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- [00:00]
A
I think both of us have been in positions before where we're looked at, rightly or wrongly, as kind of the no department.
- [00:05]
B
I don't see us as the no people at all. I see us as the yes, but people where we want to spend money and we want to invest, but we just want to understand where that money is going. But the thesis on the payback is going to look like what we think we're getting for that money and being able to measure it and actually tell what's working versus what's not.
- [00:22]
A
You've been a part of both the Datadog IPO and the UiPath. You actually called them like a branding event.
- [00:28]
B
It can have, you know, go to market benefits. Right. Because it kind of brings the whole like, ethos and the company brand into the mainstream. Right. So then people might start asking you about it and there's more awareness around the company and the brand. So there are tangible payoffs. I have some parts of my group that are more like aligned to the business, like out working with them, and I have some that are more insularly focused on finance. They're like, well, if I just had that thing, then I'd be able to like unlock a lot of opportunity. And I'm like, guys, you know I'm having this exact same conversation with your peer on the other side.
- [00:56]
A
That's so funny. It's like the Spider man pointing meme where they're both like, I want to do that. And they're like, but I want to do that. Is this thing on? Yesterday's price is not today's price. Welcome back to Run the Numbers. My name is cj. I'm what I think I'm a recovering tech CFO at this point. So I've got my buddy AJ Lyubich, SVP of FPA at Data Dog. Yes, I've been such a huge fan of Datadog for a while because I come from the Boston area originally and that's where Datadog it started. This is the deepest of deep dives we've ever done on fpa. He's probably the best FPA leader I've ever spoken to. He has all these frameworks around the maturity cycle of a high performing FPA team. And what's really cool about AJ is he also spent time on the sell side as a banker. And so he was the one on all these earnings calls asking questions before he made the shift over to the operator side. Once he got over to the operator side, he helped take both Datadog and UiPath public. So he has IPO experience, watching from the sell side and quizzing everybody. And then actually as a practitioner, taking two companies public, two high profile companies. He helped take Datadog public. Then he took a tour of duty at UiPath helping to take them public and then came back to Datadog where he now runs their FP&A team. AJ also talks about the intersection of investor relations and FP&A. I've written about this extensive, extensively over the past month or so, how the roles are blending a bit and how the profile of a high performing investor relations professional has changed. If you're an FPA and you want to learn how the pros really do it, you're going to love this episode. AJ thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:45]
B
Thanks for having me, C.J.
- [02:46]
A
i never thought I'd be able to do a show where the host and the guests accumulate only four letters.
- [02:51]
B
I know, I like it. What is your actual government name?
- [02:54]
A
My government name is Carl John.
- [02:56]
B
I'm an Alexander Joseph.
- [02:58]
A
Four letter boys are here to shake things up. I'm so excited to have you on because we had a blast at Rillet's conference where we did that panel.
- [03:05]
B
Yeah, it was great. And I feel like I actually learned a lot from other finance leaders.
- [03:09]
A
Your answers were just so authentic about how you're using AI, how you're running your team, and like your background on how you've helped take two companies public. Maybe just to kick things off here, A.J. you said something that really struck me. You said that FP&A should operate more like a product team than a reporting function. And I was like, that's beautiful. FPA as a product team, can you break that down for me?
- [03:30]
B
I think of FPA in its best case. We really act as the connective tissue across the organization and through different data sets as well. The way that we structure our team is I have essentially five sub teams that are all partnered within every department at the organization. So we have full coverage across the Org. And the reality too is that we, we have access to really all the data, which is very rare within your organization. We have all the customer data, all the revenue data, all the usage data, all the expense data, all the headcount data. And it's very rare that any team within an organization has that much access. So how we actually leverage that and utilize it really is to make sure that the different departments understand how they're operating in context of the whole company. Also that they're talking to each other. So that the way that we're resource Allocated and growing is consistent across different departments and it gives them a little bit of a, of a guiding light back to the financials and the numbers, the end of the day. So I think it is somewhat analogous to a product organization where they're kind of the, the intersection of engineers who are actually building and making the product and then the commercial side of the house, which are those that are actually selling the product and the customers that are utilizing it. And there's this constant sort of feedback loop across all those different pieces. We kind of sit at a similar intersection where at the end of the day we're finance people and we have access to all this data and we're managing the financials, but we're really supporting the organization and, you know, achieving its objectives and growing together.
- [04:53]
A
What are the five pillars?
- [04:55]
B
Go to market, sales, customer success, basically everything pre and post sales to actually sell the product.
- [05:01]
A
So that's a business partner that's on go to market then?
- [05:03]
B
Yeah, one part of the team that, that runs go to market FPA as a, as a function. The other big departmental piece is R and D. So both the engineering and the product sides of the house. I have a team that does corporate FPA which essentially brings together all of those pieces, sort of a consolidation to manage the P and L and then also partners with GNA or the other corporate functions. And then I have a team that does all of our revenue forecasting and analytics. And then I have one more team that does what we call data and insights, which essentially helps us leverage all of this data as a multiplier across the rest of the team to be successful with that information.
- [05:36]
A
It's so fascinating and awesome how far FP&A has come in the last 10 years. So I got my start on the operator side of the table after coming from private equity in building out an FP&A team. I didn't know what FP&A was. They just wanted someone who was like a financial athlete, for lack of a better term, who could go in and create an operating plan that wasn't created by the accounting team. And the way that you describe it now is what I think all high performing FP&A teams are doing where they're splitting it out between the go to market side, the R and D side, the corporate side, and then you have these other functional areas as well that tap into different strategic veins of the company. Yeah, yeah.
- [06:14]
B
And, and my background was somewhat similar too. I kind of got into this, you know, the FPA role not knowing exactly what it was. I'M a smart guy and I like, you know, numbers and analysis and I want to figure it out and then gradually just organically building on top of the foundation that I was building and then knowing that I needed to partner with everybody at the organization in a more dedicated way to be able to achieve both my objectives as a finance leader, but then also their objectives to actually run the business.
- [06:39]
A
Is the product per se that each of those five teams is putting out different?
- [06:43]
B
Yes, because it's contextualized based on each department's kind of needs, you know, and I think about the product, right, that we're delivering in its most traditional sense. FP&A can be a reporting function, right? Like every FP and A team everywhere has some sort of reporting that you're delivering. You know, it's most sort of commodity sense can be a bva like, okay, how is the year progressing and how does that compare to the annual plan that we, we started from? And that can be very high level just at like a financial sort of aggregated sense. But the further you click down into sort of the different departments, the KPIs and what actually drives that performance is very different. And then ultimately I think the product that we actually want to deliver is something that's much more proactive and also strategic. And in order to do that, you also need to almost put yourself in the lens or the seat of those operators and what they actually care about is going to be very different depending on the department or the angle that they're coming from.
- [07:33]
A
Well, just to drill into that, how do you know you're doing a good job? Because it's not like you have a revenue target and it's not like you have a product roadmap that you're trying to hit these timelines which also links to an underlying revenue target. Is it a different gauge for each of those five groups or is it just, hey, the company's hitting their number, we must be doing a good job.
- [07:51]
B
It's a good question and it is an interesting concept because as very data driven people, we actually don't have many KPIs that relate to ourselves. I think the most sort of numeric or quantitative relate to. Especially as a public company, we do have deliverables, right. So every single quarter we're issuing guidance and then we're executing against it. So having good visibility and understanding any variances relative to that guidance, which ultimately is, is based on the foundation of forecasts that my team are putting out, I think that cycle is one that's very telling. Of any, any oopsies along the way or a nice steady flow of performance that you would expect. And then the other one too is relative to the annual plan. You know, we set an annual budget, we set annual, you know, sales targets, revenue targets, profit targets, an execution on that. That either is what you would expect or you can explain any variances. I think those are markers of success. But really at the end of the day, I think, you know, this is a people business. If I'm being genuine, the markers of success that I actually experience is really people just reaching out and saying like this person within your team added a lot of value to this work stream or they give us visibility into a trend that I didn't even know was happening. And now I'm thinking about and I'm using with my leadership team to actually run our business. And then ultimately too, I think the major marker that comes out of that is things like people's career development and promotion cycles and getting really interesting, you know, different opportunities, whether it's insularly into my group or elsewhere within the company and doing other things. And frankly the investments that we've received from the business, which is, you know, a sign of those dividends paying off of the value that we're adding to the org.
- [09:18]
A
I often think about business partnering success being if you turned it off, would the departmental leaders just be heartbroken? Would they just be like, I don't know what to do?
- [09:26]
B
It's actually interesting being at Datadog because sometimes we use, even for our own product, we use kind of this car analogy where you can drive a vehicle without a dashboard. Like, you know, everything works like the steering wheel works, the engine works, the wheels, they will turn. So you can drive a car, you know, without that. But what we provide is that dashboard. So you actually understand how fast you're going, you understand how much gas you have in the engine. You know, like you understand the actual performance of the vehicle so you can drive forward with confidence. I think the same analogy works within fpa. Like yes, my whole team can disappear tomorrow and the business isn't going to fold. But I think the visibility that all those leaders feel like they're they're receiving will dissipate. The connectivity between those different parts of the organization will go away. And then what the forward looking momentum of the organization looks like, there's going to be a lot of question marks around it that you don't have seasoned folks to help you navigate through.
- [10:18]
A
That's an incredible analogy. Hey, thanks for listening. We'll be right back after A word from our sponsors the CFO role has evolved faster than the tools built to support it. Most finance teams are still running infrastructure designed for a job that no longer exists. The reporting, the reconciling, the close that bleeds into the next month or quarter. That's not finance. That's overhead with a really crappy title. And the cost isn't just your time. It's everything your best people aren't doing while they're buried in it. Agentic finance shouldn't multiply your output. It should eliminate the work that was never worth doing in the first place. That's why I run mostly media on Brex, an intelligent finance platform with AI powered agents that capture expenses automatically, enforce policy before the spend happens, and close your books in minutes instead of weeks. 35,000 companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Anthropic, and Doordash already run on Brex. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com metrics Today's episode is brought to you by Anrock, the sales tax platform behind companies like Anthropic, Notion and Vanta. Here's a fun way to totally ruin a Tuesday Open a letter from a state you've never set foot in telling you that you owe back taxes you didn't know existed. Happen to me. Because the rules never stop moving. Stop. States are now racing to tax AI digital ads streaming. Really anything new, and they're doing it faster than a spreadsheet can keep up. Anrok handles all of it. One platform that watches your exposure everywhere, automates compliance and flags risk before it turns into that nasty gram. That's why thousands of finance leaders trust Anaroc to stay ahead. Talk to an Anaroc sales tax expert for a personalized exposure estimate@anroc.com RTN that is a N R O K.com RTN here's a growth tax that nobody talks about. Every new pricing model you ship creates a nightmare for your finance team. Usage based pricing. Now you're tracking usage against commitments product bundles. Now you're untangling what to recognize and when for every line item. Mid cycle upgrades. Good luck. Manually reallocating revenue. The pricing strategies that drive growth are the same ones that break your finance process. Right rev turns that irony into a competitive advantage. Your product team can ship new pricing without asking finance for permission, and your sales team can close deals without worrying about downstream chaos. But I've seen too many companies where sales are celebrating a huge quarter while finance is still trying to figure out how to recognize half of it it's actually me. So here's a good place to start. WriterRev built a free tool at calculator.wrightrev.com it scores your RevRec process, shows what's exposing you to risk, and tells you exactly where to focus before it bites you in the rear. Probably explains why your last close took so long. Check it out@calculator.wrightrev.com all right. Without the Boston accent. Calculator.wrightrev.com AJ do you think there's a maturity cycle to FP&A.
- [13:22]
B
Yeah, big time. It's one that I've lived a couple times over the way that I think about it and I've even shown sort of my team internally. We think about four kind of stages. The first two being, I'd say more sort of standard FP and A like stuff that that any FP and a group probably has to do. And then the latter two are probably more strategic finance like what we really want to aspire to. The first one is foundational. It's all really centered around data and a lot of that has to do with good connective connectivity with the accounting team and just making sure you understand the ledger and you know what's hitting the books and you know what KPIs matter for the organization to actually manage to and watch for from there. Then the second phase I would say is what do you do with that data? And that's contextualizing things like your forecasting and analytics. So so that when you do something like, you know, a BVA or a budget versus actual analysis, which can be relatively high level and pretty rote in, you know, in its base case actually going the level deeper of not just this is what the numbers say, but why do the numbers say that? What. What is happening at the organization that's actually driving that performance? You can be a good FP and a team and sort of just do those two things. If you really want to pivot to being sort of world class or best in class or whatever you want to call it. The latter two are what matters. The one is getting to data driven decision making. That is really what I think we ultimately want to aspire to. So not just here are the numbers, but what do we do about it? And that can mean anything like territory planning across the globe. Where are we performing well, where are we not? Are there areas that we want to double down and there's huge opportunity ahead of us? Are there areas that we expected certain payoff that we're not seeing and maybe we want to, you know, reallocate those funds, connecting the dots between your revenue trends, your margin trends, your headcount, pacing, things like that to ultimately leverage the data to actually, you know, inform operations. And then the last one, which is I think really what I use as the guiding light of what to drive toward is the penultimate of FPA to me at least, is when the boundaries of what is the business and what is finance start to really dissolve and the evidences of success there when, you know, business leaders start to invite you to things like their staff meetings, their on sites, their planning huddles and their quarterly, you know, QBRs to say, hey finance, we want you both to tell us how the organization is trending and helping thought partners and how we sort of fit into that context and how do we actually apply that, you know, to the tangible actions that we're taking on the ground.
- [15:38]
A
Wow, okay. So just for the benefit of listeners, I'm going to play it back. So it's foundation setting, number one, understanding and forecasting the financials, number two, data driven decision making, number three, and becoming part of the business day to day, number four, you're at a large successful publicly traded company. Do you think you can reach all four of those levels at say like a series B stage, a series C stage?
- [16:02]
B
It does depends on the rest of the ecosystem of what's at the company. Right. Like in some earlier stages stage companies, there's like a chief of staff or somebody who's playing a lot of that sort of connective tissue type of role. Sometimes there's a large, you know, sales strategy or operations group that's doing certain pieces of that. So I definitely wouldn't do it in the spirit of, you know, creating duplicity if there's already, you know, parts of the org that are playing that role. In contrast, there's some earlier stage companies that you almost have to play that role in the FP and a seed, if you really are the only operator that understands the sort of convergence of the operations and the financials. So oftentimes earlier stage, in some ways it's actually easier to do because there's less, you know, there's less territory that you have to cover in order to be successful.
- [16:45]
A
And you were telling me you actually hold forecast meetings every Monday. Now, most finance leaders who are listening, they may be like driving to work in the morning. Listen to this. You say, wow, that sounds absolutely exhausting. Why is that worth it, A.J.
- [16:56]
B
you know, for us Datadog, we are a consumption based model. So it is really important to look you know, on a continual basis at the actual usage trends of our customers. And because we have such good data there, we can see it in pretty real time. It ultimately does. It kind of starts from that level, which is really our revenue forecast based on the consumption trends of our customers. And it's a good signal just of like the momentum of the business. And you can catch very early inflection points by very small movements in any product line, in any certain customers. And what it does is it catalyzes a conversation. So then we have that, you know, we have the forecast, it starts more insularly just in finance, and then we bring it to more of the executive team and our sales and other, you know, cross functional partners, you know, senior folks that are in that conversation. It's a springboard to have a conversation of saying, you know, we see this customer is doing xyz, did you expect that? You know, the deal progression over here, here is going, you know, this way or that way, you know, and it's just a good, healthy feedback loop for all of us to have. And then ultimately what we do is we take that revenue forecast and then we do the full sort of P and L recast and that piece stays a little bit more just within finance, separate from what is more formalized quarterly cycles, which is the one that we actually expose, obviously to the board and the fuller executive team. Once we get to that, like fully baked quarterly reforecast, there's no surprises because we've had touch bases throughout the entirety of that quarter. So we know exactly what's happening on the ground.
- [18:17]
A
Well, to dig into that, so you're reviewing it each week, but how often will you actually make a change to the underlying forecast?
- [18:25]
B
The outcome of that shouldn't be to change our operating cadence or change things within the business. Right. We don't want to overreact to small signals here or there. So it's very rare. And it's probably not a great thing if we're changing something based off of a weekly forecast. But it's more about that conversation starter and starting to plant seeds. Like even if, just as an example, if we see like pipe coverage in a certain areas looking a certain way, that might catalyze the way that we're going to, you know, analyze the quarter end once we get to it, or if we see that our sales bookings results are growing in a way that diverges from our resource allocation. Once we enter into our planning season, you know, come summertime, we've already kind of laid the groundwork of some Trends that we want to dig into. So it sort of plants the seeds for future planning, recasts. But we're not really going to make decisions in short term inflections.
- [19:06]
A
I used to always write this email to whoever my boss was. I would basically go through, these are all the things that I'm going to do next week. They acted like I was going above and beyond to basically lay out all these different things. And it was actually pretty selfish. It was actually for me and I was just sending it to them because it would allow me to say I need to go and have a conversation with the CMO and reminding myself and here's why I have to do that. In a lot of ways, I think a forecast is similar to writing those things down of like you don't know what you think until you write it down or until you do the forecast and why, while it sounds like a huge lift, you're actually giving the team this structure and these data points to go out and interact with the rest of the company.
- [19:45]
B
A lot of times the work that we do, you should start from like what you need to understand to actually like operate the business. And then what usually happens is you, you know, run, you analyze this thing and you run this forecast and it's like, actually my partners and my stakeholders might actually find a lot of value in this. Then again, there's this feedback loop where you've made your job a lot easier, you've given yourself a lot of visibility and ultimately you're giving a springboard out to the business to just leverage what you've already done.
- [20:11]
A
Talk to me about having a single source of truth. Where does it live and is it at the company level, departmental level? What does it look like?
- [20:18]
B
That one, I'd say is still on our vision board, to be really frank with you. But I think the like ethos that I try to drive forward is at the end of the day like you can do all of the great like analysis and work in the world. If it's not being leveraged by the right people in the right way, then it's kind of falling flat or it was all a little bit for naught in a single source of truth, driving towards something that's actually to be leveraged across different stakeholders and partners so that we're not in this fragmented silo of the world where, you know, the people team has their own view of things, finance has their own view, product does and go to market does. Let's just all get together because we're ultimately one team and want to have the same sort of version of the world. The reason why I'd say it's still a little bit vision state for us one is because to your question earlier every department operates a little bit differently so the context behind the questions it's hard to get to a one size fits all approach that's going to work for everybody. The reason why I feel optimistic that we're getting closer there is we do have we put into place a lot of tooling and infrastructure that will enable us to get there. We did buy just Shout out to to Pigment which is sort of a next generation like planning and forecasting tool. I'm very optimistic of what we can do there. We've now brought together all of our like revenue, ARR, headcount, expense P and L management and we're going to our sales performance and reporting as well. Once we do that I think we're really going to have a full stack both reporting, forecasting, analytics tool that's also really servicing the business and not just finance.
- [21:42]
A
Hey thanks for listening. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Hey founders and finance folks. You know how early on everything is fast and scrappy and then suddenly equity gets messy, Spreadsheets break, grant docs pile up, lawyers are sending new forms and collecting fees. It all shows up right about when you're already swamped. Well, if managing your cap table feels like one more frustrating thing on a very long to do list, you need to know about Pulley. Pulley makes equity management simple and stress free. You can issue Options, model dilution, complete 409As and more all in one place with support from real experts when you need it. So if you're raising, hiring or scaling, Pulley keeps your cap table clean so you can stay focused on building, not wrangling spreadsheets. Learn more Request a demo@pulley.com mostlymetrics that is P-U-L-L-E-Y.com mostlymetrics I got news for you. The ERP category is finally getting disrupted and if you haven't heard of RYLIT yet, please pay attention. It's the AI native ERP built specifically to replace netsuite, and it's already won over hundreds of finance teams. Their mission is to make the zero day close a reality and they're actually doing it. We're talking teams closing the books at 1:35pm on the first day of the month. Companies like Windsurf, Merkor and hundreds of others run their entire finance stack on Rylot, revenue recognition, close management, Multi entity, native storage, stripe and Salesforce integrations. Woo. Everything a scaling company needs. They've got 5.0 start 5.0wow 5.0stars on G2. They're backed by A16Z and Sequoia. Heard of them and CPA led implementations that get you live in 45 days. That is simply unheard of in the ERP space. If your books aren't running as fast as your business, check out Roll it. Book a demo@rillet.com cj that is r I l l e t.com cj that's me everyone in finance is adopting AI right now. There's a problem because there are a dozen disconnected tools. You got one for revenue, one for ap, one for close. And each one of these needs training and documentation and the expertise to run them lives in your team's heads, not your systems. Maximore takes the opposite approach. One autonomous finance platform for the whole operation order to cash, procure to pay the close, cash management reporting running on a single unified finance context that pulls from your ERP billing banks, even email and Slack. Maximore runs on self learning agents that learn how your team already works. No prompts to write, no workflows to build, nothing to document. Every output is audit ready and when a call needs human judgment it escalates for review because the agents optimize not just execute your KPIs improve. I'm talking about DSO working capital cash conversion. In fact one PE back customer cut their clothes in half, their audit findings from 7 to 0. Back office costs down 70% and in six months no ERP rip and replace. You pay only for real outcomes, not seats. See it at maxmore AI that is Max I M O R AI. Will you mention that fifth pillar of the team was a functional area for BI and insights? It sounds like and I often talk to leaders on the podcast about like is it possible to ever have this single source of truth that is also to a certain extent self service where somebody can come in and they're going to get the same numbers every time there is this friction of like some stuff is actually not meant to be self serve. You should have somebody to be able to talk you through it. But at the same time you want to empower people to be able to look at the numbers and feel ownership of them.
- [25:18]
B
Well one welcome AI, right? I think AI is democratizing a lot of that, right? We're now at our fingertips. Pretty much everyone has access to everything obviously with data limitations in place. But the scariest thing to me is exactly what you said where like anybody can sort of query like pipeline or revenue trends. And as long as they have access to the data, the AI might return some results that may not have the context or the insights that us the human sort of in the loop does. So I think that part is critically important. The way I think about it is this sort of intersection of horizontal and vertical where my data and insights team is kind of that horizontal like data experts and they're really making the team powerful to understand the data and go sort of be successful with it. That vertical is very important where you have subject matter experts that are plugged into the business and operating them, you know, every single week. And that intersection is, is then very valuable because they're using the data and then leveraging it with the business in the right way, in the right context.
- [26:13]
A
The canonical example for me, AJ of people self serving data and being mathematically correct, you're in the room and you're like, I have a different number than your number is CAC payback period. Why is CAC payback period an important metric for you to track a datadog?
- [26:27]
B
It brings together your top line momentum and results as well as your investments and the expenses. I think it's very easy to look at an investment decision and say well this is adding incremental revenue or it's growing quickly so it's successful. But then you're leaving off the picture of like what investments did it take to get there and vice versa. You might say this is cheap to do and it's quick and easy, but okay, but is that adding any incremental value? So this is one of the few metrics that actually brings those together. And I think in comparison to things like, you know, LTV to cac that I found is less valuable one because the inputs are so sensitive. You especially for a high retention, high gross margin business like us, you can get results that are just a little bit silly and also sort of hypothetical. In that sort of multiplier framework, the payback approach is very tangible. It's like if I make this investment today, I'm going to recoup my cost in a year or a year and a half or whatever it is, is it's also pretty comparable across companies. So you can go to public comps and you, if you have your non GAAP sales and marketing expense, your non GAAP gross margin and your revenue, you can get an apples to apples comparison of how efficiency compares across external stakeholders and get a good sense of how you sort of stack up against public peers. And then it's Also a rare metric because you can use it not just at that like high level company metric. You can really click down into the organization and of course you have to make some assumptions of how costs are, are allocated and things like that. You know, you can understand for us, we look at our sales channel payback to understand how our different go to market engines are working and how the efficiency there compares. And you can keep going deeper and deeper where you go by region and ultimately by country and you can look through that lens for any investment decision you're making on a, on a comparable basis.
- [28:06]
A
I love what you said about LTV to CAC actually being like almost too compound of a metric and too sensitive of a metric. I often find it interesting and telling in the long term, but actually kind of worthless in the short term.
- [28:18]
B
We're trying to make decisions based off of the data. If I get something that's very hypothetical and super sensitive to inputs, it doesn't add that much value and frankly doesn't give you much confidence moving forward with a decision.
- [28:28]
A
You mentioned using benchmarks or CAC payback period. But you also mentioned using the number internally to make decisions. Do you think CAC payback has a different value if you're talking about it operationally, just within your datadog team versus externally, either benchmarking yourself or talking to investors?
- [28:44]
B
The publicly reported metric, it's always going to be very high level and it's going to be an amalgamation of a lot of things that happen and you know, it fluctuates and every business has a different business model so it might be less or more applicable depending on like the accounting of your revenue of how much services revenue you have, what the gross margin means. So sure, there's a little bit of comparability stuff in there, but it's, it's just a helpful guidepost of are we best in class, are we middle of the pack, are we bottom decile? So you just get a little bit of the red, yellow, green there. To me the more interesting part is the one making operational decisions off of. We might want to make it an investment and throw some money at something, but we always want to start with a hypothesis of what is the actual payoff going to look like. Like in a year if we do this thing, what do we think this is going to look like? What is the incremental revenue that's going to come from it and when do we expect to, to recoup that payoff and does that degradate or improve our efficiencies as a company? And that may, you know, be a good thing or a bad thing, but we want to be very conscious with what we're moving forward with.
- [29:39]
A
Well, let's talk about that. You mentioned drilling down from global sales channels all the way down to country level CAC payback. Can, can you think of a time where that type of analysis led to a meaningful business decision?
- [29:50]
B
Datadog at its essence has kind of two core sales channels. We have one that's focused on enterprises, so larger companies. And then we have one that's more of inside sales which is more of a velocity motion selling to more of your cloud natives and smaller organizations. They have a motion where they, they land the initial customer and then they hand it off to our customer success team. One of the things that we had done initially is even just take a step back to understand between those two motions what is the relative to pay back and even you know, from being at the organization for many, many years ago, as we become more enterprise y, there was a little bit of this question of are those efficiencies going to degradate over time because an enterprise sales motion is heavier and more difficult to actually deploy. What we found is that they're relatively close to each other just because the mix of what we're spending to get that customer dollar is different. For instance, you might have more of your digital marketing spend and your advertising dollars going toward that cloud native and that more velocity motion. But you're going to have a heavier sales focus with larger ote type of AES focused on the enterprise. But net net they look and feel relatively similar when you sort of blend it all together. That's a good starting point in the benchmarking. And then some of the things that we've piloted or we've looked at are things like, you know, account coverage and ratios for every ae, how many accounts do they own and over what period of time? Because we have a blend of different, you know, AE groups that are a little bit more hunter, a little bit more, you know, curator and gardener. Will we be better off if we have our best reps holding accounts for longer? And what does that actually payback look like? We've been able to move forward with some pilots for, you know, certain groups of AES holding onto accounts longer because it's, it potentially is more expensive, right? There's more commissions, dollars and time and attention that's going to go to those accounts. But the thesis is it'll pay off and longer term healthy customer relationship and potential more use of the datadog platform. So that's where that benchmark of what good CAC payback looks like started us off on that journey of what this pilot might, you know, might actually uncover. And we've been able to move forward with confidence and continue those over time and measure the success of them.
- [31:47]
A
Sometimes you just gotta give the guy the rock and let him cook. That was, that was truly beautiful. We have a view of your finance team, how the FPA team partners. I think both of us have been in positions before where we're looked at, rightly or wrongly, as kind of the no department, the people who put the brakes on things. How have you been an advocate for growth and how have you positioned your team to say yes to the right things?
- [32:09]
B
I see when parts of the business are newer to working with finance, they oftentimes have an allergic reaction and they're like, oh God, finance is in the room, like clutch your, your pennies. And because we're going to be looking for all of them, it takes trust and relationship building and asking good questions to sort of shake that off. But I think at the end of the day, you know, especially at a growth oriented company like Datadog and a lot of growth tech companies, I don't see us as the no people at all. I see us as the yes, but people where we want to spend money and we want to invest, but we just want where that money is going, what the thesis on the payback is going to look like, what we think we're getting for that money and being able to measure it and actually tell what's working versus what's not. And if we gain confidence that something is actually working really well, oftentimes we're the first people sitting at the table saying, well, why don't we double down on this thing? And it might come from some reallocation and saying, okay, well this thing over here isn't working as well. We should inspect that and understand that further. I think you see the shift change often through those planning cycles where, you know, folks think that we're going to come just by sort of pulling back the envelope as much as we can. But we're actually trying to connect the dots and saying, hey, you have a really interesting idea over there. Make sure you're talking to that person, make sure you're all working on the same things. And by the way, we think this thing is a huge opportunity. Why don't we go further there and, and double down and really invest heavily here.
- [33:25]
A
I think the willingness and just showing a couple of times publicly that you're doubling down on Something goes a long way. It just shifts their frame of mind. Like every time I come into this room where finance is there, it's not necessarily that they're going to cut it down. They may look at this like this is a portfolio of bets. And they actually are encouraging me to go bigger.
- [33:41]
B
And I think there's always like a burden of proof, which is also what I tell my stakeholders. Like, you know, whenever they come and they say, well, can I do this thing? And I'm like, well, maybe like, tell me the why. Like, help me understand what you're trying to achieve and why you think this is going to pay off. And we can, we can work on it together. Right? That's the partnership aspect. You're not alone in it. Like, let's, let's unpack it, let's work through it together and then ultimately maybe we can actually pull the trigger on something.
- [34:02]
A
I was really excited to have you on the show because you've sat in both the FP and A and IR seats. Really. Basic question, which of those jobs is harder?
- [34:10]
B
IR can be really difficult but rewarding when you're getting through something net new like an IPO. You've never written an S1. You've never, you know, displayed yourself this way to the global market. That is hard in that it is building from the bottom. But I would say it's on a normal course basis. I think FP and A is harder mostly because there's a lot of ambiguity. A lot of the stuff that we're dealing with are like brand new questions that nobody's really unpacked before and that folks come to us to try to solve and get visibility into. Which is also why I love the job, because you start every day kind of fresh and there's always like new and exciting challenges that come up. But it makes it hard because there's no playbook that you can just repeat from yesterday to today for somebody early
- [34:53]
A
in their career who may be choosing between which of these to lean into. How would you describe the day to day reality of each role?
- [35:00]
B
They're both finance practitioner roles.
- [35:03]
A
Right.
- [35:03]
B
So you need to, you need to love numbers analytics. You need to have some connection to, you know, financial reporting. The fork I think in the road is that FPA is probably a little bit more detail oriented and kind of into the guts of the business and operationally focused. So if you really want to like get deep into problems and have discrete stakeholders that you're working with on a day to day basis, that's a great place to be and if you want to like help, actually inflect the operations and influence the way that, you know, the business thinks about itself. Great place to be. If you tend to love relationship building and more of marketing and type of speaking, types of roles, IR is a great place to be. The reality is, you know, IR in particular, you're. You're meeting with folks on a very regular basis every single quarter. You're having a lot of meetings, a lot of discussions, you're doing a lot of writing as well, when you think about scripts or other sort of marketing, types of documentations. So if that appeals to you with a finance lens, then that's a great place to be as well.
- [36:02]
A
One thing that's super fascinating about your background is you've experienced both how companies explain themselves internally and then how they're judged externally. How do you think spending time in IR can make someone a better FPA leader?
- [36:15]
B
Yeah, I think it definitely has been helpful and I think about it similar to my like Wall street background because even before I was at a company I was in equity research. And what I'd say that does too is it gives you great connect activity to the global markets and the capital markets and you have a broader sense of just the way that markets move and the way that investors think. For myself, having sat in the IRC where I had investors peppering me with questions and thought processes all the time, I will always use that a little bit as a guiding light. Even when we're solving internal operating purposes, sometimes things are so granular and tactical that it's helpful just to get context to be like, from an investor standpoint, maybe this thing doesn't matter. Like maybe we're overthinking this and it's like, it's not that deep, it's not that impactful on the global scale. But then also there's a different angle by which to think about, you know, what would our investors or stakeholders think about the way that we're approaching this and what lens might they have that's, that's a little bit different than what we're thinking about internally. So it definitely is a helpful sounding board and a helpful way to get me to be able to zoom into the details in my more like operating seat, but then also zoom out and have a more global view of the world.
- [37:20]
A
Do you think the type of investor relations person is shifting away from the communication specialist to more, more of like a hybrid strategic finance person?
- [37:28]
B
I think yeah, potentially. But I, I do also think that that's always a little bit been there Back when I was in equity research, you know, many years ago, you know, I interfaced on the other side with a lot of IR folks. And I remember thinking that the diversity of IR professionals was just like completely across the spectrum. Like there were some folks that really just managed themselves as sort of of almost marketing directors just doing that communication layer. There were some that were like really deep into the financials and knew every like accounting nuance to how they were closing the books. There were some that were product specialists and were like every day with the engineers and understanding the way that they're going to market. So I think that's always been a little bit the case that IR can be a seat that can kind of flux in many different directions. The IR role puts you at this sort of epicenter to talk to a lot of folks and get a lot of inputs and feedback. The way that folks can really harness that is on this more like strategic finance kind of lens where you're actually going to take those insights that you've learned from the markets, from investors, from bankers, and then go back to the business and say, hey guys, have you thought about this? You know, this is feedback that we're getting. Should we think about operating a little bit differently or have we capitalized fully on this opportunity? You can make that opportunity what you want of it, but I think ultimately you might see that continue to morph in that direction over time.
- [38:39]
A
Well, maybe a different angle. Do you think FP and A and IR become more of a singular function if business models are becoming more complicated and the cadence of communications with analysts is increasing?
- [38:49]
B
I think it could, but I think similarly it depends on what the company is looking for and also the talent pool that you have. In some ways, you know, increased complexity is also a reason why you might need them separate. Right? Because you might have more specialty or focus areas in specific areas. I think there are synergies to have that hat in the same person or the same domain because they really like have a feedback loop and leverage each other. But at the end of the day, it's also a pretty finite talent pool and finding people that have both sort of the operating hat and that investment sort of higher level approach, it's frankly tough to have and you can develop it in either direction, but oftentimes you have to start from one.
- [39:24]
A
Do you think it's easier to start in one direction versus the other? Like you can have an FP and a person who can learn the irl?
- [39:31]
B
I think you can start in either direction. To be blunt too, like I'M tempted to say it's probably easier to start from FP&A and go the other direction because I think, I think a lot of times it's easier to start from more detail and then get more abstracted and higher level. But the truth is I'm an example of going the opposite direction. Because I started from Wall Street, I kind of went more into the IR route and then I kind of knew I wanted to go deeper to like learn more and sort of complete my own stack. So I think the reality is you can be successful in either direction. You just have to have a propensity to want to go in whatever direction you have and sort of fill the gaps on and just ask really good questions along the way.
- [40:04]
A
You know, I want to stay on this for a second because you've been on both sides of the table as a sell side equity analyst and then as an IR professional. So you've seen markets over and under react from both of those angles. How do you avoid letting market sentiment influence the internal decision making too much?
- [40:21]
B
What the markets do enable, which is very helpful, is just constantly asking ourselves questions. When the market does react in a certain way, that's either positive or negative, just sort of stepping back and saying, wait, what's going on? What questions are they asking? That maybe we're not and can just be, you know, a helpful part of that conversation that we're having internally. But at the end of the day, I think it really comes from not overreacting to short term signals, which comes from knowing your core and having a long term focus. And a lot of that comes from the top. Right? I know Olivier, our co founder and CEO, like even back when we IPO'd, and he'll even say it, you know, to this day, if the stock moves in one direction or the other, he'll always remind us like, we're not 20% better or 20% worse than we were yesterday. Like, we're gonna put our heads down, we're gonna focus on building great products, servicing our customers, capturing market share in a way that we always do. So I think having that steady hand and, you know, cascading that throughout the organization is super important because curating that culture is something that you just have to do over time and you just want to make sure you're not overreacting to short term signals.
- [41:21]
A
That's really cool to hear that it comes from the top because it can be tempting to think like, oh, we're up 15% this month, we must be on top of the world. But Then you also have to remind yourself that it can cut the other way. It doesn't mean the business necessarily is any worse off if you're down 15% sometimes.
- [41:37]
B
I know a lot of companies will also sort of tell employees, like, don't look at the stock like it's not. It's not worth it. Which I've seen many, many very senior people that have said that out loud, like, and I look over at their laptops and they're on the stock screen. It doesn't really work in practice, but I think the way that you look at it as just like an information signal versus reacting to it are two very different things. And the best companies are the ones that are really focused on building products and servicing customers. And the rest will come over time.
- [42:01]
A
Talk to me about IPOs, because you've been a part of both the Datadog IPO and the UiPath IPO, and many people will just say, oh, you know, IPO is the finish line. We made it.
- [42:12]
B
Yay.
- [42:12]
A
But you actually called them like a branding event, which I thought was a really neat way to think about it. Why do you think IPOs are romanticized so much?
- [42:21]
B
You know, you get the whole executive team up there and there's these splashy banners, and everybody gets these great photos in Times Square on top of a balcony. And they are exciting and they are important. They're fundraising events, right? You're getting capital for the organization, and there are liquidity events for employees and other investors, which, you know, are important, great things. But I think it is important to enjoy the day, enjoy the moment for what it is, but also remember the purpose of what you're achieving there, which is just fundraising and liquidity. It can have, you know, go to market benefits, right? Because it kind of brings the whole, like, ethos and the company brand into the mainstream, right? So then people might start asking you about it, and there's more awareness around the company and the brand. So there are tangible payoffs from that to the same concept. Like, just because you IPO yesterday doesn't mean you're any better today. Like, you might be a little bit wealthier if things go well and you get some liquidity, but at the end of the day, you're focused on the same mandate and working for the same objectives that you were the day before.
- [43:16]
A
You helped manage Datadog's ipo and the roadshow around the same time that we work was melting down in real time. Like, what. What a crazy time, just in the capital markets. What do you remember most vividly from
- [43:27]
B
that period, I was on the roadshow with Olivier and David, our co founder, CEO and our CFO. And this was, you know, August September 2019. And we were very proud of what we were doing, what we were building and the company was performing, you know, well at the time and growing very rapidly. We ended up ipoing at, you know, sub $10 billion valuation, which by the way, I think that multiple at the time was like a record for a software multiple prior to actually going public. As we were doing the roadshow, all of the headlines, all of the oxygen from sort of the IPO space was taken up by WeWork and we were reading all these headlines. They were looking to, you know, go out at something I think just shy of $50 billion valuation, which was just absolutely wild. It was like a massive event at the time. We went through some of the filings and saw what they had done and we were sort of chuckling, but also a little confused by things like their community adjusted EBITDA and some of the metrics that they had created. When we were looking at our metrics and saying these are just like, these are bog standard, you know, sort of boring metrics, but we're proud of them and proud of the business that's, that's been created and we can bring to the world. And as I talk to like family members and you know, acquaintances that were outside of the space, they had no idea who Datadog was. They didn't know, like when I would talk about us going through this really exciting ipo, they didn't care, they didn't understand it. They would mostly just ask me, well, cool, did you see that? Wework's going out and here we are now, you know, many years later. And it's very interesting to see where we are. You know, Datadog went public at sub $10 billion. Now we're at $80 billion plus market cap. And we know, you know, how we work turned out. And I think that goes back to that ethos of, you know, being long term focused, knowing your core, just building product and, and servicing your customers. And again, it pays off in the long run. And as I reflect on that memory and that time, it really, it really goes to show you how, how, how many dividends pay off by just sort of knowing your core.
- [45:15]
A
I want to switch gears to talk about career development for a bit. One of your career philosophies is, is actually surprisingly simple. It's do really good work where you are, impress people and then leverage that into the next opportunity. Why do you think so many People overlook simple advice like that. Do you think they're looking for maybe a fast and more definitive path?
- [45:35]
B
I am sometimes surprised by how much conversations around career development orient around like others. You know, when folks come to the table and they're like, well, what other opportunities do I need? Or like, how do I need to position myself for the next thing? And I think a lot of it is just, just not realizing how much your destiny is in your own hands. Frankly, that that can be a terrifying concept, which is maybe why people avoid it. The greatest folks that I've seen that have accelerated and really ascended in their careers, they don't overthink those things. They're just like, I am where I am right now. Let me do really, really well. Let me execute strongly, and I'm gonna leverage the relationships that I have to show the great work that I can do. I'll link that to the next thing and then figure out where that takes me, me. And maybe you have a longer term strategic path of like, what you want that next thing to be. But at the end of the day, most people can accomplish a lot by just doing really good executed work in their current seed and of course then get it on the radar of the right people to make sure that they're noticing and that they. You can springboard that into something else.
- [46:35]
A
I think it's something ambitious people often wrestle with because they're always like, well, what's the next thing? What? The grass is always greener. And also how do I go up a level? And the reality is those things mysteriously somehow always unlock if you are just like the best of what you're doing right now.
- [46:49]
B
Exactly. And there's so many different paths to success. And even just like within my group, I have some parts of my group that are more like aligned to the business, like out working with them. And I have some that are more insularly focused on finance and like internal reporting and forecasting. And I constantly having these conversations with one or the other where they're like, well, if I just had that thing, then I'd be able to like unlock a lot of opportunity. And I'm like, guys, you know, I'm having this exact same conversation with your peer on the other side. Like, you all think that the grass is greener somewhere else. If you spent that amount of energy just putting your head down and doing good executed work, you probably could make it a long way.
- [47:20]
A
That's so funny. It's like the Spider man pointing meme where they're both like, I want to do that. And they're like, but I want to do that. And hopefully if you do a great job, people talk about it. One of the quotes that you gave me is that people are always talking about you. I'm a paranoid person, but I think this is actually a good type of paranoia.
- [47:36]
B
It's one of the realizations that I've had as I've gone from being like, a more junior sort of IC type of person into a more senior role, where, like, I feel like back in my more junior brain, I was constantly thinking, well, I just wish that person saw what I was doing, or I wish that person, like, knew what was going on. And now kind of being on the other side, it's very apparent that, like, people know what's going on. Like, the more senior folks, like, they know the key players that are doing really good work and making those DOC connections and then actually, like, bringing forward the. The organization. And it is both a terrifying thing because you're like, oh, crap. Like, people are always sort of talking about me. But it's also empowering is every little interaction that you have matters, whether it's your direct sort of boss, your direct partner, whether it's your peers and the way that you make them feel and how you give them information and context to things that are going on, or more junior people where you end up, you know, whether you're a manager today or you aspire to be one, you can be acting as a coach and somebody that somebody else can look up to and feel like that person's really a leader and something I aspire to. So it's really the. How you bring together all those things in a 360 way. And then if you're impressing all of those people and making them feel empowered and like, they have good information and making them feel energized, that sort of lifts the whole boat and really can be an accelerator to your career opportunities.
- [48:52]
A
Yes. And I also think that there's. There's immense value in having just the awareness to recognize the moment of. Sometimes there are meetings that are way more important or moments or rep or reps that you get that are more crucial than others. Like you said, you want to make sure you're doing an amazing job of, like, a rising tide all around and treating your peers right and making sure you're enabling them. And there are also these moments, I think, in time, where it's like, I got to really buckle down and prepare for this, because getting in this room for 15 minutes, if I do a great job, I might get Invited back for a 30 minute presentation next time, which turns into like some sort of like weekly cadence. And it snowballs.
- [49:27]
B
In some ways, though, that is where it's also at the behest of your leader or your manager to put you in those right positions to be able to execute on those partnerships. Which is why I think the structure of the organization is super important. So, you know, like, like, okay, this person is somebody that I own in terms of the relationship. But of course, at the same time, I'm gonna have a continuous cycle of impressing people and making people feel good.
- [49:46]
A
AJ My understanding is that Datadog didn't actually have a role for you when you first started talking to them. How'd you do it? How'd you convince them to create one?
- [49:53]
B
Yeah, so this was back 2018, and I was in equity research working at Jefferies covering software stocks. I had known I wanted an operator role because I had learned so much by studying software businesses and I knew what best, best in class ones look like. Datadog was a fast growing, you know, software startup who had great efficiencies and was based in New York, which is where I am. And there's not that many of them here. So I had Datadog on a very short list of companies that I really needed to get after. And I, you know, ended up networking with the VP of finance at the time, Scott Buxton. Hey, Scott, what's up?
- [50:26]
A
Oh, yeah, Scott's a great guy.
- [50:27]
B
He hired me originally and the reality is, at the time, like, he didn't have like a defined role, but they knew eventually they were going to be building out the FPA team more broadly. And my pitch to him was like, look, I don't know this FPA thing, I've never done it before, but I'm a smart, hardworking guy that's like numbers and financially focused. I'm sure I can figure it out. And by the way, if you guys ever go down the route of wanting to go public, my whole job is studying software stocks and talking to investors. I can help you guys package things together and actually go and market out to public company investors. I can be very helpful along that journey. They kind of like, bit on that pitch. That's why they hired me into what was at the time a kind of amorphous hybrid role. But then we ended up hiring David, our now cfo. We went through an IPO process and I was able to pick up that responsibility based off of my. My background on, on Wall Street.
- [51:16]
A
It's awesome how you were able to package yourself into a product and pitch yourself in a way that exhibited, hey, I can stack these skills and be an asset to you.
- [51:24]
B
That's another career development thing that I encourage people to think about is how do you do the job you want before you have that job? My original job was actually in wealth management. I worked at the private bank at JP Morgan and same thing. I knew I wanted to get into equity research, but I had never done equity research. So what I did is I just, I did my own research report. I picked a company, I made a model, I wrote up a research report. Looking back on it was pretty terrible, but at least had like the foundational like understanding of what the job was and showed people I was willing to put in the work. And ultimately that was my spring board to get into equity research and get a job there, which you know, helped me lever into the next thing.
- [52:00]
A
Do you remember what company you did a write up on?
- [52:02]
B
I don't. It was some like environmental, like clean energy type of company. I. That's a good question. I should go back and figure that out.
- [52:09]
A
I guess it wasn't a strong buy.
- [52:11]
B
I did look at it at some point like many years later and I looked at my price target versus where it was. I was very wrong.
- [52:15]
A
All right, aj, I'm going to take you into what we call our long ass lightning round. So you're a successful guy, you've got an amazing resume, but you got to give me one thing you've messed up on the job before. It could be this role or different one.
- [52:27]
B
The biggest mistake I ever made that will always stick with me. This is taking it way back to my first job at JP Morgan and it was one of the first times that I had like a big senior round table to sort of convince to do something. I was leading the like investment roundtable for an ETF that we wanted to bring to market for our customers. It was a Japan focused ETF which was currency hedged. And I had done all the research, I had done like the whole pitchbook. I, I was the like first very junior member who was actually like getting in front of these very senior people to bring it forward. And I was super excited by it. I didn't think there was any question that could like knock me off kilter. We get to the investment committee and everyone's like super buzzed about it. But there was one guy who like completely shot it down and not only shot it down, was like pretty upset and basically sort of took me to the side and was like, you can't do this. Again, it was the currency and commodities guy, it was an equity etf. So I had done all of the work and all the due diligence with the equity team, but I had ignored the currency and commodity guy. And he was nervous because there was some like new type of, of of hedging that they were doing with forward contracts and ultimately he was uncomfortable. And the lesson that I like always learn and I've always kept on to is that you have to resell and socialize all of your stakeholders ahead of a like go, no go decision. I've always brought that forward because I, I go through any work stream. I'm sort of paranoid of like who did I forget or what boxes did I not check? And before you actually get to the like the game time meeting or that big email that you're going to send out for sort of of final sign off, everyone on that thread should already know what's coming and they've already been bought in. They've already done the due diligence with you. They've already sort of socialized the yes, any questions that are being worked out like you can kind of do it together. That was probably the biggest mess up I've had and the biggest lesson in my career.
- [54:07]
A
Learning how to socialize decisions before you actually send out the decision for approval was such like a major stepping point in my career. I'm like, I actually thought that we were making the decision now. No, no, no, the decision is made many weeks before in a series of other rooms.
- [54:22]
B
Well, and it sounds inefficient but the reality is there's so many like things you have to go through and different questions you have to chase up and side analysis you have to do to actually get to something that's like very clean and packaged that it actually makes the on ramp much easier. Because you've done the due diligence separately,
- [54:36]
A
more of a technical one. What tools does your team use today to get the job done?
- [54:40]
B
The obvious ones that I think everyone around the world are using are some, you know, Claude and open AI, which we very much are doing. And it's been so impactful to our work streams of taking a lot of that remedial sort of time consuming manual work like out of the equation. So my people actually feel really powerful now that they can actually go and be more strategic and thoughtful with the organization. But I guess the one that I'd shout out that like not everybody is using is Pigman, which I mentioned earlier. And they are a very flexible modern planning and forecasting tool and what's powerful for us is it's both service the business, where we have a lot of dashboards and reporting that now we've kind of tipped the dial where it's, it's being consumed more by the business than it is by finance, which, you know, we talked about markers of success that to me says that it's, it's being successful and it's for me bringing together all of the sort of pieces of work that we do across, you know, the expenses, headcount, revenue that ultimately can talk to each other, which is harder to do than most people realize and often happens in spreadsheets, which now can get into a system across, you know, very interesting dimensions and, you know, different tagging that we can analyze.
- [55:43]
A
Any tools you'd like to shout out for ERP, expense management, Revrec, anything there.
- [55:48]
B
The reality is we today use NetSuite and a lot of homegrown stuff for our invoicing and our revenue pipelines and things. So that might not be the new school crop that you want to hear about.
- [55:59]
A
No Net netsuite's a friend of the show, so we hear of them. And there are also some cool players coming out like Rillet, who are breaking down some barriers in the AI native world. Quanta is another one that comes to mind. So that, that's like a space that's changing and like, I didn't think it was going to change until last year. I felt like everything changed. Last one I got for you. If you could give your younger self advice, knowing what you know today, what would you tell them?
- [56:20]
B
I think the other big realization that I've had is I've sort of gone from being a more junior person into a senior one is no one's an expert. Everyone's trying to figure stuff out as they're going. Because I remember many years ago thinking that, like, if I just got to that person's level of proficiency or like that person really knows what they're doing. I think the reality just being like a really smart inquis person that is hard working and just asks really good questions and wants to like always take the next step of like, okay, I did this thing well, what's next? What does this mean? Why is this important? You can accomplish so much. And I found that comforting on the other side that the boundaries are relatively limitless as long as you set yourself up for success and then just work really hard to get through problems.
- [56:59]
A
There is something both horrifying and relieving when you notice that the people at the highest level are kind of like you in terms of just figuring shit out. Like a lot of people are just making it up as they go. Yeah.
- [57:09]
B
And that that's okay. You just got to do it with some boundaries and barometers and you'll be okay.
- [57:14]
A
AJ this has been an absolute blast. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Yeah.
- [57:17]
B
I appreciate you having me.
- [57:18]
A
Ear on the numbers is a mostly media production. Yelling and intro by Fat Joe. Artwork by Meg Delesandro. Show is executive produced by Ben Hillman. Nothing said on this podcast is intended to be business or investment advice. It's the sole opinion of me. A guy who feeds his dog way too much ice cream and has a history of net operating losses. Lol. If you like this podcast, hit subscribe and give us five stars. It will take like two seconds and our algorithm overlords love it. Drink water, call your mom and have a great day.
- [57:46]
B
Peace.