Software at Scale - Software at Scale 40 - Talent Management with Nikita Gupta

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

Nikita Gupta is a Co-Founder & CTO at Symba, a platform that helps manage talent development programs like internships.Internships are one of the most effective ways for hiring at a software company, but there’s a lot of work that goes into managing successful interns. With hiring getting harder across the industry due to increased competition and funding, I thought it would be interesting to dive into understanding how to manage successful internship programs.Highlights0:30 - What is Symba?1:30 - Starting with the hot-takes. So, are college degrees overrated now?5:30 - Why do I need a software platform to manage internships?8:50 - Why do companies generally need to manage 8 - 10 platforms for internships? What have you seen?10:30 - As a software engineer or manager, how do I make my intern successful?13:30 - Cadence of check-ins16:30 - With remote interns, how do you build a successful community?18:50 - How do I measure the success/efficacy of my internship program?21:00 - How do I know that my intern mentors/hosts are doing a good job?25:00 - What are some concrete steps that I can take to increase my intern pool’s diversity? What should I track?27:30 - What are some trends in the intern hiring space?32:00 - Government investments in internship programs33:00 - What’s your advice to the first-time intern mentor/host? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.softwareatscale.dev

Welcome to Software at Scale, a podcast where we discuss the technical stories behind large software applications. I'm your host, Utsav Shah, and thank you for listening. Hey, welcome to another episode of the Software at Scale podcast, and thank you for joining me. Of course. Well, thanks for having me. So honored to be here and excited to just have a fun conversation today. I am especially excited for this episode. So Nigita is the CTO and co-founder of Simba, which is a remote internship platform. And she's also a friend. So yeah, thank you for joining me.

And maybe we can get started with what does Simba do? Can you just tell listeners? Of course. Well, hi, everyone. joining me and maybe we can get started with what does Simba do can you just tell listeners of course well hi everyone Simba is for symbiotic relationships and not for the lion king but what we're doing is we're helping our companies and customers design some of the best workforce engagement experiences so Simba is tapping into this space first with internship programs, but we're already making waves and helping companies manage and engage their program participants all the way from apprenticeship programs, high school mentorship programs, and a lot more. So really helping companies create some of the best early talent programs

and helping them manage everything from their projects to their onboarding, engagement, community building, and so much more. So that brings the immediate question, are college degrees overrated now? Or do you think they're still really valuable? It's a great question, something that is highly debatable these days. But it's really funny because there's a saying that goes in order to get new experience, you need previous experience. I think for me personally, my, you know, college experience helped me get those internship experiences. But what's really important is having applicable knowledge and of the education that

you're learning. So, you know, I can go on and on about how, you know, there might not be a need to go to school for four years to get a computer science degree, for example. And instead you can get some really great coding knowledge from all of these bootcamps, programs that are online, coding schools, and so much more and still be a great programmer. But I think that having an internship experience was so important because it taught me the real-life application of what I was studying at school. And for me, having internship experiences at large corporations as well as startups really helped me understand what I wanted

and did not want out of my career. So that kind of answers the question of how you got interested in starting this company. Was there anything else in your background that made you like take the leap in the sense decide that you need to solve this problem through a company? Yeah, well, so growing up, I've always had an entrepreneurial energy around me. My father is an entrepreneur. And in fact, actually, growing up, I love eating and I love cooking. And I used to just cook a lot for friends and family. So one day, my father and I were together and we thought about how can we monetize or

just, you know, make my Nick at this Kitchen a bigger brand. And that's when I first coded up my first website. It was a food blog where I was sharing recorded videos of me cooking with the rest of the world. And that's what got me interested in the intersection of technology and my passion to be able to solve a problem or to be able to share what I was really passionate about. And I think that has served me well. All throughout college, I joined a lot of diverse organizations as in the leadership positions and really just got to be able to work around some super intelligent peers

in the startup industry. And after I graduated college, I was also a software engineer for a startup. And I really got to learn the ropes of how to launch a company, work with your co-founder, the CEO, the CTO, and to be able to solve a problem. And when I met my co-founder, who is Ava, I was really passionate about how she wanted to bring these internship experiences to students across the world and not just stick to the traditional, you know, come wear a suit into the office in the hot summer and sit at the office and work for 10 to 12 weeks. Instead, we wanted to make it super accessible that students could even do internship experiences part-time while they were on campus for the company of

their dreams. And for me, as I mentioned earlier, internships helped me define what I wanted out of my career. So both of us sat on this journey to help companies create some of these best experiences and helping companies not only make the best experience but also helping them streamline will help them scale and offer more opportunities so the more positions that are open the more opportunities that are available for everyone around the world and so all of this was started pre-pandemic so clearly you were like five steps ahead of where everybody else is right now. Yeah, we started the idea, ideation of Simba in late 2017, actually, and really created the platform by 2019 and even had some beta users way before pre-pandemic. So why do I need, I guess, a platform, right? Like when I think of an intern, I just

think I'm going to hire someone, I'm going to throw them at my like bug backlog. Not exactly, maybe I'll give them like an easy bug first. And then as just like a software engineering intern, and then they can probably take on harder stuff. And three months later, I'll decide whether they were good enough to join as like a full-time employee like what is wrong in that idea maybe you can walk us through that of course so first off we work with customers that actually care about their interns that are investing in this talent and nurturing them to become the future leaders not companies you know excuse my french to get the interns to get shit done so you know it's really about how can you retain this talent how can you you know excuse my french to get the interns to get shit done so you know it's really about how

can you retain this talent how can you you know give them these types of projects where you're actually you know treating this like a three-month interview or a six-month interview where you're getting to understand how this you know student works and again the really cool thing about internships is it's not just college students. We have high school students that are doing internships, even moms who want to get back into the industry who are doing internships across different industries, as well as veterans who want to get back into the workforce. So, you know, internships is for everyone. And that's what gets us really excited about how large this market opportunity is and the type of impact that we can make with Simba.

So just going again, you know, these, it's important for companies to retain this talent, because they're investing so much money, they're giving these program participants the experience, the projects to be able to, you know, mold them into the future leaders. So why a company would want Simba is that they need to create the best experience, they need to be able to have the metrics, have oversight into how successful their program is. Are those program participants getting their work done? Are they making an impact to the company? As well as just giving them the best experience. On average, from our customers, according to them, they're using 8 to 11 different platforms to manage their students. It's time consuming to get them set up onto these platforms.

It's very expensive because you're buying them individual subscriptions. And plus, after they leave, all of that data is lost because you turn off their accounts. What we have on Simba is that as soon as that program participant gets an offer, they're activated on Simba. Everything from their onboarding to their entire journey and even offboarding and post-program engagement as alumni users, that's all handled on Simba. So if a student is going back to campus or is completing other things or taking a break or getting a PhD or master's, the company will still be able to stay engaged with them and know what they're up to if they choose to come back to the company full-time three years after. So just having

those benefits of not only creating the best experience and having oversight, but to be able to stay engaged with the talent, keep investing in them, keeping them updated and excited about what the company is doing is what are some of the benefits that Simba mostly serves. And it seems even more important with hiring getting even harder with so many options for interns or anyone to pick for their next role, you want to provide the best experience possible, it sounds like. Definitely. It's so important.

Everyone is hopping around. There's the saying, the great resignation. But again, it's about how can you provide the best experience and retain that talent? Because again, you're investing so much money and it's just not a good look if they choose to leave very soon. So when you mentioned that there's eight to 10 platforms that people generally use to manage interns, like I can think of in their HR system, some kind of onboarding docs and

stuff they would have to read. And that insight on the fact that they have to their accounts get turned off and you lose all their data at the end that's a really interesting one so maybe what do people do like what what are generally those platforms that people use if you can go into a little detail there of course so it ranges from everything like you said hr applicant tracking tracking systems, onboarding platforms, project management, feedback, chat, community, profile building, even offboarding. So there's so much that is there. And again, time consuming, you have to get everyone an account set up, everyone's building, you know, 11 different platforms, because there's 11 different logins. And that's what we're using with Simba is that we're bringing everything into one place. Simba's platform does offer strong integrations with tools like HR applicant tracking systems, as well as project management tools. You know, it's definitely, we are trying to minimize the change of behavior, especially

for full-time employees who get on board to the platform. And these are, for example, the managers that are working with those interns on a day-to-day basis. So in order to make their workflow even easier, we are offering these types of integrations that's not disturbing their, you know, day-to-day routine. And that's what we've been able to eliminate with Simba is that you're getting oversight, you're able to track these beautiful reports in the dashboard, you're able to understand the performance and progress of each of the program participants. And that's what's helping them get efficient and not having to use these eight to 10 different tools. So let's say that I'm a software engineer, like software engineering manager, and I'm going to get an intern or a few interns on my team. How do I think about making my intern successful? So like, what principles or framework

should I use to maybe chart that out and make a plan for them? Great question. So we actually conducted a survey with a handful of our intern users, and realized that first of all, the most important hurdle for a lot of companies is getting their interns onboarded. You know, it's not just about giving them the HR documents that they have to sign, but it's about having them understand what the company culture is like, who the different team members are, how their team is structured, and, you know, what type of impact their projects are going to have. So what we do is we make onboarding very seamless.

One of our customers, for example, who has an internship program of just 500 students in the U.S., had to send each intern five to seven different emails with different documents and resources. And they had to resend it, even though that student already had it. Now with Simba, they're able to view all of these important documents. It's always up to date. And they're getting the latest information that they need to be onboarded and set up for success at the company. Even before the intern begins on day one. Most of the time, especially for software engineering internships, the offer is extended in December, January or like the late fall winter time.

And you don't start your summer internship usually until the May or June of that that following year. So in that five month gap you're not able to stay engaged with them you know one or two emails just doesn't cut it. So as a manager we've been able to offer them ways to keep their students engaged and give them information that they can you know read on their own discretion and usually they are because they're so excited that when they come on day one they're ready to go. So onboarding is a number one hurdle and the biggest challenge usually for getting an intern set up for success. Secondly, I think a good framework is giving the interns projects that will actually make an impact. Definitely start off with projects, you know, just be able to test the waters, get them used to, you know, the code base, for example, understand the process of fixing a bug and pushing it and get it deployed to production and whatnot,

but giving them projects where they see the impact and where you can track the number of hours and the engagement rates and the number of submissions. That's all really important too, because that's what makes an intern feel engaged and impactful at the company. So those are just two of the biggest things. And as a manager, also staying engaged with your student, not ghosting them or leaving them in the dark. You know, on the platform, we have a feature that allows the intern to, on a click of a button, say that they're stuck on something. Usually, even me personally, you are very nervous to go to your manager and ask for help or let them know that you're stuck. But on Simba with the click of a button, the manager is notified even through Slack notifications that, hey, it looks like your intern is stuck on a project or hasn't added a

submission in a while, maybe it's time to check in. And tools like this have really been able to strengthen that relationship between the manager and the intern. And again, having an engaged manager makes an internship experience even more engaging. Would you suggest some kind of periodic, I guess, like every two-week check-in, every like monthly check-in, like do those things add value? Should those be like more asynchronous? What do you think? So there's really no right answer for that. It depends on the working style for both that intern and that manager. I definitely, first of all, it's very important to just have that, you know, quote unquote door open such that if the intern ever needs to ask a question, they can ask you at any time asynchronously rather than having to wait for that check-in, whether it's every

week or bi-weekly so it really just depends on the manager's work style as well as the type of project that the intern is working on if things are changing very frequently in that project then it might make sense to have more frequent check-ins but if it's a long-term project requires a lot of you know self-research for example then it could be kept to like every two weeks or something like that but again having the capability of letting your manager know when you're stuck on a project or if you have questions or if you add your draft one out of 50 and getting instant feedback those are the types of things that we're able to add to our platform to make that relationship and

strengthen it and make it more engaging okay Okay. And how important is it to have some kind of like a cohort for interns? Like, is it, I remember that when, when I was an intern, it was nice to have other interns as well. So you can kind of form a relationship with them, sometimes ask them questions when you're stuck rather than asking the scary, like full-time employees in a sense. what's your opinion on that i think cohorts are very important and it's what makes it's what builds community because interns are going through the same journey together just like you know if you were starting out full-time at a company on your day one it would be nice to be you know with the same people who are also

starting out on day one. So that's actually one of the biggest things that we keep in mind at our team is community building and engagement within cohorts. Our features such as dash, or sorry, such as the forums and the discussion boards, as well as communities and profiles where you can actually search for people who have similar interests or similar passions as you makes it really easy to get to know one another. You know, it's definitely not possible to have huge cohorts if you were to do a fall or spring internship program, for example, but definitely in the summer we've seen that it builds camaraderie, it strengthens the community, and it makes the interns more engaged if they're, you know, put in a group together along with other students who are

starting off and doing the same thing. And it doesn't necessarily mean that they all have to be on the same team, but going through an onboarding experience together and just getting to know that there are other interns out there, skills that you might be able to learn from one another, we've been able to, you know, we keep that top of mind, especially on Simba, because maybe building an engagement is so key key not just what the company is doing to make you feel welcome but it's also who else is going through that internship experience with you too. So this kind of adds to it's a good segue to how do I make my remote intern successful right this seems to be a bunch of challenges around how do you actually build some

do some kind of community building I think they're the same challenges as like working keeping remote employees happy versus building like an office culture and stuff so how what do you think about the added complexity of being remote as an intern great question so we all know that remote work is not like going into the office where you can step into the kitchen or the cafe and have an immediate conversation with someone who's around there. But what we're seeing and we're actually seeing so many of our customers get super creative with ways to engage their remote team members. ideas include you know calling in a michelin star chef and doing a cooking class together online as one of the social activities doing some really cool ice breakers or virtual escape rooms and again it's not about just you know giving the interns work and projects and expecting it to get done but these social elements really help again strengthen that community and make the

interns feel more special so there have been so many companies that do some really great social events virtually. We've even seen one of our customers send out portraits of the interns and their pets that have been hand-drawn by artists as a welcome gift, kits throughout the internship experience of different snacks and goodies or even hoodies and different company swag and a lot of these is what helps them feel you know valued at the company so whether it's social events whether it's kits there are so many different ways to get creative and companies who do that have been successful in seeing the engagement rates spike up for their students or the program participants where they do invest this, these resources to do so.

So how do I know that I'm running a successful, like, intern program, remote intern program? Are there, like, the clearest metric to me sounds like how many interns come back full-time, but there's a bunch of factors over there that are out of my control, right? What should I track and how should I know that I'm doing a good job as the an intern program manager maybe

that is a great question actually one of the biggest challenges so you're absolutely right you know the conversion rate is what company is used to measure on how many students they've been given that they've extended an offer to and how many of those students actually accept. But you know the problem with that is that it happens at the end of the program. So what metrics are companies able to track even at the beginning or at the middle of the program to be able to prevent low conversion rates? And that's the type of metrics that we collect and have seen everything from the number of projects that the interns are working on, how much time it's taking them to complete a project rather than it staying past the deadline date, as well as how many interns are able to meet with one another, build community, how many of them

are actually attending the social events and are showing up and being present. And then we also, what we do for our customers is send out these customized surveys, engagement surveys that track how was the relationship with the intern and that manager going? How many times are they having check-ins? Or asking the manager, are they trending, is the intern trending towards a full-time offer? As well as what new skills has the intern gained? Both in a self-reflective way and obviously collecting both qualitative and quantitative information. So having these types of metrics and oversights at the beginning of the program is super valuable because it helps you improve the program

all throughout rather than just waiting what that conversion or retention rate is going to be at the end of the program. And that's something that we wanted to be able to, that's something that we wanted Sima to be able to provide transparency on, because the earlier you know this information, the better chance you have to improve it, so that way you can maintain those high conversion rates at the end. So I think maybe one level deeper is how do I know that the intern mentors are doing a good job, right? Like, yeah, completing their projects on time. I think that certainly adds up. How do I validate that, you know, my intern mentors are putting in enough time? Is there like an accountability mechanism

or like a feedback loop that I can look at or I can use in some way? Yes, definitely. The mentors and managers who are there when the intern needs stuck, what their response rate looks like, as well as even sending out these poll surveys to the students and asking them how present their mentor is, what their mentor is, you know, doing best and what their mentor is not doing as well. All of these types of metrics are really important. And that's what we do for some of our customers is we send out these poll surveys as frequently as every two

weeks. And that way they're able to understand, is that mentor there for that intern? Or is the mentor actually slacking and not present for the intern to be able to help them get through their projects or just have a good experience for them? And really, you know, what's exciting about the companies that we work with is that there was actually a FinTech, one of our FinTech customers actually set up on Simba in the beginning, just with their internship program coordinators who are the admins, and then only 25 interns. Two weeks later, we had 25 managers reach out to us saying, what is Simba that our interns are talking about? What is this platform? Even we want to get on it.

And we've been able to bring on all of those mentors or managers who are the actual full-time employees of the company onto Simba because it helps them, again, strengthen that relationship as well as build a better experience for everyone. So the invested mentors are the ones who are able to really create the best experience for their students as well. And that makes me think that the onboarding experience for like a remote intern, a good onboarding experience is not that different from a remote employee. Right. In a sense, there is that time factor. But what are the differences and when thinking about like remote interns versus remote employees versus like remote freelancers or contractors what's the key difference other than just the time duration there's really no major difference in onboarding for all of them you know you can count that there's different documentation that you have to sign or different logistics that you have to go through but um, it really just

depends on how a company values a freelancer versus an intern. In our experience, freelancers are hired mostly to get a certain project done and they're put on a very limited schedule where the time duration is defined and the project scope is also defined. For companies who truly care about their interns and are investing in the success of their interns, they will make sure that the intern knows how exciting the company is, what are some major updates at the company, who the rest of the team is, fun activities, company culture, and so much more. And that is what's going to help the intern build a more, a better, you know, well-shaped round experience. So there's not that much difference in even their onboarding.

So technically you could use Simba to onboard pretty much your entire company if you were running a remote company. Yes. And funny that you asked because we've definitely had some of our customers say, you know, our interns are dealing with such a beautiful platform, but then when they become full-time employees, they'll be on a not so beautiful platform. And that gets us really excited to think about the larger use case of Simba and how we're able to support not just the students that are coming in for this internship experience or this mentorship, but even beyond that. So we are going to take that step slowly because we want to focus on this cohort-based learning experience. But growing from there, we are looking into supporting even new grad programs. So your first year hires, your undergrad hires, and grow from there. Or even rotational programs where new hires are going

through a two-year rotation where they're trying different teams and kind of when they rotate from one team to another that's kind of treated like an internship experience if you were to look at it at a different angle so there's definitely a great use case for that but we're really excited about building and improving the cohort-based learning experience at Sunbio. So how should I think about hiring a diverse intern set right like let's say I'm running a slightly larger intern program and diversity is a priority for me how should I think about you know tracking that or improving those numbers? What have you seen just from your customers or just generally? Yeah, well, first thing first is that remote internships has allowed

companies to tap into talent that they weren't able to before. You're not just restricted to the same 10 universities that you have to go through. You're not just restricted to students who can afford to relocate to the major cities. Now with remote internship experiences and even internship experiences that can be hosted anytime throughout the year, even part-time or full-time, that's been able to help our customers tap into diverse backgrounds, students coming from different schools, different neighborhoods, different skill sets. And that's what gets our team really excited as to how you know we can make internships accessible you know at Simba our main mission is to open up the workforce and open up the workforce and help companies offer more opportunities so that way

more opportunities lead to more work experiences for everyone around the world. And what we do and what we do to help our customers track and target their D&I initiatives is give them that information on what neighborhoods or what schools their participants are coming from. And that has been able to help them the background, have them been able to track the backgrounds. For some of our customers, it's completely optional if they want their users to put in their preferred pronouns, as well as their gender. So that depending on the customer and those types of metrics that they want to be able to track has really helped them understand how diverse their own programs are. And then it's not just the program diversity, but it's also the ones that actually accept the full time offer, what their diversity or what the diversity of that class looks like as well do you think it's getting easier to hire interns not just from you know the same country but like around the world like you always hear of this idea around tax implications being tricky uh what have you seen her people trying that do you think that's getting harder or easier with time? I think more people are trying to hire talent from outside. It's really fascinating because

as soon as remote internships opened up, especially at Simbo, we saw students from so many different countries that were excited to look for internship experiences. And some of the larger companies or countries include Nigeria, for example, in Africa, as well as students coming from India and China. There's so much incredible diverse talent all around the world that I think that if companies can actually put in the effort to invest more resources into hiring diverse talent, it's going to be great. There's definitely legal obstacles that that you have to go through understanding what type of visa requirements are there. And I think that with more dialogue and discussion around this, there's,

you know, I really hope that it will open up and make it more accessible. But again, it really just depends. Some companies can offer virtual internship experiences to students who are outside of the U.S. and if they can we have seen companies take advantage of that and hire students from outside of the U.S. but it really just depends on you know the time and resources that it takes to be able to hire the international talent and I really do hope that it becomes easier but again you know internships in the internships in the US are very, you know, are more structured than other countries. And I love to see personally how a lot of companies or a lot of countries are investing

in creating more internship experiences and want their young talent to be able to have this type of professional work experience. Yeah, and we should just ban unpaid internships so that more people have the opportunity to take 100 percent at Simba we don't you know we don't support unpaid internships at all and also it's hard for us to personally work with companies that provide unpaid internships because if they're not going to pay their interns very very less chance that they're going to pay for Simba too and and that brings me to what's next for Simba, right? So all of this makes sense, but what's the opportunity you see that's just coming up,

that's becoming bigger over time? You mentioned, you know, going into new grad programs, but is there like a particular area you're really excited about or something that you think other people aren't seeing just because they don't have the kind of insight you have into this problem? I think what gets our team really excited is just the opportunity that there is to tap into young talent and provide these cohort-based learning experiences. Again, and to my point earlier, it's not just college students who need these internships,

it's everyone, high school students, moms who want to get back into the workforce, veterans, people who are trying to acquire new skills and don't want to commit to a full-time job yet, you know, people who can do two or three internships at a time. There's just so much opportunity around companies who can offer these internship experiences and that's what we're trying to tackle. You know, it's not about making it just easier and saving time and money for our customers. It's about helping them realize the potential that if they do save time and money, they can offer and open up more positions and more positions means more access to the workforce. And what's next for Simba is we're going to be, you know, we have

different hypotheses about how engaging these programs can be, how much companies have been able to scale. Actually, over 80% of our companies have renewed with higher user seats, which makes us so happy because we're seeing them scale their programs. Some even starting off with just hiring 20 interns last year and are now already hitting over, you know, in the three in the triple digits next year. So it's just incredible to see that scale and that growth. And again, it's opening up the workforce and making it more accessible to everyone. And what we're excited to tap into is seeing, you know, how can more companies offer these positions, track their metrics, have oversight, build the best experiences, and then how we can create a really awesome community of talent that is willing to, you know,

tap into this. So we definitely are drafting, you know, what Simba looks like in the next five to 10 years, but there's just some really exciting opportunity around the space. And it's untapped, it's underserved. There's a lot of investment, even by the government coming in into workforce development. And I think that Simba has a really exciting future in that sense.

Could you talk a little more about the government investment? So that's interesting, right? Because you don't generally hear of governments thinking about internships specifically. what are they trying to do yeah so president biden for example released a couple months ago that he wanted to earmark 100 billion dollars in workforce development programs so this means anything from hosting different boot camps mentorship programs and just young talent programs and just having that funding has allowed more companies who've been companies as

well as even non-profits who have been able to apply for this grant funding and even get it be able to often open up these experiences we work work with some incredible nonprofits who have this immense talent pool of students and these corporate partners where they're able to help place that talent into their into internship positions at corporate partners and corporate organizations. So when we work with nonprofits like that, we've been able to make an impact and help them get their diverse talent pool positions at companies because companies can now, you know, they have the resources, they're able to better engage and have better oversight into their programs. So government funding has definitely helped a lot of companies been able to grow their talent

pools and work with corporations to place talent into these types of development programs. Okay. And maybe as a wrap-up question, what's your advice to the manager hiring an intern for the first time? They've never done it before. They don't know where to start. What's your one piece of advice that you would give to them? I think if you're a manager and you're really excited about where you're working

and you want to hire talent and you're excited to help the company grow and nurture future leaders at your company, I think what's really important is just making sure that you'll be present for your intern as well as giving them impactful work. Nothing makes an intern feel better when they know that they can see their work go into action at the company. When I was doing software engineering internships and I saw my code being deployed and customers actually interacting with it, that made me the happiest. And again, just knowing that, you know, the company really cares about me as an intern, really wants to invest in my future and is excited to see me as a potential full-time member as well as you know is giving me assigned impact projects I think that's really important for a manager to keep in mind to ensure

that their interns can have the best experience. I think I think that makes sense and I think just generally the combination of college degrees getting more expensive and this is my opinion remote work becoming a bigger thing. I think remote internships are just going to grow. So it's a really exciting future, I think. And I'm also excited for Simba's future. And Nikita, thank you so much for being a guest. This was a lot of fun. Thank you for having me. And super excited to, you know, just continue on this journey. Thanks again.