and the accuracy and gather metrics and make decisions, Is that right?

100%, yeah. I think that's a huge aspect of his job. So, you know, and doing what we can to try and make those changes without them feeling like huge, significant changes for our internal stakeholders is, is critical as well. So as one example, our sales team, like many sales teams, lives In Salesforce, that's where they track their deals. That's where they check in on deal progress and assign priority to what they're working on. Our legal team that's negotiating those deals works in Ironclad, which we love as a contract management platform. Airtable is something that we use to bridge those different technologies. And so we, we have an airtable database that serves as the source of truth for all of our pending deals. It brings in information from Salesforce, it brings in information from Ironclad and allows us to have meetings with our sales partners where we look at one source of data. At Airtable, we can kind of add information into that database while allowing people to still work day to day in the systems that they feel most comfortable in.

Yeah, and I actually think that's best practice. I mean, talking to so many in our industry, in our world about what reports do they look at and what metrics they look at. And should every software that you implement come with canned reports? And I've always had the mindset of the canned reports are not that helpful because really we're still in a day and age where every enterprise, every organization, every department is looking at their data or wants to look at their data in their own way.

Right.

They want to slice it and dice it, depending on how they're defining things, what's important to them today. And so it's really difficult, maybe even impossible, for a software company to anticipate. Here are the five most useful visualizations and reports that we can give you from our system out of the box. Where really most departments, most companies want to extract data from various systems. Whether it's your E billing system, your contract system, your Salesforce. Right. And put it into something like an airtable or whatever platform they're using to then manipulate the data, join tables, put things together and start to paint a picture of what matters to you. And what matters to you is going to change by the day. And that's why you want to have the flexibility to put it together, take it apart, slice it, dice it, visualize it in different ways.

That's exactly right. And I think that flexibility is what we love about airtable. And I also think no matter what, even if you do align on a set of metrics and reports, that works for you today, who's to say that's exactly what you're going to need next month? And who's to say that's what your business partners are going to be asking for a few months down the line?

Exactly, exactly. And I love the ability of Being able to join data from different systems together, because that really paints the story about what's happening.

Yeah, yeah.

And just tech generally has been important to you as you've built out your department, right? I mean, obviously you're a tech company. And having come, my background obviously was also at a tech company. There is that mindset that, you know, people are open to technology and using it as a solution and trying it. So how is that? Has that always been kind of a really important thing for you?

Yeah, you know, I think there's very little that we do that we don't challenge ourselves to do better or faster or more effectively through technology. I mean, we are growing very quickly and the reality is that we aren't going to be able to grow as a legal team in a way that keeps up with the growth of the business. And so it's a constant battle to get more and more leverage out of our time. And that means automation, that means technology, that means new systems and processes that increase efficiency and help people get the information and the answers that they need in simpler ways. And I think one thing that we have found is that we've not only been able to leverage technology for our own purposes, we've actually been able to develop some insights that the rest of the company can use for their own business priorities. So I think that's pretty rare. Typically, the legal department isn't thought of as a source of information for other aspects of the business. But the reality is that legal has a ton of valuable information about the business, about our risk profile, about the relationships that we have with third parties and customers. And by leveraging technology well, the business can get access to that information. And in the process, we can show legal's impact to the rest of the company. So, you know, I think as one example, we use airtable to track all of the key terms in our customer agreements. And we do that in a structured way in an airtable database. And the way that happens is that when an agreement is executed in ironclad, an airtable record in our airtable database is automatically created and populated with our standard contract terms. And then the person who negotiated that deal takes about five minutes and goes into a customized airtable interface and enters in any non standard terms that were agreed to as part of the negotiation. And the result is a rich repository of contract data where we can, with the push of the button, with the push of a button, answer questions from other teams throughout the company to let them know how they might be impacted by the terms that we've agreed to. So let's say the marketing team needs to know what publicity rights we have for our customers. We can very easily just push a button and generate that information. If there's some new law coming out in Texas that impacts the way that the signup flow needs to occur, we can very quickly tell our product teams which customers contracts are subject to Texas law. You know, if a potential investor needs to understand if any contracts are at risk for termination based on a termination for convenience clause, we have all of that information stored in airtable as well. So I really love that we not only have the ability to manipulate and report on the data in a variety of different ways for our own purposes, but we can provide actionable business data to other teams throughout the company.

So this gets me really excited. You and I chatted the other day just to you wanted to show me kind of with your airtable and ironclad integration the data that you were able to extract and the reports and the insights that you were able to have for the whole company. And I will say, you know, for so many of us, the whole idea of contracts life cycle management and what we call at ironclad digital contracting is a journey. In fact, someone said to me the other day, the idea that implementation never ends, and I said that's, that's not very positive. The way you, you frame it like the way I'd rather say it is that the, the benefits or the value that you can extract from the data that you're able to capture once you've digitized your contracts is never ending. I mean, you're always learning so much and you want to tweak and you want to gather more data and then you're able to really transform your business with what you've learned. And that entire thing is a journey, right? You've got to get your contracts one place. You've got to figure out what, what questions you want to answer. You've got to figure out which metadata you want to track. But then once you have that and you're able to start painting a picture and telling a story, the upside is just, you know, it's unimaginable, frankly. And what I think that you've done with that data and what you've done using airtable to visualize it and tell a story is probably more mature than any other department I've talked to. And it's not like I've talked to everyone, but I do a lot of talking. And you know, the stories and the regular reports that you're managing up with really are Compelling, you know, and just the examples you've just given, you never know what you're going to need to look for when that time happens. But when you've structured your data and you've digitized your contracts, you're able to find what you didn't know you needed to find pretty easily.

Right, Right. You know, I think we have a couple things going for us in that regard. One is we did get started with legal operations and this sort of technology and systems work really early on in our development, thanks to conversations with people like you, who really helped us understand the value early on. And so what that means is that, you know, I think in a lot of companies, they get on this train late, and then there's all that new data that gets created through their new systems, and then there's that big black box of legacy data from the old systems and the manual processes that, honestly, it's probably not worth the time often to go back and enter into a new system. Well, we implemented these systems early enough in our development that it was worth the time to go back and manually enter some of this data for contracts and operations that preceded the implementation of these systems. And so we have a really good, comprehensive, clean set of data. The other thing is that we have hired a team that is excited about this opportunity as well. So when we interview folks for our team, we're pretty clear with them that if you're not excited about building process and infrastructure where there is little, and thinking about data in creative and novel ways, and constantly asking yourself, how can we get more streamlined and more efficient, then this might not be the most exciting opportunity for you, because that's a big part of what gets us going. And so, yeah, I totally agree that getting the data in place is step one, and then constantly analyzing it and tweaking it to derive the insights that you need is step two. I think one item that you and I looked at, Mary, earlier this week was a way that we've tried to use data to measure our own effectiveness in legal negotiations, which I think is something that has been a challenge for legal departments for a long time. I think a lot of us lawyers want to believe that legal is different, that it's more of an art than a science. And, you know, our effectiveness can't really be be measured with pure numbers, but we're really trying to challenge that. And one way that we've done that is that amongst the terms that, that we track in our enterprise contracts, I mentioned a moment ago that we track all of our key terms is Our exposure under those contracts based on the limitation of liability provisions in those contracts. So those provisions essentially say this is the maximum amount of money that you could be liable for under this contract. And so that gives us the ability to understand our overall exposure across our contract portfolio. And all things being equal, we want that exposure to be proportionate to our revenue on the deal. And so we track the ratio of capped exposure, the ratio of the liability exposure under our limitation of liability clauses, the ratio of that to our revenue on the deal. And that is, you know, a proxy for measuring how good of a job we're doing negotiating those deals. We look at where that ratio has moved over time. We look at it by deal segment, we look at it by deal size. Because we also want to make sure that the larger deal, well, the smaller deals, the simpler deals where we're able to get customers on more favorable terms are acting as a hedge against the increased risk of. We might need to take on for larger, more complex deals here and there. And this, this metric really helps us measure that and make sure that our, our approach is healthy.

I can't tell you how much I love this. Literally, this was my dinner table conversation last night because I was telling my family how cool the stuff that you're doing is. One of the most common questions that GCs and legal departments get is how do you show that you're delivering value? Or how do we know that you're reducing risk? Or how do we know that you're even getting better for your. And you are, like, you showed me some of these charts and graphs and you're literally able to see in a very easy to understand picture how your department is reducing risk for the company. Over time is getting better. Over time is getting faster, is negotiating better terms. It is visually represented in such an easy to understand way. And it's real data. It's not like you can argue and. Well, that's your interpretation of it. I mean, it's there black and white. And I think for me, that's really the first time that I've seen anyone show how their department is doing those things, is reducing risk in their contracts. And that's really cool.

Thanks. Yeah. Well, first of all, I'll need to get some conversation tips from you because I have tried to talk about this at my dinner table, but my family has absolutely no interest in it. So I'd love to understand if there's a better way for me to position it to actually get their attention.

No, I feel very bad for my family for years and years they all, like my baby's first words, were legal Ops.

Right. You know, I think. I think one reason why I like this measure as well. And of course, there's lots of things that this one measure doesn't capture, and that's why we're continuing to mine the data for other ways to show our effectiveness. But one of the ways that I think we have gotten fairly good as an industry generally at measuring our effectiveness is with various forms of data that measure speed. Right. I know Ironclad has some great new metrics that help us understand how long is the deal cycle, how long is the legal team taking to provide red lines on a particular contract. And that's incredibly helpful because as I mentioned before, speed of execution is paramount in high growth businesses. But I also think you have to kind of put quality on the other side of the scale as well. Right. It's all well and good to say it takes us five minutes to do every legal review, but if we're missing a lot of issues or agreeing to terms that we don't need to agree to, maybe that maybe it's worth another five minutes or so. And so having this measure of negotiating effectiveness on the other side and having all the various other insights that we've developed about the specific terms of our contract helps us understand in a more quantitative way whether that time is being leveraged effectively and where we can kind of tweak our approaches to get even faster or smarter about our negotiation practices.

Yeah, Brian, the most difficult thing that no one has cracked yet is how do you measure quality of legal work? Have you guys thought about that? And it's an impossible question.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think this is one way which is, you know, we do know what the terms in our contracts are. So we as the legal team members, and particularly Amanda and I as the leaders of the team, kind of develop frameworks for understanding what our preferred terms are. And now we can look through numbers at how often we are hitting those benchmarks. Another way, obviously, is just understanding the relationship between Legal and our internal stakeholders. And we try check in with them as much as possible to make sure that our trust is preserved, that they are happy with the service that we're providing, that we are aligned on priorities. That's obviously a softer measure of quality. But I think given legal's role as a customer service team, I think that's as important as anything to just keep checking in with our stakeholders to make sure that they feel that their needs are getting method.

Great. Amazing. And I know another big challenge for Heads of legal is figuring out what resource needs you have, what your headcount needs are. And we also chatted about and Hugh showed me some of the reports that you're doing to look at kind of what's on everyone's plate and not in a Big Brother way, but just really tracking workloads and allocation.

Yeah, it's always a challenge, especially in a remote environment. We also have a pretty flat team. We have experts in a variety of different areas. We have one employment lawyer, we have one product council, we have one privacy council. And so sometimes there isn't another option if someone's workload gets too heavy. But what we are doing is we are really focusing on developing self serve tools for the business that they can use to get their questions answered without necessarily having to interact with a lawyer. On our team we have intake channels within Slack that we are supporting with automated macros and auto responses that again, hopefully answer a lot of the common questions that tend to come in. And we try to create intake channels that at least give us a measurement of how many questions are being asked and allow us to keep track of the volume of requests that we're getting month to month, which obviously doesn't tell the whole story, but I think goes quite a bit of the way. And then, you know, we've been fortunate to also have the ability to use some really competent outside counsel for some overflow work where needed to make sure that our team really is able to focus on the matters that have the highest return on investment. So, you know, if someone on our team has two hours to redline a contract, or they could send that contract out to our overflow council and instead spend that two hours developing a contract for, excuse me, developing a playbook for redlining a contract. I'd much rather they spend those two hours working on the playbook because that is going to compound in a lot more impact down the road and build some more systemic change rather than focusing specifically on one deal.

Yeah, you're thinking about it in all the right ways. It's awesome. So as a department, as a leader that is so focused on data, as a company that's so focused on data, how do you think that's changed? My guess is for the better your relationships with other parts of the company. And I'm thinking, you know, for, for departments like finance, does that help you get budget to invest in software to add heads because they know that you're using it responsibly. Does it help your relationship with sales leaders because you know, you're able to show that you're doing things as quickly and as efficiently as possible to get deals done. I mean, how does it, how does it affect your cross functional relationships?

Yeah, I think so. Look, I think anytime you can use data to put your work in context and to show the value of what you're trying to do, that's going to help build trust. Especially when you're trying to make that case to departments that have very different specializations and expertise. And we really do put a premium on putting legal work in context. So we talk a lot about what we call our big secret, which is the fact that we spend much of our day trying to identify and mitigate legal risks that could impact our business. But the reality and our big secret is that the vast majority of those legal risks will never materialize. And so what we've tried to do is develop strategies for maintaining the trust of our cross functional partners and helping them understand the value of our work, despite the fact that so much of what we do is to protect the company against risks that are unlikely to materialize.

So Ryan, as a, as a company that's focused on data, as a department that's been really responsible about how you're leveraging your tools and your headcount with your data, does that help with finance? Like when you go back and ask for budget, if you want to invest more in a tool, if you need another head, does, does being, you know, responsible and having the data to show what you're doing help you with your, with your case for investments?

Yeah, I think so. I think any time that you are trying to show the value of the, of your work and trying to show your needs, if you can use data to support what you're trying to say, especially when you're making that case to another function that might have a different specialization or expertise, that's going to be helpful. And so yeah, we've been able to show, you know, the increasing complexity of our contracts, for example, in quantitative ways that help predict our resource needs for the future. We've been able to show how we are getting better leverage out of our outside council spend through some of the systems that we're building in data driven ways. And yeah, thankfully we haven't had too many difficult discussions on that front at all. But I'm sure that some of this data that we're able to share proactively is helpful.

Yeah, that's so cool. And then just generally across the rest of the company, then we all know that legal is often seen as the department of no. And that's changing. So, you know, with the data that you're able to use, does that help you build bridges with, you know, your relationships with, like, your sales leaders and showing, you know, kind of that you're speeding things up for them and you're. You're doing a great job for them? How does that affect your relationship with sales department or other teams?

I think avoiding a reputation as the department of no is always one of our highest priorities. And we talk a ton about how to develop a reputation to the contrary, that we are actually the department that helps facilitate the achievement of business objectives. But that's something that we need to focus on and be thoughtful about all the time. And so one concept that we've been talking about a lot lately is what we call our big secret. And so our big secret, as we think of it, is the fact that we spend a ton of our time identifying and mitigating legal risks that could affect the business. But the reality is that the vast majority of those legal risks will never actually materialize. Most contract provisions are never going to end up in litigation. Most employment practices are not going to be scrutinized. And so what we've tried to do is develop some strategies to maintain trust in the work that we're doing and to think about our own role that kind of leverages that fact to our benefit. So, for example, maintaining the trust of our internal partners, as we all know as legal department professionals, is kind of critical, perhaps the most critical element of our success. And I don't think we develop that trust by hiding the ball. So I think, you know, I see some legal professionals that sort of keep their clients at a distance. They might hold back key facts. They embellish risk factors. You know, they kind of go to lengths to make sure that they're kind of seen as the. As the expert in the room. And, you know, I know what that feels like. When I go to the mechanic to get my car serviced, you know, at least for me, and I know nothing about cars. You know, if the mechanic talks only in technical terms, if they give you only bad news, if they don't really explain what's going on or percentage present different alternatives to you for fixing an issue, we might grow mistrustful. We might get concerned they don't have our best interest in mind. You know, we might go get a second opinion. But if. If you get that mechanic who's like, you know what, there's this thing going on with your car, you could replace the part, but you know, that's going to cost You a lot of money. I think there's a fair chance you can be fine without it. You really develop trust for that person and you're going to come back. And more importantly, six months down the road when there really is that big problem, you're going to trust them. And so we kind of try and do that too. We talk really honestly about legal risks. We try and acknowledge that legal risks are just one piece of the puzzle, that there's something we need to weigh against many other business factors. And we try and think about risks in ways that really make it not just kind of a good thing for relationships to say yes, but they're actually really rational if you think about the value of those risks. So I think just as one quick example, if a legal risk that a business initiative involves might present the possibility of a million dollars in harm, that's kind of the catastrophic result. That sounds like something that you have to think really long and hard about going forward with. But if that legal risk materializing is only going to happen in 1% of situations, then you really have to discount that million dollar risk for that 1% chance and value it at something like $10,000. And therefore, if a deal is worth more than that $10,000 to the company, then an economist would tell you to move forward with that deal. And so that's a situation where looking at the risk in context and thinking about it as just one factor of many in the process can really help a yes answer be the right one for the business and be one that makes sense to take on for a legal team.

Yeah, I'm very excited to watch what happens next with all the stuff that you're building in your department. And I think you guys are really building a department for the future. So kind of what's next for you all? What's next for the legal team at Airtable? What are your big priorities for the next 12 months or so?

Oh, you know, 12 months feels like a long time given the growth, the pace of growth at our business. But I think, look, continuing to focus on systems. So I just talked about the way that we really try and put risks in context. One way that we do that is we really focus on systemic change. For us, it's okay to have one bad contract with a customer. It's not okay to have a flawed contract template that goes out to a bunch of customers. And so what we're really trying to do is get our systems sort of public company ready so that one day, if and when we decide to go public, we have systems in place that really make sure that the company is legally protected, that we have scalable ways of going to market from a legal perspective, that we have really good visibility into our priorities and our vulnerabilities and kind of that's something that we work on every day in Airtable. So I think developing those programs, privacy programs, ethics and compliance programs, commercial programs, and thinking about them in that strategic two to five years down the road way is where we are and where I think we'll continue to be over the next 12 months or so.

And that's actually a really unique answer. A lot of folks spend so much of their time being reactive and firefighting and dealing with whatever the big challenge is at hand Today. When I talk to you, you spend a lot of time talking about the foundation and putting things in place that are going to enable you to continue to scale at this crazy hyper growth pace. But it's not always about dealing with what's in front of you. Today it's thinking about what's going to be in front of you a year from now. Right.

With some of these systems we talk about four stages of maturity. Number one is ad hoc and that's really when you're just running around, reactive, defensive, trying to put out whatever fires come your way. I think next is what we call basic, which is when you have the kind of minimums in place in order to ensure compliance and a functioning legal system. Then you have strategic, which is where you're really thinking proactively. Two to five years down the road, what can we do to build this function out thoughtfully and support the business objectives that the company is focused on. And then I think that last category is differentiating. So you have a mature program in place, it's been mapped out, you know where you're going with it. And it's not just functioning in an optimized way. It's actually a value add that can affirmatively drive business value. Something that you can actually sell to customers as, as something unique and differentiating about this company that should make them want to do business with you. And so not every one of our systems needs to get to that differentiating stage, but we're really focused on figuring out, okay, what is most important to our customers, what is unique about our platform so that we understand where we really need to be a differentiating presence in the market. And then it's a matter of just going through those stages of maturity and getting to, getting to the place that we want to go.

Fantastic. Ryan, it's been such a pleasure having you here today. I have learned so much. Appreciate what you're doing for all of us and for leading the way.

Thanks so much, Mary. Really enjoyed it.

I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Bye.