Parker Conrad & Sam Blond (Zenefits): Hyperscaling Inside Sales

We're. We got the imperson here.

Yeah.

Thank you for coming. Oh, yeah, buddy. Good to see you.

See you again.

Looking good.

I like the look.

Yep. Good to see you. I like the. I need a pocket is the problem. Yeah, yeah.

I actually. Matt Epstein yesterday.

All right, good. Well, we've got again, this is. I think this is a treat. It's. You can hear a lot of CEOs drone on and on. I've done it before, and you can see, you know, VPs of sales, but getting a super successful team together, you know, between these two sessions, I haven't. I haven't seen it before. So thanks for coming. This is it. We're all lucky. Thank you. Right, so. So. Lot of stuff we would love to chat about. So Zenovitz had a good 2014, as I understand. Is that right? Some good growth?

So far, so good.

All right, you want to give us a little Parker, you want to give us 30 seconds on the company and 30 seconds on 2014.

Yeah. So basically what we do is we solve this problem that I think pretty much every business in the United States with less than 1,000 employees has, which is that you have 20 different systems related to HR. And because that anytime you hire or terminate someone, you need to set them up or remove them from 20 different places. And if the world made any sense, all this stuff would be connected up. There'd be a single place that companies and their employees go to make changes, and it would propagate everywhere else. And that's essentially what Zenefits is with the wrinkle that we give that sort of core hub and connective tissue away for free.

Yep.

And we make money on sort of the spokes in this hub and spoke system.

Yep. And so last year we grew about 20x, something like that.

Right.

I think you did put the numbers in TechCrunch or somewhere like that. Right. So 1 to 20 million or something like that in run rate. Right. And as amazing that sound, I think you and I probably met five or six months before that when you reminded me. I think you're doing about 15k in MRR. Right. So a lot of growth. Right. So a lot of things we could chat about. But let's go back in time. So we met and I connected you with how many folks did you hire last year?

So today we're about 95 sales reps. 95 sales reps.

Okay. So you added about 94 of those sales reps to the team.

Yes, exactly.

Right. So quite a bunch of scaling. So a couple.

The one that I hired was really good.

What's that?

I hired one of them.

Good manager.

She's still there. Yeah. All right. Very good. That's a good sign. So Parker, you said to me, and even though it was at 15k mrr, Zenefits was a sort of a pre hot company. I mean, you came, people knew of you, you came out of icombinator. Right. And you had the ability to meet a lot of reps. And you told me Sam was much better than the other folks you're meeting. Right. And so what did you see there? What did you learn? Right. It's not like you're some. Not like you're stuck off, you know, in France desperately trying to find anyone. In sas you met a lot of people. Right. So what was. Why did you know Sam was the one?

So I think it was. So first of all, Jason introduced me to Sam, which was a really helpful introduction. So I appreciate that. Basically, one of the things I look for when I interview people at the executive level is it's always a really positive sign if you think that you learn something in talking with them. And all of, I think the best hires that I've made have all been people that in that first conversation, I felt like I walked away with from it really understanding something about the business that I didn't understand before.

That's key.

And with Sam, it was, you know, just, I mean, everything he said made a lot of sense about how to think about this. And one of the things, you know, that we talked about that made a lot of sense to me was, you know, he basically, I said, you know, listen, how's this going to be more challenging than your job at Echosign? What's going to be really different or unusual about it?

Yep.

And he pointed out that the free thing for us kind of like cuts both ways because on the one hand, you don't have to get a check, you don't have to. People don't have to have budget. There's a whole bunch of advantages to it. But on the other hand, it's harder to sort of discount or create a sales cycle around a free product. And he sort of identified that, like, early on.

The discounts are tough, huh? Exactly.

Yeah. I was like, that was going to be a big challenge. And how do you do that?

Rebates.

And I hadn't actually even thought about that, but as soon as he said it, I was like, that's true. That has been a challenge for us. How do you get people across the finish line and sort of what do you do about it. And so that was one of the things where I was like, gosh, already it seems like Sam understands at least some of the dynamics here a lot better than I do. And so that was one of the main reasons.

So that comports with my experience. You found that relatively rare in your interviewing process, Right?

Relatively.

Right. Most of the folks you interviewed couldn't explain a bunch of things that you didn't already know about how to scale the business. Yeah.

And to tell you the truth, I mean, I didn't interview a ton of people on the VP of sales side because we had just started talking to a search firm to help us out. And you made the introduction to Sam, and I interviewed Sam and really liked him. And so I think we canceled the search.

Oh, that's a good sign.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So let me ask you. There's a lot of stuff I want to chat about, but so last year you told this story when we were on Salesforce tv and before, or maybe I think at Boxworks, the plan last year, which was audacious, which was 1 to 10. Right. And somewhere around May, you doubled the plan.

Yeah.

Now how do you guys negotiate this? Because it sounds a little intimidating to me if I'm to the right of you. Right?

Yeah. So here's what. So actually the way that this started is after Lars Dalgard from Andreessen invested in us. I was sitting down with him, like, shortly after the round closed, and I think Sam was there too. And I was feeling really proud of myself. I was like, so the plan for this year is we're gonna go from 2 reps to 20 reps, and we're gonna go from like 1 million to 10 million in run rate revenue. And I was feeling like, you know, like, that's pretty good.

Yeah.

And Lars sat there in like his. A very Lars fashion and was like, why are you guys so fucking bush league? Like, what's. Like, why 20 reps? Like, you know, you guys gotta get your heads out of your ass and start like focusing on, like going big here.

Sam was at a rewarding meeting. And was that a rewarding meeting? Was it rewarding?

Okay, yeah, it was like, why? Like, you guys should be at 100 sales reps, like by the end of the year. Like, don't you want to be going big, going after something here? Like, what's wrong with you? And I was sitting there like, you know, and Sam and I kind of looked at each other. I was like, I don't know what that was about. But then, you know, it did kind of get us thinking. And so, you know, I started thinking about it and I kind of. It started off with like a what if. Yeah.

Or.

And I went to Sam, I said, well, what, you know, what if we wanted to hit 20 million in run rate? Like what do you think that would require?

Yeah.

And Sam was like, oh, there's like no way. I mean we'd have to, like, we'd have to split our sales team in two. We'd have to have someone managing like the sales team for smaller companies and someone for the larger companies.

Yeah.

I was like, well, well, why that's not so bad. Like maybe, you know, maybe we should do that. And we kind of. And Sam was like, yeah, no, I actually that's not a bad idea to kind of get that done a little earlier anyway.

Yeah.

And so it started off as sort of just like a thought exercise on what it would take to get to something much larger than what we thought we could hit. And when we started mapping out what that would look like, it actually seemed like sort of doable. And so that's, you know, gradually. And there was a lot of pushback from the team because there were people in the company, Matt, who you guys know are VP of marketing, who's like, this is fucking crazy. Like there's, you know, like, I can't believe, like, why would we do this? And you know, so. But we start, you know, just like, you know, treat it as like a thought exercise. We're not gonna tell anyone outside the company. That's our goal. And then like a month later I started telling like all of our investors that was our goal. And so then it actually, Parker couldn't.

Keep his mouth shut.

The self fulfilling prophecy.

And so then, so then it actually really did become the goal. But by that time we'd sort of like people had sort of gotten comfortable enough with it that it sort of made sense.

And when you change the goalpost mid season, mid game like that, how do you, if at all, how do you make sure that the team is comfortable with that? Right. Because you don't want. If you've doubled the plan and the sales and marketing team hits 70% of the double plan, you don't, I don't think you want people to feel like that they should jump on 20% higher.

Than the original plan.

Maybe you did. Right, but how did you negotiate that so that it at least sort of was a win win for everybody or did you not negotiate?

I'm not sure this is the right way to do it. But it started out as, like, it's not a plan, it's a hypothetical.

Yeah.

And then it became a plan. But we said, listen, if we don't get to 20, but we beat 10, we're still going to give ourselves a really big pat on the back and be very happy with this. And then it evolved to like, no, we better fricking hit 20. So it just kind of happened sort of slowly.

I don't know.

Is that we also dedicated a lot of resources differently. I mean, at 10 million, our plan was very different in terms of hiring, strategy and marketing spend and all that stuff. So those things increased dramatically to get us to that 20 million.

Yeah.

So I think.

And we raised another $60 million.

Yeah. No, you took some financial pressure off it, which does help. I mean, not being facetious, but yeah.

It'S an interesting exercise. I think we're doing it again this year. We have a target this year, and we're saying, what if, you know, what if again, what if we needed to get to 1.3x that target? What would we do differently?

Yeah, you're gonna redo the plan in February this year? It seems early.

I don't know. We'll see. Could be another interesting year for us.

Yeah. Well, let me ask you, so, Sam, from your perspective. So it's actually. It's great. I mean, we can't all do exactly the story that Parker said, but I think for all of us running SaaS companies, the idea of pushing the plan higher during the year is a great idea. Right. I mean, if you're failing, you're failing. Right. But we all, frankly, can do a little better than we're doing. Right. So how did. From your side, how did you stay comfortable? Was that negotiated or was it just come out of the trust that the two of you have? Or how did you see it from your chair?

So for us, it was all about. We had sort of created a system by the time that we officially made the plan, 20 million. And we knew what it was going to take in terms of sales reps, how much business they were going to be able to close, what we're going to need to do in terms of management structure. And so there were some things that we did a little bit differently. Phoenix was one of them. We were able to hire much more aggressively in a less expensive market. So we made some changes that when you just do the math, you sort of see how you can get there. And so we decided collectively that we were going to go for it with the pretext that had we missed and gotten to 12, 16, 18 million instead of 20.

Yeah.

You didn't think you were going to get fired for that. Yeah.

It was still a great year. Right. We're still one of the fastest growing SaaS companies ever.

Yep, yep.

And the thing that made it possible for us to do this is that we have, like a really brilliant VP of marketing, Matt, who's not here right now. And we, except for like a very brief period of time last year, we were never top of the funnel consumer. And so, you know, he would hit.

His lead, commit whatever it took.

Right.

It got to the point where, you know, the basic sort of agreement was like, listen, Sam, as many sales reps as you can hire, Matt was going to be able to provide them with demos with companies so that there wasn't going to be. So then it just became a numbers game where it's like, well, if you can't get there with, you know, 30 sales reps, you just need to hire 60 sales reps. And so it becomes like, you know, just about recruiting and training.

Yeah. So you got comfortable. It's always an interesting question of do sales reps generate revenue? Right. I mean, obviously they close deals. Right. But can putting bodies in generate revenue? Right. But. But in this case, if marketing can clearly deliver their commit, then the answer for Zenvis was yes. Right. And Sam had carte blanche to hire the number of good people to hit the revenue plan. Right. So sales reps equal to revenue for you, that was the. That was the switching point in Sam sounds like. Right?

Yeah, sales reps. And also Matt, the VP of marketing, he thinks about these levers. And one of the levers was, I mean, you have 95 salespeople, but how many prospectors do you have right now?

What are we, about 70 SDRs?

I thought it was like 50, but yeah, somewhere in that range.

So I remember that was, you know, there's the lead generation, which mostly is done through outbound prospecting. You guys had a funnel and you. You had some enough data to start to be able to predict all right, if we need to add. And Matt had that. He figured out something that worked and so he felt like he could blow it up.

When we started 2014, we didn't have any SDRs. We actually made our first SDI hire at the very beginning of 2014. And as the year went on, we realized that that was a lever that we could very easily control, unlike any other inbound Legion lever that we could, we could pull. And so today we know we can hire one SDR that's going to create X number of leads that will feed x number of reps. And we're able to just push that as hard as we can. And so it really is a machine today. And it's all about what can we, how aggressively can we scale without the wheels falling off the track?

You guys have a really clean way that you have sales development and marketing and sales work together. Can you share a bit about it? Because I think it's a really good model for people.

Yeah.

So we have sales development, live in marketing. It's a little different. Or some people live in marketing. Some people have it live in sales. For us, it made more sense to live in marketing because marketing has a lead commit to sales, much like sales has a revenue commit to the rest of the company. And so that works out really well for us. And again, at this point, we know exactly what an SDR is going to produce. And so this month, you know, these numbers are sort of made up. But if we're going to hire 15 sales reps this month, we know that we need to hire 12 SDRs. And if we increase that number from 15, that number from 12 goes to 14.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Parker, let's talk a little bit about Geo. So you opened this, the Phoenix office or Scottsdaler. Right. It's more, I assume it's more cost efficient there, but I don't think that was the number one goal. Right. I mean, there is a little bit of capital in the bank. So I assume it's as much about scaling as efficiency, is that correct?

Yeah, it's just about the number of people that we needed to hire. It got hard to do. It got hard to do it in San Francisco.

That's my question. Just a sheer number of human capital that you need to fuel this engine, Right?

Yeah. So we hired, I think we hired about 600 people in 2014.

Wow.

And we started out the year at about 15 employees.

50 to 600.

Yeah, yeah, 600 and change.

That was as of yesterday, but today.

I think we're hiring about 100amonth right now. And it was just there was a limit to how you could do that in San Francisco. I mean, even just like real estate, it's hard to get office space. And even if you want to spend money on it, if you want to add 30,000 square feet, you can't do that with 30 days notice. Usually takes like six or seven months.

Yeah.

And so it got that. So Phoenix was less expensive. You know, it was easier to scale or just another place to scale at least. And also like, you know, the talent there has been great. I mean, you know, it's not. It has not been our experience that, you know, it's sort of a step down in these other. And there are a couple of them, you know, there's Phoenix and there's Salt Lake City and Denver. And the experience has actually been that a lot of the guys in Phoenix are kicking the butts of the people in San Francisco in a lot of cases on this stuff. And so it can be a great way to do it, I think once you've got something down and kind of locked and loaded in terms of how you're going to do it, is it.

Because of the management talent? Because I assume that the individual, the reps are equivalent. Right. Is it more the management talent that you need to source before you do Phoenix or your version of Phoenix? Because you said here first, which we're all doing Well, I think it's hard.

To do anything at a distance until it's like really, like, until it's really just kind of rinse, wash, repeat.

Yep.

So once, once you get to a point where, you know, you can, you know, hire this rep, you can put them through this training program in X months, they're going to be hitting quota. You know, you have. You have a team of people that you can see the office with. So we actually sent about 15 or 20 people from San Francisco down to Phoenix to seed that office. So that, that way there was sort of like a cultural touchstone right from the beginning around what are just the norms about the way things are done in the company? How do you run the demo, how does sales work? And also with these other teams, how do we do customer support, all that different kind of stuff.

Stuff.

You don't want to be hiring people just from scratch there because then you have no idea sort of where it might veer off into. It can take on a direction that's very different from what's working in the home office.

So let me step back for a minute because it always confuses me when you have a lot of capital, but you still want to have a CAC driven model. Right. So you come in, you want to grow faster, you get an extra 60 million bucks in the bank. Right. Clearly you can. You want to deploy the capital. What did you. Parker, what did you. What did you loosen up like? How did you. Did you. Did you. Did you. I assume you probably didn't lower quotas, right? You probably didn't lower quotas. I don't think that happened. So it's just structurally what, what, what did you loosen the belt on with that capital to help you grow faster? Right. Because you don't want to, you don't want to lose. You still want to have a decent cac, Right. You want it to perform, you want to pay for leads that work and you want the sales reps to hit whatever their quota is. 800,000amillion. Right. So the quota take home isn't really going to change much. Right. So how do you deploy that effectively?

Yeah, so the way that we did it, I mean there were some just basic growth, you know, hiring a lot more engineers, but.

Engineers, Yeah, I got that. But on the revenue side, how do you deploy.

The scary reality of the way SaaS works, as you know, is that, you know, almost all of your costs are front loaded. And so on day one, you kind of drop into negative territory on a customer and then with these subscription businesses, you're gradually making that money back over time.

Yep.

With, with some sask. If you do annual contracts, that's like a revenue recognition fiction for us because we actually get paid monthly. It's a real cash issue.

It does impact your cash if you.

And so what, what that means is, is, you know, we were looking at it and we were like, the more successful we are, the more business we close, the more money we will lose in the short term. And that's one of the criticisms that people make about SaaS businesses. It's like the more successful they get, the more money they lose, especially with the business. But it swings down in the short term and then it comes back up. And so we were looking at it and I was like, geez, there are certain points where like, our success, like, our success can actually itself put us out of business because like you, you close so much business that it puts you into such deep negative territory that you ran out of money and you need a way to kind of like bridge that gap to get to when it like rebounds from a cash flow perspective.

Yeah. So were there things, there's, there's an exercise that I like to do. Some version of, especially when you sort of hit initial traction at the end of the year is imagine next year, you had no capital constraints in your business at all. What would you do? Right. So did you go through a version of that exercise or even after this, did you still feel capital constrained or what did you let the team do where capital didn't matter? Right. And how did that, if anything. Right. Was there an exercise you did there?

No, I think it's kind of dangerous to sort of say what would you do if, like, money didn't matter because it.

Well, my idea is the lead still have. You still have to. You can't. You can't. The lead still have to perform and the reps still have to close. Right. But what could you do if we weren't worrying about money in the business? Right. Maybe it didn't impact your thinking.

Yeah, it didn't. I mean, we were very fortunate that, you know, and this is very different from, like, my last company, but at this company at least, we were fortunate that, like, capital hasn't been the constraint for us on this. So it's been more like, you know, other weird constraints and bottlenecks have popped up. There's always sort of a different. Different one, but it hasn't been the fundraising side.

Yeah, yeah. So what were. And I'll ask both of you, including Sam, so trying to just literally add the amount of sales headcount that you have over the last 16 months. Right. What were the biggest bottlenecks? Right. What's the hardest part? Was it adding an extra layer of management or was it literally throughput or. Because a lot of us have trouble hiring three reps. Right.

So challenges have been different along the way. And if we go back to sort of middle of 2014, we made a major shift, as we sort of alluded to earlier, from inbound lead gen, coming from marketing activities that were not sdr. And so there was a period of time where we had actually overhired on the sales side and marketing needed to figure out a way to sort of catch up. And so that became a bottleneck for about a month or two, and we fixed that very quickly. And, you know, today a bottleneck is actually the number of candidates that are coming through the door. And so we are tripling internal recruiting resources on the sales side to generate more candidates. We're also doing things like internal recruiting blitzes. We've increased the amount that we're paying people for referring candidates. And so, you know, bottlenecks change over time. And for us, we've had two or three over the course of the last year.

Do you know roughly how many resumes you get to interviews to hires?

So at this point, recruiting is actually its own department, whereas historically there was recruiting was reporting into the department that they were recruiting for. So I don't know how many resume submissions there are. I know that we hire about one in four. That makes it two sales.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I'd say, I mean, I think on Sam's side, I think one of the things that he did really well. Is he more than sales? More than any other part of the organization. Was very aggressive about promoting people internally early. And I was like, always very nervous about that because, I mean, Sam would say, you know, we need to promote, you know, Matt Plank and Leah. And I was like, what do you mean? Isn't it like the top.

They joined last month, the top guys.

Like, you know, you know, they've only top individual contributors. Been here like three or four months. You know, we gotta get like, you know, they're closing all this business. Why would we do, you know, let's not do that yet. And he was always very aggressive about doing that, I think so. You know, sales management was never really the bottleneck on the sales side. I mean, I think management has become a bottleneck at various different points in time for other parts of the company.

Yeah.

But in addition to the hiring stuff, I mean, I think training was a big bottleneck for us on the sales side. And so we went from, like, we went from a point where we had, like, no trainers in the company to now having a lot, a lot of trainers in the company and having an entire, like, just sales training department of, like, multiple sales trainers in sales with, you know, a VP of sales enablement to kind of run it.

Yeah.

And that. That shift happened. We went from, like zero to like, you know, somewhat fully built out in just a couple months.

Yeah. And so Parker now, or. And if it's changed historically, what do you do in sales? What's your role? How do you support the team? How much time, if any, do you spend with customers? Right.

So I tend to spend more time with customers post sale than I do on the sales side.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of that is a function of, like, where our bottlenecks and challenges are, which tend to be sort of like operationally post close. And so that's, you know, I spent a lot of time there. David Sachs, our coo, spends a lot of time there.

Yep.

And because sales and marketing are working really well, I end up spending less time there. I try to get on a demo with one of our enterprise reps sort of, you know, once a week or every other week. Sometimes it ends up being less frequently than that in practice. But to just hear, you know, when. When people tell us no, like, why do they tell us no? Because it's really good. It's really good feedback into sort of the product. And it's hard. It's hard to get it secondhand from. From the reps because sometimes, like, what you hear is like, people want faster horses.

No, you got to hear it yourself.

And you, you got to hear like, their problems firsthand because, like, the solution may be non obvious. So that's like the most for me, like, since, you know, Sam and his team are doing such a great job, I can actually spend less time there. But the thing you want to make sure to keep a handle on is what, you know, why do people turn you down?

Yeah, no, that's a good insight. And so how much of your time would you guess you spend with the existing customers? I mean, is it budgeted? Do you have a rough sense how much of your. I mean, you've got a lot to do. Even with David, you've got a lot to do, right?

I mean, I'd say I spend.

Probably.

90% of my time on sort of our, like, ops as a whole, like that whole, you know, what's going on with, you know, you know, products and integrations and, you know, customer support and account management and renewals. And how does, how does that all work? Yep, that's. That's probably where I started a lot.

Yeah.

But that's changed over time because there was, you know, there was a period of time when like, marketing had a crisis, and then I was spending like all my time, you know, with Matt on the marketing side for like a very brief period of time.

Yeah. So let me ask you a question. How much? I mean, actually, Zenefits at some levels, in a very competitive space, right? I mean, maybe not every single deal is a knuckle brawl. Maybe it is, I don't know. But at least at a, at a high level, there's large entrenched competitors, Right. With the kind of growth you see and just the crap you have to get done, how much, if any, time do you spend worrying about competitors and what's your advice there to other founders? Because I think we all worry too much about competition.

You must have a lot of copycats now, don't you?

Well, not really.

I mean, so what happens is we tend to have, in this hub and spoke model, we have some vicious competition for individual spokes. So, you know, in every deal, we're going up against an insurance broker who does the insurance piece. But what we're selling is this sort of like all in one integrated sort of system of record. And there are relatively few companies that do that. And so, I mean, you know, TriNet's one, but it's a very different business model. And it's, you know, an expensive product and they underwrite their clients and, you know, end up rejecting a lot of companies because they're like poor insurance risk.

Yep.

So it's kind of inherently a niche product and we haven't seen the same kind of like all in one approach to this. I mean, it's a hard problem to tackle because, you know, most of the time with companies the conventional wisdom is that you want to focus and we're, you know, for better or for worse, taking this opposite approach that actually the problem is when everyone's focusing, then the client ends up with 20 different systems for each sort of narrow piece of functionality. And so what's needed is a company like Zenefits to sort of unify them and bring them all together, which means you kind of have to do everything, which is like hard and a real pain in the ass.

So it's not high on the list. Worried about competition? Discussion about competition.

You know, I think a lot of, you know, our challenges are more internal about, you know, the pace at which we're growing and how do we do that successfully and.

Yep.

And how do we sort of make it? How do we keep all of our internal chaos from spilling over to our customers and fix that internal chaos as quickly as possible so that we can take it to the next level?

So, Jason, there is no. We're in a unique situation because there is no resonate with you DocuSign to our Echo sign. There's nobody like that that is a truly direct competitor. So for us, as Parker mentioned, we have all of these different spokes. Well, our biggest revenue driver is commissions on the health insurance dollars and our competition there is a traditional health insurance broker. And what you get with.

Yeah, so it's very diffuse.

What you get with a traditional health insurance broker is no technology. And so for us, when we show them this incredibly powerful technology platform that comes with us being their broker, that then becomes sort of a no brainer for them and so on. These sales calls, sort of a sales rep stream we hear all the time. You know, why wouldn't I do this? Or why isn't every company in the United States adopting something like this? Because we're giving the hub away for free.

Help me. There's a. We're running out of time. There's so many things I want to chat about. But help me with, since I have both of you, one thing. Sometimes, you know, CEOs are doing SaaS for the first time. They magically know exactly how to work with the VP of sales. But. But usually it's a learning experience. What do you guys. If you have one on ones or what do you guys chat about? You don't just whip out the salesforce pipeline, do you? How do you work together and how do you manage each other? Right up and down or right to left?

We have, I think both are incredibly important. We have sort of a work relationship and a personal relationship. And our work relationship is, I would say, less formal probably than most. And it might surprise you. We actually don't have a one on one that's on our calendar every week when we need something done. It's more spur of the moment. And we probably meet, you know, this week. I think we've probably met two or three times a day and we just sort of get things done. It works well for us. It fits our personality type to be. To take that sort of approach. I think on the personal side, you know, we have a great relationship sort of outside of work and joking within work as well. And a couple stories that come to mind that we did a big sales dinner at Bobo's one night and Parker and I were slightly over served and we ended up on the floor of the restaurant in a wrestling match with each other to end the night. And, you know, just, I don't know, half an hour ago we were up in the green room and we saw two bottles of unopened drinks and we sort of looked at the bottom.

I'm glad it's been used. It's good. Yeah, I was, I was worried that they would be. They wouldn't be unscrewed.

They're no longer unopened.

That's good. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So good. But you. So the way you get your transparency Parker said you needed is meeting multiple times a day is the answer, right?

Are your offices next to each other?

I mean, I guess the only thing I would know because, I mean, I. The only thing I would say is that I think like, sometimes conflicts can come up in situations like that when people are like in each other's shorts or there's not a lot of trust. And you know, one of the things that I found about Zenefits is the growth is so, like overwhelming and so like paralyzing at times that there's no way that I could. I mean, if I was trying to be like really deeply involved in sort of Sam's part of, you know, like how you scale sales. I mean, I just don't. I don't think.

I can't micromanage anything.

You need to have people in sort of each of these areas that you trust well enough that they're just kind of running with it because there are going to be enough places where you're going to have to stay involved a lot, and those are the places where things are going wrong. You want as much as possible within the organization, you want everything to be running smoothly so that you can go play video games or something. And everything is running really well. And to the extent that you have to spend a lot of time deeply involved in any one part of the organization, it's probably a sign that something's not working.

Yeah, I think so. All right, listen, I'd love to go through more. We're out of time. This was amazing. So thanks to Parker and Sam and Aaron for joining us. This was terrific. All right, guys.