Field Guide Advice for Scaling from $0 to $100M with Okta’s COO, Frederic Kerrest

Please welcome okta co founder and coo frederick korest. Hello. How are we doing today? Thank you for the applause. I appreciate it. I haven't said anything yet. How are we doing today? Can I hear you a little better? Come on, help me out here. Awesome. I am thrilled to be here with all of you today. My name is Frederick Karas. I'm the co founder, chief officer or chief operating officer and executive vice chairman at Okta. And I am very excited to be here at Saster 2022. This morning. We're gonna talk a little bit about one of my favorite topics, field guide to scaling your company. We started Okta 12 years ago. Let's see, there was two of us today. We've got about 6,000 employees. We have about 16,000 enterprise customers. It's a $1.8 billion revenue business growing 40% year over year. And we've been public for 22 quarters. Not that I'm counting, but if I were, it would be 22. Those are all exciting statistics. And certainly when I started as an entrepreneur, I would have taken those in a heartbeat. But. And the company's doing very well and growing fast. But really my favorite part of the entire thing is building. And entrepreneurship is a fantastic career. I think it's the best career out there. It's a hard job, but it's a very rewarding job. And there's a lot of tips and tricks that I learned over the last 12 years that I'm gonna share today. Practical advice. I've discussed it with a lot of other public company CEOs. I'm fortunate to spend time with a lot of enterprise software CEOs in startup land today and testing all these tips and tricks and seeing kind of how they all work. So I'm going to walk through practical advice, hopefully things that you can use every day in your life, building your companies. And we're going to take them kind of in the order in which they happen to you as you grow and as you build. So some of this will be motherhood and apple pie. Some of this you'll say to yourself, I already know that stuff. Now, one thing I do know as a entrepreneur is there's a lot coming at you at all times. So you're saying to yourself, man, I got this going on. I got that going on. I'm listening to this guy on stage. I don't even know what's going on, what he's talking about. You're probably sending an email right now. I know a few of you are. You're maybe Even getting on a slack channel. So I'm gonna keep it really simple. If you walk out of here in three minutes and remember nothing else, I want you to remember these three things. These are the three biggest takeaways I have from the last decade. First of all, time is your most precious asset. Okay, it sounds pretty standard. 168. That's the number of hours in the week. The there's no more. You can't add anything more. So if you're saying yes to something, you're saying no to something else. And when you're building your company, you need to make sure you take control of your time. There's gonna be a lot of people asking you a lot of things. We'll talk about email a little bit later on in the presentation. You need to lock out all those things and think about what your priorities are and what you're gonna do. By the way, if you've taken institutional venture capital, there's basically a fuse on that money anyway. They're not giving you that money to use it over the next five years. They have LPs, they have to have returns, they have fund limits. So you need to think very carefully about how you're spending your time. You need to go and look at your calendar all the time and say, these are the things I'm doing. Are these the most important things? You should delete meetings, delete one on ones, have people make them, put them back on your calendar to see whether or not there's important, number one. Number two, keep the main thing, the main thing. Okay, there is a lot coming at you. People are going to ask you about payroll, they're going to ask you about insurance, they're going to ask you about some customer support issue, whether we should be opening an office in London. You need to have the priorities set for what you want to be focused on. And then you need to be able to hire the right people and empower them to focus on the other priorities that are important for you. But they're not the number one thing that you should be doing as the founder, as the entrepreneur. And then number three, nothing happens until somebody sells something. I love sales. I love talking to customers. It's favorite part of my job, talking to prospects who are like, should we consider okta? What about the competition? How should we use your service? What's the value building those relationships? For me, that's everything. I love it. It gets me fired up. Now, the CEO and founder 10 years ago was a salesperson. The CEO and founder today is a technologist. Technologists know a lot about technology. They don't necessarily know that much about go to market and G and A. We'll talk a little bit about more about sales. It can be intimidating, right? Calling someone saying, hey, will you give me money? But it's very important because you're only really going to learn things when you try and separate someone from their wallet. Human nature. We want to be positive. You want to show me your product afterwards, I'm going to say, that's a great product. Would you use it? Yeah, of course I'd use it. Great. Will you pay me $10,000? It's like, whoa. Well, what do you mean, whoa? Now we can have a real conversation about the roi, about the value that you're going to get out of the service that I'm providing. So again, if you remember nothing else, take these three away. And don't worry, I know you have short memories. I'll put it back at the end. We can talk about them one more. All right, let's talk very quickly about teams. If you're here, you probably have your company off and running. You know what you're doing, very basic things. If you're setting up your new company or you're thinking about how you're gonna do that, and that's why you're walking around here. First of all, teams. You should always have a team of two to four. The data is very clear. If you look back at the 10 or 20,000 most successful companies that have been built over the last 20 years, it's always founding teams of two, three, four people. One. It's a very solo journey. There's no one to bounce anything off. 5. Too many cooks in the kitchen. So think about how you're going to build your team. Next comes equity. If you're splitting up equity, do it very simply. I'm fortunate to work with dozens and dozens of entrepreneurs who are building their companies. Keep it simple, okay? Equal shares to everyone. If someone isn't pulling their weight, don't worry, they're going to leave after a year or two. You're going to get all that equity back. You're going to have so many things to deal with in the times ahead. Keep the main thing. The main thing, and keep these things very, very simple. Number three, hiring and firing. It is your most important job. If you are here at this event or you're going to be watching this on the stream later, chances are you're building a software company. Software. We don't have heavy machinery. We don't have factories. We spend 60, 70 cents of every dollar on how you attract, develop, retain, grow the best people in the world. That's your business. So you got to think very carefully about hiring. I've made all sorts of hiring mistakes, more than we have enough time to talk about here. But you got to think about who you're hiring for. You got to think about blind references are very key. Go find three people who know this person and ask them what it's like. You got to figure out, look, I'm just trying to hire for 18 months, 24 months. Don't try and hire for four years and don't hire for the next six months. So there's a lot of practical things in just thinking constructively about hiring. By the way, if you have five people in your company, you should have a full time recruiter, period, end of story. Because if you have a contract recruiter, they're fighting with everyone else to get the leads and get their attention to. So something very important then firing, right? You gotta get comfortable firing people. They say hire slowly, fire fast. It's very true. I have wasted months and months and sometimes years not letting a person go when we both knew it wasn't the right fit anymore. So something very important to think about is your team. Next we'll talk about culture. Right? Culture is now everywhere. Well, 12 years ago when we started, I didn't think it was a big deal. I thought that if you got a kegerator, you got really good coffee, you let people bring their dogs to work, everything would be fine. I give a lot of credit to my co founder who said no, we actually need to have values. You need to write them down, you need to talk about them. We've done a very much better job of that, I think, over the years. And we have very clear values. We add on average 50 people every week. So if we haven't talked about our values in a quarter, you can do the math on how many people have not heard about our values. We put them on the board behind us in all hands every week. We put them up all over the place, we email them out, we talk about them over and over and over again. And until people say, I heard you. And when they say that, you tell them one more time because they probably still didn't hear you. Culture for me, is how people behave when no one else is looking. Okay? It's very easy when there's 5, 10, 20 of you, you're all in the same room. I can see what you're doing, I can hear what you're doing. I didn't like how you talk to that customer. Let's talk about it. Let's have a dialogue now. It's much harder. You're in offices around the world. You're hiring all sorts of people. Look, I closed the first 20 customers myself. We're going to add 800 this quarter. Good chance I'm not going to talk to any of them or maybe five of them. So how are the other 795 going to join our company? What's their experience going to be? So making sure everyone's pulling from the same playbook in terms of how you're doing things, how you're thinking about things, that's really key. There's all sorts of things you can do to enhance corporate culture. Something important for us is what we call the ball bearing awards. Okay, what are ball bearings? If you're a skateboarder, which I'm not, but I've learned they're the little things inside the wheel that keep everything flowing very smoothly so that you don't hear any noise. Right. So it's very clean. What I had seen in my career before starting Okta was that the squeaky wheel got the grease. The person who did the diving save or complained the most about the comp, that's actually not the people you should be rewarding. In a lot of cases, I want to reward all the people who are doing their jobs that I'm not hearing about, that without them, the machine doesn't work. So we have ball bearing awards. We do it once a quarter. You can nominate people, you give in a bunch of votes, we go and we celebrate them in public. And then finally, the last thing about culture is you should. When someone does something well, you should talk about it in public. When someone doesn't do something well, you should talk about it in private, or you talk about it in public, but you say that you did it. So a lot of times at all hands, I'll say, oh, you know what? I made a mistake recently. This is what I did. And I'll tell the story. The person who made the mistake, they know who you're talking about. But everyone else is like, well, Frederick probably didn't make that mistake because it seems like he's making a lot of mistakes because he's telling us about this every single, all hands. But they get the point. You're trying to emphasize how you should behave and how you should drive your business because it's not you anymore. As soon as you're hiring other people, there's a lot of other People involved, All right? Leadership, very important. You're all leaders. If you're in this room, you're a leader, okay? You need to lead from the front and you need to lead from the way that you believe is authentic. It's authentic to how you do things. People can see through all the BS if you're just putting up a bunch of fanfare, but actually doing other things. People know that. So I like to think about, I'm not gonna ask the people that I work with to do anything that I wouldn't be willing to do myself. And it makes a huge difference. When you go out on a sales call and you're in the prep session and you're guiding the conversation and you're helping everyone get motivated and you're talking to the customer, everyone sees that. When you send out the recall notes, which I do after every major sales call we have still today, every conversation I have with a C level Fortune 500 executive, I send out all the notes, all the prep notes, all the detail to the top 200 leaders in my company. And I copy everyone on the account team and I say, by the way, do you have anything to add? And that kind of process of people see how that works and they're like, wow, Frederick's taking time out of his day. I got to get used to that. You can create templates, you can make it easy, but lead from the front and make sure you're doing things the way you want to do. Now, leadership also is about making sure you're focusing on the important things. There's a lot of different ways to do that. Prioritization has probably been one of the top skills that I have had to develop over the last decade. And there's a lot of different matrices. People have different approaches to this. A very simple one is something called the Eisenhower matrix that I just discovered a couple years ago. And it's been really good. Named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, general in World War II, who obviously became a two term president here in the United States. And it's very simple. It's a two by two matrix. Everyone can deal with that. How urgent is it and how important is it? If it's urgent and important, I'm doing it. If it's urgent but not important, I'm delegating it. If it's important but not urgent, I'm scheduling it. And guess what happens. If it's not urgent and not important, I'm deleting it. I know it sounds pretty simple. I update my prioritization list two to five times a Day. It's on every single device I have. I write down on pieces of paper. I make sure it's all organized by the end of the day, especially on Fridays. I block out 4 to 5pm every Friday, or whatever the end of your workday is to go back over my calendar, see what I missed, get organized, put everything in a bow in it. I have a family. I have three kids. I spend time on the weekend with my kids. Monday morning when I drop back into the program, I want to know exactly where I was, what I had to do and what was going to happen next. Prioritization. I cannot emphasize it enough. Right along with that is executive communications. Okay, this is super important. If you're hiring smart people. Smart people usually are good writers. What do good writers like to do? They like to write. Especially if you hire any reformed lawyers in any other capacity. You'll probably get essays. Essays are nice. Do you have time to read an essay? No. Neither do I. Okay. A lot of times I get hundreds of personal emails every single day asking me for what's the decision? What's the direction? What do we go to next? Can I get your approval? Whatever it is, if you're going to write me an essay, that's really nice. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put a star on it and I'm going to read it next time I'm flying to Australia and cleaning out my inbox. That's probably not going to be very valuable to you because I might be in a month and you need a decision next Tuesday. So couple quick, simple tips. You should do it and you should have everyone who works for you do it. In the subject of the email. Re, re, re. Not helpful. How about action required? FYI only. Here's the specific thing that I'm putting in the top three should be a bullets tldr. It's too long. Don't read. These are the three things you need to know. We just closed this customer. They want to do this. The CEO would love to talk to you next Tuesday. Thanks. You can write as much as you want down below in the details. You can attach 15 attachments if it makes you excited about it. But I got the key points because a lot of times I'm going to have 30 seconds to read that email. I. And by the way, if you do that for all your teams, that information is gonna flow a lot better. Now I know I'm old school. People are like email. I do slack, I do like sms, I do like brain waves, whatever Okay. I do a lot of email, and that's how email works for me. Finally, you got two more things about leadership. Hitting clutch shots. Super important. Okay? I think there are maybe four to six decisions that you, as a leader, will make every year that matter. I know you're like, that's crazy. I'm gonna make 50 decisions this week. That's right. I didn't say they weren't important. I said they didn't matter. For the future of your company, for the growth, for the competition, for where you're gonna win, okay? That's one a quarter, maybe two a quarter. When they happen, they matter, and you gotta pay attention to them. For me, unfortunately, now they also involve earnings calls. I know it's happening every 91 days, for sure. So the days before earnings calls, they're blocked out. I got to be super focused. I got to get organized. I got to have my train set. I got to have the dashboard I want to have for the earnings call. We're going to prep Q and A. I'm not taking anything that's not super important. I'm blocking those times out because those are the clutch shots. And when they come, whether it's a sales pitch, whether it's venture investing and raising around whatever it is, you got to hit those shots. And then the final thing is, you got to embrace giving things up. If you're going to grow a large organization, you're going to scale it. If you're going to scale it, you're going to be hiring other people. If you're going to hire other people, you got to embrace giving things up. I used to have every job. It was awesome. It actually wasn't that awesome until I was able to. After our Series C, we hired a cfo. A real cfo. Great. I wasn't CFO anymore. We hired a real general counsel. We hired a real head of hr. We hired all these things where I got to be comfortable saying, you know what? This is awesome. It means success. It means now I've been able to hire someone who is a professional, who is going to be able to take our organization to the next level. And you gotta love that. You gotta embrace that. That's part of the program. All right? Fundraising again. We're kind of doing it in the order in which it might happen in your company. Over the course of Okta's history, we have raised $2.7 billion. I raised seven rounds of private venture capital from Sequoia, Andreessen, Greylock, and Khosla to the tune of $230 million. We raised 170 in an IPO. We raised $2.3 billion of debt in the public markets over the last five years. Okay. Number one thing that matters in fundraising, I don't care if it was our seed round, which was a million dollars. I know people are like, what? My Pre seed is 10. This was 12 years ago. Or if you're doing a public debt financing, it is all about storytelling. You need to be able to tell a story. We learned this the hard way. Todd and I went up and down Sand Hill Road and had like 30 meetings. And they're all like, yeah, yeah, we like you, but not that much. We're like, what's going on? Well, it turns out we were terrible at PowerPoints, so we actually went to have a meeting. And on the drive down, Todd looked at me. He's like, you know, we might never raise money. I'm like, that's possible. I have an idea. Let's just throw away the deck and tell a story. It turned out that worked a lot better, but we had to go through a lot of pain for that. You can use a deck. If you're a good deck writer, that's fine. It doesn't really matter. If you are going to write a deck, start with the subject line, start with the titles, print out 10 slides, write the titles. And you know, sales statistics update is a bad title. Okay, how about 150% year over year growth and doubling in the commercial market or whatever it is, something actionable. Write the titles first and then fill in all the information. But storytelling is key. Second point about raising money. Two things that matter. Tkad. Who knows what that means? Raise your hand. Okay. Time kills all deals. Momentum is a real thing. And if you have it, take advantage, because once it's gone, it is not coming back. I was talking to an entrepreneur just last night. He got one term sheet on Friday. He's getting another one tomorrow. He's like, I think I can make the one on Friday wait 10 days. I said, do not do that. Because if that guy decides that you don't like him enough and he goes away, the other guy's gonna be like, oh, what did he learn? The flying, the ointment, that I got to go away. And once the whole thing slows down, it is gone. Time kills all deals. If you have term sheets, make them competitive. Take the deal off the table. Do not try and optimize on any one financing round. You're going to raise money three, five, ten times. So what you're trying to do at the end of the day is have a small piece of a very large pie. And so that 2% that you're optimizing on in that round, it's going to get diluted four more times. It doesn't matter, okay? What does matter is if you run out of money and you can't raise money and you can't raise anymore, or if the momentum goes away, because then you're screwed. And that will matter. Two more things on fundraising. First of all, venture capitalists, they are not firms. They are individuals, okay? You cannot partner switch. Make sure you get the right introduction to the right partner for the right reasons from the right entrepreneur who's made them a lot of money in the past. That's what I recommend. Number two, collusion. Okay? It happens. You will never prove it. If someone asks you, well, who else are you talking to? The answer, use my quote, you, as you can imagine, other fine firms, okay? What that means is it lets them know that you know how the game is played. They will respect you and they will back off. Do not tell them who else gave you the term sheet, because you know what's going to happen. They're going to call that guy and say, let's just split the deal and we'll do it at this other price. And there you go. There goes your round. And you laugh and you'll never prove it. And it happens. And it's illegal. I know, but too bad. That's how they play the game. Finally. No. There are a thousand ways to say no, and they all mean the exact same thing. No. Oh, I'm not sure. We're in between raising rounds. Come back to me in two months. Oh, yeah, that would be great, except my partner's out of town. You know what I would love to see is the next level of data on this thing. No, I don't need to get into your diligence room right now. Just put together this other deck. Oh, you know what would be really good is if you talk to my. You know what those all mean? No. And the good news today, there's a lot of people with a lot of money out there. So check it off as no. Figure out what you learned, take a step back and go down the road. And do not sit there hanging around waiting for them to change their mind. All right? Sales, My favorite topic. Enterprise sales. Very important. I know there's a lot of plg. I went and looked at the other folks who were talking. They're talking about plg. It's all over the place. I didn't even know it was a thing. Enterprise sales matters. It matters because customers will pay you a lot of money. They will answer your phone call. When you call them and ask them, you, you can upsell them a lot. Your company will be more valuable. Dollar based net retention goes up. They do long term contracts. They'll pay you cash up front. I can go on all day long. Okay. Enterprise sales is a real thing. It is not going away. You should get comfortable with it. Now, we said separating someone from their wallet is very hard. I talked to entrepreneurs. How many customers you have? I have 10 customers. Oh, it's great. You have 10 paying customers. Well, no, they're doing like a free POC pilot thing. You have zero customers. Okay? Zero customers. Customers are paying people. So here's what happens. I don't care. You can have any governor you want. You can have controls on free trials. They're 30 days. Or trials that are limited to five people. Or trials that are limited by a certain number of features or functions. That's all fine. I'm good with all that. But what you need to do is you need to get people to pay you. And I'm even fine if you have them sign a contract that says they're going to use it for free for 30 days. But once they start using it, they're going to pay you. Why does this matter? It matters because it's human nature. I want to be nice. You're going to show me your thing. Oh, it's amazing. Oh, yeah. Would you? Of course I'd use it. Oh, great. Hey, guess what? Frederick and Octa said they're going to use the thing. Oh, that's great. And then all these people are going to spend all their time. We're not going to use it. I'm not going to pay attention. I don't care if someone's going to be like, should we use that thing. I don't know. Just someone email them back and be nice to him. I met the guy's mom or something. Right? Okay, great. Oh, but on the other side, you're like, oh, amazing. Frederick, call me back. Octy's using the thing. No one's using anything now. What happens if I pay you $10,000? All of a sudden my boss is like, hey, Frederick, what's this line item says $10,000 on here? Oh, shit. I got to do something about that. I got to get some people to implement it. We got to start looking at it now. All of a sudden we can have a different relationship. And by the way, If I'm like, oh, this is so amazing, but it's not worth $10,000, one of two things is wrong. Either I'm not the right target customer for you, or you need to think about your value proposition, because I am the right target customer. But I'm not willing to pay you $10,000. Either way, that's a problem. Okay? Now, if you want to get someone, it's always, like, the pool party problem. Yeah. Well, he's waiting, and the other guy's waiting, and she's waiting, and they're all about to sign, and here's what you say. Oh, Sue. Yeah. You want to sign up? Look, I'd love to work with you, but you got to do it this week because I only have two professional services people, and Johnny over there is signing up, and we only have one more slot. And I loved it. And look, if today's not the right day, I get it. I'll come back to you in 90 to 120 days. That's probably when I can come back. All of a sudden, they're like, whoa, wait, what? And you're like, yeah, totally. I love you. I'll still love you in two months, but, like, I can't love you anymore next week. That's a very different conversation. Fomo. Make it happen. Right. It's your business. All right. Alligators, Fennec foxes, two kinds of salespeople. What do alligators have? Big mouth, small ears. What does a Fennec fox have? No one knows. I actually had to go look it up and find, like, the right analogy. Well, I'll just tell you. They got a small mouth and big ears. I want the second one. I want. Salespeople are going and asking questions and listening. I want active listening. If you go up, you just start talking. It's called show up and throw up, and you walk out of there. Oh, that was a great sales call. Really? What'd you learn? Well, we told them what we do. That's great. But you didn't ask them what he needed or she needed. You didn't ask them what problems they had. You didn't ask them how you can help them solve it. You didn't start to become a thought leader and a partner and what they're trying to do. So really focus on. And it's hard to interview salespeople. I got it. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of salespeople. Guess what? Salespeople are good at selling themselves. I'm very clear on that here's a good sales question you should ask every salesperson. Give me, not the biggest deal you ever closed. What's the biggest deal you thought you would close that you didn't close, and what did you learn? And I'll tell you what, if they're a good salesperson, they will know that story inside and out. And they will not stop talking until you're like, hey, we're done with this meeting. Dude, you got to go away. Okay? That is a real salesperson. All right, we can talk about mutual action plans. You should go talk to your enterprise customers. Six MONTHS LATER did you get the value? Thought. Great. Will you do a PDF so I can show it to my other customers? Great. Will you give me a quote? Awesome. Will you talk to Gartner? Cause I need you to. Fantastic. Will you help me reference. Sell up the stack? Great. These are all great things. Enterprise sales. It matters and it's super valuable to your company. All right, we're running out of time. I'm trying to talk as fast as I can here. Growth, growth. If you get to start building a skyscraper, you're in great shape. You should have a strategy. Use a very simple methodology. We use something called vmts. What's the vision? What are the methods? How are we going to get there? What are the targets? How do I know how I did? Remember when you're building, we talked about it. Time is your most precious asset. Done is better than perfect. I know you're all perfectionists, okay? I was once too. And then I started building a company. Now I just like getting things done because it turns out you can go back and tweak it later. But perfection, you can wait forever until it comes. Always stay close to your customers. You should go and ask them things all the time. Hey, how's it going? How's the new product launch? What else do you want to see? What else are you thinking about? Oh, what's on your roadmap? How are we going to work through all this and then finally competitors. You need to know about competitors. You need to understand what they're doing, but you cannot stare at them and you cannot over rotate on them. It's like a NASCAR driver. NASCAR drivers will tell you, I can know how to go 210 miles down the track. I know where the wall is, but I'm not staring at it. If I stare at the wall, I'm going to crash into it. So you got to have your own plan, your own strategy. You got to be responsive to competitors. You got to understand what they're doing in the market. But you got to have a vision and you got to have a strategy and a plan. And the plan cannot be defending against the competitor who's going to eat my lunch. All right. Crashing and burning. Every good company that you know has almost died 10 times, I guarantee it. Whether it's the phone in your pocket, whether it's the provider you're using for email, whether it's Facebook that my wife likes to use, they all almost died. Now, whether or not they tell you this story, I don't know. We almost died 10 times. So it will happen to you. And it's not about how it happens, it's about making sure that you're resilient about it. The number one job of the CEO don't run out of money. So that's the number one thing we had to do. A pivot. We had to change from going after S and B to go after the enterprise because they had more pain, they had more interest, they were much harder to get to. But turns out they have much bigger budgets too, and that totally transformed the company. We almost died in 2011. We almost ran out of money. We almost didn't raise our Series B. Okay. The values we talked about earlier, the culture you're building, you build it earlier, build it in good times. Why do you build in good times? So that in tough times it comes back and people know how to work with you. If you haven't built a good culture and things start going south, it's going to be that much harder. All right. Managing yourself, very important. Okay. This is a marathon, not a sprint. But you still got to run 7 minute miles. Here I am 13 years later. I woke up at 6am this morning and not just because of my kids. Okay? You got to get peers in the industry. People who are like you at your stage, actively reach out to them. I'm like you. Maybe we can share notes. Go find mentors, people who will take time out of their schedules to chat with you. Make sure it's not a one way conversation. Here's things I can bring to the relationship as well. The oxygen mask rule. We're starting to fly again. I know. No one pays attention when you get on the airplane at the beginning. They go through all the security. One thing they say is if the mask falls out of the sky, put it on your face before you put it on your dependent little kid. Why is that? Well, because if you're focused on putting on the kid and you pass out, it's not going to go Very well. So you need to first focus on yourself. And the same is true. No one at your company, no one in your family, no one in your hockey team or whatever else you're doing is going to get any value out of you if you're not taking care of yourself first. You got to have hobbies. You got to take vacations. It is a marathon, okay? And we do have to run fast. But you got to balance it out for the long term. We're almost done. Boards, board of directors, people ask me these questions all the time. First of all, board of advisors. Don't have them. Wasted time. I don't believe them. I know. That's very. People tell me. Well, you're totally wrong. Okay, we can have that debate. I'm just telling you my perspective. Why? You give someone a bunch of stock, they're not even going to remember, they're not going to call you back, and you think you got some value. Incorrect. Call someone, ask them a question, hey, can I get your help? If you ask them three times, be like, hey, guess what? You know what? I really don't want to take too much of your time. Maybe I can give you a couple shares of my company and I can call you from time to time. Much better way to do it. All right, Anyway, on boards, make sure that you are getting people who are passionate about your business, people who know things about your business. You want diverse backgrounds. You probably try and get a customer on your board. Probably try and get functional experts on your board. If you have a brand new head of engineering, who's the head of engineering for the first time, they might be amazing. They're gonna have to learn things about management, about hiring, about firing. Get an amazing head of engineering who's been doing it for 20 years on your board. Have them mentor this person all day long. Okay? Board meetings are also not readouts to your board about what's going on. Total waste of time. They are your opportunity to get feedback from these people who've invested in your company on the key strategic matters that you care about, that you have questions about. So what do you do? You write it all up ahead of time. You send it to them a week ahead of time. You do the executive communication we talked about. You give them an executive summary up front, one page. We, we start all of our board meetings with 45 minutes thoughts from the CEO just talking about the business. You give them all the stuff up front. You ask them and expect them to read it so that when you get there, it's valuable. Boom. I'M going to tell you what's going on in the business. These are the three things I want out of today's meeting. This is how we're going to talk. Of course you're going to have the update on sales. Of course you're going to have the update on finance. Of course, at the end, you're going to approve the option. Do not start with that. Those are details. Put them at the back. Start with the stuff that matters to you. And the other thing is, people are like, ah, I got Sequoia to invest in my company. Awesome. Well, have you called the guy on your board? I don't want to bother him. He's from Sequoia. What are you talking about? His job is to return money to his investors. And the way he's going to do that is when you're successful, you should call and harass that person every Monday morning. You should give them homework. Hey, next week I need to hire these 10 people. I need you to go find these people for me. Hey, I want to talk to these three customers who do you know, Put the people on your board to work. They work for you. They are shareholders, along with you. Okay. We already talked about board of advisors. I'll leave it there. I know I'm out of time. If you remember nothing else, I know you didn't remember what I said the first time, which is why I even wrote it down for you. This time you can just take notes, take a picture of the slide. Time is your most precious asset. Keep the main thing. The main thing. And nothing happens until somebody sells something. Thank you very much. Have a great day.