#1 Slik tok han selskapet fra $1 million til $40 millioner i årlig inntekt: Playbooken til Nick Peters

Hej mye noen er Lukas vel i Geberel og velkommen til Operators. Jeste min dag er Nick Peters. Han tok Ardok fra en til 40 miljoner dollar i årlig jentagene intekt som kjef Operating Officer. Nå er han kjef Operating Officer i kaffeberentersjølskapet erøst. Hvordan snart skal over i rollen som CEO? Litt bak rundt først. Ardok er et bit i besasetskap som hjelper store selvskapet med å kartlege hvor den vidsmeten faktisk ringer sammen. Eller så kaldt digitalt filling av selvskapet. Da Nick kom in i selvskapet stodet 10 miljoner grunner på en tablet. Det var den oljeomsetningen. Selskapet besod av 80 % utviklerne og 2 sennere. Han tok der med fatt på jobben via bygge hele de personelle laget som tok Ardok fra en starter til et seriøst entrepra selvskap som hadde snitt kontakt størrelser på 1 miljoner år til grunner. I denne besoden får du svar på disse spørsmålene. Kopp i inne som faktisk driver et satsetskap fremover hvorfor det er feil til Sverige men det lyckkes USA. Hvordan priser det entrepra segmentet uten å miste delen hvorfor tegning betyr alt i en kapital rundte. Hvordan Ardok bruker ai i praktisk. De tre centraler delene et satskap alt de kan bryte kapitalen til ned det. Hvordan for flere ansatte kan mindre alt ut og til slutte hvordan Nick ser på den moderne CEO roll. Det er et enn mystik, og så er vi å lere et b2b satsetskap for Norge. Ja, så jeg har begynnet og et team hadde just past 1 miljon dollars i en annen køring rebenut. Og bylling av satsbusis fra Norway, en b2b satsbusis. Det er det som det ikke er det som ikke har en pylætsløske, det er ikke hvertiske, det er ikke hvertiske, det er ikke hvertiske. Men vi vet at Ardok er en annen køring, og så vi kom in, og det er en annen køring av en annen køring. Det er en annen køring av en annen køring av satsbusis. Det er en annen køring av satsbusis. Men det er en annen køring av satsbusis i en annen køring av satsbusis. Og når jeg har lefte, det har jeg pastet en 40 miljon dollar mark. Så det er 40 satsgjøring. Det er det jeg kan. Så hvordan var det en annen køring om du gikk det til at jeg var på en annen køring? -Jeg er en annen ting. -Ja, det er en annen ting. Det er ennstående ting, hvor det er ennstående ting, det er ikke ennstående som du har gjort. Så når jeg kom in, jeg har vært i denne fjellet av denne fjellet av startet, for å få en sparing overlaunch, en playing ping pong, enn hva du gav i denne fjellet. Det har jeg ganske meg til å ha en gang, og at jeg har sette å ha en gang for du, men kan du ha en gang til å ha en gang til å ha en gang til å ha en gang til denne fjellet? Så jeg var på en dag, og så kom jeg en projektmanager. Så jeg kom in. Jeg kom fra Kofounder CEO, "Bridearch" og "Projectmanager" på Ardock. Det var en billig samarbeidig, så jeg skulle ha en e-go-and-check. Det var en del av hanske. Så jeg var på en gang som vi hadde at vi hadde en e-go-and-check. Vi hadde en HR, en finansisk, en IT-kompliant, en legal, og alle det som vi hadde. Så jeg var på en produkt. Ja, det er en produkt. Nå har jeg et samarbeidig samarbeidig. Ja, så hva jeg like til å se, når jeg satt på en company, jeg kan spille tre måneder. Det er R&D, som var en billig samarbeidig samarbeidig. Det er S&M, samarbeidig samarbeidig samarbeidig samarbeidig, og så har jeg en DNA, General Administrative. Så når jeg kom in, og jeg startes med at hvordan var det? Det var over 80 % av det teamen i R&D. Vi hadde 2人er i salen, og vi var just startet med de kommercien. Så det var så færdig med det, og vi var som en så veldig og så visionerig, vi hadde at vi hadde at vi hadde at vi hadde at vi hadde at vi hadde at vi hadde at vi had a visionerig. Så vi hadde at vi hadde at vi had a visionerig. Så vi hadde at vi had a visionerig. -divico til noe hva du vil accelerere. Så når jeg kom in, at jeg var ok, at en miljoner er en error, -har vi å få en money i denne 6-12 måte. Og så, når jeg brugte denne problemen, -har vi å have de tingene i hvert fall for å fornøse denne人en til å investere. Fordi, denne meene investeringen var, -då har du en delt av en delt av en delt av en delt av en delt. Men nu har du en delt av en delt av en delt av en delt. Og så, den eneste delt av en miljoner error, Jeg kan ha en system. Jeg kan ha 6-8 hårs av en annen sengelig selsie om å ha en annen sengelig selsie. Og hører det til en annen sengelig investerende i 6-års av en annen sengelig sengelig selsie. Det er ikke autidig. Så den første sengelig sengelig var vi har en system som helst hans alle insen av Errart og Tartmogel. Og denne ting var vi har så far med å ha en fantastisk personer, vi gjer å ha en annen personer. Vi starter med hårs av processen og børt børt hårs av hårs av. Det var en av de god tult. De var de 2 tulte jeg kom igjen til å ha en annen sengelig sengelig som var i denne sengelig sengelig. Tartmogel? Tartmogel? Ja. Det var en av de god tult, og det var en av de god tult, og det var en av de god tult, og det var en av de god tult, og det var en av de god tult, og det var en av de god tult, og det var en av de god tult, og det var en av de god tult. -Jeg er klareret. -Jeg er klareret. -Yes, noe som er autidig. -Jeg er klareret. -Jeg er ikke klareret. -Kommensen er sjovt, X, Y, and Z. -Jeg er en autidig oppdrykter. -Jeg er en samarbeidig oppdrykter. -Jeg er en u.s. bygge. Litt til det. -Jeg er en av de samme av de samme av de samme av de samme av de samme av de samme av de samme av de samme abdeidig oppdrykter. -Jeg er en urije investerier. Du skal gett uten av norre. -Ja, så det er de ganske som jeg tror er satsende til advise. Det er så rett. Det er det som noe du har begynnet for at noen er. Og jeg tror at i en avkjens, denne ledselsen har vært på en mål, og så at det er en mål, er det vi må til å build en real gode market motion, i en market, der det er en mål for denne future, fordi nu har du et godt mål til å føre det over time. Og så var vi med å svide med det ikke var med i år, og vi hadde å holde til å se, og vi var med å se det i en avkjens, noe. Sviden var ikke så meget ganske, og noe er ganske. Men asintet vi disse, vi var med å investere i en avkjens i en avkjens i en avkjens i en avkjens, så var det at det var en avkjens. Hvis vi ikke var så godt, at noe var i en avkjens, det var det ganske, fordi det var en avkjens. Hvor ganske har vi et grønt? Hvor ganske har vi en avkjens, og det var ikke en avkjens, og det var ikke en avkjens. Hvis vi ikke var med å investere i en avkjens, og det var ikke en avkjens, og det var ikke en avkjens. Liefen Enterprise Architecture, "The willingness to take a risk" på Arduk er en kore-workflow for big companies at have a lot of risk on their books. There's just not a willingness to try. -It's a great investment to become a part of it. customers well, right? Yeah, it's a huge investment in time and say it's out of champions. And so it just, we just didn't have any pipeline created. We didn't have any close deals in that year. And so that means it didn't work and pull back because we would rather learn that lesson of not things not working in the United States. I think you're going to have to fix it rather than pulling out. Yeah, it takes the, it takes the same amount of time, right? Yes. To go into Sweden, then to go into UK, for example. Yes. So why are we going to UK? Because if you win, even big, exactly. So overcome those pains, like, oh, there's more flights, there's more distance or cultural differences, but you've got to take all those things. Did you ever think that your product didn't have a product market fit when no one wanted to buy your product in Sweden? Yeah, because the, if they're, because like I said in the beginning, like the Norwegian relationships having worked together before is an easy open door. So when you're just being judged brutally in a business to business landscape, purely transactional. Yeah, purely transactional, then you really learn. And so I think that's where the getting into the UK first and then the United States meant that we could learn if we had product market fit. And there was lots, nothing looked good week to week at our rock ever. It was like, are we doing enough? Can we do more? How do we do it? It's only when you look back and you see all the bricks I adding up. Does it start to make sense? But in the middle of it? Yeah, product market fit is always a big question mark over your head. How can we prove it? But okay, back to the investors. So you managed to get the data auditable? Yes. And then you managed to raise capital? Yes. How much did you raise? That's what your first task to get some money into the company. Yeah. So that one was, it wasn't that much money. I guess I don't remember exactly what it was, because the numbers later got so big. It's contained just like a, a little bump. Like a change. But yeah, when I joined, I think the company was worth about $8 million. And then, so we needed to at least double the valuation at that. So that's $16 million. And so when you get up to $300 million, it doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. So you, so if $16 million and probably about 20% of that, is that a benchmark in terms of capital arrays? Yeah. I think we were always under the 20% mark during those. It's a 3.2 million or sorry. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah. But yeah, it's funny. It was so important at the time. Yeah. But now it does change, right? In terms of the big year round, you get later, which will come to. Okay. So you raised that money? Was it, was this like seeing, like, experiencing the matrix for you? Like, you just know exactly what to do to get the investors to put in some money into the company? Yeah, I mean, learning the business was like that first hurdle for me. And then, and then all the ways that the scrambled try to get up like a good investment pitch, knowing that we had, when we actually closed the deal, we had two months of run my left. So it was pretty intense at the time. And when it comes down to it, it's like the, it is the sales metrics of the last month that really moved the needle. Because you can promise it's about to come as much as you want. Yeah. But it's that last month that really matters. So closing the year strong, it's easier to sell in Q4. We learned that lesson over and over again. And so I think that's what got us over the hump. And then it's pretty much off to the races, doubling, tripling the company size in quick order to basically say, this is an opportunity we're seizing, there's no reason to hold back. It's, there's going to be a big deep j curve here. So let's just do it. Yeah, they are the best, they are namely the real number one, on EPSY's Coring, which is based on Cunders' feedback and is the gulestandard of Coring in the bank balance. Folio solve problems before it becomes a real problem, by using technology. And if it's going to be a problem, we're going to have a chatbot, but a human one. Here is a real feedback from one to two. Tommy is going to Google. Other banks will live in the middle of the bank, Folio. This is so simple, and rough, and brilliant. And it's cheap, for thousands of people. That's what we're going to do now, but I'm going to have three hours to get a bank account here on the 24th. So, if you're going to get a BDF account or have a BDF bank in Folio, then you know which one you're going to check out. Check out Folio and Folio.n. So there were basically no systems or playbooks in play. It was a R&D company. 80% breaking on the product. You set up an investor, a playbook, in a sense, or a system of the data. That also helps the company to actually look at themselves. So you spoke about going into Sweden, and that failed. And then because of the go-to-market motion there, for the family motion works in Norway, because the founder knows people. You can trust them. But in Sweden, no one knows you. It's more transactional than you thought. Okay, it failed in Sweden. Let's go at least go to the UK or US. How did you establish this GDM motion or go-to-market motion? And how did you have anything? Or did you create that from the start? Yeah, when I came in, there was the first to really focus salespeople, because everybody was doing sales in the other days. And so, yeah, that first motion of let's have a CRM, let's create a pipeline, and let's work it, right? Let's make sure that we have pipeline coverage for the quarter to quarter. So that was fine. And then what I ended up supporting them mostly on was, okay, once you get to this, they look like they want to do business with us, but enterprise sales is just a lot of paperwork to get to procurement. So I really focused on that part, knowing that it's going to be different in the UK versus the United States. And just basically getting those templates up and those certifications that were needed to basically say, you can, we're a trusted entity in this market. And then we had to also create new daughter companies to do this at the time. And then as soon as you establish, then you need to make a skeleton crew who's going to do the go-to-market motion. So all that hiring stuff is on my plate. And then, and then it's the back to the chart model. Okay, if we're putting all this money in the United States, is it working any more efficiently than anywhere else? No, something not more efficient. But the big deals are coming from there. And when they do close, they close faster than anywhere else. But how does that process look like? Closing a big deal in the United States? Yes. Like the first big deal. How did you, wasn't the two instances, right? Yeah. So the, the one I remember really well was a big media conglomerate in the United States. Reached out to the Norwegian entity. We didn't, we weren't established in the United States yet. And said, we're this big media outlet. And it's a known name, a name that I would recognize. But the Norwegian team didn't recognize it. So it was just, oh, yeah, put somebody on it. But then as soon as we realized, then it was like, all hands on deck, they're going to ask so many questions and care so much about this. We're going to build the paperwork as they ask for it. And so that was a huge first proof point that we could get through it. Because you just have to meet with they're giving you. You can't prep everything in advance, theoretically. It's like, they need this. What do you do? They need that. What do you do? We got that closed. That was a big signal that if we could sell from Norway, let's build it in America. That was very easy. We got that closed. And then you're moving on. So they reached out to you. How did you know about you? Because choosing a niche really was cover for us. Like nobody really knows what our rock does. Nobody talks about it that much. They're like, oh wow, what a company. They got built out of Norway. But in the niche of enterprise architecture, there's just deep care and champions around this stuff. And so when you raise your hand and say, we're going to do this whole niche differently, then you get attention. And it's, oh, if you're going to be different, come prove it so you can do it different. They have baselines. They already had a team doing enterprise architecture. They always tried other tools. They already knew that they were bad. And so if we had that then leverage to say, so there are better competitors in that space. Oh, yeah. So what did you do differently? The big thing, basically, is that the big insight was that everyone else was hand-drying what the map of the company should look like. And spending, hiring very expensive enterprise architects and paying them a lot of money to draw something by hand. It took so long to draw it. By the time that the CEO got the drawing, they would be on to something else. So our core insight was, let's build the drawings from the data. And that annoyed a lot of people because my job is to draw. So don't take away my job. I know a lot of other people. Like physically draw. Like physically either in Microsoft Paint. In Adizio, in Excel, trying to make graphs and stuff. No auditability, right? So that's where, if you can put this, here's what actually your company works. Here's what it worked last week. Here's what it should work next week. And visualizing it all. Without having to draw anything, that was the true innovation. Yeah. So did you know that this was your true innovation? Yeah. We beat the drum loudly about this. And especially with the gardeners and foresters of the world. Because they're basically trying to protect the past a bit. Because the old companies who started 30 years ago and helped you draw. We're paying garden and forest art plenty of money. So we had to really be strong in our vision out there towards the founders of the center so that we could move people toward our way of thinking. Now it looks like a typical disruption story. But at the time, it does feel like you're hitting the head against the wall quite a bit. Yeah. So this big company reaches out to you and they tell you there are needs. And then you're building the motion. Yeah. As you communicate with this customer. So you actually have a perfect product to this customer. Yeah. When you're done. So the product had to be right on with their pain points. And then we are building the go-to-market at the same time, which is basically BDR's account executives solution consultants, customer support. So we were creating this really because it's because to get success out of the tool, you really We had to commit to it. We had all these ways to make sure that commitment was strong, and this kind of a deal proves that you need it all. You can't do it with less. You can't just hope people are going to buy it. You have to do each step really rigorous. Did you have the capital to do this? Did you have the structure in terms of the company to do this? Yeah. So that big push from 80% R&D to, I think, at one point, we were up to 55% SNM, which was a bit overcorrecting, but to invest in that, early on, that's where a lot of those board level discussions happen, is we keep on investing, are we seeing enough from the market? So when you actually sold to this customer, you have all the templates and all the papers, all the. You had everything in terms of going to a new customer. Yeah. Then you're just like, "Okay, if that's what it takes, if this enterprise level of company in the United States wants all that, now we need to do it every single time. There's no workarounds." And so once you decide that's when operators really go to town, it's because I don't want to make something operational, and it's a nice to have, or maybe. I only want to operationalize the things in order that are stopping the business from working. And over the time, there's cultural change and stuff at the time. But when I meet that early sales team in the community here in Norway, they often come up to me and it was like, "Now that I don't have you on the team that they started other companies, now that I don't have that covered, I realize how important it was." But at the time, when you're so quarter based and you need to take advantage of every opportunity, it feels like you're putting roadblocks up. But it's actually the only way to get those monster funding rounds because if you don't have perfect contractual obligations, you could have nuclear bombs in these clauses, which basically means that you no longer owed your code. You no longer can sell your company to anybody you want. You need, they have read a first refusal. So that detail was really important, foundationally, to do the bigger rounds later on and to get these bigger customers in the United States. Because this is like a cultural insight or like a societal insight into the United States, what it takes in terms of legal obligations and stuff like that. In Norway, it's happy to go lucky, I think, in a sense. But in the United States, there are layered up to the neck. So what is the biggest difference in terms of risk reduction that you need to have in place to grab a U.S. customer? Because we're taking highly confidential critical data flows from the customer. Our security stance and the actual, all the services that we provide had to be just completely perfectly security created. So when we didn't have a chief information security officer, I was like, all right, let's get a consultant in. Ooh, he's awesome. So let's hire him. Let's build out the whole culture and tech stack around security because that's a forever thing. But the legal causes get so intense and so long that we, I stopped doing the contracts when I hired legal counsel. So in America, it's this constant, wow, it's so hard to get over the finish line. But then as soon as you're over the finish line, it's in a drawer, just like in Norway. And so it feels like you shouldn't have to. But there's so many risk assessing people on the other side that you better match. And if you don't match, then you're not serious. And if you're not serious, then even if you have a champion who wants to buy it, there's plenty of other people in the company who can veto that purchase. So did you have to do anything about the product itself or was it just everything around the product? Yeah, I mean, in the product itself, I mean, there was these really big product road map pushes to make sure that we have this enterprise level access control. Because it's not just is it safe from external actors, you have to make sure it's safe between different role types internally. So the big word here is actually a risk reduction. Yes, risk reduction becomes, it becomes the thing that actually closes the deal on both sides. If you can prove your, the tool itself will lower their risk and we lowered their risk in the procurement process, that is way more important than the, than the price point. Because the price point kept on going up. We kept on pushing that more than anything else. Was that an insight you got from this process of did you know this already? That's one of those like advice theoretical things like the out there in the, in the ecosystem is a push price. But when you actually live it and you have that first time you're nervous, like, oh, should I raise it a little bit? And then you realize that nobody cares and then you're like, oh, I should raise it more. And then eventually you just get into a, no, no, this is just trying to make sure that you have the, you capture value correctly so that your vision can come true in the world. Because selling it for under, underpriced to gain market share, that means that you can't do R&D. It's like pointless. You have to do it together. Is this like the difference between having a, like a civilian mind versus having a business mind? So the business is a different entity than your individual mind. And you think about price, but a business is all about risk reduction and keep on going or saving money. So if you can make the calculation that you're actually saving money, even though the price point is so high, it's going to make sense for a business to. To buy it. Yeah. Exactly. The, the budgets are so huge that if you can, if you're, if you think about a number, like you're a personal buyer and you think, wow, $100,000 is just so much money. But in the context of what they're doing, it's nothing. So you, if anything, you need to find that, that right price point and we did a lot of pricing experimentation that just kept, basically kept on validating that yes, we can do higher prices without making longer sales cycles. Or if we found that a $20,000 sales cycle was as long as $100,000, I say the cycle. So let's just push the $100,000 I want. Yeah. You told me that one of the reasons that you failed in Sweden also had some struggles in all the countries where you're under investment in GNA, what do you mean by that? So the general administrative part is admin. Yeah. Anything. So anything that's not building a product or selling a product, it falls into this category. And so that's security and HR and legal and finance and all of these things that kind of come up that you must have to create a structured company. Basically, if you go into a new legal entity, a new country, that's what it is. It's a legal jurisdiction and you think that you're just going to be able to do the same thing. You are wrong. Everything, whatever you did that you're happy with on all the GNA functions do not work. Every single time you add another jurisdiction. So what I think would be, what ended up being was a lot of heroic work. Okay, we're here. We're, oh, we got the first notice from some authority that says we're not doing something right and then we scramble. We fix it. But the better way to do it is it's because it's an all the time problem. If you're going to go and do a new legal jurisdiction, make sure that you invest in the GNA capacity to handle it in advance because if you say you're going somewhere and then you have to pull back, it's far worse than the cost of just planning better. It's the same, it's the same reason why product managers exist and why everything isn't just engineers because it's so expensive to build the thing, you better make sure you have the right vision for what it should be like towards the end customer and the jurisdiction is that key thing. And because in Norway, especially there's not a lot of capital that you can find that is build the business great, right? It's more, get a little bit closer to the product market fit, see if you can get side of Norway. It's more like trial and error capital, but once you realize that if you're in a space when your competitors are building their company as robustly as their go-to market, that is an advantage and that's why external VCs really focus on that, international VCs. I would say that if you don't have the money to invest in how the company exists in each particular jurisdiction, you need to go to fewer jurisdictions. And that puts it again right on the Spheres tip, there were so many times that we would get incoming opportunity from random places around the world that felt nice because they came to us, but handling that business became so expensive that it was never worth it. We get somebody from Mexico who's, "Oh, we're ready to buy and we're ready to spend $150,000. Ooh, let's do it." But then you see over the years that, no, we have created an administration burden for us that is way more expensive than that and it's not enough, it's not a big enough market to make up for it. So I would say if you're concerned about the cost of adding G&A, only go to some place that is going to matter over the five year period and do that really well, which means it's hard for any company to go, the way that I think about it, it's hard to go anywhere about the United States. Everything else is a half step. Yeah, I'm just so sad about that. Well, it is what it is, right? Actually, in my mind, when you were talking, it doesn't make sense to go anywhere. It doesn't make sense to start anywhere as an agent. You just go for United States. Yeah, if you're going to do these hockey stick stuff, make sure that you're in a market that has had proven hockey sticks. But you went into Norway, then Sweden, then UK, then the United States. I think it was a little bit more nuanced. We did Sweden and Denmark pretty much side by side. Sweden didn't work. Denmark did better. UK next. And then the US within, I think it was six to 12 months, but then COVID hit, we had to bring everybody back. So if you have to do that or knowing this and you have to do it all again, would you have gone straight for United States? I feel like I have the experience under my belt where I could go into a boardroom or an investor meeting, and I could tell them why the United States is the right thing and cheer the pushback. I feel like I could stand in that pushback better now. OK, and what's the type of pushback would that be? Is it really capital-efficient? What happens if we fail? Isn't it easier just to take a little step now and then you think through the whole outcome and you're like I don't think that maximizes the company's value and I think that's what we're here for. So the capital market in Norway, I don't know how to describe it but it's not a big one so you have to get foreign investors at what time did you do that and how was that process different from getting like Norwegian investors. Yeah those early all early and Norwegian investors basically all came out, they were around Forshings Parking or or a current investor would bring in another investor. Basically friends and family. Friends and family like over and over again across I think we probably did four rounds like that and then you just you hit the limit and then so the that next when EQT and 1P came in in 2022 that's the moment when we did a structured competitive round. Same slide decks, really tight time periods are chairman at the time was from Austin, Kapital and he had seen plenty of downturns in the financial markets and so he really these credit focus on yeah and so he I remember it so well it was a November like holiday dinner and he was like the team has proven enough these kind of valuations don't last very long let's do the extra effort to push this on a very tight time frame and because we push it on that tight time frame this deal with EQT and 1P competitive we had four bitters or whatever we landed on EQT and then they allowed 1P to join and that the money moved right before or right as Russia was invading Ukraine and the entire SaaS market crashed without those two weeks we don't have the story that it is today. That's that's a great example of why timing matters so did he push for this because he knew something was going on? Yeah you just have this feeling you've seen it before and that's the great thing about experience and then any kind of operator is I remember what it felt like when you're like wow look at these valuations I haven't seen this before this is crazy how quickly that can turn what's not like a slow death of these values it's abrupt so if you're like oh it's probably easy to raise money now it'll be probably just as easy three months later if it feels easy now take it and that's what he that's what it says inside yeah is that something you will take with you for the rest of your life absolutely now I was like I still feel like I'm 20 I'm just figuring things out but I'm over 40 the having gone through the dot com boom the terminate financial crisis COVID wars like all this stuff is just like the world's top seaterity if you have a moment you got to grab it because at the moment go fast yeah it's just it's hard sometimes you think that it might be even higher maybe it's not there yet yeah or maybe you have experiences from closing earlier rounds and that haven't been so difficult so you'd think you'll manage so the it's not easy even though it's a good way of thinking it's not easy taking that decision to actually move now yeah well it's hot so the the operators tip here is that all that feeling around wins the right timing all that kind of stuff you have to put it in the feelings box and then the number that we looked at obsessively was zero cached ZCD and if we weren't properly organizing the business investing in the right things and seeing the deals coming on time if that zero cash date was moving closer to us instead of further away from us it creates immediate like awareness so it's not oh yeah we looked at it a couple months ago and the zero cash date we thought theoretically was eight months away no it is a week over a week thing to pay attention to yeah so you're like your burn rate it's your burn rate and then there's a date when you run out of money yeah and so you knew that day we calculated that date and the goal is to get that date to hurt away from you yeah but it wasn't moving that direction or was it stalling no that's the thing is because we were so focused on it that we would like close a big deal but we hadn't hired a lot of people and so that move the zero cash date so just you when you have that sense of control then you can put those feelings in a box and then be like if something does go wrong the financial markets aren't open to us we know what other levers we can pull and so that was the kind of the discipline around even if what ended up happening didn't happen we had backups like COVID hit and we immediately went to what's the zero cash date when he's a change and we knew what to do if you're having to make the model as soon as the crisis hit you're gonna feel really out of control and that's nerve-wracking do you believe that most Norwegian startups had those the concept of the zero cash date I don't I really don't know that's the thing is I was so heads down caring about the company building that I didn't really look around that much it's only now that I see that I there's probably stuff that we did at Arduck that aren't the norm yeah well the other more what other KPIs or what are numbers were really important in Arduck the customer acquisition cost became really important you want that to go down right yeah so basically when you sell something and you're like wow we're able to sell something for a hundred thousand dollars and the cost of good sold which is the other core thing is it's so minimal just adding more users to the cloud software that the hard part then becomes the customer acquisition cost are now you're gonna spend two years worth of the customer's potential income on us and then we're like we'll take annual payments up front then you're like okay yeah that's fine from a financial perspective technically it's two years but from a cash flow perspective it's just 12 months plus one day so those kind of details customer acquisition costs cost a good sold never really became a problem for us because we had we have Arduck has the most amazing DevOps team the more and more I see what's good and what's bad out there in the world the more I'm like they deserve a gold medal like the DevOps team is insane how they kept on lowering the cost serving more customers so that's great do I mean like the marginal cost of the software yeah yeah on there and then and then and then the the cancellation rate or the renewal rate the net dollar retention is something to watch but what you really want to maximize for is lifetime value because when you're gonna go out to an investor it doesn't really matter what's happening this quarter or it's have you added enough value to this that you're going to keep enough of those customers for long enough so you're going to get 5 8 10 X the customer acquisition cost as long as they last long enough so then becoming like I have an annuity and that's what is really exciting and why SaaS multiples got so big yeah so those are the kind of KPIs we looked at and then I would always try to make fun ones because those KPIs are good for the boardroom but they're not really good for the team and I was very much of a people leader and we had this one called TTM I don't think you'll see that in any books it's called Time to a Millie we would play the little Wang little Wayne a Millie song when we would hit this number and it's basically how many days did it take between hitting the $1 million mark and the $2 million mark and the $3 million mark so that was fun so you did that 40 times you did that 40 times so and did that decrease the distance between those rings yeah so like when things work perfectly and it's like the end of the quarter and all the big things coming out once we would have a 10 day time to a millie when in the early days it took five years for the first time to a millie so in the so that means that every 10 days you get a new million not every 10 days but in an average between the nine million dollar mark and the 10 million mark might have been 10 days but then you it's not a financial metric you can't then say then we can do that every 10 days yeah it's so only there's like that oh sometimes the timing works really well so we had a big celebration for the 10 million dollar mark 20 25 like these numbers that get round when you say big celebration what do you do them okay yeah during COVID I think we managed to do a cake but as soon as COVID was over we took the entire team which is now in the United States UK Denmark Norway like 150 people and we took them all to Iceland and so we had one big hotel huge events the fun the sauna the hot springs everything for hitting the 10 million dollar mark which you don't feel like you ever have the time to celebrate nope and it was really hard to actually set aside that time and to spend that money but anybody was there remembers it and that's like a highlight yeah because celebration being a founder myself celebration is not not the thing I'm very good at because my mind is everything is on all the things that does work exactly yeah yeah so how do you manage to celebrate and how much should you actually put into celebration how important is that so I think that the easy I think that because as a founder or there's if there's people in the team also have founder mentality and it's really hard for them to celebrate because they're always the next thing and so I think that it's the same thing is that final drop in the bucket that means that you are now you're $10 million doesn't feel like enough but if you told everybody when you were $1 million that you would do this crazy huge journey to 10 million and if and when we hit 10 million we're gonna release budget to do it that is a much better thing so anticipate the next big thing that seems hard to do commit now to doing it so then therefore you just have no reason to justify It wasn't that big of a deal or whatever you commit up to that eyes on trip. We did. Yeah. We committed to it early. We talked about it a lot. It took us six months for it to come true. So I think we were after the 10 millionautomark, then we raised the EQT one peak round. And then finally everything schedules worked and we could go to Iceland in April. I think it was. But did you have like other celebrations during the time like minor ones? That were important for the daily rhythm. Yeah. So we have our, the weekly rhythm was always Friday wins. So we had this culture where, you know, because you're in an enterprise software business, so everything's a little more straight laced. So on Fridays, we would really let loose internally. And we would have all the goofiest memes and really ugly slides and just throw it together, give people shout outs, all that kind of stuff. So there's always highlighting those personal wins and those team wins that were we hit a mark that we never hit before. That was easy to do week over a week. We then had a few parties. Like I remember one, we were very much onto the, we're going to go to the moon thing. And so we had it to the moon party. I remember that one while. So yeah, there's these little things that show up in people's memories. And then you get into realizing that, oh yeah, big companies with big teams and a lot of cross-functional back and forth, you need annual kickoffs. And then so that becomes a thing. And that's where you assemble a lot of that stuff. How important, so interrelated, but I'm thinking now about the rhythm in the company. How does it, how the operating rhythm? How does it look like? And also the importance of communication. But let's talk about the operating rhythm. What type of meetings did you have, what kept the company going forward? Or did you have a OCR system in place in terms of execution? How did that look like? Yeah. We became very aware that just absorbing stuff in the office didn't work anymore once we crossed like the 70 people mark. So that was when I started, that was the blocker then. And figuring out this, oh yeah, there's all this research around how big of systems of people can communicate to each other and when there are too many nodes. And so putting a name on it and then saying, because this is going to be a problem now forever, there's no way to back from this. Here's what we're going to do differently. And we implemented OCRs from a management team perspective. Then we had weekly Monday meetings that were always had to be prepped in advanced with very tight three points for every manager on the management team. There's a management team is like the top level management, top level seven to 10 people, people who are really don't have overlapping responsibilities but need to collaborate together. And then that would then allow us to have then coordinated communications out to everyone else to say, this is what's important now, this is not important now. Here's what's coming up. And so then that was Slack channels that would do that. And then we tried a lot of other ways to the bigger you get the harder is to engage. And we would do CEO videos, but then we could watch the viewership and thought wasn't that high. So you start to how is it really worth it? So a lot, the cadence became something we talked about a lot. How are we getting it enough of it out? And when you do employee surveys, like how's it going, are we doing well? We would always score pretty well as on the aggregate. And then there was certain departments that needed extra support and changing ways of doing the cadence. And so that's how we would have a blanket. Here's what we do as a whole. Let's measure what the employees feel about it. And then let's go and let's tackle whatever the on-the-ground challenges in a giving department, finding new ways to communicate. In the leadership meetings, how did you manage to give room to strategical questions? Often you're tied up into tactical questions. It's the fires you need to put out. How did you manage to actually also lift the strategic questions? So I think that it was a lot easier when there was another funding round coming up. And so the EKT one peak round is then the final round. So that's when we also, because we're raising a lot of money, then we had a lot more support. So we would get in consultants who would help us take us out of the day-to-day, lock down everything. Here's your strategic landscape. Here's what's to do. And just like verifying that yes, you are going in the right direction. Now it's about execution consistency. So as soon as there's enough strategic direction to say operational consistency, then you don't want to open up the strategic window all the time. Sometimes you just got to go. And then we would get into a cadence of quarterly off-sites, where we would finally get away from the day-to-day. I'll talk together about what the next thing was, white boarding and figuring things out. But so much of those open the door for big strategic questions, the double-down was always, let's focus again tighter. Very rarely was let's do more. Yeah. So focus. Is that a keyword? Focus is a keyword that I'm surprised how much I've said it's a thing. And then how I get hit in the face again. Oh, I didn't focus enough. Focus is the kryptonite to founders, I think, or to also to everyone building something. Yeah. And I think that's exactly why that there's, it takes different types of skill sets and motivations and what meaningful work is across the journey. And so the vision for RDOC was tight from day one. It was that we're still doing that vision. That's amazing. But then breaking down into the chunks, figuring out what's the baseline, how can we do a little bit better? If we don't do a little bit better, is the company going to die? And how in the early days, the answer was yes, we're going to die. And so over time, over my eight years there, it became a lot more like, oh, we're not going to die. This is great. Okay, so let's talk about what you've learned. So you have spoken of things that you've learned up until now, but if you look at it's like from Ferdinand Business, what did you learn about how companies function and grow in this journey? If you don't bring people together and then start to measure what is the outcome, you're never going to be able to iterate and improve that performance. I see company building as create an ecosystem, start to find ways to measure that ecosystem a little bit until you realize that basically can this ecosystem survive another six, 12, 24 months. If you think, if you're having the data that says it can, then you're like, all right, let's go talk to investors. Let's go figure out if we can get more customers, all that kind of stuff. But if there's something that's known, we can't do it. You have to change something. So what, how do you define an ecosystem and what do you actually measure? So in the beginning and why we didn't have HR systems or processes or systems when I joined Arduck, and that's why I was among my first things, because there's magic here, but nobody can explain to me what it is. So if we put into these basic measurements on how do people feel in this ecosystem? So it's the same thing as going into a hot tub. It's too hot, it's too cold. You could measure it with a thermometer, but you could also just put your toe in. So my advice always is just put your toe in, just feel it. So you feel it, you talk to people, you put in place some surveys, development dialogues, what are you doing right now? OKRs, are you able to set a plan, make a plan, complete a plan? If all those things are happening and you're like, do you want to work more with these people or do you like wanting away from these people because it's toxic? All those are the basic things to measure in the beginning. You mentioned OKRs. A lot of people, or a lot of companies struggles with OKRs. Why do you think that? Here we are. We struggled a lot with it as well. And it was like how hard, what level to push that is the system, make it easy enough? Is it just another reporting structure? And I think that the most important piece of it is the focus part. To say, did you actually take the time to read those strategy documents and to recognize that it's these ideal customer profiles, we're actually going to buy fast enough. And that if there's a blocker to doing that in the product or the go-to market or in the GNA side, we have to tackle that now, this quarter. And if you don't know how to measure, we're tackling that or not, go figure it out. That's the key result. Put something on the board anywhere to say, I'm going to spend my time here. And if I don't spend my time there, this will fail so that it needs to focus people on not all the, oh, somebody raised their hand and said they need help this week. No. Did it actually matter for that flow from strategy to the customer where your piece absolutely is needed and everyone else is relying on you to hit that piece. Otherwise, the rest of the company doesn't know. So it is really OKRs. If it's just the structure, it doesn't really work. It has to work in the ecosystem where everyone's I'm personally saying that I'm now responsible for something. And I will hold myself accountable to it if you don't. And if we don't do this, enough of these things together, we don't hit 60 to 70% of our OKRs, then we're not doing the business building. So now it sounds like you're selling your OKRs now. Like I'm an employee and to understand why are we actually doing the OKRs? And you're right in a sense. But it's hard to how you're tackling this intellectually or logically. It makes sense. OKRs is like the most making sense system. But how do you actually get people to do to use it? How do you actually make it work? Yeah. We actually the HR system Bob had an OKR module. And so again, it's like, how much can you make it work? And a system people are already going into daily. So we chose a system that was already a daily use. Make it easy. Make it easy. Give automated reminders and show people on those like Friday wins or like the updates to say, look, we said we were going to go this far and we're 20% of the way there. Is it a reporting problem or is it a we're not doing it problem? Yeah. So it's like a re called it reward or punishment of behavior in those actually those Friday meetings. When you communicate this type of stuff, that's what you're going to do, right? Yeah. When you highlight something that's going well, you're actually rewarding something and when you highlight something that's going bad, you know, punishing, but in a sense, It communicates what are we trying to do here? - Yeah, so if you flip the other way, so you have 30 people with manager responsibility who are then trying to be like, I need to communicate what's happening in my area to everyone else. And if you're like, figure out how to communicate, that's exhausting. How do I pitch it? What do I say is people are gonna think that I'm to full of blowing smoke. And so the OKRs is more of ways, hey, I know you gotta do this anyway. Here's a streamlined way to do it so that you can do it comparatively against all people. It's like I'm thinking about one word, accountability. - Yeah. - That's probably the, if you have to use one word to describe it. - Yeah, that's what comes up. And the reason why we started OKRs is because we did another process where we're like, how many ongoing projects do we have? We had as many projects as employees. - Yep. - That's not focused. - OK, principles. What is communication tax? - Communication tax. So when I think about building a business from the size that ARDAQ was at 20, and I see how quickly we're like, the blocker is more humans. We need more humans. And so we did these crazy growth years of hiring. And then you see that there's not the equal output. There's actually less output in some departments than there used to be with smaller teams. And then you start to wonder, why is that? What, how could it work? - So more people equals less output. - That's what happened to us a few times. And so then you start to wonder like, what is this? And then so I come across the concept of communication tax. And because there's so much motivation and drive for each individual to be like, I'm here now, I'm doing my thing, I'm doing awesome, I'm trying to communicate with everybody else. It's hard to get at somebody's attention and it's a blocker for me. It creates a tax on how much throughput you could have in the system because the communication becomes so hard. It used to be easy to be like, oh, I'm gonna talk around the table, 20 people, and now I can go and run for two weeks without communicating again. When you get 200 people around the table, there is no table. Then it's like, I can get stopped at any given moment because the communication wasn't quite good enough and there was a miscommunication about what we're doing or why we're doing it. And so I have to go back and rework my communication which becomes a tax on the whole system. And so to highlight this, I created another new KPI because I wanna go beyond the feelings, right? If the feelings start to become too intense, you kinda wanna make it keep out of, make it black and white. And so I would measure the, in our HR system, we knew the sales team, when they had vacation, when they were at work. So we knew how many days they had every quarter. And then we can measure how many of, according to 10 people to 20 people, we doubled the amount of days worked. But we did not double our revenue. In fact, revenue would sometimes dip down. So the blocker wasn't the people, the blocker was the whole funnel working. So there's a days work to income ratio? - Yeah, days work to income ratio became a thing that I play with to try to talk about this, has been a communication tax issue where it's not wrong that we hired those people. And it's not wrong that it's not working. But what is the true cause of it? It might just be communication tax, which means that we shouldn't tell the board that everything's about to get better. We should say, we need these people to do the long term thing. And we need to give them time to figure out the communication style, how they're going to focus. And so I think that's the, that was a lot of the story of the go-to-market approach at Arduck. - But what do you believe now? So can you do the same thing with 20 people in Arduck? - The same thing we did back then, you know? - I think that in the new world with AI, and I think about all the, so many things that I did, the very brutal way without AI, I now know that I can get farther at a higher quality level, just with me and an AI, then I could have done in all those years. So now, because I have that comparison point, I really do see that smaller teams will be able to accomplish a lot more and avoid that communication tax for longer. Loveable is like 45 people or something? That's, that shouldn't be like the new way it's done. - Okay, you mentioned it a lot of times, Sarah, but to me, it sounds like a concept. You called blockers, but I'd use that word. - My kind of approach was always like, there's an endless amount of things to do. And if I took the approach is we can't start until we tackle, we clear all this space. Then you never start. So instead, the philosophy is, run as fast as you can towards the first obstacle, and then maybe it was from Mirage. Maybe it was, an advisor was like, this is a problem, this is gonna be a problem. And then, wow, it wasn't. The deal closed and it wasn't a problem. I was like, all right, well, non-pass that one. And then boom, the next one hits you. No, it was actually, you don't have a registered entity in the United States. That's the real blocker. All right, let's go get a registered entity in the United States. And so instead of planning it all out in advance, which is anybody who's a consultant would say, you're gonna do all that? Let's make a huge gant chart. That's three years of work. That's not how startups do it. They just run as fast as they can towards the next blocker. And hopefully have enough awareness so we can get around it once or twice, but it's gonna keep on hitting us and that's when the real thing happens. So the other metaphor I think about is deciding where the path should go and you're trying to climb a mountain. And so you definitely just gotta walk the path first. If you get to where you're going, then you wanna actually clear the bit, and then you wanna gravel it, and then you wanna get in the big architects where like, now this is a six lane highway. And so that just recognizing that just because you came from a six lane highway kind of business doesn't mean that your startup should be a six lane highway. It's just a walking path. Do that, get hit in the face a few times, realize you need to clear more, you need to pay more, you get washed out by the flood, you gotta gravel, that's the path. Yeah, I think that maybe three of the lanes in established companies are not even used, but they have them there. Yeah, so that, but yeah, sorry, go ahead. That's the fun thing about Adardock was that because then we were like, oh, we're not doing it well enough, we're not enterprise enough, we're not ready enough, but then you get to see our customers or our enterprise having built stuff that is unused and it was like over designed. And so you're like, this is a common problem. People really want that big perfect future, but they're not really willing to double check, is it being used? But the other thing, planning is not the bad thing, it's not the bad concept of plan. It's not a bad concept plan. I think you need to, I also have the time boxing stuff, is that I really like plans where you say, of everything we know today, this is the right plan that will basically make sure that we can get, we can push that zero cash date further, we're gonna learn something from the customers and we're gonna have time to do a loop, a feedback loop. That's the plan. The plan isn't, the plan at the beginning of Adardock was not, we're gonna overspend on R&D for five years, eventually get together with the go-to-market, do some friends and families stuff until we max out and then somehow attract the biggest asset allocator or capital allocators in the world. That wasn't the plan, but it is what happened and that's why you have to just attack the blockers. Let's be a little bit tensile. So we talked a little bit about the actual systems that you use, the tick stack you had. So you mentioned Bob for HR stuff and you mentioned Chartmogul for SAS metrics. For SAS metrics, which other systems did, if you had to do it again, would you use today? And look, can you do it out? The other core thing, which I think is just getting better and better, it was good 10 years ago as even better now is Google workspace. So just having one place for all of that core office needs and then you're adding on Gemini to it and having Demis Tisabis, who the creator of DeepMind, he's the one who's actually seeing the future of AI and I think that Google has the usage to actually bring it to the day to day. So I find I'm able to do stuff that I used to say that takes three months of some days. We'll get into that. But what type of tech do a company in high growth needs? If you're gonna do it with people, you definitely need an HR system like Bob. If you're gonna do SaaS metrics, you better know what they are. And there's a lot of competitors to Chartmogel. That was the one that I thought was early in stuff. But Magnov Pilskug, who's co-founder of RDOC, has a new company that is also all about SaaS metrics. That's called Be Crystal. So there's stuff out there. From the day to day work, I think that I would consolidate on one office platform instead of trying to get a bunch, trying to be like, I want Atlassian and I want Notion and I want Monday and I want Slack. All that's waste, I think. Today, it should be which conglomerate has decided to give you as much as you possibly can. I think Google workspaces the winner there. And then whatever else is your blocker is. So for RDOC, it was security. And we again chose a tool that was very forward looking visionary. They got bought by a big conglomerate and then it became less good. But I would always look for those kind of things that this is your one blocker. Don't just go with the trusted past one. Think about the ones we're thinking about for the future 'cause they'll listen to you. And they'll give, they can, you can help them grow. And then communication tools, Slack. Yeah, that's the thing is in my new role, there was no communication tool. So I just consolidated around Google workspace 'cause Google chat does Slack as good as Slack does now. It does? Really? It's really improved. Oh, also because I think the price of putting, yeah, of doing new SaaS tools is so low that Google is that we got to match feature sets. Okay, cool. So yeah, 'cause when Microsoft you have Teams [BLANK_AUDIO] And often what you often see is a combo G suite or the Google suite with Slack. That's the, but now I would cut out Slack today. Yeah. And the other tools you can, you can't do without. And then I think your DRM, what you use. Yeah. CRM, we tried a few at ARDOC that never really spoke to my heart. Like I really love them, currently on the Salesforce stack now. But I don't think start-up should start with Salesforce. Absolutely not. I think it's these AI first CRMs like ATEO, all the ones that I would look at if I needed a CRM. But we're currently on HubSpot and there's no reason to change. It's just not, it's not important enough. So I would say stick with the stack you have if it gets it done because we've also learned over and over again that if you're, if you think there's a blocker and there's a problem, you better tackle the human side of it and the process side of it before you go into the system because you're going to tell everybody we get this system and everything's fixed and it is not. Have you ever experienced that? Yes. I have to. Over again. Yeah. And that's a necessary pain. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So if anything, I think the lesson is be really selective. Don't overdo it. You don't need what some other bigger company has. Do what's right for your communication flow right now and making sure that you're serving the customers or developing the platform. I think that like the R&D can't live without GitHub. I think that all of the explosion of CLIs and digital studio competitors, I think R&D people will know that better. But choosing something that the whole team can stick to I think is more important than having variety in a single company. Okay. So let's talk AI. That's been a big AI opener for you last year's when we spoke earlier, you said that you would, you should be consistent to one call the call ecosystem in terms of AI and you are into the Google space, right? Yeah. So tell me all about it. Why is that so good? Everyone else seems to be on cloud, but you're in Google. Yeah. At RDOC, as soon as there was an AI available to enterprise purchases, so you wouldn't have to train the models. We went with Chatchy PT. And because the only thing was available to us and we had it and we ran it for a year. But you quickly saw that they weren't scaling their enterprise support but a fast enough to catch up. So then Google was come as saying that we're going to be able to scale this stuff. And so there was a lot of promises. And so we switched from Chatchy PT to Google at RDOC at a time when Google was not at the forefront. So I felt like moving backwards, which was hard change management. But just that core idea of, no, we need something that can access all of our data. That's the most important thing. And then in a secure way. And then after that, we can talk about is it at the frontier or not? And so with Google Pro 3 or Gemini Pro 3.1, the latest or the latest, you're like, wow, I can do everything with this. I can build entire websites. I can do stuff that I would have to hire a team of three to do before. So that's like my level. I would rather do something consistent in one place. This massive growth of cloud is awesome. That's great. And I do think that there will be winners on the AI for different parts of the R&D, GNA, SNM stack. But I think that companies who are small enough need to decide to stick with one thing because they're all improving every three months. So it's not like you're going to get stuck into one. But I think that you need to understand the totally consistent so that you can understand how you're actually able to unload your workload to the AI. So what have you actually used it for? It's a good use case you've used it for. So this is the perfect use case that I came into. So I'm transitioning into the CEO role at Drest, which is a hardware company plus software. And I'm not good at hardware. And so I need to basically do this McKinsey or Bane level research. Tell me everything about the market. Tell me everything about how rust is versus the market. Help me understand different strategic paths. And so I got into this workflow where Gemini Pro with deep research, breaking down these core business questions that I know that I have putting personalities on it. So now you're a VC, now you're a financial expert, now you're a go-to-market expert, now you're a marketing expert, whatever it is. And just pump through just hundreds and hundreds of pages of deep research that went out to the web and did all that stuff for me, bring it in. And then I would be able to then have create a scorecard, a rubric to be like, okay, now if I'm going to assess my rust against all my competitors, let's use against the same rubric, which is what consulting firms would do for you. And then, and then so I'd make the rubric and then I would compare against all the other stuff. And I would say, okay, this is a SWAT analysis for your company versus theirs. And if you're going to go this direction with this ICP, then you have to care about these unique selling points. So it's like the whole book of what you would normally do. And they're like, I figured out over the next two years. In this workflow, I did it in, I did all the research, got the whole management team at rust on board, pitched the board, got a yes from the board, and announced it to the entire company in all hands in a five week period where in the middle was Christmas. So I did something that I know we spent insane amounts of money at RDOC to do that outside an approach, really hard to do the change management and the back and forth. Did you really check all the ways that this isn't going to work? Did you check enough to choose one thing, get to check 10 things, anyway, that was just mind blowing to me because I'm pushing the boundaries nobody would ever ask you for that. If you went to a consulting firm and asked for the exact what I just said, they're not going to tell you five weeks, would the quality be higher or was the same quality? So how do you assess the quality of this because that's the issue here? That's the thing is that the quality is in the doing and that's where the consulting firms always stop. They always, we made you a super high quality slide deck. It is the highest quality slide deck that has ever existed. We've proven it to all the Fortune 500 companies and I say that's not my definition of quality. My measurement is quality. Can I run now please? Can I execute as an operator? And so if that's the level, I'm sure that any consultant would look at my slides in my process and say it wasn't pretty enough. We didn't have every single thing in done and I was like, for the cost that I did it for, I can run. And I think that's the core thing is like, AI, you don't know how good AI is until you use it for something that you know was really critical before and expensive and it basically removes all those blockers for you in a very short period of time. And so I did that in an exploration way and a playing way. So it wasn't some playbook or some here's how you do AI to remove the kinsy from your life. It was definitely I want to see how far I can push it. I know what good looks like. Let's see how far I can push it. I feel bad for my finance friends, but with AI, I saw some really good financial planning analysis at ARDOC built over weeks with really deep thinking and I've gotten stuff up within a half an hour in financial planning and analysis. Any kind of random ideas that comes up when it worked for our business, I don't have to think about it in words and paragraphs. I can think about it in spreadsheets in no time. So how does the CFO role look like? So I think the CFO role, I mean, that, where do we go and what do we do, is all that kind of stuff. But the compliance and how much that CFO role is absolutely critical for you to get buy-in from any outside investors, outside investors don't like companies without CFOs. And then all of the, so it's an symbolic. No, I mean, it's, and then the regulatory thing, the stakeholders. If you don't have somebody who's that dedicated knowing the numbers as a human, you can never get rid of that, right? Somebody has to know the numbers are human. But I don't think a finance team needs to be as big as I want. I basically, I've been able to do a lot of those core questions and building out KPIs and understanding what's important to the business with a zero finance team in my new job, then with a eight-person finance team at ARDOC. But how do you create the CFO if you never hire a finance team? Where does the CFO come from? Yeah, I think that's where in organizational design, I think everything is going to get flatter. So the traditional thing of being like, oh, I'm going to have a C-suite title, and I'm going to have a big team below me, and that's what success looks like. I think that it's much more fun to be like, I can have a C-suite title and have a few people that might not even be necessary, they're skill sets are somewhere in the company, but they're not even necessarily a report to me. But I can get down every single weekly, monthly, quarterly report for each type of stakeholder, all this like the operational workflow of it. If they can do all of that and they can understand the business better than anyone else, and they can say to the CEO, oh, that crazy idea that you had would bankrupt the company, or that crazy idea that you had is worth it if you take it in these steps. That becomes again the relationship. Nick, I could sit here and talk to you for a couple of days, this has been so interesting. You are now the COO of Rust Coffee, and you will become the CEO. What frightens you most about becoming a CEO? I think that when being a CEO for a long time and then deciding to do this transition because it actually is, okay, there's nowhere else to hide. The whole vision, everything is on your shoulders. I don't know if it's a fear, but it's an awareness. of the responsibility. And because I come into it having done the very low ego, it's not about the title, it's not about being able to stay on stage and say, I'm the CEO of such and such. It is about serving. What I think about most is how can I properly serve the team so that the company can live up to its biggest potential? Where am I pushing enough into the new world order, what's possible at the same time that I'm building on the strengths that the company already has? Because nobody likes the CEO who comes in and says, I don't know what you guys are doing, but you're going to do it my way now. You have to understand what actually works today. Give people who have those, the processes and the things that work, all of that props and then build the company in an ecosystem way. Oh, we have all this. Great. If we add these pieces, it'll work even better. It's not wipe away and start again. Of course not. But some CEOs come in like that. That's true. You're proving by going the route that you're doing, being the COO first to understand the company, then to become the CEO. It clearly shows that this, what I'm seeing as a dangerous signal here is that you've been an operator, you've been doing stuff. As a CEO, you do less stuff. You are more like a mascot of the company. You are into relationships. You are selling on the high level, stuff like that. Have you seen yourself transitioning? Have you seen the problems with transitioning into that role? So I really think about it as the CEO role is changing. It doesn't have to be just a mascot anymore because it is possible to understand a lot of actually what's happening. That cognitive overload of, I guess I just need some people, players and management to tell you what's going on. So you can actually know quite a lot. So you can have a flat structure, be a lot closer to everybody, have those relationships, and still absorb when somebody tells you something or there's a risk out there or something happened in the world or what happens at this happens. I am as quick to understand what the world knows about that problem because of AI and our internal database, all the stuff we grounded on. And then having that, having, having actually worked, and then I know better the direction, no decisions. So if I can do less, yes, but I can understand more than any CEO in any other era. And I can actually tell people when a direction needs to be moved, I can really explain why instead of, trust me, I've done this before. I agree with all you're saying that the qualities you have in terms of this role, but on the other hand, it's a new role. Yeah. It is a new role from COO, which is really a doing role to a CEO, which is not necessarily a doing role. It states responsibility role. And and have you thought about how to transition into that? How do you need to work differently from today? Yes, that's my willingness to just jump in and do is, I need to step back from doing that. Yes, that's one self-awareness thing. And then I again, the more that I understand how it works. And I can help with the focus part. The easier it is for everyone else to feel that very, that internal sense of success, which then will make company work, which will then be like, hey, that's a good job as a CEO. Yeah. Nick, thank you so much for coming and sharing these insights. I hope for the real hope for the best for both you and also for the rest of your coffee. And hopefully we will see Rust being even greater company in the future. Thanks to you. Okay. So, sir. Perfect. Thank you for watching this episode. 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