E99: How GTM Revenue Leaders Are Operationalizing AI for Growth with Kyle Norton of Owner.com

Aj, you go. I'm new. I'm back from my.

Oh.

Well, well, well.

My friends. Welcome Top Line listeners to a very special edition where Sam Jacobs shows his face. We have also Kyle Norton from Revenue Leaders podcast on today. And then.

That's not the name of the podcast. Come on.

Should we just restart this whole thing, is it?

No, leave this in the Revenue Leadership Podcast.

That's what I said. That's what I said. That's what I said.

Welcome to Topline, the podcast for the best founders, operators and investors in B2B tech. Every week, AJ Bruno, Asad Zaman and me, Sam Jacobs will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well informed professionals in the market.

This episode of Topline is sponsored by Staircase AI by Gainsight, your next expansion deal or churn Risk. It's already in your customer data. You're just not seeing it. Staircase AI analyzes every conversation, spots hidden risks and automates expansion plays so GTM teams can win more renewals. Drive pipeline and stop firefighting. Forecast with 95 accuracy. Eliminate guesswork. Enter customer insights into revenue. Because the best way to grow is to keep the customers you've already won. Learn more@gainsight.com staircase that's gainsight s I G-H-T.com staircase now back to the show.

You know what, Kyle? I know the name of our podcast. It's called Topline. So welcome to our podcast, Topline, where you have your regulars Austin Zaman and A.J. bruno here together. No. We're back. Sam, how are you?

I'm good.

Welcome back.

Thank you. Welcome back, everybody. Even Kyle. I caught up with him earlier today. Everybody's like, I hope you're okay. You're on your advent. So I appreciate both. I really do appreciate both of you respecting my privacy in my time away. But for all the listeners out there, I. I don't. I. I had a baby. I didn't have one in my life. Had a baby. I have a daughter now.

Mazel tov.

My daughter's 15 year. 15 days old.

15 years old.

Yeah, I was. She came out fully formed, so with opinions, the SATs. Anyway, I don't like to share too much about my personal, personal life, but that's what happened. I was on mini paternity leave, taking care of a new arrival in my family.

Well, congratulations, Sam.

Congratulations, Sam. Asad, how are you doing today?

Chilling. Life is good. Tariffs are here. It is what it is.

Disaster. This is.

It's intense. I have lost so much money in the markets over the Last few weeks. I think even last time when we recorded, I'd lost like thousands of dollars for days in a row and I just keep losing money every single day as it is.

The person is just famously like, no, no, no, I can time the market perfectly. I don't.

I'm trying to stay in it. I'm like trying to hold the urge to time it because my older brother gives me lectures when I play this game and literally I think I'm going to start playing that game again.

I think it's generally bad, you know, be greedy when others are fearful. Now is the time to buy, not to sell.

Yeah, I bought you.

You don't seem too broken up. You're not upset about this?

Well, well, A.J. i meditate. I meditate.

I love it. Kyle, how are you doing our fellow Canadian? Are you as fired up as Asid about tariffs today?

I. I'm generally fired up by the state of our economy and political landscape. So we don't need to go there necessarily. This is a self own of self owns.

Isn't that great? We came out of the tech recession now like, well, let's cause a recession intentionally.

We missed that time. Let's.

I'm still very long America right now. We're moving to San Francisco later this year and like our political climate and economic climate in Canada has definitely had a lot to do with that. And so I'm bullish on the US at this moment. I think like for all.

Well, hopefully San Francisco isn't one of the cities that Canada is shutting off power to later this year. So I think we're, I think we're good. I read that today that Canada is going to stop sending power to some.

States is not going to do anything. We're going to sit here and we're going to take our medicine like the pipsqueak little brother we are. And you know that that's what we deserve. We've destroyed our economy and now we have no resilience against anything that the big mean orange man chooses to do. So it's our fault.

We have, we've got off to the right foot on this, this episode for sure. Asit, can you, can you help us? Can you help me a little?

Okay, so we have a bunch of things to talk about, but I think since AI is still the most important thing going on, let's start there. So there are a lot of places you can go and hear people talk about what's happening within AI from a technical perspective and what might happen within AI. I think where we shine Is what does it mean based on what we know and what we have? What does it mean in terms of the future of work, in terms how we are operationalizing this within our business? And I think there are two studies that are just super important that I want to speak about and get your opinions on. So last week we wrote about this in the Topline newsletter. There's a study that came out of OpenAI called the Swe Lancer benchmark. And basically what they did was they took all these AI models and they gave these AI models the same 1488 upward tasks, software engineering tasks that equate to $1 million in potential earnings. And they're like, let's see how these AIs do when left on their own. Against these tasks, the best performing AI was Claude 3.5, which solved only 33.7% of the tasks. Performance dropped dramatically on the more complex tasks where success rates fell to just 8 to 12 21%. Then there was this other study out of MIT a little while ago. And what this one looked at was how, what does the impact of AI, how dependent is it on the human in the loop and the caliber of that human. So they gave AI to materials researchers and what they found is the top researchers, it increased their productivity by a significant margin, doubled it. But for the bottom one third, it didn't do anything. And so I'm curious, you were starting to get a little bit of an understanding of how to leverage AI in our businesses, which seems the answer to that seems to be having real credible humans in the loop. And so, and then the question becomes, well, who are, what do those humans need to have to be credible humans in the loop? And so I think that's a good place to jump in. And Sam, since we haven't heard your beautiful voice in weeks, in weeks. And you've probably only been thinking about this because you've been nothing. You've just been free, sitting there sleeping. Tell us a little bit about this. What do you think?

I think, I don't know if Kyle said something. It might have been Kyle on LinkedIn. Kyle Norton, the person that's with us right now. But it might not have been. But meanwhile, we had this other guy come speak for the CEO Pavilion last week or two weeks ago. His name was Ian. I'm sorry, I don't remember his last name, but he's really smart guy. Here's what he was saying. He was saying that the worst use of AI is bigger, faster, better, and that the most productive people using AI thought of new workflows. And he showed this picture of the first car was just literally a horseless carriage. And the point is that there's a certain level of brute force where people saying I can do the same thing, but quicker. And that tends to be the low utility, low value contribution of AI. And the high value contribution are new workflows or really new ways of working that AI makes possible that were not possible before. And I can see that with myself and the word that. There's two words that came to mind. One of them is exploration and the second is creativity. And I think AI enables exploration in a way that no other tool has enabled before, meaning a way of wandering where you are asking questions, it's giving you information, it's synthesizing information that's leading to other questions and that opens up new opportunities both in terms of like how you think about your business and how you're doing your personal work. So all of that is to say, asad, that it's not super, super surprising to me that the studies found what they found. There's this idea, but Kyle's probably the biggest expert on this in terms of operationalizing it for go to market. So there's an idea. One point of view is, and Lemkin's written about this, that the purpose of any technology is to level up the middle tier. You're always going to have the bottom performers, they're not going to contribute very much. But if you can get 20 to 30% out of the middle, then that's really a meaningful improvement to your overall acceleration, your velocity, et cetera. I hope that that's true, but I tend to think that tools like this might even widen the inequality gap between the talented people and the less talented people. The last thing I'll say, which I think is quite interesting to me, we talked about this before when we were talking about the skills of an era and how they align with a certain kind of genetic or psychographic profile. And so, you know, deal making in the turn of the century, guys like Rockefell are guys like JP Morgan people, you know, the titans of industry, Vanderbilt, et cetera. And then we moved into a world where guys like Claude Shannon and you know, the people from Bell Labs, like where I don't know if they're not all autistic, but where people that think in a very structured linear way without necessarily a lot of empathy and a lot of relationship intelligence, where those people that, that personality type aligns so well with computer engineering and software development that the people that think like that, all of A sudden accelerated to sort of the top of the food chain. And I made the comment that, you know, in eras past many of these people might end up being like composers, but now they're software engineers. So I think what's my point, My point is we might be moving into a new phase shift of psychographic or personality type alignment, basically like personality market fit where creative types have a much broader canvas and a broader, you know, a broader, you know, zone of occupation. Like they have a larger canvas with which to work. And so I think there's people that are less structured in their thinking and more creative in their thinking. And you know, I think of myself as one of those people. So I'm hoping that the technology of the era is aligning to a different vector potentially and that the people that have a different, a slightly different set of skills might emerge as sort of like the preferred personality type of you know, the middle 21st century. Whereas from like 1950 to 2024 it was really highly structured, disciplined, logical thinkers that maybe didn't over index on, you know, empathy.

I really like, I like having your soulful philosophical point of views back on top line. Kyle, reactions to what Sam said as well as how you think, you know, you're in the thick of it as a go to market operator based on what's become real, what's become available as well as our understanding of AI. How is this informing how you are leveraging it today and how you're getting your team to leverage it correctly?

So fascinating point by Sam. I think that macro view is, is really compelling. Nobody knows. I think it's. But it's a really interesting, it's a really interesting hypothesis. I think the, one of the challenges with this conversation, especially online is it's so black and white and it's filled with so many false binaries and people are saying oh it's going to be better for the top decile or the middle quartile. And I think it's actually going to be beneficial everywhere throughout our stack. It's just in what way? And one of the ways that I think this comes to bear is so when you talk about the top quartile of like scientists getting like widening their gap, well that's largely from an individual application. These are creative, very thoughtful people that have understood how to apply AI for themselves versus in some of these more rote jobs like customer success where the benefit accrues differently. It's largely because the application of AI is done centrally, some, some governing body through rev ops or data and analytics. They're building and instrumenting tools. And so I think we can count on one massive effect across the economy from companies having a central application of AI and improving everything. And that probably accrues more to the bottom and middle performers. But I think in terms of our individual application of AI, that likely value accrues to the more inquisitive, innovative, like curious individuals. And so we're trying to do both at onr. And so we've obviously done a bunch centrally. You know, we're using momentum to automate a whole bunch of stuff in terms of CRM enrichment and information flowing from one place to another and triggers for audit and oversight. And then we've got a AI simulator through Avara which has had tremendous impact and like, but, but we're. These are all central. And then at the same time, I'm really trying to push people to learn these tools for themselves. And so like Andrej Karpathy did those two three hour videos that I'm like cramming down people's throat because they're the single best, especially the second video on, on how to use AI in, in your, in your day to day. Like, it's the single best. It's the single best place to go and just get like a crazy boost to like figuring all this stuff out. And so I'm encouraging people to do that exploration. Then I have Jordan Crawford coming in on Friday to like teach people how to do a bunch of stuff and we've given him a bunch of problems that we want to solve and he's actually going to write prompts with us and, and work our way through it. So I'm doing both. I'm going tops down through applying AI to a bunch of different places and then I'm trying to go bottoms up by inspiring everybody to like learn the tools on their own because it's been so transformational to my personal effectiveness. I spoke at the C100 event last week and we got off On a tangent.

100, by the way, what does that stand for?

It's like a group of Canadian founders who are trying and like tech leaders that are trying to like bring up.

The, trying to get successful and they do it in San Francisco instead of.

This was here. Yeah, this was here. But yeah, there, there's a lot of San Francisco stuff. And I got off on this tangent about how I'm using AI and somebody was like, what did you do before AI? And I was thoroughly stumped. I was like, I don't know. Like, honestly, I just was like way worse at my Job. Like I finally feel like after having kids I now I'm back to the full productivity that I had pre kids.

Because having kids, that's not a nice thing to say given my situation.

You got AI though.

You got AI now. Like I think that's a really interesting point that like you do lose a certain amount of productivity as a parent and does this give those people back that edge? Right. That's interesting.

There's a lot of value that accrues to the, to people with the expertise and the mental models and like the creativity and innovation. I think, like, yeah, especially if you're an early mover.

I think this, this idea of centralization versus what Sam was talking to and the individualistic creativity that it can impart on people, they. Do you feel like, do we feel like they're at odds with each other A little bit? Where you, I mean a company in an entity once if I'm in a CISO or I am chief legal counsel or I'm working in an organization, I like centralizing the thing and not having our data go everywhere is very top of mind. Now on a personal level I can learn AI to be much more productive. But I would guess, Kyle, when you say productivity, you're talking about work. And so you, you can allow your teams to go ahead and do that. But are we, are we holding back, are there companies that are holding back their teams by not giving them access to these tools, these opportunities to explore and are they trying to centralize them and enforce what is possible?

Yeah, if you're not encouraging, if you're not encouraging your teams to explore these tools on your own, you're definitely holding them back.

If you're a person who works at an organization that isn't allowing you for whatever security compliance, whatever regulation related reasons to have ChatGPT at work or whatever, those people still don't have an excuse to not be on top of it. Meaning that if you're going out to go find a job in this market and you can't speak about how you've leveraged it and how you understand it and how it's helping you and what's interesting about it, then you're going to struggle to find a great job. And the excuse of well we weren't allowed to is just not good enough. It's like, well, you have another 8, 10, 12 hours in a day and you go figure it out then. I do find that a lot of people use that as an excuse. Oh, our company didn't implement it. So don't you have Legs and a mind. And, like, why aren't you doing something about it?

Kyle, what's an AI tip that you have right now? Because every week this changes that you've learned and you're like, oh, this is awesome. I hope no one else discovers it yet, but you're going to tell all of us right now what you're doing.

I didn't talk about meta prompting last time I was on, did I?

No, you didn't. I don't know what that is.

Write a prompt that does this.

Yeah, having AI write your prompts for you.

Got it.

So this is straight from Jordan Crawford. And I do it. Basically any prompt I intend on doing multiple times using multiple times. I'll now have AI write the prompt for me. I use 01 Pro for it because it does such a better job. And I'll use Super Whisper. Super Whisper. You can just like, it's a dictation app with AI, so I'll just like, yammer away into it and be like, oh, I want to do this, but do this. And like, I need you to emulate some of these, like, best people in the industry. Here are some names, but research other names. And I can just sort of go stream of consciousness and tell the AI what I want the prompt to be. And then the AI will usually ask me some clarification questions. O1 Pro is good at that. And then it will give me the prompt back. And then normally I take that prompt, try it in a new window, look at the output, and then depending on what the output's like, I go back to the metaprompt thread and I'll be like, okay, the output. Like, I was building this for writing. I'm like, the output was too. I was trying to have it be able to write LinkedIn content. I have a workflow to write newsletter content and that has a certain style. And it emulates my style because I fed it a bunch of my writing and told it to give me a synthesis of my writing style and my tone of voice. And it's like, creepy accurate. It's sort of cool. But then I went back, I'm like, hey, the output's way too cringy. Like, it sounds like just like a bunch of LinkedIn spam to, like, make it more authoritative. I want a strong hook, but make it more authoritative and less like clickbaity and annoying. And then it rewrites the prompt. And then I go back and I try that again. And that process, you can build, like, way, way, way more useful things because you don't have to. Some of these prompts are thousands of words. In the end. That's probably the biggest breakthrough I've had in the last like couple.

That was the. I took a class September of 23. It was a year and a half ago. And that was the one main takeaway was prompt writing. And hundreds and hundreds of words are the best prompts. Being as specific as you possibly can was the main thing.

Nobody's got time. You don't have time to write a multiple hundred word prompt.

This is where like voice also can become quite useful because if you're using voice mode, you can kind of meander your way through it and you tell it. You're not giving me responses right now. You're just getting context and information. Then you tell it to package that into a prompt. Then you can give the prompt to another one and say, how would you make this prompt better? Analyze it for its deficiencies. The same. If this is what I'm trying to get out of it, you can do.

That in the same thread.

And you just. Yeah, you can do that on the same thread.

Reflection. It's just reflection. Like, review your output and tell me how you would make it better. You review the suggestions and you're like, oh, implement number one and number three, but not number two and four and it'll revise it. That works better because everything is in that same context window. Every single back and forth stays in the context window as you ask new questions.

Styles. Based on your usage of AI as an operator at Owner, can you quantify its impact to date in any way? Like, does it make your team 5% faster than if this team existed in a previous. Is there quantification? Or are we at a point where we can feel that there's something different? We just don't know how to quantify what to look at as the quantification of it and how to. Actually, we're not there yet.

We're changing so many things at any given time that it's really tough to know what change is driving the impact. There's signs. So, you know, we promoted three people. We promoted and hired people into three different segments like two months ago. And the three people who had the best results out of the gate were the three people that, in their individual segments, compared to the other folks, did the most time in the sims. This is that Avara sim. So there's some selection bias because did they spend the most time in the sim because they're the most eager to learn, which means they probably would have been the best rep out of that on their own. But they got hours and hours of practice that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten because their manager is the bottleneck. Like it's really tough as a manager when you got seven or eight reps to do four hours of practice in a week with one rep. Yeah, you just get exhausted. So you know, you could clearly see that. Like even just the quality of demo. I like listen to some clips of these demos. I'm like, holy crap. This is like a, this is his second week doing the job and the demo sounded awesome because you had just gotten the reps with the sim. So it's impossible to tell, you know what's the sim, what's like our coaching and training. Like we had. This was the first time we had taken everybody through this AAE finishing school. So there's a bunch of things that are different but I like interesting. I bet we're 50% better because of all this AI.

Okay, that's 50% is a lot.

50%. No way.

You're kind of like.

I have no idea. But it's 50%.

Just think. But like even just, even just the mobile phone enrichment that is all AI powered on the BDR side led the call to decision maker connect rate. When we did this back in late 2022, the call to DM Connect rate was 3%. And then we implemented this enrichment scraping this whole AI flow was like 13%. So the output on a per BDR basis was basically 4x better because you're just talking four times.

That's a four. That's wild.

Asa to the point of you know what we're talking about though, like one part of. I almost think this question itself is like, is like level one question which is like how much time did you save? What did you do faster than what you used to do? And then there's like a level two question which is like what are the things that you just couldn't do before that now you're doing? And maybe it's the mobile phone enrichment. Maybe it's like data enrichment plus signal based selling at scale. Maybe that's something.

But this is why I think having operators who have an AI sensibility is going to make and break organizations. Because this is where the people at the top have to believe it before you know how to quantify it, before you know what to look at to like there is a, there's an aspect to this that if we're searching for early competitive advantages, then we're going to be part of the crew that figures out how to quantify its benefits and what the use cases are. So we are part of that group. Right. And you can't do that as an organization if your CEO doesn't have that sensibility. If your CRO CMOs don't have that sensibility, you are done. Like there's no chance. And I still get shocked and surprised when you meet people that actually up till date have had great careers. But their understanding of it, their use of it is just very, very basic. Asia, you sit on the opposite side of that where you've done some fancy experiments and did something truly interesting with Deep Research, which I think is till date the best AI product that's out there. Tell us a little bit about how you used Deep Research.

One of the, and I think we've talked about this on the show, but one of our employees who led Rev Ops, when he came back from parental leave, we moved him to AIOps. And I have, we have a lot of really, really interesting rich data in our transcripts. I mean I'm sure Kyle has hundreds of thousands of calls that are recorded somewhere. And for, for QuotaPath we have about 16,000 calls in the last 24 months. So we took, we took all, we basically pulled from Gong's API all that data we downloaded I don't know, 16 million gigabytes of data. It's an insane amount of data.

Yeah, it was million gigabytes.

No.

Yeah, that's a lot of data.

That's a couple terabytes in there. Yes, it was a lot of data and we had to parse through it and break it up. So basically we created a we prompt, engineered how Kyle described prompt and pulled just the transcripts that had to do with a specific subject item. So for example, it might be with an integration with rippling. So we just launched our rippling integration two weeks ago. We pulled all of the transcripts that have anything to do with payroll and payroll providing. So as we were looking at the launch, we were thinking about the different, different avenues and different ways that we could go co sell co service with them. And we used Deep Research and prompt engineered off of those 16 of the 16,000 calls. I think there were like 5,000 that had to deal with payroll specifically and then pulled and did the ultimately Deep Research, ended up writing an 11 page memo on our go to market and how we should go to market. And then we took that and we also used the web function of ChatGPT because I think a lot of it, I tend to when I use it and maybe I'd be curious how you all use it. I tend to like turn that off. I have it as default for my Chrome but I don't use the Web Research by default. But actually there's a lot of really interesting data because it's just so. I mean it's just up to date and there's so much more fidelity around the content that you're pulling in.

But we pulled this in Deep Research and it goes does its thing. It's searching the Internet.

Yeah, I think that I tend to agree with you AJ When I click the problem I've had, I just had this today which was if you leave Search Web clicked it almost doesn't have the context of the previous conversation. So I have like this long Deep Research project about one of the things we're going to talk about later and then I wanted some additional information so I clicked Search Web, not Deep Research and it just completely ignored like the entire corpus of data that I had previously. I don't know if that's specific to me, but that was annoying.

That was the same. I was going to say the same thing. It's just, it's really strange. So I don't. I think when OpenAI releases things they just throw it out there and there's no like it's a very product led growth. They don't have any like instructions with it. So long story short, we have really high quality data around pricing and packaging around our rippling launch that we've used Deep Research to help inform and help like make decisions and it's awesome.

As an operator, two questions, quick fire questions. How do you trust it? Because it hallucinates and makes up wonky stuff. So how do you.

We forced it.

So this is.

Well let me answer that question really quickly. We forced it in all of its feedback to give the actual call IDs so when it actually it will have like call ID and then put it there and then we went back and just like cherry picked a few to listen to double check that that that was accurate.

So Asia, fancy AI guy right now. This is very cool. I'm very impressed. And then what did it give you would give us an example of one thing where you're like we've done something with this. Like in an 11 page memo this.

Was the alpha I was able to take. So we did this with HubSpot and product line items within HubSpot CRM which has just been a very challenging issue over the years because it's just evolved as the product and the API has evolved and we were able to give one specific piece of feedback on how the API operates when it comes to split deals that was causing friction in 90% of HubSpot customers. So it was a very, very specific piece of feedback. But it was something that I don't think HubSpot knows because it's a newer API, their split deal API, and it's something that they probably have just had operating and it doesn't really bother their customers as much as it bothers our customers. And I was able to give it back to their product team.

That's beautiful. This feels like kind of what Sam was talking about where maybe people will talk about this in the terms of it made us being able to do this a lot faster. But the reality is that it was such a big lift back in the day that no one would have.

It's finding a needle in the haystack.

No one would have done it. It didn't make it as faster from what was possible before. Like it just wasn't a thing people would have tried to do like analyzing 16,000, something like, you know, it wouldn't have happened. And so this is a net new thing that it enables you to do. Which I think is a really good point to put a pause in our AI discussion and move on to other.

Well, before we do, I probably made up that 16 million gigabytes, by the way. That sounds. So all of you out there about to write me an angry LinkedIn message.

Triple, triple, double, double, triple.

Yeah, that's right. Triple, triple, double, double, double. Thank you, Sam. Sam called me out on it.

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Well, you called yourself on it later in the show. I have a lot of. I have a lot of thoughts about the past couple of episodes.

That's not on the docket, Sam. I don't think that's there.

Sam's list of grievances.

Exactly.

So I want to talk. Sam, you Shared this, which I think is really interesting about the idea of ARR and where it sits in our ecosystem and its importance today. So when we shifted from perpetual licenses to the cloud, it enabled subscriptions, which essentially was recurring revenue. And it fundamentally changed the technology ecosystem because now these tech companies were able to give three things to investors, which is predictable revenue, high margins, and if they were growing quickly, then that's a great thing to invest into because you can get great multiples out of that business, you can sell those things onwards. It performs well in the public market. So it was very important to have recurring revenue. And the main form of recurring revenue was ARR, annual recurring revenue through seed based subscriptions. And then we had a cohort of companies that had usage based pricing before as well. But I think Snowflake is a good example of we still didn't really understand how to look at those companies. Right. Because people used to look at snowflakes NRR and be like, this is magic, they're selling magic. But in a usage based model of the source they had, you kind of had to have that type of nrr. Right. And so now there's a conversation happening around are we going to have the same type of recurring revenue anymore? What is the predictability of this revenue going to go down as we go towards usage, as we go towards outcome based pricing, etc. So your thoughts on the state of ARR and its implications? Maybe.

Well, we've talked about this a lot, so I don't, I don't know that it's so ground shaking or earth shattering, but to your point, asad, I guess the thing. Where did I read this? I read this on the cfo. What cfo? Yeah, exactly. I like that guy and I like what he writes and it's just a comment that I've had for a while now, which is exactly to your point, asad. ARR, There's a bunch of assumptions that are implicit in ARR and the, the context of the reason. And I just, I think some people don't, they don't connect this to the markets in the right way. There's a reason, the only reason, the only reason literally that you get a multiple on revenue, like that's not really a thing. The only reason you would ever get a multiple on revenue is because the revenue base expands predictably. That is why. So if you can grow quickly and you can show that every dollar I get today becomes $1.20, $1.30 tomorrow in a systematic probabil, that's why companies are multiplied, are valued on a multiple of revenue. But that's not historically a thing. And so I guess my point is what you see like with any metric or any KPI that people are working backwards from is they start to call, everything becomes ARR. And we've talked about this a lot asad how services firms, you know, there's all these revops consulting firms, they're like we're at 10 million ARR. No you're not. If you're doing three month engagements, I appreciate that you might be doing like monthly revrec on a three month contract.

Contract or have an auto renew, but that doesn't count.

It doesn't make it ARR. So I mean it's not the end of the world. I just think it's a fundamental miseducation about why were companies valued on revenue. They were valued on revenue because we could predictably ascertain their growth trajectory over the next couple of years. When you can't do that, that doesn't mean.

And they will. High gross margin. That was also very important.

That's a great point. That is a great point. So all I, you know, we're now in usage and it was this argument that we had with David Spitz where my quibble with talking about Snowflake or Databricks or any of these companies is in a usage based pricing. That's not, I appreciate the algebraic definition of NRR is, you know, how much money did you make off the base relative to what they paid you a year ago or whatever the prior period was? That's fine. And that's true, that that's the literal definition. But saying Snowflake has 183% NRR is not, is not what we used to mean, you know, because what we used to mean is like every dollar that you put into Snowflake becomes $1.83. And that's not what it means. It means that sometimes when the CIO money and giving budget to everybody in the organization, then it becomes $1.83. But then the very next period it might become 1:25. Well again that doesn't mean the businesses aren't worthwhile. Fundamentally if they can generate cash, then they're going to be worth something. It just means that the understanding of what ARR is I think has become mixed. And I think there's people that, I think we're in a valuation reset period where a lot of people are getting frustrated that their business is my business. You know, my business until I can grow it, you know, if I can grow at 60 or 70% top line which would show that we have positive NRR even with high churn because we're a B2C business. Okay, then you can give me a multiple on revenue. Until then I'm not getting a multiple on revenue. That just is what it is, you know, so that's, that's probably like one.

Of the big I think things that the market has to stomach which is when do you get a multiple to revenue and when do you not? And there's a lot to it. Right. There's also a certain TAM that has to be associated with it because if you're a very small tam, you're not going to get a multiple to revenue because the growth won't maintain after a certain point because you're going to cap out. So there's like these two or three things that I think people don't look at and then it really just hurts a lot of feelings because when it comes time to have the outcome, have the exit, they go and ask for valuation and it's like oh, six times EBITDA and they really have very minimally. But at that point, Kyle, you were part of a company that was one of the early companies doing usage, right? Shopify.

Yeah.

How was it being in seat that. Because at that time you guys were part of that trend setting cohort of, you know, leading a tech, a leading tech company with usage based pricing.

Yeah. 70% of Shopify's revenue was non subscription. It was payments take rate, it was the variable on total GMV for the plus product. But there's a pretty long history of companies that are not subscription based. All the cloud providers, Amazon, gcc. Yeah, like I feel like this is, you know, Twilio Datadog. Like there's tons and tons of companies out there that have, you know, really long used some portion of usage based pricing in their model. So I feel like the market is past it. I think the conversation is really about what are you going to get valued on. It's the last thing that you said on EBITDA versus revenue. Is the market rewarding growth or is it rewarding profitability? And that math, it gets real slippery for people because if you're chasing the, the growth, if you're chasing the growth path and it slips, then all of a sudden when it comes time to get valued, you've not been optimizing for the right thing for some period of time and there's not really a trial that this.

Because the public markets have understood consumption based pricing. You're right.

Ever since then, you mean the private markets. VCs have backed fintech.

VCs have understood it as well. Do you think that the misunderstanding sits with very early stage operators and founders like that or that's where there's still some confusion or do you think across the market people have figured this out?

I feel like it's well understood when I engage with early stage companies, folks seem to have a pretty clear understanding because the whole.

I find that even right now companies that I'm working with that have raised from tier one investors that are like series A, series B companies, there's still a lot of figuring out when it comes to elements of. So it's so the valuing of the organization. I think people have actually figured it out. I think there's some people that are generally on the services side that try to make it feel like they have a tech company, but they don't. But I think tech founders, tech operators, tech investors understand what usage is and how to value it. I do think when it comes to operating the business with usage in mind, there's still stuff being figured out. You know, one is how to pay commissions on it. That is still a pretty big question mark we find across the market. And I used to think maybe it's a tier B type of company that has that challenge. If you raise from a tier one investor it won't be the case. But in recently working with a few of those, there's still a lot that people are figuring out to the point that when Matt Braley wrote that article about how to think about paying commissions on a usage based model, it really took off within the usage based community. I've spoken to multiple founders who were like, man, I was searching for something. Everything was about SaaS, everything was about SaaS. And then I saw and answer a major question that I had. So I think that over there on how to operate these companies, there's still a little bit of stuff.

I mean there's a company called Meter that actually is all around usage. Yeah. Usage based pricing and usage based commissions as well.

They, that's their time.

Yeah. That's their tam. That's what they do.

One thing I want to say about this, you know, because I can imagine if you're out there listening, maybe you're like, so what? Why is this important? And I had a really interesting conversation with an advisor today who was talking, we were talking about, you know, my business but so I've had a couple conversations over the last couple of weeks with lots of different people as I do. One of the people was saying hey, you're not going to get a multiple on your education revenue when the time comes to bring the company to market, meaning Pavilion. So you should really just not even worry about that and you should pursue whatever the high multiple revenue is. And I shared that perspective with an advisor who is a much smarter advisor than this other person. And this other person is smart. I'm just saying the advisor I'm talking about is like, he's one of those business minds where you get on a phone call with him, you learn something, you learn two or three things just from the simplicity with which he distills complex points. And he's like, every time I've seen an entrepreneur work backwards from which revenue stream will get the highest multiple, they end up failing. He's like, what you really need to understand is what is your business? You can't saying that you shouldn't pursue this revenue stream because it's low multiple. And you should pursue this revenue stream which is high multiple is in a way saying you shouldn't be five, nine and a half and Jewish, born in Lansing, Michigan. You should be, you know, six, five, blonde and born in, you know, born in San Francisco. You're like, well, that would be easy to do if I could do it, but that's not who I am. And a lot of times what you. The reason that this conversation is important is because entrepreneurs, you know, Asad, you were saying, like, do people, like, do people understand this? And I think they don't. And I think what they don't understand is the real, what you really need to understand is your business. Not necessarily like what an investor will tell you about your business or what you think. I don't.

Communicate that effectively. Like there's, that's the second on like what it is and how it works. And that's the. If these two things are massive, miss in the market, for sure.

I couldn't agree with you more what you just said because that the job of the CEO is to explain why the way you've constructed the business is valuable. It is not to sit there and be told by other people your business isn't valuable. And this is how you need to think about it. Because they're saying that because you don't have the confidence to articulate what the value proposition is or what the strategy is, what the path is. I think that's a really important point, what you just said, Asad, because you have to. And I'll give you a specific example from Pavilion and then we can move on, of course. But we've Got, you know, people cancel all the time. Of course they do, because it's a B2C basically business. But there was a couple days recently where four people in a row, five people in a row are reactivating their canceled memberships. Right. So if you just look at cohort based retention on a year one basis, it's not going to look that great. Right, but that's not. And if, if I don't explain to investors or to stakeholders how to think about the business, then that is what they will do. They'll say it's a high churn business. You're never going to be able to refill the bucket every year. You're going to hit a stall Point at 15, 20, 25 million, whatever. But if I explain. No, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. We're with people over 5 to 10 years, there are periods of high engagement and low engagement. When they're at high engagement and we've, you know, yes, this is the old pricing and packaging but the real way to think about the customer lifetime value is how many times they come in and out and collectively over 10 years they resubscribe three times and they buy all this stuff. So actually the true LTV the customer is 7,000 bucks or 10,000 bucks, not 2,500 bucks. But my point is if I don't understand that about my own business, then I could that to an outsider. And that is the job of the founder CEO, that's the job of the executive team is to understand how, what is specific about your business, how does it generate value? Not necessarily to say, well that revenue isn't valuable. So I guess I should stop doing it.

I'll also just add to that once you find that thing, do not let it go. If you have to re explain it a hundred times to the same people and you feel like you're slamming your head in the desk, that's okay. You have to do it it, you have to do it.

You have to be willing to change that story too. Like this is the other.

You have to be open to being flexible and pivoting off of it. If something, if there's new data, change your mind.

They say this to me that like two years ago you were saying this thing, it's like, yeah, do you want me stuck in a point of view or do you want me to twist and turn based on the game that's on the field? Sam, you shared this data with us that came out of the corporate economic board that showed that 85 executive board.

Corporate executive board Bought by Gartner.

This was a paper dyslexia I wrote Corporate Economic Board. 85% of companies hit a revenue stall point at some point in their growth and 87% of the time it's a fault of the management team versus the economy. Only 1/4 of these companies ever recover. And I think this connects these two things actually connect because A, you have to understand your business as a unique organism and then you have to have the conviction in the moment with the dexterity to change your mind as the market evolves and the game evolves and then communicate that, as Aja said a million times over internally, because people want the one time. You know, we sometimes think you give that one speech and everyone's got it. Like one person, two people got it and then you have to do it again and again and again and talk to them one on one and send an email and do this, then it works. Kyle, in your experience, have you found that people are good at that, at being able to communicate this thing of what are we doing? How do we think about what we are doing? Where is this going? Does that feel like it's a strength? Thoughts on your experience on the receiving end of that?

I think it's a learnable skill. I don't think people are naturally good at it. Even confident, outgoing, extroverted people who may sort of on paper be assumed to be good at it. I actually think they are because those same people tend not to maybe write as much and not be as thoughtful about, you know, what we call three points of contact. You communicate this thing three different times through three different channels. And so I don't think it's very natural to like do well because it's pretty hard, you know, it's pretty hard to, to get good at communicating at scale because we have this bias where we're just experiencing our own world. You know, this seems clear to us. We remember this thing. So like I just have to mention it to my team and like they'll internalize it.

But I think about the, the division of responsibility when it comes to this. Let's say narrative formulation and deployment in an organization, let's just say within an organization for now. Now you've got the CEO that sits on top of this. But tell us your view of what roles the rest of that exec team plays and their second and third line management play in getting this to become a backbone of the organization.

And you're just talking about communicating change or philosophy, point of view.

Yeah, like what are we doing? What is the mission? Why Is this the mission? How do we think about this market and what we're trying to do? Like just that general communication around the what and the what, why and the how.

So there's a lot in this question. I think some of the principles is repetition, like has to be there and points of contact is really important. So if it's mission related, you have to come back to your mission. Basically every single, all hands, every single big team meeting, you have to weave it into your value pillars. How you assign awards, how you at the end of a month recognize and reward people. Like your, your values and mission basically need to be weaved through everything. When, when values are weak, it's when it's like a plaque on the wall and it's just like something that we look at. When values are really transparency. Yeah, yeah. When values are strong, is it, is is those values just show up everywhere. They show up in decision making making. Shopify did an incredible job at this, probably the best of any company I've seen because people brought those values into fairly high stakes decision making environments. Like we would talk a lot about building a hundred year company and people would, in a meeting where you're trying to make decisions, come back to like, well you know, like the, the better long term decision here. Even though it's like it's not good for this quarter. You know the 100 year decision is actually X and Y. Chris, do you.

Think that's because that value has just. It's so rare to hear like I've never heard another company say that, but I know Shopify has this like as part of value formulation. Is it that it has to be just super, super unique, but I don't think so. To me values sound tacky. Like I'm that guy that's like, oh this is tacky shit. Like somebody brought up a value mid conversation. We're like what is this? Like what are we talking about?

Assad loves running an enps on his team. He's so about, he's so about asking how they do that where he's like.

I don't care about values or employees. And then he's like, but I do get one out of 10 from everybody that rates me.

I, I think values, if done well, can be a really positive driver for a company. And I can give some examples of how we weave our values into things here. You know, at the end of every month we do a monthly report card for the reps, for the managers as a way to give people feedback and talk about, you know, how you did and what you want to do different going into next month. And in that mrc, the company values are part of that evaluation system. When we promote people, a part of the promotion scorecard is the values and you're rating people one to five on the values. And so if you're weaving these things in consistently hiring. It's part of my hiring scorecard one my interview. The very last stage in an IC getting hired is a meeting with me and part of my executive scorecard. The executive stage scorecard is the values. And so if they are everywhere in the organization, they are powerful. If they are just like something that you brainstormed and it's in a notion page that people read on day one and you have to go back to and quiz them on because nobody actually remembers, then it's one wrong. At the, at the start of every all hands, we spotlight one value and people have like a 10 minute window to be like who we're today.

Value at owner. Build like an owner buy one, which I actually like.

My favorites. Listen closely. Act quickly.

Oh, I remember back in the day in 2021, first CEO summit, I was saying, values are crazy. Values are silly. And Sam took me to the side. He's like, let me tell you why you're wrong. It was the first like brotherly advice I got from Sam. And then he told me about the X Y1 and how he uses it in the org. And it was the first time I was like, okay, like maybe I'm too dogmatic about this.

I'll say this Asad though, you know, we had Ana to. Is it Talarico Talerico? Ana T. Ana T. CEO of Corporate Finance Institute. I'm sorry, Anna. I think it's Talarico.

You're Italian. How do you say that word?

My point is this. She has this. I think a lot of this isn't even just about values. It's about the rigor with which you have a management operating system that you're running the business with. And Kyle clearly has that at owner. And when I get frustrated at what, my biggest frustration sometimes is that there's a drift in terms of our rigor and our discipline around how we run the company and that we say we do things that we don't end up doing. And that, that, that is what snaps all of this into place for me. Like we always have this. All hands. This is how we say it. These are the award we do, an mrc, a monthly report card, all that stuff of like keeping track of it and making sure that you're doing it. That for me, is what makes all of this come to life. And when I've struggled even recently for my team or with my team, I feel like some of the things that we used to do really well two years ago, we don't even do anymore. So you're asking me about values? We don't really talk about them enough at Pavilion anymore. We used to start every meeting with them and every board meeting with them, and now they haven't really come up. And I feel like this drift. I bet AJ's good at it too. What do you think, AJ?

I'm on owner's career website and I like this website because under the leadership team, the first leader is Kyle, which I really like. And then here's a value I really like. Bring good energy. This is such an underappreciated aspect of company building. Like, are these people going to energize you? And for people around you to energize you, people have to understand that they can either to give you energy or take away your energy. And I haven't heard anyone talk about it like that. That's actually really, really cool.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the operating. The operating methodology is so important. Like I gave my saster talk was on my revenue operating system. I obsessively talk about these things. I'm like redocumenting and building a bunch of this for us now because it is the key thing. Like in my podcast with Stevie Case from the CRO of Vanta, one of the things we talked. Execution is the only moat. All of this stuff is ephemeral, fleeting. And any technology advantage, any brand advantage, like all of these things degrade over time unless you are executing. And you know, one of the things that I'm trying to find a vendor for is somebody to give me like AI, an AI Ironman suit for ensuring that my operating system is being run. I have. Because I have this seven pillar sales management framework or revenue management framework. And each of those. It doesn't yet. It's one of my few. Yeah, well, I have my. The engage. The Engage pillar of that. Of that framework. The acronym is cramps. So to engage your team, you have to give them cramps. Community recognition, autonomy, mastery, purpose, step, career.

Let's go.

So. So what I'm trying to do is find. Because, you know, you've got AI tools. Like we use momentum to understand what's happening across all these calls. And if people say the right thing or the wrong thing, I can aggregate all that data. But I want to know what the Managers are doing so for my coaching pillar, I want coaching to be questions based. I want it to be focused on just one thing at a time. I want it to. So I want to, to look at their talk, listen ratio, the number of questions they asked. I want to know if they assigned follow up work. You know, great coaching has to have reinforcement. And I know that an LLM could do this because I've taken coaching calls and put it into like a chat with like a prompt I built to like see if it's workable. It is. And so this is the system that I think when we talk about the, the opportunities that have never been able to exist before with AI. Like this is one that I'm. I don't know if there's a vendor out there for it. And if you are listening to this and you want to do it, I'll incubate it with you. I'll be your first customer. Me and Kevin Dorsey are like talking about this all the time. But like, like tell me if my reps are managing this system. Tell me if these like 45 things are done well or not well across my frontline leaders.

That's like, I think very interesting.

That's the rigorous.

How do you think about a. Just this whole values conversation that we've had and reinforcing it. We always say classically you're the best CEO out of the three of us, so you probably have a way of doing this that feels natural to you and works well. But generally also your thoughts on these stall points. Right. You've been part of multiple organizations and probably experienced some of these stall points and would love to get your thoughts on. Have you seen it and what did it happen somewhere where you were, where you were able to overcome that stall point and what happened there?

Contrary to popular belief, I was not that amazing advisor for Sam that he talks to every week that gives him great advice. So I'm like, that wasn't me. I think the drip. Look, if I'm out here, if I'm listening to this episode, I'm like, man, I'm hearing really cadence strategy. Kyle's throwing down a lot on operating system. And I, I sit there and I'm in awe of that because I'm humbled that that is, that feels like peak performance to me. He's talked about it in AI. He's talked about what he's doing. And this drift that Sam is talking about is really real for us as founders and CEOs year to year. I was thinking about something that we used to do called it was called Q Path. So for quotapath so we used to have every year where we'd have the quest plays, avoid threats and who we're helping and that used to be like our operating system quest.

That's great.

Yes. Quest, what's our mission Quest, what are we out adventuring to? Pillaging villages and forests, looking in dungeons and caves.

I don't know where this is going but I like.

But honestly as you as the business matures and you grow up a little bit, you have to take that fun cultural that you've cultivated and you have to grow up. We've had a brand refresh during that time. We changed from this quest, this Q path to what's our company based outcomes roadmap. And so it becomes more of this OKR type framework that you have have. And so the challenge that I think we have and I would say a lot of founders have with their companies that are six years old is you have a lot of institutional knowledge sometimes baggage with you and you have a lot of people that have grown up in that system and been a part of it. Our Average tenure at QuotaPath is three and a half years. People have seen a lot of different things at quotapath and gone through the ups and downs and ups and downs. So I actually when I think of operating system I think of predictability and what is the cadence that I can bring to the team on a weekly basis so I can communicate like here's it's exactly what Kyle said of just like you have to consistently tell them what we're doing and why we're doing it. And I'll tell you guys the challenge.

Though AJ with all of this becomes the bureaucracy that gets established because of all of this inspection, discipline, et cetera. And so aside balancing that how do you think about balancing?

Well so I will also say that you balance that with not having a chain of command that if you need something, say something. This idea of coming come with me with solutions with problems is something that I persist throughout the organization. But here's what I'll say where I am actually challenged today. I'll just be open about this. I'm spending all this time in the customer org and customers are going through some challenging times that I'm noticing right now. It's a turbulent quarter in terms of of the thrash of how people are feeling. Whether that's macro induced or just feeling in general. I am feeling. I was just talking to a board member right before this call of just like man, every day I feel like I'm getting like punched in the face because someone is showing up, a customer showing up and just throwing up on top of me. And the reason I bring this up is because if you're out there and you're like feeling a little challenged and feeling a little frustrated, it's okay to do that. But what you have to do, and you absolutely have to do this, and I tell myself this all the time. I'm the CEO of the company. I have to bring the best version of myself. I have to inspire my team. I have to get them focused on the right things. That focus is so critically important. And those are the areas where if I'm having a bad day, don't really have bad weeks, but if I'm having a bad day, the thing that I always tell myself is what, what meeting am I looking forward to tomorrow? That I can bring the best version of myself and have some level of positive, positive experience in that, that meeting. And that's where like, my own emotional tie to the like, execution that Kyle's talking about is where I kind of blend those two things together. And that's what I think makes founders and entrepreneurs really special in their ability to do it. Because like, I've heard, heard Shopify's founder talk and he talks. Actually he's talked about this in terms of like having coins that he can cash in as a founder, that he's, you know, has this ability to be able to do that. And I think that that's the thing that we, we need to really focus in on is just this idea that you have structure in your day to day, but that you're also bringing the best version of yourself.

It's a tough one because I find some of that structure nauseating. And so it's like, how do you find you don't have.

I mean, none of our organizations have bureaucracy. Right.

They can very easily develop it. I had to kill so much of it. That's what I liked about Shopify. Every December, they just destroy everyone's calendar. And it's like if you. Chris, what, what do we mean by bureaucracy? It's paperwork and then a bunch of meetings. Right, Meetings.

And so I'm about to nuke all of our meetings.

Yeah. Kill me.

Every recurring meeting is going to get. Yeah. Because I'm reteaching everybody in March how to run good team meetings and good one on ones. I'm. I'm redeploying new templates of how to run meetings.

And we're going to the revenue. Is that the entire organization though, Kyle? Is that from the top down. Like your CEOs doing that for every single department too. I'll.

I'm going to propose it.

Shopify does it for the whole company in December. All meetings gone.

I think almost any steam size can have bureaucracy because partially is a function of like ambiguous decision making, clarity, like who gets to make the decision, what are the inputs that, that they need to make the decision, when can there be flexibility. And then you have, rightfully or wrongfully, you have people that are very protective of certain areas of decision making. No, I can't give you another license for that software platform. I'm the only one that gets these. Anyway, I think bureaucracy, edge cases, right?

An edge case comes on and to nullify the edge case ever happening ever again, they're like, we should do this meeting or we should have this field or we should have this process. And the edge cases are what actually kill the business because it's an edge case. It happens once in a blue moon. But now everybody has to do certain things because of this edge case. And that's where it becomes really difficult. And there's no perfect answer to this. I think what happens is your business evolves and at some point you have to have a process of sitting down, looking at all of it and just slashing, slashing, slashing, slashing, and trying to, while you're doing that, analyzing who's the root cause of most of this nonsense, and sit down with that person, be like, never again, never again. Or get rid of that person, something of that sort. Okay, we're coming up to time, so we're going to do a question that I don't think you guys know that I'm going to ask you this question which makes my life a lot of fun every week.

I want you to sort of pontificate, like I want you to ruminate online, like where the question came from. I don't know if you guys know about, because we never do.

But see in life, everybody in podcasts, and when you're hanging out with them, they ask you about a moment that of kindness somebody did for you that was very informative to your life or a big lesson that you learned. But all.

Is that your question? Is that it?

No, not at all. My question is way more interesting. All of us have a chip on our shoulder as well. For some reason or the other. Somebody said something, somebody annoyed us, somebody did something, because of which we have a point to prove to the world, and I want to know about where that comes from. And AJ, I know you have one.

That well I think Kyle's got a drop. So why don't we ask Kyle first, if that's okay.

Oh, yeah.

It's funny because when I saw the Michael Jordan documentary and I saw him just like, inventing random stuff to be mad about, I was like, oh, that's me. I just, like, invent things to be. To be grumpy about, you know? Like, I. My first startup, I didn't feel like people listened to my insight enough and we didn't get to where we wanted. And I was like, man, I'm gonna prove that, like, for no reason. I'm gonna, like, prove everybody wrong. It's like, not. That's not really the scenario, but I just invented this thing in my head. I just invented a thing at Shopify that I should be, like, in a more senior role than I was. And like, this person, I. I could be doing it better than that person. I could just, you know, invent these narratives.

At what point did you realize your brain works like that where it invents these things? When did that self awareness come?

Honestly, watching that Michael Jordan documentary and seeing the meme, I was like, oh, it just like clicked in such a. In such a material way. Yeah, I don't know. I just like, I keep inventing these things in my head. I'm like, man, like, why am I not the CRO of 100 million million ARR company yet?

Because you're a loser. That's why I.

What the hell, Kyle?

You and your stupid framework. Get out of here.

That's interesting. Do you catch yourself? Like, is there now that you're aware of it, is it easy when it comes up for you to catch it and not let it be disruptive? Like, are you now at that point in the evolution of all of this?

I just embrace it. It's like a good motivator because we.

All need some juice once in a while, right? We all need some fuel, which is the point of the question.

Kyle, since you're talking, I gotta go. Thank you guys. Appreciate the convo, as always.

Yeah, great having you. Aj, where does your chip on the shoulder come from?

Matt Alvares. Yes, I said a name and Matt's hopefully out there. This is 15 years ago, right before I started my first company. I was told directly from Matt Alvarez that if I started a company, it would be a loser company and would fail.

Well, then.

That has driven me 15 years later, even after the fact I. I've like, always operated on. He's a director at. He's like a VP at Salesforce. So he's doing fine. But I've always operated with a chip on my shoulder in a similar way and not manufactured because I think when we hear something, it's the story we continue to tell ourselves. And so that story of limiting belief, of that I'm not good enough to to build a successful business is what fuels and drives me. And still to this day, it doesn't matter if it's coming from Matt Albers or if it's coming from a board member.

That one was a big one for you. Like, you held on to that one.

Well, I started a company that was competing directly against his company for that very reason. That's how big of a chip on a shorter See like the. See it.

Meltwater.

Yeah, he was at Meltwater. He was my boss.

Sam Lesson has written this. He does these Twitter screenshot essays and he has one on the revenge startup being probably the most investable, early stage type of business that you should look for as an investor. And this is a little bit of that.

Yeah. Well. And Brett Hurt, who's this was the CEO of Bazaar Voice at the time, didn't invest in Trend Kite and says that that was his biggest miss in all of auto.