DocSend CEO on Investor Tracking: Pitch Deck Analytics

[00:00:00][Music] this week in startups is brought to you by linkedin jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters get 50 off your first job post at linkedin.com twist our crowd helps you invest early in pre-ipo companies alongside professional vcs if you're interested in investing you can join our crowd for free at our cr dot com slash twist and zendesk listen to zendesk's new podcast sit down start up to hear conversations with zendesk's leaders and the founders ceos and makers on how to start up even when the world goes topsy-turvy download and subscribe on spotify apple or wherever you get your podcasts hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of this week in startups i am really excited to have our next founder on the program because you've all gotten his links in your email but it's a little bit uncomfortable it's a little bit uncomfortable because you know you do a podcast you do 1100 episodes and you have try to keep it real i always try to keep it very real for people on the podcast and so i give you my candid opinion and sometimes i say something and i'm like well i think robin hood's going to have a better ipo than uh airbnb when i did my ipo episode and lo and behold ding ding ding one of the producers of airbnb is like hey i was just watching the show i think we might do better than robin hood and i said well great can you come on the show and uh so in 2021 we will have one of the founders of airbnb on the pod he said he loves he's a big fan of the show and i i just had done a throw away comment hey throw away comment i don't know i invited the guy from airbnb on a couple times he said no so i don't know maybe he doesn't like me and he wrote music i love you i think your podcast is great so uh one of those thrilling comments i had was we were having a comment about one of my investments superhuman and i had previously had david hamer hanson on uh or maybe it was jason free and they were talking about their new email product hey.com which took up all the room in the uh all the air in the room for a couple of months there and he was really going hard at superhuman which is one of my investments and i've invested in rahul twice and one of the things he was like oh my god read receipts you're letting people you're you're spying on people you're tracking their emails and i'm like yeah i guess they do have that very subtle feature we're in superhuman you know if somebody's open it called read receipts and i said well it's not as bad as toxend i hate that company i can't stand the docs and i get the stock send links i can't take it uh because all these founders send me a docs and link to protect their ip rightfully so it is their right to do and they want to know what pages do investors look at when they get their decks and we've all gotten them as investors and the cognitive dissonance then hit me in the head i was like oh my god i can't stand this being tracked but i kind of love my founders being able to track investors and have some information if they open the deck or not and i always tell people i don't open doc sense i don't open spyware i don't want spyware on my computer i just send me and i was being hyperbolic but just send me your deck or i would go to a website i don't know some website where you can convert a doc send into a pdf and so anyway russ hendelston is the ceo and co-founder of docsend and it turns out he's a delightful guy and i listened to a podcast with him on one of these sas podcasts a bunch of sas podcasts out there and he's a real genuine hardworking founder and he just emailed me and he's like i don't know russ what you said welcome to the program but you said like hey i'd love to be on the pot sometime and uh you know the product's not all that bad and i was like oh no it's another one of these situations where i was a little brutally honest about my opinion and now i gotta own it so let's number one thanks for reaching out and coming on the pod let's just tackle the issue that i had from the beginning which is uh hey doc send i i i let's just you know clear the air here what did you think of my criticism when you heard it it can't be easy being a founder and then you know i don't know if you're a fan of the pod or if you've heard of it before if one of your friends told you of it no i'm a long time listener i'm a big fan jason so i appreciate you having me on it's actually the the thing i had to do yesterday and prep for this was i had to listen to you at normal speed because i always listened to it at one and a half x and i was like i wonder what it sounds like at normal speed pretty talking too fast it's hilarious you just made the whole producer channel light up and laughter um so i think it's very big of you to come on the pod i don't even remember what discussion do you do you remember what disguise and this is we're talking this is the nature of my life running this podcast yeah i can't remember what episode who was i talking to what was that what was the context and what did i say of uh it's pitch.com kind of the powerpoint competitor oh which i think has a little bit of docsendish stuff in it i've always said i never want to compete with powerpoint but no i don't take it personally at all jason and i always appreciate your candor so i just thought it might be you know fun to have a discussion and just share a little bit more about what's behind it because a lot of people don't really think about us as a company we have been running under the radar for a while but we have over 16 000 customers we're profitable we're growing really quickly i heard eight figures in revenue you guys get tens of million in revenue you've been incredibly capital efficient and as we get into it let's let's start off just talking about the issue of tracking people looking at decks just as an issue how do you think about that and how do you frame it with people who use the product and then customers who maybe are privacy sensitive privacy sensitive yeah it's a it's a great question um and it's a it's a thorny one too right because it's really at the the sender's discretion what they want and i i certainly didn't agree that for for some materials it's you know you do want to have a local copy and the sender can always turn on downloading and once you download we stop tracking it's just in the browser so we're not doing tracking at any level that is kind of above and beyond what any other website would do we're just taking a document making into a website and you know showing engagement information and for some people that's really critical and valuable um oftentimes in fundraising where we get used the most is or the beginning part is just that pitch deck that gets you the meeting or not and there are a few things that are unintuitive there about why analytics are helpful that document gets updated a lot like you jason are looking at these things really fast on average investors only spend but it used to be three and a half minutes per pitch deck now it's down to three minutes per pitch stack during pandemic it's a whole other story but then you know there's a lot writing on that the founder is updating it a lot so if i send you you know an attachment which is my deck and then i don't hear from you for three days but now i've suddenly updated a bunch of stuff in there do i send you the new one i don't even know if you looked at the old one and it's just kind of an awkward way to start off so i can see if you've looked at it i can update it i never have to tell you that i updated the thing so you basically have this way of controlling who's seen what and having this audit trail and the per page analytics are useful sometimes but but more just like um you know do you look at it did you care so the flip side of this is that when you spend time reading someone's deck you're giving that founder a really big compliment because you're giving them your time so you know in some instances you're like yeah i don't really want to know but it does dissuade um a practice where like investors will just forward decks to other investors yeah that is completely unfair and you're protecting them there and it really is helpful as you're saying to know that the deck was opened and it's helpful to know how what pages people dropped off on or they zipped forward or they zipped back and in fact i i was literally uh getting prepared for the podcast this morning and i realized oh my lord i'm a double hypocrite uh number one i love that i i i love what you do for my founders so they can tell me yeah you know five people in the at this venture firm opened our deck we sent it to them and they've been in it like 10 times updated the partner says i'm going to send it to my other partners and then they don't do that or they do that and that tells you everything about how really engaged they are you know and how likely they are to lead the ground and the interesting thing about that was when i was starting the company mahalo back in the day i was uh had created accounts for people to test it and it had like a sort it was sort of like a little bit of a death kind of thing but it was more like an account to go check out like the prototype and um my tech guy goes oh do you want to track everybody and i was like yeah what would that look like and he's like well whatever you want and i said okay um just uh can you send me an email anytime or you know and he goes well i made you a web page and so any it will send you an email you know this web page and you can see everything they did long story short i sent it to one of the most famous people in the world at the time who's no longer with us who was running one of the big tech companies people could fill in with that might be like literally the one of the most iconic people in the world and i sent it to him that day and i had met him before and i said here's a new project i'm working on and sure enough at 1 30 in the morning i get an email and then i see this very famous person is going through the website for 45 minutes and it was a search engine and this company didn't have a search engine and i was tracking them to make sure i knew if they were going to go see the prototype so this idea of tracking people if both people understand it so do people understand when they go to docs and that they're actually being tracked or not i guess that's where the you know the criticism of superhuman was coming in is that people weren't tracking it people don't know they're being tracked and i guess for outreach and salesforce and any number of products people don't know they're being tracked necessarily unless they're sophisticated users so we get back this quick break i want to know in the industry if there is a standard yet for a global or a how the industry thinks about letting people know who are clicking on the link hey you're being tracked we know if you've seen slide seven or in another product we know if you've watched the video or not wistia as an example you can see in wistia how far people have watched in the video when we get back on this week in startups it's a new year it's a fresh start and you've got your small business over here your medium-sized business and you are now shifting business hours maybe you're hiring more remote employees but the one thing that remains unchanged in the sea of change that we just experienced in 2020 and let's face it 2021 is still gonna have a lot of change especially the first half well you need to have the right people on your team this is going to be a constant no matter what happens in the world talent is the most important thing for you as the founder and the best way to hire people we all know this you know this i know it it's linkedin jobs they can get you qualified candidates and they're going to find you the right person quickly and most people say listen you can have quality or you can have speed you know what with linkedin jobs you get quality and you get speed that's the magic of it they have over 722 million members worldwide and getting started is super easy on linkedin jobs all of these features that they've created are designed to help you get high quality candidates and when you post your job you can put screening questions i love those and linkedin will quickly get those screening questions in front of the right people and you can do this all from your mobile device now if you're on the run we're hiring a bunch of people for my company launch guess where we're finding the best candidates i'll wait for you okay yep that's right linkedin jobs of course it's like day jobs when your business is ready to make that next hire find the right person with linkedin jobs you can pay what you want and get the first 50 off at linkedin.com twist that's right 50 bucks for your first job posting is waiting for you right now at linkedin.comtwist linkedin.com twist terms and conditions do apply because they're giving you 50. welcome back everybody russ heddleston is with us thanks for coming on the pro on the pod he's from doc's end they've got i don't know 50 100 people working there now yeah about the 55 or so yeah the hiring is currently our bottleneck [Music] i guess as we wrap up this sort of first segment on just privacy in general and privacy in the enterprise what is the what are the is there like a ground rule for the industry and obviously you have to deal with now gdpr in europe and what's the california privacy protection act is it cpp something anyway we have those two really super duper hardcore privacy acts do those impact you and then what is the industry standard and what are your thoughts on informed consent from the recipient the person who opens the deck and is being tracked and maybe doesn't know they're being tracked yeah that's a great question and we've kind of gone back and forth on this uh what we found is often that our users or new users will be worried about their recipients and if their recipients care but by and large we haven't really gotten complaints from recipients everything is cookie based so dachshund is fully gdpr compliant we comply with the california privacy act as well um and you know if you just delete your cookies then you know we stop that there's also an option as the sender of a link to request your email address there's even an advanced feature that says you have to authenticate that you own that email address we never make a recipient create a docsent account that's one of our differentiations but as a sender i have a lot of nuanced control around what i'm requesting from you so if i send you a link and i don't request email it's just anonymous however because of the way our system works and every time you send a link it's a unique link i would know that this link has just been sent to jason another thing we do to protect the recipients is that if we've seen you before jason and someone new sends you docs on the link and they ask for your email we'll auto populate that email but you have to you have to hit ok to give it to them so they know who you are um and so that's in our mind kind of like the right uh compromise to have we could for instance make it much more in your face around like hey we're tracking you and we actually did try that out for a while like we would show you the recipient your own stats just to like let you know about that but yeah but by and large it didn't really make an impact and then the feedback we got from our users is that detracts from the content itself which is what i want you to spend your time on so it was viewed actually as salesy for docs and in a way that detracted from our product so you know i don't think there are any industry standards we try to do the right thing we comply with all the regulation but it is kind of the nature of the internet that based on cookies and like where you're spending time all that stuff is being tracked anyway it's just a question of in in what ways is that surfaced and whom is that shared it does seem to be a one-sided concern mark suster absolutely demolished you back in 2018 saying you should not use doc send and you know he on both sides of the table he wrote i know everybody told you to send your fundraising decision here's why you should send a deck um and you know the founders are like the deck could have a spelling error in it and then it lives there forever or it could not have the october update and i sent it to you you know whatever date and then you opened it two weeks later and i have the new data so why wouldn't you want the new data um and uh what was your thought when you saw the both sides of the table post because i guess the issue is do you build the pro which side of the table using mark suster's own words both sides of the table and in his blog that refers to the founder on one side and the investor on the other um what what was the uh climate like in the office when he wrote that blog post it just it gave you more customers ultimately i'm sure but it seemed like a nice form of advertising although i think in his post specifically he he took great care not to mention dachshund by name so he didn't uh give us a place to meet him he didn't give us free advertising um you know that that's fine that's a bummer yeah you should have told him like hey listen if you're gonna call me out put a goddamn link in the first sentence did you reach out to me i don't think i did no um see that's you've learned your first rule today russ i know of um criticism which is engage engage your critics engage any criticism because every piece of criticism is like a road map to making a better product and just talking to you and working through my own cognitive dissonance i just really thought of an interesting way to do it which is it you know if people had the ability to do the handsh to do a handshake agreement when you send a doc send to somebody when they click on it if i had i want to do the handshake agreement it just shows a picture of two handshaking and it says you get the most updated deck we know uh when you've read it and uh you know what pages you've looked at and you just click ok and so you kind of put it in the user's hands that they can do that is that how you do it now does use have the ability to like put like a little warning there when you put in your email address hey by the way um want to let you know that we we know when you open this and what pages you look at kind of like the little warning you get when you use facebook to authenticate it gives you the bullet points to kind of educate users have you considered that well we've thought about it it just has never really risen to the level of concern like for for instance in 2018 and 2019 50 of venture capitalists that raised the fund successfully used docsend for their fundraise so you know people will complain about it on the one hand but then they'll often tell their founders to use it on the other and so there's been kind of an organic awareness of what is docsend and and how it works so to take up more ui and to interrupt the flow there it's just not been something that's risen to the top of the list we also just try to be really helpful to the startup community even though it's a minority of our revenue it's not that much but we do some really interesting marketing like we have a free intro service uh called the dachshund fundraising network where for pre-seed and seed companies they send us their deck if it meets our bar based on some tech we've built and kind of a human review then we'll actually match them with lead investors for precedence oh wow that's cool yeah because it's just what's the url for that for people who want to try it it's just i'll give you the plug i'll give you the plugin network if you just go to dachshund.com under the resources tab there's send fundraising network there goes it filled in uh for those of you who want to check it out that's a great idea it's very helpful docset.com fundraising dash network wow that's great so you're putting your time and money into helping people find an investor very cool yeah so that i mean it's good for the investors right like one of our investors on cork led around recently in the company that we sent it that he wouldn't have seen otherwise very excited about it oh wow yeah jeff clave a good friend of the f of the pod he's been on a bunch of times what do you think when somebody makes something like deck the number two pdf.com which is what i use sometimes if i if somebody on my team gets a pd a docs and i say just give me the pdf send me the pdf and you know i have different security concerns in other people because you know i'm a little bit higher profile and people are trying to hack me to get to bitcoin wallets or whatever so you know having my ipa address out there or anything that could potentially you know loop me in i use all kinds of tricks to um keep myself uh secure and uh you guys don't make the website deck to pdf.com i'm assuming no we we do not although that would be fascinating if we were our own enemy just to create controversy um no so we we know when people use deck to pdf or any of the other scrapers and we alert the sender so you know that's just the signal you're sending uh to them that that's what you want to do but that's also just in the basic docs and version the personal plan it's like 10 bucks a month if you use the advanced plan which is what financial institutions use or you know if you're going to use it for investor relations or board updates or you're an investment banker you're going to m a user advanced plan and in that one we're able to block all those services because we have some other features in there that preclude them from being able to get in and scrape it um so it it it's not a problem by and large for our larger customers and it's just really in the startup uh startup fundraising world if they're using the the personal plan let me ask you a question about pitch.com really slick product and uh you make the and basically their value proposition is hey you make a deck in keynote or or powerpoint and then you you make docs you convert it and you upload it to docsend what if those two things were put together that's their basic value proposition so when you watch that podcast i'm curious as a founder a new competitor comes out and they decide they're going to put two things together when we get back from this commercial break i want to understand when you have an atscale company that's got a huge loyal fan base and you've got you know tens of millions of dollars in revenue you guys are incredibly capital efficient and you have a product that requires zero marketing every time somebody sends a docusend link you get all that built-in marketing and they have to put their email address in and the workflow starts and we all know this dropbox style phenomenon and you in fact were an intern at dropbox we'll get to that but i'm curious when you watch as the founder of the pitch.com podcast where this comes up how do you as a leader of a team and this is inside baseball but how do you reconcile investors emailing you your team and even yourself in your own psychology of dealing with the new competitor that is going to stand on your shoulders and they're specifically doing that saying hey you use product a we're putting peanut butter and chocolate together and you're going to love this new variant that we're creating on top of their shoulders when we get back on the sweet startups do you ever wish that you invested early in some of the best performing ipos of 2019 and 2020. i bet you did well our crowd investors were able to invest in many of those ipos because our crowd allows accredited investors to invest directly in these startups and they can do it easily and they can do it early and that's what it's all about and you know these companies go on and sometimes they ipo and other times they get bought our crowd investors benefited from investing early in companies like beyond me that ipo'd amazing right that's a great exit strategy another one is many of our crowds companies have been bought by really high-end acquirers like intel nike microsoft and oracle our crowd's professional research team identifies these promising companies and promising funds across a range of sectors and they do it across a range of stages and many different locations and our crowd is investing in medical technology ag tech food production the multi-billion dollar robotic industry and so much more so here is a very easy call to action for you you go to our crowd.com twist o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash switch you go to rcrout.com twist and then you can start investing our crowd is free to sign up for and you just go to o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash twist okay let's get back to this amazing episode welcome back to this week in startup the founder of docsand is here his name is russ heddleston you can follow him on the twitter r-h-e-d-d-l-e-s-t-o-n and he is active on the twitter so tell me russ when you see competitors taking and you're a horizontal service horizontal meaning anybody can use you for anything i'm a student could use your art project a vc racing money for their fund or a founder trying to get that money from a vc or anybody in between what do you think and then how do you deal with it internally how do you deal with it with the investors and how do you deal with it with your own psychology yeah that's a great question and it i mean as you well know like as a founder you have to have deep conviction in something and building a company is much more of a marathon or a super marathon than it is a sprint so you know it there are a lot of things that have happened historically to docsin where a big public company says hey we're going to clone your entire product and you know you know it's like okay that could be scary or apparently there are a lot of like dachshund killers that investors get pitched on in various forms yeah um yeah yeah and and so i'm flattered by that i mean i don't think we're at the scale that you know someone should try to copy this you should be going after a really really big market and i do think dachshunds is going after a big market i don't think we're we're not a public company yet so uh i know and and we're also pretty nimble still so i don't think we're necessarily the best to compete with the conviction i have is why we started docs and is that years ago we saw that creation of documents and collaboration were going to go hand in hand i interned at microsoft in undergrad and i really don't want to recreate powerpoint or keynote those products work fine and that's hard behavior to change so we saw creation and collaboration going hand in hand and then file sync and share it has uh less value proposition but then we saw this external sending thing and there are all these niche companies there's like diligent or interlinks or all these you know like sales enablement players or you know even linkedin has a smart links thing and so what we want to do is just and our mission statement is to combine common workflows for sending documents externally into one intuitive solution which also means that we're building out the full virtual data room feature set and we're also building out the full e-signature feature set so we want to combine all those into one so if you take that lens on things if pitch adds some basic tracking functionality on top of it that's awesome they should totally do that that's really really smart i still think as a market share of the world of how people create decks i'm not too worried about them taking over like most of our users are already trained on keynote and powerpoint they'll continue to use those things so i mean we're always we always say that we're running our own race and um you know i'm pretty open i like it's not a lot of founders very secretive about what they're working on i was like well no here's here's our traction here's our here's our road map like here's the theory we have and you know no one else has the exact same view that we do on the market well and you worked at facebook so you got to see this firsthand correct yeah that's actually a funny story like um so uh the first startup i had was talent acquired by facebook and as you know when someone says acquired that can mean a range of things in our case like what does it mean aqua hired yeah it can mean a lot of stuff but we we had to start up before um me and two other co-founders and we raised the seed round i didn't think it was going to work so we're going to pivot facebook used it early on and so we interviewed with them in linkedin and decided to go to facebook and so it was a great outcome i got to have some great experiences there i also realized while i was there that you know i talked to founders and they're always very cagey being like oh my god you're going to copy my idea and my response was like no i'd be terrible at my job if you know some founder says here's this thing it's like there are no new ideas they're all in a spreadsheet the founder has more to gain by sharing with the big company that time me because then i can give them feedback on why we think that is or isn't a good thesis and why that might why now might be a good time to do that or not so fast forward to when i left facebook and we started docs and one of the first things i did was went to every other big company that i thought should build out the concept behind docs end and we got some talent acquisition offers but like no one was going to build it so we were like okay like i guess we have at least a few years to like make make a go at this and it turns out we had even more than that and still there's nobody who's thinking about it exactly the same as we are yeah it does get into people's head um you know like oh my god talking to this company and trying to be protective of your ideas and when it what really matters is execution and if you just look at how long it takes you know for a company to copy another person's idea and their likelihood of doing it in all likelihood they're already know the idea it's a 98 certainty that at some off site a bunch of facebook executives you know who are trying to one-up each other are going to come up with great ideas around some roundtable while you know at some corporate you know retreat it all goes into some spreadsheet somewhere with all the ideas or maybe today on a notion or a coda page and then they have to build a roadmap and when you're building at scale it takes what you know 12 24 months to roll these products fully out you know to the the base of users so they they get to like fire a bullet every whatever six months or every three months as an organization they may have five or six products getting updated the likelihood of them stealing your ideas incredibly low they probably have it in that google sheet already and they've only do four of those 400 ideas is that kind of what happens that's kind of what happens yeah you can only make a few bets like it's interesting being at facebook uh i mean the kind of pattern that i saw a couple of times is that facebook would want to build a new product internal resourcing was hard and then someone really senior would say okay we got to move faster than they buy a company to plug that hole so you know if if a big company is really coming after you and like you are their big bet they'll usually approach you first to buy you but even then as the company you have to consider like how well they're going to execute against it you know are they thinking about it exactly the same and i think by and large for startups that you know just just keep building your your vision out and don't don't stress too much about what other companies are doing or what they're saying um at least that's been our thinking so far and having invented you know some big companies you know i think that's by and large true there's there are obviously counter examples to that but um everything is already on the spreadsheet as you said uh you uh it was interesting about your previous idea pursuit i remember this time period in the 2011 2010-2011 time period right when this boom started right you started that company right after the financial crisis or their or thereabouts yeah i was in business school actually at the time um so we kind of had the idea in 2009 10 and 2010 we started building it out and what we probably should have done was build out an ats like a greenhouse or lever but we instead tried to build out a recruiting product to help uh with referrals at companies and so i i was that was a great experience for me i learned a ton um in in kind of launching something for the very first time but yeah that was an interesting period of time to start a company because the everyone's still recovering from the financial crisis but there are a lot of like great companies built out of that vintage amazing yeah i mean that's when i started angel investing was right around that time so you know if you if the market crashes in the next two or three years just so you know that is the time i'm going to push all the chips in which is essentially what i did during the this financial crisis that happened in march and april i just put my equities in wealthfront on 10 and poured a bunch of equities and then started investing in more startups because i knew there would be a lull pursuit was a pretty good idea actually your previous company which was using social networks and your sort of um your network to then win to get bounties or you know what do they call them yeah whatever a referral bonus right the referral bonus was a big thing when there was a talent war but that business didn't work or it was just too small of a business what did you learn she said you learned a bunch what did you learn about why it didn't work and then take me through your process of saying i'm giving up i'm just going to sell it and go work it and lick my wounds and work at facebook for a couple years uh yeah so i had two co-founders who are also engineers like i'm a software engineer by background and we were solving a problem that we had like scaling engineering teams and found that most of our best hires were referrals but there wasn't a great way to you know kind of programmatically do that and and so you know we actually had a bunch of ideas on a list and this was just the first one and we said okay we'll just try to see how it works so one of my big lessons is like you do not have that much time as a company as soon as you start writing code you're really entrenching yourself so we ran it for about a year we launched it i think we got like 50 60 companies signed up using it and the real big like oops moment was that we realized the people who do that make the most referrals and are best at making referrals like i'm sure jason that you make referrals to your companies all the time you're probably a great source of like you know someone a talented person looking for like their next thing you're connecting them to right people but once you get money involved people feel weird about it so yes matter incentives matter so we actually did get a lot more sharing of job opportunities but people went out of the network in order to refer those people they didn't go back through so our kind of thesis around money itself could help motivate people to spread the word about high value jobs ended up just not being quite right so it's interesting everybody's kind of learned that over time i remember at my couple startups ago mahalo we had mahalo answers and quora had done a q a site and google was actually doing a question and answer site like quora and they were paying researchers at google for this google research project i forgot the name of it exactly i might have called it google answers actually and they had full-time librarians who you could pay 30 bucks to go research something for you if you needed it right so if you're like i need to know more about this and that was just a particularly hard search to do they would do it for you uh and they and korra added some kind of gold or some kind of like way to incent people and you could earn gold and i could earn gold and that would help you promote stuff and it turned out that's not why people use quora the reason people use quora is like you did when you started docsen is like somebody's like how do i put a password on a pdf how do i track a pdf and it's like use docsend there's like other motivations like people want to get status and status is just such a much bigger motivator for folks so one thing i thought was very interesting about how you run the company is you think about what you want to accomplish in the next 18 months and then you work backwards to how you have to staff and fund based on that and then you raise money on it so these sort of like 18-month sprints as a corporate sort of concept i want you to go into that process maybe tell us how many times you did it how you came up with that cadence and if you're still pursuing it now since you kind of have escape velocity in other words i think you're either profitable or very profitable when we get back on this week at startups everybody knows that zendesk is the go-to tool for customer support it's the gold standard but what you may not know is zendesk also offers a suite of sales tools designed to remove the difficulties of sales software so sales teams like yours can go spend more time on what really matters to their business which of course is having better customer conversations even better zendesk is offering this suite of sales tools plus their industry leading support software for free for six months as part of the zendesk for startups program think about that along with the free access to all of zendesk as part of the program you'll also get access to zendesk's community of startup founders and partners who will teach you all the best practices to better serve your customers and they'll even offer dedicated onboarding guidance and support to get you up and running in no time steezy one of our great investments here at launch they teach people how to dance it's a subscription service think calms meditation steezy for dance they rely on zendesk and they love it they use the combination of zendex explorer and their ticket tagging system so that they can track which features their users want and that they're most excited about and then they take all of that information from the customer support channel and they give it to the product team right get six months of zendesk for free at zendesk.comtwist and to qualify for this program because they're giving it to you for free they just ask that you have under 50 employees and you've raised a series a or below right so if you're a series b and you've got 100 employees why don't you go ahead and pay for the product okay but this is zendesk for startups it's free zendesk.com twist all right welcome back russ heddleston is here from doc send as i mentioned they have a cool product called the docs and fundraising network if you're trying to raise money which if you're in this audience you uh they pre-screen your deck and then send it to folks which by the way is how naval and myself started in the industry we would just send emails to folks and say hey we're raising here are people we've met with who are raising money his became his venture deals became angel list and uh my open angel forum became launch and all the other projects i do so uh i had heard you talk about this 18-month sprints that you do and that planning that you do around it maybe you could explain that a little bit for founders and and why it's important yeah i mean everyone runs their company differently so you know examples of all sorts and know ours has worked well for us we we talk about it as kind of the strategy neapolitan where there are a few different layers like mission vision like you know we think of that on like a you know five year horizon like three to five year horizon and then and and so those don't change very often that's our north star but then you know we have uh departmental okrs that are quarterly and that's way too big a difference between those two things so we have two other layers in the middle um there is a strategy that is an 18-month strategy so we kind of revisit that on that time frame and then there are company okrs that are every six months every year is too long six months seems like the right kind of like cadence to optimize for so there's kind of the first half of the year companies sprint the back half but then every quarter each department is is updating their okrs um and so that that what's nice about that especially as the ceo is i'd like to not be critical path for everything you know we really want to push down in the organization decision making which has a lot of benefits right people feel empowered they feel appreciated they have a bigger impact and i don't really like to micromanage so if you can kind of get everyone on the same page about where we're going in 18 months people can start to be smart about how they slot things in now versus later and kind of have those open cross-departmental conversations about what are the trade-offs and what's the right ordering of stuff so you know and then based on that 18-month roadmap yeah we look at well what's the team we need to to get that done and then from that we kind of back out okay well you know like on what time are we going to hire them how much is that going to cost and then do we need to raise more money and you know the last time we raised money was in 2018 that we raised 5 million from dcm and we actually had a term sheet for 20 um but we just saw i'd i'm with dcm and kyle louise on our board there from there and you know he's really on board with how we run the business and so you know as you mentioned we're now profitable very casual positive and i always tell our team that that's not the goal but we also don't keep score based on head count or dollars raised we keep score based on growth like are we building a big company or not and my co-founders are also engineers and so the three of us have worked at hyper growth companies before and especially when you're trying to scale up engineering if you scale it too quickly it ends up being confusing people don't know exactly what they're working on you spend most of your time interviewing and it can actually be detrimental to your ability to make progress you know on you know 12 18 month horizon so we'll grow our engineering team 50 in the next year we grow other departments based on need as you mentioned earlier 100 of our deal flow is inbound it's 90 95 self-serve and engineering and product and design is our is our biggest spend as a company and that's where we think we have the longest term differentiation and uh you try to do sas sales uh and have a big sales team but the problem with your sales team was if your average sale was 20 grand or it cost you whatever 20 grand to make a sale when you take the entire sales team together and you divide their whole book of business you know it might cost 20 000 for an at scale enterprise sas company in your case to make a sale but that was your average uh yearly spend so you're basically in the hole and you only make money if they renew for the second year so you disbanded the whole thing correct as a failed experiment it wasn't a failed experiment i think it would have been much more capital intensive to do that and i when i when i see or talk to founders who are kind of starting out sometimes they'll be like oh we're going to have self-serve and enterprise sales and i'm always like no no you got to pick one go to market motion and stick with it like superhuman being a great example i'm sure that superhuman could spin up an outbound sales team the question is is that the best use of their time right now and the answer is probably not um and so you do see a lot of examples of product-led growth companies that then later on put on top in enterprise sales motion which is probably what we would do as well it just happens to be the case that we can get more growth out of the strategies that we're currently pursuing so we did spend two years selling up market specifically in sales enablement and that was working fine it was more capital intensive and the math as you point out means you just need more upfront cost there's a lot of risk in terms of you know your sdr's maybe not working or you know scaling your ae team and you really need to have big big acvs for that to be worthwhile average customer average contract value contract value right so if you're you know paying your cost of uh acquiring your deal is 20 000 and you're only making 20 000 in the first year that math is not going to work out it needs to be like 100k or above and opinions on this vary but you want to be really targeting um those companies and dachshund has a lot of public companies we have a lot of big contracts um but for a 55-person team i think it's better to just focus us on building for the end user which is not necessarily smb versus enterprise it's just that we we build for the person using our software versus the economic buyer at a big company um you know and and those are just two different feature sets and it both both strategies can work i just think for small companies you probably should pick one because then you are setting yourself up to be better at it so what type of marketing has been the most successful for you if you were to like as look back on the history of the company now and say here are the three top channels for us i'm gonna guess and it's pretty obvious to everybody that the number one channel is people sending the link to people and then after you look at a document you then go create your own document or you have an account etc we've all been through that kind of workflow i'm assuming that's number one but i don't know if it is tell us what were the channels that you clicked into um and that drive your growth yeah so actually the number one channel is not product virality it's actually word of mouth yes 60 of our sign ups are direct meaning that we've never seen them before they just type in dachshund.com um the number two channel is product virality like you get enough docs and links for then you come to toxin but because we've cookied you uh like we we unless you clear your cookies right in which case we wouldn't know but most people don't bother to do that we would know that like oh this person has just seen dachshund links before so we're going to put them in that direct product virality bucket so so making the product better and easier to use has always been our biggest growth channel it's just kind of unintuitive for some people that you know word of mouth is is like the bigger driver than the the kind of i think that is the hotmail kind of viral loop where it's like you know i'm using hotmail there's a little signature superhuman has that viral loop as well um but in our case it's not always the situation that a recipient of a docs link is a sender like you don't send as many decks as like a founder fundraising or a sales person or someone in investor relations at a big financial services firm like those people are senders so i think that kind of cuts down on the the viral opportunity for us um in terms of marketing content marketing has been our biggest driver and and so we always talk about docs in being a horizontal technology we have to market vertically and we've always built it the product in mind where it is very horizontal across our 16 000 plus customers like there are all sorts of crazy use cases for it um but from a marketing perspective um last year what we really focused on was the fundraising use case so we have that fundraising network we come out with a lot of research reports and like what is a pre-seed or seed round look like which is just really useful because you know we've all been to these conferences where it's always the investors talking and our research tries to really represent the founder perspective so um when you sign up for docs and you say what you're using is for if you say fundraising then we'll ask you six months later if you want to participate in research like we're very security oriented this is all opt-in but we have thousands of founders who are like yeah sure i'd love to take the survey you can in aggregate and anonymize all my data and and so then we code their decks and then we can say you know here's what a successful pre-seed deck looks like and what a successful pre-seed fundraiser look like it takes something from that and that specifically what does a successful pre-seed seed deck having it and where do vcs and investors spend their time index what do they step over and what pages do they screenshot because you know if people screenshot we can we don't track that no because we don't have code on your device to do that and we could do that but then it would make it even more annoying as a recipient and so we try to strike that balance between making it easy as recipient and giving the center control but you know even if we did detect screenshots by putting code on your computer which you probably wouldn't install that would be kind of scary you can still take a picture with your phone so if the pixels aren't someone's screen and someone's sufficiently motivated then they can get them yeah it's like the same thing that clubhouse is going through right now everybody knows how to do screen recording on your phone you know you hit that little screen recorder it's built into uh iphones now they actually i think can detect i was understand because people were clubhouse shaming people by recording their clubhouse chats that they thought were anonymous or secret which is so dumb like it's it's the internet like it's you can put it on speakerphone folks and just take another phone out and write a microphone the same thing for docs it's like this is a cat and mouse game so even if we did that and clubhouse can do that detection because they're on your device it's how snapchat does you know their screenshot detection but doxin does not put code on recipient computers that would just you're limited by what the browser can do but the the interesting part is the time spent and it really is interesting that the time spent uh is what per how many seconds does an average vc spend looking at slides and are there slides that vcs just really care about i.e team or something else revenue well yeah team is the most commonly included slide in precedence decks and series 8x although surprisingly no category slide is in 100 of successful decks so there are i don't know like five or ten percent of pre-seed decks that just don't have a team page which is shocking to me but okay um no where people spend a lot of time in pre-seed is on the product pages and one of the interesting takeaways here is that pre-seed is all about the product and so you can see investors spending more time and more time spent there correlates to being more likely to be successful because remember we also have all the failed decks or i should say many of the founders who don't raise successfully still opt into this research and so then we can compare and contrast the two so more failed deck versus successful deck if they spend a lot of time in the precede area looking at the product sections it correlates with success correct and then seed onwards spending more time in the product sections actually correlates with not with failure that's interesting inverse correlation yeah yeah and then you want to see more time spent in the business model or the traction or kind of other areas later on like if you have financials in your pre-cedar seed deck that'll get a ton of scrutiny from investors but i mean personally i don't think you should put your financials in there if the financials are the best part about your company at that stage you shouldn't raise money you're probably doing just fine um and so typically it's just like yeah you're losing money or you have done some crazy projection that i'm just going to discount um you know so yeah the this is really interesting that the takeaways in terms of ordering which pages get the most um kind of time spent on them but one of the other takeaways is that having a good deck is all about storytelling and that kind of varies company company to your question about time spent it used to be three and a half minutes on average starting with the the beginning of the pandemic we also track for the entire deck for the entire deck you as a founder and what's the large number of slides in a deck i think it's 18 i want to say there's rifling through five seconds of slide or something their flip flip flip because again this is the thing that just gets you the meeting or not and and so different people look for different things uh one of the interesting things since the pandemic started is that that decrease in average time spent is due to a lot of just 20 and 30 second views so you might go through a deck but after page 5 out of 20 you're like uh i don't think this is a fit you know like people are just dropping out like it's a much higher bar to like read the whole deck so we just didn't see that many kind of abandoned decks um before but we're also seeing record numbers of founders sending out their deck so record numbers are not just existing founders but new founders like as you mentioned like now is a good time to start a company if you can afford to and we're also seeing record number of vcs like going through decks and you know i attribute that everybody is at home there's everyone's personal meetings that makes total sense and you know the interesting thing was i always had a rule when i was you know running companies that had a lot of vc interest i just would say we're not raising and that was my number one we're never racing and the number two thing i would say is if you're ever we'd say i just say we're not they we try to set up calls and i'd say yeah if you find yourself in santa monica and you want to come by and uh you know have a hamburger come by anytime i'll take you out for a burger i'd love to meet you and they say hey when dropping a call and i said yeah no um but if you're in santa monica don't have time for a call but if you're ever in santa monica do come by and i was interested to like be like a jerk about it and man did people come to santa monica like i literally had vcs or just fly down there it's fascinating yeah i just took like a very you know uh strong-handed approach to it which was if you want to meet me if you want to be involved with the company i want to see you get on a flight and meet me in san francisco i i will get on fire for san francisco stand upon it and come have a burger with me and let's spend an hour and the people who did it was like really awesome because you you the whole relation the whole dynamic changed i think i don't think you can pull that off now but what you can do is you can get an investor on a 20-minute zoom because nobody wants to be on a zoom for an hour no it's too long especially for too long and because everybody's been forced to i think that this becomes the thing that carries with us post-pandemic right now in america this is being taped uh and distributed in january of 2021 yep that that 2021 the time period between january 6th and january 20th when everybody was knuckling it uh trying to land the plane in american politics i keep joking that this is the thirteenth month of 2020 still but i guess technically it is yeah if i think i'm going to continue this month in uh 2020 it's a great one but really you know the pandemic's going to end i mean we have a lot of vaccines going in arms some pla some states in america are already at four or five percent shots in arms and have six seven eight percent of shots on shelves uh so we're we're kind of entering the end game of the pandemic but the thing i think that stays is and i'm interested in if your data says this you tell me if you see this in the data first meetings second meetings are all going to occur online with data rooms front loaded and then the socialization in person will happen if you get past one or two zoom meetings and all the data and all the information up front then the socialization and in person will happen at the end as opposed to how we used to do it which is you come to silicon valley you meet 50 investors over you know two months or you meet 15 and you get lucky and you do it in two weeks and then you do the diligence after the in-person meeting so basically you're as an investor being pretty open-minded about letting people into your office to pitch you now it's gonna be the opposite to get into the office to get pitch it's gonna be a higher benchmark what do you think i mean i agree with you it's hard for our data to be predictive in that way going forward but i mean i do think the market is remarkably more efficient in the last year um it's just as you pointed out investors looking at more things having more data points the the flip side and the downside for founders is that they have to get in touch with more investors um but if it's less time per investor then that can be okay but it is a little bit harder as a founder just to orchestrate that you know getting in touch with 100 so the pipeline is harder but the the pipeline process and the managing of all the relationships is harder but you get a better chance at finding a match if every i think people can do three times my math we did it internally was we are capable of doing three times as many meetings not in person and we had a very in very very very fast in-person process for our accelerator where people came in for interviews like they fly in for y combinator interviews they would fly in for launch accelerator interviews and we would do them back to back we'd have somebody in the lobby organizing or organizing people that would come up they would go to one table then they go to second table then we call them back the next afternoon or whatever if they got to the next round and as efficient as that was it's it's still a third as efficient as doing it remote yeah well the other thing to keep in mind is you know we i keep hearing about this exodus from silicon valley people moving elsewhere and yeah i think it's been the case for years now that you can start a software company anywhere and silicon valley has more knowledge it's not like the people are necessarily not as as good elsewhere it's just they don't they don't have that institutional knowledge right being a multi-time founder getting to talk to people like you but as that information gets more widely disseminated you know hopefully the cost of running a company can go down and we can like move some of these jobs to other areas because you know pre-pandemics san francisco i just joke it's like a competition of business models to run a company in san francisco just so insanely expensive so if in the future you have more things being started elsewhere then you know yeah it's fewer jumping on planes it's like one thing if it's just like uh you know 10 minute bart ride in san francisco but plane flight as you put it is a big ask so i would imagine that the first couple meetings being on zoom will continue but i don't think it will be um kind of you know the in-person thing will go away obviously based on the check size and based on people's personal preferences you know some might not need the in person some are going to require the in person but i hope the efficiency is here to stay for sure when you look at um what you've accomplished in the first 10 years for the company and you started looking out at the where are you getting how long has been around seven years eight years seven years we started in 2013 we started monetizing in 2015 2016 and 17 i learned all the lessons of a technical founder getting into outbound sales and then in 2018 we changed our pricing positioning and packaging so we did not a rebrand but kind of like a we really doubled down on the you know self-serve horizontal technology we market vertically and so i'd really say like our current growth curve was set in 2018 um but but yeah your question still stands like okay we started in 2013 like how do we think about having been at it this long and like what the future holds is that kind of fair yeah that's kind of where i'm going it's like you've been at it for six or seven years now you've got to make a decision you have investors they're looking at spax they're looking at sas being the the greatest you know most amazing uh run of of all time how do you think about you know i'm assuming you're at or i understand you're at tens of millions of dollars in revenue but maybe not enough for an ipo or a spec or maybe getting close and then are people contacting you when you're in this sort of let's call it a tweener stage you know you're maybe don't have over a hundred million in revenue but you're way above 10 million right so how do you think about that well yeah i don't think we have line of sight to going public um and and i i don't it's just not something we spend a lot of time thinking about i you know we have these 18-month strategies right and and so like we kind of know what the market looks like we did our last one in july and we see the opportunity and it's interesting as a founder because every like you know year or two you you're in a different spot if your business is growing and things are available to you now that weren't available to you you know a year or two ago so for us we're just in a really interesting position it's a really fun company to be involved with we've got a great team morale's high and you know like as i mentioned before like no one else is really thinking about things the same as we are um so you know we're just kind of full steam ahead um and i think it depends if you're if you as a founder have like flatlined or run out of ideas or you're just tired or just too stressful over time like that can really build up and make it no longer fun to work on but i mean for dachshund my two co-founders uh we all went to undergrad together we've worked together before so we've been friends since 2003 right so you guys like doing the you guys love doing the company you're slow and steady wins the race but you must be getting a ton of i mean if you were gonna sell this would be the time to do it you must be having people knock your doors down to add that revenue whether it's salesforce or you know slack or you know well like i bought my software so but all these enterprise companies must desperately want to own you carda et cetera and then some of them have gone public already like has docusign or hello sign did they go public uh dropbox bought hello sign docusign is public and crushing it they're very very enterprise focused i think as a founder there are a couple things to consider for for that enterprise companies like buying other enterprise companies by and large and they don't or they do they do they do they they like yeah good go to market where they can like throw it through their sales team and since doctrine doesn't have an outbound sales team you know it's unclear if we could you know sell it through a channel i think we could obviously but there's that to consider um no i think for for us it you know if we were going to sell it's something we evaluate when people are interested but there isn't one quality to docsend is that it feels easy to use and therefore it feels easy to copy and so in the build versus buy people try to build yeah however it's unintuitively large especially when you get into the data room workflows inside of dachshund or the e-signature there's just a lot of smart stuff we've built in there so as a recipient it looks pretty simple as a sender it's easy to get up and running but there's a lot of room for mastery in there and there's probably some kind of comparable analogy to superhuman because i have to imagine like they're in a similar situation they're building something differentiated interesting it's growing quickly um you know but by and large we're just we're just running our company and having fun in the meantime um and i also have a belief that software just tends to grow like it's just the best place to be in so if you have interesting ideas and you're on subscription it compounds right i mean it just compounds and compounds and compounds so exactly every day that you don't sell you're accruing more value to your equity if it is in fact growing the way it is so it's it you know i had these youtube channels that people kept trying to buy off of me and we one of them was called exit it was like a cross fitness one that we had done because when youtube was looking for partners they were partners with my previous company mahalo which is now insight.com we have this youtube channel exit it has three million followers and it makes sense 200 000 a year in ads just every year year in and year out and it just keeps growing and i don't know what to do with it because every time i go to sell it nobody wants to pay a dollar per subscriber but i was like you know this is worth a couple million bucks the right person but i don't have time to sell it but it keeps throwing off money so why would i even sell it just keeps baking that's like sass it just keeps growing like youtube channels just keep growing seo links just keep accruing to the person who got them if it's good content right so it is a really difficult yeah to understand when to get off the treadmill but if the market were to collapse how would you look at it then that you missed the window i guess is what you have to think about as a family yeah it depends on like what time frame you need money and how much money you need like we pay our employees really well there there are great markets for doing secondaries if that's something we wanted to do in the future so we can get people acquitted we haven't done the secondary thing yet that would be it um it is undisclosed undisclosed okay yeah so this is the thing that's changed the game see for for people who are listening it used to be in somebody in your shoes that wouldn't be able to do secondary in fact a lot of people in the industry i think ron conway and fred wilson friends of mine uh you know or at least particularly friends of mine um they were uh very anti secondary because they thought this would might take people to games and then they realized over time oh secondary keep spilling the game longer right like you get a chance to take some chips off the table buy an apartment pay down your college debt i don't know maybe you know uh buy a ski condo somewhere it just takes the edge off right as a founder yeah and it's i mean there's a couple dynamics that i think they're going to be more companies that are like doc send like you i mean you've got some in your portfolio there are things like calendly there there are things like um lucidchart um companies that just or even survey monkey early on right yeah things just keep compounding over time and then things become more interesting and you have more options available to you i think as a founder one of the most important things is to just remember it's a long road so you got to be engaged and you can't let your stress level get too high like you have to run your company well keep yourself from getting too stressed out about all this you seem like a pretty mellow dude uh naturally but do you have moments of like incredible stress and dread in this uh seven year journey where you're got existential dread or you've just been charmed that it's been up and to the right um well a couple things no no no there are definitely been moments of stress for me like especially you know when we decided to go all in on the self-serve and not do the outbound sales stuff and while we're doing the outbound sales stuff we had our competitors in that market have raised almost a billion dollars and we just raised 10. so you know that's every time there's an announcement there and then our sales teams are in these meetings and then you know is this going to work and so yeah why are we raising 100 million why aren't we why don't we do this why don't we do that we're falling behind sales people are aggressive and they don't sales people have no problem going into the founder of the ceo and being super aggro and aggressive about like hey you know this is what we need to do russ yeah well our sales team was pretty tall and i keep in touch with with them and we found good homes for them um but you know so that was a moment of stress but but since then though we've got a good leadership team like so that's really important like good hiring and one of the things we tell our employees is that you know like we have a lot of the benefits of the startup or high growth but we also have a really small preference stack only less than 15 million that we've raised so their equity is likely to be worth you know a fair amount and you know basically the equity we would have given up to raise more money or you know just generous with employees and so if you hire good people and you run your business well and one of the key things is just getting rid of underperformers or even google i think says they get 30 percent of their hiring wrong and i think a lot of startups don't take the time to to college for that yeah like every every time you know we've hr i think at the end of the day ends up being the most stress for a founder managing your team managing egos and so if you if you can get those things right and continue to invest in them i think it does take a lot of pressure off of kind of day-to-day firefighting um what is your like ideal employee team member profile like do you have one where now that you're seasoned and you've been at this for a decade and you worked at dropbox for a little bit or did an internship and you worked at facebook and you're on your second startup at least like do you have like a certain type that fits with russ and somebody who gels with you and you know founder employee fit founder team member fit i try to let our hiring managers and the vps and directors like have the final say and i'm involved in every interview loop that anyone wants me to be on and and so my personal criteria is is that you can correct for a lot of things but you can't correct for motivation and inspiration so um i try to look to see is this position at dachshund a real win for this person their career like are the things we as a company the things we have to offer them things that are going to be really valuable to them so for instance i've seen some other startups that'll like try to hire like really big name execs but in my experience it's like those people are probably going to want to build out a really big team underneath them so you need to hire the right people at the right time um so we we don't overweight on name brand like schools or name brand logos you know we really truly try to dig into like how excited is someone about this and for the level of stoke yeah yeah it really does increasing levels of stoke folks you just need to have that stuff and it is true like what you're thinking of as the founder and the person hiring the person you have to think about their careers especially young people and their career arc more than them right it's almost like you have to take the burden on of saying we need to make sure this person succeeds in their career so that they stay with us for five years or six years because really the magic i find the magic in relationships in business happens in year three or four or starts to happen in year three or four the first two years you're like kind of getting up and running but then like somewhere around year three four five when you're working with somebody i have this with ashley with jackie i had it with starting to have it with presh on my team and matt had it previously with uh brian alvin my partner on a couple projects like you just kind of finish each other's sentences you can trust them to get the whole project done you got the cadence everything right yeah exactly yeah yeah it's a great point too like you as the the higher like the the company you need to think about people's careers more than they might necessarily because to your point if they leave after two years if your whole company's like that that means every year you have to replace half your company that's that's crazy and then you're also trying to grow the company by some amount and then all that institutional knowledge is lost and that's just a real pain um and as as the founder like i can give a really good pitch to someone on joining docs and even if it's not the best thing for them but i don't i don't do that we try to figure out like is this really the best thing for them you want to talk them out of it more than anything uh my friend tony shea rest in peace used to pay people at the end of their training at zappos they would say we'll give you a month's salary if you leave now here's the check it's sitting here and they would literally put the check in front of them and say if you want to take this check you can leave with one month's salary this is after like a three week training program they could just take a month's salary and bolt yeah i love that example it's very clever yeah so rest in peace all right listen russ we could talk all day and we have to get back to your day you've been very gentlemanly in taking my uh insanity on the pod and just saying reckless as opposed to mark suster who wouldn't even put the link in there and uh i appreciate your honesty and candidness and obviously insightfulness you you are a uh as one of the producers are saying sleeper sleeper guest sometimes we have guests people haven't heard of them or maybe they haven't met them before but they have a lot of great knowledge and you fall into that category russ i just say thanks for having me on this has been great and i appreciate you uh don't ever change please i love the the candor and off the cuff remarks it's really fun to listen to all right listen continued success uh let me know when the next secondary goes in so i can wet my beak and we will see you all next time on this week in startups bye bye