Sales is Not Magic, It's Math w/ Loren Padelford (Founding CRO, Shopify)
34:05 Share

Index on impact, not work. Care about the impact people have, not the work they're doing. I remember my first call with Lauren Paddleford 10 years ago. I was driving in the morning to Cambridge.

on the Tribal Bridge, 7.45 a.m. I was always taking the commute. I used that commute time to help entrepreneurs, founders, first salespeople with their software companies and scale. I always ask questions like, what's your context? How many salespeople do you have? He said, zero. How many customers? 75,000.

How much revenue? 100 million in revenue. And I said something like, oh my gosh, you are going to be so successful with this one. And boy, was I right. Lauren Paddleford was the first salesperson, first sales leader, first CRO at a company called Shopify. A company you all have heard of today, but maybe not at the time.

He scaled that Shopify Plus business unit from zero to a billion dollars in revenue in his seven years at the firm. We're going to unpack the whole journey starting from the beginning. My name is Marker Berge, and this is the Science of Scaling. Hey, Lorne. Great to see you. Hey, Mark. Really excited to be here.

It's great to reconnect, man. I think like we've been jamming a little bit. I think it was like... So it was 2014. Yeah. So, okay. 10 years ago. And gosh, what a journey. I'm so excited to like unpack it with you. It's just, it's fun. It's been fun checking in with you. But like for the audience, let's just go back to the beginning. You know, like how did you...

hear about Shopify back then? How did they hear about you? Can you unpack that for us? I didn't know anybody at Shopify. I had no connection to them. I was just like, that's a cool company. And so take a shot. It was a long process of meeting with a lot of folks. And the reason is ultimately, Shopify, they had never really had sales. So they couldn't grok why they needed sales.

And so a lot of my interview is them telling me how much they hated sales and salespeople and, um, you know, how they thought this was going to fail and it wasn't worth doing. And I was like, well, this is a fact. This is a great interview process.

Where was the debate? Wasn't everyone just like, we don't need them. We're doing so well getting to 100 mil. We're awesome engineers. We finally cracked the nut. We don't need any of these crazy salespeople. Like, what's the debate? They were arguing about whether they needed it in the future, but there was a challenge that they had encountered.

So the analogy I use primarily for this is Allbirds. Back in the day, they were the hyper growth DTC brand that everybody loved. Allbirds starts on Shopify. They grow very quickly. Well, Shopify is for startups. At some point, these brands outgrow Shopify. And so they're like, okay, well, I guess we can sell them more stuff. Like we'll sell them, like we'll create another plan in the stack. So we have small, medium, large. We're going to create the enterprise plan and we're going to,

sell it to them. Like they're going to have humans talk to them and convince them to use this enterprise plan. I could imagine there's a lot of product founders out here that are getting traction on PLG and they just want to keep the dream going. Why does it break down in a certain ARR ACV? At that moment, there was a, what I'm going to call the emotional mental break of the buyer who at a certain MRR or ARR would not make the decision without talking to somebody.

And at Shopify, there wasn't really anybody to talk to previous to this. And so they would get to the point to be like, this sounds awesome. This sounds great, but I'm not going to invest $25,000 a year for that, which for a startup is a decent amount of money without having some kind of relationship with the company. Hey folks, just Mark here. This is pretty shocking to a lot of the product technical founders out there that are executing PLG. Look across the

the best PLG companies in the world, the public PLG companies. I can't think of one that doesn't have a vibrant, large enterprise sales team. It's just a necessity to bring the full opportunity to life. It happens later on. I mean, yeah, I mean, look at Shopify. They get to 100 million in revenue without them. But to really unlock that multi-billion dollar journey, layering in that sales org and a leader like Lauren is necessary.

Let's get back to him and find out how he did it. The thing that Plus taught Shopify was that if you have one conversation, right, you can convert 10x the AR. When I came in, there was a sales rep, an account manager, an implementation person all kind of chipping away at this idea. And it was working in the sense of people were upgrading. There's a lot of Shopify customers. And so rightly, they were like, I wonder if we could get more people to upgrade.

if we just made this team bigger. While Shopify is a very straightforward platform, it is a big platform. There's a lot going on in a Shopify store, especially when you add the ecosystem of partners, apps, installation, that kind of stuff. So they wanted help navigating that Shopify ecosystem. That was primarily what we were doing is calming people down, being like, we're a real business. There are real humans that work here. It's safe to make this choice. And...

How can we help you stand up, do better, do more with more of the Shopify suite and the ecosystem? Like if people just need a tour of the product, I don't, why do I need these expensive human sellers? They're just like, Hey, welcome to your Shopify tour, Shopify plus tour. Let me walk you through the 12 different modules and how they work. Like why doesn't that work? And what did you all have to do differently? Buyers aren't really logical. Buyers are emotional.

And so it isn't I read the checklist and I agree with it. It's I read the checklist and I agree with it, but I'm still nervous. You know, sales reps, great sales reps are great therapists. It's like, it's OK. You can make this choice. Biggest question I get every day. How do you build the next unicorn?

How do you build predictable, scalable revenue growth? Luckily, the folks at HubSpot have put together the Science of Scaling Database, real playbooks from companies that have gotten to the scale of like $40 billion in market cap. The playbooks cover key decisions like hiring

hiring, compensation, go-to-market strategy, ICP development, even stuff on AI in sales. All from the folks behind the fastest growing companies in tech. It's not fluffy. It's super tactical. You know my content. You know my brand. It's stuff that you're going to pick up, download, and put to use within an hour. So head to the description, click on the link, and download your free copy to start scaling your business today.

Can you unpack like what that was, like who you hired, like the methodology you ran, like the demand gen tact. I mean, obviously demand gen was there, but like, can you just unpack that motion for us? So I read sales acceleration formula. It immediately resonated because I was like, yeah, sales is not magic. Sales is math, right? It's science. And so this, we're going to just apply the crap out of science to this thing. And yeah,

So I hired five more sales reps. I said from the beginning, we are not hiring people with experience. We're going to take them right off the street, no experience, and we're going to teach them how to do it.

And the teaching them how to do it, we didn't really teach them how to do it. We just kind of put them, we let them build stores. So we trained them and we're like build stores, right? And then call people and just start talking to them and see what they say, right? And so that's what we started to do is we just got on the phones and started calling existing Shopify customers. We had triggers of if a Shopify customer had sold more than $10,000 in a day for multiple days in a row. So we had a bunch of triggers that indicated who might be bigger, right?

than somebody else. And we started calling them and saying, hey, we have this Lex novel plan. You get an account manager, you get this small package of things. It's called Plus. Are you interested in that? And we start to learn the conversations. We would have pre-meetings every day in the morning, decide what we were going to sell that day. How are we going to talk about it? We are varying the pitches, varying the pricing model, varying everything every day.

Just it was pure experimentation. So we'd all we'd make a ton of calls. And then we get back together at the end of the day and like what worked, right? What didn't work? What do you hear? What do you hear? And we iterated and iterated like for months. We just did this. Like I was on the phones. The team was on the phones. And we were just trying to learn what it was like to talk to this customer group and what they keyed on, what value they got interested in.

And we honed it and honed it and honed it until we started to realize what our value props were. And so it was pretty raw. The plan itself was an absolute mathematical swag. There was no history on how big it could be. I just did reverse engineered math on physics math.

How many calls could a human make in a single day? What could the hit rate be? You know, yada, yada, yada. And we picked a target. It was 900 customers in the first year. It was our target. Hey, folks, just Mark here. I mean, this is so critical to the pursuit of go-to-market fit in the scientist scaling model. It's really what Loren's bringing to life. And in this case, he's figuring out the revenue math, the bottoms-up revenue math.

When people are thinking about, okay, like what are we going to do for revenue for Shopify plus next year? Oftentimes it will just be like a tops down number, like triple, triple, double, double. Like that's what the VCs, the investors, the board, the executive team wants to see. But what Lauren's bringing to life is how bottoms up math is done. And I want to show you a template that you can use. So what you see here is there's two aspects to it. There's the bottoms up math from the sales capacity side.

And there's the bottoms up math from the demand gen side. And Lauren's working both of those. And a lot of people get the sales capacity piece. Like the example I'm showing here is like, this is a company that is doing 5 million last year, five reps doing a million. But what they often don't do is they don't study the bottoms up demand gen piece. So in this simple example, I've got two sources of demand gen. I have some coming from cold calling SDRs.

And I have some calling from marketers. And you can see what happened here. Like they had five SDRs. Each SDR set 240 appointments for the year. So we can see how many that was. 5% of those appointments became a customer and those customers paid X amount. So there's our revenue. And then you can see what's happened on the marketing side. They spent a million bucks. They got 2000 leads. It was 500 bucks a lead. 20% became an appointment and 10% became a customer.

That's really critical bottoms up math that not a lot of teams do, but look at what Lauren's doing. So now you can apply that to a forward looking model and not just do the math on the sales capacity side, but also do the math on the demand gen side. So now the company is trying to get a 10 million a year next year. And a lot of folks would just say, okay, cool, double the size of the sales team and we're good to go. But that's only half the story. We also have to keep the demand gen in sync.

And you can see in this example that they're increasing the SDR count, assuming that the conversion rates to customer are the same and increase in the marketing budget and assuming the conversion rates are the same. This is what Lauren figured out. And he used this math to make sales, not magic, but a math formula. Let's get back to him. So we were going to sell 900 customers. Um, no one had any idea if that was pot. We ended up at nine 60. Um, and so we're pretty accurate on the swag target. Um,

And we just learned. It was just raw. It was like all of us sitting in this crappy little office in Waterloo, dialing every single day, trying to learn what the sales process was going to look like. And so those first five reps, along with the group that was already there,

fundamentally built what everyone else learned how to do. People ask me this question all the time. You're going to roll your eyes. I'm going to roll my eyes, but let's just get a data point out there. They're always like, how many calls do I need to make? And what convert will, how many will convert to a meeting? And how many meetings will convert to pipeline? And how much of the pipeline will convert to a sale? And I know it's like so circumstantial, but like, can we, can we try to like, just remember the Shopify one, just to give them a data point? Do you do remember any of those numbers yet? I still have the spreadsheet.

And so what I use, I have a belief in like be pessimistic. So if you can make a worst case scenario model work, then everything else is going to be great. So my models are always kind of worst case. So it was a 10% model. I just said, okay, right. You know, the average call is like seven seconds because it's voicemail. The average connect is like a minute and a half, 240 selling days a year round average. It's not right, but it's close.

six hours a day of selling time. So I was basically, okay, you're gonna make a hundred calls a day, like a hundred dials a day, totally reasonable, do it. You're gonna have a 10% connect rate. You're gonna have a 10% convert rate. You're gonna have a 10% close rate. So 10, 10, 10. So you're gonna get one, right? Out of those, out of that hundred. That's your job, one. That's the entire math was built on that for the first year. That's the swag. And I was just like, well, how many reps can we hire against that and train correctly with that math?

We deployed that and we updated it every day. Hey folks, just Mark here. Yeah, Lauren is like beautifully guiding his team through the pursuit of go-to-market fit. Unlike the product market fit phase in the science of scaling, where they're just trying to figure out like, you know, does this product work and will people retain? Now they're working on the playbook to bring it to market faster

to streamline, to streamline, to iterate, to test, to experiment. And I'm laughing over here because he's running the growth mindset playbook of the best in class product led growth teams on the product side. I know that's what Shopify did and he's like applying this to sales. It's so cool. So let me just bring that to life on what that means here is these folks do four things.

In a traditional PLG product growth team, the first thing they do is they optimize the self-serve funnel through sequential experiments and analysis. So they've got the funnel running and it's like 8%, then 7%, then 9%, then 2% and they're just attacking it. And so they're attacking it with different experiments and then they're sharing their learnings in weekly stand-ups.

That's what he's, he's actually doing it daily, which I like even more because that, that pace of that standup is representing the pace of your learning.

The third thing that he's doing is he's creating a log. He's creating an experiment log. That's what the best growth teams do, is they have a log now of all the learns that came around. And when someone joins the team, they actually read the experiment log and they're right up to speed on why we say the things that we do. They're right up to speed on where we are on the frontier of understanding how to get this software out there into the market. And the final thing is they use those experiments to enhance and iterate.

Every single day, they're tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. And now that 5% to 6% to 9% to 2% suddenly becomes 10%, 10%, 10%, 10%. And the efficiency of those leads and means through the funnel goes way up through this process. All right, let's get back to Lauren. We tuned the math model every single day because we were like, oh, actually our hit rate's higher than that. So it's not 10%. So if I call 100 people and I get 10%

10 connects, right? And then I get a meeting, you know, it was like 12 and then it became 14 and 50. And then we, so we kept tuning the message. Are those five people different than the next five? Like once the playbook's built and now it's like this, here's the compliment, here's the deck, here's the objection list, go to town. Like are they the same people or are they different? The first five were intentionally hired. That hiring process was very specific. If you were expecting a lot of training and support, you're not the right people. Right.

So they were very raw. After that, you could be a little more loose. They were 100% sales reps, no BDRs and SDR nonsense, right? You were just like AEs from day one. We didn't really train the first five at all. Like I said, we had them build stores and then put them on phones.

And we were just collaborative from day one. They had a team quota. They didn't have individual quotas. We had a team-based quota. We win and lose as a team. And so we just built collaboration from the beginning and said, that's the only way to learn. What were some of those key learnings and iterations before you were ready to package it up and scale? I've always believed it's like you have to have at least one team always going for something new. Yeah.

I don't care how much inbound you have, eventually you're going to run out of inbound. Started to just cold out into the world. They were verticalized. So we picked a couple of verticals that we could run the vertical list off Shopify and be like, what were the biggest verticals on Shopify? Fashion, electronics, that kind of stuff. We put them in those verticals. We said, just call people and just like see what happens. We were trying to figure out two things. What's the value prop, right? What objections are we going to get? What's everyone going to hesitate on? What's everyone going to question us about? So what were we going to have to answer?

We had a price in market at that moment. It was $795 a month. It was a flat fee. There was no like, you know, we had Shopify payments so you could do payments on top, but it was a flat SaaS fee. Shopify was $79 a month. So it was a 10X upgrade in cost for basically the same platform. So we had to figure out

Was that our price? Were people willing to pay more than that? Did we have to sell it for less? And so every day we altered the pitch slightly. We would pitch one value one day, another value the next day, and we would track everything. We tracked every response to email. So we sent out emails. We tracked all the headlines and how they worked, right? All the content and how it worked.

We tracked all the calls. We wrote scripts and tracked which scripts worked better. And so we had a bunch of tracking sheets to just analyze what was performing better than others. And then we were writing down every question we got. And so that was the pre and post meetings. The pre meetings, we'd be like, okay, today we're going to sell it at $1,000 a month. Today, the value proposition is this.

We check how that went at the end of the day. Right. We'd iterate. We'd set up the next day. Be like, great. It's twelve hundred dollars a month today. And we just got closer and closer. And then at some point you just like the math started to even out where you're just like, oh, we're not actually learning that much anymore in this in this iteration. So now that's the model. What do people pay for now when they're jumping from like whatever, 50 bucks a month to a thousand scale and reliability? Shopify was by far the biggest competitor to Plus.

Like no one was even close. Shopify stripped plus customers on a regular. That's the value of Shopify is anywhere on your journey, we have your solution. So if this is too much for you, great, downgrade, use a different plan. We don't care. Just stay on Shopify. The sales reps were taught, you're not selling them plus. You're trying to figure out if plus matches the complexity.

If it does, describe that. If it doesn't, give them basic and let them run on basic because that's the right choice for them. I bet a lot of founders are like, yeah, this is what's happening with us. We're not selling the value. We're getting into price discounting. We're not. And so can you unpack the unlock there? We were very antagonistic with the market as a design company.

We were like, we're not the enterprise. We're anti-enterprise. It's a lie. So we had this very hardcore narrative of like everything you're told by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Demandware is a lie, right? This is a mafia trying to keep the money where they want it, right? I wrote that blog post. That became our flag, right? It was like, screw everybody, right? We're going to rewrite the rules. So that was our sales pitch as well. It's like, I'm not trying to convince you that Shopify

Shopify is the place. Either you see it and understand, or you don't. I don't actually care which one is the choice. These companies would talk to us, Walmart, Red Bull, and they'd be like, I'm too big for this. And I'd be like, how much do you do? And they'd be like, I do $100 million. And I was like, yeah, Shopify did $5 billion. But no one saw the platform. They just saw the stores. So as soon as we unlocked the platform, immediately people were like,

I want to talk more. How do you do that? Tell me how I can get into this thing. So we were selling cost effectiveness. We were selling scale and we were selling reliability. The last thing we were selling was which horse are you betting on over the next five years to innovate the crap out of this industry? Is it going to be IBM or is it going to be Shopify? This is a philosophical sale. Either they understand what's going to happen to retail or we don't want them.

And so we had this internal motto. We had two things, which I'm very proud of. One was, I don't want the current Fortune 500. I want to build the next one. You're behind.

That was our sales pitch. It's beautiful. How did you prevent the reps from like overselling and not doing that? You know, because they're just sitting there and they're like, I need to hit my quota. A lot of it just started at the beginning, how we hired them, what we taught them. It was very culturally based is we are here for our customers success. We are in a very long game. I would rather load less customers who we know we can make successful and are going to be referenceable for us.

then load a bunch of customers that this is not the greatest option for them. Second, you work for Shopify, you don't work for Plus. So Shopify has multiple options. That is the value of it in the world. It is unlike any other platform. We can accommodate everybody.

but find the right solution. See number one, right? Do the right thing for the customer. This is a long game. So we just instilled that culture over and over again. The other thing was celebrating when we did the right thing.

Who'd you say no to? I said no to them. Why'd you say no to them? Well, they wanted me to do this and this and we don't want to do that. Correct. Who'd you allow to stay on basic? Oh, we let these guys stay on basic because it was easier for them. We just celebrated doing the right thing for the customer. If we can't make the customer better, don't do it. A couple of times you mentioned like you had them build a store when they came in.

What do you mean by that? Oh, so Shopify, one of the core aspects of Shopify's training program was build your own shop, build your own store. There's no better way to know the product than to dog food it yourself. So try, like pick a product, build a store, try and launch your store. So,

a large percentage of Shopify employees have side businesses running Shopify stores. And so this was a great training because once you know the product, like they all knew the product intimately. So our sales reps are also product experts because they had built stores. So they could go to a customer and talk about it and be like, yeah, I built my own store. Look, check it out. And they could show it to them. And it created a bond. It was like, oh, you're not just some sales rep. You also like are kind of an entrepreneur. It was entrepreneurs selling to entrepreneurs. Yeah.

Hey folks, just Mark here. Yeah, walk in the buyer's shoes. That's one of the key objectives of sales training. Not just like memorize the playbook, not just memorize every feature in the product, not just memorize every single objection and how to handle it, but to be able to relate as a human to the buyer.

What is it like in their job every day? What is it like to walk in their shoes? So probably the most important part of their onboarding and training is to have them build a store. It's really easy when I go into an organization and I try to understand and diagnose the effectiveness of their sales training program. How much of your training is about your product?

And how much of your training is getting the seller to walk in the buyer's shoes? Usually it's heavily weighted toward the former. But Lauren has set this up to be heavily weighted to the latter. And to make selling about buying. To make selling about helping the buyer make the right decision for their business and select the right product at Shopify.

Let's get back to Lauren. It's a great way for them to understand the challenges our customers would have, but also very easy for them to engage demos, like customers like, let's do a demo right now. It's like, cool, let's do it. Like any of those reps could have demoed any moment of any day. Obviously, just the foundation that was built there was so critical to, you know, what Shopify is today. Let's talk for a second, Lauren, like we, you and I have chatted and

you know, just on a personal side, we've reflected on that experience. Everyone's like, you know, some of you, would you do it again? I gave it everything. I gave it heart, soul, mind. I committed to the thing. I learned a ton, hugely valuable, hugely valuable. But I was a disaster at the end. I, you know, ended up getting divorced after like it, you know, I like to say, this is not a knock on Shopify. This is all me.

I burned down my first life for that mission. And so I get asked that question a lot. Was it worth it? I don't know how to answer that question, to be quite honest. Hey folks, just Mark here. I'm so thankful Lauren's willing to talk about this. It's critical and we don't talk about it enough. I feel like every successful executive can

criticized to some degree suboptimal investment of time in their journey. And Lauren's walking us through here. I'll just build on his point around like controlling your time, time management. Number one, in a holistic view, not just your career, not just the meetings you're going to get to, but holistically, what do you want to do?

And trying to like proactively plan around it. I mean, for me, that's been a big thing in my life as I've learned and gone through the same journeys as Lauren. So just very tactically speaking, I mean, you can copy it if you want, but like three weeks before the beginning of every month, I'll lay out the next month's calendar.

And I start with the personal things that matter to me. Like when am I going to pick up the kids at school? When am I going to have dinner with them? When are their school events and sports events, etc.? And I put in when I'm going to work out every day. And I put in when I'm going to reflect or pray or meditate or whatever you do for personal reflections and gratitudes. And then I put in my work stuff, my one-on-ones, my meetings, my travel time.

But it all works together. And then I can reflect, of course, it's going to change. Of course, I'm going to have a critical meeting that overlaps with a workout or with a kid's dinner. But I'm going to manage that and move those things around so that there's balance. And when I look back and I have a proportion of time that I'm spending on health, on family, on work, I'm taking control of that time and that plan. Copy it if you want, but definitely listen to Lorne and learn and reflect on his words.

Let's get back to him. You know, I joke with my friends. I'm like, well, I'm not giving back the money. So, and they always laugh and I'm like, so, but I don't know that that means it was worth it. It's, it's so hard for me to reconcile the incredible high and the incredible experience. And, and I couldn't be doing what I'm doing now had I not worked there. Like I,

But man, it cost a lot. I want to get your opinion looking back. Like, what would your guide be to the, like, you know, the 29-year-old Lauren? Because, like, I remember in business school, you know, 20 years ago, they had these, like, MBA graduates from 30 years ago that went into banking, went into consulting, went into these rigorous careers. And they were coming back, like, kind of depressed. Like, super successful, right?

but had like lost everything on the other side of their non-career life. And that stood with me quite a bit. You know, we've got a bunch of folks probably listening. They're like, you know, I'm 27. I'm hopefully going on this career ride, but can I have both? And like, what would your advice be there? First, hustle culture is bullshit.

do not buy this hype, right? It is a lie. It is a great way to sell podcasts and to sell books, but it is not true. You do not need to wake up at 3 a.m. and go to bed at 1 a.m. and grind all day long to be successful. There are thousands

far more examples of people not doing that who are successful than there are people doing that. That does not mean don't work hard. It just means don't burn your life like every hour of the day on this thing. Second, boundaries are fine. Boundaries are fine. This isn't the whole work-life balance thing. I loved work. I love work. Like work is a game. It's a sport. I love it. It's not that. But you also have to breathe and you have to be healthy. Post-Shopify,

95% of the people that I talk to every single day never talk to me again.

It was a brutal realization that these were not my actual core circle. These were work friends. These were work colleagues. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's, you know, so many folks, including myself, can take so much away from that. And you have a lot of life left. For sure. And you're on to something really cool now. And can you talk about, you want to talk about Slice for a second? Slice is a vertical application for pizzerias.

Aaliyah reached out to me when I was at Shopify and just started talking. And he talked for five years. Well, I kept saying no because I was doing other stuff. And then timing made sense. And his vision was compelling and hard and big. And so I was like, yeah, that sounds like something that I would like. But I definitely...

in retrospect, had a bunch of like boundaries of, hey, I will not miss anything of my kids ever again. I will travel for sure because that's part of the job and I want to do a good job, but like not all the time. We had a long conversation. I just said, and it's okay if that's not what you want. Like that is fine.

Right. I'm just telling you what has to work for me or it's or like I will burn out because of my own personality and I don't want to do that again. And he was like, no, it's great. It's awesome. Like, how do you lead with those boundaries, but also get the most out of your people? The thing I learned probably the most at Shopify from Toby Craig Harley was index on impact, not work. Care about the impact people have, not the work they're doing.

In a sense of like if someone works 50 hours a day and like does not have any impact, that's not worth it. Don't like don't do that. And so that is that's the key to me for leaders to set the tone is like stop talking about how much you work. And let's talk about the impact of your work.

And let's match those two things up so you're not, so you can make far higher impact with less time. So I don't really care this much about what you do all day or how many hours you work. We have a set of goals and impact that we need to achieve. If you can do that in one hour a day, amazing, right? Let's try and do that. Let's try and be maximally impactful with the minimum amount of work. And then we can play with those dials over time.

But just telling me I worked 100 hours a week, it doesn't mean anything. I'm like, good for you. I don't know what that means. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for dropping all this knowledge. It really illustrates how multifaceted, successful sales leaders and leaders in general need to be, you know, and looking at the ground we've covered from the revenue math to the experimentation and pricing all the way to the human side of balance of career in your life and

You know, I'm so thankful that we had that phone call 10 years ago. I always remember and talk about it to this day. We laugh about it whenever we see each other. It's been amazing to follow your journey. And, you know, congratulations on all of your growth as a professional and as a person.

And thank you for coming on the show and sharing that story. Well, Mark, I appreciate it. This is a highlight for me. I owe you and your thinking a lot of this. And so I've appreciated being able to talk to you and learn from you over time. And, you know, hopefully other folks are learning what you've done and are applying it to the world because this isn't rocket science. Like you can like people can do this. So appreciate you having me on. It's been great.

Thanks, Lauren. I'm humbled by that. Appreciate it. So that's it, folks. Today's episode is written and produced by my favorite producer, Matthew Brown. Editing comes from Patrick Edwards. And hey, if you like the show, be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. And check out my VC firm, Stage 2 Capital. We are the VC firm that's running back by the CROs, CCOs, CMOs, and other go-to-market leaders across all the tech. So that's it for today. I'll see you on the next episode.