Inside Clay's unconventional path to $1.25B: Rethinking GTM, pricing, and enterprise sales | Varun Anand (Co-founder and Head of Operations)

So I would just join all of these WhatsApp groups and basically we'll just wait for people to talk about problems related to data enrichment, which we kind of suspected was gonna be the first preliminary use case. We would also use tools like SIFTIN for social listening to track these conversations on Reddit, pretend to be different people and reach these people on Reddit and when they're talking about these problems. But the WhatsApp groups were definitely the most effective. And so we would use that as ways to get these conversations and get into this ecosystem, get people they're really solving their problems with clients. Welcome to In Depth, a show that surfaces tactical advice, founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, companies and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at First Round and we're a venture capital firm that helps startups like Notion, Roblox, Uber and Square, tackle company building firsts. On the In Depth podcast, we share weekly conversations with startup leaders that skip the talking points and go deeper into not just what to do, but how to do it. Learn more and subscribe today at FirstFran.com. For today's episode of In Depth, I'm thrilled to be joined by Varun Anand, who's the co-founder of Clay. If you're not familiar with Clay, they're building what they call a GTM development environment, taking inspiration not from the world of sales, but from software engineering. While most growth tools solve single problems like finding contacts or sending emails, Clay combines over 100 integrations and AI agents to help teams find data from contact info to intense signals, and instantly put it to work across their entire tech stack, CRM's, data warehouses, and email sequencers. Just yesterday, the company announced a $40 million Series V expansion at a $1.25 billion valuation, with an incredible profile in forms, which we'll link to in the show notes. The news follows a really remarkable trajectory, where they 10x revenue in 22 and 23, followed by 6x growth in 2024. Today, Clay counts category leaders like open AI, canva, anthropic, ramp, and rippling, as well as 5,000 others as customers. In our conversation, Varun breaks down the exact moves that power this growth. You might remember our conversation last year with Clay's co-founder and CEO, Karim, about their product evolution and paths to product market fit. Today, we're diving into the other side of the story, how Clay built their go-to-market machine, from their early focus on agencies to layering enterprise sales on top of PLG. Varun shares the moves that made the biggest difference. He also walks us through several counterintuitive bets, like keeping their wait list for up to 15 months after launch, and creating an entirely new type of sales role instead of hiring traditional account managers. Whether you're trying to make a PLG motion work, get content to take off, or make the move up market. There's a lesson here for just about every GTM challenge start up might face. You can find a written version of this conversation on the first round review, and we've linked Clay's funding announcement in the show notes. Now let's dive into my conversation with Varun. - All right, well, thank you for joining. - Thanks, Brad. - Excited to be here, let's go. - Let's start by talking about how you approached go to market in the very, very early days when you joined. And how did you think about building a PLG motion versus more traditional top-down sales? - At the time, for whatever reason, Kareem and I were very intent on making a PLG motion happen. Arguably, it was a little irrational, and actually in many all hands meetings with the team from the months of May 2022 to January 2023, people were asking, why are we doing this? Oh, why don't we just sell, but at least for me, I thought it was very clear that we could make this happen, because I could see how this could be a self-service product, and I think Kareem believed that as well, and we had early evidence of it, and we believe that with enough loops, we could kind of make that happen. So maybe I can kind of walk through the journey to answer your first question of how we approached it in the earliest days. The first thing was, actually the very first thing I did in a very tactical way is you know that group that Pete Kazanji has called Modern Sales Pros. I'd been a member of that group of four years, and which funnily enough was inspired by a lot of the early first round community, really. Yeah, and we spent a bunch of time talking about it. Okay, great, that's amazing. So I like looked through the archive for the previous like three, four years, for the words enrichment and data, and outbound and things like that, and basically I went out and down to 30 people who had said something somewhat intelligent about this topic in the last three or four years, and I emailed them all, and somewhere SDR, somewhere agency owners, somewhere VPs and marketing and sales, most of them agreed to talk to me. And what was the state of the product when you were doing this? It was ASPRITCHI connected to a handful of APIs that a few of which were data enrichment providers, and also there were a bunch of others that were more horizontal in their use cases. And so it was a very horizontal kind of thing, but we had decided we're focusing on the go-to-market, kind of use case and figuring out where to start. And you had how many customers using it at that point? Maybe 10, 20, 25 paying customers, any of whom were paying somewhere between 30 a month to 200 a month. The true answer is really zero, because all of those people were not ICP, and maybe all of them with the exception of two or three churned within the year when we really focused. So because you had recruiting use case, you had people that were also resistant. There was like an EA person in there. There was all sorts of random people using it in different ways. Yeah, technically there was 30K revenue or something, but they were all not using the product in the way we wanted to focus, so they were not really our customers in that sense. So we were kind of scratching, starting from this focus area. So anyways, we talked, I talked to these 30 people, and the only ones who kind of really understood this were these agency owners, these like cold email agency owners. And I think Kareem had known that pull from them for a while, but that's when it really stood out to me at least. And in retrospect, it makes sense, because these are people who have, they feel the pain point really acutely, because they have so many clients that all have the same needs. They're also technical, they are scrappy, 'cause they're entrepreneurs, and they're like price sensitive, so they wanna do things in automated ways. And so that's why we kind of started with them, 'cause we felt immediate pull from them. And then the next tactical step is like, where do these people live? So they actually live in WhatsApp groups. There's some really funny ones. There's one great one started by this guy, Jesse Led, who's awesome, and it's called the Sass Yacht Club. There's one started by Eric Noslowski. It's called Slesial technicians. There's a few more of these. So I would just join all of these WhatsApp groups, and basically we'll just wait for people to talk about problems related to data enrichment, which we kind of suspected was gonna be the first preliminary use case. You figured this out through the Modern Sales Pros conversations. When I talk to these people, from Modern Sales Pros, yes, yes. And then we'd have more conversations and be like, well, where are you talking about this? And eventually these WhatsApp groups kind of emerged. I'd use tools like Sifton for social listening to like track these conversations on Reddit, pretend to be different people and like reach these people on Reddit and when they're talking about these problems. And so we would use that as ways to like get these conversations and get into this ecosystem and get people there really solving their problems with play. And then when we started to do that, that's how we'd get some of these meetings. We would have these like reverse demo conversations where I wouldn't traditionally demo the software. Basically they would demo it themselves. Like they would sign up, share the screen, do the flow. I would help them do the individual steps through Zoom annotations. And they would learn the product that way. And so because once they feel like they've done it once, they feel like they can do it again in a self-serve way later. - So this is before they're a customer. It's a normal sort of first demo conversation. And that is what actually helped us do a lot of things. So that helped them have the confidence to come back to the product by themselves. It helped me get like a UX master class in what was wrong with the product. Because you know, they would make all these mistakes and clicking this button or clicking that button. And so I would have a litany of like product feedback that I could share with Eric and our engineering team to fix. You would also have like eight of these calls a day. So it was an insane amount of feedback to get. And then I would work with Eric and other engineers to fix all of these things. And you can imagine that compounded over seven months is kind of how we went from these initial sales calls. We're taking like seven demos to get someone to pay two, three hundred a month to January, February of 2023 where it was taking one call or even none. - When you started to focus in on growth agencies, did you think at all about like, are there enough of them? - No. - The quality of the revenue from them, any of those types of things. - No, no. It's all about getting to the next step. You're just trying to get to the next step and that earns you the right to keep going and getting you to the step after that. And you know, they're kind of like stepping stones and stepping stones to help you find something great 'cause when you're building something new, there isn't a play before it. And so you're just trying to get to the next stepping stone and you're kind of following novelty and interestingness along the way. And what I mean by that is I would have eight of these calls a day. And occasionally someone would say something or have an idea for something that we would act on immediately that would unlock the next stepping stone. So just as a small example of that, you know, I'm on one of these calls. It's a random small private equity firm in Kansas City. They're trying to find plumbers in Oklahoma and Missouri that they want to buy and acquire. And they're like, you know, I wish I could scrape Google Maps for this. And I was like, we can make that happen actually. And that happened in a day thanks to Eric on our team. And that opened up a whole series of use cases. Actually to be even more like practical about that, there's this entire venture firm called Fractal the incubator and it's filled with vertical software companies. Every single one of those vertical SaaS companies, they cater to audiences that are on Google Maps, the small businesses on Google Maps. That one integration basically helped us win the business of those like 50 or 60 companies that we would methodically go through. And so that's like a stepping stone to a use case that we would have never had if we weren't listening to that and like being open to that. So one of them to what you were talking about was, you know, you're asking like, hey, our growth agencies, two small market, how much are they going to pay us? Remember the use case was data enrichment, right? And so we knew that like that has a massive market. Zoom in though has a several billion dollar market kept in minimum and we knew that's just the first step. And so it's more like, okay, growth agencies are the first customers who have the skill set needed and the pain needed to use the product in the current state. And then we will improve it, take all their feedback and add more and more data partners. That was my sole focus, my core top priority for 2022 was how can we get, how can we make this the best data enrichment product in the world by adding as many data partners in here as possible. And then we knew we could expand. And there was actually like a seminal moment when we closed Rippling in March of 2023. So we got connected to Rippling through one of our investors. And what was really cool about it is once we got talking to the actual users, they started using it themselves. And obviously they had lots of problems that we helped with, but they started using themselves and they started expanding really quickly, started using credits and they went from a self-serve customer paying a few hundred a month to paying several thousand dollars a month in like an eight week time period. And this was really meaningful for us because it was one of the first examples of a real company of a significant size and scale with our core ICP being able to self-serve almost completely with some basic support into a real contract. And so that was a really significant sign for us and how we knew we could expand this from just growth agencies to regular startups, but also to major enterprises like a $10 billion company like Rippling. Why did you think that PLG was important because it's slightly antithetical, like one of the benefits of doing a more sales-led motion is you're interacting with customers in real time. You're then able to take that feedback back to your team. And so there's a diversion in terms of just, you know, go use the product yourself. What was sort of the origin story of? You went from the sales-led motion talking to lots of customers every day, getting some early traction. But they're only paying us two, 300 a month. And minimum, it has to be a 5K, 10K annual contract to make a sales-led motion work. So at this price point, an accredited-based model like self-serve has to work. And we can talk about how we eventually turn that into a sales-led motion, charging six figures and more. But yeah, so that's why the self-serve motion had to work. I think to be honest, it was a more emotional reason than a purely business-driven one. I think we just wanted a PLG business and wanted a self-serve business. And I think we knew we could make that happen with Clay. I think it's certainly a better business model in many respects. And it's a more elegant one in many respects. And at certain scales, you obviously need sales. And that's an important element of it. But I think the honest answer is that we wanted it. And we knew there was light at the end of the tunnel and we could get there. And at this price point and this type of product, the sales motion was not-- a sales-led motion was not going to work. We wanted to really give it all on this before we tried to try something else dramatically different. I think a couple of thoughts on your earlier points on the growth agencies. They are also how we helped. That's how we learned about Lake LinkedIn as the main growth law for us. And I think we were open to that. We started to see the early signs of them posting on LinkedIn about Clay and the use cases. And they're incentive to do that wasn't an affiliate fee from us. They're incentive was that they wanted to position themselves as the expert of this nascent technology. We saw that and immediately bounced on it. And it's like, OK, how can we enable more people to do this? And going all in on that, I would post content every day. Our team would post content every day. That became how we generated a lot of demand. And even to this day, we are still all in on LinkedIn as a main driver of growth for us. And we have a whole ecosystem that's not posting about us all the time. And so those growth agencies seeded the first elements of the growth motion on the marketing side as well. A minute ago, you were talking about how LinkedIn was kind of an early growth driver. But you didn't share as much about how you went about getting PLG going, where you were transitioning from actually doing a more sales-led consultative sale that was driven by some of the WhatsApp conversations over to something that was more PLG-like. So what are the elements of PLG? You need demand that's coming in. You need to convert them on the website. And then you need them to get into the product by themselves and get value and pay you money. So those are the four steps. And so you have to break it down into each of those elements. So on the acquisition side, how are you getting customers? For us, you kind of have to fit the-- an Emily Kramer has some good frameworks on this. But you kind of have to fit the marketing style, the marketing motion to your product. And there has to be good fit between the two. And so for us, we noticed that LinkedIn was really going well and content was really going well. And we knew that both of those levers dovetailed really nicely with the word amount. And so for us, we were able to go all in on those two things, both through ourselves and through our partners. And that's what drove the acquisition. Then it's like, OK, now you need to convert them on your website. We always enjoyed very high website conversion rates. And part of that can be attributed to these people being high intent coming from word mouth or content and things like that. And part of it, I think we've always had a really high emphasis on brand and always over invested in brand way more so than any other B2B software company that I'm aware of. And any of those always a strong, intentional decision from the very beginning. Then they have to come into the product and get value on their own. So that was the entire purpose of the reverse demo and like having confidence in that. And so being able to take the seven sales calls into one to zero, that's how we got confidence in them. People being able to come in by themselves and get value. And then the last piece that is monetization. So how are you going to charge? And so in January of 2023, it'll be interesting to share that like we didn't have billing in the product. You couldn't pay for clay in the product until past a million an hour. Until a million an hour, I was just sending stripe invoices to people, which was crazy for a self-serve product for like 200 a month. And so ultimately, I think we made the right decision and landed on the right value metric. And that's like the most important thing, which was we landed on credits. And then we fiddled with the feature gates and the exact unit costs and all the pricing from there like every month we would iterate on that. But we had the right value metric. And so we felt confident in the pricing. So I'd say those are the four elements to building a self-serve motion and kind of how we at a surface level did each one. How did you think we land on the idea of credits? Clay at the time was a spreadsheet. And a spreadsheet has columns and rows. We basically realized that all the value is in the columns because every column you add is a new enrichment. And that's what really matters. And really the pricing lever should be an equation, which is multiplying the columns by the rows. And that comes back to credits, basically. And this is actually fairly controversial at the time. We were a usage-based pricing model in 2022. And the time was fairly controversial because everything in sales tech was perceived. Now it's obviously changed with AI. So it's changed. But I think we were at the Vanguard of that. And constantly, our customers would be shocked that we weren't a per-seq company. People thought we were leaving so much money on the table. But ultimately, there were many things here. But it's like, okay, we're first counter-positioning against all the other sales tech companies that are perceived. But it's also, it's about our value prop. We are a product of efficiency. We are a product that is aligned with your interests. And we are not trying to charge you to have so many people using Clay because we want you to have fewer people using Clay. We just want you to have a few people using Clay to drive crazy ROI for your whole company. And so it's very aligned with the customer. And I think we were early to that. But ultimately, I think it was the right decision. What gave you the conviction to do that versus do the conventional thing? - It's obviously the better choice. It's obviously aligned with what customers want. And I think with pricing, generally aligning your interests with the customer interests is what's going to work. I mean, I think we knew that we didn't want lots of people to use it because it's not a collaborative tool like Figma is. Figma is a collaborative product. So it even makes sense for them to have per-seq pricing. But we're not that, right? We are a tool where you do one thing to orchestrate the actions of many. And so it had kind of intuitively made sense. And I think when in doubt, you go on the side of what's better for the customer because you want to engender that long-term loyalty and knowing, and even since then, by the way, every decision we've made on pricing, we publish a memo every year on our pricing updates. And we're pretty transparent about why we make certain changes because when we make changes, we want our users to know that we are aligned with them. And that's why we're making these changes. - What's some of the other things that got the growth engine of Clay working in their early days? And I think for folks that are less familiar with the company, one of the most unique parts, ironically, is for multiple years. You've had this incredible inbound machine that you've built. So building on what you're talking about with LinkedIn, what are the other things that you did? - Honestly, I think to keep it simple, if you just blow people's minds, people will come. I don't really think you need to overcomplicate it beyond that. And that was basically the central mantra of our content. Just do things and show people how to do things that are really, really valuable to them. And that's all you have to do. Because if you do that and you actually sell people's problems, you're clearing so much of a higher bar than what 99% of business software actually does. And I think if you can do that and communicate it well, and have a good brand that reflects what you're trying to do, people will come. And we were really just focused on content and delivering that content in blogs and on LinkedIn. - There are many other ways of growing your business, right? You could obviously do email outbound, you could do paid ads, you could do SEO. There's many ways of generating traffic. We now have billboards all over San Francisco. For us at a time, these were the things that are working and we were basically going all in on these two things. - And did you go about them in any particularly interesting ways? - So I knew the honest answer is that now we go about the meeting in particularly interesting ways. And we can talk about those. At the time, it was more brute force and it was more just regularly putting out the content and diligently doing that with some discipline and getting other people to do it as well. And these would be the agency owners or customers and things like that. Now we have turned that into a machine that I think is actually pretty interesting. And what I mean by that is I think that so much of our business is a loop. And there are so many feedback loops and we have now tried to create feedback loops in many part of the business. And so from a content perspective, it's like as an example, we have 50 different clay clubs hosting community events all around the world from Bangalore to Sydney to Toronto. And things that these amazing people do is they share clay tables and there's content that comes from that. We take that content and we can like put that in a LinkedIn post and we can combine those LinkedIn posts and put them into a blog post and combine the blog post and put them into a guide. And you can have this loop where you can keep repurposing the content that I think is super powerful and can compound over time. Our growth marketing lab by Bruno has done an amazing job at enabling the rest of our community to power content. And that can mean like how do we enable people to post something to now and how do we incentivize them to do it and how do we have clay creator programs and clay expert programs to incentivize that behavior. But it could also mean we're using software internally to help our creators post videos online that are personalized to them about clay features in their own voice and doing that programmatically. And so I think there was actually a bunch of things that we're now doing that's very interesting and unique. But at the time, it was more force of will. And were you asking early customers to post or this was just all organic and then you would try to amplify it or thank them or it was a mix of both. I mean, there was obviously something organic there happening and the reason it was organic was because clay as a product enables that and it was in their incentive to do it because they're agency owners, they're trying to win business and so they want to post something into position themselves in a certain way. But there was also a lot that we were doing to enable that. And so we were telling them a new feature is helping them make content, partnering with them to write things. So there was a lot that we were doing behind the scenes to help them with this, but there was a huge undercurrent of organic things that were happening that we couldn't just pull out at the air. - What was the team structure in terms of generating and getting this stuff going? Obviously, you have a large team now that does a bunch of this stuff. - It was mostly a couple of people DIYing it. So early people were like Matthew Kwan and Yash and Eric Noesowski. I mean, I'll actually call out Eric in particular because I think hiring him was a huge accelerant to a lot of this because he is the king of the WhatsApp groups. He is one of the most, if not the most respected agency owner there is. And so us hiring him and bringing him at house give us a huge amount of credibility within the audience. And it's one of those hires where I'm not thinking four years in advance. I'm thinking like how do we get to the next step? 'Cause as first run likes to say in the early days, it's all about getting to base camp. And so we are just trying to get to base camp there, right? And Eric really helps us get to base camp and he was with us for a year and made a huge impact in that year. And that's posting on LinkedIn. That's getting us the credibility in the community groups on WhatsApp that he's already creating and he's already a huge part of. That's getting all these agency owners on board. That's working with some of our top customers because he's the most creative outbound person there is. So we were having almost like an in-house agency person doing these calls. Remember that it's all a feedback loop. So the people, myself, Matthew, Yash, Eric, who are working with customers, we all have different skills and so we are very versatile. And so what that means is we can have these reverse demo calls with customers. And then each one of those reverse demo calls is an idea for content. It's not only an idea for content, but it's also product feedback. 'Cause you're seeing what they're trying to do at the product. Yes, and then you can post about that. And obviously, I'm not gonna say that this company's doing that but you can just post about it generally speaking. And so every conversation we have turns into content, anonymous content, every conversation we have turns into product feedback. And so this loop keeps on building when you're doing that. As you were sort of building the early PLG motion, you were still doing a lot of sales conversations and reverse demo conversations all along the way. Right. And remember that all of this was actually still what we were on a wait list. We actually launched our product in February of 2022, removed the wait list. Two months later, put the wait list back on. And then we didn't remove the wait list until multiple millions of ARR in July of 2023. What was the thing behind the wait list? And why did you remove it and then add it back? Well, when we removed it, we was like, oh, we should be general access. And then it was overwhelming. And we were talking all sorts of people who were the right fit. And we wanted to like make sure people were bought in to have some barrier. We actually used clay to manage the wait list internally. And we, every morning actually, I would go through the list of people who would sign up for the wait list. And some people I would let off directly into the product who I kind of didn't prioritize. And a bunch of other people I would say I wanna talk to them. And effectively, the ratio of that from spring of 2022 to spring of 2023, over time dramatically shifted. I didn't have data or metrics to track how this cohort was doing, it was more anecdotal and listening to that. But that's what we did. And at some point in the spring summer of 2023, we felt, hey, I think we can let everyone in. And we're ready for that. So let's do it. What else were you doing in early customer reverse demos? Well, let's do one together right now. So let's say you signed up for the wait list. I would click a checkbox and clay. That checkbox would trigger workflow and clay I would send you an email. That email would say, hey, book some time with me and actually come prepared for this conversation with a data set you want enriched or a problem you want solved in this. You would show up to the call. And ideally, you would have a CSV or some data you want enriched. Alternatively, you might not, but we spend the first five minutes coming up with something. We've come up with a problem for you. So that, I'll just, let's spit ball an example. So you could say, to pull from our earlier one of my Kansas City, it's like, okay, let me get list of all the plumbers in Kansas City. I wanna know what year they were founded. I want to know, and that, I want that because I only want to sell into plumbers who are founded more recently because there'll be more and more to buy software than much older plumbers. I want to know which ones are well reviewed. I want to get the owner of the plumbing company and I want to get their content information. Remember, my goal is to blow their mind, right? So my goal is to solve that problem in 30 minutes. And I think that is a bar that most software companies cannot achieve. Can you solve someone's entire problem in 30 minutes and have them do it? And basically, you would say, let's do this and you would click the buttons, I would tell you which ones to click. In order to do this, you need someone who's able to, in our all our early hires and body this, creative enough and on their nimble on their feet enough to basically do any use case at the moment of the drop of a hat, right? But it's a great thing for the customer because they solve their problem in a 30 minute calendar invite. They believe that clay is their solution going forward as well. They know how to use it and I get a ton of product feedback and content ideas to work with. In the 30 minutes, you wanna solve one use case, themselves and then hopefully then they hat, then they're equipped to go and do all sorts of other things with clay. - That's right. And I think as CreamShared and one of his podcasts with you is we removed Intercom from the product. So you had to join our Slack community to get a help. At the very end of the call, I would force them to join the Slack community. I'd be like literally go into your URL bar, type in clay.com/slack, join it and then send me a DM when you're there and I would only hang up the resume call one day it sent me a DM and that way I had a point of touch with them where I could manually like keep up with them and make sure they were doing things and there for help if they needed. - I wanna go back to something we were talking about a little while ago, which is you started to develop a PLG motion, you generally had agencies and then smaller businesses who were customers that got you to call your first X hundreds of thousands in ARR and then you started with Rippling to move up market. And I want you to sort of share the story of like how those two things work together and ultimately how you started to build the enterprise motion of the last 12 to 18 months and I think you all have made this pretty elegant transition and so I'd love to hear the story behind it. - Rippling was one of the first, another one of the first that was still kind of self-serve and again we were helping of course, was like Vercada comes to mind and around the summer fall of 2023 we were like let's, we should build sales motion. - And like in the case of Vercada, did they start in a PLG fashion? - It was a similar story to Rippling where we got connected through mutual people and then started trying to enable them and then work with them more on self-serve and started getting them to use the product. And so then there were a couple of companies like Rippling and Vercada and a few others that were starting to do this with but we still weren't able to charge significance about money. - Did you just use your normal credit pricing with them or you started to think about enterprise? - Well, so this was still like normal self-serve pricing just scaled up so nothing changed at all. - And you didn't change the product for them. - Didn't change the product for them. So we're now in the fall of 2023. Basically it became clear that if we want to become a generational company, we need the best company that is in the world to use our product. And it became clear after these experiences with Rippling and Vercada and a couple others that if we want the best companies in the world, we need to spend way more time with them and we need to like properly enable them and that means a sales motion of some kind that feels authentic to us. And that was the first, like okay, let's try and do this. Our first attempt at this, which was not the right one, was how are we gonna get people? First question was how are we gonna get people to pay enough money to warrant all the time we're gonna spend with them? And it was like how are we gonna get someone to pay 50 to 100K? And to us at the time, remember ACV was just a few hundred a month, that's an insane amount of money. But also why at that moment, did you want to do it? You could wait six months a year. The reason at that moment was I felt that the self-serve motion was working, that we had those four elements, acquisition, website conversion, activation of the product and monetization, not amazingly forced, but it felt like it was more of a machine and we just made the hire to hire Bruno from Webflow to delete our worth marketing. And so I felt personally that I could hand that to him, he could run with it, and I could spend more time focusing on sales. And so that was kind of why at that moment, our first question was like how do we get people to pay this much money? And our first answer to that was incorrect, and it was what if we do it for you? Because our customers were telling us hey, I would pay you this much money, but you should just build all this for me. And so basically they were asking for professional services. And so we did this with two customers, and we actually closed them and we charged them one was like 84K and one was like 60K. What we quickly learned was this was not the right approach and this wasn't the right approach for a few different reasons. First of all, it wasn't insane amount of work. It was actually way more work than 84K and 60K was to fully service these customers end to end. Second of all, maybe more importantly, we were actually competing with our Clay experts. We had this ecosystem of Clay experts that wanted to serve as customers and charge them for that. And by us offering a service that our sale was to do the exact same thing, we were competing ahead 10 of them and we want them to thrive. So we don't want that either, right? And so then we had to learn, okay, how do we sell this just as the software? And not as, and how do we price that in a way that we can actually make enough money to make this motion work? And how do we differentiate that from the self-serve motion? Which by the way, these people could sign up for it anytime. And so that was the next question. And so this probably brings us to early 2024 January-ish. And it's like, okay, how do we think about this? So the first thing is like we kind of needed a pricing model to actually support this kind of sale. And so we came up with a platform fee and we had to justify that platform fee. And then we had credits that were priced similarly to the cheapest credits on the pro plan. This approach carried us for about six, seven, eight months where we would have a platform fee. And really, I would say most of this happened, there was still a lot of experimentation and not many sales that were closing in Q1, even Q2 of 2024, just like one or two. The other big unlock was positioning and how we were positioning the value. At the beginning, we were positioning it as like, hey, you can move all this work from SDRs and whatever and just do it in revops and save all this time, save all this money, things like that. We basically ran into a huge amount of skepticism. Effectively, people didn't believe us. The bar to clear and getting them to believe us and pay money for it was just too significant and it was too hard to prove that in a POC. What we then found is that actually we should start with something much more narrow and build up to that. And what we should start with is data enrichment. Remember, that was our first use case in self-serve and that remains our first use case with that in price. And we say, hey, we will solve your data enrichment problems. You are paying for too many data vendors. It's too expensive. It's too many to manage. And your data quality still isn't very good. The great thing about this is it is an existing budget line at them. Everyone has the same problem. Everyone is paying for the same set of vendors. And by the way, there is a POC we can run. That is a very easy benchmark. Very numeric driven. And we win every data test we're in. And we have the highest data quality. And so we can prove to you we are better. And so that turned into the motion. And it became much more like rinse and repeat and something that we can actually do. So it was the positioning change. Then it was the pricing change. But that pricing change only took us to the summer of this year. Maybe early fall, then we changed it again, actually. And the key learning there was two things. First, platform fees are inherently challenged. They are not great pricing mechanisms. And the reason for this is, first it doesn't scale. After the first year, you want to keep raising the price because you want to create more margin. It's very hard to increase the platform fee. Procurement teams will eat it apart because it's like, why are you charging me this amount of money for this nebulous set of services? Then you're left with the credits which are on the low margin that you had on the cheapest plan on the self-serve product. And so we needed to figure it a way to meet our margin goals. Remain usage driven and also keep a much higher price point to warrant all the investment we're making with these customers on the enterprise side. And then by the way, the challenge we had as an undercurrent throughout this whole thing is differentiating it from self-serve. Because why at any point in time would these customers not just pay on the website in a self-serve way and get access to the product way cheaper? And ultimately, the answer to the question is to be super transparent about it. And just be like, hey, it's your choice. You can go self-serve and do this, or you can work with us on this higher price point. But you and I both know that you're not going to do that. And maybe it's because your company doesn't allow you to do those things. But maybe it's because you need our features, many of which we didn't have at the time, but we were building in the moment in the year of 2024 to warrant the platform fee and warrant the enterprise offering. Maybe it's because you need our support. Maybe it's a mix of those two things. Maybe it's because this is just how you buy. And it's just embracing that and being really candid and honest with the customers and giving them that choice. And then letting people go in whatever direction they want to go in. Honestly, some amazing logos ended up going self-serve. And we would probably, of course, give them more attention and love than we would normally, because we would hope to over time put them into the center of price bucket. And that brings us to the fall of 2024 where we basically bundled all of this. I took a lot of inspiration from Snowflake's pricing model. And we basically bundled all of this into the credits and bundled the platform fee and the support and all these things into credits just dramatically simplified the pricing. And they come with more features, they come with more support in all of these things. And that warrants the higher price point. And it simplifies the pricing dramatically, aligns customer interests, and then we're entirely usage-based. And so it can scale much better as well. - Are there any other things that you figured out in this path to crack enterprise that might be useful for other folks that have a PLG or down market motion that's working as their approaching going up to enterprise for the first time? - It first depends on your pricing model, right? So it's like, are you a usage-based company or a seed-based company? And so that kind of dictates how you would go about it. I think we had a more challenging approach because we were usage-based and translating that to enterprise. I think that companies like Notion and Figma have a clearer path to going from self-serve to enterprise because it's seed-based. You're expanding from team to team. You can go to IT and you can make an easy compelling case. And there's a lot of precedent for it and it's more straightforward. And it's less about a sell on the value and more about, hey, this is already happening bottoms up and you just need to formalize and get these security features, pay premium for that and go, right? With us, it was more challenging because we didn't have that many complementary effects from the self-serve motion. We don't have that many examples of self-serve customers turning into enterprise customers. A lot of these enterprise customers are coming in cold. And so you don't have that many complementary effects. You're almost doing a sale from scratch and you're doing a value-based sale. But I think what's interesting is that when you're not doing seed-based and you're doing a value-based sale and you are pricing in this usage way, you can price more aggressively. And that probably enables you to go away higher over time as you generate more value in a way that most seed-based pricing models don't enable as much. What about how you approach relationship building in enterprise selling? I would encourage people to be on a texting basis immediately. I talk to people in the first call and I say, let's just get on text now. Like let's share your number, let's go for it, right? So that just immediately makes it a much more human connection. This is also, by the way, where the events play a big role because what you're really trying to do is you're trying to stand out again. You're trying to be different. And the events are yet another arbitrage moment of where people are doing one thing and you can do another to be stand out and be different. You know, a lot of people say that enterprise buyers don't respond to certain types of content. Not like, hey, it's not in forest or gardener and like, it's not like professional enough for enterprise buyers. But remember that enterprise buyers are just human. And they're just humans like everyone else and they respond to the same things that we do. And so being human with them and approaching them in like unique and creative ways is probably going to work because if it would work with you, it would work with them. And so that might mean figuring out ways to sit next to them at a dinner and talk to them about how you can help and like connecting them in that way. That could mean putting on unique events for them. That could mean like being on a texting basis with them and helping them. And it could also mean like just understanding their own personal goals and how you can help them, right? So as an example of that, we had, you know, oyster was one of our customers and Petra was our champion there. Her goal, she wanted to get promoted and we through Clay enabled her to do that. And she also wanted to over time realize that she wanted to start her own agency. And it's like, let's help her do that. We weren't like concerned with what about our champion leaving or this and that. So let's help her start that and let's help her do that. She ended up having oysters her like main client. And this is a huge one for everyone because oyster is now saving 40 hours per rep per month. Petra is thrilled in having a successful agency and we're supporting both them. And that's great for all of us. - You mentioned that one of the unlocks was positioning, was repositioning the product for enterprise and landing with sort of the insertion point which is enrichment. How are you thinking about then going from landing and enterprise with enrichment to other use cases to ultimately sort of expand? - I would say for us that model is so success. Basically customer success is almost as important if not more important than the sale itself. Because we're usage based and because we have a very methodical plan led by Jess on our team to start with enrichment, make sure the data quality is high and then build use cases on top of that on that strong data foundation. Each of which by the way uses credits. And so that could mean keeping your serum enriched but that could also mean like using Clay to automate outbound at scale, automate your inbound at scale like anthropic users to automate all their inbound at scale and triple their enrichment rates on that and finding way more leads through that. Vercada was using us to come up with you growth ideas to personalize web pages at scale for ABM efforts, doubling their ad targeting rates. And so basically it's like you have a good data foundation and it's like how can we work with you to come up with growth ideas, cross outbound and inbound and you're in and expanding your existing customers. And we are partnering with you to grow your business. The consequences of that is they grow their business, they also use more credits which also leads to bigger contract and so it's a win win across the board. - And so do you do that be a sort of consultative CS on the back end or what does it actually look like? - Yes, it's done through Jess's like consultative CS team and it's like working very closely with them to understand this is what could help them grow their business helping them understand their growth ideas and helping them put those into practice in a methodical kind of way one by one. And we even goal against that internally of like how many recurring use cases like that are we unlocking per customer per month and how is there credit usage track relative to the ramp that they should be on relative to what they bought and things like that? - What do you think are like the big ideas that are you think generally useful to other people starting companies? - So a couple of things that come to mind and again some of them still maybe more applicable to us than other companies. But I think one thing we did in the early days is you could consider a Matthew and Yash myself and Eric as some of the first sales people even though that wasn't really what we were doing but I could imagine for a lot of products maybe not enterprise products or security products but for a lot of products I could imagine for the first couple of customer facing hires to hire people who are obsessed with your product and love it and have passion for it and because any of the early days you are trying to optimize for customer love and customer adoption you're not trying to optimize for maximizing the revenue from any particular customer and so choosing people who are great with your product and that doesn't necessarily mean pushing your customers but finding people who can be real lovers of your product is a good start. - There must have been tons of passionate customers that would like to work at Clay. What were you looking for in terms of like the raw material that you would hire? - Yeah, well we can start with those three first people then we can also draw today where we continue to hire people who aren't classically trained to do things to do new functions. So at the time we can talk about Eric and Yash and Matthew in particular and all three of them are high slope unique, wonderful humans. - Actually I would say that only Eric was truly a clay power user and passionate user and he was one of the first users and I think because of that and like how deeply he knew the space and how he was our customer how like we knew how valuable that was gonna be. Yash and Matthew actually weren't clay power users when they joined or like shortly before that. That being said they were deeply embedded in like the no code space and were really proficient of tools like this. So they understood it immediately and they started to see the value in it and then they started to get in that direction. But I think like what we saw on them which is true is they are extremely high agency. They are amazing with customers and like our builder of mentalities like they're the instinct is to build and like to do the work and that's rare. They're all fairly technical and none of them no computer science or maybe like not a code or maybe a little bit but they all are technical enough to use clay to the 99th percentile and build really unique things with clay and other no code products. And there's obviously a bunch of soft attributes of what makes them amazing people to work with as well. And so I think those are kind of some of the attributes but even to this day we still have so many people at clay with not a central casting for certain rules. And so for example Everett is our head of sales out of Go to Market Engineering and he's a great example of this, you know, he's an engineer by training. He's a former founder. He was ahead of growth at a growth stage start up and now he's doing sales, right? And he's doing an amazing job of it. But again, I think the work that we're doing in sales is different than most companies. But I think we see this in lots of different roles. Lila on our team is went to Yale and studied physics and started a company and has now running our events motion and leading all the community events that are happening globally. So we just hired a growth investor to be a go-to-market engineer. We have Puneeth, our head of brand who's also head of people. And he's doing that because we want our brand designer external thing to be consistent with our internal thing and he's designing both of those experiences. And he understands our culture better than anyone and we know we can support him on the operation stuff with other people. That's cool. And so those are just three examples and we have a dozen more. And so those are a few ways that we bring different people and different perspectives to new disciplines and help them bring that. And I think we're also doing that with the product, by the way. So it's our product that's taking the engineering discipline and bringing that to go to market. And we are trying to do that in the way we company build as well. Everyone in the company is on the business side is super technical. And so that leads to really tight feedback loops amongst people. And so you can have way fewer people. And so that helps us move a lot faster. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that. There are many examples of this. But one thing is our support team is super technical. And this leads-- we don't have an outsourced support team in India or the Philippines. And this leads to the fact that, sure, we're paying a premium for these people, but they're delivering extremely high quality support to our customers. And they're technical, so they deeply understand the issues. And they are much better at translating those issues to product feedback to our engineers. And that leads to a much tighter feedback loop, as opposed to having a support engineer or a support person in India and the communication lags in between. Another example of this is how we do sales. So we do sales through this, you know, we call it go-to-market engineering. And so this is collapsing three different roles into one, an AE, an SDR, and a sales engineer all into one role. And this is a person who's a bit more technical and background who is good with customers, who is high agency and high slow. Again, I wouldn't recommend this for every company. But for us, with our model, with our type of product, that's good in bound-to-man, but needs help getting usage. And we are focused on adoption and love and engagement, as opposed to maximizing revenue. It works really well for us. And as a result, you have really tight feedback loops where that one person can work with customers, generate content, generate product feedback, and deliver an amazing customer experience, as opposed to having it segmented out in three different roles to generate demand and help customers have a good experience and close them. And when you say technical, do you mean like CS technical? No, not necessarily. I mean, if you look at this team, it's like 12 people. It is actually led by Everett, who's a former founder and engineer, but some of these people are structural engineers by background as some of them are mechanical engineers, many of them are former founders, some of them do have a couple of them have like CS backgrounds, but I would say it's just a technical bent. And one of them is a growth investor actually. So I would say it's all like a bit of a technical bent and varied backgrounds, but no, they don't need to know how to code or anything like that. And it's ultimately just a proxy. It's not like a requirement. It's just a proxy that they would probably be good at this job. How do you end up running an interview process for someone who didn't do the thing before? It's heavily weighted to work trials and take homes. We like give them a chance to focus on that. It's much harder obviously to do a behavioral interview where you go in a methodical way through their background and kind of identify what they've accomplished and how that translates to the job. That's not really possible. But I think through work draws and take homes, you can identify high-slow people and people who can make an outsized impact in a new role. How do you approach designing a take home? A lot of it is trying to simulate what the actual work is as much as possible. Actually, I think I got that frozen from you. That's what you're trying to do the most. You're trying to simulate the real work as much as possible. And so for Bruno, who is who we hired as our head of growth marketing and put together one of the best take homes I've ever seen in my life, it's like, okay, we need to have a growth marketing strategy and then we need to execute it and what does that look like? For Osmond, who also made an incredible take home, it's like who leads our, or a lot of our go-to-market systems teams, it's like, okay, we don't really know what we need to help build the plan to make it happen. But it also goes into how we hire go-to-market engineers. And so for those roles, which is our sales role, we say, hey, go build something fun and amazing in Clay and blow our minds with it. You know, because that's what the job is, actually. And you need to have the ability to do that. And our minds have been blown by people who have built clay tables that simulate Santa giving Christmas gifts to lots of children around the world, to engines that generate tarot card readings and your astrology signs. So the creativity in those are really unique and like those give us good signal into whether these people will be able to do this job in real life. One of the passing comments you made a little while ago was you invested a lot in brand early on. What does it actually mean to invest in brand early on? So first of all, I think we benefit from the fact that the company's name is Clay. And so that lends itself to many things that make it much easier to build a brand around, right? And so what does this mean tactically? Well, tactically, it means we hired a claymation artist who we worked with part time for many years and is now full time a clay. And we have a full time claymation artist who's a building imagery and art with clay online, right? But we also have a lot happening in real life as well. And so we try to bring a lot of this brand creativity in real life as well because we are trying to stand out from the normal kind of tech audiences, right? So for a dream force as an example, our team put on a spa day, and which is pretty atypical for a SaaS event at Dream Force. And the intention was how can you like, relax and wind up for really depleting few days at conference. And so how can you bring this energy and creativity in brand both in your digital presence and in your in real life presence? And that is something we invest a lot in. And there are several people at the company just focused on that. We think it pays long-term dividends. It's not a short-term investment by any means. Last point on this on the brand thing is when you look at other B2B software, no one invests in it. And so when you have something that no one invests in and everything kind of looks the same, a lot of early stage software is just about standing out. Because you're trying to make news about something you're just trying to stand out from the crowd because it's so crowded in the early stage and brand is a way to do that. And you obviously have to have a point of view on it and you also have to be creative. But when no one else is investing in something and you invest in something, that is a way to have alpha and that is a way to really stand out in the meaningful way. - Yeah, I think it's a good point. I think one of the things that I've noticed is that people focus on being better as opposed to being different and just being different is valuable. - Yeah, it's enough. And you have to look for those areas in company building where there's an arbitrage moment that you can capitalize on and also feels authentic to you are. - What are the other things that come to mind when you think about arbitrage moments for Clay with that idea? - So in terms of other areas of arbitrage moments, I think one that comes to mind is around how we compensate people, Clay. We are very proactive in giving people more compensation if they are truly high performers and sometimes people are that have just been here for a few months when we change that. It's because we notice that they are defying our expectations that we had when they joined and we're not trying to wait for some formal performance review to make that happen. We are trying to do that immediately when we notice it in a consistent way. And I think that's not super common, but I think it's both the right thing to do. And I think it engenders like longer term like loyalty too. I think that I have been personally on the other end where I felt like maybe I was a top performer in a company and I felt like I was warranted more compensation. And the process of getting it is really painful and actually leads to a lot of environment. And it's like, okay, so you ask for it and they're like, okay, you have to wait till this performance review. Why do you have to wait for this performance review? Because it benefits the company, Brett. It doesn't benefit them. Because it benefits the company to save some money to have some arbitrage on the time that the person is higher performing than what you're paying them. And the truth is, if they're actually overpaying them, the company's getting a bargain. And so you have to wait till this arbitrary time and then you have the arbitrary like performance review conversation. And then there's an negotiation. And after the end of this, you maybe get what you asked for, you get a fraction of that and you don't feel good. And ultimately, it's about how do we make people feel good? How do we make people feel whole and full and excited and all in and feel seen for their contributions? And that way is not the right way. And so they tactically, what does this mean? Tactically, it's like, first, we should separate performance and feedback reviews with compensation. Feedback is a gift to you to help you improve. Compensation is fluid because as things change, as you perform, we should reward you and you should give more. And the top people will always deserve that. You know, just treating people well and treating people in the right way and being generous with your best people pays long-term dividends not only for doing the right thing but also for the company and for both people involved and it feels not standard for how most companies handle compensation. - Do you do it according to some sort of leveling system? - We use benchmarking, right? But with the best performers, not that you throw the benchmarking at the window, but for the top people, like obviously, it's gonna be on the higher end and so it may not make sense. And so a natural follow-up question is like, you know, how is this fair or how is it equitable? And so one thing you have to think about is like, I've heard like some companies that I've talked to actually have or one company I've talked to has a program where they call them like founder grants or executive staff grants and they just have a specific program where they say, okay, here is this pile of stock and we will just give it to the top performers at completely our discretion. And then if people are like, well, this person has more than me, they can point to the fact that, hey, this person actually got a founder grant and so that's okay. And that's why, you know, we don't have like a formal structured program like that. But I think that in every case, we can justify actually almost all of these things even with the leveling because it's and the benchmarking data because it is people who are exceeding the expectations of where they were before, therefore warranting more. And maybe that's a higher percentile of where they are or maybe it's a brand new level. And so I think in retrospect, you could look at every single one and just find it that way. But we are kind of using that as a baseline to understand the ballpark and what we're talking about from a competition perspective and revisiting it both at fundraising moments when the company is escalated evaluation and we should reassess to make sure everyone's is good. But also when we feel like, hey, let's take another review of the people and see who's really performing and do that on some normal cadence maybe every month or something and like notice and like reward people in the moment. When did you come across this idea and start to implement it? - We've been implementing it for the last three years. We've been doing it since we started really scaling the team in 2022. The core thing is we wanna be proactive. We wanna be ahead of our team as much as possible because we want them to know that we value them that we are grateful for all their contributing, that they feel that we really see them and we really appreciate them. And I think that taking the reverse approach or waiting and waiting for them to come to you, if someone on your team comes to you, you've already lost the game because they have been thinking about this. I promise you for weeks, if not months, because it takes a lot of courage and bravery to like go up to your manager or the founder and ask for more money. They've already been thinking about this for a really long time and so being proactive is the first the right thing to do but also helps you as well in the long term in building a really strong relationship with this person and having them with the company for a long period of time. Are there downsides that you've observed? I can name some downsides. I have not personally observed them, but I could come up with something that I have been concerned about in the past. So the first thing that comes to mind is, well, if you just keep giving people more money, aren't they just gonna keep coming to you for more money all the time? Yeah, or they join eight weeks later, they get a bump. Yeah. And then another nine months goes by and there's no bump. Yeah. Doesn't that feel like you've set an expectation? That's right. So you're not gonna continue to do that. That's right. Yeah. And then it's like, oh, that's messy and then you don't have a standard time to do all these things. I don't have a great answer to that, except for the fact that we've been doing this for three years and that hasn't been an issue so far. And so something is working there. My guess would be that people get it and they're grateful. They appreciate that this is way more than what happened at other companies. And by the way, it's all defensible. So let's just play out your example where it's like, hey, someone comes in 12 weeks in, they get a raise and then they come back eight months later and it's like, hey, I didn't get a raise. And it's like, why? Well, there was a reason this happened and let's look at the benchmarking data. Now, I haven't had that conversation yet but that would be the conversation I'd have. If the benchmarking data has changed and their performance has changed, actually Brett, if they get a pay raise in 12 weeks and then they come back eight months later and are still crushing it and are still defying expectations that we had for them at the end of 12 week mark, let's give them more money because they continue to set new standards. I have so many issues with benchmarking data in general. Like I just, it is an odd thing that, you know, it's a collection of all the data points theoretically in an industry but your company is its own unique thing. And also we have insider information, right? We have, we are probably valuing someone way more than the market would allow you someone because of context, because of personal relationship, because of trust, whatever. Or it could just be that your business if ultimately compensation in its most idealized version is representative business value and not just the abstract what is someone could get paid down the street. It also doesn't sort of capture that. You may have a specific role that is, quote, not highly compensated another company but for your company, it's creating extraordinary shareholder value. So there's two examples to talk about. First of all, let's talk about events, for example. Events, if you look at pay or other benchmarking data sources, events people will be paid very little. Social media, if you look at social media people, they'll be paid very little. But for our business, events and social media are really important. This is how we grow. So for us, I don't look to events and social media as a benchmark. I look to growth marketing. Another example, like I said, is we have people who are coming from different backgrounds to do different things. So as an example, I was talking to a finance person who was interested in doing the people operations role. Now this is a really high caliber, amazing person who's coming from a finance background. I was talking to another person from an operations and legal background, also highly compensated from that field, going into a marketing position. Now I'm getting a really amazing human to work on a field and a problem that is diable to us, but it's traditionally under compensated relative to these people's backgrounds. So I'm not going to compensate them at this brand marketing benchmark or this people operations benchmark. I'm going to compensate them as if they were finance and legal people coming into the company because that's who they are. And the things they're working on maybe aren't finance and legal, but are really important to us. - I want to wrap up by asking the question they will always do, which is basically who in your career has had the biggest outsized impact? - This guy named Nick Merrill, who was, I worked for Hillary Clinton for almost four years, years of like 2013 through the campaign in 2016, and he was my mentor and manager actually throughout that entire period of time. He has probably had more impact and influence on me than almost anyone except my parents because it was a very formative stage of my life. It was like the ages of 19 to 22 or something. And you know, I think many ways taught me how to be an adult. He taught me how to contribute. He taught me how to work in a professional environment and make an impact. And I learned a lot from his example. And more specifically, like he was always, you know, on the Hillary Clinton campaign in particular, with a lot of ups and downs, a lot of crazy things happening every day. And he was able to be extraordinarily level headed through all of that and taught me a lot about how to do that in my current circumstances, which are frankly way less stress and way lower stakes than a presidential campaign. - Do you think he is just a level-headed human being or did he work at being level-headed? - I think he probably worked at it over time. And I think that being in the melting pot of chaos that politics and government can be, especially for as long as he was in it, it's a real training round in that. And I think that when you start with that as your standard, going into startups where the stakes are not about like the future of the country and the stakes are be to be software, it's easy to have things in much greater perspective. And so for that and many, many other things that are too many in name, I love them like an enormous amount of gratitude. I feel I'm so fortunate that I now get to work with Kareem at Clay who is even more of that, who brings a level of calm and thoughtfulness to every interaction. And so I think like I'm unbelievably fortunate. I am able to work with two people in two of the most formative kind of career experiences of my life that bring this emotional energy that I learn from and continue to do myself. - And he also has a very good sense of humor. One of the things I was wondering is just in general, do we just undervalue humor at work? - Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's like we shouldn't take ourselves that seriously and it's important to remember that and it's important to remember what we are doing in the grand scheme of things because it's like, you know, we're here to make an impact. And actually I could argue that like we are making a huge impact on people's lives at Clay and that's really important and it's meaningful. But we have lives beyond that. And I think that's important, by the way. I don't think you actually are going to be do the best work of your life if you don't have perspective beyond that. If you give it all to your work and don't have things beyond that and having that perspective and having those passions is really important to being like a full human and enjoying life for what it is and building the business as one part of that. And for Kareem, it's maybe creating music and as his passion and for me, it's other things. But these are things that are important in our like human identity and like what we need to do our best work. And I think we believe that and we try to bring that ethos into Clay as well and how we hire people and how we foster the company culture and our own expectations by the way of how people should be performing. Like this is a, we try to have a company that is very consistent and very long term oriented. So that by the way, like when the music stops or if the music ever stops for the company in our growth, people will be there for the long term. And maybe for specific periods of time, for a sprint or a specific goal, we can turn it up. But we're focused on a long term because we're trying to build an enduring business and how we treat people is a huge part of that. - Great place to end. Thanks for joining. - Thanks Brett. (upbeat music)