a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: When Organic Growth Goes Enterprise

Episode Date: August 25, 2018

with Martin Casado (@martin_casado), Andrew Chen (@andrewchen), Russ Heddleston (@rheddleston), and Hanne Tidnam (@omnivorousread) What happens when the bottoms up, organic growth usually associated with consumer companies starts to go.... enterprise? Part of our continuing podcast series (you can listen to part one on user acquisition and part two on engagement/retention) on growth, this episode explores the increasing trend of enterprise growth shifting to be more "bottoms up" -- with a16z general partners Martin Casado and Andrew Chen, and DocSend CEO and co-founder Russ Heddleston, in conversation with Hanne Tidnam. So what exactly does more bottoms up growth for enterprise look like? And then how does organic growth map into the direct sales model we traditionally see in enterprise? How does it affect company building overall? What changes in how we evaluate growth, what do we look at... and how can those two different models work best together?

Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah, and today we're talking about another aspect of growth. This episode is about the growth typically attached to bottoms up consumer companies, but that's now more and more showing up in enterprise. So what does that more bottoms up growth for enterprise look like? How does it affect company building? How does it change how we evaluate growth? And what do we look at? Joining us to talk about the tactics and questions we should be thinking about in this kind of hybrid scenario, our A16Z general partners, Martin Casado and Andrew Chen, and Russell. Hedleston, CEO and co-founder of Doxend. The first voice you'll hear is Martin, followed by Russ, and then Andrew. Let's start with a super basic question, which is what exactly are you

starting to see happen with this shift in enterprise? So traditionally in the enterprise, you'd build a product, and that product would be informed by your knowledge of the market. And then once that product was ready, you'd go ahead and sell it by hiring salespeople, and the salespeople would go directly engage. You'd probably do some sales-led marketing, where maybe the salespeople would go find the customers, or you'd have some basic marketing to do it, but like the majority of the go-to-market effort in the early days was this kind of direct sale. And we're seeing kind of this huge shift, especially in SaaS and in open source, where companies establish massive market presence and brand and growth using these

kind of more traditional consumerish growth motions. And then that very seamlessly leads into sales and often a very different type of sale. And so I think a lot of people in the industry are on their heels, both investors and people that have started companies in the enterprise before to try and understand exactly what's going on. Is it actually seamless? Is it a seamless transition there? Well, I mean, that's often the question, right? So we've seen companies moving on either sides of this. Some companies like, you know, listen, we're just going to do organic growth. And they don't actually do sales. And in our experience, these tend not to be kind of hypergrowth on the revenue side, right? So they'll continue to kind of grow customers, but it's hard for them

to actually get these nice hyperlinear revenue growth. On the other thing, hand, we see companies that will just do sales. And for them, it's actually very difficult to grow quickly because they don't have the top of funnel that you'd get from the growth metrics. And the ones that seem to have figured out the best, what they'll do is they'll create kind of a brand phenomenon. They'll get this growth. They'll get that engine working. And then they do kind of tack on some sort of sales on the back end. And then those two motions work in tandem. So if you're a small startup, breaking into that big ACV sale is tough. You've got to have a really high annual contract value and everything is becoming more crowded and it happens occasionally

but it doesn't happen as often. And if you're trying to target a specific buyer, just getting access to them can be very challenging. And that's just a huge hurdle to overcome. Like how on earth could anybody break into that? Consumer understands a lot of different tips and tricks because you have to be really frugal to acquire a customer that you're just supporting with advertising to get someone who you make six bucks a year off of like you can't spend any money to get that person. So there are a lot of tactics there that are really interesting. And if you apply those to some of the B2B value propositions, you can actually break in in a way that no one else was really thinking about before. Well, let's get into those. What are some of those? The way we broke into the market is

we took a relatively simple workflow, which is sending content from one business to another business. And so we said, okay, a better way of doing that is to allow the person sending it to create 10 different links to that asset, send them off to 10 different companies, and see what happens to them. How long do they look to each page? Who do they forward it to? And you can see what people care about. And so the first version docs was just free. That actually just gets people using the product. And it's cheap enough that they can keep everything else in their stack. So we're not replacing anything. We're purely additive at that point. And that's really how we got our toll hold in the market. Ross, how did you get your first 100 users? I think the first

revenue we got was in the form of a bottle of whiskey that someone gave me as a thank you for giving them an account that they used for their own fundraising process. What kind of whiskey? remember. I think our office consumed it relatively quickly, so I don't think it was around for very long. But from a top of the funnel standpoint, where did you get? It was all word of mouth. Forty-two percent of our sign-ups are still word of mouth. About 28 percent of our sign-ups are

from someone viewing a link and then getting interested in coming into the product. When you look back at Dropbox, the first thing they did to get traction was to announce on Hacker News and also Dig at the time was such a big deal. These days, maybe the actual platforms have changed. Like, maybe you'd go to Product Hunt

instead. Maybe you'd go to Twitter. But ultimately doing a big announcement, but then getting all the sort of viral word of mouth, means that a lot of your first users end up experiencing it because one of their friends wants to show them the product or they just decide they want to try it, as opposed to having somebody email you or call you up. Is there a certain kind of company that this works for better than others? I think that there are certain kinds of products that can be all the way pegged to completely self-serve, you know, bottoms up versus like maybe what's kind of in the middle, right? Is the product a horizontal enough product that literally you can bring almost all of your co-workers? Things like Dropbox, Asana, Slack, these are all things that everyone in your company can use. And so naturally is going to spread much faster because at every moment, each node in the network is going to be able to have access to all 15 to 30 people around them where it can spread. The second thing is products that are actually really front and center in your workflows.

All of the acquisition that we see, especially virally, happens because of engagement. They're deeply, deeply linked with each other. Because as you engage and as you're using the product more, inevitably, then you're sharing links. You're assigning tasks to people. You're commenting on people's files. These are all things that bring people back and bring new people into the product. There's a whole class of products that aren't completely horizontal that maybe only apply to a particular job title or function. And so that all of a sudden gets harder because maybe it can spread within the department, within the function, but it's not going to go really broadly.

And eventually you get to the set where it's like maybe there's only a couple buyers in the entire company. And for that, you don't go bottoms up at all. It's just literally impossible. So this middle zone is what we're talking about where there's some indication, but it's not completely horizontal and viral. It needs a little bit layered on. The new thing is that the fact that users can then bring these products into their workplace and you might get a large, company, 20,000 people with a patchwork of folks using a whole bunch of different products before IT actually makes a decision. That's new and very interesting. Every company tends to have some

form of superpower that's available to it based on just what their business is and what their product does. So we typically add features in one of three buckets. One is to increase the spread of a business to another business. One is to get more lock-in within a company itself, so getting that spread within the company. And then the third is just making our customers more engaged. because the more they're using it, the more they're sending it outside the company. Our top request at one point was, I need to send a folder of content. And you're like, okay, that makes sense. But what they really wanted was this kind of like deal room thing.

So we ended up building spaces. And that just really increased engagement of our customers. That is why one of the really interesting things that Martine and you and I end up talking about with these bottoms up, companies is evaluating the engagement on the products using consumer metrics, because often it's the engagement that's really the leading indicator for growth, both from an acquisition standpoint, as well as retention, which then is sort of the leading indicator for, like, are they actually going to renew their subscription over time?

So to me, this is one of the key questions. We see these companies that fall in between this kind of consumerish growth and this enterprise thing. And actually, a question I've been meaning to ask you and I haven't yet for a secret opportunity is, so is it the right thing to evaluate these things purely from a consumer lens? Are the growth patterns, like, should be they the same as you would see, like, consumer X,X?

Let's even just put aside the question of sales. Should the growth metrics be the same as a consumer company? When you're evaluating even purely consumer products, you have to really look at what the expected behavior is. And so I would kind of turn the same question for the kinds of things we've been working on, which is obviously if you have users that are trying out some new email security product, let's say. Hopefully they're not interacting with it that money. But if the whole pitch of the company is, hey, this is going to be the system of record,

for everything that your team's going to work on for all of their projects or whatever, and they're going to use it every day. Then it's like, all right, let's actually start using daily active metrics in order to evaluate if that engagement is actually there. What about from your point of view, Martin? Are there metrics that you...

Well, yeah, it starts to get a little complicated. So there are a number of consumer metrics you track, right? One of them is engagement, which gives you a sense of how often it's used and maybe that's like some thing that you can proxia to value. There are also just simply top of funnel growth. Like how many people know about it, What is the brand?

The world I come from is nobody knows about the product when you start. There is no organic growth. Marketing at best is linear with the dollars you put in, like the number of customers that are top of funnel. It's probably sublinear. All the value and monetization is driven by direct sales. It's account-based sales. It's account-based sales.

So your ACV has to be high enough to cover the marketing camera. So that's one book-in. The other book-in is all of this growth stuff you do, acquires tons of customers, and then the product will monetize itself, right? So, you know, my big question is there are a slider bar here. If you slide the slider bar all the way to the left, you know, there's the Atlassian model and there's very little sales.

And if you slide your slider bar all the way to the right, then it's just direct sales and no marketing. And then the question is, is what does it look like in the middle? Because you look at it like the slider barles all the way to the left, and I look at like the sliders all the way to the right. But more and more, we're seeing companies that actually, they're very interesting on both sides, but they're not classic on either.

So let's assume we just take the case with the slider bar all the way to the organic growth. And it's purely horizontal. And it's growing like crazy. So the question is, does it still make sense to build the direct sales force?

As in, will it increase the unit economics if you do? I think our experience here with Slack and with GitHub and with many companies is... It's definitely yes, right? Yeah, the answer is yes. Because that's how you maximize

ACV, per customer because there is a procurement process and just finding the budget and maximizing that is something a human can do much better than a product at this point in sales. Right. And in fact, I think actually even the virally spreading products end up going tilting towards enterprise over time for a really simple reason, which is that with larger companies, your cohorts will look better because there's revenue expansion. Because no matter what, when you're working with SMBs, I find it very hard to get better than, let's say, 5% per month churn rate. All these little companies keep going on

business all the time. They're fickle. They have small budgets, etc. And so what you quickly find is like you have to go to the big guys, all the budgets there. And so then that inevitably leads you, even when you're completely bottoms up, to start building stickier products for enterprises and at the sales team, at customer success and all of that. So I think that is the natural trend. My question is, when is that happening? Is that happening in tandem all along? Are they sort of naturally that hybrid from the beginning? Or do they slide along as things change in the company cycles? Specifically, were you thinking about sales when you started? No. No, not at all. The common refrain. We launched Doxon, we didn't have any background in B2B. So it kind of caught us by surprise.

And we got a lot of interest that we weren't able to convert into dollars because we weren't even charging people. If we could do Doxon Dover again, I think we could build it in half the time. Because I think this is a new type of company that there aren't that many examples for. If you were to put that very broadly as like the type of company you mean, what is that type of company? If you create a business value, like a B2B value for something, you build some product, and you release it for less money than you should or free, you're going to get some usage of it. If you're creating a B2B value, you kind of pick your target audience, you get your 100 accounts you want to sell it into, and you have people just pound on their doors until you get in there. And then we start at the top of the list. You go to the bottom, then you go back to the top of the list. And I think when you compare it to a consumer, I mean, for most consumer kind of audience-based plays, you really defer monetization, like for a really long time.

Because you have to aggregate this huge audience, and then you start talking about, okay, let's look at ad-based models. And so, and you contrast that to these BDB products where you can actually monetize from early on. And in fact, when you monetize, it actually unlocks a bunch of paid acquisition channels and it'll unlock sales and it blocks a bunch of stuff. I think that's very confusing for people who, you know, they get started and they're like, they're kind of in this consumer products mindset. And so they often end up kind of like, oh, how do I grow? How do I increase acquisition? What are the signs that that's the right time when it begins shifting, the sort of tipping point where you're like, okay, I need to pay attention to this? We were just selling some small deals on the side.

So I was like, I think we should hire a salesperson. So we hired our first S&B, AE, and in her first month, we're like, we don't think she's going to sell anything. And she sold twice what the quota was supposed to be. There was just a lot of money laying around, whereas you actually talk to someone on the phone and explain it to them. They might have bought one seat before, but now they're going to buy 15. Didn't you have a support person collecting checks? We had a support person selling. a lot of docs at it for quite a while. That's a pretty good indication. It's time to do sales.

Yeah, that's another really good indicator. Also, now that we're going a little bit more up market, you actually need someone who's able to run a good sales process, even though they're not doing the outbound part of it. Once you get them in the door, running a good sales process, having good sales hygiene, really understanding who your buyer is. You need to do all those things, too. So you really need to marry both sides of it. Another shift I've seen, which is important from a company building perspective. So if you think about direct enterprise sales, the actual lead-up to the sale can take nine months to 18 months. And when you're working the account, you've got an S.E. in the account, and you're educating them, et cetera. So with these new companies, often the

customers educating themselves. They're already trying. And so much of the actual total value of the account comes after the users of the product. And so it's about expanding the account. So now there's this very interesting relationship between sales and customer success, where a lot of the values actually being driven by customer success. I don't think the direct enterprise is used to this model. Yeah, we always say you win the renewal when you do the onboarding and getting everyone really engaged quickly with an account really helps with expansion and renewal. When we do onboarding, we have a little raffle. So if you've got 50 salespeople at your company, and if you send a certain amount of docks and links externally in the first two weeks, then you're eligible

in this raffle, and you get like one of three different prizes. It's like a $200 bottle of whiskey or a tequila or Amazon gift card. And that'll actually... What kind of whiskey? I also don't know. But that'll actually get everyone using the product really quickly. And then they look at that and they say, oh, we bought the product for our sales team. Man, we should use this for our customer success team or our support team. And so then they build faith in it and then it kind of naturally expands. Sometimes you need a salesperson involved.

But more often than not, customer success is just saying, yep, you can use it for that too. And then they expand. So I want to get into the timing question of when, when this starts happening, when you happen into this moment, when all of a sudden you realize, well, this would be helpful. How do you begin to actually make that happen? What are the signs and signals that are telling you like, now is the time? Well, I think one really important one is what kinds of companies and people are signing into your service, where you're starting to see both prominent tech companies,

as well as Fortune 1000s just signing up to try it. Even on a purely bottoms up basis, you create the funnel from signing up to using a contact enrichment service and starting to score all of these new users that are coming in. And if you find out that a large proportion of them are actually enterprises, that's actually pull demand from the market that you should actually be up-leveling faster. One of the things we actually did to spread that awareness faster is we decided that marketers will send off tons of things to people.

So why don't we just support the marketing use case, not because we make more money from that. If we power, for instance, a research report for a company, they're sending that to tens of thousands of people that then get exposure in lots of areas that we weren't even in before. So it really kind of allows it to hot. into other places and then we then generate more of that demand coming in. You need to take a look at who's signing it for your product

and you need to think about what might they be looking for and what problems might be able to solve for them. Another thing I might add is what kinds of feature requests that folks are having. If you're building something that's like an email client, right, something that is really horizontal or it's a new document editor, everything's great and all of a sudden you start getting these future requests for Salesforce integration and you're like, oh, okay, this is like a different

Another request we've always gotten has been DocSend, you can't actually send anything from DocSend. And it's really nice to be able to send from email and customize it, and there's a different philosophy around that. But we were thinking like, man, just let people send stuff right from DocSend, because then it's got a doc send email that they get. And so it's actually a good growth thing as well. And so you can kind of reprioritize your product list

based on how much it's going to spread awareness about your product outside of the company, which is a great lens for every company to use when thinking about trying to make these viral loops go faster. That's interesting. Okay, so say ideally you have this kind of blended model going on. Are there conflicts ever in the types of information that you're getting from the different sources? At the highest level, I think there actually are a lot of conflicts in these motions in a number of areas. I mean, the most obvious one, and this is something that's so prevalent in open source is a good way to get organic growth is to give something away for free. And if you give it away for free, it may be hard to monetize it. Because a lot of the assumptions here are predicated on organic growth, there's always an open question of how much do you give away versus how do you monetize. Enterprise really is all about monetization

because there is no conversion between eyeballs and dollars like you do in the kind of more advertising like domains, right? And so there's a real tension there. So how do you think about that balance? It's sort of funny because it sort of implies that you can go one way and not the other. Meaning if you have a product that's making a bunch of money

and you have a highly functional sales team and then a product person in the org is like, hey, let's have a free offering. That's not going to happen. versus the other way where you have something that's product-led and it generates a lot of users and then you build this whole pipeline off of that and then you build the sales org, right?

If you do it in that order, all of a sudden, the freemium product actually feels like it's actually very helpful. Nevertheless, eventually free tends to go away or become pretty crippled as the whole business evolves. But freemium can be so disruptive in these industries because if you're a large enterprise B2B software company, you're not going to be able to do this kind of like low-end free

offering. Yeah, a lot of what we're talking about is just pricing and packaging, which is something that's so hard for everybody, because you'll look at a company and you'll look at their pricing and packaging, and you'll be like, congratulations, you've done it. But then when you look at a new company, they're like, well, what should their pricing be? Everyone's like, I have no idea. And it's hard because you can't A, B, test it. And so you have examples of what's worked, but it's really hard to predict what will work for a new given business. And so you could say, on the low end, we've got a free thing. On the high end, we got an enterprise thing. And then maybe there's something in the middle. We actually just increased the pricing and added a couple new plans.

And we thought that conversion would come down, but we'd make more money. What happened was that conversion went up, and we made way more money. And why do you think that was happening? We moved some features around, and then we talked about the plans differently and who they're for. And so people also trusted it a bit more because they're paying more for it. People then value it more and actually use it more because they're paying for it. Well, I mean, this is the difference between also when Netflix increases their monthly subscription by $2, everyone's, you know, screaming bloody murder.

And B2B is obviously less elastic, you know, than that. There's some price signaling that you get as well. But it's also important to compare it to traditional pricing and packaging. The general model used to be when you first come to market, you are as expensive as possible. And you know you're going to go for a limited set, but ACV is high enough to cover it. And the sales cycles are long anyways. And then after you feel like you're saturating that, you offer lower price units so that the aggregate market is larger net cannibalization. So you don't want to cannibalize yourself. And the way you do this is market

research of existing customers, you know the target customer base, and you can ABTES. You can do actually do kind of fairly small rollouts because it's not marketing led. That motion is lost in this world because basically as soon as it's publicly available for free, everybody knows about it. And it's very difficult then to kind of retract that. So you have to be very thoughtful about pricing and packaging up front because any experiment basically is reality now. And that's very, very different than the traditional enterprise motion. We experimented with pricing so much in the early days, and the only thing you had to hold sacrosanct was price very expensive early on because you're only going to get 10 customers anyways. And you just can't do that motion. Even the way that you do pricing, it can potentially impact engagement. Where do you put your paywall? Is it a time-based trial? Is it a usage-based thing? Those things become really important because especially when you have a product that is growing virally, it's building a network inside these companies. You don't want to cut off the network prematurely because the network is what makes the whole thing sticky. So for example, it would not make sense for product like Slack. If they were

like, well, we're going to cap the number of people that can join a channel to five. That doesn't make sense because the entire network effect is based on having all of your colleagues there, right? And so what you end up wanting to do is you're gating these features that, you know, the IT admins want. And those are the things that end up being how you differentiate the enterprise customers from purely the consumer ones. When you start thinking about like forecasting or planning. Do you ever get competing signals and information from this blended model where you're doing two different kinds of growth in sales? Well, I do you think there's a really interesting question of for wherever you are in the life cycle of the company. Let's say you have a dollar

to spend on go-to-market. How much of that dollar goes to brand and marketing versus how much that dollar goes to sales? And that is a question. I don't think anybody knows the answer to. But what are some of the ways you start figuring it out? The traditional view in the enterprise is you spend it all on sales, basically until you've got a working pipeline, a repeatable sale, then you have unit economics you understand, and then you start increasing the top of funnel. That's the traditional model. But now we're marketing led, and so how do you know how to split those dollars up and when to do it? A lot of it has to do with the DNA of the founding team. My two co-founders and I are all engineers and product people.

And so we've basically used our product as the marketing engine for the company so far. We haven't done any paid acquisition. We haven't been doing a lot of marketing stuff that's been driving a lot of the top of the funnel. The product itself is driving the top of the funnel. But that would be what most of these companies are doing in this kind of company. That would be common. Well, okay. I mean, there are a number of companies that will actually just buy their users. I'm totally not used to that.

Andrew's totally used to that. And so this is kind of a muscle. And I hate it. Yeah. Yeah, there's folks that they're spending tons and tons of money on Facebook, on Google, etc. That's very common. The other one as well is a huge focus on content marketing as being one of the primary channels. I think that is really different.

It's kind of going back to what we said earlier, should companies invest in sales? And my view on that would be, if you show me a company that's growing organically, I'll show you a company that's performing better if you also add a sales team to it. If you can get it working with the product, you can actually probably get a good baseline of growth, but you should probably spend more on marketing and sales on top of that. And if you can get the unit economics anywhere near reasonable for paid acquisition, you should probably put everything you can into that channel, knowing it's just a component of your overall strategy. The thing that makes it hard to normalize a bunch of these

efforts is they happen on very different timescales. You can literally increase your paid acquisition budget and see a spike in sign-ups and self-serve conversions within a 24-hour period. If you're going to go and hire and build out your sales team, it's going to take you months to build the team and then months to recruit them. But when that revenue hits from these really large contracts, it's huge. Hopefully you have kind of multiple systems that are mutually reinforcing each other as opposed to feeling like they're in conflict. But that certainly happens if you are trying to figure out where do I put the next dollar. I mean, what are some ways around dealing with that discrepancy between timeframes and

planning and forecasting when you're trying to match up these two very different chronologies? I don't think there's any recipe. Like, there's never a recipe to doing a startup anyways. There's no recipe to finding part of market fit. I don't think there's any recipe to knowing what's the right balance between growth and sales and when to do it. But here are things that a founder should think about that has traditional enterprise expertise in like the new world. The first one is brand. You normally don't think about brand, but brand does drive viral growth.

product focus, right? The product itself actually creates virality. The enterprise very rarely thinks about, believe it or not, product. They think more about solving problems, right? Really? That's so surprising. It's not about making the product, quote, unquote, delightful, or easily consumable. It's solving a real problem than adding business value, less about consumability, right? Now you have to think a lot more about consumability, like single player mode, like self-service mode, right?

Very different than traditional enterprise. You need to design your company for bottoms up growth, whether you're open source or you're doing, SaaS or whatever because this is the new method of consumption. And I do think that the one most important is if you're doing bottoms up growth, I think you have to expect a lower ACV, which is a different way to build a sales

team. And so you just have to be more comfortable with either inside, inside, outside models, and then you have to be more comfortable with focusing in on expansion rather than up front ACV. So these are all very, very different than the traditional enterprise. They're sort of mind shifts. They're all mind shifts. Right, right. There are new

organizational structures that end up being built within these companies that sit alongside sales because, you know, all of a sudden you can have multiple revenue centers, right? And that's a very different approach. And the people that you hire for this end up being designers and PMs and engineers that are kind of this businessy metrics focused folks going back to Dropbox. I know the most recent incarnation were sort of biz ops people turn PMs that were previously working oftentimes in consulting or banking. So it's a new hybrid kind of role in organization as well that comes down from this. Right. Exactly. That's interesting. You want to hire the Nth engineer into this team that can run a whole

bunch more of these A-B tests, or do you build out your sales team more? These are the kinds of decisions that these companies have to make these days. Russ, did you see that as well, that kind of hybrid role? Yeah, there are a lot of things that aren't just salespeople calling and, you know, getting contract signed. Enterprise sales is like a playbook that makes sense. For the bottoms up company, you'll see this perfect curve, and kind of the outside view of that is they did something brilliant at the beginning, and then everyone went on vacation, and it just kept growing. But in reality, behind the scenes, it's a series of very smart things you did to keep that growth going. And what got you from A to B is not going to get you from B to C's.

You often have to redo your organization. You have to add in new roles. And you have to recognize when you're going to hit points of diminishing return for a type of investment. And you have to get ahead of that and say, well, what's the next type of investment we're going to be able to do to get us to the next stage of things? Add on another layer, right? As Jeff would say. It's different for every company. There's no one right answer.

The really important key thing is the importance of not just a great product, but literally great user experience and design and all the fit and finish that you would expect with a completely modern consumer-facing application. Now that's coming to this world too. Right, exactly. Like Envoy, that is an amazing B2B viral story. They're very rare.

But the reason why people use that now is because, offices are part of the brand experience. And then after they use the thing, then they're kind of like, oh, yeah, we're using pen and paper back at the home office. Like, we need to upgrade to this, too. These examples cross over both the consumer, you know, sort of design world, all the way to sales, all the way to performance marketing. You really have to leverage a lot of skills in order to execute these strategies.

The expectation for the usability of software, I think, is going up in enterprises. Larger companies expect more polish and more usability. and if it's not there, they start to really worry about it being shelfware or not delivering on the value proposition. And shelfware is a pretty big problem at a lot of big companies. One of the funny anecdotes at Uber was that for a long time, we were officially on HipChat, but there were so many teams across the company

that would have their little secret slack, you know, team chat going because they just like didn't want to deal with. I feel comfortable saying it's now that Hipchats been shut down. You know, it's like employees will literally rebel and just use whatever they want. And so as a result, as companies selling into these, your products have to be really good to compete with everything else that's out there. I didn't understand how powerful actually just growth tactics were, independent of product, actually, independent of sales. Andrew, you and I were looking at a company, which was amazing, like the growth was amazing, like all of these arms were amazing, the engagement, they were monetized, like, everything looked great.

And the conclusion we came to, it was like, it's because they just had, like, such an amazing growth team. It's almost independent of the product that they were selling. We literally came to the end. We're like, wow, this could be anything. This could be like, you know, dog food. This could be like, yeah, whatever. If you figure out how to do it, right, it's a very, very powerful thing. And by the way, that used to be what you said about sales.

What you used to say about sales is if you have a very good sales team that understands the buyer, it's kind of independent of product. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for joining us on the A16D podcast. Great. Thank you.