The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Nobody Discusses Work Software Outside of Work -- and Then There’s Slack

Episode Date: January 13, 2016

For as long as there has been software we have had this collective hope -- maybe more of a desire -- that software will make all kinds of work easier, more productive, and more creative. Spreadsheets, computer-aided design tools, digital publishing platforms, though never perfect, are examples of software that have definitely changed how we work and what is possible. Still, you find very few people enthusing about Excel over cocktails. So what is going on with Slack? The messaging app crops up in conversation at dinner parties. It’s become a kind of cultural signifier of a tech savvy workforce that is always looking for better ways to connect -- inside and outside of work. In this segment of the podcast we discuss Slack with its founder Stewart Butterfield. Why Slack has resonated so well across all types of people, from engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab to dentists, and what that says about how we work today and about our ongoing quest for the perfect tools and services to get the job done. The conversation happened as part of a16z’s Capital Summit. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. For as long as there has been software, we've had this collective hope, maybe more of a desire, that software, will make all kinds of work easier, more productive, and more creative. Spreadsheets, computer-aided design tools, digital publishing platforms, though never perfect, are examples of software that have definitely changed how we work and what is possible.

Still, you find very few people enthusing about Excel over cocktails. So what is going on with Slack? The messaging app crops up in conversation at dinner parties. It's become a kind of cultural signifier. of a tech-savvy workforce that is always looking for better ways to connect inside and outside of work. In this segment of the A16Z podcast,

we discussed Slack with its founder, Stuart Butterfield, why Slack has resonated so well across all types of people, from engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to dentists, and what that says about how we work today and about our ongoing quest for the perfect tools and services to get the job done.

The conversation happened as part of A16Z's Capital Summit. Stuart, welcome. I guess Mark told your origin story, how you're out to build a massively multiplayer online game. So my only question, we don't want to rehash that, but like, why, for the love of God, you've done this twice now, can you not build a gaming company? Gaming companies are much harder. I think games are harder to build. I mean, it's actually in some way

is a serious answer that it's good practice for any other kind of software you might want to make for two reasons. One is because technically they're pretty challenging, but probably more importantly, the amount of patience that someone has for a game before they start playing it is about zero. So if you're not able to capture their attention really early on, if the new user experience isn't really smooth,

then you're going to lose, and those lessons apply to pretty much any other software product category. So it happened at Flickr, but then it happened again at Slack, but was that the moment where you're like, right, people aren't playing our game, but we have this other thing we built to build the game together? Like, when did you know that the product was Slack, or at least the proto Slack? There was no aha moment. I think there's a long process of argument, and it's funny because I just found the pitch deck that I took down to John O'Farrell and Frank Chen, Franks here, which is exactly what we ended. to that building.

It was like almost three years ago. And the response was kind of, yeah, I guess you might as well do that. I'm not sure what else you're going to do. So there's definitely no moment of perfect clarity. However, in retrospect, looking back at that, I think what really helped us was we spent three and a half years working on the game. There's 45 people at peak. And we had a bit of patience for internal communication.

problems, but in an entirely non-self-conscious way, with no speculation about what users might like, we solved our most immediate problems in the fewest number of minutes we could and then just kept on doing that over the course of years. And so by the end, we had this system that we knew worked really well

for us. It was still a question of whether it would work well for others. And that's in contrast to, you know, often when you start off, you have these kind of grandiose visions of what it could do, what you could imagine people wanting from software, but it's really generally very speculative

and this was entirely empirically tested and proven so I don't think we recognized that at the time but in retrospect that was right so when you were building this product for yourselves what were the things that you just unselfconsciously wanted to solve for?

One of them was transparency across the organization so transparency I feel like is a little bit of a loaded term and has some political connotations and Edward Snowden and stuff like that or it means the bosses can see what the workers are doing or conversely the boxes are open with the workers about what's going on with a company.

And that's not the sense in which we mean it. We mean lateral transparency, so across functional groups, people can see what their peers are working on. Because when you get big enough, within your group, there'll be sufficient communication, and then that'll go up to a manager, and then the next morning stand-up meeting will go across to another manager, and then over the course that day, go down to the other group. But if the marketing team has perfect clarity about what's going on with sales,

and can see where they're falling down, see where they need better materials, if the technical operations team can see what's going on with customer support, if the engineers can see what the designers are working on next, there's a huge amount of value you get out of that. And the second one was, and this, again, this wasn't a thesis that we had or anything like that, just a result of the work that we did. We would have people start, and they would have the whole history of all communication

that happened before they got there available to them. And that's in contrast to an email-based organization where on your first day you literally have an empty inbox, and the company might have exchanged, depending on its size, hundreds of thousands or millions, or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of messages before you got there, and you have access to none of those. So sometimes it's important to be able to go back and see the origins of some decisions,

sometimes how we dealt with this problem last time it arose, but also just the ability to scroll back and have a writing transcript of how people interact with each other. You get a sense of the social protocols, what the expectations are about response time, who really knows the answers to what kinds of questions, who makes the decisions? Because there's that process of triangulation when you start in a new organization where you know a couple of your peers, you know your manager, and you have to figure out how this place operates, because every person is idiosyncratic,

but every organization is like the multiplication of all those idiosyncrasies and can be hard to figure out. Look, we've been trying to solve this problem of how to work together, how to collaborate, how to communicate for a long, long time. You know, Lotus Notes and before that. What's been so hard about it, this is a three-part question, what's been so hard, you know, why now, what's in place both sort of in terms of technology

and behavior to make it work now. And then also, like, what do you guys know that nobody else knew or knows? Like, how is it that you guys were able to pull it off? So I'll take the Peter Thiel question first. I don't know that there is anything that we know better, like, you know, some secret that we have that no one else knows.

I think in our case it's purely a matter of execution. But skipping back, the why now question, I think, is really important. And if you think back 10 years ago, 2005, many of you in this room will have had the very coolest phone that you could possibly get, which was on back order all the time, and hard to get your hands on, which is a Motorola razor. And if you think back to that now, like what a...

Ooh, I had one. Yeah. I love that phone. And the little, like, the blue glow and the LED. But think of what a different kind of device that was than what you carry around today. It's not just that, like, the screen is bigger, and it's... you know, the processor is faster or something like that. Our relationship to those devices and our relationship to other humans as mediated by those devices is entirely different than what it was before.

So the reason I was into games was in 1992. I started college and I got an account on the school's Unix server and I discovered Usenet and Talk and IRC and I got my mind blown by the idea that humans could use computers to interact with each other. And the games were a hope that we could build some social, substrate that would make those interactions interesting in the form of a game. But I was on IRC in 1993. I was on ICQ in 99 or whatever that was.

Had a Blackberry early on Messenger. So for me and for almost everyone here, messaging as an application of the Internet and as an application of computing technology is really old and very familiar. But my mom didn't send her first, and I'm trying to use my mom as the canonical example of a naive user, But my mom didn't send her first message of any kind until about two years ago. She sent me an I message. And the advent of the smartphone, I think, opened that up via SMS. Because SMS back in the day of the Motorola Razor was something for Scandinavian teenagers who were amazing at T9.

But now, you know, the last, I don't know, four or five years, Facebook's brought another 700 million people online. And not just online, but online in the sense that this is one of the avenues by which they, conduct their relationships. Like their relationship with their significant other with their children, with their siblings, with their business partners is mediated through these little devices in their hands. And that's so different.

And so I think if we had started Slack three years earlier, we just wouldn't have taken off the way it did. It might have been a moderate success, but it wouldn't have taken off the way it did. So technology, mobile, and then also this behavioral part where your mom and the rest of us are all. Yeah, and I'm not sure it's like

necessarily just a form factor or mobile in particular, but mobile as like a proxy for all the other changes that that brought. So, first of all, new software systems, but also connectivity. We forget now, I think, how recent it is that we've had amazing internet everywhere we go. Like, it's like three years or something like that. In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country to get over 50% penetration of internet connections in homes, and that was still dial-up.

So it was like, I think, 2004 in the U.S. before dial-up got to 50%. And this kind of always-on availability is really new. I was about to call you an enterprise software company, but then is that even a correct description? Or does that sort of... If the distinction is consumer versus enterprise, then definitely, yes, enterprise. I think we think of ourselves as a business software company.

So we value and treasure our customers in the SMB sector just as much as the enterprise sector. we end up with on a per customer basis, obviously much more revenue from our biggest customers. It's kind of tautologically true. And I think over time, we will have higher margins from those customers. They'll represent a greater percentage of our total revenue versus the total users. But I think to be successful at the scale, we would like to be successful. We would like every dentist to be using it.

Right. Well, so you brought it up. So let's talk about customers. At the beginning, one of the things that you noticed was, there were advocates or profits for slack out there who were using it. And it was sort of the cool companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. And they talked about how much they liked it. But then you saw a shift where it wasn't just Airbnb or whomever.

It was kind of across the board. So what did their customer base look like at the beginning? And how did it sort of cross-pollinate? And then let's talk about where you're headed next in terms of customer base. So there's a really interesting experience when we've, going back to that origin story for a second, we decided that we were going to do this right at the very end of 2012. So we didn't get started until January of 2013.

And by March, we had done enough that we could use it. And then May, we started trying to convince our friends at other companies to use it. And immediately we're like, this is going to be way harder than we thought. Because we have to, A, ask a whole group of people to change their behavior, which is hard enough. I mean, you compare it to, say, Dropbox,

which I can decide by myself, hey, I'm lazy, I don't like to back up, and I want my same files on these two computers. nine bucks a month, great deal, I'm going to do it. But you can't unilaterally decide that you are going to use Slack for team communication. You have to get the whole team. And especially at the early stages, it's very, it's vulnerable to any one cranky-pants person who doesn't want to go along.

So the key is like everyone has to use it. Yeah, and it's absolutely binary. So if we get to 80% of the team, and that's it, then it goes to zero. It's 100% or it's nothing. So with that in mind, you know, the very first customers were the ones that we were persistent enough to be able to convince. and a handful of startups all in San Francisco. And from there, it started to spread in many different ways.

So one was people, and this is the entrepreneurial dream, people liked it enough that they would tell their friends about it. And most people don't tell their friends about the software that they use at work. Like no one, forgive me if there's anyone from concur here, but no one at the dinner party is like, I had this amazing experience filing my expenses, and I would highly recommend it to everyone else. I was reading a story the other day about how San Francisco is changing demographically,

and Slack was used as kind of a cultural shorthand for the people who are moving into San Francisco. I mean, so it's, again, it's gone beyond this kind of, you know, humdrum, work-a-day thing to a cultural touch point. Yeah, so some of those, I mean, it spread from there because people would tweet about it, and they would say that they love it, and so people would see it. We also, this took a little bit longer, but we got the sort of, who were in the same position that Twitter was in 2000. where approximately 0% of the world uses your product, but 100% of the tech press does and the business press. So, I mean, like the economist in New York Times and Fast Company and Courts and Business Insider

and Vox and Gawker and almost everyone who covers either tech or business and pretty much every other media outlet besides that uses Slack. So everything we do seems like it's super significant and important. And that helped in the spread as well because people would hear about it multiple times. They would see people tweeting about it. They had a friend mentioned it. They would see it on people's phones and ask what it was. They would read an article about it.

And then there's two different ways it would spread. One was, here's one example. Nordstrom bought two companies. One company called Outlook and another one called Trunk Club. And both of them were Slack users. So Slack got into Nordstrom through that. Trojan Horse kind of, huh? Yeah, and also people would get recruited from their current job

at a Slack using company to a new company and say, the way you do, I mean, every person you hire has a, way of coming and saying, this is not what we did at Google, and this is probably the wrong thing that you're doing. But they would say, we really should use Slack. It was great at my previous company. Here's all the reasons why. And sometimes that would work.

And it would spread in that way. So yeah, it spreads from team to team to team and then takes over an enterprise in theory. So going back to your original question, people have the impression that it's Silicon Valley companies. At this point, the U.S. and Canada put together are 47% of our daily active users, roughly 30% in Europe, 20% in Asia. Japan was our number two country, both for paid seats and daily active users, until it got dislodged by the UK and Germany. And it's across all kinds of industries.

We have a big team at the General Services Administration, which is kind of like the least like a Silicon Valley story that I can imagine. But also the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA and a small dental practice in the north of England and everything in between. And is it, I mean, in the early days, the way people were describing was like, look, it's trying to kill email. But what are you trying to kill or not kill or perpetuate within an enterprise? I had hippie parents and grew up in a log cabin, so I'm not trying to kill anyone, man. But it's a very easy headline, and it's people want to click on it. And to some extent, it makes sense. And I think that in the ideal case, we will kill email inside.

of the organization because I think email is a pretty terrible way to handle internal communication for a couple of reasons. One is the transparency they mentioned. The second one is having that transcript, that archive that builds value over time so that when a new person comes in, they have access to everything.

But email crosses organizational boundaries very well. It's how we set up this conversation. It's how people like us will set up conversations like this 10 years from now and the future. I mean, sorry, email will probably be around you know, three, four decades from now, and it might even be like the cockroach of the internet.

Like, it just won't ever be exterminated. But it does have some virtues. I just think it's not a great tool for internal communication. So you talk about your customers and the growth, and you also talk about how the paying customers, it's expensive. This is sort of a roundabout way to get to your valuation. You're a rational guy, and I want you to explain to me rationally how you view your valuation.

Okay, that's a good question. And look where we are. What a great audience for this. So part of it, and I'm not sure how the degree to which everyone would like to admit this is one of the factors that drives valuation is there is exactly one of us. And if you want to invest at us, this is the price. I mean, so there's a supply and demand issue that comes into play. The second one, and this is something that we're very conscious of because we have a conversation, what would be too high evaluation for us?

What would make us uneasy and why would it make us uneasy? And obviously we cut off a lot of options. The higher the valuation, the fewer possibilities there are for acquisition because only a smaller number of companies can afford it, and I'm not even going to go through the rest. But the dangerous one for us is we don't hit that price by the time that we are ready to IPO, and we have to wait and we're in this weird limbo where we just can't do it

unless we're willing to take the haircut. And that's not the end of the world, right? Like, you know, if you still created several billion dollars worth of value and it's just not quite as many billions at the time of the IPO, then it could have been, then that's not so bad. But valuations in general, I think now,

I don't have a lot of insight into other companies, I don't know where they're at, but I think they're largely on the basis of the ability to generate revenue or free cash flow and the rate of growth. So our multiple is crazy in one sense, but although our valuation has gone like this over the last year, the multiple has come down pretty dramatically. And it's continuing to come down because we're still growing at 15% a month. 15. Yeah. And so if you think about that in comparison to a public company, yeah, the multiple is going to be very different, but there aren't public companies that are.

growing revenue 15% a month. That's not a thing. So it's what you believe about the total address of the market. It's what you believe about the trajectory and whether as you extrapolate out, there's whatever the delta is when you go out 18 months from now in your projections, if the bottom end feels comfortable for that price, then the bottom end feels comfortable for that price. What are your customers, so it's hard to get people to pay for anything, but what are they willing to pay for and why are they happy to pay for it, shall we say? they're willing to pay because the value has, and it's tough, but because the value that they're getting is much more than what we're asking them to pay.

We're asking them to pay about one-two-thousandth of the total cost of employment for a knowledge worker. They don't see it that way when you get this new bill for a thing that you didn't have to pay for all at once, and you're like, depending on the size of your business, you know, it's five grand, or it's 250 grand or whatever. But, you know, we did this survey of 16, we went at 1,600-something, responses from Slack team owners and administrators. And we asked them a bunch of questions. So to what degree has Slack reduced your internal email or reduced meetings or increased productivity?

And so this is entirely subjective. This is the weighted average of their responses. And I'm not sure this would stand up to econometric scrutiny. But 50% less email, 25% of fewer meetings, 80% agreed, increases transparency. But the big one was the weighted average of all the responses on how much has it increased your productivity was 30% And if it was really 32%, you know, that's like a couple decades worth of accumulated productivity

gains in the natural course of economic development. So that's probably an exaggeration. But even at a 1% productivity gain, there's a huge ROI for them. And if it's 2 or 5 or 8%, that's a pretty magical thing. I mean, that's like a lot more capacity. And it's obviously much cheaper to buy some software for 5 grand or 10 grand or 100 grand, depending on the size of your organization than it is to hire for. 5% more headcount or 8% more headcount or 8% more headcount or 10% more headcount.

Let's talk about the future. You know, the old world of software that we use at work. I'm not going to call it enterprise software, but it was this sweet approach, right? So I'm Microsoft, I'm SIP, I give you everything you need, whether you want it or not, and here are the different products I use. Do you, as you grow, and your ambition sounds like it's massive, do you need to take that kind of like, we're taking over, you know, the enterprise this way and this way? Is it necessary that you have that kind of sweet approach and or do you think that that's a relic of the past?

I think relic of the past might not be the right way to put it, but I think it's something that's no longer possible. And if you'll allow me to pander to our hosts for a moment, software is eating the world. And one of the side effects of that, I think, is the application of software to problems that didn't have software applied to them before. So there's new product categories that emerge all the time. Application performance monitoring is a whole new thing that this didn't exist 10 years ago. Even things that did exist 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, 20 years ago, CRM, for example, are unrecognizable in the contemporary form versus what they used to be. The proliferation of marketing analytics tools, of BI tools,

of productivity enhancers for software development organizations, very big. And now, so, I mean, I remember 20 years ago, we bought most of our software, like most companies, from Microsoft. We had some other stuff. We were a design agency. This is not this company. So we bought several things from Adobe, and there's a couple of other vendors,

but we got most of it from Microsoft. That's no longer possible, because if you think about, first of all, it wouldn't make sense anyway. Wow. Not if you're talking to Microsoft, but anyway. Well, you need to do more things than Microsoft empowers you to do.

No matter how broad the suite is. I look around our company, we buy software from about 50 different vendors. And this is like software as a service from here. Right. Because there's at least five things on the marketing analytics side because they're paid advertising and they're up there. So I mean convertro, Mercado, optimizely, and on CRM, two different packages. And we buy NetSuite and concur.

But also the software developers keep their code in GitHub, and we use Endes for customer support ticketing. And on and on and on. So document, editing, collaboration, all those different categories, project management, bug tracking, mobile crash reporting, application performance monitoring.

Most companies are buying software from all over the place. So first of all, the suite would be far too broad for anyone to do, period, and certainly for anyone to do well. But that's actually something that one of the reasons I think Slack

has been successful now is because there is no place where it all comes together, 20 years ago when everything, almost everything we bought was from Microsoft, the same VB script that we used to do Excel macros could be used to tie MS project

to Outlook for task assignments. And there was these technologies like ActiveX and OLE, which made Microsoft stuff work with other Microsoft stuff. And the server environments that we developed for were perfectly meshed with visual source safe and

stuff like that. So it was a neat package in a specific server. Yeah, it was a neat package for a lot of the things you had to do, but now there's too many. And there is no place where everything comes together. For most teams that come to use Slack, it's not just the messaging, which is very important. But not just the messaging from humans. It's the messaging from everyone else. So on our team, the Slack team, we have 250 people.

We do about 20,000 messages a day from people. And we do another 80 to 100,000 messages a day from machines. And if you think about your own email and just try to divide left, probably 80% of it is from machines. It's things like someone followed you on Twitter or this expense report requires your approval. Or here's the receipt for your lift ride. or whatever it is. In the business context, obviously, there's all those messages and more.

We get 20,000, 25,000 support tickets in Zendesk a month. We have about an equivalent number of people tweeting at us every month. We have every sale going through there, every crash report, every time we check and code, every bug that gets reported. And having all of that searchable and accessible in one place is something that just wasn't possible before. And I think it's also one of those things that once you get it, you will not be able to live without it. So how does then Slack sit within all that stuff?

Like just how do you describe it? Are you the what for the enterprise then? Sometimes we say the bottom layer of the business technology stack. There's a customer who had a really nice mixed metaphor, which is the blank canvas operating system for your team. The blank canvas operating system for your team. Yeah. And people do treat it like that.

I think the bottom layer of the business technology stack is the articulation we like. because it gives us a nice place right down the bottom, and everything else plugs into it. But the relationship that we hope to have with everyone else is we make them a little bit better or we make your use of their product a little bit better. So here's an example of that. If you use Dropbox and you're going to send someone a link to a file in Dropbox

and you send it via G-chat, then what they will see is a long nonsense string. That's the URL. If you send it in Slack, then we'll go get the actual name of the file and we'll show our preview of it and we'll also index it. We'll take a copy and index it for search so that you can find it again later. Does that make your use of Dropbox like 100% better? No, but it makes your use of Dropbox like 2% better or 5% better.

And by the way, we'll do that for Box as well. And we'll also do that for Google Drive and we'll do that for One Drive. And go through every other single tool that you use. We'll make all of them just that little bit better. And that would be enough to justify certainly the cost of Slack, which is 22 cents per user per day on the base plan. It's not really less than what most companies spend on soda pop, but

at this point. But just the enhancement to productivity and all the other tools would be worth it. Microsoft made an announcement recently with its office 2016 product, and they said they had a slack killer.

Clearly, they weren't raised by hippies in Canada. But what first off, what was your reaction to reading that? very proud moment, as you might imagine. That's kind of what you want. What was awesome about it was it must have been sanctioned at some level because it was the

CMO who said it. But the sentence went on to say a Slack killer, four teams that are using Office 365. And I think that'll be the access by which we're able to compete because Office 365 is actually doing really well. I don't know if all these people were actually using it, but the headline number is 100 million people. But if you have to be

fully committed to the Microsoft Slack in order to use their Slack killer then their Slack killer can only kill Slack to the extent that... So if they end up with 40%, could kill Slack. If they end up with 40% of the total market for whatever Office 365 is

now, that leaves 60% for us and will also take some of the people who are fully committed to the Microsoft sack. Not to say that it's not dangerous for us. And we don't know what this Microsoft is yet. I have a huge amount of respect for Sotcha and

Chi Liu, who's one of the three SEPs, I worked with for a long time of Yahoo and he's an incredible hard worker and a genius. I don't know if this is the same Microsoft that just wants to kill stuff to like Netscape for the sake of killing it, whether they view us as that kind of

threat or whether there's a possibility to work together, how aggressive they'll be. So we'll see. I mean, to be totally frank, it's the one company that I really worry about from a competitive angle. And I think it's going to take them a long time to get where we are. And I think it's also going to take them a long time, if ever, to lose the mentality of it's Microsoft first. So, I mean, I just want to get a little bit into the culture of, well, you and your team, then how do you fend off?

It sounds like, you know, you guys are girding yourselves to, you know, see where Microsoft goes and take them on. But, I mean, as a company, how do you plan on fending Microsoft and others off. I might have a very different answer for this question 18 months from now, so we'll see how it plays out. But we try not to be reactive to what competitors are doing. We hired a CMO, a guy named Bill Mocytis, who was the perfect match culturally for us because the priority has been and will continue to be, if we make our customers very happy,

then A, we'll retain them. And we have industry beating churn, like 20 basis points of trillions. turn a month. And they will go on to recommend us. And if that's where the focus is on making customers really happy, then we will continue to succeed on the same basis that we have. Because that 15% monthly growth is coming from people recommending us. We're just at the very beginning stages of being able to test paid advertising and other marketing programs. So that I hope will be a factor that allows us to continue to drive growth into the future. But that 15% a month right now is coming from people love it. And if we can keep that as we grow, then

It doesn't matter what my... That flywheel is going. It doesn't matter where anyone else does. Right. Stuart, final question. Will you ever successfully build a gaming company? No, I'm done. That's it.

Good. That's fun. I'm actually glad to hear that. Stuart Butterfield. Thank you so much. Thanks, Michael.