Trello: When a Product Everyone Loves is Worth $450M

Michael Pryor discusses how Trello grew from a Fog Creek side project to a $450M acquisition by Atlassian. Launched in 2011, Trello hit 20 million signups by spinning out in 2014, with mobile accounting for 30-40% of usage and support in 21 languages.
Questions this video answers
June 15, 2017.
2000.
18,688.
2011.
2014 (after ~3 years internal/bootstrapped).
Chapters
All right, let's welcome Michael Pryor to the stage. Very cool. Thanks for coming.
Thanks for having me.
This is fun. So we'll start and end the annual with some founders. Founders and good stories. I actually want to talk almost nothing about the acquisition other than giving me some context around the story. But I wanted to start with this fun slide. This is me. So here is planning different parts of the Sasters annuals on Trello. Who here does not use Trello? Can we have a show of hands? That does not use Trello? All right, there are a few, and we'll talk about that. But what I want to actually have a little fun as a founders founder story is it seemed a lot of us, we read TechCrunch or whatever form we get, and wow, Trello is acquired for $450 million. Like that came out of nowhere. But it's a pretty long story getting there, isn't it? 17 years.
Yeah. And a lot of failures along the way.
A lot of failures. So I want to highlight one thing and I want to hear the story, but Trello comes out of Fog Creek, which is a suite of products. Right. One of which is fog bugs. And I logged apparently 18,688 fog bugs in the system. That was my first experience to the family of products, and it saved my life. And I've actually done a number of investments, QA related, out of that experience, but. So you guys started Fog Creek in 2000?
Yeah, it was in New York City.
The worst or the good or bad part of 2000, it was still good then. Still good. Seemed like everyone could start a dot com and just become a billionaire overnight.
Yeah, we started doing consulting, we thought, and we'd build software on the side and sell the software with the proceeds that we were getting from consulting. At the time, there were no software companies in New York City.
Nothing. You had no peers.
You could work for an ad agency or a bank, but there was no pure software play going on. And we didn't want to move to Silicon Valley, so we just naively started a company there.
Did you have any mentors, local mentors or anything?
No, no. I mean, my co founder, Joel Spolsky, he had worked at Microsoft for a couple years, so he had a lot of experience, worked on Excel and had a lot of ideas about how to run a company and how to run it well. And he started blogging about that, and that sort of took off. Jolin's software became a big hit.
Yeah.
People ask about the success early.
Early content marketing. Yes.
Yeah. Like how Do I do that? And it's like, well, go back to 2000 when no one is blogging and start a blog then. Yeah, it's not great advice, but yeah. So we started back then and didn't have an idea for a product. So it wasn't, hey, let's start this company, we're going to build this product. It was more about, let's make a cool place for developers to work in New York City, because you couldn't do that as a developer. You were in the back office at some bank or something like that. So just started building things. In fact, the first thing that we ever built was a content management system called City Desk that became a complete failure because it was a desktop version of content management instead of a SaaS.
Ah.
You know, so it was like Movable Type and typepad at that time were figuring out that people couldn't get shell access to their web servers to upload these CGI scripts and they solved that problem. We tried to solve it in this other way and that was like one of the first examples of total failure, big failure. I mean, we made a little bit of money off of it. And then Fogbugs, it was just something that we had on the side. We said, hey, put it up on the website, sell it, we'll see what we do.
That story keeps working with Slack and yammer the side projects that just take off. So it was your own tool, you put it up. And did you have a sense back then of how big the next generation developer market would be or anything? Did you have any idea? Did you know you were in a big market? Did it feel small?
No, I think it felt small and I think it was funny because we've been competing with Atlassian for 16 years. Basically like they started their. Scott and Mike, the co founders of Atlassian, started their company basically around the same time. So we were sort of born out of the same era.
It is the same.
And we competed pretty hard in the marketplace for a very long period of time. We still compete. We still sell fog bugs or Fog Creek still sells fog bugs. I'm now an Atlassian employee, so. Yeah, but, you know, so I didn't. I don't think if you went back to me and asked me then that you could, that I would have thought you could build a $6 billion company out of that.
But you wouldn't have thought. Yeah. And so I want to come back to Trello. But one question out of that. So I had not really thought through that. You and Atlassian were born in that era. Right. So those relationships go back. I mean, Trello happened quickly, but the relationships go back 17 years.
Yeah.
This was not a random call you get from Atlassian wanting to buy the company.
Yeah. I mean, we weren't like collecting close friends, but I mean, I knew them.
Yeah. But these are relations with each other.
At conferences and things like that. And I knew a lot about their company, obviously, because I would pay very close attention to what was going on. And there were a lot of similarities. I mean, that was really. If you sort of dig down and figure out, like why I thought this was such a great idea to put these companies together. It was because the people and the ideas behind it just match so well.
Yeah. So Atlassian and Fog Creek and then we'll talk about Troll as a company. Partial. Not total competitors, but partial competitors. Right. The learning from that. Founders struggle with how to deal with competition and competitors. Do you build those relationships? Does it not matter? Like, I think we overreact and underreact.
To competition in different ways a little bit. So, like, I feel like, first of all, I want to thank you for doing this because this is amazing what you built. And I was here last year sitting in the audience and Jay Simons was on. He was.
Yeah, he was great.
And when he came up, my VP of sales, you know, clapping and I gave her a look. I was like. I mean, it's funny because, like, as people, you know, the people as we've gone through this acquisition and the integration and all those things, like the people inside that company are just amazing people.
Yeah.
And you sort of. You probably know that on the outside, but it's hard when you're competing directly with somebody to really, like, become friends.
It can be hard. Yeah. Yeah, it can be hard. All right. So even in a touchy feely developer haven, the competition is still pretty visceral. Huh. All right, so, okay, so let's go back in time. So Trello is this. Trello is a side project too? At the time or what's the lot? What's the story of the Trellis Trello?
So we sort of had this because we started the company as just a place for developers to work, like a great place for developers. We had a culture of, hey, let's just try different things. Right. And we would do what we called Creek weeks, or it's like Google's 20% time, except we would take time out and just try new things. Like, let's build a new product so that actually works. I mean, we had a bunch of things like if You One summer we took a bunch of interns and built a screen sharing tool called Copilot.
Yeah.
And that was before Log me in and go to my PC existed. And so that was actually serving a real need at that time. We didn't see it. We marketed it to customer service people instead of the way that Log me in and go to my PC, sort of market it more to consumers.
Yeah.
And so I think that was like the right product, right time, but wrong marketing strategy. That was like another example of failure in some sense. I mean, we made decent money off of it, but it never became, as you know, Those other companies IPO'd and became giant successes. But we had this pattern of, hey, let's take some time off, build new things. And Trello was born out of that.
Yeah. So Trello. It seemed like Trello got acquired in 90 seconds. But I was looking back on my Saster post on Trello, I think it was in 2012, launched in 2011. Right. So let's go back. What was. People actually struggle to answer this question, but what was the secret sauce for Trello? What made it take off? You've built a dozen or more products over the years. Right. And they didn't all take off. So you have more information here than most. Right. What made it click?
Right. So the secret to success. So I don't want to underplay luck.
Yes.
Factor in that. And also privilege, like the ability from the history of like, you know, growing up as like a white guy in the United States and having the privilege to go to good schools and meet people and like, those things. So that has a lot to do with it, I think. But there's also things about the product that we learned from historically, mistakes that we had made in the past. I think, you know, at that time we were sort of looking at the way we saw our own developers who were using Fogbugs. They're putting sticky notes up on the wall in their office to manage what they were working on.
Yep.
And we're like scratching our head going, why are they doing that? They could just put this stuff in Fogbugs. And they didn't because they were looking for a much more lighter way of getting perspective on what they were working on. You know, like a higher level sort of than that detail. Very low level. And we started thinking about that and Joel came up with this idea. He said, okay, what if we build a to do list and it'll just have five slots in it, and so everyone has one list. So you have a list, I have a List. Everyone in the company has one list and there's only five slots. So two things that you're working on now, because with developers, you can be compiling, so you need something else you have to work on. Right. And then two things you're going to work on next and one thing you're never going to do. So if you come and ask me to do this thing, you can see it's on my to do list. I'm never going to do it. And he said, everyone will just publish those to do lists, and then you'll be able to see what people are working on. And so that idea, he wanted to call it Five Things or Five Camels. I don't know where that came from. Joel. So Fogbug's not like, the best name for a product?
Yeah, the Z thing always threw me, but I rolled with it. It's a great product.
I had a fun Trello naming story, actually. We tried to figure out that name and we couldn't come up with a name. And so we were gonna launch a TechCrunch Disrupt and we had, like, a deadline. We were like, we need a domain name. And so we got the whole company together and we all voted on names. People are throwing out names and Five.
Camels was fairly far down the list.
Yeah, it was really low. What we came up with was, at the time, we had a mascot that was a manatee and Trello was sort of doing planning. So the name that they came up with was Planning Planety.
Planetty from Fog Bugs and Fog Creek. Yeah, yeah.
So I even have a sweatshirt, Foggity, with the little manatee logo in Trello. And I just put my head in my hands and I'm like, I can't do this. And Joel said, well, you got till 5 o', clock, because I don't know, we have to go on stage tomorrow. We just have to do this. And so I went back to my desk and went to one of those instant domain search websites and just was touching, typing in. I tried everything. I could not come up with a.
Name I didn't know that still worked in 2011.
The code name that we had used was Trellis, because, like, in the garden, a trellis gives structure to a plant. Right. And the idea was we were trying to give structure to things that people were doing. So I tried Trellis and an ad for Trello came up and I was like, perfect. You can spell it. It's easily pronounceable. That's where the name came from. So we almost. It was almost Planety.
That would have been like 320, I think maybe 285 is my guess. Yeah.
The runner up was a cardvark.
Cardvark.
A card and aardvark.
How many marketers work, worked at the company at the time? Like 12, 20. Any product marketers at the company?
It's funny because I think brand marketers. Joel was such a great writer and his website was so good at attracting an audience, which a lot of our later things used that audience to bootstrap, like stack overflow, bringing the developer community together. So we never really developed a traditional marketing muscle, which I think Atlassian did. They were very good at it.
They're very good at it.
So it was almost like a crutch for us. Joel's website sort of let us get ahead, but it meant that we never really developed.
If you have the leads, you can be crummier down the funnel, Right? Or something like that. Yeah. Okay, so I almost get it, but what was the secret sauce? So the five geese I get, you've got sort of, you know, you've got the super easy to use user interface. You've got this.
Okay.
I think Trello was somewhat innovative, like in moving cards and Kanban style. But it might not be the first time the raw elements were used. Right. There's some secret sauce that got it. I mean I was, you know, I used in 2012, I was probably like a fifth generation viral user. Like someone shared a project they were building on Trello and I'm like, this is better than what I'm using. And I became a convert. But what got it to go critical.
So I think that one, the audience that we had built it for was not developers, it was everyone else.
Right.
So all the marketers, the sales people, people using it to plan their weddings or the gift giving for their kid at Christmas, the in laws getting together to make sure they don't buy the same gifts or things like that. Right? Yes. The idea was we're not going to add dependencies and milestones and all these project management terms. That's not what we were building. We were building something for everyone else. And the idea was this is going to be a visual tool. And the metaphor that we were using was these are just sticky notes on a wall with a little bit of structure around them. You can put them in lists. And everyone gets that because they've done that in real life. They get it. So the learning curve is basically nothing like the metaphor of how the app works. You get it already if you've ever written something on a sticky note and put it on a wall. And so I think knowing the market that we were going after, or at least the market we were not going after, as well as that visual metaphor and you said the word kanban and it was like, we're never going to use that word because the market that we were going after would never know what that word would be.
It would not know. Yeah.
And so I think there's a, there's a, you know, part of the success is I don't want to overuse the word simplicity, but I think that, that the simpleness of the metaphor that people already understand instead of, you know, for example, you come into Salesforce, it's like, okay, you have to learn what a contact is. Then you have to learn what a lead is and an opportunity and how those things, you have to understand the grammar of Salesforce in order to become effective.
I'm with you, but can I challenge you on one thing just to learn? So I'm with you. But I think every product focused founder that's passionate about product as we are believes in consumerization of the enterprise and ease of use and elegance. But there's a lot of pretty elegant products out there today that launch on Product hunt like every 90 seconds. Right. So there's always more than that. Yes, the sticky meta, it's easy to use, but there's always something. And maybe it was cross pollinating from the existing base or somehow Joel's blog could seed it. But there's always a story that makes it's more than. Because we all know to build easy to use software today, don't we? I think in 2017 we've gotten the message to entry. It's become entry. Right?
Yeah. Now it has to be fun and emotional and human and all these other things.
A little ML and AI sort of sprinkled in as well.
I think timing is probably an important component to that. If you look, it was probably a year before we launched Trello that the iPhone came out.
Yeah.
So you have all these people now that have this device with them all the time. Basically our connectedness to other people has increased. Right. And so that collaboration aspect of, hey, I can you see that explosion in the communication sector. Right. With Slack and even the consumer communication like WhatsApp and all those things. But I also think that we took advantage of that in the collaboration sector and the idea that people are just doing like projects. They wouldn't call it project management when you're working on your house or doing a renovation at Your house. But you needed a tool to solve that problem.
How much is mobile usage? What percent is mobile?
Like 30 to 40.
30 to 40.
But it's not solely mobile. Right. That's like overlap with other.
Well, that's why, you know, in enterprise it's a nuanced issue. Right. Because it's really not one paradigm, is it? So it's 30 to 40%. It's the answer.
And when we look at people that use Trello, 90% use it for work, 50% use it for home, like things that they do in their personal life. Right. So there's a 40% overlap there.
Yeah.
But almost everyone is using it for work and then a huge percentage is using it for their personal life.
So let's go back a little bit. It's. You know, you mentioned Jay from Atlassian. Atlassian's famous for being bootstrapped. Right. Fog Creek was bootstrapped. Right. So just because I think it'll be interesting to folks here, how did you guys make the real decision to spin it out? Right. And you had to run it and you ended up raising money and you became a traditional venture backed company after being bootstrapped for what, like half your life? Right.
So Trello, we actually bootstrapped Trello with.
Internally, right?
Yeah, for three years. So launched in 2011, but we didn't spin it out until 2014.
So what's the decision? You made a decision to go for it in a certain way.
We were having success. There were four different things that we wanted to do product wise. And we looked at our dev team and we were like, okay, we're going to have to do one. Then we finish that, we'll do the next. Then we finish that, we'll do the next. As far as resources. And we were using the profits from Fog Creek.
That's attention a lot of people have, especially when you go from services to software. How big was Fog Creek at the time?
Employees? Probably around 50 people.
Oh, 50. So that's a lot of resources going.
To 2020 were working on Trello.
It's 40% of the company.
We used to do profit sharing at Fog Creek every year. Right. So we would take the excess profit from the company and give it back to the employees. And when we were doing Trello, we didn't.
Every employee's paying for it.
Yeah. Now they got equity. Turns out that worked out in the end. So that was nice. But you know, that was hard at that point in time because they were like, hey, where's my big bonus? You know, and we're like, well, we're investing in this thing that we hope will be something that is hard. And so that was a shift in the sort of the way that we were thinking about it. But basically we needed to do those four things and we were like, we should just be doing them all at the same time. And we just can't because we don't have the money to hire the developers.
Got it.
We knew investors from the people that invested in Stack Overflow and so we just went.
I forgot Stack Overflow was spun out too. Right.
So we just talked to them and two of them, Spark and Index were like, that's easy.
It's a five minute.
So it took like five minutes and term sheet done.
No, I got that.
And we had gone through the pain of. It's actually a very emotional and painful experience to separate one company from another company. There's like an identity crisis, you know, that happens. And so we had gone through that with Stack Overflow already and knew the mistakes that we had made. So it was a little bit easier this time with Trello.
And so when did you have nothing to do with Fog Creek at all? Like, not one bit to do with it?
Probably Friday.
Friday. Because you've also got to. You gotta draw. When you do that, you've gotta draw a deep line. Right. It's especially tough with founders because if you keep one leg in the services business and one leg in the SaaS business, it's tough.
Yeah, we. Well, I mean, at Fog Creek we hired Anil Dash, who's like a well known person in the, in the tech industry, to be the CEO of Fog Creek probably about six months ago.
Yeah, recently.
So, you know, it's in good hands and they're working on cool new things. So I'm excited about that.
So let's. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about its aster and business models and learnings on freemium. So in some ways it's still early. Right. Even notwithstanding the big exit. So but what are your big takeaways from freemium? So you've got a product that both businesses and gardeners are using and people are using to plan birthday parties. Different monetization strategies. Right. How does that work in general? How does it impact how you've learned about sales and marketing? And how is that different than selling a cool developer tool?
So when we launched Trello, we got up, we were actually in a competition at TechCrunch. It was like Startup Battlefield or something like that. And Joel got up on stage and he said, we're going to build this product. We're going to 100 million people to use it. 1% of them will pay us $100 a year.
Classic premium app.
$100 million, right?
Yeah.
And at the time, that was just ridiculous nonsense. Right. Like 100 million people. And then I think we passed 20 million signups, you know, so it's like.
Okay, you can see the 100 million now, but now you realize the conversion's not as simple as you initially thought.
Right, right. So I think, you know, the idea was give away a lot of value. You used it to plan this conference.
Yeah. And our speakers and stuff. What's that?
Do you pay for Trump?
I pay for so much stuff. I don't know. But there's an honest. There's a high probability I don't pay. I may say, what's the gate?
What's the gate? Well, I think that's the truth.
I don't even know what the gate is.
There isn't really much of a gate. So I think that intentionally, in fact, when we built Trello, we didn't even think about monetization for a couple years until Google shut down Google Reader, I think at some point. And everyone started to panic about free services. They were like, I'm not going to use a free service because you're just going to shut it down. And so we were like, oh, we have to start charging people in order to reduce friction for sign up. Okay.
It does work that way, actually, doesn't it? Yeah.
Okay. So I think, like, that's balancing. That is definitely a tricky thing. Like, obviously tomorrow we could say, hey, if you make more than 10 boards, you have to pay us. But we would make more money. But that would destroy what Trello is, that I think that there's a delicate balance between giving people that are heavy users of the product, giving them more features and more value, and letting them see the value that they get and then they're totally willing to pay for it. And so that's like a process.
Yeah. And so related to that. So the hundred million 1% model, you're at 20 million, but all the users aren't the same value. Right. So have you learned? How do you identify and especially when you don't have a gate, how do I identify the ones that are? And how do you staff against it? Right now you've got to service these customers differently. Or maybe you don't.
Well, an interesting takeaway from this is. So I think that when we look at companies that use Trello, a larger company will have Hundreds of thousands of Trello users within the company. And yet those are a whole bunch of different pockets of Trello teams and they don't know each other. And so that's the bottoms up. We're. The employees are able to start using Trello because it doesn't cost them anything. And we find that when you go into those organizations and you say, hey, did you know you had 6,000 people using Trello in your company? They're not an SSO, you know, you don't know who's going where. The early Dropbox strategy is talking to the IT person. Right. And then for security reasons and those kinds of things, those deals are fairly easy.
So that's key part of sales today is that is. That is.
I think if you.
It's not.
It's basically you're not selling. Right. Because they've already adopted your product. Right. So the trick is just can you get them to pay for what they're already using?
And in 2017, that strategy, going to the CIO and saying there's 600 people or whoever it is. Yeah. Does that. Do you have to be careful how you do it? Because you can, you can, you can do it with a stick or a carrot. Right. Sometimes it can be seen as a security risk. Even in 2017. Right. Well, my data is flowing outside of my organization in an uncontrolled fashion. So have you learned the yin and yang or trade off there yet or is it. You're not sure yet?
I think that it's fairly. If you've already had the adoption across the whole company and you have a ton of people using it, it's fairly easy to demonstrate why the things that you're selling on the enterprise version make sense for the company. Got it. That's only one piece of how we sell.
No, but it's a proven model that works. It's a proven model that works.
I think that if. And for us, it's fairly easy because our product is so horizontal. So we're across sales, marketing, finance, legal. Right. There's not. If you're selling a more vertical product, it's a little bit trickier because now you're in a slice of the company and you're probably going to need more per user than you would normally if you're a horizontal product.
Yeah. So let's. I want to jump back on topic. I want to make sure we have time on just because I think it's interesting when you talked about mobile. So mobile is 30 to 40% of your usage. You know people a lot of folks in SaaS struggle to staff different teams struggle to do platforms struggle. Especially old people like you and me that have been doing software longer than since like 2014. And we have desktop roots. We go back and we grew up in a browser area and then we hired an iOS developer. And with that 30, 40%, how do you think about how do you staff it, how do you deal with the trade offs in product and engineering?
So we have a dedicated iOS team and a dedicated Android team. From the very beginning, the mobile strategy was always really important to us. As I mentioned, iPhone coming out, people connected, this sort of consumerization of collaboration that we were trying to tackle. And it's also important when you're building a product that's so horizontal and you really want to reach everyone in the world. That's our market. It's not just the US and you start to think about places like Brazil or India or China where people maybe the way that they work and live is not sitting in front of a computer all day. It isn't. But they have these smartphones, they. Then you start thinking about, okay, well, connectivity. That is a hugely important piece of our mission, which is to be an international product and also an international company. So we have people that are working remotely for us. 60% of the people that work for Trello are working all over the world. People in Peru and Hawaii and Austria and Canada, you know, so I should.
Know how localized is Trello?
21 languages.
21 languages. So this is another learning, right? A lot of us, we localize late and we have a lot of technical debt there. Right. So what were the learnings there?
You know, we tried different things around crowdsourcing or getting paid for translations.
Yeah, Pretty low quality, isn't it?
Yeah, you kind of have to do. You could do a little bit of both. And I think the trick that we learned was if you internationalize, if you translate your app into another language, that doesn't mean it's localized. Like, you know, there's jokes in the app when you're using it that have to be translated and the people that translate it might not understand what those are. But also just marketing it, like, you can't just put your app out there and be like, it's available in Turkish but nobody in Turkey knows that it's available. Like, how do you solve that problem? So we actually did some A B tests where, well, ab we translated into Spanish and didn't do anything in Spain and then we translated into French and did marketing. I went to conferences and spoke. Don't Translate your app and then do no marketing for that. That's a mistake.
Well, that's because we think that the Internet is so global. So you do Spanish in Spain, even with the brand, Nothing. It doesn't take off.
No, you can't.
You need those supersedars or something in Trello to spread it, right?
Well, yeah, you can just get on a jet. You could wait, but it's going to take a very long time.
So literally, getting on a jet, that.
Makes a huge difference.
Yeah.
And I mean, just marketing, Right. Like, try to get. You're thinking about what's the PR strategy in this country? Who are the incubators that we want to go talk to? Like, all those different things. But you have to do that work. You can't just be like, here's my app. It's available in your language.
And so Mose, just. Last question on that. Then I want to hit one other thing before we run out of time, but. So when did you make the decision to localize? Because I think we all do it late, where in the users. It was probably pretty early in revenue. But when did you make the decision? And would you do it earlier?
No, it was probably like a year and a half ago.
A year and a half ago? Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty late.
And so it was a big effort. Like, basically we had to take everyone across the company and shift focus to do this and get it done, because there's that upfront work of doing, not just translating all the strings, but changing the way your product functions. And then you got the website, the billing, all those different things.
Yeah. All right, one last question. We've got just one more minute. I don't want to talk too much about M and A, because this stuff's much more fun, but what's the big takeaway? When do you know when to sell and not to sell for a founder? What's the answer?
I'll tell you. You made a tweet. I think I've paraphrased it. It said. It said, if you get to 20 million in ARR, never sell.
Yes.
Something like that, right?
Something like that, yeah.
I just want to ask you. I looked at that tweet. I spent a lot of time looking at that tweet, trying to.
What's the post behind the tweet?
So I'll give you one. We spent a lot of time, Mike and Scott and I focused on the culture and the people and the mission. And it turns out that we were having one of these conversations. We're like, we're Trying to get to 100 million. And Mike's like, that's our goal internally, I guess to get to 100 million people using our products. And I was like, there were just a lot of similarities between the companies and the focus on the product. And we had a lot of matchup. And I think that's one of the reasons why I did it. And also we spun off from Fog Creek, 16 year old company. The cap table's this long. Oh, I get all that.
Yeah.
Everyone gets paid, you know, they go on the cap table.
So do you know in your gut? Do you know in your gut?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Right decision. But I want to ask you, why did you say that? So what made you tweet that out?
I think that it was funny. It was kind of the topic of the conversation I had with Lou Cerny here last year from New Relic, he sold Wiley to CA for like 400 million and then in some ways found a new relic to do it again. But he sold the ca, not Atlassian. So kind of like polar opposite ends. But I think at 20 million, if you have happy customers, if your MPS is high, it really is unstoppable. Like, you can't not get to 100 million. Like it becomes if you have 20 million and you have a 50 mps, even if you're horrible at sales and you're horrible at marketing, like that 20 million, worst case, it turns into 30 million next year. And you've been doing this for 17 years so that 20 million will get to 100. Now your error. Multiple for exit may never be better than at a certain moment, including IPOs, because IPOs aren't even that great a multiple, right? They're not that great. But from a journey perspective, if you get to 20, you can get to 100, and then that's when you have something huge. Right? So that's my Zen learning is just. There's only. It's so much. It's impossible to get to one. Right? And it happens. And then 20 is this moment where, holy crap. Like I can see. I can finally see that hundred. And that's the learning. But congratulations.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for all the time and coming out. It's great.










