Founders Focus: Drift

Well, hey, let's get started. We're now live on Cloudflare TV. My name is Doug Kramer. I'm the General Counsel at Cloudflare. And this is an episode of what we call Founder Focus, which is an hour that we spend talking to interesting people that we think are running interesting companies. We'll talk to them a little bit about their company. I'm sure they're exhausted about talking about their company, their path to a growth market funding, things like that, although we'll certainly do a bit of that. But we will also, and more significantly, I think, talk about the experience of being a founder, and what they run into. I mean, I certainly know, when I talk to my colleagues as a lawyer, I think that I run into these impossible challenges that nobody would have ever faced before, and somehow uniquely overcame them. And then I always find that everybody's been through the same exact circumstance, and I just should have talked more to them. So, let me get started. So, David Cancel is the CEO, and Elias Torres is the CTO of Drift. We're going to talk to them a little bit about Drift, and more importantly, their founding. So, David and Elias, welcome to Founder Focus. And why don't I just start with this? Why don't you give us the tour of exactly what Drift is, what you aspire to be, and kind of where you are on that path? Sure. This is David speaking, and Drift is basically the next generation of sales and marketing platform. And so, we spent a lot of time building the past, and what we figured out is that we spent so much time focused on helping the company that we've left the buyer on their own. And so, it's very hard for most buyers, especially of enterprise software or B2B companies, to actually connect and have conversations with the company. And so, we came out originally with chat and chatbots, and a bunch of conversational kind of marketing-related tools and platform to help businesses connect in real time with their customers, and make sure that gets routed to the right person within sales services, et cetera. That's great. And so, where are you in your growth right now? How many employees do you have? What sort of products do you have available now? Where are you on that path? Sure. We are just around 400 employees now. We've grown right from 20 to 400 in the last just under three years. So, growing pretty quickly. We're just in the beginning of our phase. Ultimately, we think we're trying to read the entire thing, including the CRM, but that's much down the lane. So, we're in the beginning phase of scale. And when it comes to the customers that you're working with so far, what's the general makeup? I doubt by industry, because it sounds like what you guys are doing is applicable to almost any industry, but when it comes to size or types of sellers and things like that, who are you working with right now? We're working with all sorts of companies. You can imagine a lot of enterprise companies, a lot of mid-market and tons of SMB companies, but companies that you would in the enterprise like ServiceNow, Workday, Inocta, a lot of enterprise tech companies. We are heavier in enterprise tech and enterprise software, because that's just where we started. That's where we had a bunch of friends who started using the product, and it was kind of a viral component to our product. And so, it just led to more and more companies. Once Red Hat would sign on, then other people in their space would sign on. But we are working with banks. We are working with a company, Bataan, who are on the consumer side. Lots of different companies of all sizes. Good. And then, Elias, as CTO and co-founder, what's sort of on your plate right now? So, going deeper on sort of feature set of products you already have out there, are there aspirational new things that you are working on right now? What's taking most of your time? Based on my personality, I straddle between the go-to-market and, more specifically, maybe sales and success. And I think it's really inspiring for me to get to spend time with customers, because those teams are effectively the kind of functions we're supporting at our customers. And so, that pushes me to understand the problem at a deeper level of what we're solving and the pain that companies are going through today, which is really a communication challenge of how sellers will talk to buyers and provide the right information to be able to help them succeed. And so, that's how I get the inspiration for the product strategy of the company. Right now, our focus is on our next generation, our AI platform that we've been building to really support things at scale, because I think it's time now for companies to realize that AI is here. Drift already has solutions that go beyond that decision tree, that like, oh, let's just build a bot that is kind of like a voice response system, and move into an era where we're really augmenting humans, sellers specifically, to help their customers, the buyers, in real time. I think it's something that people don't realize that the world changed. We've been in a messaging-driven world, we've been in a real-time world, and COVID, we're in a virtual world, living every day. And what's happening is that most of the systems, the thousands and thousands of marketing systems and sales systems out there, they're built for like, they were built maybe even before companies had websites and requested demo forms. And so, like, they're not really keeping up with the times. And so, I think that that's where I spend my time with the product leadership team on strategy and innovation and what we build. And I was going to ask, after David sort of mentioned some of your sort of leading customers, and Elias, you sort of walked right into this, like, what are you all experiencing or hearing in the current moment, right? Because when I think about some of the customers you're talking about, like Okta and Workday and folks like that, who are sort of already doing a lot of these things in a virtual way that now have become essential in this moment, and older models are trying to catch up. It also strikes me, I mean, you probably went in with the aspiration to sort of change communications between buyers and sellers, even on a flat surface, but all the more so now, where people who have used traditional models of selling, which might involve flying out to see customers or spending a day with them and whiteboarding or things like that, that just aren't happening right now. Are you finding that there's a particular need or change at all in what you all are addressing as a result of the current moment? Yeah, 100%. I think what we've seen is, the way that we think about it is those enterprise companies who have been able to rely on some of the methods you talk about, in-person events, flying out to customers, just field sales and field marketing organizations, and have been resistant to moving to a fully digital experience and undergoing that digital transformation, had to do it overnight, right? So there isn't a company now who has not sold over something like Zoom or virtually. It could be Fortune 50 company, they all have had to figure it out. So we fast forwarded a decade or more overnight. Then a lot of the myths that we believed, including some of the myths that we believed as an emerging startup, I mean, I didn't believe we could hire the most senior person that we would ever hire virtually, but we did that. We hired our CRO, Todd, during this pandemic. We've never met him. He's never been to one of our offices. No one has ever seen him. He's doing amazing on the team. I still had that hang up, thinking that I could hire lots of other people, but someone at that level. And that's just a very small example of what all these companies are having to deal with. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And so as we get into it, and that is- Yeah, please. I think the thing is that people don't really go deep on the buying journey, right? And don't understand that what we normally, people refer to as the buying journey is when you go from an opportunity to a close one. And that I would might say is like, they're really the last mile. It's the last 20% of that journey. And I think that is the easiest one to replace with Zoom, right? You already are engaged with the customer. You already have the number. You invite them to Zoom. You're already now in lockstep for the good companies, right? And finishing that process. I think that that's the easiest part to adapt to the online world. The hardest part is the first 80%, right? Is that suspect to opportunity. And that's what people don't understand that has the most need of change. And that's what Drift is providing, right? Is to help you, instead of buying 100 tools to try to piece together that journey, is like you can use Drift to entirely replace that first 80%. Because what people don't realize is that we are the most inefficient on the buy, on the company side. We're so inefficient when it comes to sales and marketing organizations working together. And what we're really trying to like spark is a new generation of go-to-market teams, where they both focus on revenue and they speak to one another to say, this is who we're looking for. And this is how we help them come along our journey, right? And so that's where Drift comes into a company. Very good. So I want to extend, because we're going to talk about a number of different subjects around the idea of being a founder and starting a company. And I want to talk a little bit about experiences you have both had outside of Drift, just to get a scope of that as well. But before that, I would sort of observe that, you know, I sort of led off by saying, you know, you run into these circumstances that you feel like nobody's ever seen before until you realize kind of everybody has. But particularly in this space you're in, like, I think it was already turned on its head by some of the privacy laws. You know, all of that sort of identifying targets, those sorts of things, the old methods of just sort of, you know, canvas the world sort of a thing between GDPR and CCPA and some other regulations really made it to where the amount of shots you had to fire were limited. And so what you all are doing, I think, to make sure you take advantage of each of those opportunities when you get them to a greater extent and cultivate them in a more comprehensive way was already important. And now the fact that you're providing tools for people to do this in a virtual world, you know, you seem to be in a good place. You could have never anticipated this. And I'm sure you've, you know, and it hardly means that you haven't had to make adjustments in dealing with all of that. But I don't know when to just sort of drop a big observation on that and pivot. So I don't know if you have thoughts on that. But that's at least my sense of what you've all, you know, of all the stuff you've got to do with starting a nascent company to begin with, you were throwing some pretty big curveballs so that they might have curved back to the sweet part of the plate. Yeah, I think you nailed it. I think, you know, what has been different for us in starting this company, and we've started other companies together, is that we actually started out with a mindset on, you know, what are the mega trends that are happening? What are the undeniable things happening in our world? One of them is what you mentioned, which is this long progression. I've been a marketer a long time, being privacy centric, even back in the early 2000s, continued. So we saw that that was on a trend line already happening. And then we saw the adoption of messaging, which is where we started, right? Messaging, I would say, has been around my entire career. But, you know, there was only one of us geeks using RSC and ICQ and stuff like that, you know, 20 years ago, or, you know, more 24 years ago. And now the world defaults to messaging. So that was a mega trend videos, another mega trend, we actually built the company on top of this idea of these undeniable trends that are happening that are going to have to remake business more so than starting with a product, which is very different. And then what we've seen is that those things have accelerated even faster than we thought by another 10 years, because of what's happened this year, with COVID and other changes in the market. Well, if I could ask each of you just briefly, you know, serve as the first broader question is just describe a little bit what your career in sort of business, but specifically entrepreneurship and opening, you know, helping found businesses. I think, David, you alluded to the fact that this is not the first go round for you and Elias and starting a company, you know, talk to me a little bit about that. And then importantly, within that, if you could describe a bit, you know, how you reach certain decision points in each of those when you decided that, you know, you should make a change and move on to something else, or, or how you made the decision what to move on is at that point, because I think that's, you know, the idea of starting a company seems interesting to a lot of people, but understanding, you know, how then to make transitions or make turns in the road is challenging. So if you can tell that story with with that sort of insight, I think that'd be very helpful. So whichever one of you wants to sort of jump into that in that first, do you want to take that? Yeah, it's trying to try to make this a little bit more dynamic, I think, bring bring the Latino spice into it. I think that we are we're masochists. I you know, David and I work, you know, 12 years together. So we kind of know each other's phrases. And I know David says this, I usually we can answer each other finish each other's sentences. David says that we are masochists, because we it was getting too easy what we were doing, right? We were not being challenged. And that's really what moves us to the next phase. And and something that, in fact, we started talking about early, every every $10 billion company cannot go without its inflection points, right. And so every, you know, you know, the, the Reid Hoffman, right, levels of company size, right from from family, tribe, village, you know, village, city, nation. And so each of those brings on complexities, and people expect for the journey to be nice and great entrepreneurial life. And so we're, you know, we we just doubled the company from 200 to 400 in a little bit over a year. And we're in those inflection points. But what's most exciting to me is that is this the hardest challenge I've ever done as an entrepreneur, right? And and be here that's in and I say to the team, and so the team can actually see it here, right? It's like, we left HubSpot to be in this exact moment today. You know, we did we started Performable right after the 2008 crash. We start we started Drift a little bit earlier, which gave us it's I feel blessed to be able to say, hey, we had established already a brand, a market, a wedge in the marketplace as Drift, right, as a conversational marketing platform, before this hit, right? It would have been much harder if we had, it would have been earlier in the life of Drift. So it's this is the moment, right? This is the moment that if you are an entrepreneur, you really want to, you think you're asking for it. So it's best to appreciate it and to figure out that this is the moment where you're going to grow and be stretched and learn the most in your life. So can I dig down a little bit? I mean, you use the word, you know, masochism, right? And I want to tease out what you mean by that, right? Because obviously, I mean, technically masochism is a, you know, condition, whatever folks would call it, you know, English is a second language. So I might not even know if it's the right word. But I know it is. It is the right word. But it's it's it's but I want to dig down. It's exactly the right word. But it's it's to describe sort of, you know, how you experience it. But it's also want to dig into that. So I'm a lawyer, right, which is its own sort of condition and dysfunction, right? And, and we're incredibly diverse. What's the lawyer? I, we have our own version of masochism, which is very different, which is why I want to dig into what you're talking about. And so ours comes a lot out of risk aversion, right? Like, like very scared to take risk. If we were to take a risk, we would take it once. And if it succeeded, we would either like retire or we would like ride that out, right? Like we'd ride that as long as we could. And what I find with folks who are serial entrepreneurs and successful at it, is that success is treated very differently. It's not this sort of, oh, relief, you know, I survived the risk, and I live to tell the tale. Or like, I'm just going to sort of ride this as long as I can. Like, there's, there's this, you know, as you sort of said, you know, you know, to some extent, exactly, you weren't being challenged anymore, and you had to jump, you know, to something else. Talk to me a little bit about that and how you gauge, you know, there certainly is this famous sort of, like openness to failure, which I think is an essential part of the story and, you know, in Silicon Valley and all that. But I think equally part of the story is people who are, you almost want to say dissatisfied with success to some extent, that like, you know, you get successful, and then you, you know, you're looking to change and do something else. So, you know, describe that, what you mean by that. So that's what I take you mean by a little bit by that masochism, these decisions that don't seem to make sense that that bring you additional challenge at a time you don't seem to have to take on the challenge. So can you dig a little bit into what you mean by that, like how you knew those moments were upon you, and it was a good idea to go jump and start something new. Yeah, I'll jump in and say that, you know, I always say for years, I've said like, you know, about starting a company, if you were start a company once that it's, it's okay. It's excusable, you didn't, you know, you were naive to start a second company, it's questionable. And if you start three or more companies, which is our camp, then you're certifiable, right? Because you're constantly putting yourself in an uncomfortable situation, right? And so people and this has to go, you know, to the greater kind of learning model, right? Like to continue to learn and progress at anything, you have to keep putting yourself in these weird, uncomfortable positions. And I think a lot of people like to look at those things and say, aspire to it or want to do it, but then to actually do that, and do that work and deal with that pain and deal with that, you know, identity crisis that you go through, right? Not many people will do that. And that's what separates people who continue to do it with those that don't not saying that one is better than the other, but it's just like a different kind of mindset. And that's why when I talk to aspiring entrepreneurs, or people that you know, business school, which I spend time helping out here in Boston, you know, and they come to me and they say, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a company. I'm also considering this job. I'm also considering traveling the world. And I'm also considering this thing. And I'm like, you know, like, you know, starting a company is the most irrational thing that possible. And so you're trying to apply some logical model or some, some rationally thinking through this decision, it doesn't make sense, because it is going to get too hard, it's going to get too uncomfortable, you have too many options, you know, at your feet. So you can go do this, you know, I, I will say that I started a company, my first company, because it didn't really matter, I had nothing to lose, I didn't have any options, I didn't have anything to lose. If I lost it, I was an engineer, and I can just get a job, it didn't really matter. It was no social pressure on me to start a company. But I wanted to learn and wanted to experience the thing, which, you know, both of us as a team, you know, raised, you know, we immigrated here, I was born in the US, but my parents immigrated here, we were both raised by single moms. And so like, we have something inherently in us that we have to prove not only to ourselves, but also to some group of people, they may be fictional, they may exist only in our heads and memory, that we can do it, that we can achieve this thing. And that we can not only do it once, but we can do it multiple times. And I think it's a deep, you know, psychological profile, I think of people who continue to put themselves in this uncomfortable situation, which is not unique to entrepreneurism. You see it in sports, you see it in lots of domains in the world. But it's, it's a, I will say it's a weird thing. It's not a normal or average thing to continue to do. So David, I just to be clear on what you were saying there. You know, you were sort of like, you have all these other options and everything. It sounds like you weren't necessarily saying that starting a business is sort of the worst of those options, by any means. But like, if you feel called to do that, the other thing shouldn't even be a close comparison, because it should really be this unique pull. You know, it's like, if you're, it's not even apples and oranges. It's like, I've got 20 minutes, I'm going to run to the gym, the grocery store, the moon, right? Like if you're either going to the moon, or you're not like the other two, just don't. Okay, that's that that makes a lot of sense. It's very helpful. Um, anything, as you talk about seeing those moments move, anything objective that you noticed any, any milestones, whether it came to, you know, the company being sufficiently sustainable, or things like that, you know, if I'm trying, other than jumping in your head, and sort of observing those moments, anything that you would generally see at a company where you're like, yeah, this kind of feels like the time when I started to see this thing happen, or that thing happened, you know, not that it was good or bad, you know, it's fairly neutral, but it was always a sign to me that like, I should start thinking about maybe what's next. Yeah, I think, I don't know how you would think about it. I think for me, it's just, I've only been motivated by one thing in my life, which is learning and trying to get better. And it could be at anything could be at like, making pizza, as well as starting a company doesn't, the domain doesn't really matter. But I've been obsessed with that. And the minute that I feel like I stopped learning, then I can't, my personality is such that I can't force myself to do the thing. Right. And so, you know, for the early version of me in school, in school was extremely lazy. And I don't say that as, you know, something good, but like, I couldn't, no one could motivate me until I discovered a subject that I was motivated, self motivated. And then I would learn more about that than anyone you can imagine. But if someone tried to force me to do something, I'm very bad at that. And I think Elias share some of those qualities as well. I mean, I think that there's, there is, there's a satisfaction. I mean, I think what drives me is, like a lot of people, or maybe not a lot of people is, but I want to have a sense of purpose, right? It's like any other human being, I want, you know, validation that I'm doing something productive, right? And so what has happened in my career and during especially working with David is that I've been able to expand, you know, the potential impact of my work, of my production. And so we, you know, a lot of people say that they want to be learners, but the reality is there's theorists out there or that like to audit classes, and then there is people that really want to learn and apply it, right? And so to me, it's really getting to a level that you can understand how you can take yourself to the next level, right? And not necessarily alone, but bringing the right coaches, right? You know, being able to accept and understand your limit in this aspect, right? And now you now take it as a new mission. And so that's how I kind of piece together my purpose in every phase of the company. It's like, how am I performing? What do I need to do better? Who do I can get help from? And that's what like restarts like the love for the company all over, right? It's like, oh, I'm in this new phase. Now I need to learn this moment, meet with this person, find a mentor that could help you for the next year or two, and then maybe you have to go to the next challenge, right? So that's what keeps it like motivated. And the amazing thing about a company, a startup, is that if you are open, there is unlimited options for you to go to put yourself in and learn. Much more different than if I take up woodworking, right? I could just take up woodworking and be obsessed with learning everything about it, right? My wife, she's a gardener, and she goes deep into that field. But that in itself is not enough. I need to have a larger set of choices to pick from, right? And be able to do maybe simultaneous. I mean, this certainly isn't meant to be an episode on sort of like the future of education. But I think you both make really good points about, you know, and this is very, very different for a lot of different people. And it definitely suggests, I don't know which one of these more stridently, but like, you know, either that the sort of people that will, you know, start businesses and do all of that may not be the people that are most susceptible to sort of traditional classroom learning, you know, on the one hand, but be also just sort of demonstrates how lacking and we may not have better choices, right? But just how everybody is absolutely different in the way that they want to learn and execute that. And we seem to identify that and cultivate that in different ways when people are older and in their careers, but there's sort of this one size fits all. And who knows whether the current moment, you know, the current moment seems to be bringing about a lot of changes in the way that we address the way we've done so many things. It'll be interesting to see, you know, we sort of switched to one model of remote education, I think for a couple of years, we see a modification there. I think it's go ahead there. I'm sorry. I was just going to say, I think it's very linked. I won't go on my, on my tangent about education system, because I could go forever. I mean, I'm personally a college dropout, Elias has a bachelor's and a master's, but like, I think, you know, one thing that I wish I would have learned earlier in life that may dovetail here is that there are different learning models, right? There are different ways of learning. We have one kind of prescriptive way of teaching, and there are people who learn, you know, kinesthetically. There are people that learn, you know, Elias has to, you know, vocalize and think through something. I'm the exact opposite. I don't vocalize anything. I have to think through and process. I'm a processor in the way that I have to think through things. And there's all these different learning modes that people, you know, are more, you know, lean more away than one of, than the other, but we give them one path in the way that they're supposed to learn something. And, and there's just people learning different patterns and, and respond to different things. I'm sorry, Elias, what were you going to say? Same thing. I was, you know, I was going to say the same thing. Don't get us going on education. Right. I was having dinner with my kids. I think it was yesterday or the day before that. And it was Tuesday. We were talking about education of like, I have three children, they're all different. They all have learning models themselves, but I don't know if the model is the right word, but it's the method of them learning, right. Versus the methods of us teaching in this country or in the world. And they were like really written into pieces saying like, why am I reading Lord of the Flies? Right. It's like, and why do I have to read it from, Noah was saying, how do, why do I read this from start beginning to end? Why do I have to talk about it? It's like, that's not how I read a book. I'm going to look it up on the Internet. I'm going to read some footnotes. You know, it's like, it's broken. The system is broken. And this pandemic is just highlighting what we're teaching to our children over Zoom, you know. Well, one of the things, as you guys continue to advocate for this, because it sounds like you will keep talking about this. When Elias before was talking about woodworking, that's the one that sort of hit me. It's like, you can absolutely think of the sort of people who do very well with that. And that's their path. And they're just a type. And I imagine if you went back to most all of their grade school teachers and said, you know, Bob turned out to be this sort of guy who ended up doing woodworking. They'd be like, oh yeah, that makes all the sense in the world. I saw that's always the way he was. Right. So they know it, they see it, but they're still putting them all through the same things. And again, I don't mean to put it on teachers. I taught for a couple of years. I taught, I think I probably taught Lord of the Flies. So I apologize on behalf of high school English teachers everywhere. But you know, so they don't really have the tools to sort of figure out and do that. But when you look at the macro issue, educating all of the kids in a city, you would think that there are some alternate paths you can provide other than 30 at a time in the classrooms, you know, with someone at a whiteboard talking about. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's just, it's incredible. Well, let me, let me pivot a little bit on something that I want to talk about that that's very much on this on this path though. And that is creating culture at a company. I mean, your co-founders here, you've, you've had similar sort of roles in other companies. Do you find that you have clear philosophies, clearly have philosophies about, or thoughts about education that you share? Do you have thoughts about workforce and culture that you find are sort of the stamp of recognition on every place that you have worked, some core values you apply? How do those deviate? Are they wildly different based on the nature of what the company is doing? Or are there some constants you run with? What's, what's important to both of you in that regard? I would defer to Elias because Elias is far more, far better at focusing on culture than I have. And I think, you know, my personality type is to be a hermit. And so like, I don't get all the, and be robotic, you know, a little bit like Rayman. So like, I don't get all the social cues and social nuance. And Elias has made up for my deficit there. So I'll let him take this one. I would say, well, but I, but I've learned a ton from, from David's ability to study us and our actions, right? And the team to extract the patterns, right? And to, and to help me understand, you know, how I work. And so what is that? I don't know. I think we got invaded briefly somehow. I think we'll have to figure out what's going on. Yeah. And so we went away for now. Yeah. And so what I think is like, you know, in the four companies that we work together if I look back, so I drift, I'm going to try to work, go backwards. We have eight principles, right? And so we got, you know, put the customer at the center of everything that you do, build it, create a culture of trust and respect, deliver daily results, practice, extreme ownership, stay scrappy, be a curious learning machine, seek feedback, not consensus. And so we, we created this, this principle that are not words, but they're leadership principles that you can apply both at work and at home, right? In your personal life, in your business life, in your professional. And what they are is a synthesis of how David and I work together, right? And it's just being able for us to live them. And he lives some more than others. I live some others. And, but we, but now we're able to articulate them and say, and this, this, this struggle, right? Is, is, is how to use them on a daily basis in our communication for people to understand really what they mean because we need so much repetition to, until we have become a true tribe, right? A true city, because we are like, that's what brings us together. That that's the only thing that we can bring to that should bring us together because we should bring people that are all different, you know, as human beings. And we don't expect, we don't want that to be the, the homogeneous aspect of it. We want the principles, right? That brings us together. And so that's really the, the journey that we're in. I think, I think we know ourselves really well. We know what, what the company we wanted to be. And it's pretty clear that we are not a typical tech startup, right? I would say we are unique. We have our own culture, but I am not happy yet, right? Because it's an aspiration, right? To, to, for everybody to internalize those hard lessons that we have learned throughout the years and that we aspire to become better and better every day. One of them is push for high standards, right? So it's a never ending thing, right? So David, I won't let you and you're, you're being a hermit, you know, totally off the hook. Because I did see, you know, you wrote a blog post at the beginning of the month where you shared sort of an internal message that you had shared sort of in this moment with the company talking about some of the systemic changes that you see going on and sharing that with your team. If you're comfortable, I appreciate you talking a little bit about sort of what you said in there, what, why you thought that was something that was needed and how you think about communicating in, you know, in times of adversity or change like this. Yeah, I'd say, you know, again, you know, I do, I do think about this a lot. I think Elias embodies it more and feels it more and is the chain is more of the change agent and person who pushes more for us to focus on this. I'm a processor. And so I have to process things and things, think about things in terms of like frameworks to understand them, right. And so like, it has to be logical for me to understand it. And so I spend a lot of time, therefore thinking about the stuff and trying to rationalize things in my mind and create and create content that I share with the team, and that that's the easiest way for me to communicate. So that takes a form of a Sunday newsletter that I do that takes a form of internal videos, internal blog posts, external things. And so that's how I communicate to the team. It's almost like a little bit removed. But you know, it's, it's coming from a place of studying in and try to understand that. And, you know, I sent the note to the team about, you know, things that we just have to do change in this kind of time that we're all in right now. And, and I believe the one that you're talking about has to do with things that we were trying to do to increase diversity, which has been at the center of starting the company, especially for Elias and I, who are both Latinx founders. And, you know, when I met Elias, I was 10, more than 10 years into my career, and he was the first Latin person I ever worked with. So like, you know, and I was, I grew up in most of those companies I worked at were in New York City. So it wasn't like I was in some far removed place, like, but I, in tech, I had not anyone. And so like, it's deeply core and important to us. And we highlight things that we need to change and that we were doing as a company in order to make this real. I think, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about this and think about like, the inches and the things that we do every single day are the things that matter in order to, to cause change within a company. I think, you know, often, and I give this feedback to people on the team, like often, we want to move to quickly towards, let's create a program, let's create initiative, let's create a campaign, let's create a thing. But those things, those things are helpful. But those things by themselves are not things that will cause change to happen. Change comes from the hard work that you have to put in each day. And so like, if you're someone on our team who's on the recruiting team, and you want us to create initiative, my pushback to you would be like, you're on the recruiting team, you need to do the hard work, right? Maybe all of the candidates that are coming in have a certain background or certain ethnicity. Maybe you need to spend twice, three times, four times the amount of time to go find diverse candidates on your own and source them. That is going to bring change to the company. The program, me announcing a program is not going to bring change to the company. But again, these are the uncomfortable things that people like to think about them in theory. And almost, you know, again, we are like simulation machines, if we talk enough about something, we convince ourselves that we actually did the thing, when in reality, we didn't do the thing. So anyway, we push for these things and try to push the team to actually take action every single day. And it's incremental, and it's not as glamorous, but those are the incremental steps towards change. Yeah, no, and those, you know, you can have those as principles, but really finding ways to make those real and executable can be hard. I mean, sounds like the newsletter and blog is a good way for you to do that. I know Elias, you wrote in one blog post about time at IBM and with the Latinx group that they had there. And I think there's a lot of question about, you know, how do you not just sort of form those groups to check the box, but how do you make them really valuable and living, productive, you know, organizations? You know, my recollection of that is that you did find that to be something that was valuable to you and a resource, and why and how did that work? And what are the sort of pitfalls to avoid when you try to create structures like that? Well, as a business owner, operator, I want to think first and foremost in bringing value to the customer, right? And if we're not here to deliver value to the customer, then this shouldn't be a for-profit organization. And so what I advise to people asking me about ERGs is that you have to present it in a way that you are an ally to the company, right? And not seen as a threat and say like, and I say, I urge Latinx people that are approaching me, Black professionals that are approaching me, and they're saying, what do we do? How do we get support? And I said, you should, you should, at least this is my opinion, I say, you should, the two most important things the most important thing that a company has is the people. And the two hardest problem with people is attracting them and retaining them. Very similar to customer, I cross between recruiting and customers, and I say to them, you need to present it that you're not creating a club, but what you're doing is creating an organization, a group within a group to help attract and retain people that have that unique aspect of whatever they have in common, right? Because what we're trying to do is bring diversity into the company. And so I think that that's the essence, that's what I recommend. I think we're at a great moment, right? As a consequence of the pandemic, or not a consequence, but it's just, you know, happened right after, is that we're now are getting a stronger voice, you know, in the world and people are listening. And so I think it should be less, less of a problem, in some ways to voice that. But we still have a responsibility that when we create this ERG, we have a clear EV to provide, right? And so that's kind of like how I do it, because I did not understand that when I was at IBM, the impact that it had on me of how much confidence and support I was getting, that just felt so natural to me when I didn't expect it. So it was as a plus. And so for example, I was on, I did a webinar on Tuesday, where we were talking about microaggressions in the workplace, right? And Damian, the CEO of Alpha, you know, a Latin American professional association, was explaining that what happens when he, as a Latino, goes into a customer, and the customer will ask the white person that came with them and shake the hand and treat them as they were the partner, when that person was junior, and he's the partner. It's just like that we have such a short window in time to get that right. Because if we don't have the right reaction, we could lose that deal. We could lose that customer. And so those are the kinds of things that we don't realize we need a place to communicate and to talk about that, to train and to practice and to show up ready. And those are the kinds of things that could help your team be more successful when it comes to creating an inclusive atmosphere, right? And so it's like, that's kind of like the kind of ways that I want the ERGs to work, right? Not simply a thing that is just demanding more things on the company without them taking action, right? Right. And what do you think the current moment does to all of that, right? On the one hand, my assumption would be, and I'm happy for this assumption to be rebutted, but my assumption would be, you know, as we think about hiring and integration and all those sort of things that need to happen, I'd be a bit concerned that, you know, you guys just talked about having to make a very, you know, senior hire, you know, virtually, right, for the first time and how that was a little bit difficult. And I wonder whether or not we fall back on sort of old networks and old, you know, existing, you know, relationships that might stunt the growth and openness to diversity and efforts, you know, made in this area. Like, what are you concerned that the current moment might create challenges there? And if so, any thoughts on how we make sure that we don't let the current moment, you know, have us fall back on old habits and, you know, instead becomes an opportunity for us to rethink the way that we build our communities and support and diversify them? You know, I personally think that I'm optimistic and I don't think we can fall back into those things. I think just like before that, the massive shift that we were talking about earlier for businesses that happened during the COVID pandemic, we will go back to business as usual in some form, but we will never be the same, right? And I think the same thing with what we've seen with a call for racial justice and diversity, like we will never be the same. We will be a variant of, you know, some of the old and some of the new. So I'm optimistic that we're headed towards a better place, both for businesses and both for, and for humans more importantly. I mean, I would say just add to that, 100% agreed. I think one thing that people don't realize is that, you know, referral networks is really one of the major causes of discrimination in the workplace. And so we are, we are experimenting a drug and taking much, you know, higher risk that other companies don't do. For example, we instituted a double referral, a double price for referring a person of color, underrepresented person, right, in the workplace. And we were trying to figure out, like, we don't want to penalize someone referring, but we want to incentivize people to look deeper into their networks, to bring people out that add to the diversity of the company. You know, it could be, it could be gender, race, it could be age, right? It doesn't, it doesn't really matter to us. But it is a hard journey. I mean, like, we are, you know, two Latino founders, but don't think it's easy. And we are in a, it's very difficult to be in our position because we, there's like a double standard that we, we're trying to do good. We're trying to help. We're trying to spend part of our time personally, both time-wise and financially to help other organizations, especially here in Boston. But at the same time, we're held to a double standard of, like, why isn't our company already 50%? And it's like, we try to, but we can't. And the other one is that people don't understand that this fairness thing, in order to offset, and I think that that's been a biggest part of my learning with Black Lives Matter movement, right, is the amount of education I've had to take on myself to learn the history of this country. And to realize that it's not a matter of, do you have a person of color in the interview panel, in the interview lineup of candidates, right? It's about the result. But we, it's like, if I have to hire 100 people the rest of the year, you know, hiring 10%, hiring 20% of them of color is not going to change anything. You know what I mean? It's like, we have to be thinking much more open and say, maybe it's all, out of all the hires that we're moving forward, should be 50-50. You know, recently I learned that the reason why blacks are more successful in a city like Atlanta is because the mayor said, like, you have to have 50-50% of the contracts need to be to minority. I don't think that that's what happens in California. It doesn't happen, maybe 10%, 15%. And so that, we need to be thinking in a different scale to bring equity into this country, right? And it's hard. Yeah. And since this has become two-thirds a show on founding a tech company and one -third critical of American education, you know, it is sort of surprising to see all the people, very well-educated who have gone through a lot of different circumstances who, you know, just learned what Juneteenth was, just learned about, you know, sort of the massacre in Tulsa, you know, just in the last three weeks, right? And so all the people who don't know about Bloor-Sparta or, you know, so many other stories, yet sitting there in Boston, I'm sure you guys are confronted with Paul Revere every day. And you try to figure out, you know, what his relevance is to the American experience compared to some of these other stories. No, I don't need to be getting Paul Revere hate mail. But anyway, so let me, I promised at the beginning, this wouldn't, you know, we wouldn't sort of walk you through like a, you know, a pitch meeting or something like that. But I do want to at least take a moment and ask one question about what your experience has been. You know, it's not just to have one co-founder, but to have, you know, two co-founders, you know, that are minority and you've gone into funding meetings. And for all the sort of programs we've talked about, like government contract, you know, initiatives and things like that, I think, you know, early stage financing has notoriously had a challenge when it comes to diversity. And do you have any experiences or advice or war stories or anything that might be helpful to folks that are fearful of making mistakes in those meetings or think that they're insurmountable and don't even want to ask for them in the first place? Anything that you would share based on your experience? I think, you know, for myself, I think I would have probably done it differently. I think I would have, you know, I would have, I love what you said at the beginning, because I think it summarizes my entire career, which is like, there are people that have figured this out before and you don't have to freaking on your own. And so, like I say, like, you know, it took me most of my career to figure out, like, I don't only have to learn through trial and error, aka pain, which is the only way I learned versus trying to model and learn from other people, whether those were mentors, role models, people that I worked with, whether it was books, it didn't matter what the medium was, but these lessons have, people have gone through this before, no matter how unique you think you are. And so, like, rely on those people. So, my first advice, and I didn't know this, so I would have taken this advice, is to try to lean on other people who have gone through this experience. We are two of them. I wish I would have leaned on someone. And, but I would say, like, you know, again, you know, when I first started starting companies, like, it wasn't until 10 years later that I worked with someone that looked like me. And so, like, for those first 10 years, I kind of, I had to almost pretend that it didn't exist, right? Like, I didn't even see it. I would, in some ways, I was born, I was raised in Queens, the most multicultural place in the world. And so, like, I never looked through those lens, that lens, and it wasn't until I moved to Boston, and someone asked me how, how, how was it being in an interracial couple? And I was like, I didn't even know what they were talking about. Like, someone had to tell me that they were referring to me. Like, I was like, I've never even heard that. So, like, I didn't have that frame. And so, I took that on, I thought the same way in terms of funding, whatever, I'm sure I dealt with lots of issues, but I couldn't even see it. Because if I saw them, and if I, if I became, and I didn't have anyone to rely on, and I didn't know, this wasn't the, you know, Internet that we live in today, there was no LinkedIn, there was none of this to find other people like me, I think I would have given up, right? I probably would have given up. And so, I just ignored it and kept going. And, you know, I'm sure Leah says different advice, but that was mine. No, I, I, I'm the one here always at risk of saying something controversial, right? And I think, I think what you said is, is very interesting. And Doug, like we, we're still two Latinos that don't understand the system, you know? And I think what David is saying is that we, we're, we're kind of learning everything through pain, right? And David says, I wish I could just learn it, you know, the lesson be given to me, and people don't, don't really pay attention. So, I'm wondering, what is it? Is it the humans don't learn it from others, and they have to experience it themselves, or do we not have access to that information, right? And, and it's something that, you know, as we have gained reputation in, in, in the tech world, right? As we, as we built something of substantial progress and growth, you know, I'm starting to learn more, and, you know, you, you get to spend more time socially with investors, you, with bankers, with founders, with really, really successful people. And I am blown away by how much they're teaching us, right? And, and it's a, but we didn't, I didn't have that 20 years ago, right? I wasn't in that circle. And so, it's just, you know, just sharing to you our perspective that we didn't go to the same schools, didn't grow up in the same neighborhoods, didn't go to the same country club, did not go to Nantucket, right? Did not know my, my, my father. I didn't even have a father, right? And so, it's a, those things limited us and not be custom to rely on that, of that knowledge, right? And so, what our, our, our desire is by showing up here is to share to, especially to people of color, that I'm trying to figure out how to do it at scale back to education by saying, let's record it here, let's make it live, let's make people watch it, and say, go ask, go ask those questions. People are willing to tell you, they just don't, you're not in the same place with them, right? And, and people want to share this stuff, and maybe it's not evil necessarily, but it's just a matter of access or knowledge that it exists. So, that's, you know. Yeah, or momentum or whatever. I mean, I, I'm sitting here a little bit surprised, and I think what's, what's a really wonderful realization is, you know, David's sort of saying, it's so important to sort of get connected to those folks who have gone through it, so they can walk you through it. And then, I'm looking at the two of you, and looking at what you've done, and I'm like, well, I think 99% of people watching this, this, this conversation would be like, well, that's, that's the two of you, right? And you're still here saying, you know, we've got to get ourselves into those conversations, and we're still learning, you know, from these folks. So, I mean, just to put a useful point on this, and then let you elaborate on it, or, or, or tear it down, but it sounds like you're saying, and, and this has been hard for me, even though I haven't, you know, faced the same sort of challenges, you just have to put yourself out there in a vulnerable way to go make those connections, and they won't all work, but some will. It also sounds like, you know, you might find a more receptive audience with someone who's also Latino or something like that, but by no means should you be limiting yourself that way, that you can find other people that have gone through this that would, you know, it might make the outreach easier if you feel like you're going to someone who has a bit of a shared experience, but by no means should you limit yourself that way. We're doing that, and that's, you know, we, you know, David and I have this thing called the American Dream series, right, where we're gathering, and if I could put this in YouTube as well to keep it together, you know, this content, is that we want to share our journey, right, and have people learn, because I don't want to hold anything back, right, we, whatever we've learned, we want to give, right, because people that are like us will appreciate it, and we will have the right perspective, but coming here, what we would like is to develop the relationship, the allies, right, the sponsorship to say, you know, also as, yes, we have to encourage people from these positions to say, take a chance, be vulnerable, but it'd be great if somebody reached out a hand and says, you know what, I'm willing to mentor you, I'm willing to help you, let me tell you this, and just take an effort there, and so we can all come together, because I think people want to do that. Sometimes people are just like not aware that we want it, we want it, come over, Doug, please coach us, right, you know. I don't, if I've taught anything in the last 50 some odd minutes, I don't think I have anything to teach the two of you. Any, getting really based, any tools, you know, cold calling people on LinkedIn, you know, local chamber of commerce meetings, or other sort of networks run by your founders, like are there any particularly helpful events that you are more likely to go to than not, or tools that you're more likely to use to make those connections you need to make? I have to admit, a lot of mine have been, yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry, I was going to say two things, I'd say one, like, I think it's important for us to all remember, and this is, at least, and I try to think, it's like, these are multi-generational shifts, right, like this is not an overnight, there is no quick button, there's no easy button, and that's what we mean by putting in the hard work, like we, because of that, you know, from a drift philanthropy side, but also personal side, we try to spend time in helping kids, you know, not of college age, but kids who are in high school, middle school, etc., like those are going to be, getting more of those people and expanding the pool is going to be what is going to help transform this, versus people who have already self-selected into a path, that's a much harder thing to do, obviously that's immediate, versus this is going to take a long time, but that we're trying to invest in making system-wide changes here to actually move the needle, and then on the other, on the, you know, other side, I think, you know, it's difficult each day to, to kind of push ourselves into this uncomfortable spot, but, you know, we are, we have figured out now that it's way easier than ever, because of LinkedIn, because of, you know, different virtual groups, like we can find people now, we can look on Twitter, we can find people, you know, we, Elias and I are part of a Latinx founder group that communicates mostly on WhatsApp, I've never been part of a Latinx group in my entire life, like that's the first time, why? Because, how did we do it? Because we could actually connect to people via people that we knew, or via, in this case, via LinkedIn, and just connect, and just say, hey, let's just do something, and we just host a webinar series on helping Latinx founders, and he does that every month, and he does that with other people in the community, some people that we do know, and some people that we don't know, and those people that we don't know, we co-call them, we call the email, we reach out to them, and we just make it happen, and they are remarkably receptive to finding other people, like-minded people, who are trying to help their cause, and help the collective cause, so it's very easy now, you know, I wish I had access to this stuff, maybe I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have worked for 10 years before seeing someone like Elias. Well, I'm gonna correct David, whenever I say the word easy, David says, it's simple, not easy. Simple, not easy, that's true, you're right, you're right, it's very simple, not easy. We have just a couple minutes here left, and so I'm happy if you guys want to end with any reflections, I think the reflection I would take from this conversation, and it just came up in the last couple minutes, is as Elias was going through, you know, sort of the ways that this has traditionally been done, these connections that we all realize are very essential, you know, they are the oldest of sort of brick and mortar sort of things, the colleges you went to, the country clubs you belonged to, the neighborhoods you grew up in, you know, that was generally how you created those relationships, and certainly those things still exist, and perpetuate a lot of those sorts of relationships, or glide paths for folks, but there are whole different, you know, sort of tools available now, that we need to make sure that we're focusing on, that open up some of those things, because there might be very well-intentioned, I mean, there are very well-intentioned people sort of that exist within that system, maybe not all are, but there are a lot that are, but who otherwise you couldn't get to, I mean, there were literal gates, you know, that would keep you from getting to those things, and I think, you know, some more and more of those people are engaging with the sort of tools that David was running through, and all of that, and I think a real emphasis on that, and making that sort of connection available, is the pivot we need to do at this moment, if we're not going to fall back on the old habits, but instead use it as an opportunity to sort of open up more of that, so that's my takeaway, like I said, I think we've got about a minute left, if either of you want to close with any other ideas, and then we'll figure out a way to make sure that we make this content available, I think, as both of you have talked about, because I think it would be good for people to see. Yeah, I think just to maybe end it, it's like, it really, if you want to succeed, you have to have grit and perseverance, right, and so to do that, I think that I want to just encourage, especially minorities, right, to be, to really shift from, shift the control from somebody else to yourself, right, to really be consistent and keep trying, this is, this is a numbers game, right, it's like if somebody rejects, so I cannot reply to every LinkedIn message, right, but there's some people that do it again, right, you have to learn how to approach people, you have to learn what their interest is, you have to do the homework, you can't contact us and say, I want to hear more about your journey, we have put our journey out there, right, and so it's like, you can get that, you can get more specific, I sometimes ask entrepreneurs, oh, I need help with my business, well, I go write it up, tell me what you want, tell me what you're thinking, and then see if I can help, right, and so I think that, you know, just trying to, I'm trying to save time, right, and just propose that to people when you, when you approach someone, if you show that preparation, they will pay attention to you, right, they might give you their time, and also reach out to people always that are way more successful than you are, and that they might have the time, believe it or not, right, David and I have been, you know, building up relationships with, with people that have had multi-billion dollar exits, that is just incredible to hear their wisdom, right, and their insights, and how they know us, and because they've been down that path, so always be, you know, you got to look for, for, for someone that's been there, well, and you guys have learned almost all of those people at some point in their life made that leap ahead, and found someone to pull them up, and do that, and so they'll be, they'll remember that, and be open to that, I think that's, that's a perfect way to conclude, I really appreciate you guys giving us the time, this was extremely insightful, and, and want to thank you very much for, for all of that, and we will, we will be in touch, and we'll make sure that we, we share this with all of you, thank you, thank you, okay, thanks. you