Leyla Seka (Salesforce): How to Partner with the Big Guys

Next up, I want to introduce Leila Seka, who's actually an amazing guest for us to have. One of the topics I think we all get confused about is partnering. Right. How do you partner with big companies? What does it mean? Everyone has these ambitions, what's possible, what isn't, and we'll bring Layla out and give her a background. But I don't know Anyone more in SaaS that's better that can talk to us about this topic. So introducing Layla. Thanks for. Thanks for joining us. Yeah. All right.

For you.

That's my finger.

That's your finger.

All right.

Do with it what you will.

Very good. All right, so I will let Layla introduce herself in all of her learnings, but she joined Salesforce, the company, when? 2007 or something like that.

Yeah, early 2008.

Okay, 2008. And turns out I just learned this backstage that I and the team were the first partner that she met with when she started. Right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So join Salesforce to take its partner ecosystem to the next level. Clearly, that was your job when you got hired. You got hired from the top. I remember you came down to the office, you said, they're paying me a lot of money to do to really make this big.

I'm kidding.

And so turned the whole partner ecosystem into a huge success and then was convinced to come over and take over desk.com and be the GM and head of that. And so not only did Layla take the whole partnering program at the biggest SaaS player to the next level, now she's on half of the other side. So she's at Salesforce, and she's at a large startup within Salesforce, managing her own partner ecosystem on all three sides of it. So I really can't imagine someone who has thought more through all of these issues than Layla. So it's a treat to have you. So thank you.

Thank you.

So I want to talk about a lot of details, but before I even get there, let's just start at the top at the simplest thing, because it sounds simple, but it's confusing.

Right.

So at Salesforce and then at Desk, and let's compare and contrast as relevant. What is a good partner? Right. Because we all want to be a good partner, right?

Sure. I think partnership in general is like any relationship. It's like a girlfriend, a boyfriend, whatever. You have to be mutually compatible. There has to be a reason why you're in the partnership. I often see too many people kind of running like, oh, I'm going to be your partner. I want to be your partner. I want to be your partner. Why? Why do you want to be my partner? What are you going for? You got to really get down to that. And then once you figure that out and you approach the partnership, you approach it together and you voice what you feel. I think sometimes people are like, well, I'm just a three person shop and you know, what am I going to do? That's not the right attitude. If you have, like a solution that's going to actually make both companies more successful, that's the kind of what. That's what you're looking for in a partnership, you know? And so what makes a good partner? Someone that's there to do something, not just there to be there because everyone else is.

Yeah.

Someone that's got a vision. Someone that's trying to. With us. There were many people that came. Well, let's talk about you.

Yeah.

You know, you were the first partner I met with. You had Echo Sign. It was a electronic signature. It made Salesforce work great and made everything better, made our customers happier. That was a good partnership.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So let's. And then one of the things that is confusing from the founder side. Right. Is even when it's clear, what does a partner want from us? Right. So, for example, let's step back. I asked this morning, Aaron Levy and Bob Tinker, like, how do spiffs work for partners? And Bob's answer was, actually, I hadn't thought through it. He's like, in the early days, it actually can help a little bit. Right. But ultimately, reps want to close what they want to close. Right. So how do I learn what a partner wants from me? Right. So that this relationship is sort of mutually successful.

Right.

It's confusing.

It is confusing. And I mean, I think that it's. Especially when you're a smaller company interacting with a larger company. Yeah, that's hard. What do they want from me? Because a large company has a lot of things going on. Right. So why don't you reverse the question and say, what do I want from this? Why did you partner with Salesforce when you were at Echo Sign?

Because we wanted more customers.

That's a good thing to want. Okay, great. But you brought something to the table as well. You know, you brought electronic signature. That's a really good thing to have with an SFA application, which was kind of where we were back then. That was kind of what we were doing solely and the platform. But it was very clear you wanted something and you helped us. Mutually beneficial. And then you also were comfortable with your Voice. I too often hear small companies being frustrated, being like, well, you know, I'm never going to get it. Or, you know, say what you want and then try to pursue it. Scott Hemmiter's here in the audience somewhere. He built Aeropoint. It's like, was a three person. Hi, Scott. It was like a three person company for the longest time. It might even still be. Talk about someone who built something that was really powerful. So sat next to Salesforce really well, and then with a very small company, used the resources, used his connections, did things to make it better. He had a roadmap of what he was gonna get from Salesforce and what he was gonna give. And then he attacked it. Right. He went, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. And when he hit a wall or hit something, he dug in. He was like, why is this happening? Who do I talk to? How do I fix it? And that. He was very active in the relationship to the point where even though he was a teeny little partner, he became a very important partner to all of us.

Yeah. And so using Aeropoint or others examples. So let's say I build the world's best integration with Desk or with Salesforce back in the day. Right. But I'm an introverted founder, as many of us actually, deep down inside. Right. Will you find me?

I will find you if my customers want you.

Yeah.

You have to understand that, like, I do what my customers tell me to do. Like, I run a. I'm lucky. I run a startup in a big company. So I have big company resources, but a startup vibe.

Yes.

It's awesome, by the way. But, you know, but if my customer is saying to me, I need this integration or I want to use this, like, Olark's another example. They're a great partner of Desk. Right. And they do amazing things with chat and we have a chat, but theirs is amazing and everyone wants to use theirs. So I went to the CEO of Olark and I was like, let's do this. And we became partners.

Did you know him before that?

No.

Okay, so that's my.

I said, go get me a meeting with the CEO of Olark because all my customers want better integration with Olark, you know, so. And that's hard to do. And I understand that that's, you know, Olark was very established and doing well. But it really does come down to, are you fixing something for the customer that I haven't yet fixed? And can I get lift from you? And you get lift From. From me. And we all go up together kind of a thing.

Yeah. So, okay, so a little bit of that. The lift is interesting. Let's dig on that. But a little bit of the chicken and the egg. So if I built a desk integration, right, for example, and it's cool, but I don't have a joint customer am I wasting? I mean, obviously you want those relationships, but at some level, how much effort should I put into that until I've started to monetize that?

Well, I wouldn't necessarily build an integration unless you have a reason to.

Right.

I mean, building an integration because you're hoping to get access to my customer base.

Yes.

Although Valiant. And maybe a good decision based on what you're trying to do.

Yes.

I have a lot of people. I work at Salesforce. It's like the biggest SaaS company in the world. You know, I have a lot of people that want to hang out with me. Not me, but with it, with Salesforce. So.

Yes.

Why, why, why are you bringing something to the table? And you know, it doesn't. It can be a product gap. It can be something else too. Like, I often look at, like Uber and Lyft didn't change how taxis worked. They changed the service around taxis. Right. So maybe your integration brings some level of service that doesn't necessarily fix white space in my product, but just something else that makes it better, makes my customers happier, makes our joint customers, if we have them. If we don't have them, then let's sit down and talk before you build an integration. I have a team. I have a biz dev team. They'll talk to you. We don't want anyone to waste their time. Got it.

Yeah. Well, let me ask the variant of that. So you said the Olark desk integration partnership's gone well. Right. Let's imagine I've started a startup and it's just like olark, but it's 22% better or 33% better, but it is in one. Not in the grand scheme, but in one little thing. Because that is possible. Right. Is it harder to get attention there or Because. And how do you manage that part of the relationship?

So, I mean, that's something I saw a lot. So I was on the app exchange for six years. I took it from almost very little to pretty big enterprise ecosystem for SaaS in the world. But competition is natural, right? I mean, there are always people that are gonna do it better, faster. Cause they learn from what you did. Right. And we've certainly felt this at Salesforce like people Learn from things. We want to. I see. Competition is good. If you build something that's 30% better than someone I'm already invested with. I have an open partner program. We do at Salesforce. We try to stay agnostic. Like, it's an open marketplace, the App Exchange. Everyone has free will. Everyone can do what they want. If your product's better and you're going to win, of course I want you to be a partner. It doesn't mean I'm a dump. Olark. Right. But join the family. One choice. I want my customers to have choices, like what we did on the App Exchange. I would say that is in many ways one of the most differentiating things at Salesforce. It's the ecosystem around our platform. And, I mean, that makes me super proud. But that's also really interesting. Right. So I want competitive partners because I want my customers to say, do I want Olark or do I want this one or do I want that? They should be able to have that decision.

Yeah. And how. And in. And so you want the competitive thing. How many? Just in your experience, across different categories. There's sort of a cohort, though, that naturally rises to the top. Right. A group. How big's the pack? Because people think about competition a lot. Is there room for three or four that are recommended?

Is it two?

Is it.

I mean, I think it kind of depends on the thing you're tackling. Right. I mean, let's use electronic signature. Right. Because there is Echo sign. And then DocuSign showed up. Right. And you both were in the App Exchange, and a lot of people wanted Echo Sign. A lot of people wanted DocuSign and my stance. I even talked to you about this, I think, on the phone. I was like, I just need the customers to have a choice. Right. If your product's better, your service is better, your relationship management, whatever, let the customer choose the one that's better for them. Not necessarily even the products may be the same. It may just be that the customer's preference is to go one way or the other. And as a platform company, we. We want the customer to have as much choice as they can.

Yeah. Okay, so let's step back for a minute. So I've built something on Desk or AppExchanger for that. It's got a little bit of something going. Right. I've built. And I want to talk about building relationships more, but I built the relationship, and that's usually going to be the CEO, right?

Yeah.

If it's early.

Right.

So I think a mistake. A lot of Folks make early is they. Most CEOs actually are pretty good at business development in the sense they may not even be good closers, but they're good middlers. Right. And so how do you. Since you've seen the other side of it so often, you know, how early should you bring in business development? What do you see on the other side? When do you want to talk with the CEO and not the VP of business development? What do you advise founders there?

I mean, I think if you're a CEO of a small company, you're typically going to be. You should choose which partnerships you're going to do, right? Because you only have so many calories in the day and you're building your own business. So you typically, you know, you sit down and you look, what are the strategic partnerships I'm going after? And then as a CEO, you go approach them, right? So the VP of Biz Dev, whatever, you want to get to the CEO, you want to get to the person in charge. The two people in charge talking. Like when I talked to the CEO of Olark, then all of a sudden it got really clean, what we were doing, right? And it wasn't that there was. It wasn't clean underneath. It was. It's just that people were trying to understand. And then when he and I sat down, I was like, listen, dude, all my guys want to use this. All my customers want us better integrated. And he was like, I want it too. And I was like, let's go. You know, so I think you need that the VP of Biz Dev and a larger company like Salesforce especially, there are lots of them, right? So it's like, how do you navigate that? Again, it's really, what are you bringing? Right? If you're solving a problem, they're going to want to talk to you and they're going to bring you in and they're going to hopefully take you through the levels and inside of a bigger corporation to get you where you want to be. So, I mean, I think it kind of depends on the nature of the partnership, but it's always good when the two leaders shake hands on what's going on because it's cleaner for the people that need to execute it underneath.

Oh, yeah. At the top. So let me ask this scenario. Because people find it, let's say I built this great integration with Desk or Salesforce for that in it, and I've got a handful of customers, and let's say I'm doing. Let's say it's not an expensive product, right? So Maybe I'm doing 20k in annual revenue from this. Right. But I've got a couple of them.

Right.

Should I hire someone? But it's feeling good. Should I hire someone almost immediately full time to manage that relationship with Desk or Salesforce?

No.

What's that?

I don't think so. I mean, resources are so scarce.

They are scarce.

That's what I mean.

But these are long term relationships. Right. Because you want to make sure that enough attention is being given to the partner that it doesn't go in and out. Right.

And I guess it comes down to what are you trying to do? Like in that scenario, if I had a small company, if most of the partnerships I was pursuing were white space in the app partnerships, I would lean on product management in that instance. And actually I would probably stay fairly involved as the general manager or whatever trying to keep that. But I'd want the product team to be pushing it because we were trying to fill white space in the product. If these were marketing relationships, then I'd kind of want the VP of marketing to be involved in a little bit in a very early stage. I think that sometimes it's really. I see this often and honestly I've been guilty of it myself. Where you're like, okay, you're in charge of biz dev. Go, yeah, go where? Get me good partners. Who? These three people?

Yeah.

Okay. How? That's your problem. Right. And they walk out the door. Like, that's not helpful. In a small company you have to be really like succinct. You have to write a roadmap. Then you have to. Part of your roadmap should be who are we going to go try to partner with? Like, who are the big dogs we're going to get? Like, I wanted to partner with Slack, you know, and I know they're coming here later, but I was like, I definitely want to partner with Slack. And I went and found Bill and some of the people. I was like, we want to partner with you. We're going to build an integration. And that was me as the general manager of Desk saying, I want to go do a lot of stuff with Slack because I think it's awesome. Right? Yeah. And then that partnership got prioritized and then there were other little partnerships we've done that I'm super happy about, but they weren't nearly as interesting to me as the GM as a Slack partnership. Yeah.

So that's. So going back to the. Because the biz Dev thing, it's just an interesting hire.

Right. Because it's a hard Hire. It's a hard hire because really, honestly, when you're in a startup, you want your VP or you want your biz dev person to be technical. And a technical salesy person is not the easiest thing to find. There are a lot of them out there. But your best case scenario is someone that can actually understand your technology, can speak a little technology. Maybe not as much as the product team, but enough to be smart, to figure out if it's going to work, but then also knows how to negotiate a contract, knows how to, you know, figure out how it's mutually beneficial and no one gets in a screwed position and all that. That's a hard role to find, which is why in the early stages of a company, I see it being effective. This is what I do, you know, I use my functional leads, depending on the partnership we're pursuing. And then we do have a biz dev. I work at Salesforce, I have more resources the most. But like we have a biz dev person who I love and who's great, but we sit down as a management team and decide through the year what are we going after. And then each executive has a role in bringing down the strategic partnerships.

Yeah. And what. So just. And then I want to go on, but just because the biz dev, it's this weird hire. And you're right, the technical. When you meet folks like this, do you think in the early to middays they should have a quota and carry a number and do you feel like you can smell it in the room when they do? Because it can cut both ways, Right?

Yeah. It's a hard question. I mean, everyone should have a quota. Right. Because then at least they know how to measure success on some level.

Well, is it a sales role or customer success? Right.

Well, yeah, it's something. And it's kind of a mix of both. I mean, I think giving a biz dev person a quota, if you are a small company, you decide to hire a biz dev person. Yeah. I think you have to put them on some kind of quota because they have to generate money. Like, you're small, you need to bring money in to grow. Right. So if you're going to actually. And heads are so such a huge commodity, the human capital, if you're actually going to give one of your precious heads to that role, then you have to expect an amount of revenue contribution back from that and they have to be judged on that. I would say that's my opinion.

Yeah. But sometimes as a CEO, if you've built the relationship, you just don't want to make sure no one breaks it. Right. And if they're only aligned to bringing in short term revenue and a long term relationship, you worry that they will push the relationship in a way, as CEO, you don't because you're thinking years out. I don't really care If I make $6 off desk today. I want to ride the desk train when it's a billion dollars in revenue and I want to be there.

Right, right. And I mean, that's the. But that's why I think that it was important for me to meet with the olark CEO. You set that relationship up front and then you let other people execute. And if that relationship starts to get crazy, the CEOs call each other pretty fast and like, what's going on and that fixes it. I get what you're saying. You don't want to incent your biz dev person to be chasing dimes when you're going for dollars. Yeah, I get it. But you also, you can't put people into roles that aren't revenue generating unless they're building the product or in early. At least for me, you're either building the product or you're helping us get money like this in a small environment. That's what we're doing. Like, yes. And of course, customer success and all that is wrapped up into that because attrition can destroy your money as quickly. It's much easier to keep the dollar you have than go get a new one. But I think it's a delicate mix. I don't know. That's kind of my philosophy. You're either building the product or you're helping us make money in the beginning until we can get bigger and start to really think about things.

Yeah. So let me ask. Because another thing that folks struggle with, although certainly people are more sophisticated these days, is over expectations from partners too quickly.

Right? Yeah.

So there was a partner, not Salesforce, but I remember back in the day, a big, huge tech company. We built an integration for them for a big launch. And what we got was a tweet. And I love the guy that ran and I emailed to him and I said, really?

Thanks.

He's like, well, didn't you see the tweet? I don't even know if they had favorites on Twitter. But he was like, there were two retweets. I'm like, okay, I had two engineers work on this for three months and I got a tweet like, I'm a little. I wasn't expecting. I'm a little Disappointed, right, would be the word. But, you know, it was a learning, right? It was a coachable, I guess, a coachable moment. But a lot of us go through this, right, Because. And so any advice in terms of how to measure your expectations for the investment?

And, you know, I felt this a lot when I ran the app exchange, right, in the early days. People. People are showing up and they're like, where's my money?

Yeah, where's my money?

Not really how this works. You gotta go get your own money. You gotta go sell your own stuff. You know, when you're a small company and this kind of goes back to what I said when we started, which is these are all relationships, right? Like, if you're a nerd chasing the head cheerleader, you know, that's a. You're running a little bit. You're over your skis a little bit. But that sometimes is the best thing, you know, that can get you just where you want to be. You can become the prom king in that instance, right? But you have to know that's what you're doing, right? I mean, you'd probably do better with the person who's sitting next to you in your class that thinks you're great at calculus than the head cheerleader that's doing what. But you have to choose that. So if you go and you're like, I'm going to go integrate into this giant company, right? And I'm going to try to be part of their giant launching. You do everything you can. You have to know that you may not make. You may get cut, right? It may not. Hopefully you won't. But go in eyes wide open. No one wants to do that. No one wants to not. I'm sure he wanted to do more than a tweet, and it's quite possible something. Something stopped him. There are lots of rules in big companies, too, yo. Like, just so we're clear, like, a lot of rules about what you can do and you can't do. So it might. It might have been that he had grand plans and they got thwarted by someone else. My advice would be go in eyes wide open and assess the risk. I mean, we've done this a couple of times. When I first came to talk to you, I was building the checkout feature on the back of AppExchange, which I messed up royally a couple times until I got right. And you know why I got it right? I got it right because I used stripe, and stripe came to us. And I was like, I need you to fix this. But I Couldn't promise them the world at that moment because that's not what we do at Salesforce. But they did it. And I mean, thank God for Stripe, right? Because the whole back end of all of our payment processing on the app exchange now, the online piece runs through them, but they knew it, Right? And I remember talking to them and they were like, well, what are we gonna. I was like, you know what? I don't know what you're gonna get. You're gonna get to do this and you can take the money you're gonna make from doing it, but I can't promise you that I'm gonna put you in the Wall Street Journal or do you know that's not stuff I have access to. They knew it. They knew eyes wide open what they were going into. And I was honest with them and it worked out really well. Right. But I've seen the other side many times too. Just be calculated in the risk. Understand that I'm going to put these two developers on this. My hope is that this is going to happen if this happens. Well, at least I tried to do that. And it's there if a customer needs it and hopefully someone will use it and I'll get some kind of lift. And if I didn't, I knew what I was doing. I went in eyes wide open. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. And then just a related thing that founders get wrong just at a high level, we don't have to get into any specifics, but a lot of founders think that I can tempt some large company to partner with me by sharing all my revenue with them.

Right.

So let's. Can we just chat a little bit about immateriality in the grand scheme of things and why revenue share is important in the long run, but it's not going to elevate you above the pack. Right. And as silly as it sounds, I don't think it's silly, but I hear it. So I'm gonna go to Desk. I'm gonna give them 90% of my revenue and they're gonna give me every customer that they have. Right. Does it even enter into your day to day calculation, running the business unit?

I mean, not specifically for Desk per se. It's not really. I mean, again, I'm really looking for partners that make desktop better for my customers. I have a pretty clear thing. Or that I'm kind of taking the playbook I already did at Salesforce and doing it at Desk, which is like. Yeah, for small businesses focused around support, really a more focused attempt at that. I don't think you should give 80% of your revenue to anyone. I would never.

I just mean that as an excuse.

Right. I know, but I think that Rev Share is an important part of everything. I think that it's more. Much more about the relationship. And a funny thing I think small companies do is they think they're immaterial. Right. But, like, it's a relationship. Salesforce, like, I like to get tweets from people saying they liked the app exchange when I was running it, or, like, that they loved. Those were the things that actually made us feel good. But I think sometimes people thought because we were Salesforce, like, I don't care if I tweeted them. Like, I want you to tweet. We want it. It's a relationship. Like, just because we're a big company doesn't mean. I mean, we don't want you to feel Connected. Yeah, Connected a little bit. Right?

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think that you just have to be a little human in it. And you do have to understand you're a small company, they're a big company. Their focus may be on different things at times, but it doesn't mean that you can't be successful. I think the biggest mistake people make in partnership is they're like, I'm going to partner with these people, and then everything's going to be done for me. This is my biggest problem on the app exchange in the first couple years, because everyone would be like, okay, I signed the contract. Where's my check? And I was like, you're. That's not how it works. Like, sign the contract, roll up your sleeves, and get to work. Now you got to, like, get some good marketing. You need to figure out how you're going to sell this. You need to explain how you use it. Like, you need to do. You need to write doc. You need to have support. That was really what I spent the majority of, like, at least two years explaining.

Educating them.

Yeah. It was like, just because you partner with us doesn't mean you're going to be us. I can't give you access to the customer. Like, that would break trust, and we would never do that. That's, like, our number one value at the company. So, I mean, I think you just have to. You have to figure out how much. Instead of thinking about what they're gonna do for you, try to think about what you're gonna do for them. Like, of course you need to think about what you're gonna get from them, but you already know that or you wouldn't Be doing this now. Try to approach that relationship and be like, all right, I'm gonna do this and this and this, and it's going to be great. And I'm going to tweet about it and I'm going to write a blog about it, and I'm going to like what you do. I mean, I love reading your stuff. It's fun. It's fun, right? But engage with a big company. Just because they're big doesn't mean they don't want a voice. Right. Or they don't want a reaction in a social context.

And the related thing, I think, love to get your thoughts that I think we make mistakes on. First of all, we do the partnership, sign the contract, and then kind of go away and don't invest it. That one we get at least I think maybe we've learned a little bit from the. That all. It still happens. The other thing and I'd love to get your thoughts on, is we don't build broad enough relationships with the partners. Right. So I meet Layla. She's the GM and SVP at Desk. And that's great, but there's a whole team working under you. And especially if you don't have help, if you don't have a business development team or whatever, it's really hard to build the 10 people on the team. But sometimes it's just as important, isn't it? Or maybe more important. How do I deal with that? Because the best people build out, like, graphs of relationships, and, you know, I hate it, but you got to bring the cookies sometimes. You got to bring the baked cookies to the office and know everyone, what kind of cookie they like. And most people in this audience are not bringing cookies to their partner.

I mean, you know, I think that business is inherently human. Right. When we all come down to it. So I think that, like any relationship, it works better when you make it. Like when I was meeting you, I could have done that call on the phone. And I don't really like driving to Palo Alto because I live in Berkeley.

Appreciate it.

Of course, it was well worth the meet. But I went down there because I wanted to meet you. I wanted you to see me. I wanted there to be like a. I wanted a rapport to begin so that you could feel like you could trust me as we moved through the process. And I knew who you were. Right. But once we did that meeting, I didn't talk to you again for a long time. I worked with Loretta. I worked with all the people on your team. Right. So, yes, you and if you're little, like again, not to go back to Scott Hemitor, but he tweeted me last night, so he's on my mind. But like, Scott was a one man shop for years. But everyone on the app exchange team, which got big by that point, there were like 50 of us. @ that point, everyone knew Scott.

Now how do you pull that off?

I mean, that's the question. You know how he did it, how.

Do you do it?

He communicated with people, he asked questions, he tweeted like he was, was active. He did nice things for people. Whenever we needed someone like, oh, we need a partner to do this. Scott was always there. He always was willing to talk to customers. He was honestly, he felt like an extension of the team for a really long time. And a lot of our partners did that. Now it's hard. I'm sure if you were to ask him, he'd be like, I had to call those people, they never called me back. Na na na na na. But you just don't give up, right? And eventually they're going to call you back and they're going to become friends and it's gonna. Then that's how it all kind of starts to gel together. But it's important, it's important in partnership to make the app. When you work at the same company, you have to deal with each other whether you like it or not. This person's gonna sit here, you see him in the bathroom, you see them in the kitchen, you're gonna deal with them, right? Partners are not in the same world. So you have to do a little extra. You have like my desk when I worked at AppExchange around the holidays was ridiculous. It was like covered in stuff like candy, wine, whatever, like, and it was very nice. But I got. And I'm not saying go buy everyone candy wine. That's not my point.

More than you could ever get through.

But the idea was that everyone was trying really hard to create personal relationships. And I think that's difficult in life, not just in business, but you just gotta do it right? You just gotta keep trying, keep trying. And I used to. So I worked at a very small company before Salesforce, right. And we actually evaluated partnership with Salesforce and I decided not to do it because we were on premise and it was too expensive. And so that's funny because then I went and ran the whole thing afterwards. But you know, as we were working through that process and thinking about it, I remember I spent a lot of time like trying to meet Salesforce people going over to Salesforce chatting with them just to get a sense, you know. And my feeling was I would love to work with these people. It's just technically too expensive for me to do this based on where I was at that time. But I felt like if I was even considering embarking on that intense of a partnership, I wanted to look in the face of the people. And you may not live in Silicon Valley, okay, You can look at people's faces online, you can do it on your phone, you can FaceTime with someone, you know, like. But it does say something. To actually look into someone's eyes and be like, okay, we're going to partner, make something right. Yeah, we're going to do this together. We're not like, this is us, you know, we're gonna go run at this together.

So one last question on that. Because we're running. We went by in the blink of an eye.

This is.

We could go on for another hour, but on the FaceTime. And I learned this lesson from Rick Nucci, who founded Boomi back in the day. He's got a new company downstairs and he told me he faked it. He pretended he was in the Bay Area even though he lived in Philly.

Right.

Do you need to do that? Do you need to be as if you're in the Bay Area to build it? Even if you're not, even if you're in London?

You know what? I, I think the whole point of what we did and SAS and all of this was you don't have to be in the same. Like, you shouldn't have to be. I think you can do it with the technology. You have to come every now and then, but you got to come every now and then anyway. And so make those trips worth it. Right? Like stack it. Those are the most busy two, four, three days. You go meet everyone, you take everyone for coffee, for lunch, whatever those things are. But I don't think you have to be here to be successful. I think you just have to know how to hook in from where you are.

But you've got it. You've got to come by every quarter or whatever it is, right?

Gotta come by every now and then. I mean, this is kind of. This is where we all, where everyone is. I mean, you run Silicon Valley, for God's sakes. You know everybody, this is coming out with you.

I'm a bystander.

Yeah.

I'm just a finger waving bystander right here. All right, we go on for an hour. This is amazing. But let's thank Layla because these are amazing.

Insights.

Yeah. Thank you very much.

Take care. Get out.