CEO Systems: 5 Lessons Learned from Scaling at Every Growth Phase with HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet
Dave McJannet, HashiCorp's CEO, shares five lessons on scaling a company through different growth phases. He covers market selection, system design, and how to adapt your approach as the company grows. The talk focuses on practical systems that work at each stage.
Chapters
I should probably start just with a quick little background of me since no one's ever heard of me. I'm the CEO of a company called Hashicorp. Anybody here use our products in your ops teams? I actually bet it's much more than that because people don't realize that we are the company behind products like Terraform Vault, Consul Nomad, Vagrant Packer and a whole bunch of other ops products that probably are. If you're using cloud infrastructure, almost certainly you're using. The good news is we make them open source. So that's probably why you're not paying us anything, which is just how the model works. So I've been in the startup ecosystem for a lot longer than I might care to admit. They're going on 20 years and I've kind of been intrigued by two things always. One is I really like infrastructure. I think infrastructure is really, really cool. I like knowing that when I go swipe my credit card at that gas station or whatever application I'm using, I know that it goes through products that we envisioned and built. It doesn't matter to me that other people don't know that we get it visceral satisfaction out of that. And I think that's one of the criteria for company building is you really have to think what you're doing is cool. I think infrastructure is cool. I know that's weird. Number two, I've been really obsessed with the notion of company building. I think. I think company building is a fundamentally team pursuit where a group of people are aligned around a common idea and we win together, we generate value together. People pay us a dollar for our services or our products because that has value to them and that is inherently satisfying. So I spent 20 plus years doing. I've actually done that inside some larger companies. I spent a good amount of time at Microsoft earlier in my career and so I kind of got to see what scale looks like. You want to see what it looks like to refresh a revenue report and have millions of dollars appear every time you refresh it. That's what it looks like at Microsoft when you refresh revenue reports. It is at an enormous, enormous scale. I also had then spent some time at one of these companies. Is projecting one of these companies here around 60 million in revenue, one of them around 100. And then I did actually a handful of companies from zero through their IPO process. So you'll see some commonality here. These are all infrastructure companies. They are all deeply under the covers things you're not necessarily aware of. When I Look at web Methods in particular. You've probably never heard of web methods, but it jumps out at me because it's an example of the craziness that happens in the financial markets that sometimes distracts us. Web Methods went public on $15 million in revenue and opened on the first day at $7 billion in valuation. Right. That was in 2001. Seven or eight years later, after executing double digit growth rates, all through that time they sold for about $400 million. Right. So what that tells us is what we should be focused on is not so much worrying about the externalities. We should be focused on the business building aspects of what we do, because that's what's repeatable. What strikes me with that lens backwards, which looks very deliberate, but in hindsight, but in fact was fairly serendipitous, is that there' immense repeatability to the, to the business building process. And that's why a lot of you are serial entrepreneurs. To me, it's really these three things. Pick the market, find the people, build the systems. Those are the three aspects. Whether you're building a restaurant or whether you're building a car wash or whether you're building a software company that we do. And you might say, well, hold on a second, that's kind of backwards. I don't pick a market. I build a product and I take it to market. Then I try and scale that product. And I would suggest that that's a very inward looking view if you look at it from the lens of your customer. We all participate in markets, right? If I am going to decide to do something, buy a cup of coffee, go to a gas station, that decision is based on my alternatives. I'm only going to spend so much money on that category. So picking the market is actually what we do, not building products. Ultimately your products will be delivered behind that mission of what market you want to enter. But you are picking a market. I think that's the most important thing. If I'm a restaurateur, for example, and I say, hold on a second, I'm a chef, I can cook lots of different things, I'm going to open a restaurant business. I have a choice. I want to either open a high end steakhouse or I can open a family style business, right? I'm picking a market, right? In the overall world, there's only so much money I'm going to spend on high end steakhouses. There's only so much money I'm going to spend on family based restaurants. When I make a decision as to where I'm going to spend my money. It's against the market in which you're participating. My favorite line from Frank Slootman is only the government can print money. The rest of us have to take it from somebody else. Which I think is a pretty profound statement which tells us we all participate in markets which are somewhat finite. And for me to take money from the high end restaurant business, I have to take it from somebody else. That's just how markets work. Markets are fights. So pick your market wisely. If I'm going to pick a high end steakhouse, obviously the people that I'm going to find are those that are dressed a certain way, that allow me to charge a certain price. I'm going to walk into this high end restaurant with a maitre d that is going to make sure I feel like I'm about to spend 500 bucks versus if I'm going to be at a family restaurant, I might hire high school kids to do the same thing. My product development processes are going to be different. My lead to cash processes are going to be different. Because the way that I go to market is predicated on the market that I pick. Those people are different. And lastly, the systems are different. So like I said, how I build, how I cook, the food, how I do, all the things related to the product development process are just different. So it turns out picking the market is the singular most important thing you're going to do. If I were to give an example of what Facebook has done, they've deliberately said we were a social media company, but I want to be a metaverse company. They are making a decision as to which market they're going to participate in. For whatever reason, they believe that that's going to be a big spend category. I do infrastructure, I'm happy to sell them the software that underpins it. I have no idea whether that's a good market or not. But they are making the decision. What they then have to do is they have to go find the people that know how to do that. So on the product introduction side, who knows how to build Metaverse products? I'm not sure. Maybe it's the folks from Linden Labs back in the day. Like they know how to do that. There are other folks that do much better than me on the lead to cash. On the customer acquisition side, again, how do I acquire customers? That's a totally different game relative to being a social media company. And they're going to have to find the people that know how to do that. The systems associated with all those aspects are Also going to be different. So that basic model is how we think about repeatable business building, whether it's a car wash or a restaurant or whatever it might be. My favorite example is actually the folks at Snowflake who have been really in the news. We were all looking at this market 15 years ago of like data explosion. I made the decision. I think this technology called Hadoop is going to be the way that data storage is done. Bob Mugley and team said, you know, I think actually the cloud data warehouse is how this is all going to be solved. They made a decision, build a data warehouse or I build a cloud data warehouse. What market do I want to be in? They decided, hey, all the net new data is going to be generated largely around cloud. Therefore we're going to build a data warehouse in cloud because we think that spend category is going to grow. They could have easily said I want to build a data warehouse for the private data center and they would have been wrong because it turns out picking the market is like I said, the single most important thing that we do when we build businesses. They then set out to find the people and they actually went and hired the team from Oracle that built the original relational or sort of analytic data warehouse for Oracle, the database incumbent. And on the go to market side they hired a group of people from emc. Why? Because their customers are enterprise customers. They needed to hire salespeople that knew how to, how to reach those particular people. All predicated on the market that they chose. The systems that they built, again customer acquisition systems, you know, new product introduction systems lead to cash systems. All predicated that this is the market we're going after. So I'm always stuck by, struck by those three aspects. And we get a lot of advice, particularly from our VC friends around picking markets and hiring people. We certainly get a lot of feedback around hiring people. Everyone's got opinions about that one, most of which I tend to disagree with. But such is the nature of advice that we get. What we don't talk about is the really, really hard bit about the systems building. Systems building means the hard day to day execution that actually builds companies. We can all talk strategy, we can all talk about the right kind of people, but it's waking up every single day and building the systems that builds companies and doing that over extended periods of time is how we build valuable companies. So what I want to talk about just for the next 15 minutes or so are the core aspects of system building that we've learned from progressing through those stages of growth at the Companies we participated in. The very, very first one is this notion of phases. I think this is the most profound thing that we've observed over the course of time. I've worked for some CEOs that are really, really good at this is understanding the different phases of growth that companies go through. We use this sound bite a lot. It says, you know, we're all, if you're the founder of a company, CEO of a company, if you're on the exec team of a company, we all get a lot of advice. But it's not that the advice is wrong, it's just that it's not typically matched to the phase of my company. So, for example, someone might say, you know what, you should really do a product LED growth model and you should really build marketing automation machinery. You should really invest deeply in HubSpot and all the things that come with that stack to allow you to do this product LED growth motion. Well, should I depends where I am in my phase. If I'm just in the discovery phase of whether I have product market fit, that might be a waste of money, right? So it's not that the advice is wrong. It is just not net match to the phase. So for the last several companies we've done, we've actually mentally had this identical model of phases, which is there are, you know, very distinct phases your company goes through. For us, you know, these dollar values roughly match our experience. For you, it'll be different depending on what market you're in. From 0 to $10 million, you're literally just trying to figure out patterns. From 10 to 30 million, you're trying to figure out how to reproduce those patterns. And that's when you largely have product market fit. In our business, there's something magical about the $30 million number. In my experience, when we can get products with $30 million, they'll get to 100, right? So that $30 million number really is important to us. At 100 million, you're just scaling out that playbook, repeatability. Then there's early scale, then there's mid scale and then typically around a billion dollars people product portfolio and say, okay, one product isn't enough. We're going to start going to adjacent markets and growing. This has enormous, enormous implications for everything. Like, let's just talk about it through the lens of picking markets from 0 to 10. You're actually just trying to discover what markets you're in. What do your buyers compare you to? Like, hey, I might think I'm a database, but actually if it turns out your Customers don't think you're a database. You're not competing for database dollars, you're competing for some other dollars. Maybe there are no dollars in that market. Maybe you should change your thesis if that's what you think you're doing. If your product doesn't have fit, people aren't reacting to the product at 0 to 10, there's no point in putting gas on the fire to expand it. So this notion of pattern matching is the very first phase of the company life. For what it's worth, when I first joined HashiCorp six and a half years ago, we were at zero. And I had the inside sales folks sit outside my office for a reason. Because I wanted to hear every single phone call they did. I wanted to say, what are people reacting to? What are they not reacting to? Where are they, where are they calling BS on what we do? That was the 0 to 10 phase, right? It didn't matter. I had marketing automation systems. It's irrelevant. It's like, do people believe in what I'm selling and will they buy from me? Even if it's experimental? At 30 million right now you're at a slightly different scale now. You got a bunch more salespeople, right? But you've just, you've established that maybe that market is right. The same thing holds true for the people side of it. And this is obviously we all understand, but if you hire someone from Microsoft and say, come and help me build my company at 10 or $30 million, it's going to be really, really hard for them because they just haven't seen it before. It's a different, different game. And the hard part about startups and scaling startups, in my view, is this phase shifting notion which causes you to reinvent the company at every step along the way. And that is hard. That is why, as I was joking, you know, if you look at my corporate photo from seven or 10 years ago, it looks different from my corporate photo today because it is hard to do this. It is relentless, relentless, relentless. And most people trip through these phases. So first and foremost, this notion of phases is critically important for your market picking for your people and for your systems building. Comment I make on market. In fact, I saw the folks at Snowflake do this really, really well. When they got to 500 million, 700 million, they actually changed the market. They picked a different market. They used to be in the data warehouse market. That's not a big enough market. And they deliberately shifted their market to a more broad data platform market, right? Why? Because it increases their addressable market, they are picking a different market. If they'd done that earlier, it would have failed because they didn't have enough money, enough repeatability, what they were doing to be able to make that real on the system side. This is also why people say, say, hey, you got to replace that VP all the time. Because if the VP doesn't understand that they are having to re architect the systems for the next phase, everybody falls, right? So when people are not far enough out in front to architect for the next phase, next phase, next phase, that's when companies hit a wall. Let's just talk about what I mean by systems. I'm a big fan of Ray Dalio, the Bridgewater CEO. And we actually have plaques of this framework around our office and always have. When I talk about systems, I mean that mechanism that can repeatably machine something into an outcome. So I say, hey, my goal here is to build a car. How do I take the inputs and repeatably output certain outcomes? The system is the machine in the middle. It is the repeatable, repeatable machine in the middle. And that's what we are building when we build systems, right? This is the hard part of what we do each and every day. I'll give you an example. Let's just say, for example, I want to build an expense processing system in my finance organization. I want to be able to predictably take a bunch of inputs, some employee expenses and invoices, and I want to output those expenses paid within 14 days and an error rate of less than 0.1%. That is a system. Someone has to build that system. Your system is comprised of people, so your company's comprised of people and systems. So this notion of systems is the essence of company building in my view. If you pick the right market, then with good execution, you have the opportunity to build the systems to make that company successful. If you pick the wrong market, no amount of execution is going to help you. But this is what execution looks like to us. Obviously your systems are very different from other people's systems and there's a reason for that, is because kind of the characteristics of your company are in fact the systems of that company. That's what makes repeatable. If I were to envision what the employee experience is like at something like Oracle, I can imagine what their employee expense reporting system is. It's probably not pleasant. Why? Because unlike us, we have a slightly different view of the importance of people and culture in the building of these systems. So the actual full view of the Dalio systems view is this One which is it is built on top of your culture and your people, right? So we had an expense system back in the early days where our head of finance said just to just submit your expenses and if you don't submit them, you don't get paid. And his comment when we released it was if you don't submit your expenses, we'll have assumed you've been abducted by aliens or something to that effect. Everybody thought, hey, that's kind of funny. But it actually worked right Today if you forget your expenses is we have a mechanism for actually correcting that back then, right? We didn't because we couldn't afford it. But also it was kind of cute that we could joke around about how our systems work. Our culture was very, very particular. Our systems are built on culture and people. The third learning I would just pause it is this one is company is comprised of four distinct plans and we draw it like this. It is in this order too. A company is both on a financial plan that then drives the people plan, that then drives the product plan that drives the go to market plan and that reinforce the financial plan. It is in that order. And I don't mean hey, I want to build a financial plan to generate $10 million next year. That's not what I mean. I mean I'm going to put in an Excel spreadsheet that says we're going to build X dollars in new X in expansion, X in renewal, X in this geography, X from this, from this product category and X from this segment. So a very, very detailed financial plan which drives our business. Companies are driven by a financial plan. There's a reason for it because it dictates the investments we're going to make. So we always start, this is great, what are we trying to get to next year? Extra 10 million in revenue. It's going to be decomposed this way very, very specifically. That is my thesis for how this is going to unfold. I might be wrong, but I'm going to have a thesis, right, that then informs the people plan. If I think I'm going to generate, you know, $2 million of that in the United Kingdom, I better have some salespeople in the United Kingdom, right? If it's going to generate X from this product category, I better have developers building that product category and it drives my resource allocation system that then drives the product plan in terms of what I can commit to and then that then informs the go to market plan with respect to how do I get users on this journey with us. So it is the Very, very tight linkage of those four things that actually systematically makes our business go. I know this is obvious from the outside, but these are very, very simple things that actually took us a long time to figure out. This actually dovetails into the idea that a company's like an orchestra. And when I do an onboarding, which I do every month to new employees, I say, hey, a company's like an orchestra. I could be in your seat, you could be in mine. Somebody has to be in all these seats. And then they say, well, hey, what are our objectives? What are the company objectives? Well, how can I have one set of company objectives that cascade into okrs if I have four different plans? If you're in the finance organization, right, Your objective is to build an expense processing system this quarter. Right. If you're in the sales organization, your objective is to close X amount of dollars in this category this quarter. So actually your whole company decomposes into these four categories, whether you like it or not. And understanding that there is no unified set of objectives, all of them, but rather actually objectives across all four of the core wheels of your car is sort of the core learning of the systems of your company that we've learned from the inside. Okay, cool. So I have these four different plans that doesn't feel very systemy to me. I would posit that actually a company is nothing more than a set of interlocking systems. So this is actually how we draw it. We go, great. Early on in your life, maybe when you're $10 million, you start hiring execs that are going to run each of these different functions for what it's worth. I believe finance person, HR person, heads of product. I actually split sales, marketing and customer success into three different functions inside the go to market organization. I don't believe it's a good idea to put those all into one person for what it's worth. Not until you get much, much later. But conceptually, those are the four aspects of your company. When you hire those execs, what they will then do for you is build the systems. Right? That's why we need them. Early on in your life, you know, actually early on in our life, in this last company, I built all those systems. It wasn't very fun. Then I brought in execs and I said, you're going to build the extension of this system and the extension of this system. I was deeply involved in all of them. You are architecting this. If you're the founder of your company for a long time, it probably wasn't until we got to about $100 million in revenue that I fully relinquished some aspects of this. Hey, you're running finance, I trust you to do this. It wasn't until we hit much, much larger than that that I was willing to relinquish the go to market system. So your role in orchestrating this as a CEO founder, if that's who some of you are, will change. It's not like, oh, I'm going to hire a head of finance and they're going to build all the systems. No, they don't know how to do that because they don't understand the culture of your company. They don't understand the people and they don't understand your business well enough to be left alone to do it over time. You're trying to get them to do this unmanaged or lightly managed. What they are doing underneath them is hiring sub sort of directors of functions. And you can see how this cascades into org structure across the different aspects. So that should say cash collection system on the left. How do we invoice our customers and have that cash be received? Well, whoever runs finance is going to hire a controller or somebody underneath them and their job is to create that repeatable system. On the people side, it's your talent acquisition system. Their job of the TA lead is to do that. On the product side, the hard part is how do we take feedback from the market and repeatedly machine that into innovation that gets brought to market. Right, that's a new product introduction system. On the lead to cash system, just an example of a system that gets built in the go to market side. Ultimately it looks like this, your company is just a composition of different systems within these core functions. All not very, very complicated. But you can also see, like I said, how this ultimately manifests in org structure. So you have someone running the product system or the go to market system. You have a lead to cash system, you have a sale to renewal system, you have a resource allocation system, perhaps, maybe those are the big ones you measure. Right. We run process reviews on each of these systems. So we don't just say let's have someone create the system. I don't trust people to create the systems because people aren't always great at the system design. We run process reviews every month. I want to see what the system looks like. We'll talk about results at the end of the quarter. But I want to see the system because I'm trying to force the entire organization to understand that their job is about systems building. Their job is about anticipating phases and Re architecting those systems for the next phase. Our lead to cash system when we had $10 million in revenue obviously looks like very different from the lead to cash system when we are today. That had to get re architected. Re architected. Re architected. And most people aren't that great at that. Truthfully. The people that do well in startups are people that can do that. Right. It's a sort of a different breed of people. Really, really importantly is you have to shift those systems by phase. And this sort of the point I was making, right, the system design of the go to market side, which tends to be the most acute at the different phases, is acute, right? Re architect. Re architect. Re architect. Re architect. And I think like I said, this is where many companies struggle. I was actually talking with some public market investors a couple of weeks ago in New York and I said, hey, what do you look for in companies? Like, what's interesting to you? And they said, hey, we look for two things. Number one, companies that obviously have product market fit. Cool. And then number two, we look for those that can transcend certain revenue breakpoints. And they say, typically it's $500 million and a billion. And you're like, well, can you talk a bit more about why that is? And they go, well, it's pretty straightforward. Is because getting from 0 to 500 million is about product market fit and minor execution. Getting from 500 million plus a lot of companies hit a wall because of this exact notion is because the system design that's required to get from 500 to a billion is totally different than what got you to 500 million. Sometimes it happens earlier because previously it only mattered that I had enough quota capacity, for example, if I'm a sales driven organization to hit the $500 million number. When the numbers get really, really big, it's like, do I have enough quota capacity in Japan in these two regions with enough leads to support them? It's an operational challenge. So it's a system design challenge. It's a process, It's a process scrutiny all the time to make sure that those systems are appropriate for the next bit. And most people aren't good at that. Like noted. Makes sense to me. We are obsessed, obsessed, obsessed with phase shifts. Those systems really just visually look like that. The last point maybe to talk through, obviously I could talk about this stuff all day. I find it fascinating. This is like a dark art that nobody really talks about is for this notion of system design. Whose responsibility is it to redesign the systems? Someone showed me this picture years ago and it kind of resonated because it just makes sense. Management structures are about ladder time horizons. So if I'm an individual contributor, sales rep, like we give them six month quotas, they are only focused on six months. I can assure you, if you're a developer, you're focused on the next six months, the next couple of quarters. What I have to do, the managers of those people, maybe they're taking 12 months out. The leadership team that reports to me, they're thinking 18 months out and my job is 36 months. But the leadership team, I kind of go back to the point where we get a lot of pressure from our investors, hey, this person's not scaling, this person's not scaling, got to replace them. Implicitly, this is what they're referring to. They don't think about it this way, but implicitly they're saying, hey, there are phase shifts ahead. If the person running HR is not 18 months ahead, anticipating the new system that's required for the next phase, the whole company's going to trip and it's your fault. And they're right, right. So the leadership team becomes critically, critically, critically important at scaling companies because they have to have the 18 month time horizon. And obviously this is what makes high scale companies really, really hard, is because you transition so many phases, so many phases, so many phases, so quickly that it actually gets past people, people. And so the ideal person, your leadership team, is someone who's both seen startups but also seen scale and they know how to get there because that way they can say, I know what it looks like at scale, but obviously that's not going to work. But I kind of know what we're building towards. I'm going to get, I'm going to, I'm going to go, I want to get there in four stages and this is how we're going to do it. So this notion of time horizons is critical, critical, critical to company building. You think about the, the leadership team, they really are most focused on the systems. If you think about it, they're focused on the systems and the people. The only person that's focused on the market is me. My job is to make sure that I am 36 months out in terms of making sure we're picking the right market to be in so that we don't run out of tam, so that we don't run out of opportunity, so we can continue to grow at the horrendous pace that our investors expect. That is my job. That is what makes the CEO job so, so difficult in My opinion is because technology move, markets move so quickly, you have to figure out how to stay ahead of the wave. Ahead of the wave, ahead of the wave. In fact, my favorite interview years ago with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, someone said to him, hey, Warren, you guys are great friends. Why don't you ever invest in Microsoft? And Warren Buffett's answer was, because technology is like surfing a wave. Like, you can be on the wave and then boom, you fall off the wave and you're done. And you can't catch back up because the markets move fast. And so it's just really, really unpredictable. And that is exactly why market picking is our problem. So I'm always 36 months out market wise, but I'm also forcing the leadership team to accept that their job is phase shift. Phase shift, phase shift. And that's why you get the feedback, like I said, that, hey, that person's got to go because they're not making the next phase because they haven't seen the next phase. And I go, I'm not sure I agree. If you look at my leadership team over the last couple companies, we've done like, there's actually a lot of first timers in there. Because it is systems thinkers, not experience, that wins. If you can think about how to re architect that system, your job on the leadership team is not to pick the market. It is to re architect the systems regularly. That is something that can be learned. Systems thinkers are the ones that do that best. We've gone through these phases here, you know, without giving the specifics of our revenue. We're a public company now. We've gone through all of these, all of these phases here. But we are absolutely dogged about re architect. Re architect. Re architect, rearchitect. And I would say I spend all my time making sure that the company doesn't trip. If I get it wrong, If I'm not 36 months ahead, the company does trip. Right? And we've been very, very fortunate that I work for one CEO in particular who's really, really good at this that just sort of introduced us to this notion of, of phase shift. Phase shift, phase shift, phase shift, phase shift. So if I were to summarize it, I have one more thing I'll add after this one. For us, scaling systems is really about these five things. The notion of phase shifts really matters. Goals, systems, outcomes, finance plan, People plan, product plan, go to market plan. Your company is ultimately a set of interlocking systems. People come and go, systems endure. Right? So if someone were to leave your Finance team tomorrow you could replace them with somebody else because the system already exists. That'll get them for the next six months, 12 months. But the system exists and that's how it works. The last thing I'll leave you with here, because we've been in the startup world, you know, I've been doing it for 20 plus years and we, we've actually had this slide in one of our decks for quite a long time, which we jokingly refer to as the. The three IPs of startup life. The first one really, really matters. I think the. This is what makes Silicon Valley so unique and so repeatable. We jokingly call it intellectual philanthropy, which is kind of a dumb phrase, but it makes an IP work. The startup world is small. You cross paths with people multiple times, both on the upswing and the downswing. We should all have a lot of humility about the downswing. We all encounter downswings, right? We're all just struggling to survive. We should be helping each other, and so we do. It's all in the execution, right? Ideas are free. You can read a book about Andy Grove building intel. You can't do it just because you read the book. So there's no harm in sharing the information with others in our ecosystem. Number two, we are paranoid. This actually comes from Microsoft. They are paranoid. Someone's trying to kill me all day, all day, all day. And I'm not gonna let that happen. That's a hard way to live, but it's also the way you survive. Because markets are fights, right? No matter how well you do or while you did a thing, assume someone else is about to do it better, right? We are paranoid, paranoid, paranoid about markets and execution. And the last one is actually probably the most important to me, which is startups are about elevating into the information flow. Once you're in the information flow of the market, it's actually not that hard to figure out what to build, what people are reacting to, what to sell. Elevating into that market information flow is how it's done. You know, as a company today, we interface with probably a thousand of the Global 2000 who share their infrastructure plans with us every time we meet with them. It's not that hard to figure out what to build for them. Getting to that point where you have the credibility to engage in that market information flow, really, really hard. That's my ask. If you have the opportunity to get into the information flow, you will get the rest of it, right. It. We're out of time. Thank you for coming today. And hanging out. Appreciate it.
