Doug Hanna, Grafana Labs COO on GTM at $3B Scale (Pt 2)

Michael Koenig: Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal Chief Operating Officers from all sorts of companies come to share their insights, advice, and crazy stories. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and today is a special episode. It's the return of Doug Hannah in part 2 of our conversation. As a refresher, Doug is the Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs, the company behind the leading open source projects Grafana and Loki, which recently completed a $220 million fundraise at a $3 billion valuation. Prior to joining Grafana, Doug spent 4 years at

Doug Hanna: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Michael Koenig: So, let's talk about when you joined Grafana. You, you joined early on, which was about 2.5 years ago. How big was Grafana at the time in terms of the team, in terms of the customer base? Whatever sort of metrics you can share to help paint the picture of what you walked into.

Doug Hanna: Sure. Grafana, when I joined, which was about September 2019, which feels like a very long time ago, but it was just a little over 2 years ago, was pre-Series A, just barely. When I was talking to them, they were close to term sheets basically, and there was a lot of investor interest already. They had about 70 people globally. My team, or what was going to be my team, were about 20 people. And the company ended the year before, if I'm remembering right, I think they ended 2018 around $5 million in revenue and grew by the end of 2019 to call it $15 million in revenue. So pretty nice growth from there. And the company had kind of a relatively slow rise between 2017, 2018. Like one, like barely a million in ARR to about 5 to about 15. So it started really taking off around the time I said, before I started talking to the company, before I joined, I definitely can't claim credit for it and all of it at least. And then over the last couple of years, we've grown our revenue substantially. Today we're about 600 people globally. We haven't disclosed our most recent revenue number, But it's grown quite a lot and we have, we've raised a B round and a C round. The C round being what you referenced, we did that over the summer. That was about $220 million.

Michael Koenig: Yeah. So in total now, isn't it about $294 million unless Crunchbase is lying in total funding?

Doug Hanna: It's more than that.

Michael Koenig: It's $317 million.

Doug Hanna: It's more than that. Yeah.

Michael Koenig: All right. Someone's gotta let Crunchbase know.

Doug Hanna: We did a kind of 2 B rounds, but they were both insider rounds and we only announced the second one. So it was, I think, $50 and $35, but so that added up to $85 plus about $30 kind of before that and $220, it's about $337 million.

Michael Koenig: So even in 2019, I mean, $15 million, and then to go on and raise the type of capital that you have raised, I mean, this is a massive curve that we can just assume there is, right? We don't have to put any numbers on it, but we can assume that there was some massive revenue growth going on and that didn't happen overnight and didn't happen by chance. Can you maybe talk a little bit about some of the successes? What did you guys do right to hit that point?

Doug Hanna: Sure. I think you mentioned this in the, the intro, but it is not always been smooth sailing and it has not always been as clear, clear momentum as we have today. I remember a couple of points earlier in my tenure at Grafana sitting down with our CEO and really debating should we hire 1 or 2 additional salespeople and is that the right number? And like, are we getting too far ahead of ourselves and what grave consequences could happen if we over-rotated there, whereas today I think we have openings for about 40 sales reps currently. If we could hire them all tomorrow, we would gladly do that. So it, it's crazy that that has, has changed so much in really just a couple of years. But I think some of the things that have helped us get there, one, the open source community that we're a part of and that we started with Grafana and we're a part of kind of more broadly some other tools like Prometheus. Has grown a lot and really serves as our top of funnel. Almost everybody we talk to already uses Grafana today. Most of them use other tools in our ecosystem as well. So we're— we've been able to not only see that grow, but kind of tap into that more and more every month and every quarter. So that's been really helpful. A lot of the macro trends around cloud, around kind of increase of observability software and importance of it, containerization, microservices, any of the kind of Gartner buzzwords that you might want. Grafana benefits from a lot of those. So that's been really helpful for us as well and our growth. And I think we've learned and really narrowed in on— and it's a continual process, but we've made a lot of progress over the last 2 years on kind of what works for us in terms of how we go to market, what our sales process looks like, what marketing activities work, how we support customers post-sale. We've had hard-fought learnings within each of those areas and across the entire, really, like customer journey, ranging from, I think of our go-to-market motion as adopt, land, and expand. And we've learned a lot across all of those over the last couple years as well.

Michael Koenig: So let's take a step back and maybe just give our listeners some definition. There are two main things here that I think we need to make sure people understand and get up to speed. And that is one, around open source and how Grafana fits in, but also how Grafana Labs has built a business around it. And then two, if you could kind of give our listeners a brief description of what the heck observability software is.

Doug Hanna: Sure. Starting with the, the latter, observability software, or really observability, I would describe it to, to my very non-technical mom as we, we help companies or people understand how well their, their technical systems, whether that's an application or a website, is performing, whether it's fast or slow, online or offline, working or not. And there's a bunch of custom kind of variables you can define, but we really help answer questions about the performance of different systems. And those systems for us and our use cases range from really kind of consumer hobbyist things like people will monitor beehives or their home labs or their solar panels or a bunch of things like we talk about a lot of these on our blog to very boring but very important corporate infrastructure at Fortune 500 companies around are their applications performing, are ATMs online, is Wi-Fi in theme parks working? Lots of very, very varied use cases, some of which are super interesting. All of which are pretty important. So that's what people are using our software for. Grafana itself was started about 7 years ago. That sounds about right. 7 years ago or so. And it is really focused on visualization of time series data. Time series data is anything where time is one of the axes. That is what has grown a ton. There are about 800,000 active instances of Grafana today, a couple million end users. And it's really like, you can think of it as a lot of dashboarding, charting, alerting around how some of these things are working. It's super customizable. And since the beginning, it's been delivered as free, as in $0, but also kind of software freedoms, free and open source. Meaning source available, people can edit it, they can make modifications to it, software that people can download and run. And as of a couple years ago, they can also run it in our cloud for free. We have a freemium offering as well where we host and manage it. And you and I both come from kind of the WordPress ecosystem, and Grafana is a little different from WordPress in that we, as in Grafana Labs, own and control the Grafana project. It is not run by a foundation or something like that. In some open source companies, that's the case, in others it's not. And we monetize a premium version of Grafana called Grafana Enterprise, which has additional security and compliance features, additional data sources, things like that, as well as a managed service. Whereas in the WordPress ecosystem, it's more— most people are monetizing the managed service. There's not really like a premium version of WordPress that people are selling. So that's how we make money at Grafana, and we have a couple other open source projects that have similar kind of model where there's a premium version of the software itself available, and we also can run it as a managed service, which for some of our product areas is much more of a value-add than others. Like running an at-scale Prometheus metrics instance is quite tedious and requires a lot of specialized expertise, So a lot of companies are looking to partner with companies like Grafana to do that.

Michael Koenig: Perfect. Okay, so now my mom knows what we're talking about moving forward. Hopefully. In terms of, you talked about the various use cases of Grafana and it sounded in the examples that you gave very horizontal in nature. Are there certain verticals that you've gone deep in, and can you kind of tell us a little bit about how you honed in on your core ideal customer profiles?

Doug Hanna: Yeah, happily. So our— you're right, we're very horizontal in nature, and we, we don't have currently any formal verticals in our go-to-market motions. We have had a lot of success in the financial services space. Most at this point, I can say most of the big financial services companies are customers of ours, paying customers. Some of our biggest customers are financial services companies. They probably a variety of reasons for that. One is it just becomes very self-reinforcing. You get kind of one proof point and then you get other proof points. JP Morgan gave us an award that we were one of their top vendors. We've been able to talk about that publicly. They're kind of a trendsetter amongst a lot of financial services companies from a technical perspective. So that's been certainly helpful to us and they've been a great partner. But there, there are a bunch of other ones that we've worked with and they all have their own use cases. And as you have more kind of expertise and kind of proof points, that really helps get you into a vertical. So if you're thinking about getting into a vertical, whatever it is, getting one big proof point is so helpful., and you can hopefully leverage that extensively because we definitely have. Then other, other verticals, like kind of like software, IT, or like tech companies are another great customer base for us. They're kind of horizontal themselves, but they are, kind of cloud native, very tech forward, lots of engineering kind of resources relative to the average company and investing heavily in kind of their, their application, website, et cetera, is kind of the core of what they do., and those companies are also, a lot of them are Grafana customers. And if you look at kind of our top 10 customer list, it's kind of a mix of software as well as, as well as financial services with maybe one or two exceptions to that.

Michael Koenig: Okay, great. And can you give us a concept then of how you and your team have structured your sales organization?

Doug Hanna: Sure. So our sales organization has We're segmented and we're organized regionally. So we have in the US, East, West, Central region. Each of those has a leader and we have an EMEA, one team. We have EMEA North and EMEA South right now. We're going to add EMEA Central here shortly. And then we have APAC. So those are regions also reporting to our head of sales who reports to me. We have US federal that's broken out as its own thing and channels and partners, which is also broken out as its own thing. And we also segment our roles. They all report up through the same leadership chain. So if you think about like West has— US West has commercial, which is our kind of smallest accounts, generally defined as less than 1,000 employees, enterprise, which is about 1,000 to 5,000 employees. Employees is how we think about segmenting, and then strategic, which is 5,000+. And the kind of US West team, for example, has a mix of people in those different roles all reporting into that team. And, uh, we kind of carve it out by companies that are based in whatever the US West states are, obvious ones like California or Washington State, but, uh, also like Nevada. And then with the kind of— that represents the totality of accounts that are assigned to that team.

Michael Koenig: And so you mentioned breaking out federal. Is that something that you would expect as the sales team continues to grow, as Grafana Labs continues to grow, that you're going to break out more, maybe have, you know, different teams focused on different verticals?

Doug Hanna: Possibly. So some companies at scale, I feel like there are a couple of things that companies like inevitably do in their growth journeys, but usually one is they explore verticals at some point. We're— that's not a next year thing for us, maybe a year after. And we can talk about that. We'll probably actually start with what we will call like a global account team and they'll have a handful of accounts and we might assign like one, one rep to only cover some of the big financial accounts, for example, and kind of achieve verticals that way. Also, if you think about where a lot of the biggest financial services companies in the world are based. They're usually based in New York, specifically in Lower Manhattan. So our, our team that covers that geography tends to have a lot of financial services accounts, and that's most of their, their book of business. So we, we have them informally, but what we're not really seeing is that the nature of the product engagement or supporting the customer for financial services companies is not that different than our other customers. They're, they're big companies, so they have complex buying processes and multi-stakeholder engagement that's needed and things like that. But kind of how they're using our product is not fundamentally all that different from how other customers use it. So we're able to support them kind of from a central account team, whereas with the US federal business, very specialized in how they buy, very specialized in how they kind of relate to that, like how they're procuring software, how they evaluate it, how you get budget, who you work with. So that's very, very specialized for us. And then in a lot of cases, your support needs are specialized as well. Where you can only have, for example, US citizens supporting certain federal government entities or projects. So we think as that business grows for us, which we're pretty optimistic it can, and be more significant to our overall revenue, that we'll need to effectively think differently about how we support that team, and which is why we broke it out.

Michael Koenig: You mentioned before that some of the learnings were around what the key was to making a smooth customer experience. So can you kind of chart out the experience and the touchpoints that, say, a lead to a prospect to someone doing a POC to on-ramping, can you, or onboarding rather, can you kind of chart out how have you all designed it? Because you're clearly doing something right.

Doug Hanna: A live customer journey mapping on a podcast. Okay. This is really going to be the disappointing sequel.

Michael Koenig: But all right, well then let's keep it, let's keep it broad then.

Doug Hanna: Yeah, so I mentioned at the beginning, adopt, land, expand. That's really like our high-level process. So adopt really means that the majority of people we talk to are starting as open source users, and they're starting their journey with Grafana Labs and Grafana open source as an open source user., and they're either downloading Grafana from our website or GitHub or wherever and going to run it elsewhere, or they're starting with our free product in our cloud. And then some customers, a lot of the vast majority of users will stay there forever. Like they won't become paying customers of ours, or open source software is really good. You don't necessarily have to pay for it. And then, but some small percentage of them will become paying customers and whether we'll reach out to them or they'll participate in our content that we do, we do a lot of different content, webinars, events, things like that. Or maybe they'll submit an inbound request being like, hey, we're scaling, we would like help, or we want more support or these certain features. That will happen. That generates, kind of kicks off a lot of our sales processes. Our sales team, which partners with our solutions engineering team, plus a bunch of other internal groups around legal and finance and Field Desk, etc., to help kind of get attractive offers in front of customers and help them go through the buying process both on their side and on our side. And then they'll become customers. Our account executives stay involved with customers post-sale. We generally aren't transitioning, we don't do a hunter-farmer model. We have a combined hunter-farmer role. And then our customer success team comes in. A lot of our customers opt to buy some professional services, so they'll be part of this and we support them on an ongoing basis. We have 24/7 support. A support team that's available to help them if they have sort of like break-fix issues or if they need help with any, any pieces. In the meantime, try to do regular business reviews of, hey, Mr. and Ms. Customer, you've been a customer for 6 months, how is this tracking against what your expectations were, what we decided in the sales process, etc. I actually just had one of those with one of our bigger customers on Tuesday, about 6 months post-purchase, and it was a good discussion. And then hopefully they expand, they buy more services, they add volume, and renew. If they're expanding, they're probably renewing, and that kind of creates the flywheel of— we're effectively a SaaS business with our very top of the funnel looks a little different because of open source.

Michael Koenig: That makes a lot of sense. Now, as you think about the growth, and the reason why I asked you to kind of describe that a bit is that it's so much more than just having an SDR go out there, nurture an inbound lead, pass it off to an AE, and then, "Oh, you're up and running, and maybe you ping us every now and then for a support question." There's so much more that goes into it. So hearing how you all have done this at scale very efficiently is quite interesting. Now, are there any sort of stages that come to mind, specific, let's not call them milestones just yet, but specific growth stages where you've had a growth spurt, really had to kind of change how you operate and then go beyond. And maybe can you tell us a little bit about the difference between those? What were the problems and how'd you solve them?

Doug Hanna: Happy to cover that. And before we move on, one comment based on what you just said, What you described can work for certain companies where it's a little bit more hands-off. Someone signs up online, they barely talk to anybody unless they have a support issue. That is not our model because our average customer that our sales team is involved with is spending a lot of money, like, uh, and it's a kind of high-end enterprise sale. We do have a self-service business that's a decent and growing part of our revenue and is super strategic for us. Where customers just sign up online, they put in a credit card number, and we really don't talk to them except unless they have questions, or sometimes we'll reach out and say, "Hey, can we help?" And most of the time they're like, "We're good." And that's okay, and that's great. So if your business can support that, even better. Like, that's a really efficient way to grow your revenue. A lot of great companies have grown that way. And then more typically, they add kind of the higher-end enterprise stuff on after that.

Michael Koenig: That's very interesting. The post-scale repeatability, how do you double and triple? That's a great question. Do you guys know the answer yet?

Doug Hanna: I don't think we definitively know the answer. I think we know a number of things we need to do. Like for example, if you talk to anyone on my team and you ask them their biggest challenge, I imagine pretty much all of them would say hiring. And we, we know, and the market is crazy right now. Most companies are experiencing a version of this and we're fortunate to be a really desirable place to work, but we still have plenty of challenges. Hiring challenges, but we're roughly 600 people now. We'll probably grow 70-80% headcount next year. That means we need to make, call it, net 500 really good hiring decisions in the next year. And that's going to range from salespeople to engineers to VPs to C-level executives, probably. And making those in the time you need while also continuing to run the business. Like, I'm not a professional recruiter. I have to— I have other things that I need to do as well is really hard. And like, we know we need to do it, but doing that at scale is tough. And it's those sorts of challenges that I think we're dealing with now. It's like, we know we can hire 10 people, we know we can make 10 or 15 people exciting, but— or successful and hopefully excited. But like, how do we do that with 100 people is a very different set of challenges. And like, the reality is we're going to try our best, but everything kind of will break. And we will have to learn as we go and refine constantly.

Michael Koenig: I'd imagine that type of growth is quite staggering. There are few companies that experience that, that have probably done it seamlessly, I would say.

Doug Hanna: I don't think anyone has done it seamlessly. And it's interesting. So we're at the end of the calendar year now. Our fiscal year ends at the end of January. And we've been doing some lookbacks with our teams of just all the stuff we've accomplished in the last year. And we're, we're super hard on ourselves internally. So we spent 98% of our energy focused on what's broken and what we need to do wrong, or what we need to do better and why we're, why we're so bad. And only spent probably 2 or 3% of our energy on all the amazing stuff we've accomplished in the last year. I don't think that's an uncommon balance across successful teams and companies. They're, they tend to be hard on themselves. Themselves, which is why they get better. But, uh, it is amazing when you step back and you're like, wow, this is all the stuff that we did in the last year and the progress we've made. And then you're like, okay, like, now, now it makes a little bit more sense. But when you're, when you're in it, and the best— pick the best company in the world and they'll have this version, I'm confident— it feels like everything is broken, everything's on fire, uh, nothing is working the way you want it to work. And you really have to step back kind of look at, look at the forest through the trees and be like, actually, no, things are working pretty well. We're doing it, we're on a really good path, uh, and we have a lot of opportunity, which is what we try to remind ourselves of.

Michael Koenig: So can you tell us a little bit about the operating system of the company? How has it changed?

Doug Hanna: What do you run?

Michael Koenig: Are you guys using OKRs? What's the meeting cadence? How does senior leadership work together, collaborate? What can you tell us about those inner workings?

Doug Hanna: Sure. The company, we, a lot of those things have not changed as much as you would think they would or should have in the last few years despite our growth. So we implemented, when I joined, I implemented a number of those things. So we implemented OKRs, we implemented kind of our current all-hands cadence, our leadership team syncs that we're doing. Kind of a lot of our policies, or we didn't even, if you can believe it, most people in the company didn't even have like formal one-on-ones when I started. We had just started really implementing those a little bit before I joined. So thinking about what those look like across the company, we do use OKRs. I'm really passionate about not being overly dogmatic on OKRs. It's really about setting out what our priorities are, what we want to get done in the quarter, and executing on that. And then we cascade those from a kind of company-wide level down to individual contributors at all levels of the company. Everybody sets OKRs at Grafana and they're all public. And then we do retrospectives at the end of the quarter generally. So that's how we approach goal setting. Within go-to-market, I think we've come up with a good cadence and then continuing to refine it. Of like, if you think about the beginning of the quarter, we spent some time looking back and talking about the previous quarter, what went well, what we should do better. We have our kind of pipeline, our review processes, and thinking about how we're, how we're being successful with those or not. We have our forecast, which is kind of our in-quarter deals, talking about those and what we need to do to drive success there. So we've gotten a lot of those processes refined. We certainly refined our hiring processes, which is a really critical kind of high-throughput thing that we need to do. So most of the roles we hire, especially at volume, uh, have a pretty refined process in terms of who the candidates talk to, uh, how long that should take, what the, what the decision process is like, et cetera. Uh, and then how does that go like all the way through to onboarding? So we've refined a lot of these things over time, but They, I would say the main distinction between now and a year ago is that we've probably added more rigor and we've added more repeatability to them. Again, it comes back to that repeatability, whereas now we run a pretty tight, I had a forecast meeting about an hour ago. We run a really tight forecast meeting. All the right people are in the room. We're able to make decisions, we're able to get informed. It's a really valuable hour. And that's because we've spent the last 2 years really refining that process. Other things that are newer, it feels a little clunky still and we have to improve it. So we're slowly improving a number of them and others it doesn't, it's maybe not as acutely broken, so we'll spend some more time on it and just see how it goes over time.

Michael Koenig: So where does Grafana go from here? Not Grafana the open source project, where does Grafana Labs go from here? You've raised a bunch of money, you're growing like crazy, you're doing expansion within EMEA. What's next? What are those big milestones for 2022 and beyond?

Doug Hanna: So we're continuing to grow, grow our revenue, grow our customer base, our open source community, all of those things. We'll launch new products. Uh, we've acquired a couple companies in the last year. We'll probably continue to do some, some version of that over the next couple years. Anything can happen in terms of company outcomes. My, my favorite story is AppDynamics, which is in our space. They were actively going public. I think, I think the acquisition was actually announced like the day before they were supposed to ring the bell. So, and they all ended up working at Cisco and they thought they were going to be going public. So anything can happen. And even if you're super far down the path of going public or, or not, and obviously we're seeing companies like Stripe and Databricks et cetera, they're staying private quite a lot, quite a bit longer as well because of the easy availability of private capital at super, super high valuations and no particular urgency to go public. So we're really focused on, at Grafana, we want to build a large scalable business. We have big ambitions. We know our space is really large. We know what the customer challenges we can, the challenges we can help our customers with. There's a lot of them, and we're super bullish in what we can do to help them. So that's what we're focused on, continuing to grow the business, help our customers accomplish more, and give ourselves optionality for the future.

Michael Koenig: Fantastic. Well, Doug, going back to September 2019, before you started, or right when you started at Grafana, what has Doug Hanna now in December 2021 tell Doug Hanna in September 2019, don't do this?

Doug Hanna: Good question. I thought you were gonna stop with, before the don't do this, I was gonna say prepare for more gray hair because 9 quarters as a revenue leader at a high-growth startup will give you quite a few. Dave, our sales leader, has is largely bald, and I tell him I'm going to look like him in a few more quarters, and that doesn't make me happy. But, uh, it's, it's high excitement but also high stress for sure. And, uh, revenue is a very measurable set of outcomes, so everybody knows how it's going or not going, which has very high highs and very low lows sometimes. I think the, the— not necessarily don't do, but focus a lot on and you'll regret if you don't do is spend a lot of time and energy on making sure you're bringing the right people onto the team and don't cut any corners there. And it's painful when you have a role that's open, uh, but it's in for a long time even. But it's really painful, uh, when you compromise and you realize the effects of that down the road and really, and you have to make a change and it's disruptive, et cetera. So I think especially in a high-growth environment, companies compromise more than they probably should. And it, and it's a totally rational kind of compromise at the time of like, well, somebody in this role is better than nobody and we needed it yesterday. And it will take us however long to go find somebody. So I definitely get that. But I think December 2021 Doug would tell September 2019 Doug, like don't lose hope there and make sure that you make those hires and that you get as much conviction as you can because if you take a shortcut, you'll regret it.

Michael Koenig: Fantastic. Well, Doug, that just about does it for me. I normally ask that awesome question at the end of, you know, do you have one of those, I never thought I'd see that stories, but you've already shared yours. So I don't know if there's another you'd care to share with us Or if you'd just like to tell us a joke.

Doug Hanna: I definitely came unprepared for the joke. I think, I'm trying to remember, I think last time my story was, I didn't think that we would achieve kind of the scale that we've achieved. And that still remains true. I'm a pretty optimistic person. I think you have to be working in the startup, but this is, kind of exceeded my expectations. And now I have a lot of conviction that we're actually in the early days and we have so much more we can go do. So I'll reiterate that and end there instead of a poorly told joke. My preferred joke mechanisms, I like to send GIFs to people. We have our Giphy integration on our Slack and I sometimes will put them in presentations, which people don't expect. Coming from me, but that's my preferred humor mechanism.

Michael Koenig: There you go. And humor as a leadership quality, I think, is very underrated, isn't it? If you can have a little bit of a humorous moment every now and then, it kind of humanizes you.

Doug Hanna: For sure. I personally have a pretty dry sense of humor and can be a little snarky, which sometimes will catch people off guard. And I think it's important because like we were talking about, startups are hard. And if you're not laughing and enjoying and having fun and enjoying the people that you're working with and what you're doing, you'll probably, probably go crazy because they're definitely stressful and difficult. So you need to have those moments of levity and enjoyment too.

Michael Koenig: Okay. Last, last question for you. I think we all have at some point we've had that experience where we've landed that first big client or a client that really sort of signifies a turning point for the business. Do you have one of those experiences that comes to mind? And if you do, how'd you celebrate it with your team? Because it's so important to celebrate those wins.

Doug Hanna: That's been actually one of the more challenging aspects of COVID and our CEO and I have talked about this. So basically since COVID started, we've raised, uh, roughly $300 million. We've grown our business significantly. We've made tons of key hires. We've celebrated our first million dollar deal, our first $3 million deal, uh, more and, and other milestones to come. And everybody's just sitting in their home office or their hotel room or wherever they are. Parents' basement, wherever they are. And it's super anticlimactic. And sometimes I'll go to the fancy wine store down the street and like maybe buy a bottle of something on Grafana. But like, that's super disappointing. So we try to celebrate those when we can in person. We've been doing in-person travel since, I guess, late spring for some people. So that's exciting. But We again try to step back, appreciate the moment. Like, we're hopeful. Actually, today we've already signed half of the documents. We're closing a deal that we've been working on for over 2 years, and it is going to be a moment of celebration for sure across the entire company. And we have a channel in Slack called Commercial where the sales rep usually will post when we win and talk about the story and thank a bunch of people, etc., and I am super excited to see that post for this deal in our commercial channel, and I bet it will get 500 Slack emoji reactions or whatever from basically everybody in the company. And it's been like, it's movie-worthy, the ups and downs of this deal. And it's exciting to see it come to a conclusion and start working with that customer in a really exciting way. But it just goes to point that like, it's not like it looks externally like we've accomplished a lot and it's been smooth sailing, but I can't even tell you how many times I've talked this rep that's been working on this deal out or off of away from a negative place and tried to be encouraging and how many times we've probably exchanged testy Slack messages about it. So it's, the road to success is not always the smoothest, straightest road, but it is, It's a fun one. And if you can appreciate the journey, it's that much better.

Michael Koenig: I'm right in the middle of that journey with one client that we've been talking to for, wow, maybe not 2 years, but 12 months. And I'm going to be staying up late for a midnight call with them because they are located in India. So when you guys do land that deal, let me know how you celebrate because we're going to have to do the same, hopefully.

Doug Hanna: Sounds good.

Michael Koenig: All right, Doug, thanks so much for coming on again. And I think it lived up to the hype for sure.

Doug Hanna: Yeah, absolutely. You definitely undersold it, which is under-promise, over-deliver. So thanks for having me again, Michael. And I hope you land that deal. I hope we land this deal. It's not done yet. It's not done until we give it a try. But maybe in the show notes for both of us, we can put the outcomes of of the deal so people, uh, people have a little appendix of how it's going.