How to Build Your MVP & Sales Playbook At The Same Time w/ Mike Gamson (Founding CRO, LinkedIn)
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If I were to, as a 20 year more experienced person, be able to come back and talk to myself back then, I think the thing that I would say, if it can't be a multi-billion dollar business, don't waste time trying to pursue it. Because the biggest enemy of a startup's ambition is

is to spend the time from any of their important people on things that are constrained by market size. There's a connection few founders make, and that is the best practices 101 at doing customer interviews and deciding what to build is almost exactly the same as sales 101 in building your sales playbook. That those sales playbook best practices should influence

You're zero to one minimal viable product design. And during that stage, not only are you figuring out your MVP, you're actually building your sales process. There are so many companies where you look back at the foundational times and they follow this process. Today, we'll unpack one of them.

that you've all heard of, a company called LinkedIn. You look back on that early team, it's like looking back at a franchise dynasty in any major sport. And one of those players is my friend, Mike Gamson, one of the first sales hires founding CRO. And he's going to walk us through how they thought about it, how they thought about the zero to one, and how they were building their sales process and sales strategy before they even had a product.

My name is Mark Roberge, and this is the Science of Scaling. So Mike, it's great to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much. I'm really happy to be here and really excited to be doing this with you, Mark. Do you remember how we originally got connected? I don't, is the short answer. And I would probably describe it as I feel like you and I kind of came up together.

Yeah, I think you were always many ticks ahead, but yeah. I don't know. I feel like we were both playing significant roles in companies we felt really passionate about that were hitting inflection points around the same time. Do you remember way back? I think it was like 2011 or 2012. HubSpot was clearly going a certain direction around content production. And I think you and Jeff and a lot of the leadership at LinkedIn had...

some percolating ideas around content and like we're talking to different people who are supposedly good at it i said i guess like us and you were like hey can we like buy you guys and we're like let's get jeff and brian to get into our match together and they got kind of close yeah there was a definite alternative universe where we ended up as one company

And, you know, what I remember from that time is I think there was a unique simpatico amongst the executive leadership where, again, you know, HubSpot's a very special company that was built by very special founders who had a specific eye towards the product and the culture, et cetera. LinkedIn, very much the same thing. And I think both of us probably looked around.

the landscape of other companies and didn't always find, usually didn't find companies that resonated so deeply with what our members and customers would want and what our employees would find to be appropriate. And I think there was, there was a real moment there where there's a, there was a, could have been. Hey, I don't know if we're getting in trouble by talking about this, but it was way back 15 years ago. So anyway, I think both companies have done well. Statue of limitations on private information, I think. Yeah. Well, anyway, let's unpack that journey because it was wild.

quite a doozy. And let's go back to the days when you first heard of LinkedIn. And I don't even know the story actually of how you met them and they met you. Can you unpack that for us? So I joined in August of 2007.

And my job description said, figure out something to do for money. It wasn't like you're the head of this or the person of that. It was literally figure out something to do for money. And most of my ideas were really lousy. I didn't understand LinkedIn's culture. I didn't understand what it meant to really put your free members first. I had just come out of an enterprise software world where

the products that I was building and selling were for hedge funds and asset managers. And so I got to LinkedIn, I'm like, holy smokes, this has like the most amazing data in the world. Let's take all this data and let's sell it to hedge fund managers and have like an investment product. And I wrote up this little thing and I brought it to Reed and Reed's like, that's a terrible idea. Like, how would you feel if you were a member and we sold your data?

Hey folks, just Mark here. I mean, isn't this really cool to see how like instigated by Reed from day one, their mission of member first.

Like, don't screw over the member. That's what this is all about. You just see so many companies were like, oh, we should probably have a mission statement. They come up with something. But it sits on the desk and collects dust. It doesn't drive decisions. You can see how much is driving the decisions here from like the selection of the monetization strategy to the value propositions. Eventually as this unfolds, even like the type of people they hire to sell this thing. Yeah.

So it's just really cool to like see how impactful a founder and their mission and their selection on that mission and how it influences key decisions to drive the success of the business. Let's get back to Mike. I was like, oh, I guess I not feel great, but really we can make so much money. It's like, we're never going to make money doing something that subordinates the interest of the free member. So anyway, so that's how I got to LinkedIn. Biggest question I get every day.

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Can you paint the picture there on why they wanted someone like you to be thinking about creating revenue at this moment? I would imagine, I'm trying to think back to then, I imagine they were very well capitalized and had plenty of demand. They weren't running out of money in 18 months. Why decide then to work on monetization? The years between 2003 and 2006 is when the

the member network began to really be clear that there was something there. So if you go back to 2006, which is when I believe the company flipped into profitability, you know, LinkedIn was never a huge burner of cash. Reid was super thoughtful about it. The team was very small. I think it was in 2006, I think there was still probably 50 or 60 people only. Overall, the whole company raised, I think, less than $100 million period. And the last 50 of it was never touched.

to my knowledge to stay on the balance sheet. But Reid was always thoughtful about wanting to make money in the company, but never at the expense of the member growth and member engagement. - Hey folks, just Mark here. I just wanna point out this capital efficiency. They raised 100 and never touched 50.

I think it's really important in the next five or 10 years for a variety of reasons. For the hype cycle that's happened in AI, for the concentration of capital, for the massive push for blitz scalers. People don't realize that more wealth is generated entrepreneurship in non-venture deals.

More wealth is generated in entrepreneurship in the non-moonshots. And even just like point to some examples like Klaviyo. Look how capital efficient they were. Go back to Dropbox when they went IPO, how capital efficient they are. Look at this instance with LinkedIn.

For whatever reason over the last 20 years, we've been obsessed with raise seed capital, build product, get to post seed, raise post seed, triple burn capital two years, get to A, triple burn capital two years, get to B, triple burn capital two years, go to C. At any point, if you go off, you're bankrupt. Right.

And yet, like, there's so many examples out there where it's just like, raise money, get to profitability and use your profits to grow the business. You control more. You have more optionality. You build a real business. I know that's not like the blitz scale. I know there's plenty of examples where they didn't do that. That's the one that makes the front page of TechCrunch, right? But like, there's just another way. It's not considered enough technology.

And so here's just another example on how Reed was capital efficient and used that raise to just grow and build a huge business. Let's get back to Mike. And at the time in the early 2000s, in my opinion, the world didn't really offer companies the ability to be other than one, you're an enterprise company or two, you're a consumer company. The idea of being both was it didn't exist. And so it kind of

got people confused. And so when Reed brought in Dan Nye to lead the company, he did so with the idea that because the enterprise monetization engine was going to be the thing, let me bring in an enterprise leader, bring some of that enterprise sensibility to an otherwise completely consumer company, and then we'd be off and running. Okay. So I want to unpack that first step where you're brought in. Yeah. And I want to go back and I'd love it if you could unpack how you thought of it as like a

20-something or early 30-something Mike Gamson. And then probably more importantly, how would you do it today, given your wisdom, as well as a 2025 context? I think we could probably draw a fair analogy of what you were faced then to anyone today with your wisdom and what would you have done differently to figure that out? It was a...

very open to ideas, time and place where there was lots of things that we were exploring. You know, should it be a news company? So when I would come in with an idea of, hey, I think we should become like a Gerson Lerman group or like an expert network, which is

which is the best of the not great ideas that we worked on in my little world that year, there was openness to it. We knew that the asset was our member engagement and our member data. We were very clear with that. That's the asset. That's the unique thing. And that's the thing that we could see the viral growth really happening. When your very first value is that free members come first,

How do you monetize that data in such a way that is a good thing for the members, not a bad thing? And that became the constraint that drove the ideation around what businesses we should be in. And ultimately, when another couple of colleagues who sat a few cubes over from me had the idea that we should be in the recruiting business,

because then we could use data from members, but we could serve them with career opportunities that were on mission for us. And the mission at LinkedIn was to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. And so when we looked at the expert network business first, the first thing that we started making money on in my world

it did help to make them more productive and successful. We did pay them for their expertise and monetizing expertise was something we thought was interesting. It just turned out that the recruiting business was much, much better. In all the different ways that monetization strategies have evolved today, if I were to, as a 20-year more experienced person, be able to come back and talk to myself back then, I think the thing that I would say, and this was really read new from the beginning,

If it can't be a multi-billion dollar business, don't waste time trying to pursue it. Because the biggest enemy of a startup's ambition is to spend the time from any of their important people on things that are constrained by market size.

And that was really probably my most important learning of the first, you know, 12 or 24 months there. So when I would come in to read and I'd say, hey, here's this thing, this business is going well. And I would say it's going well. And he said, but Mike, it's single digit millions. And maybe it gets to, I don't know, 50 or 100. But

If it can't be worth billions, it's just not something we can afford to do. Once the idea started to marinate about the recruiting side, which was the first, from what I understand, the first major revenue driver and is still major today. Yep. How did you pursue it? Like, how did you dip your toe? Did you go all in? Was there an experiment you ran? Like, how did that unfold? The most expensive thing you can do as a software company is build something that nobody wants.

That's sometimes an existential problem. This guy, Frank Robinson, taught us his process for doing a market validation. It's very structured. You go off and you speak to 30 prospective clients. You have a product manager, an engineer, and usually a sales and marketing person in a little pod. And you go travel in these waves, and you do five or six of them at a time. You go back to your hotel room. You change your mock-ups for the next day. And you have this really intense iterative process of essentially building out the MVP in real time

on the road with your prospective customers so that you exit the process either with some number of them, 10 or 15 of them committing contractually to buy this product at this price if you build it as described or you don't build it. Hey folks, just Mark here. What Mike's about to walk us through here is such an important process that's rarely used. The first point here is this, the mock-ups, right? People think that like, okay, you have this idea. If the test that we need an MVP, let's invest three months to build a product and see if it works. No, no.

No, like rarely is that necessary. And what they're doing here is mock-ups. They're just like using mock-ups. I don't need to show you a product demo. This is like, this is what it's going to do. And this is what it's going to look like. And I can just like run my process to figure out if that's interesting and going to work. And I get a sense of the funnel shape before I even build that. This happens all the time today in PLG. We'll have a company like, oh yeah, like we should do PLG. Let's do PLG. Okay, great. Let's do it. All right. So we're going to start testing it in three months. Why? Why?

Oh, because we have to build like the product first and the funnel shape and the, you know, we have to get them to be able to sign up and then take a credit card. And it's like, it's going to take like three months. Like, no, no, don't do that. Tomorrow, set up a couple of paid ads and a landing page and send people to the landing page and see if you even get anyone to the landing page and see if you get anyone to even sign up. And if, you know, God forbid they sign up, just say, oh yeah, we're building this. Sorry. No one's going to be upset.

But it's like you can go through all those learning moments and get significant confidence that what you're going to invest the three months in to build the MVP is actually going to work and be sellable. Case in point with Mike here. Let's get back to him. And when we were on the market validation tour for the recruiter product, I just never heard feedback like that before.

you know the product manager greg cervelli at the time uh and george we would get back and we would say holy smokes i think you know every one of those prospects you you get a baseball score they named it a home run they you know it's like a 10 out of 10 they said they buy it immediately they didn't even you know blink at the price we wanted to sell it at we knew we had something special and so i think literally from that moment of how many folks were willing to buy it we knew we had something special so that's thing one

So then once you have something special. Before you go on, Mike, real quick. So sorry, because I love it so much. I see so few entrepreneurs pursue this process. You mentioned that you'd kind of show them some stuff and then you'd say you'd get them contractually committed if you were to buy it. Can you unpack that? You go forward in waves. And so the very first top of funnel waves, you're not getting anyone to commit to anything except a next meeting with the stakeholders.

So you yourself hold yourself to a discipline of you don't have a meeting unless the decision making unit, including the buyer and the user are there, which is hard. You're basically front loading all the hard things about sales before you even have the product. But when you've done all that work, the most expensive time for a software company is the engineering time.

So it really just de-risked that. So now let's say you're two months in, you're a couple of waves in and you've got the MVP nailed and now you're really starting to get to the practical side of should we build this? Is this going to be the highest priority thing that we're working on as a company to supplant another priority or is this like a nice to have?

And so the only real way to discern that is to extract a commitment from the client or the prospective client. Because if they're not willing to say, I want to buy it and become a chartered client, which is the nomenclature in this program, then you don't have a real sale here. You've got a sure maybe, which is not what you build software around. Hey folks, just Mark here. People don't realize what's actually happening here with how Mike is bringing this to life.

With what people think is customer interviews and customer research and figuring out what you're going to build, you're actually running your sales process. You're simultaneously building your sales playbook. If you read some of the best work in customer interviews and product management, one of them is like the mom test.

Go look up the mom test. And yeah, I've got some slides here to show you some of these things on the mom test. It's like telling your mom you're going to build this product and what do you think? She's going to be like, oh, you know, that's wonderful and you should definitely build it. And I think that's going to be the best thing. But behind the scenes, what she's really thinking is like, oh, that's not really going to work and I don't really need that. But like, it's so cute that they're working on it. Like that's just human behavior.

They want to be nice. They want to tell you what you want to hear. And so the rule 101s on good customer interviews and product management is like, focus more on asking open-ended questions around how they're thinking about the problem. How are you thinking about this problem? What would a good solution look like? Have you tried anything in the past? Why didn't it work? How urgent is this to solve? Have you quantified the pain?

That's how you're running this opening discussion. And then based on what your findings are, you're using these mock-ups to tailor how you're describing it to the buyer and getting them contractual agreements along the way to be bought in.

Does that sound like a sales process? Because it is. It's the same thing. Like fast forward three years, they have hundreds of millions under revenue, they have 50 salespeople, and what does that first conversation sound like between the seller and the buyer? Tell me about this problem. How are you thinking about this problem? What have you tried in the past? Why didn't it work? What would a good solution look like? Mike's bringing this to life.

It's like you are not just figuring out what your MVP is through this process, but you are running and building your sales process.

The difference between some of the best 101 in product management abilities with like the mom test, et cetera, and then go read like spin selling or Sandler or challenger sale or the work from winning by design. These methodologies are so similar. So appreciate that.

Because that's what happened with Mike and with LinkedIn as they laid the foundation. Let's get back to him. Consumers, I think, are fickle. I have no idea the magic of someone who can predict consumer intent. But if you're a business person and you've got a problem and you're willing to be open about it, if I can solve it for materially less than it costs you to solve it today, you're

you're open to buying that solution. What about the contractual part? Did you literally have like an LOI that they signed? Because I just feel like I want... You have to chart... How did you message? You were just like, hey, listen. Literally from the beginning, we tend to lay out the whole process and how it's going to work. And we know that if by accepting the next meeting, here's what you're signing up for. You're going to give us more detailed feedback. We're going to do these things. And by the end, if you want to be a charter customer...

You have to sign the charter customer document. Do you price it for profitability or how is it priced? No, we priced it for market share capture. Good question. We priced the first unit at $5,000 per person per year, which was pretty high for a SaaS product back then. If you were a recruiter and you were paying an outside agency $30,000 for a hire, paying $5,000 for a seat of software that could help you make a bunch of hires, it was a cost savings tool for these clients.

So then how do you know if you're going to the next phase? Because it's kind of like, okay, I'm feeling the phases out. There's a wave. There's a bunch of first meetings. You're being super clear about commitments along the way where the first commitment is bring the DMU to the table. Eventually you're getting to commitments where you have some sort of target of like five to 10 of these alpha or beta customers that are signed on. What is it? You build the product and then what do you do after that? You know, like anytime you're managing a funnel, you know, let's say you start with 30 good meetings, right?

the shape of that funnel declining into charter customers is really important.

So, there's another, the core group who's managing this process I mentioned is usually the product manager, the lead engineer, and then a sales or marketing person. There's another group that meets more like monthly, and those are typically the executives inside of your company who are the end decision makers on will this be funded. And so, there's usually two or three process-y check-ins along this three or so month process where you come back in and you report out, here's what we learned in wave one.

Out of the 30 people that we met with, 27 of them are still interested and have committed to a next meeting. If the answer is 27, that's pretty good. If the answer is nine, maybe not so good. Or maybe you've got to refine who's at the top of your funnel. Hey folks, just Mark here. Yeah, we have to unpack this too, right? Like he's choosing the 30.

He's choosing the 30. Let me give you some perspectives on this. I don't know if this is exactly how they did it or not, but based on the dialogue, it seems like it went in this direction. It's kind of like, yeah, you could try to boil the ocean and do this for everyone in the world, right? Like North America, South America, Europe, Asia, big companies, small companies, tech, industrials, finance, healthcare. Don't do that. It's rare that you're going to come out of the gate with all of that.

But at the same time, you also can't like do it for like left-handed recruiters that live in, you know, just west of the Mississippi that work for like small businesses. You know, it's like you can't be too constrained either. Right. So like have some hypotheses on where you think the early adopters and the gold is going to be. And it doesn't have to be like go from zero to a billion in revenue on it. Like we're just like, let's go from zero to 10 on them.

As long as we can get there fast and also have a high amount of conviction that we can expand it out. And Mike talks about this a little later that they did.

Then we can pick it. So he, you know, you pick like 30, whatever of some variety. Maybe there's five different cohorts and let's see what happens. These two cohorts did really well. These three didn't. Okay. Let's try it again. This time we fill the 30 with only two that did really well. Holy cow. Now what went from like a stage one to a stage two to a stage three conversion of 10%, 10%, 10% because we honed it in. It's now like 60%, 60%, 60%. We have a real funnel.

We can't get to a billion of revenue on this, but we can get to 10 million, 20 million, 50 million. And I'm very confident that if we crack this, it's going to be very easy to leap over to this other segment that'll get us to the billion. That's how we thought about it. Let's get back to Mike.

And so you begin to discover where your real sweet spot is for the MVP that you want to build. And then sometimes you go back and you refill the funnel. So you get to another 30, but now all at the sweet spot. But what you're looking for is that the degradation of interested people from one phase to another is not rapid. So I'm curious, like how you thought about that 30? Because

When you're thinking about like building a multi-billion dollar business, you want a couple from Africa, a couple from South America, a couple that are big, a couple that are small, a couple that are from industrials, a couple that are from tech to prove the size. But that diversification flies in the face of the funnel, you know, like preciseness, right?

So how did you think about that? If Salesforce comes to sell to you and you're in one industry or another, the number of human beings in your industry who are involved have nothing to do with your likely effective use of that product. But for us, it had everything to do with LinkedIn. And because the value of our SaaS application recruiter was directly tied to the amount of people you could find in it who you care about and look for,

When we went out into the world and did these market validations, if we were talking to a prospective customer who was in an industry or a part of the world where we didn't have enough network density, like enough members, we just couldn't create enough value for them.

And that was the case for the next 10 years. I mean, we would do often as part of our demos, we'd say, hey, give me the hardest search that you're looking for now. And we'd go into Recruiter and they'd say, I'm looking for, I remember very vividly, we were with ConAgra once and they said, I'm looking for a popcorn scientist who has this kind of experience. I'm like, a popcorn scientist? Is that a real thing? Turns out there were like eight popcorn scientists

in LinkedIn at that time. And the guy's jaw just hit the table and he became a customer right then because like, you can find the popcorn scientists on this thing. We could tell

based on consumer data and consumer usage, where the enterprise opportunity was going to be today, and where it was going to be next year, and where it was going to be the next year. So we had a very unique opportunity to go to market region by region and industry by industry, knowing that we weren't giving up on the other industries forever, but we had to wait for the network growth to happen. And based on that funnel shape,

Because there weren't many people who opted out for this. We knew we had something special. And we could just look at the data about how the consumer network was growing, first in the United States, then in the ex-British empire, then through Western Europe, then eventually through developed Asia, and then eventually into South America and Africa. But from that, you could predict with great specificity where the enterprise product would have enough network density to be useful. So now we've decided to focus on

the product recruiter and this business. And then there was a huge question, I think highly germane for the folks who are listening here about, well, how do we bring it to market? Because to also bring you back into nearly 20 years ago, Silicon Valley, Google was the absolute king of the hill in terms of the company that everyone aspired to be more like, the company that was resetting every record of growth, profitability, doing incredible things.

And there was some quote where they described salespeople as a bug when the software is not good enough. That was the prevailing thought among many at the time, you know, 2008, 2009, where if you design your product well enough, you don't need salespeople to sell it was essentially the idea. I didn't believe that. Hey folks, just Mark here. Yeah, that happened. I remember it.

You know, the 90s, we were still coming out of like, honestly, 80s, 90s, best sales team one set. It wasn't product. It was on-prem. It was shelfware. Best sales team one. You got it. You got the contract game over. The company bought the servers. They deployed the software. They hired a change management consultancy to teach everyone. And the software sucked. It sucked. That's where shelfware came from.

It didn't matter. Someone put their neck on the line, you were stuck with it for 10 years. It all changed with the internet. You can buy it in like a day, just get a login and you could leave. It was all about retention and churn. And because you could do it that quick, you didn't need salespeople, product. This is the time. The engineer was now the most important person. Forget about the sellers. This is exactly what Mike said. If you need salespeople, it's because you are bad at product.

But then like, I don't know, somewhere in 2012, 2013, someone had one of those crazy funnels and like, hey, maybe we should try a salesperson and boom, revenue tripled. So we figured out a good balance now, right? Like we can't build shelf worth crappy products. It doesn't work today. You're not going to have good reviews. No one will adopt it. We're smarter than that. But at the same time, it's extremely rare to run a test at scale where a humanist funnel

versus a hybrid that has sellers in it, where the latter is not going to accelerate revenue and build a better business. And that's where we've settled into today. That wasn't the case back then. And Mike had this barrier to get through. Let's hear more of his story. And so I remember very vividly in an exec staff meeting, then at a board meeting, talking about my belief that I think we might need to hire an enormous sales team.

And I got really shot down a number of times by it. And one of the examples that we talked about was

There was a company called Monster and there was a moment where we discussed very intently whether we should simply just license our product to Monster's distribution and let them distribute it. So that was a turning point moment for what LinkedIn became because clearly we did not do that. I'm sure there are ideas thrown around of like, why don't we just have a button and people can sign up to it? We did try some buttons and it didn't work that well. So we always wanted to offer a multi-channel way to purchase our products.

And it just turns out that people don't want to make, you know, 10, 20, $30,000 decisions typically without some, at least in those years, without some human engagement. And so the experiment that I remember really well, I'm smiling because it felt so bold at the time is I went to an executive team meeting and I made a presentation about how I'd like to hire 30 sales reps and that I wanted to hire them in three classes of 10.

And that I would commit to a certain dollar output. And if it didn't work, I'm wrong. But we really had to prove that would work with human beings and that wouldn't be a waste of time, money, energy, etc. And it was crazy wildly successful work.

And that became the data set on which the bigger bets to then hire 100 and then 300 and then 500, then a thousand and then the thousands that came. That was all from that first bet on 30. Did you start them all together? Did you did you was the last class a little different than the first class because of some learnings? Can you just tell us about that?

Yeah, we wanted to do classes so that we could compare people against each one another from everyone starting the same time. And so that we could do it with like scaled education, scaled onboarding and a really even playing field. I mean, it was such a big number of people to hire. It like blew our mind to think about it, that doing 30 at once felt like completely unreasonable. 10 felt like the extent of what was unreasonable.

And then by staggering it where we thought we could hire a few classes of 10 over the next several months, we could experiment a little bit with the DNA of the team. And our perfect team of 10 would have four people from the recruiting world who really knew the customer and came from that industry, but maybe have never sold. Four people who have sold software and knew how to run a territory, work a pipeline. And then two X-factor people. Can you talk about the selection of those people?

compared to the selection of that same role of the scale mode? If you think about LinkedIn, and this is 2007, 2008, essentially everyone in the company was focused on the consumer business. So already, just by being interested in enterprise revenue of any type, you were in a very small subset of the company. And if the whole company at that time was 100 people or 110 people, the five or 10 people who began to think about the enterprise were already like a tiny team of

you know, self selected for that opportunity type of folks. And, but it was one of, you know, five or six or seven, there was just so much entrepreneurial energy and throwing stuff up against the wall in those days to see what would stick. They felt passionate about it. You know, George Sliders put the process around it. And then I just jumped into kind of have a sales person's orientation as we went through it. Well, I'll tell you, Mike, I,

I invest a lot personally in mentorship and surrounding myself with the right mentors. There's a short list of two or three during at least my HubSpot journey that I would go to frequently and for different reasons. And you were certainly one of them. I think I've told you many times. Thanks, man. I'm so glad our friendship has continued and thankful for you to just take the time to create this learning journey

moment for the rest of the ecosystem. So appreciate you dropping knowledge on the show. Oh man, it's an absolute pleasure. And I feel like I've been so positively changed by the investment my mentors made in me. I have a permanent karmic debt to the universe and, you know, any sales leader out there who is participating in this show, if you've, you've got questions or need help or just, you know, want some advice, you can always ping me directly on LinkedIn. I would love to be useful.

Remember that moment when you've made it big, folks. Thank you, Mike, for having that perspective. 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 of tech.

So that's it for today. I'll see you on the next episode.