Ep 140: A Very Cloudy 2020 - Michelle Zatlyn

I'm Joanne Wilson and this is positively Gotham Gal. Real, honest and meaningful conversations with women entrepreneurs and their approach to life, business, and everything in between. Hello, Michelle. Hi.

How are you?

Good, how are you? I'm so glad we finally get to do this.

Yes, we.

Me too. You know, it's really hard to do any planning when we haven't hit the bottom.

I know, I know. It's so hard. I know. Yes, yes, yes. Especially now, like, the holidays are coming up and I was kind of like, we should be more ambitious. And now I'm like, kind of second guessing my desire to be more ambitious, so.

Yeah, well, you have been very ambitious your whole career, so, you know, you're allowed not to be as ambitious. Where are you right now?

I'm in San Francisco, so I have two young kids, so their schools are open, so they're at school, which is wonderful. I mean, so great for them, but it kind of makes it hard to go live. I was actually just. One of my friends just posted like, they're moving to the mountains for the ski season and I'm a little like, oh, that sounds really great, but it's hard when you have kids in school.

It is. So I didn't realize. You are Canadian.

Yes. Yeah, we're Canadian. My husband's Canadian too. So I moved down to the US for business school in 07, so I guess it's been 13 years. And then when I graduated, my plan was to kind of go back to Canada, but then I ended up staying and then I ended up starting Cloudflare. So it's been us has been very good to me.

Yes. I mean, I know so many phenomenal women from Canada that have crossed my path and it's kind of like, amazing. Where in Canada were you from?

I'm from Saskatchewan, so it's like the Prairies in between North Dakota and Montana.

Yeah, yeah, that's totally out there. So you came to go get your MBA at Harvard. That's how you started coming to the States and you left. And where did you meet your co founder?

At business school. So Matthew and I met at business school. We were classmates at Harvard and we were on a school trip out in the Silicon Valley. And the whole purpose of the trip was to kind of get to know entrepreneurship and meet the investors. And it was January 2009. If you think back to January 2009, it was like a different version of the time we're living right now is right after the crisis. Exactly. Financial crisis. It's just everything was kind of blah and we Were out here for a week in January and on a professor led trip. And it was the Wednesday I was literally at a Plug and play down. I'm sure you know that place. It's like an accelerator and listening to. We've been meeting Jim Breyer and we. Mark Pincus was the hot entrepreneur at the time because Zynga was like just growing like weed back in January of 09 and Wednesday. I know it's like a total, you know, you've been in the industry for a long time. So it's like I've walked down memory lane. YC wasn't really big yet and it was, it was the Wednesday of that school trip, but we were down in plug and Play and there had been. This was the early stage entrepreneur pitch. So I was listening to some entrepreneurs pitch their business really early and I was tired as one day we'd been going out every night and I walked into that room at break time saying, God, if that guy can start a company, so could I. Because it just.

You kind of demystified.

You realize they weren't special. They were just, you know, smart and had an idea. And I was like, I'm smart and like, I could have probably come up with an idea. And then I said that to my friend, someone else on the trip and it happened to be Matthew. And Matthew's like, of course you could. Which is like the best response you could ever ask for from a classmate. And then we basically like sketch the idea on a napkin that night.

That's amazing. But it's something. I think that if you're smart and you're driven and you meet a lot of these people, it could be anything from starting a store to starting a web business. And you're like, you know, everyone fakes it till they make it. It's just a matter of figuring it out when you get to each point. And then before you know it, you know you've got a publicly traded company.

Then you've made it. You're like, wow, I did it.

No, you're exactly right.

And it's, it's like you don't take yourself off out of the game too early. You keep showing up, you keep, you know, you're, you, you're still humble enough to ask, okay, how did you do this? And. And not, I think, have the. I couldn't have said it any better. Exactly. So it's amazing.

Why did you guys decide on security.

You know, this trip to. I mean, I had always wanted to do something entrepreneur. I mean, I had done lots of Entrepreneurial things. So that, that was that. And I love building and I had done a lot of things, but not, not, not, not gonna take my company public. So I've done a lot of entrepreneurial things and I loved it, by the way.

I don't think anyone thinks about when they start a company. I don't even think they think about hr. Right.

No, right. They're just. Right. Passionate about something. Right, Exactly. And so. But I did have this overarching desire because I wanted to go be part of something and help grow. And my, like, line was, I want to join Google. Before it was Google or Starbucks, before Starbucks. And when the hearts and minds of its customers make a big impact in the world, like, that's kind of how I was thinking about it. I was looking for that. And so I always evaluated ideas. Matthew has lots of good ideas against, would I be proud to work on this? Like, if it was hugely successful, would I be proud to be attached to it? So there's a lot of things that are good businesses, but I was just like, I don't really care about that. I don't want to end. And I did not know a lot about cybersecurity or global performance, but I did. When we kind of were bantering on the idea, I was like, huh? If we can make the Internet safer for small businesses and developers and then eventually large enterprises, that would be cool, because who doesn't want a world that's more safe and online? And then again, we were doing all these other things, you know. Now looking back, that was what I was excited about, was I was like, I would be proud because I was like, that would make it better. And it kind of passed my, my sniff test of would I be proud to work on this if it became super successful? And so even though I wasn't a expert on cybersecurity or I would even say passionate about it, I was proud of saying, well, if we're successful, I'd be proud to put my name next to that.

Right. So it was that seed of an idea which is basically making things safer. Yeah, yeah.

And it was especially for like, the small business owners and the developers and the entrepreneurs, because that was originally that. That was kind of where we were starting of we were opening up. What was the access to some of these cybersecurity solutions?

Out of curiosity, are your parents entrepreneurs?

No, no, my parents are. My dad's a lawyer. He still practices law. He's in his mid-70s and he's had his own law firm for 50 years. And my. I Guess he's an entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur running his own law firm in that sense, and then small business owner. And my mom was a teacher for a long time. She's since retired, then worked at my dad's law. They're great. They're actually staying with us right now in the Bay Area. We have a second place in Sonoma, and so they. They've been living up there for the last two months, and it's been awesome having them here. So we're getting lots of face time together. And, you know, they're really proud. And I was telling my dad that he has three daughters, and I was just saying to him, like, how lucky. Because when I told them, they kind of. I grew up in Saskatchewan, where most people don't leave. And so the one thing my parents always said is, to all of us, they're like, you can do whatever you want in your life, but you can't. You have to go to school outside of Saskatchewan. They're like, you have to go. See, you can always come back if you want, but you can't go to school here. They really pushed my sisters and I to go somewhere else, and so that kind of opened up the world. And then when I was gonna say. When I said, I'm moving to California to start a company, I was telling my dad, like, most parents would be like, that's crazy. Don't do that. And they were like, okay, what does that mean? But good luck, and we'll be here for you. And the other thing my dad said was, it was interesting. He's like, they always paid for our school.

Because he.

And he just told me yesterday. He's like, I didn't realize, but it actually makes a lot of sense. He's like, we. Your mom and I never wanted you to have any debt because that meant you could go do whatever you wanted versus if you had debt, you'd make different choices. Which I was like, you know what? That makes a ton of sense.

Yeah. That is such a lucky thing, because I know so many kids who have debt, and it makes you make different decisions about what you need to do in your 20s with the hope that you could change it in your 30s. But it's really hard to change things when you sort of become entrenched in an industry to be able to just jump and do something else, you know? Exactly. But you started two startups before you did Cloudflare.

I did. Well, that's what I say. I've always been kind of entrepreneurial, but, like, not. I mean, I Live in the Valley. I mean, they're kind of jokes, but I had a party planning business. We used to throw New Year's Eve parties in Toronto. And turns out that's a good business. I mean, and profitable. That's actually how I paid for part of my business school. So that was cool. And then.

I like that.

Yeah. And then I was on the. I was like employee number two of a company that actually ended up getting, like. I was there early, so way before venture funding. And so I was on the founding team, but I was not the founder. I was on the founding team, but it was not my thing. And it turned into a company called I Love Rewards, which then turned into a company called Achievers, and it actually ended up raising money from Sequoia. It actually got bought by Blackhawk, the gift card division of Safeway. But it was not a success story. And it's kind of an interesting. I mean, it was. I think the founder did fine, but it was interesting. But I was there early. I was there in the good old days where, you know, everything exciting, everything was exciting. And we were growing and winning big accounts and, you know, there was 20 of us and you think competing against these big legacy players and winning some of the chips were falling our way. So I kind of got a taste of that. There's.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes I think about companies, they're like children, right? You know, bigger children, bigger problems, you know, and so sometimes you sit around in a meeting and you're just like, wow, we are talking about such different things than we talked about two years ago. You know, and as much as we wanted to get here, these are even more complicated.

Exactly.

So Cloudflare has been around for almost over 10 years now. So, you know, what is the biggest challenges you've had to overcome? I mean, I know there's plenty of. But going from this concept on a piece of paper to now having a huge company with publicly traded, doing incredibly well, you got to many mesas where I'm sure you're like, oh, my God, yes, definitely.

I mean, I think that there's a couple of things and, you know, lots of entrepreneurs, you invest in them. I mean, the first one to four years are really hard. And I actually think for some, for some companies it's three, four years and for some it's one, two. But I think everyone goes through kind of the, the spread very thin, tough phase. And so it's anywhere I kind of, my, my unscientific analysis is one to four years. And so those first four years were Tough because things were going really well, but we were nobodies. Like, we literally were nobodies. Matthew and I showed up in the Valley with Lee and we were not known, we were not known actors within the ecosystem and we raised some money to go prove, but we were really plucky and had a good idea, had a lot of hearts, guts, smarts, and we got really lucky. And so it's just, everything is hard. It's hard to hire. Like, why would someone come join us?

Really hard to hire for sure.

Because why join a 50 person company when you could just be like, okay, call me when you get to your series C and then I'll join for the same amount. So I kind of understand why people join companies really early because the equity that you get is bigger than you would get at 50, 60, 70 people. And I kind of get why people join in the scale phase once there's something there. But that kind of trough is hard and companies are just groups of people. Right. And so you need great people to come help. So I think early on getting the right people, so we had to use. And this was, you know, when Facebook and Google were paying people a lot of money. And so we actually, really, actually took the fact that I wasn't American as a, as a strength and we like started to recruit from other places and it was kind of like, come move to the Valley. It was like if tech was your religion, the Valley became Mecca and people would move to come join a startup. And actually we just did a reunion internally with a bunch of early employees at cloudflare that Matthew and I went to and like people talked about, hey, yeah, I'd never been to America before I took the job. I got on the plane from Australia and I moved my wife and my two kids to the Valley to take this job. And I think, my God, that's amazing.

I know.

I mean it's all worked out for them and they got like, and they're having a great time but. But it doesn't always work out.

It's like doesn't always work out, right? I mean, most don't. And how was it for you? I mean, now things are so different for women. I mean, we still have a lot a way to go, right? But 10 years ago when you started going out there and raising money and you were not raising money for, you know, a CPG product or a marketplace, I mean, you were raising money for cybersecurity security company. As a female, I mean, how was that?

Yeah, infrastructure. You don't see a lot of Women in Infrastructure or B2B or Right Cyber. Although for all the women listening, it's a great place to come. So please come join the industry. We need more of you. They're a great, you know, there's economics, there's lots of cool things to do. Different point of view. We need more women. I mean I, I'm a half glass full person so I guess I'll try and do the cheery version of it. Like in the good times it didn't matter. Right. Like it was at the end of the day we were getting measured on results and delivering and Matthew Lee and I made a really good team over time. Right. Like we proved ourselves. Having said that I have lots of scar tissue that I where it was early. We were raising our early round and like a really prominent investor from a really famous venture firm basically said like women don't belong in infrastructure companies. Like we like the company but we don't like Michelle, like get rid of her. And I mean and so you know, that's hard to hear because we're all unproven now. I was really lucky. I mean again back to having great pick your co founders and your life partners really closely, whoever you just choose to spend your life with. You know, in this case my co founder said screw that guy, we're not going to take money from him. And we had, we had a good company so we have options. That's you know, one of the good.

Things makes a big difference. It's the ones that have to take money from the assholes because they have no other choice. Yeah. And I think women have a lot of scars from a lot of things that I find many of them try to get profitable really early on so they don't have to go through that again.

You know, for years I hated raising money even. I mean like I just did not. I had a man business partner, we were doing well and I just did not enjoy it at all. But what one thing that I will say all those stories are true and that's terrible but like there are some really great investors like nea, amazing partners. Like they really have been amazing. Union Square Venture, like your husband's firm. They were amazing. They never treated me differently. It was really about the business and the idea and the technology and that there's also some bright spots. So I think like if you can.

Find or you wouldn't be where you are. Do you really think that tech and the industry has changed broader in a good way for women over the last decade or is it still.

Put it.

This Way more women at top jobs. I mean, really top jobs that are being talked about to sit on really major boards. And when I see that, I think, oh, thank God, you know, but has anything changed except for that?

I mean, that's good. I think there are more women investors. Either they forged their own firms or they're being promoted within partners. So I think Karen Norton upfront, and I think those are real people at the table making real decisions, and I think that's great. So I think that's good. I think there are more women who have started companies, and the data shows that. But, like, the numbers are tiny. So it's. I mean, so. Yes, but there's still tons of work to be done, and it's still not. How about this? This is not about investing. But I was literally last year, so it's 2020. So in 2019, I was at a very major, like, super major international event in Europe, and I was speaking at an event, and I was on there, and I went to meet my fellow panelists beforehand. The moderator was like, oh, great, Michelle's here. We're so happy to have a pretty woman on the panel. And I was just, like, looking around me like, where am I? I couldn't believe it. I thought, okay, whatever. And then he said it again when the other panelists kind of came, and I just thought, oh, my God. So again, I showed up and I did a really good job. And my job is to get invited back to another panel. And because of my content and because they're like, oh, wow, she knows what she's talking about. But, yeah, we still have work to do. I care a lot about hopefully having women, more women join technology roles, because I think it's a really important place. Like, that's where tech's gonna become more and more important, not less important. So it's a great place to start to learn. You might as well learn now.

If you.

If you have don't know it yet, you might as well start today. Better today than in a week. And you work with smart people on hard problems and you get paid well. And, like, I think those are the things. And then go find a place where you're valued, not, you know, not valued. And so I do think those exist. And there's some really bad behavior, too. So you kind of gotta carve your own path and almost. Almost have blinders onto some of those things.

Yeah, I think you just have to be sort of roll with the punches, and when you do get a chance to punch back.

I know, and I hate saying that because it's not.

It is what it is. Eventually, I don't know when, but eventually, hopefully, things will change completely, although possibly never. So you guys at Cloud for through the election year, you volunteered your services to local governments. How was that?

It's called the Athenian Project and we do provide our enterprise grade cybersecurity and performance reliability services to which enterprises pay us millions of dollars a year at no cost for all of the infrastructure that powers the election. So where you go to register to vote? Where do you look up the polling times? And it's a project that got created out of the last election four years ago because we saw some of the cyber attacks and disinformation, we said, okay, if you can't have a functioning democracy, you can't have entrepreneurship. So we really felt like we wanted to play a role. And I will say that it is a great source of pride for many people that work at Cloudflare. People are really proud to work at Cloudflare because we do things like that. And we also do it for at risk public interest sites under a project called Project Galileo, but this for the election site. So we've been working with the local and state agencies and saying if you need anything, let us know. And Senate races, the federal races, and we had a lot of interest. Some people have been onboarded for months and months and months and other people like they were coming under attack and they onboarded under attack because they were seeing something and we, they wanted to find a solution. But it was a great source of pride because again, we need a functioning democracy to be able to allow entrepreneurship. If you don't have that, it's really hard to be able to create a company like Cloudflare. And we just felt like we wanted to play again, it's an important role, but again, the world is a big place, so it's a small role, but it's an important role and something we're all really proud of. And so the one thing that I find interesting is actually this year the elections, I don't want to say went off without a hitch, but there wasn't cybersecurity interference, which again is good. Which is good.

Yeah, it is good. I mean, and certainly it's amazing that you can go on to Amazon in one click, but you can't vote so easily. That's a whole issue in itself.

Well, I'll leave that for someone else to solve. I'm not sure that's not your thing, but if you need someone to power the back end, we're happy to help on the security, performance reliability side.

I think the other thing I'm really interested in is how did you guys change as a company during COVID Yes.

Yeah. So I'll answer the question, but I will just preface it of I feel really lucky where, you know, it's cloudy 2020, terrible things going on in the world and this pandemic. And in a way, sometimes I escape reality by going to work. I guess I feel really lucky about that. Something that's kind of become more clear the last month. So we've been really busy. Turns out that if you can't go do business with your favorite company in person, you turn online. And so basically overnight Internet traffic doubled around the world. And if you have anything online, an app, blog, a website, a new business that was an in person, you're doing yoga classes in person, oh my God, my livelihood's gone, I gotta go online. So Internet traffic doubled overnight within two week period.

That's amazing. I didn't like that.

Right. And so there were a lot of companies behind the scenes holding things together. And we were one of them, and there are others, but we were one of them. And so things have been really busy. Our team has been stretched thin to do that. And then secondly, customers, these companies who maybe were servicing restaurants in person, all of a sudden like, wow, I need a direct to consumer business or whatnot. So all these kind of digital projects that were on the back burner became on the forefront. And if you're put anything online, anything, you're connecting a car online, you're connecting building a website, you're trying to get your employees to access workloads internally. You need a service like Cloudflare sitting in front because we again, make everything faster, safer, more reliable. So we have been really busy and so what we've told our team is step one, focus on yourself. Because everyone's going through this pandemic together, right? It's impacting us all in so many different way. Step two, focus on your loved ones. And then step three, any energy you have leftover, channel it to our customers because they need us more than ever. Like they feel like, oh my God, I'm out of a job or out of a business if I don't get this new service spun up. And so we've been really helping our customers with these digital first initiatives and making sure that they have all the performance reliability in front to make it work, all the employees working from home. And then the other thing that's kind of sat on top of all this is Internet traffic. Is way up. So are online cyber attacks. So it's not even that. It's enough for, if you're an entrepreneur or business owner having to think about, okay, what's my new digital first strategy? I also have to be careful about now I have employees at home and that's now the new way that hackers are using to attack companies. And it's like, oh my God, I got to add something else on top. So we've been, it's been busy. So we're all, we went from a 100% in person every day sort of company come into the office every day until 100%. We're all at home. That's been interesting. Some things are better because of that. And the things that aren't better, we've gotten, we've, we've tried to fix. That's a huge difference. But it's been a really busy year. The other thing that's been interesting, and I think this is different as you look at company to company or if you're a founder, is we've shipped a lot this year. Like, we've shipped a lot. Our team is like, we're really focused on solving problems for our customers because they really need us right now. And I think that's been good because everyone, again, everyone's distracted. We're all going through this together as people, but when you can go to work and feel like my work matters and customers are using this, like that feels I'm helping to solve the problem. And I know some other companies that I think are stuck where they're not able to ship right now and people are kind of distracted about what's going on in the world. And so I guess if you're a founder listening, I think if you can try and get your team focused on shipping something that solves a problem for your customers, it might be that productivity. I think it feels good to do something useful right now during a very cloudy 2020.

Right. Well, I like the whole concept of digital first because, you know, when this whole pandemic set in, you know, we saw the onslaught of a lot of companies are only have enough money in the bank or able to last for two weeks and then they're in big trouble. But it also forced many industries that have just sort of ignored technology. Like they sort of had it, but they didn't really have it. And then it was like, oh my God, if we don't get with it, we're done. Like, we are going to be completely irrelevant. Even though we've had companies that have been 100 years old. And so that, I thought was the most interesting because certainly coming out of the tech industry, it was always one of my frustrations where when we would see businesses that were being built to solve these problems and take us somewhere else and companies were just, like, dripping to get there, and, you know, and now, bang, you've no choice. And so I think that. No choice. And I think that's actually a good thing.

I agree. I agree.

So one thing that has happened to you over the course of 10 years is you've had two children.

I have.

And how is that? I think that a lot of women grapple with having kids while they're building their businesses.

Again, I preface this with again, a half glass, full person. And I really wanted it. Like, 10 years ago, I was really, really in Cloudflares. We just started. And the person I was dating then is now my husband. So I had been dating somebody, and I really wanted a career. I was super ambitious, always in pursuit of something. I wanted a life partner. I wanted to be married, and I wanted a really happy relationship. And then I wanted to have kids. So I wanted all three. And I guess over the last 10 years, that's what I've done. I've done all three, and that's what I wanted to do. And, you know, I feel lucky that I've been able to do it. And actually just kind of this year, a little bit of like, wow, I did it. Great career. I have a great husband. I have kids, like, and I kind of appreciate it more and more, especially during this time. So I guess I'm here to say that it's possible. I wish more people spoke about it. My husband's an entrepreneur. He has his own company, so we got lots of balls in the air at home. And I, like, I want more people to talk about how you can have a great career and great family and a partner. That also works, because I think that there's lots of people doing it. You just kind of hear all the negative about it. You hear about why it's so hard and why this. And I'm like, I mean, it's not that.

It's.

I hate this. Yeah. Everything in life is hard. Anything worth having is hard.

There's nothing easy. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is daunting for some people. But the reality is, is that even though things move quicker, there was always a cadence to when you, you know, more than likely settle down with a partner and then have children and build your career, and it doesn't happen in your 60s. You know, it happens at this time period, you know, somewhere between your mid-20s to your early 40s. And then you go to another thing. And that's how life has always been. I would like to see more women talk about that and more women, you know, be in the role that you're in. Because I do think that when media ends up quoting more men than they do women, that they're not looking hard enough. Because those women that if they were quoted every day or they were looked at as, you know, what they've created, you'd see more people, particularly young women, saying, well, I can do this too, you know, and so I think that's really important. So one last question. What are your future predictions for cybersecurity? I mean, you've been quoted saying, you know, that it's going to be the thing of the past is that, you know, although I find it hard to believe, but like everything, you know, we evolve into something else.

Yeah, no, I, well, so I do think that technology, this next generation with cloud based services will make cybersecurity go to more intrinsic cybersecurity, managed security, where it's going to get built into the products, into the code reviews, it's going to get built into a service like Cloudflare, like if you're connecting anything online, it's going to go through a service like Cloudflare, then the products are all going to have better intrinsic security. And I mean that's a good outcome. I mean we should all want that. Like this is, that doesn't mean it's not a good career to go into. It doesn't mean like I did say that recently and I don't really think of myself as a very controversial person, but that's probably the most controversial I've ever said that got people's attention and some of it was like, well, you're not going to encourage people to come in and that's impossible. And I, you know, again it's. You think something like email spam, you know, 15 years ago is terrible and you know, Gmail and Microsoft gotten really good at it and they've gotten really good at making go into the spam folder and, and again, I still think it's a great field to go in. We need really great people. There's a huge shortage of jobs and it's certainly not today. But I do think that if we all do our jobs really well and people build products with security in mind and every leader thinks about that, all the tides will rise. Some of the other things that I think are interesting are we all need to be better digital citizens. So I'm really big into digital citizenship, digital leadership. We all need to understand how we're using things online, where our data is. And do you have to be an expert? No. But you also can't outsource that and be like, oh, I don't really care. It's like, we all. There are so many tools that you can use to make your life better on a daily basis that I think it's up to everybody to be better digital citizens. It's up to the school systems to teach this. Like, and if not, you should go be doing like code.org because, like, it's not going away. It's only becoming more important and you don't want to feel like you're getting left behind. It's more like it kind of. It's back to my plug and play experience, where by just seeing an entrepreneur pitch their business, it demystified it for me. And I literally was like, if that person can do it, so can I. And I think if you kind of do some of these things, it just demystifies. Oh, that's what a line of code looks like. That's what it can do. It's not. It's like, oh, I actually kind of. I might not want to do that all day, but now I can understand it a little bit better. And I think just rising all tides in digital citizenship, the people who do that will be really well served.

Yes. And I think everybody should. I mean, Rahm Emanuel had a quote a couple weeks ago saying that, you know, all the people that are no longer working at JCPenney should now learn how to code. And people were just slamming him. And I thought to myself, yeah, that's exactly right. And by the way, you should set them up in JCPenney's because they're all going to be empty, you know, so, you know, it is the future. And it's always been the future for you. It's been the future for me. It's been the future that we know in the tech industry. But more and more, we all have to be digital citizens because if we're not, you're going to be left behind.

There's some friends of mine work in the public market and they kind of give me an insight of saying there's a lot of public market investors who think tech is a fad. And I was like, I really don't think it's a fad. And really don't. I think it's here to say, make that assumption But I was talking to Pam Costa, who runs All Raise, which is an organization that's dedicated to get more women founders and investors into the field. And I asked her, like, do you have to convince people this is a good idea? She's like, yeah, some people still think, like, it doesn't really matter. And so I guess, you know, there's. You can decide which side of history you want to be on, but they.

Don'T think it matters until someone, you know, breaks into their account and tries to sell all their. Steal other information and they've been hacked. Then they'll realize how much it matters matters.

And so I. And so I guess, you know, again, for people listening to our banter, which has been so fun, Joanne, is just this idea of you don't have to get everyone to agree with you up front before you start and do something. Like, actually the easy, you know, 10 years ago or eight years ago, I was at parties and people like, when they said, what do you do, Michelle? I'm like, I help make the Internet better. They, like, literally were like, or, I helped make the Internet safer. And they're like, eye roll. Super boring. But now, 10 years later, people are interested. Wait, what do you do? You have all these customers, you have all this. You're being successful. Wait, what didn't I get in eight years ago? And so I do think sometimes it's paving your own path and just doing it. I'm a big believer in doing things because when you do and you start to get momentum, people start to come along and you start to have proof points along the way, and then it becomes less words, but, like, let me show you what I've done and how we're helping people in this certain area. Like, I do think that's like the great equalizer if you can do things like actually move an idea forward.

I totally agree. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was great conversation, and hopefully this Covid will be over soon.

I know we can do meet in person and have a shared meal.

I would love that. I would love to share a meal. That's actually one of the things I.

Miss the most about COVID is I, you know, I used to go. I always enjoyed going out for a dinner with a group of interesting people and kind of meeting.

Yeah.

Dialogue. And you can still do that with Zoom.

Not that you can't do that, but it's the same something. Totally. All right, well, thank you so much. All right, take care.