Janis Zech: Welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab. Today, we have a very special episode. We're here with Samarth Mital. I hope I pronounced your name correctly. And, yeah, we wanna talk about Rubrik's journey to IPO and all the lessons learned on the RevOps side. Just a few numbers to jump in. So when you joined, the company was at seventy million in ARR. Now at the last earnings report, it's at nine hundred nineteen million at a hundred twenty percent NRR, forty percent year on year growth on the subscription ARR side. I think really, really fascinating numbers. We try to dissect this. But before we go into this, who are you? What do you do?

Samarth Mital: Yeah. Thank you. You nailed it, Janis, on both my name and the metrics. So thank you again for having me, Janis and Philipp. It's a privilege to meet you and a big fan of the RevOps Lab Podcast and the incredible knowledge and community that you're building, so thank you for that. For all the listeners out there, hi everyone, I'm Samarth Mital. I lead global planning and analytics, which includes forecasting, pipeline, STR operations, mid market at Rubrik. I've been at Rubrik for four and a half to five years. Prior to that, I was at Deloitte Consulting in their strategy and operations practice, helping large to medium sized tech and financial services companies essentially solve problems. I spent ten years there, and early part of my career was as a software developer in the travel and leisure space. So that's a bit about my background. A slight detour, you know, consulting is obviously an incredibly challenging but also very gratifying profession. There's always two sides to the coin, right? For those of you that have been consultants, you'll recognize the drill, which is Monday, three ams, you hop on a flight, long queues at the airports, oftentimes delayed flights, canceled flights, you work, work, work throughout the week, sometimes up until two AM, waking up at six, getting ready, showering, etcetera, and that hamster wheel goes nonstop. But on the flip side, you know, during that ten year run, I had the opportunity to work with some incredibly talented people who invested heavily in me, helped companies through a variety of challenges, whether they were facing career defining stages, whether it was a bankruptcy or a market transition or M and A, or helping them set up their sales or customer transformation practices. And so I think through that what I realized is that, you know, at the core of all of this is being true to your purpose, which to me in this case is solving problems for the companies, bringing value in the process, and really building close relationships with the people along the way. And so I had the opportunity to join Rubrik early twenty twenty. This was just about when COVID was hitting, and my current boss, Dhruv Nag, who I'm an incredible fan of, brought me into the company here, and, you know, the rest is history.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Awesome. I mean so we wanna dive into that history right now and learn as much as possible. So when you joined, I mean, describe a bit what was the setup, and how has it changed since then? And what were some of the different kind of steps you took?

Samarth Mital: Yeah. Absolutely. And just for our listeners, Rubrik is — we're on a mission to secure the world's data. Right? As we all know, and COVID played a key role in this as well, cyber attacks are inevitable. And realizing that cyber attacks will ultimately target your data, we created what's called a zero trust data security architecture that helps deliver cyber resilience for organizations to secure their data, whether it's across the cloud or their workloads, because essentially if your data is secure, your business is resilient. And so we're really passionate about helping not just businesses, but hospitals, nonprofits, schools, and government agencies. And so to me, the early days, that purpose was very important, and I think that for me it's across the team and the people that we bring on because when there's a lull of a moment, you know, you get fired up by just knowing the impact that you can drive in the world. And so when I joined, you know, early days, we had a couple people in planning, a couple people in field ops, and then we started to hire some folks in systems and comp, so our focus at the time was to make sure that we can hire people that have deep knowledge in a single domain, right, and that have done it at, let's say, maybe one or two places, but then they can build a team around themselves. And so as we went through each of the transitions from one year to the next, you know, we made sure that we were consciously identifying where those needs are, where the puck will go in the next year or two, and starting to plan in terms of what skills, what team members we need to start focusing on, right? So think of it as, yes, we need strong data foundation, so we started to invest there. We need to have a strong sales process in place. We need to make sure that the sales planning and comp side, that we have, you know, strong fundamentals and interactions, and then making sure that in the field we're partnering with the sellers, the sales leaders, and so forth, and making sure we're orchestrating the right end to end journey for the customers as well. So, you know, those were kind of the initial days. And just to put things in perspective, you know, for those that are aspiring on the IPO journey, you know, since two thousand and five, there've been only about thirty thousand or so venture backed tech companies. Only a hundred and sixty of those companies went public. That's point five percent. Of those, point zero nine percent reached a five billion dollar valuation, and so you're essentially talking about a one in an eleven hundred chance of being part of something so special. Right? You have a one in twelve hundred chance of falling and fatally injuring yourself in the shower. Right? So that's —

Janis Zech: That's it.

Samarth Mital: That's it. And so for a lot of us, I mean, it was an incredibly career defining moment to be part of something so special, and so, you know, a lot of times the hiring mix that we wanted to orchestrate was making sure people had that mindset, that growth mindset, that can do relentlessness attitude. You don't necessarily need to tell them what problems need to be solved, they identify the problems and they go ahead and solve it, and that's what really started to, you know, grow the company and bring the teams together. So today we have teams that are partnering with the sales leaders in each of the geographies, so Americas, APAC, EMEA, and they work really closely with them in terms of identifying what the plan is for the year, how they can make sure they achieve it, what the plan should be for the future years, and how can we continue to double down on growth where needed, but doing so in a very profitable manner. So we're really hunkered down in making sure that we're conscious about every dollar spent, and that's optimized for the outcomes that we want to drive. And so what we've done over the last four to five years is we partnered incredibly closely with our data team, and they're kind of, I would say, our secret sauce a little bit, in that we've got a very good handle on the key metrics across the business that matter, a series of dashboards that are going to allow us clarity in terms of, you know, how much pipe we're generating in any given quarter, how much pipe do we need in future quarters, do we have sufficient coverage to meet the need for that future quarter, and do we see early warning signs that we now need to start to alert those parts of the business. So we're able to go down to a unit level, and that's that ability to traverse up and down across the stack, whether you're thinking MQLs to meetings, to opportunities, bookings, and do that across all parts of the ecosystem, whether you're talking sales, STR, channel, marketing, etcetera, and now starting to even do that across your product. Because Rubrik's a platform company and we sell multiple products and making sure that, you know, there's no opportunity left on the table, and so providing that data clarity is really important. And then the second part of that is, you know, making sure that our sales reps are participating. There's a high degree of attainment because at the end of the day if the sales reps aren't getting paid and aren't meeting their OTE and going into accelerators, we're going to be struggling with all kinds of attrition problems, and so we're really closely monitoring all of those metrics and making sure that factors into our quota setting, our planning, our headcount and hiring, and, you know, in our QBRs and our monthly reviews, we focus on those and making sure we're keeping a close eye on that. So I'll pause there and turn it back to you.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. Is the — what's the team composition today? I mean, you have forty people on the RevOps side. How is the organizational structure? Where do you report into? What are the different responsibilities? Is the data team part of it, or is it a different team? Is the kind of technology team part of it, or is it a different team? Super curious to learn a bit more about that.

Samarth Mital: Yeah, absolutely. So we have, I would call it four key disciplines that fall within sales ops. Our sales ops teams report into our chief revenue officer, Brian McCarthy, who's a phenomenal sales leader and incredibly privileged to work with him. So the four pillars being — first is field operations, so those are the people that are partnering with the sales leaders like our global VPs of Americas, of EMEA, and APAC. So we have the field operations team that roll up and work with them to help with all things forecasting, pipeline, opportunity management, and all kinds of data and analytical pieces. Number two, you've got sales compensation, so they're the ones designing the comp plans, rolling out the ICPs, and managing that, as well as making sure that we're looking all the time at our commission cost and expense, and how we're being great stewards of that and rewarding the right behavior so we can drive the growth that we need to. The third is the sales planning and analytics, which is what I lead. So we focus on all things planning as well as pipeline and partner heavily with cross functional teams in orchestrating that go to market motion in not just setting the plan but making sure the execution of it is being done in a very thoughtful and a process oriented manner. And then the fourth pillar is sales systems. So these are the folks that are building out the sales processes, configuring our tech stack, and making sure that, whether it's forecasting or sales engagement, etcetera, all of those are being handled, and it's allowing the autonomy and scale so that as we went from the journey from seventy to nine hundred million in ARR and onward to, you know, a billion and three billion and so forth, that, you know, we can do so in a very efficient and thoughtful manner. All of that said, we also partner now closely with DealDesk, which sits under finance, product operations at CPQ, which also sits under finance, so we partner very closely with them in making sure that we're driving the deal velocity, we're protecting our margins, we're making it really easy for our sellers to transact the business. And then our sales transformation team, which is kind of, in other words, it's enablement, reports directly into our CRO and we work closely with them to identify what are the challenges we see in our ability to plan and where those pockets may be. So they're really great at, and they're mostly former sellers, so they understand how to sell, how to pitch, and they're constantly keeping a close eye on what are the new products, what's working in the market, and helping teach the art of the deal so that our sellers can be really lethal in the market. And then we partner very closely with obviously our finance and marketing teams to orchestrate that end to end motion. Then obviously renewals and customer success, right, because as we've seen with the ARR growth, that renewal book has grown significantly, so looking at all things such as GRR, renewal rates, on time, and churn, and making sure that we're not just planning but also executing on that on a weekly basis. So that's kind of the overall mindset. You asked about the data team, and then I'll turn it back to you. The data team is a central team, it sits under IT again within finance, and it's more of a, think of it as a hub and spoke model, because we really believe that having that common data foundation and the best practices and metrics, housing that in a single department, not just allows you quality in the metrics and the reporting, but also allows you to scale and really keep that domain expertise in terms of, you know, where it can drive value for the business, and they're incredibly talented and work very closely with us on a daily basis. They're in the same meetings, reviewing the same set of metrics and understand the impact of what it means for the business when, you know, we're looking at a future quarter and we're saying, oh, we see some softness, or if the pipeline build isn't working, so we're able to not just look at the output metric, but what are the inputs and where is that failing, so we can start then bringing those additional cuts of data so that now our sales leaders or our cross functional partners can take action very quickly.

Janis Zech: Yeah. This is really fascinating because it fits very well to an episode that we did with Jacco a few months back. Jacco van der Kooij, he wrote a new book called Revenue Architecture. And with him, we talked about data model and revenue architecture. And, I mean, it's basically what you're saying right now. Right? Like, you talk about some very basic metrics to look at, but then finding the right structure to collect the data on the different levels and to surface it. I think that's the really hard part where, like, especially organizations at large scale, this is really where you sort of, like, you know, can divide the companies between those who actually manage to scale to the level that Rubrik has now been able to do versus those that kind of just fail at a certain ARR level. What I'm curious about here is, so you mentioned different teams also reporting sort of to the CRO, to the CFO. How do you bring that all together? In sales, we have the SKO typically once a year. Do you have, like, an ops KO, I don't know, like something like this, where you just align and organize yourselves, or how do you structure this?

Samarth Mital: Yeah, great question. So obviously we have our planning cadences that we work towards for our annual plan, right, and for us over the years, it's been an evolution, and now we're in the rhythm where we're looking at our, not just our current year plan, but next three year plan every single quarter, right? So we have what is a quarterly rolling forecast, so we're reporting out in terms of — and we have models that have been built and we're constantly iterating on that, and we're interlocking with our finance and marketing and other parts of the business to make sure that they have not just visibility, but they can help influence and be part of that, and product and engineering is a key part of that, right, because in order to grow the business, whether it's inorganic or organic growth, we need to make sure that some of it is coming from increase in productivity, and potentially incremental headcount when needed, but then also that there's incremental product that our sellers can constantly focus in and expand the business and existing accounts in. And why that is so important for us is it allows us to manage our lifetime value and our cost of acquisition for the business. So we maintain a healthy kind of focus on new customer acquisition because for us it's really important that we're constantly expanding the pie, and our addressable market by twenty seven is upwards of fifty billion, and so we're really focused on, you know, going after that and making sure we're not diluting that focus, but also, you know, our current customers and making sure they can get the full value of the platform play. And so we build those cadences on a monthly and a quarterly basis in working with those different teams to methodically define the key metrics for each year and measure towards that. So we have what's called like an accountability forum where we meet every month, each team is responsible for reporting on the progress towards those key milestones, those key inputs that will drive those milestones, and so we don't lose sight of it. Right? At any point in time, if there's slips, we can constantly, you know, help each other and not lose sight of that. So I hope that answers your question.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. You basically have — so do you do forecasting updates on a monthly basis or — that's how I understood it.

Samarth Mital: Weekly. Forecasting is weekly. Weekly. Pipeline reviews weekly. Yeah. Yeah. Long term planning, next year planning, etcetera, that's typically monthly or quarterly, depending on where you are in the cadence. As we get closer to forming up the next year's plan, we're obviously meeting in much higher frequency, but absolutely forecast pipeline reviews, you know, at a minimum weekly, sometimes even more frequent than that, and then we intersperse that with cadences with execs and sales leaders as well to make sure that they have not just asynchronous, but like live meetings and conversations so we can understand some of the challenges and help them, whether it's, A, we're struggling in certain geography we need to hire, or we need to sort of use a different tactic, we need more help from marketing, or we need help from channel in this geography, and so we can sort of start to bring those group of people, so it's very much a central team that drives that, but then it's a pod model in terms of, okay, here's a problem, let's get the tiger team and let's go and attack it.

Janis Zech: Yep. Yeah. And this is such a great point because I think this is exactly why — this is also something we try to preach when we onboard new customers for our forecasting solution is, like, go with the weekly approach. Don't do this monthly. Like, you know, yeah, of course, like, you can do monthly forecasting in general, but the updates, like, the cadence that you need to follow, it needs to be weekly because you need to be able to react quickly. You need to collect the data, and it's about the process that you establish with that and the culture so people can follow those ceremonies, those sort of traditions that you establish over time. And this gives you the ability to then also react quickly like with a tiger team, like you mentioned. So, yeah, it makes a lot of sense, and I think it cannot work in any other way. I definitely believe this.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I think it's so interesting because, I mean, obviously, at the scale you're at, right, I would assume that the operating cadence you have is, you know, almost broken down by multiple levels of hierarchy. Right? So you have US, EMEA, APAC. Right? So there's different ceremonies for different teams that are run on a very regular basis, and I think it's all about, you know, driving accountability, collaboration, alignment. Right? And, you know, maybe a different — just something to add because I think it's something Jason Lemkin from SaaStr preaches. Right? For SaaS companies to grow to a hundred million and then faster, right, I think they always need a second product. And I think I really love how you're describing, you know, the thoughtfulness, not just to look at your new logo acquisition, but how do you actually grow, you know, the existing customer base with more products. And it's something, you know, I think we've been always fascinated with. I think there's a company called Rippling. I think many people in the SaaS space are aware of that that always had this, you know, compound product approach. Very similar to what we do at Weflow, we have, you know, a variety of different products like activity capture, pipeline management, forecasting, CI. Right? So, like, basically, you know, offering multiple products so that, you know, you can start working with customers on one product, and then they can level up and grow into other products. And, obviously, it's something that is a lot harder to do in the enterprise space, right, where you guys play, but it is so important.

Samarth Mital: Yeah, because at the end of the day, scaling isn't just about, you know, acquiring more customers, right? It's also about — you want to scale your ability to make those customers successful, and that's where a lot of SaaS companies stumble because they focus a lot of their energy on growth metrics, sign ups, new sign ups, MRR, ARR, but they neglect the real challenge, which is ensuring that those new customers actually succeed with their product. And so, you know, if you're just adding customers without supporting their success, you're not really scaling. You're setting yourself up for churn. Right? Think about it. Would you hire more sales reps if you had no onboarding process? Would you add new features without customer support to explain them? Would you promise twenty four seven service without enough staff to deliver? Right, so scaling isn't just about quantity, it's about quality at scale. And so, you know, oftentimes we think about the true test of your SaaS model is not how many customers you acquire, but how many you can keep happy and engaged in the long term, and that's where the magic happens. Because now you start to build advocates, and advocates don't just stick around, they grow with you. So, you know, as we all talk about in the world of SaaS, net new customer growth is definitely a north star, but, you know, that alongside NRR and profitability and scaling your business efficiently are constantly going to be the kind of both ends of the stick that you need to manage.

Janis Zech: Yeah. One question. You mentioned that, I mean, you're doing kind of rolling planning, right, basically every quarter, every month. How's the collaboration with the FP&A team at Rubrik?

Samarth Mital: Yeah, I think it's a healthy challenge, I would say, in the sense that, you know, they come with their point of view and they bring a certain degree of rigor and analytical mindset, as well as expectations in terms of where they want to take the company, and so we like that because it allows us to kind of look at things from a different lens, and we have our own set of modeling and things of that nature, right? And then we also, you know, bring in the product side of the team where they size the market, they talk about the potential, and where we're seeing growth in certain products and not and so forth, and what we can do to drive a certain, maybe a different go to market motion to accelerate growth in certain products, maybe structure the sales teams differently, maybe run a pilot in a certain geography, you know, maybe we build more analytical insight that would allow you visibility to why or where a certain product is selling or isn't selling, where the attach rate is declining, or where churn is coming through, etc. So you're able to then very quickly allow your sales engineers or your customer support team start to now play a more longitudinal role in that sense in securing your customer base. So we work very closely across those series of, you know, three or four metrics on a rolling cadence, which is, you know, let's evaluate it quarterly, and then let's make sure that throughout the quarter we're keeping an eye on and measuring our way towards that.

Philipp Stelzer: One thing I'm curious about as well is — I think, like, one of the hardest things to do is hiring the right people. And I think the more you grow as a business, I think the more it matters, really. I mean, I think it also matters, like, if you have just a small business, obviously, but you lose oversight, right, like, at some point. And you start to hire people, and maybe it doesn't work out, but nobody really notices, or it's just, like, the organizational track that leads to those people just staying there. So I'm curious, like, how you think about that. What are kind of things you look out for when you hire people for your part of the organization? What matters to you in terms of skills and traits?

Samarth Mital: Yeah. Great, great question there, and I think that's the number one quality. If I were to say number one quality in great companies versus good companies, right? So for us, you know, company building is a long journey. Right? We're a generational company as our CEO, Bipul Sinha, says, and folks can join startups for many reasons. You know, some join it for career advancement, speed, could be for a great boss, maybe a great mission, less bureaucracy, to make money, but the reality is they join it for a sense of purpose. Right? And when we're looking to hire, you know, three key attributes that come to mind is, one is intellect, right, that's a no brainer. You got to be able to think on your feet, be able to anticipate and dive in and solve those problems, but do so with the intellectual curiosity and rigor. The second is doing it with a great attitude, right, in that I'm willing to roll up my sleeves, I'm willing to partner, I'm willing to exude great teamwork and help each other in the process. And then the third and probably the most important — and the first two kind of pale in comparison — is integrity. As if you don't have the right transparency and honesty in how you're going about your day to day and being open about the challenges and being core to the purpose, then the first two don't play as big of a role. Right? So I think those are some of the key attributes. What I've also found incredibly important is, you know, we do a mix of functional and behavioral reviews of people when we're hiring, but we'll also run our candidates through case interviews. So we'll provide them a data driven case, you know, think of it as you're presenting to a CRO, a sales leader, and you know, you have all the data, let's look at how you think, how you structure the problem, what assumptions you've made, what recommendations and outputs you come through with, and, you know, we allow them the opportunity to really dive in and showcase their skillset, and a lot of times you'll find that people might not even be willing to put in that level of effort, or they claim a certain level of outcome and capabilities on the resume, but ultimately when it comes through, it may be entirely different. So it acts as a great filtering mechanism for us, and, you know, we're very open to hiring people from different parts of experiences that they may or may not have, whether it's in sales ops, or they could have come from finance, or they could come from even marketing, or who knows, never have done this role, but if they're able to take a basic problem and able to structure, break it down, really explain, engage, you know, we've had people that have joined the team and have done incredibly well, and learned through the ropes and created some fascinating impact for us here. So I think, you know, you just gotta get down to the unit level and first principles and basics when you're going through that hiring process.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Is that the Deloitte consultant speaking in you also? Is that, like, that experience shaping that perspective? I definitely fully agree with it, by the way.

Samarth Mital: It is definitely coming from that school of thought. But then I'll also say that what I've learned here is the importance of the company culture that you're building, so you not just get the people in the house, but how do you keep them motivated and engaged and helping them through their career journey in getting them through the next and the next steps so that they can continue to progress, not just personally, but also professionally, and being able to chart that path for them and really being advocates for them. So that's really key. I go back to, you know, people come to work for you because you really care for them, you really care for their careers and for the growth that it brings and the sense of purpose. And so it's incumbent on us as leaders to kind of create that environment and really codify what those values are and showcasing those values and expecting those types of behaviors and beliefs yourself and from your team members. You know, if I go on a little bit of a tangent, we focus a lot on RIVET, which at Rubrik we call it relentlessness, integrity, velocity, excellence, and transparency. Right? So the relentlessness, I can't overemphasize, I guess, the importance of it, and especially even though we're nearing a billion dollars in revenue, we operate every single day as though it's a startup. It's that mentality. It's the hustle, and we're willing to do what it takes. Right? It's what our former president Barack Obama said, when times get tough, we don't give up, we get up. And ultimately, you don't move the business forward if you let the problem sit. The problems need to be fixed and fixed in a timely manner. Right? And so I'm incredibly fortunate where, you know, we've got a team here that is passionate about solving those and revels in that mentality and being able to go out there and continue to drive value. And, you know, it's an obligation and also an expectation that, you know, you want to maintain those high standards of performance and behavior. And it's a culture that we build that focuses on delivery. Right? There's no blame, no excuses, and you'd be surprised that sometimes optimal performance comes when people are stretched beyond their comfort zones, and that is also the place where people tend to be the happiest.

Janis Zech: I miss Obama, but that's a different topic. Let's not go down that route now. But if you would sum up, you know, what are your top learnings from your route to IPO?

Samarth Mital: Yeah. Absolutely. I'll try to do it, you know, in a bucket of five years. So the first one is it's important that you're able to find a repeatable sales motion. Right? And so obviously for early startups, it's not just about achieving product market fit, that's obviously key, but it's critical for you to achieve the results and avoid burning cash. Right? As our CEO says, you want to play to your potential. You're not just here to be good or great, but you want to play to what is your max potential. And in doing so, you can't be doing things sequentially, right? You've got to be doing things in parallel, right, whether that means, you know, your product's not maybe a year or a year and a half out, but are you willing to go out to your beta customers and sign an early order, early contract, and really test and iterate on that, and you really quickly filter out who are the real tire kickers versus the believers. Right? Number two I would say is, you know, the role of founders and early sales reps is really key, right? Especially in the initial days, the founders, given their passion and flexibility, their ability to navigate complex situations, be able to drive the sales motions, and clear the decks so that you can go out and drive big changes in the business and orchestrate the go to market motion. The third I would say is being able to hire effectively, right? The CEO's role again and the early team is key, and I remember, you know, being at Rubrik in the early days, our CEO talks about not even having a hire in the first forty five days of starting out, and he thought to himself, wow, that's a terrible mistake, but he pushed through the fear, and oftentimes he would be at like Silicon Valley coffee shops or throwing parties for engineering family, and slowly but surely, you know, we were able to build a world class team, and then one of our customers got hit by a ransomware attack, and we were able to successfully help the company recover and bring their services back online. And so that was a big accomplishment in our journey as a company, and it told us that Rubrik was poised to scale. Number three, I would say, is market focus and experimentation, right, and that you want to continue to learn and keep your ears to the ground as your customers are engaging with your product, you're constantly validating your fit and making tweaks and then growing increasingly new products as well. Number four is around your messaging and understanding your customer needs, right? You want to always be thinking customer first, then business, then the function, right? The smartest sales and revenue leaders that I've ever worked with will optimize for the customer or the buyer, and they're able to go deep and wide in exec meetings, and they think P and L, not just revenue. Gross margin matters, operating margin matters, cash flow matters, right? The worst sales leaders will close revenue at all costs and lose sight of the business' greater needs, right? And then lastly is we talked about metrics a little bit, right? It's MRR, ARR, obviously those matter, but then making sure that you're building and scaling the business for the future, and how you're building that, building the operating margin, driving the lifetime value of the customer, focusing on NRR. So I think those five key elements in summary for me, you know, as we kind of navigated the journey and still we've got a long way to go. I'd argue that we've come a long way, you know, in the analogy of if you think about Mount Everest and, you know, we were in the initial days, we may not even have been anywhere near the starting point, right, maybe we were in a coffee shop somewhere close to the starting point, but now we feel like, okay, we've reached base camp where we can see, okay, there's lots of tents, there's some oxygen, there's food, and most don't even get to base camp, right? And at base camp where we are, you occasionally get a glimpse of the peak, but as now we're climbing that mountain, you can't do it alone, and that's when you realize that it's a team effort, and occasionally things can happen, and sometimes the heroics on the team might help you navigate that, but that will never scale, right? So as you grow the company, we're very conscious that we're doing it with the team in tandem, right? And sometimes as you're going up that mountain, you get to see below, you get to see the competition, and you get to pick the path because you're the first ones out there, and that's the energizing part, right? The higher you go, obviously, the less oxygen there is and the harder it is, right? And the most fit are the ones that can get anywhere near the top, right? So we're constantly focusing on that part and making sure that we're ready for that game. So the teamwork, the discipline, the operational rigor is critical for us