Ken Weary, Hotjar COO on Remote-First Culture, M-and-A

Michael Koenig: Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal chief operating officers come to share their knowledge, advice, and crazy stories. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and I'm excited to welcome our guest, Ken Weary. COO at Hotjar, a product experience insights company based in Europe with over 200 employees that shows how users behave. Hotjar was recently acquired by Content Square just this past September. Prior to Hotjar, Ken spent 11 years in corporate product and IT roles at companies including Safeco and Liberty Mutual, where he was responsible for the allocation of $180 million in annual IT expenses. Expenditures. Ken and his family are true digital nomads, having spent more than 2,700 consecutive days traveling the world. It dates back to 2013 when he and his partner decided to hit the road after a trip to Guatemala and the realization that he needed to break out of the cubicle and stretch his legs. Currently in Portugal, Ken somehow manages full-time travel with running a company as COO. Welcome, Ken. Thanks for being here. I'm excited to have you on.

Ken Weary: Awesome. Thanks for the intro, Mike.

Michael Koenig: Michael, sorry. Yeah, absolutely. Ah, that's okay. That's okay. So, there's definitely a discussion to be had around constantly traveling with kids while running a company. But first, can you tell us a bit about your path to becoming COO at Hotjar?

Ken Weary: Sure. So, I think you really kind of hit some of the highlights there in the intro, and that's prior corporate experience, but helped to cement a lot of some of the disciplines and practices and experience. But prior to that, you know, my resume is very diverse, spanning from nonprofits to startups, scale-ups to corporate gigs, and working as an independent contractor as well as an entrepreneur, having my own business. And so because of that, I've seen a lot of different things and played a lot of different roles wearing different hats. And I think 5 and a half years ago when I joined Hotjar, that was one of the things that really attracted David, Hotjar's founder, to my profile. Also mixed in with that, I'd been a digital nomad for about a year and a half at that point and had been keeping up a personal blog as to the travels., and he said to me at one point through the interview process, you know, if you can figure out all this crap of traveling with your car in Central America that I've read on your blog, I think you can handle scaling Hotjar pretty easily. And so a lot of that is what built up the under-the-belt type of aspects for what I, what I was getting into with Hotjar and made, made it a perfect Hotjar's growth cycle at the time, as well as some of the challenges they were facing, were extremely appetizing to me. Great learning experience. And I joined the company originally as Vice President of Operations and a role that I held for a number of years before recently becoming COO. And largely speaking, the role itself didn't change. The responsibilities and, and purview throughout the company being larger and larger and more and more accountability. Just helped to land the need to update the title to COO.

Michael Koenig: Very nice. The different roles, the different hats, so common among COOs, isn't it?

Ken Weary: Yeah, it is.

Michael Koenig: Would you say that it's the saying of a mile wide, an inch deep, or do you have certain areas where you're a mile deep as well?

Ken Weary: I would say that definitely the inch-deep aspect is more prevalent through my background. I mean, there are areas where I've got greater depth. You know, one of the things that I've always done is manage projects. So whether that's— pick your flavor of project. I've been involved in it in one shape or another. And part of what I'd like to view my role at Hotjar is really just the uber project manager for the company that's looking out for different aspects. And so I think that if there's anything I excel at, it is that— is taking a project, looking at the risks, looking at the opportunities, making sure you have the right resources in place, and then playing kind of train master, if you will, to keep all everything running on time from that end. And I would say that That's where I would have greater depth across that. But the types of projects, you know, whether it's a legal or financial or whatever, total mixed bag, and the depth is going to weigh very, very quickly, very fast.

Michael Koenig: And so are there— you talked about legal finance— are there specific areas of responsibility that you have primarily under your purview? Or is it truly across the entire company?

Ken Weary: Yeah, this is the thing that just really— and I'm sure your past guests probably can relate to this as well— is there is no common definition for what a COO owns, right? And so because of that, it's hard finding the right peer group to a degree of like, you know, oh, you have that? Oh, wow, I don't have that. That wasn't something I would touch. And so at Hotjar, I see what the COO role has underneath from an accountability perspective. Is finance, is legal and compliance, anything regulatory perspective, people operations. So all across our people functions from our recruitment to all of our process once people join and leave us ultimately. And lastly, anything miscellaneous, anything my boss doesn't want to do ends up on my plate usually. And so we call that business operations.

Michael Koenig: So true. So you spoke on legal, and the product that you all put out there with regards to user behavior is particularly interesting, especially as a European company as well with the development of GDPR and just that constant updates. I mean, we have the new updates to to the SCCs, the standard contractual clauses, just a couple of months ago, and they just continue. How have you all managed that, particularly in the face of the type of product that you have?

Ken Weary: Yeah, if anything, this has been the place where I've gotten more than an inch deep out of necessity. So when I joined the company, GDPR was not in our vernacular, you know, coming about a little over 3 years ago. And really getting up to speed as to what's entailed from this end. And then of course, not just GDPR anymore, it's CCPA in California, Brazil's got LGPD, there's draft legislation in over a dozen countries, so more's coming, right? And then of course the additional clarifications from the original regulation of GDPR. The way that we embrace it is twofold. Number one, we fundamentally believe that the spirit of it is fantastic and right on. Individuals should be able to control their destiny of their data. And so with that in mind, it makes it really easy for us internally to get our engineers behind it, our marketing behind it, and so forth, and makes it really easy for us to do that. Beyond that, of course, there's hurdles to get over as far as new interpretations, new cookie laws, new whatever. And so we do constantly monitor what's going on there. We also really, when it comes to privacy across the board, we've decided early on to take the gold standard of privacy, which is to say, let's, let's go with the German interpretation. Okay, we figure if we can meet the German interpretation, which we have a lot of customers, is very important market for us, if we can make sure we meet that, then we're going to meet the at least as it stands today, we're really gonna meet every other country on the planet. And so what that does mean is that we actually spend a lot of time with outside counsel. We have an excellent privacy practice that we engage with commonly to help us with different interpretations, and they also flag additional privacy legislation around the world. And so I think the easiest way to sum it up is we get along with The regulations by trying to fully respect it, embrace it, and leverage outside expertise to help us make sure that we're navigating it thoroughly.

Michael Koenig: Very common practice of adhering to German regulations for sure, and having that first data privacy impact assessment done and saying, okay, here's what we have to do in order to be good in the eyes of German regulators and then being able to do that. Let's talk about the acquisition. How did it come about? How did you connect with Content Square?

Ken Weary: So it came about with our, our founder and original CEO, David Darmanin. One of the things he did when he first founded the company was start an outreach to other people in the industry, in the behavioral analytics industry, and and connected with a number of competitors and CEOs just to establish a rapport, which he did and has a great, great strength and skill in doing so and always maintain, you know, good open dialogue with them. And one of those competitors has been Content Square, our new parent company. And David struck up a relationship with Jonathan Cherki, their CEO and founder, and they maintain that relationship for years and still have a great relationship. And over the course of time, they would compare notes and realized, hey, well, we're competitors, but we're really not full competitors. They service the enterprise area and we focus on SMB. And so they would share notes from time to time about, you know, struggles and successes. And over time, Content Square had shown an interest in Hotjar. And it never, never heated up until when there was concerted efforts by Content Square to David. And they talked again informally, and David wasn't sure that it was really the right path that he wanted to take the company. And then ultimately, they put forward an offer, which included, of course, the financial aspects of it, but also the aspects that You know, from a, from, from a true acquisition perspective, we're fulfilling the pipeline in the funnel, right? Not only can you start a business really, really small with Hotjar, matter of fact, we have a free account so you can start for free. And as your business grows and scales together, we could offer the full suite of products to anyone who's really interested in this space. And Hotjar being the leader in the, on the, on our side of the house, on the SMB, and then being the lead on the enterprise. We saw the fit from an offering perspective. We then— David pulled in myself and our future CEO, Mohanad, to do some early discussions about what was going on and if this made sense. We also looked at visions, you know, what is their vision? What motivates them to be the best behavioral analytics business and what motivates us? And we saw a ton of commonality.. And so again, it reinforced that, wow, this, this could make a lot of sense. As part of the original letter of intent for the acquisition, it was negotiated that, of course, they're buying us, so they're doing a ton of due diligence, but it was negotiated that we also get to due diligence on them. And so we were able to really assess, is there a cultural fit here? How do they operate the business? How do we operate the business? Is this going to be a cannibalization, right? Are they just going to, you know, say, thank you very much, we'll take the customers, customers and, you know, see ya, or, and how would we operate? How do their current staff, you know, think they operate? What is, you know, let's take a look at their employee opinion scores. You know, do they, are they a bunch of jerks or are they actually, you know, or not? And so this is all information that we were able to gather and assess before ultimately the board of Hotjar made the decision to move forward. But this is all the decision that went into it and behind it. So it was, It was a pretty grueling couple of months as we went through diligence on them and they on us. And ultimately, before the decision was, was striked, the decision definitely took into effect of, is this a good place for our team? More than anything.

Michael Koenig: That's so unique, the two-way due diligence there. And that certainly must have made you really comfortable that this is a good spot, this is a good move for the company, if Content Square, the acquirer, is willing to kind of lift up the hood, let us check out the engine, kick the tires, whatever it may be. So that's, that's quite unique.

Ken Weary: When we originally put it into the, the LOI as a term and condition of moving forward to diligence, We were unsure how they were going to react to it, but they accepted it. And one of the other counters to it, if anyone's in a similar situation and they're wondering, you know, how to also get leverage of that, oftentimes in these deals, it's not just an exchange of cash and purchase, it's cash and stock. And so if you think about it, you're going to be accepting stock on a company you don't know. Is that really a smart business decision? No, it's not. So by being able to counter it with I need to know what I'm getting into, right? You're giving me some stock. And that would've been the position that we had taken if they had balked, but they didn't.

Michael Koenig: That's such a good point there. You spoke previously about an alignment of motivations for Content Square, but also Hotjar. Can you tell us a little bit about the motivations as a company behind Hotjar? Why is it that you all do what you do?

Ken Weary: So at Hotjar, we believe that we should exist for something much bigger than just, say, tracking somebody's behavior online, right? We believe that if you look at Hotjar, yes, we do heat maps and we do session replay and so forth, but if we focus in on just that, you know, what difference does that make? We should exist for a much larger aspect. And we're big fans internally of Simon Sinek and the rational and the aspect of you should always have a why, but you should also have a just cause behind it. You know, why does your business exist? What, what really is it that you're trying to get behind? And so we believe at Hotjar that our reason to exist and why we exist in the world is to inspire change through empathy, which kind of sounds like, oh, well, that's, that's interesting. But if you think about our product and what we do is we want to inspire that change through empathy of each individual end user. By employing a product that allows people to understand what's going on in their website, what's ticking off their users, and what their users love, they're able to portray that empathy to the, to the website owner, who can in turn provide that back to future users of their site. And we believe that that is so critical to being successful. That's the way we design our product. That's the way we look to improve it? How can we convey better empathy and in a much broader scale actually provide substantial change online that goes beyond just somebody's dot-com but to broader sites across the internet? And so that, that's a lot of why Hotjar exists and what we saw through Content Square's vision statement. And I can't articulate it word for word, but it was very much the same thing. They want to make sure that they are improving experiences for their customers who therefore improve it for their own customers. And so what we saw was, wow, actually that's a different way of almost writing what we have. And so it's not to do anything better or anything more than that grand thing of improving the web.

Michael Koenig: They really are aligned. Wow. It sounds like a tremendous fit in terms of cultures and in terms of motivations and missions behind that. Now you spoke a little bit about the grueling nature of an acquisition. Position, particularly, I'd imagine, especially in my experience as well, having been on both the buy and sell side. When you're trying to do that and still run a company, that is, uh, really challenging. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you manage that. And then also, on top of it, you're a digital nomad. With a family, with kids, that adds a whole nother variable that I actually can't even wrap my head around. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, first part, managing both the ongoing day-to-day business operations and the acquisition, and then throwing some kids on top of that?

Ken Weary: Absolutely. And I would say that the TL;DR is a lot of luck and great timing. So from the aspect of running the business, that was definitely the hardest part. Most of the aspects of diligence are asking people, finance, legal. We want to know it all, right? The aspect of, you know, how the product functions or looking at code is actually not something that's looked at. So it was all directed, you know, 80% plus of the diligence was directed to me and my teams. And so while doing so, we're also under tight NDA. And so we're very, very selective and have to do so as far as the number of people in the company that are involved. Because, you know, first and foremost, you need to keep the business running. Acquisitions oftentimes fail to happen. So if you get everybody spun up on my team, hey, we're all— we're going to be, you know, we're potentially being acquired by A, B, and C company, and then it doesn't happen. Oh, wow. They didn't get their work done and now they're spun up with what-if scenarios. And so it was very much a closed-wrapped aspect. So, you know, what I did is I relied on more and more of my team from a delegated responsibilities perspective and basically kind of said, hey, I've got some things I have to tackle that David or Mohanad had asked me to tackle. And so I'm not going to— I'm going to be out of these meetings. I'm going to be, you know, not doing X, Y, and

Michael Koenig: It sounds like you hired very well.

Ken Weary: I have a great team. I have a great team.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of the acquisition, you mentioned some of the uncertainty that can come with potentially cluing the team in, having them start to think about what that might look like. And then potentially not having an acquisition occur. But let's talk about the acquisition itself. Okay, now the acquisition has occurred, you've announced it to your team. There's certainly a lot of question marks there, and oftentimes acquisitions can, you know, maybe introduce even that uncertainty about what's my job going to be, am I going to have security in this new type of company. How did you address that and how did you make sure that your team was feeling confident and feeling good about that next stage of the company?

Ken Weary: Cool. Before I do that, if I could digress, you'd ask the question about how do I do this as a digital nomad. So as you mentioned, yes, I travel with my wife and two kids. I have a now 16-year-old and now 12-year-old, and they've been traveling for about or more than half their life. And as I mentioned, the TL;DR being luck and timing, the luck and timing, fortunate for me, unfortunate for many, many others, is that COVID put travel on hold. And so because of that, we were, you know, we weren't moving, we weren't mobile. Had I been mobile at the time, it would have— I would have needed to put a stop to it, to just hunker down and make sure that, you know, work was, work always needs to be the priority from a digital nomad perspective in order to stay afloat. And so when those times come about, both historically and in the future, it does mean hunkering down and staying put and being less mobile. And this time there were no options. And but there was the ability for my mother-in-law to, to come and visit from America in Portugal where we were at. And so she helped be the co-parent at the time while I was just slammed, right?

Michael Koenig: So very fortunate. Very fortunate. Now, I did want to ask in terms of the digital nomadship, if I can maybe make up a word there, from a work management perspective, just for yourself, how do you introduce regularity when, and routine, when your surroundings are changing, when your workstation is changing. How do you introduce that consistency so that you yourself can wrap your mind around everything, not constantly have environmental changes, and be able to be present and there for the company and there for your team?

Ken Weary: Yeah, great question. Much like I would say it starts with the aspect of, you know, what is a COO is also, and which is it depends. What is a digital nomad, which I believe it depends. And having discussions with Liam at Time Doctor in the past as well, of, you know, there are, there are people who interpret those words very differently. And so for my mind, it really means living a location independent lifestyle. And when I say living, it does mean both professionally and personally. And so what I do is, as I travel with my family, my kids, my wife all know that when I'm working, I'm working. So it is very respectful, just like when, when they're doing their schoolwork or when my wife's on a phone call, you know, you should only interrupt if there's emergencies and you figure out different ways and different norms that work for your family, your friends, your coworkers. And it's been no different of just making sure that you establish those norms. So when it comes to our travel, we slow travel. We stay in a given place for at least a month, which helps with less changing of environment. We only travel on weekends or when there's planned holidays. So it's not like, oh, it's Tuesday night, Wednesday morning you'll see me in a different location. There's too much context shift at that perspective and it's too disruptive. You know, what if there's not internet there? Oops. You know, it's— yeah. So you plan in the contingencies, you plan in the timing, and it does take the right balance while doing it with a family. If you've got to have the right partner, you've got to have the right support system because you do need to put forward, you know, some of those discipline roles. And so I would say that that's my summary statement, but feel free to pick at it if you want.

Michael Koenig: I used to travel with a router.

Ken Weary: Yeah, I do. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. BYOR. The, you know, you're— yeah, the number of Airbnbs we've stayed at that have good internet but a crummy router, it, you know, doesn't cut it. And let alone that router may only work there in the living room. And so we travel with a mesh network. You know, it's just�� it's small enough. It's your own network and just plug it in throughout the Airbnb or wherever at. And good to go from that end.

Michael Koenig: Yeah, I remember my travel kit was not only laptop stand, things like that, router, 25-foot ethernet cable, like all of those things. I think I was traveling with a surge protector at one point or power strip at one point. It did get a little out of control.

Ken Weary: It spiraled a bit.

Michael Koenig: So I wanna get back into the operations of Hotjar. You all are a distributed company, and this happened— this predates the pandemic when companies were forced into distributed environments. Many companies just had to learn on the job. I imagine that GitLab's handbook, the webpage visits skyrocketed, but you all have been doing it for for years. Can you tell us a little bit about the success of your operations? And I really do want to dive into this because so many companies have really struggled with adapting in-person co-located operations to distributed operations.

Ken Weary: Yeah, and then there's the, the mix of hybrid that people are still playing with and I'm a firm believer that that's an experiment that will completely fail. But Hotjar was founded as a remote-first company, and it was done so in 2014. The founding team, even though they all worked and lived in Malta, which is a small island country in the middle of the Mediterranean, and so it'd be very easy for them to get together every single day, they decided, "No, in order to really scale this business, we're gonna need to be remote." Let's start by being remote, even on the island of Malta. And so because of that, the company was always built for working remotely. You know, let's document our processes, let's centralize them, let's make sure that, you know, there's always a reference point there. Let's make sure our recruitment process will always support hiring remotely. And we built on that and continued to refine for every single thing we do. We've just now, since we introduced it, we introduced it with that right mindset, and now it's just iterating on it continuously versus those less fortunate who started off in a traditional office environment and were thrown into remote. That would have been a ton of headaches for past jobs and companies I worked for. And of course, we saw it. And now there's the hybrid aspect of you can work from home 2 days a week or what have you or every other Friday or whatever it is. I do believe that's a failed experiment from the aspect of part of what makes either an in-office or remote company thrive is culture. And when you start introducing and mixing up the formula of, "Oh, you can be remote if you want, or you can come to the office if you want," you're fracturing the culture just by default. And then when you start saying, "You can come into the office, you know, 2 days a week, or, you know, pick your days that you want," and this, that, and the other, you're only going to go to work with the people that you really click with. Not the others. So again, you're driving more and more fracture of how people work and what, what actually makes the company itself and its soul. So I think that I have nothing against in-person companies. I think they're great and they work for a lot of people. I've been there. I know it's not for me in my future. I would much rather— I work much better remotely. But the aspect of trying to get the best of both, I think, is— it's like, yeah, trying to go out and party all night and not have a hangover. It's just not going to happen.

Michael Koenig: Well, a common sentiment right now amongst companies that were forced into remote because of the pandemic is that it's much more difficult to create those human moments amongst the team, those moments of just hanging out, grabbing lunch, the water cooler, the serendipitous interactions that maybe lead to innovation. How have you all gone about that from creating that environment from the get-go?

Ken Weary: I think just like in an office, those things can happen a bit more naturally because you see your coworkers in a particular area. But But what about the people on a different floor, in a different building, in a different aspect, right? How do you— you end up connecting with those people more than the people right next to you. How did that happen, right? There was either a company meeting or a get-together or a birthday or a social or a happy hour where you connected with, oh yeah, you know, Sally up on floor 3, her and I, our kids are in the same baseball, you know, team or whatever. There's always some way. So if you look at how do you replicate that in a remote company? And the answer is with intentionality. So if you look at what are the activities you're going to do to do that. So some of the things that we do are anytime anyone joins the company, they get put into a house. And a house at Hotjar is similar to the Harry Potter house world where you're put into a house by a sorting hat. We have a Mechanical Turk that does that. And the sorting hat puts you in a house. That is a mixture of people from different backgrounds, different tenures at the company, different departments from the company. So it's a cross-collaborative aspect in that unit within that house. We just reorganize houses and there's about 5 people per house. And the idea behind them is that you have an internal support group, you have an internal group of, you know, if I need to know what's going on in marketing, I've got someone in my house that I can actually ping and, and so forth. But then when we do activities such as internal fundraising activity, let's let the houses decide where, where their funds should go. Or we're doing a team-building activity and it's a contest. Let's put people in houses. So you begin to get some cross-collaboration there. We also do something that's very popular called Culture Jar, where throughout regularity we have, you know, 220 people now spread across 35 different countries that all come from different walks of life, different cultural backgrounds, different festive aspects that they get into, especially this time of year. The culture jars are incredible when you start learning about holiday traditions and how people explore them in different countries. And so you come to these aspects and they're, they're on

Michael Koenig: I love the culture jars. I love the houses. I love the digital sorting hat in Mechanical Turk that you all have come up with. And I'm assuming that somehow you all have put the rivalry between Gryffindor and Slytherin to bed, and that's not an issue at Hotjar. All right, getting away from Harry Potter and nerding out there. We have the great talent reshuffling right now, and many people have taken on new roles where they've never met any of their teammates in person. And there's this theory that it's easier for people to leave their roles because they haven't developed those deep relationships that contribute to making that work enjoyable. It sounds like you all have cracked the code code to creating that psychological investment amongst the team? Was that intentional? Is that something that you found really helps with attrition in addition to just making the, uh, experience enjoyable? Are you all experiencing some of that reshuffling?

Ken Weary: So right now our, our stats, uh, year to date are, uh, in par with what they have been for the the past couple of years with regards to retention. So we're really happy about that. We are, we do of course watch the retention rate or turnover rate, but it's something, especially right now, every time somebody leaves, it's like, ooh, was that one of this? Are we experiencing it? So set aside some of the hype around that or concern about that. We have not experienced it at this point in time. So when it gets into, you know, cracking the code or watching that, I think a lot of it gets back into the word I used earlier, intentionality. If you're doing those kind of things to try to swerve away from retention, you're doing them for the wrong reason, right? You want to do them because they're fun. You want to do them because they're cool. If you start saying, well, we're doing this to help with retention, then it's inauthentic, right? Nobody's going to want to say, "Oh, well, you're doing that because of this." And it's like, "No, we're actually doing it because it's cool. It's fun." It's— and so that's always been top of mind for us anytime we introduce anything. Is this, is this going to be— is this going to fit with our culture? Is this going to be fun? Is it going to be something that is of interest to the team? Not of interest to the next person who's going to— we're going to hire, not of interest to keeping people, but are they going to want to do this? And, and we've done a lot of things and shut it down because it just hasn't been, you know, it hasn't been fruitful. The team hasn't enjoyed it. Cool, no problem. Or it started off strong and it fizzled out. So there's no forced team bonding.

Michael Koenig: I love that when companies— yeah, hey, let's go bowling. You all are gonna— we're all gonna pick a lane, share a pitcher, and you're gonna be friends, whether you like it or not. Definitely a bit more genuine, a bit more natural at Hotjar, for sure. So what advice would you have for COOs going into a new company? What did you learn, maybe the hard way, not necessarily with your immediate transition, but what have you learned along the along the way that, gosh, you wish you had known beforehand?

Ken Weary: So I would say my biggest learning experience as from a professional standpoint is just how important culture is and really your own cultural alignment. And so I would say first and foremost, make sure that throughout any interview process you're involved in, find out who the company really is and find out, you know, their heart and soul. You know, are they jerks, right? Are they just in it to blaze ground and so they can be attractive and IPO? Are they actually in it from something that motivates you personally? And if your motivation is IPO and you don't care, then cool, that, you know, that's all good too. But make sure that your motivations align with the business. And it doesn't have to— and I'm not talking about like you got to love the product. Right? Is, you know, there are brands out there I wouldn't want to work, work for because they're, you know, not in alignment with my personal values. So I would say, you know, first and foremost, make sure that you're, you're aligned from that end. And then once you come on board, reassess every single thing you know about the culture, make sure that you understand and have aspects for, you know, what is it that— how does this machine that is in place that you've joined, how does it run? You know, what is it that works and what is it that doesn't? So you don't go in and actually gum up the machine, right? That's the worst thing that can happen is you break something that's, you know, the secret sauce and you just because you didn't know it. And I'm not saying be afraid to change because you should absolutely, you know, question everything. But as part of that questioning, make sure that you really understand, you know, what it is. So that you can then build the right team around, you know, the company, what you don't like and what you have authority to change. Do it, but make sure you also understand it at the same time.

Michael Koenig: Makes a lot of sense. So here's my favorite question. The last question that we have here. We've all had those moments where you have a new problem and you thought, well, never thought I'd see that. Do you have one that comes to mind that you can share with us?

Ken Weary: Probably one of my favorite ones was, uh, and it's a very obscure one that, uh, we got hit with about a year and a half ago is at Hotjar we have, um, customers in 180+ countries. And so we have customers all over the globe. Um, and we have, uh, a subset of those in Russia and Russia implemented, um, VAT, or value-added tax, you know, more or less sales tax from a US perspective. And we were notified by the Russian authorities, tax authorities, that we needed to start charging VAT. It's like, well, A, how do we know this letter that we received is actually legit? And, uh, and B, how do we submit it and stay in compliance with it or whatever? And if, you know, and how do we know that the calculations— how do we know we were even sending it to the right place? So we reached out to one of our legal partners and said, hey, do you have any— actually to all of them and said, you know, hey, we're looking for contacts in Russia. Can you introduce us, you know, preferably a tax attorney? And we got introduced. The first one we got introduced to, it was an email introduction. And they said, you know, you know, can you tell us what questions you're looking to have answered and we can give you a quote. So we answered, we said, you know, these 5 questions, and they were all very, very straightforward, like, you know, is this legit letter, right? And, and their response was to all 5 questions, we can answer all of this for $10,000. It's like, what? Instantly, like, the radar's, whoo, we better— $10,000, not even local currency. And these are questions you can answer in like, you know, 5 minutes in an email. So we decided we're going to seek additional advice at that point. Thankfully, the second and third intros that we got were much better and reasonable from that end.

Michael Koenig: That's too good. That's too good. Oh yeah, I can do this for you, but before I can do that, I need you to pay me an absurd amount of money, and then, you know, maybe I'll I'll consider it. Maybe I'll consider it. Yeah, that's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Well, Ken, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Ken Weary: Where can people go to keep up with you? So I am not a big social media person. You can find me on LinkedIn. You know, just check Ken Weary. And of course, Hotjar and Hotjar's blog has got some great materials, not just about our business, but about how we operate remotely as well. So you can check that out too, hotjar.com. Fantastic.