Ep 103 - Founders, Funders, and the New Rules of Growth

Speaker A: Foreign. Goose digital dot com.

Speaker B: Who do we have? Chris O', Neill, Kevin Butler.

Speaker C: I think it's 104105.

Speaker A: Michael Turksani. Yeah, we might be uh, we might be off there on episode or two but we're getting rolling so we're happy about that. Coming off the back of our Sailing and scaling podcast.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: Which was really nice.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker A: Uh, on Lake uh, Simcoe with Chris uh, Adams and uh, and his boat

Speaker B: called uh, called um. It's all good.

Speaker A: It's all good. Yes. When he said it's all good the first time I was like oh. And then I didn't realize it was

Speaker C: the name of the boat.

Speaker A: So that's great. We're going to build on that today with uh, with more, with more content around our founders and funders vertical that we're calling. So maybe to start that off, let's talk a little bit about what we even mean by that founders and funders and maybe I'll turn it over to you Chris to kick us off in that direction.

Speaker B: Great. Thanks Mike. Yeah. So founders and funders as it uh sounds, it's, it's all about helping founders, early stage uh, startups and their funding partners to drive growth in their uh, you know, in their uh, agencies, uh, organizations that drive marketing solutions that drive Ah, SaaS Solutions, um, you know, helping them find their market, sell into their market and drive uh, and drive revenue.

Speaker C: I like that call it, I think growth like the literal or obvious explanation would be more revenue but I think behind that layer of the onion is well growing of opportunities, growing of momentum in terms of taking marketing and actually creating value from it and even sales processes where it's momentum on a growing sales team that can absorb more of the sales cycles, more of the sales and kind of extract out of just a founder led mission. So I think growth is the name of the game across a variety of different functions within a go to market.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's exciting. I mean I think the uh, times and we'll get into like setting the stage for 2025. Why we think you know the, the game has changed. Um, and I think it hits home for this, for this market because you know, traditionally, I guess if you want to say that over the last 10, 15 years you know the capital's been flowing and there's been a lot of opportunity to sort of go build your business through investment and, and we've, you know we've benefited from that. You know these companies have picked up us as an agency and we've helped them get going and had Some very successful runs with organizations building their revenue operations. But at the same time there's a lot more scrutiny now on the funds that are being raised and where we're going to put that funds and how we're going to uh, ultimately generate the types of business outcomes that we want and not just say uh, leads or MQLs which we've uh, uh, seen from a lot of these uh, uh, marketing teams is sort of their benchmark. It's like no, no, no, we need to drive either qualified pipeline or actual revenue. Um, and that's a big shift and I think that's been driven by the economy and how that's worked. But I also think it's been driven from kind of uh, an awareness that these traditional, if you want to call it that in the last 10, 15 years, spray and pray type, mass, uh, engines of lead that don't really go very far. Um, that's not really working. It's certainly not working in 2025. And so I think that when we talk a little bit about you know, what you should be doing, kind of that intelligent marketing approach that we're bringing to the table, just a different way to go about uh, spending the money and growing the marketing function.

Speaker C: I think there's just been such a convergence of a ton of things in the last few years especially whether it's emerging technologies from a marketing perspective like you no longer need a six figure marketing stack in order to distribute your messages and get through to your target audiences. And then on the flip side the kind of technology coming out in the form of like your competitors or semi competitors and how that's enabled rapid adoption quicker go to market and then there's pressure on the VC side wanting to see returns quicker. So it's a double edged sword but like you can move so much faster now and mobilize a pretty significant base much quicker than ever before.

Speaker B: Feels like years ago um, that it was that sort of spray and pray model where you know, I think one of our customers called it landgrab if you remember that the land grab was around uh, investing enough in your outreach, whether it was Google paid or LinkedIn paid or whatever to basically be the first one there for that search. And then you would sort of drive into that you know, marketplace with the most sort of momentum. Um, now the, you know, the scrutiny that is around that spend, uh, does not allow that. Uh, plus the changes to the Google logarithm and so forth makes it almost, almost impossible even if you did want to do that makes it extremely difficult

Speaker C: so, well, not to mention the emergence of technology. Like, we're already seeing cannibalization going on in Google search with respect to AI searches. So everything's continuing to shift again, as far as how you would approach that, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And I think the, you know, call it, you know, the spray and prayer, just doing, you know, a thousand different things. I think you, you know, you kind of got into that trap where, oh, if we're doing, you know, a thousand things and we're doing the same thousand things that every other tech company is doing, you know, we're kind of ticking the boxes and hopefully that means that something's going to come out of this, right? We're going to do every single event in our industry. We're going to run a bunch of webinars, we're going to run all the Google. And it was just kind of like there was more of that. Like, we have to be doing all these things in order to feel like we're marketing. And now it's like, well, we actually don't have the funds to do all those things at once. So what things actually are going to move the needle, start to scrutinize those. And I think that becomes very challenging because we talked about here is that that distribution. The good thing about nowadays is that the distribution costs have come down. That doesn't mean you want to be going at it, uh, and not doing it from a, from a, you call it a professional way. You know, even this podcast, you might say, well, it's an audio podcast, but to distribute it, to do that. Well, from a professional point of view, well, we want the video podcast, you know, we want five or six clips that are, you know, fit for LinkedIn's engine that we can upload directly. We want maybe five or six clips that are, uh, you know, landscape or portrait mode that we want to use on Instagram's engine. So now we got that, that dynamic, we want to get a blog out of it. Like, all of a sudden, like, what was a very kind of straightforward exercise of getting a podcast together, it's created this like, well, geez, there's a lot to this production all of a sudden. But the good news is, through those tools that you talked about and, uh, a lot of that technology comes coming down in cost. You can do that professional distribution for a lot less money. And there was. There's always this, like, fight between brand and content and, like, strategy and distribution, like, who's gonna get the money? And traditionally it's been hoarded by the content and Creative, where he will give you that one video and it's like, well, that one video isn't enough. Right. We have to cut it up. We have to do. We need like, we need like eight or nine assets now. So there needs to be this like, balancing act from the budget side. But the good news is that that has come down in cost. Right. So it's more about picking what do you think, the things that are really going to make a difference in your audience and testing out those messages. Because even though the distribution is call it more reasonably priced than it was years ago, in some cases, we still don't know what's going to resonate. If you're a new business and you're trying to attach yourself to your target audience, you know, we don't know what's going to work.

Speaker C: But to that point, and uh, we talked about this in a previous podcast, is your ability to get data points to see if these things are working. M is so much quicker too. And before, call it 10, 15 years ago, you've got to go come up with this message. Takes forever to build and you've got to wait probably a minimum of 2/4 before you can start to see is this working or not?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Oh, it's not.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: Now we got to pivot. We've lost a half year now. I feel like you can start to get little signals and signs perhaps in as much as a week or two, depending on your audience size and, you know, the scale of the data you're pulling in. But that's amazing to know that much quicker. Are you gaining traction or not? If you have to pivot, you haven't even lost the quarter yet.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Versus, uh, a whole half year.

Speaker A: So let's talk about kind of the founder led question here. You know, is founder led growth dead or is it just getting started? Let's talk about, you know, a lot of these organizations that we're talking to today, talking about today, they're probably have grown and, or are continuing to grow on the back of the founder. Yeah. So how do we look at that? Chris, you want to take that first?

Speaker B: Yeah. So, uh, obviously founders are the best at getting their message across. Like they are no doubt, 100%, no questions asked, the best at sort of describing the use cases, at delivering the, you know, the language around the product that they have. And it's oftentimes very, very challenging to wrest that from a founder. And understandably because they've put their blood, sweat and tears into this thing for years and they are the, they are uh, so committed to it and so understanding of the value to their customers that very easily you could say that the ideal world is clone them, clone them and sort of throw um, a few of them out there. The thing about like, when is it the right time to uh, grow and expand? And what would that growth and expand look like? That's sometimes, um, that's the, the maze that we have is like, what is the sort of the right time to kind of move on and grow? And what does that first step look like? Is it putting in a platform to kind of manage that, manage uh, that data that's coming in? You might have some marketing, you might have some sales conversations and some pipeline going on. When's the right time to, to kind of invest, uh, in that platform or even invest in another person to kind of, uh, take some of those conversations off?

Speaker C: I'd like to jump in there. Uh, I think the person's really important and in my mind, in an ideal world, the sooner you can do that, the better. And I think the important distinction here is the conflation between founder led sales and founder led evangelism. Because the founder, to your point, he or she lives and breathes this stuff. There's just no one, in all likelihood, 99% of companies at this stage that is that passionate, that knowledgeable about the solutions, the industry, the challenges going on, and even a vision for where they think it's going than the founder, he or herself. And I think as a result, you don't want to stop that. In fact, you want to double down on that person and their ability to communicate, that that's really going to be the heart or source of your content and direction. And there's emerging data coming out that's suggesting more and more organizations are buying because of thought leadership and not just because you are theoretically the market leader. So that's interesting too. But the important part about ripping out the founder from the sales led motion is that if you're going to hire a sales leader to, to go manage that, they're gonna put in structure that makes sense that can scale out. Not stuff that's sort of in the founder's head that only he or she can do. And the earlier you can do that, the more viable of a sales process you'll have. We've worked with organizations where the founder still leads and is very much the sales motion going over a decade, and it's so hard to extract and pry and remove them from it. They've become so integral to the process that like the building falls down without them. So the earlier you can do it, the better in my mind.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And it's a painful process, you know, having done uh, it here, you know, past companies, you know, we.

Speaker B: Painful for everyone by the way.

Speaker A: Well, it's painful for everyone, yeah, because you know, the sales organization wants to close deals and what you're, what you're doing is you're, you know, you're letting them try and you don't really know if the tools that you've given them are 100%. They're not battle tested, so to speak. So they're also going through that process and then just speaking to that in terms of hiring a sales leader. I mean we've seen this, right? You can have a uh, rockstar come uh, off of a organization that's growing fast and they do very well. They over subscribe their course quota all the time. They're great at what they're doing, but they're inside of an organization that has that momentum. Right, right. And then they maybe join a smaller firm and they're trying to get things going and it's like, whoa, this is like a real, a real gap now. Like we don't have the same, not even the tool set, just the product, market fit, messaging side of it that, you know, trying to really wrestle that. So now that individual is not as successful. Right. And the founders have to give them time and also be self aware enough to say, like, look, yeah, I might be in a deal to your point, but what I do in a deal isn't scalable and it's not practical and there's too many pivots. So how do we break that down into something that, you know, whether it's a package or it's a scenario or it's a questionnaire or something that we can start to peel off these layers into other, other people that can start to contribute, contribute to deals. Right. And that's really difficult. You know, we went through that here and I think we've done pretty well like at that. I think we can always do better. But that process and I think as it relates to the funders, you know, uh, they do notice this, right. If you're even as if you're investing in an organization or if you are an investor and you're, you're looking into it, surely you're going to be asking those same questions. Oh, Chris is doing every single deal here. As the founder of this company, he seems to be the only one that can really, to your point, not only evangelize the business, but actually close the business, like that's a risk and that's not scalable. And if you haven't gone through that process, then that'll be a major lift. So when we talk about marketing and rev ops, it's like, you know, that's where you don't want to be pushing too far ahead of your skis, so to speak, before you've got the ability to scale up your sales organization.

Speaker C: Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Any other points you guys want to

Speaker B: bring up on that? I guess the only thing there that I wanted to talk about is the, you know, that juncture. At which point, you know, kind of do you. Do you need to kind of bring in that, you know, that platform to manage the stuff? I think in some cases the, um. And again, like, I think. Do we think that we brought it. When we say early, brought in a platform? Salesforce brought it in early? I think for a lot of people who would say yes, brought in that platform early. Um, like, were we driving the, the amount of, uh, revenue every single month that sort of demanded that we put that uh, system in place? I would say maybe not. Um, but why did we do that? We did that because we anticipated that we would want to know some things about the patterns around sales that would give us the indicators that we needed so that we had our deal stages and we saw where deals were falling off. We were able to analyze them. That whereas if you're just doing like a one man show, or even if you've got some agents that are kind of like assisting and sort of driving that, but no, actual kind of like you've got, you know, kind of like anecdotal, kind of like an um, understanding of what's going on. But if you don't have the data, then how is, you know, to your point, the funders, how are they going to look at that? Are you going to, Are you going to be able to sort of describe to the level that they need to understand how your sales process, how your process of understanding your audience?

Speaker A: Actually, I think that's a really good point. I mean, maybe you want to build on that, Kev, just in terms of, I think how, you know, positioning your business through a CRM, whether you're closing lots of business right now or not, how that does play a role in being able to articulate, you know, opportunity to a, uh, funder.

Speaker C: Well, so there's a few different angles. I think I'll get into some of the data side in a moment. But one of the other key things, things that you hit on is Any CRM, um, forces a bit of structure, which isn't a bad thing either. It forces you to ask, well, what do we recognize as an opportunity versus not quite yet, and what are these different stages of an opportunity that goes from like, it's getting close to now, it's really forecastable and things like that. Right, like. And of course there's lots of nuance there, but I think that is a bit of a forcing factor, that if you don't have a CRM, then you're kind of just like, like winging it with a bit of sort of know how and process in the background. And we talk about scale, but that will not scale, of course. Right. But then the actual data that one can extract from a CRM, um, becomes really crucial too. For one thing, it's how do you go in position if you are in fundraising mode, how long are your sales cycles? Do you, like, do you actually know? And does the value of the deal size change, how long it takes takes to close those deals if you're going up market or whatever? Right, But I think the other thing too is it's not just about that particular fundraising round. What about like the next one and what about the check ins with your investors? Do they want to see that in all likelihood you're getting better at closing deals with more velocity, just quicker sales cycles, we're theoretically getting better at this go to market, we're understanding how to be more nimble and efficient in the sales cycles and, or we're reading signals better, more clearly to understand what's really ready for sales to be able to move quicker. So I think all of this is going to come from a foundation of a CRM that's reasonably set up to actually pull data on things like this.

Speaker A: Sure, yeah. Uh, if you have, you know, even if you're not closing, you know, every deal or your close rates are lower than, you know, even what you'd expect out of your industry or whatever. Having those opportunities within the CRM, to your point, actually gives you all this other intelligence. If you're like, look, we're going out at this price and this is how we're configuring and we've just done 80 pipeline opportunities and they've been quoted this way and now we're seeing a world where we're only closing 5% of these deals. It allows you to ask those questions, wait a sec, is our pricing actually out to lunch? Do we have, you know, a timing to get a quote out issue? Is it that product market fit, you know, what is going on. So I think, you know, not having that, you're down to a spreadsheet. And uh, when was the last time we. This and that becomes very challenging. So I think to your point, uh, you know, CRMs have come down in cost.

Speaker B: In cost. Yeah.

Speaker A: You can get into, you know, something like a HubSpot CRM at a reasonable price point. Right. And I think that the, the one pushback that you're going to get from a smaller organization, especially when it's founder led or founder led sales, is going to be how do we keep this thing updated? Right. Is it just a. The tool that he wants everybody else, he or she wants everybody else to use or is it actually going to be used by the primary sales individual? And that's very difficult. Right. It's a huge commitment on these to get these systems to get the data that you want out of them. So that's interesting. But I do think that if we're talking about scaling up, I m. Think the sooner the better, the earlier you can afford. Even if it's throwing the smaller customers or the smaller deals off to, you know, a sales organization or even your first sales leader to start to build that capability, the better. Right? Yeah, uh, yeah, for sure.

Speaker B: And you know, to the point about the cost, um, you know the, the it used to be. And we use Salesforce and there's you know, it's a, it's a great product. For a lot of founders that product is just, you know, the pricing is a little bit intimidating and I understandably. But I can tell you that there are alternatives in the marketplace that are very, um, you know, functional and not expensive and a great place to start.

Speaker C: I totally agree with that. And they'll last you a long time, if not indefinitely. And that was part of the comment before around this new age technology, these modern CRMs, for example, they are so cost effective in some cases, some of it is free. If you look at HubSpot, there's still a world and a place for Salesforce. I feel like I'm married to Salesforce. Everything in terms of a sales process, I think Salesforce first just for how it works. But there's no denying there's so many other equally good, possibly better for your organization, viable solutions out there. So those barriers of old, I don't think exist today.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean we haven't even talked about the intelligent marketing stuff much. I think we can get a little bit into that. We have been exploring how to leverage AI in our marketing, uh, and particularly in strategies, but also in the sales process, you know, we've looked at. We've got, uh, you know, custom gems created for creating proposals and we've started to explore how that could work in writing sows. And I think even to the extent that this is kind of another angle of being able to test your own go to market strategy and throw. Throw into the system, you know, the founders. What's in the founder's head and you know, oh, this is how I do deals, what my deals look like and try to test that out against, you know, the AI to see, okay, you know, what, what would you see? Come back. Are you going to find that, uh, we do see some holes here and we would need to change things in order to scale up a team around it. That's really interesting as well. And I think the whole intelligent marketing came about because of the shift. Shift in sort of the demands of capital, you know, the capital constraints and just the scrutiny that we're under. But also just uh, from our own philosophy over the years of like being an automation company, which implies that you're leveraging data, you're always looking at being more efficient. And now with AI that sort of builds on it to be like, well, if we're going to go against a marketing strategy, you know, let's do it. Let's take the best of the last 10, 15, 15 years, cut out a lot of the costs and be able to. Your point, Kev, earlier was like, how do we do this? Uh, m. Quickly, right, where we can start to iterate and test and grow, uh, without being left behind, I think

Speaker C: so for our particular organization, we're pretty sophisticated in our sales motion. Our founder is not involved in 95% of the deals, which I think is, uh, a great sign. And we have probably eight, maybe nine individuals who can scope, quote and deliver proposals for signature independently of one another, which is important too. Some of that will range based on like, the complexity of the deal, the size of the deal, things like that. We have sort of checks and balances in place if they're larger and a bit more strategic. Strategic, things like that. But I think we're um, on what, like about year seven, year eight of this mission to be more efficient with our sales process. It's about that. And we're even down into the nitty gritty. If we look at, like you said earlier, time to proposal. How long does it take? What's the time between proposals sent and signature received and just trying to tweak every nook and cranny of the sales process. M But I think knowing what we know now and seeing where technology has gotten today, whereas it wasn't seven years ago, we could do it at least two times as quickly now I think maybe even like more.

Speaker B: Well, there's no doubt. I mean again, just speaking for myself, um, the um, ability to kind of record a call which um, you know, that's pretty recent and for somebody like me and again like I know there's some uh, younger sales reps out there that are very good keyboarders. I was a little bit late to the keyboard and uh, as a result my note taking had to be after the call. So I had to take my notes then I had to enter them into Salesforce later. So of course I was, I've got to say, burning the midnight oil.

Speaker C: Now we use, we use the Google suite for everything for like meetings with, with Hangouts and Gmail and everything else. But those um, the follow up meeting notes we just have like, they're always being taken for every meeting and the emails you receive now with the notes there's like the highlights, there's the next steps and then there's the full transcript. But those allow me to be so more, so much more present in these meetings. Like I run all kinds of strategy sessions and for me historically it's been a battle of like how do I engage my customer, how do I get the information I need to get out, how do I have like frankly an enjoyable conversation while also taking lots of notes.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Then I'd have someone come with me to help take notes so I could entertain and host. But even then the notes wouldn't be so great because either they're not fully understanding the conversation, they can't keep up like whatever. These notes now that come in are so incredible that become a staple in my process. But to your point, bringing it back to sales, it's either direct integrations or just a quick upload after into the CRM. Whatever AI capabilities your CRM has can do something with that on top of it.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker C: But now all of a sudden you're not sitting there post call for the next half an hour trying to make sense of the conversation you just had and transcribing it from memory. It's incredible.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think uh, that to the funders and founders and I mean for everybody, this is like a huge game changer in terms of being able to kind of take the data from an exchange that you had like live and then you know, being able to create a contextual presentation uh, for a client. It's like all Of a sudden, you've gone from needing a whole bunch of additional. Again, you've got to train these things. There's some training that has to take place to kind of get them working 100%. But it's like the tools are there to be able, um, to take that information in to, uh, uh, improve all of the processes around sales. So for example, right now, if you were sort of bringing on a sales rep, you could actually take a look at what those exchanges are like. Right? So you don't even have to do the, you know, the old school kind of like role playing that we used to do just to see, okay, is this sales rep really asking the right questions, doing the right thing? You can sort of see you share that information. So the compression of time that you have the ability to collect this information, make better, uh, and more informed decisions about what's happening in your sales funnel, uh, it's massive.

Speaker C: Or even this. I was just thinking how the old school way of doing it would be like, sales leader brings on a new salesperson, lets them kind of figure their way out for, call it like a month or two kind of thing, and then they'll sit on a call or two, maybe three, hear how it's going, and then make a decision. Is the sales rep running a good process? Yes or no? But now I feel like you could just take full transcripts of this individual's first 12 calls, 15 calls, and you could ask AI, just what are the commonalities? Where are the gaps? Like, what do you think could be improved? Like, even that would give you, uh, a really interesting read, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Can you relabel our sales stages in Salesforce so that they make sense based on the conversations that are now happening?

Speaker B: The thing is, if you're a founder, um, maybe you've got the time in the evening or whatever to kind of learn about, uh, all this stuff and how it all really comes together. But I think the advantage that we have in the intelligent marketing side is we're deploying these things right now. We know how to kind of use these technologies, make them work together so that the efficiencies are created and you're actually delivering the data into these, into these places, which are then shareable, and then you can actually drive.

Speaker A: I mean, I think for closing, some closing thoughts here, I mean, I think, you know, one of the, uh, things we had was sort of like how investor expectations are going to shift. And I think that one of the things that we've seen a lot would be building out your marketing team. Right. You always raise the money, hire the people. Right. It makes sense. I mean um, uh, however, we have seen a shift where. Okay, well we want to have an agency as part of that equation. Right. Um, let's hire a marketing manager, maybe a director. But we want to have the capabilities, the actual, you know, the skill sets being delivered by the agency with some market, with some strategy support. I think that what we've seen is the turnover in marketing teams and the challenges to sort of retain those people, especially inside of founder and funder type environments where these are early stage organizations trying to get going and you know, depending on the mass or the brand or where they, what's going on, it's not easy to retain people. Like, you know, it's, there's, there's sort of like other opportunities that uh, could shift a little bit now with the employment landscape. And that doesn't change the fact that you know, you are asking a team to really dig into your business and try to do one of the most difficult things out there, which is get the marketing outcomes or the marketing activities to produce business outcomes. It's not easy. It's like the most, one of the most difficult things in business. Right. So I think that uh, part of the investor m my take on this for the investor expectations is really going to be what capabilities do we have from a marketing agency perspective? Like yes, we might need to get some level of leadership here, but how do we get the capabilities? And um, to your point Chris, you know, someone that can snap those in that's already up to speed on the latest and greatest. So they're not coming up to speed and that we do have some continuity in the event that you know, we love the marketing leader but in the event that they decide to move on. Right. That we've got. Our program doesn't just grind to an absolute halt. Right. So we've got the best practices coming in and we're also seeing some continuity that be my investor prediction. What do you guys got?

Speaker C: Well, I think one, um, speed and agility is going to be easily the most important thing. I think like patience is probably at an all time low and not like in a negative way. It's just like the expectations are just so high now. Right. I would imagine that like every VC sending these like TechCrunch articles about how quickly some so and so Companies scale to 100 million ARR inside of a year and it's like hey, why aren't we doing this? Or some sort of equivalent of that. Right? Because we know what's possible And a lot of it's on the back of um, nimble teams and really efficient technology use driving a lot of it. So to that point it's like if I were either the founder or even the investors I would be asking a key question as far as like the sales led and then sort of of the go to market in general. Like what for your audience, for your business and vertical, what do you have internally that's like a must have to keep inside the business and what do you want to um, have as an external resource elsewhere. And that's where the agency can come in. But you're going to have that evangelist. You should have some sort of like sales leader. I think those are probably the two biggest ones. Maybe you have like a, I would call it like a creator role. Someone who's capable of understanding the stories are being told and being able to like cut it up into smaller bite sized chunks for the distribution channels and then the agency can go and deploy all of it. So I would think those are some of the important things too going on inside of these HUDs.

Speaker B: So many more. So many of the uh, larger funding organizations are uh, employing marketing and sales sales uh, resources to drop into their investments. Um, and not every investment uh firm or VC has the resources to be able to do that. Uh but again it can be something that's ah, uh, sorely missed. Um, when a VC is looking at some results over the past quarter in one of their investments they're having to look at a spreadsheet trying to understand what that spreadsheet means. Again these are very smart people, investment bankers and uh, VCs are super smart but you know they're not in the business. Every day they're having to interpret something on a spreadsheet that uh, is at best kind of like very much a whiff of what's happening. And I think that the data and being able to actually sort of drive, drive uh, you know, drive really useful data about pipeline, about engagement, about audience management. That's going to be the thing that's going to help a vc, um, you know, understand that. So I think that data is going to be, is going to be the thing that makes the difference for founders and funders going forward.

Speaker A: Okay, yeah, I think that's great. I mean I think we'll continue this series on uh, this topic so we can um, you know build, build off of this where we've got the reignite

Speaker B: event September 18th to 20th, September 18th to 20th.

Speaker A: So we expect to see a lot of founders uh, and funders out at that event. They'll be out there last year.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I think we got our new website coming up a, uh, couple weeks. It's looking really solid.

Speaker C: Now, on a previous podcast we committed to, I think we said middle to late August.

Speaker B: Is that. Yeah.

Speaker A: So we're going to be tight. We're going to be tight, but not right on track. Not too bad. Not too bad. Um, yeah. So then that'll also build on a lot of these themes, obviously, in the intelligent marketing being a big one, as well as, uh, some of these verticals that we're. That we're really supporting right now. And, uh. Yeah, I guess, until next time.