"World of DaaS"
deep dive into Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) businesses. World of DaaS is a podcast for data enthusiasts, by data enthusiasts, where Auren Hoffman talks to business and technology leaders about all things data - building it, acquiring it, analyzing it, and everything in between.
"World of DaaS"
Bill Magnuson, CEO of Braze $BRZE : Future of Mobile
Bill Magnuson is the co-founder and CEO of Braze ($BRZE), a publicly traded customer engagement platform valued at over $5 billion.
In this episode of World of DaaS:
- Growth of mobile technology
- Power of first-party relationships
- Modern martech mindset vs traditional advertising
- Tech company IPOs
- How SMS spam and fraud works
- Build vs buy martech strategies
- Toxic tech workplace culture and “family”
World of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph & Flex Capital. For more episodes, visit worldofdaas.buzzsprout.com, and follow us @WorldOfDaaS.
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Bill Magnuson on X at @billmag
Follow World of DaaS @WorldOfDaaS
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)
Welcome to World of DaaS. A show for data enthusiasts. I'm your host, Auren Hoffman, ceo of Safegraph and GPFlex Capital. For more conversations, videos and transcripts, visit safegraphcom slash podcasts. Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Bill Magnuson. Bill is the co-founder and CEO of Braze, a publicly traded customer engagement platform valued at over $5 billion. Bill, welcome to World of DAS.
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here this morning.
Auren Hoffman:Now, how did your original 2011 vision for mobile compare to the way the market has developed?
Bill Magnuson:So I think, when I reflect back on the early days, it's a really great example of the adage of how we overestimate progress in the short term and then we underestimate it in the long term. So, in the short term, we were founded in mid 2011. And we were trying to build something that would help mobile app developers build more sustainable businesses. There was a lot of energy in mobile. People were building a lot of really cool apps, they were experimenting. There were a lot of things that were toys and gimmicks and we all remember the flashlight apps with the ads and we remember the prank calling, soundboards and all that kind of stuff but people weren't really focused on building sustainable businesses, and so we started in mid 2011. Smartphones existed, app stores existed, but it would still be several years and we actually almost ran out of money twice in those early days before we even started to sign our first actual paying customers.
Bill Magnuson:Now, on the flip side, I look back on it today and the spread of mobile has now outpaced every other technology in the world, including like grid electricity to even charge your phone, or literacy like this is the most widespread technology of all time, and I look back on it to 2011, when I quit my job and started this company and the number of units shipped on that timeline is like this big all the way back in 2011. And it obviously came in like a tidal wave and just spread across the whole world and that's kind of an incredible thing. When we look at timing, it's like, on the one hand, we were there at the ground floor and we were there just the right time in mid 2011. On the other hand, we almost didn't exist. We actually did almost run out of money twice and all three of our early Series A, series B, series C we only ever got one term sheet in each one of those rounds and it was not for lack of trying. It was definitely very, very difficult in those early days.
Auren Hoffman:And over those last 13, 14 years, what surprised you most about general development in mobile?
Bill Magnuson:So, on the one hand, it has followed patterns that you see in other generations technologies Like cloud or something I kind of think about it more around, like consumer interfaces and the way that we adapt and the way that we integrate these things into our lives and the way that then brands and institutions and businesses think about what they're going to deliver. And I think the financial services industry is a really easy example of this. The earliest websites for banks were usually a phone number and their operating hours. Basically, they were taking what was on a sign that you would drive up and it would be printed on the window. And now it's on a website and then you start to really think about it and you're like, okay, actually, if I can be open all the time, what can that do? It means that if I log into my bank, I could start to see my balance there and I could start to engage with the bank in a way that wasn't possible before.
Bill Magnuson:Then you get into the mobile era and the early banking apps. You would log in and you got to see your bank account balances and there wasn't much else to do there. But then the fact that everyone had a mobile phone brought to bear mobile payments and peer to peer payments right, and so that ends up being a mobile-specific use case that ends up transforming the financial industry completely again. But it was not obvious in the beginning, and so I think that through these generations of technology we always jumped into it at first and we just take the old thing that we were doing and we move it to the new form factor and then it takes a while to really get used to that form factor, for consumer preferences to change.
Bill Magnuson:There were a lot of stumbling blocks along the way In mobile early data was expensive, the battery life wasn't great, we didn't have the GPS as miniaturized. There was also just prevailing consumer sentiment. You probably remember people being concerned that if they just put their credit card into a phone that it would somehow immediately get stolen, or all the hand-wringing about like is it really worth it to buy a digital good? Should I really pay $3 for this thing? And it's like these feel like quaint concerns now. But they all did get in the way of that early mobile economy and when you look at the pieces it was like some hardware. Here it was a telco deployment, here it was prevailing consumer attitudes over there and also obviously the mobile app ecosystem itself had to find compelling value props that took advantage of what was different about this technology for it to really take off.
Auren Hoffman:If we fast forward five years from now, what do you think is going to surprise me, or maybe surprise our audience?
Bill Magnuson:This is perhaps a mundane answer, but I think that that's why it'll be surprising, is I actually think smartphones are going to continue to be a dominant form factor for quite a while.
Bill Magnuson:There's a lot of talk right now about the Apple Vision Pro, there's been a lot around augmented reality and mixed reality and what's the next device, and etc.
Bill Magnuson:When I look at the history of mobile and especially the way that human behavior around it and the behavior of institutions has changed, From my perspective, I actually think that the step that we took when we went from not being connected as a species to being fully, instantaneously interconnected to each other spread across the whole globe.
Bill Magnuson:Now we can communicate with each other instantaneously, we can access knowledge and information no matter where we are, and that is kind of a step change as a species, and I think that that is so much more profound and more important than the form factor that we use in order to access that connectivity. We tend to try to look at the next new thing and try to decide is this the next new thing? And I think it's just really important we stay grounded in the fact that we just deployed mobile connectivity and computing to the entirety of the globe in a way that technology had never spread before and I think that the impacts that are going to play out from there we're still very much in the globe in a way that technology had never spread before and I think that the impacts that are going to play out from there we're still very much in the early innings of it.
Auren Hoffman:And while about 90% of Americans have a smartphone, I think maybe 55% of the globes. So there's still a lot to go. There's more and more people have this information in their pocket. How is that going to change things? Or is it just going to be kind of a steady march toward change?
Bill Magnuson:It's hard to get exact numbers on this because a lot of people own multiple devices, but the numbers are actually most likely in the 80 plus percent around the globe. Oh, okay, really, yeah, and I actually I've often quoted. I think it's really interesting that actually smartphones have deployed even to communities where they don't have access to a grid, and it's so important to people's lives that they go and rent time to charge it on a battery hooked up to a solar panel that's on top of someone's home, and it's because that connectivity ends up being such a game changer for things. I love the examples where you have farmers who would benefit from having access to weather forecasts but there's not even literacy in their community, and so there's actually been services that have been developed where they can access audio weather forecasts to be able to know what's coming or to be able to get advice around, like when to plant different seeds and what to do for fertilizers and things like that, depending on long range forecasts, or what's going on with drought conditions and things like that. And that's a really great example where you come into a place where you wouldn't necessarily think of as being a place that's going to adopt advanced high tech technology. Sustainable farming, as an example, is not about to have self driving John Deere tractors that are being directed around by satellites anytime soon, but they actually still have massive benefit to be gained by having connectivity to information that's already available, and so I think that there's still a lot of examples where there's an opportunity to still inject communication and better data into a lot of the activities that we're already doing today. And similarly, I think, when we look at the impact on our day-to-day lives of brands continuing to develop stronger first-party connections with us through technology, one of the ones I've been speaking about quite a bit this year, because I think there's some really interesting change about to happen across a lot of different verticals, is the drive toward building the first party relationship with a customer as a primary priority of a business, and now the simple example of this is the massive investment that Disney has put into Disney Plus. I think Disney is a great example of a business where they've had a multifaceted business model since the very beginning. Many of us have seen that master plan from Walt Disney where you've got the characters and the songs and the movies in the early day, build the connection and they cement that connection with the stories that they have to tell. That brings you into the theme park. The theme park forms the memories, it brings you back to the merchandise and these things all feed into each other. But while they had this amazing multifaceted connection with a lot of the globe, they didn't necessarily have the first party data to understand it and they didn't have the first party platform to be able to communicate with people and to be able to enhance that first party experience directly and enter Disney Plus. They're now able to do that. I think we go to another vertical like.
Bill Magnuson:Automotive is a really interesting example where the vast majority of people that own cars, they have this relationship with the automobile manufacturer in the sense that they rely on their products almost every single day, but they have almost zero interactions with them. Right, they buy it from a dealer, they fill it up from an oil company or an energy company. They're getting service done with them. Right, they buy it from a dealer, they fill it up from an oil company or an energy company. They're getting service done somewhere else. They're buying insurance from a financial services company. They're getting accessories from yet another. They're washing it at a car wash chain. They're parking it somewhere. Right, like. There's all these other brand interactions, and none of them are with the automobile manufacturer.
Bill Magnuson:And then enter the simple innovation of letting you unlock your vehicle with a mobile app and now, all of a sudden, they actually have a way to understand the nature of that relationship and to communicate with you directly through your phone.
Bill Magnuson:That creates, then, a platform for those businesses to be able to innovate with new services.
Bill Magnuson:They can now put custom-tailored insurance offers in front of you. It can adapt based off of your driving style, they know when a lease is coming up and they also can communicate with you around that. So, instead of needing to bombard the world around you with brand advertising, they can reach out to you directly and they can help convert you into, effectively, a subscriber, instead of having someone that's going to turn off and you need to reacquire them. There will continue to be on the foundation of building these first party relationships with people and being able to maintain a continued conversation or communication with them through mobile. Really amazing opportunity, I think, for businesses to diversify in a way where before they were more beholden to their supply chain or to various aggregators, and so I'm actually excited, in particular over the next five years, to see what the advent of basically every vertical now being able to build a direct first party relationship is going to do to the way that they approach their own businesses and the business models that they drive into the future.
Auren Hoffman:As everyone is doing this, the number of apps that we have on our phones now have proliferated. I don't even know how many apps I have, and then most of those I haven't used in a very long time. So you have this like quick relationship you, you check into a Hyatt, you download the app or something, but then maybe you don't use it for a very long time and as they're all competing with each other, in some ways, maybe it's less important than it was, or do you think it's still extremely important?
Bill Magnuson:Well, there's only so much attention that a consumer can provide and only so much wallet to be able to turn into revenue for those businesses, and so I think that the competition for those scarce resources will continue to be fierce right, and the fact that they have a foothold in that relationship in the form of an app that you've downloaded but are using doesn't necessarily mean that they've got a fantastic, enriching relationship with you, but it is a foundation upon which they can build. I think there's a few other interesting dimensions to competition as well, in particular, in the digital space. Almost all services can now be much more global than they ever were before. There's an interesting aspect of Braze's revenue that I get asked about a lot, which is that over 40% of our revenue comes from outside of the United States, and I've been getting some version of the question.
Bill Magnuson:You seem like a pretty young company to have that much of your revenue come from outside of the US, and I have to laugh because it's actually been true since the mid 2010s.
Bill Magnuson:It's not something that became true more recently, and the reason wasn't because we started with offices all over the world.
Bill Magnuson:It was actually just that the App Store was such a global distribution platform that our customers, from the very first day, were spread out around the world and the App Store meant that not only were you available on an increasingly global install base and we spoke about that earlier but you could process transactions in 100 plus currencies, and you could do that on the very first day, and so, as a distribution mechanism, you don't have a supply chain to worry about, you don't have any of the cross border transactions, etc.
Bill Magnuson:Any mobile app anywhere in the world could become a global service. Now, of course, the flip side to that means that you don't have any geographic monopolies to protect you from competition either, and so there's a bunch of ways that I think the opportunity is much larger than ever before, because we've got the ability to understand the consumer in a first party way. We can communicate with them in order to enrich that relationship throughout. Depending on what your product or services, you can probably go more global or fully global well before you would have otherwise an access, an audience that's interconnected to this platform at a scale that has never existed before. But, of course, with opportunity like that, obviously comes competition as well, and that's what you're highlighting, and so there's great opportunity for people that are going to do it really well and there's more opportunity than there ever has been before. But the flip side of that is always competition.
Auren Hoffman:Now one of the really cool things that's happened in the last few years is just like the proliferation of payments, and I love when I go to New York, when I travel the subway. Now I don't have to get one of those cards. I can just use my phone or watch or whatever and pay, which is just amazing, but when I travel I still need to take my wallet. It's got my ID A lot of times. I still need my credit cards. Maybe I don't need cash as much anymore. When do you think we're going to be at a point where everyone's going to be traveling without their wallet?
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, I mean I think we're getting close. I already have friends who travel. Your wallet just kind of stays in your hotel room and they just go out with their phone. I was just in Utah recently and saw their digital ID being advertised in their security in the TSA-like line. If you're a Utah resident, you can actually now use your digital driver's license on your phone, instead of needing to do it there.
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, as far as I know, new York doesn't have that yet, but I certainly will sign up once they do. I had a friend who actually went to Dubai recently from London and he said that he realized that he didn't have his wallet with him when he got to the airport. He had his phone and he had his passport and he just decided to chance it and went to Dubai and made it the whole week just using Apple Pay Amazing, wow. So it's like the point where you're literally not bringing your wallet with you anymore. You need to have confidence that that's going to work, but I do think there are already situations where people are doing it, and it's a pretty nice place to get to for sure.
Auren Hoffman:One of the other things I'm really excited about is this idea of near field communication, getting rid of the key, and so the Tesla works amazing. Right, you just kind of show up next to your Tesla, you can walk in. You don't even need to like take out your phone, you don't even need to open the app, which is incredible. It's just an incredible experience.
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, actually I just dug this out of my pocket, but the only key I carry is my bike lock key. Stuck this out of my pocket, but the only key I carry is my bike lock key.
Auren Hoffman:Okay, good example, right, yeah, so like, imagine, when you go to a hotel like the apps don't really work that well to get you into the door, it seems like in the next few years your phone will be your key to get a lot of offices. You still need to have that card key or the fob or something to get you in there.
Bill Magnuson:We're going to get there at some point pretty soon and that's going to be amazing, yeah, and I think that a big part of that is also that we're becoming more and more comfortable with our identity being associated with our device, with our phone, and it is a great thing as well, because it's a lot more secure Once we actually get there. That has real security capability in it that just doesn't exist with happening to have physical possession of something else. So, in addition to being organized, in many cases it's more auditable, it's more secure, so it's definitely a good direction of travel. You mentioned payments. The fintechization of a lot of different brands is another interesting example where you're building a more multifaceted relationship with the customer. Even things like buy now, pay later that are getting integrated in a lot of whether you're working with a third-party service or you're white labeling something else. That's actually an opportunity for a brand to have an ongoing relationship with you as well. It's a financing relationship, but the fact that when you command the consumer attention and they make that purchase through you, you can then build a more long-term relationship with them through a financial services product. That creates a more multifaceted relationship, and you're going to see a lot of brands, I think, continue to push ahead on dimensions like that in a way that you certainly didn't see in the economy of the last few decades.
Bill Magnuson:So many businesses were very narrowly focused on whatever their vertical was. Even then they stayed in their whatever part of the supply chain they lived in and there were aggregators and distributors and everything else and there was kind of margin throughout. And what you're seeing is there's more and more opportunity for the brand that actually holds the customer loyalty to collapse a lot of that stack and build the relationship directly with the customer. They capture more margin through that vertical integration, but then, of course, now have the opportunity to expand their offering horizontally as well. Another great example of this, I think, is in the QSR space quick service restaurants where a lot of them in the early days of delivery they had to jump on partnering with the delivery services, but the power relationship was that the delivery service owned the customer relationship and so they're paying pretty high fees to them. And in many cases for those QSRs it was actually the brand loyalty to them that was causing the order to happen in the first place. Right, but because the delivery app commanded the customer attention, they were getting the lion's share of the margin and that was fine when it was incremental demand, but then when it turns out that it's your most loyal customers that are actually producing that demand and it's coming through someone else, that's a big business problem for you.
Bill Magnuson:And so now they've innovated. Much like the hotels and airlines obviously have built their own incentives to directly book and reserve through them, the QSRs have also built their own delivery and takeout services. They built their own mobile apps and mobile wallets mobile apps and mobile wallets and then, once they get to the point where they actually own the customer relationship and they have the demand, they can turn that on its head and they can then use the delivery service and white label it and be able to actually still provide the delivery to the customer. But now they're actually negotiating with that delivery service as a utility or a commodity that's just getting the food to people. They can still maintain the relationship, and whether or not they're making almost nothing or they're actually vertically integrating more of the service delivery is entirely dependent on whether or not they hold that customer attention at the beginning of the transaction. And so you know, that's yet another incentive for businesses to be investing in building those first party relationship interfaces.
Auren Hoffman:The problem is, though, is that some of these businesses, like Starbucks, have just an incredible job. They've got a great mobile app and it works really well. Most of them, their mobile app is terrible. It's very hard to use, it's very clunky and, if you think of most banks, it's a real terrible experience.
Bill Magnuson:Most of the world's airlines, hotels, etc.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, and that's just not what they do. That's not what their core competency is, is like UI, interaction technology, etc. So I mean, not everyone's going to be able to make that leap to the next thing they do become commoditized.
Bill Magnuson:They become available from verticalized suppliers, like even from a customer engagement standpoint, you would have had to have been a very sophisticated technology organization to be able to roll your own version of that 5-10 years ago. Now you can buy Braze. We'll help you configure it. We can get you up and running with really sophisticated approaches to solving that customer engagement problem. When you look at other examples of that over time, where technology deploys more slowly, the streaming space was another great example where in the early days Netflix seemed to be the only company that could figure out how to get you to be able to stream on multiple devices and they still. When you look at the unit economics of their streaming service, they still certainly stand out from other people because they've had quite a head start. But from a technology perspective many of these other streaming platforms actually close the gap. And now most of the questions that exist in the streaming space are more Hollywood problems than they are Silicon Valley problems. Right, because the technology problem has been solved.
Auren Hoffman:And I guess, if we think of retail, if you build on top of Shopify or something like, you're going to have a great store. Maybe you just need to like customize it in some sort of way.
Bill Magnuson:And then it shifts from it's a retail and a product design problem rather than the technology problem of just getting you through a checkout experience right. And with food it's like you build the loyalty general because of the quality of the food experience that you actually get. And then the technology needs to be sufficient. And, to your point, for many companies the technology is not sufficient, but over a longer time horizon it gets there, and as long as that brand hasn't been mortally injured, I guess, along the way and they're still building great products that people are enjoying. With the hotel, you put up with the bad app as long as the hotel room is awesome and that gives them time to then figure that out.
Bill Magnuson:Obviously, as a consumer, especially people in the technology space, we would love it if everyone just got with the program. But from your bank as an example, you want your bank to keep your money safe and not have a chance of failing first and then the app. It matters for sure, but the key thing there is the trust relationship and the financial security, and so it could be frustrating as a consumer, and it's even frustrating when you try to sell to some of these companies because, especially if they're in a highly regulated or a capital intensive industry. They're insulated from competition in a way that we were talking about before. A lot of a globally deployed digital service built on top of mobile is immediately exposed to intense competition and they're forced to provide you a top notch digital and mobile experience or else they're going to quickly die.
Bill Magnuson:In capital-intensive and highly regulated industries and we mentioned some of these, like banking or travel and hospitality Healthcare Healthcare there's more insulation from competition, so they have more time to be able to catch up, and the same thing was true in the movie. With respect to movie production. There's a lot of entrenched forces and momentum that exists there. It gave them some time. They don't have infinite time, but there is an opportunity for them to at least get there.
Auren Hoffman:I hope this happens soon Because if you think of like these large, let's say, a retailer or restaurant, they can invest quite a bit in this. Like, my favorite quick serve restaurant is Five Guys. Like, I love Five Guys I'm a huge Five Guys fan but they're kind of like in the middle. They're not nearly as big as a Starbucks or something to invest in that, but they're big enough where they have to start thinking about. And ordering directly from Five Guys is probably going to be way better for me than ordering it via DoorDash or something. It just gives probably a much better experience if I could do that.
Bill Magnuson:And I think, as the economy eventually shakes out, there's still a lot of room for DoorDash to really be the aggregator for every single small pizza chain and small retailer and there's so much of the economy where that aggregator is really valuable. And, similarly, that aggregator is super helpful to be able to introduce net new customers to a brand. Maybe you, as a loyal Five Guys customer, will go into their first party ecosystem and engage with it there, but someone that's never tried Five Guys is more likely to discover it through DoorDash than they are through something else, and so there's still gonna be a role for discovery and for that aggregation. But for customers where you have the opportunity to develop the first party relationship with them, that's something that, as a brand, you've got a strong incentive to lean into.
Bill Magnuson:The same thing obviously has already been playing out over the last 1020 years with online travel booking agencies as well, where you who are going to a new city for the first time that might not have any loyalty to a particular boutique hotel or hotel brand or whatever. You're probably not going to find them unless you're doing it through a hotelscom or a bookingcom or a TripAdvisor or maybe even just Google Maps, whatever like that discovery phase. But you go there, you have an incredible experience, you join their email list or you engage with their loyalty program or something like that, and then that's the foothold for them to have an enduring first party relationship with you, and then the next time you book through them, they're going to make more margin, right. You're going to have a more connected experience, and so these things need to build on each other, but there's only a role to play for each of the stages.
Auren Hoffman:Now marketing is changing like super fast and it may be faster than almost any other industry which has led to just a ton of creative destruction. A lot of MarTech companies have gone out of business. What type of people are well adapted to exceed as leaders of these more tech companies?
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, that's an interesting question, I think, with a lot of different answers depending on what part of marketing we're in. I think that Braze has gone through an interesting evolution where actually in our early days, if you go into our code base, actually the database model for a login to the Braze dashboard is a developer, not a marketer, because in the very early days of Braze, mobile apps didn't have business models and it doesn't really make sense to have a marketing team when you don't have a business model yet.
Auren Hoffman:All right, so you were selling dev tools, essentially.
Bill Magnuson:We were selling to usually like small product and engineering only teams that were putting apps in the app store. So you were more like Twilio in a way or that type of thing. We weren't like Twilio in the sense that we were only the low-level APIs, the service that we had. It's very similar to what you see at Braze today, where we were tracking the state of the customer, we were integrated into the product, we were delivering multi-channel messaging, but the stakeholders in the organization that would be working on that were more associated with product delivery than they were necessarily with marketing. Then what happened over time is that cross-channel communication with the customer became the responsibility of marketing teams and then now customer engagement teams.
Bill Magnuson:And when we look at what characterizes a modern customer engagement team, I think it's primarily that interdisciplinary collaboration that exists where you've got the traditional marketing or creative groups, you've got data science and business analysts and then you've got the product and engineering teams. And that's something where, when we look at the teams that do customer engagement best, it's characterized by having more data sophistication, having better interconnection into the technical delivery organizations so that there can be part of the product journey. I think that's so much of modern customer engagement. It's not just hey, let's take our brand strategy and try to get it in someone's email inbox and then hope that they'll show up on our website. You really need to be a companion to the product journey for the customer all the way throughout, so that they're there, you understand, you're getting involved in the right moments and on the right channels, you're able to kind of nudge people in the right positive direction, avoid churn or people drifting away and generally just be there as a good listener and a great companion.
Auren Hoffman:One of the things that has really propelled marketing on the web as opposed to mobile over the last 20 years or even longer, has been the cookie, the third-party cookie, and that likely will go away this year. I'd love to get your thoughts about, like why is it even survived this long, and how will the ad tech market change in kind of a more cookie-less world?
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, cookies are one of those funny ones where it started out for a very innocuous, very different purpose in the early days of the web and then people realized that just the ability to write things down is super valuable and useful for all kinds of things. And now, like here we are, why is the cookie still around? Well, there's tens, hundreds of billions of dollars that flow around, a giant interconnected ecosystem that depend on the cookie. Like that tends to produce a lot of staying power.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, and it's kind of an elegant solution Like it is anonymous in most scenarios and it allows you to more seamlessly log back into the websites that you like, so there's a lot of good about it too.
Bill Magnuson:Yep, no, totally. I mean, yeah, the ability to write things down and remember them is super valuable from a customer experience standpoint. Now, obviously, those things got abused over time. I think it's unfortunate that so much around cookies is now in the hands of regulators, because a lot of the best solutions to these problems are actually just technical fixes. Right, and we're actually seeing a lot of those technical fixes deploy as Safari and Chrome and others are continuing to develop new solutions to these things. The technical fixes for some of the abuses on cookies are actually pretty good ones, and so now we're unfortunately in this world where I think Safari in particular has really been leading the way to protect consumers with technical fixes. At the same time, we're still dealing with all these cookie pop ups everywhere else, and it's just like that was not the world we wanted to end up in. I hate how, in particular, when I use the internet when I'm in Europe, it's like I'm in the 90s again with all these damn pop ups. It's so annoying.
Auren Hoffman:Oh my gosh, it sucks so much out of all of our lives, those pop ups. I don't know anyone who ever says no, I don't agree. So it's just the silliest thing.
Bill Magnuson:I'll give a quick plug for a browser extension called I still don't care about cookies, that just auto accepts those.
Auren Hoffman:Oh great.
Bill Magnuson:Okay.
Auren Hoffman:If I had that browsing session, it probably would have saved me a lot of frustration over my life, yeah.
Bill Magnuson:So I think that, on the one hand, like obviously, they've stuck around because they're an important part of a really large online digital economy, and so even small changes to them have been super impactful, and I think it's been the right thing to kind of move slowly. I think that the goals, though, of being able to protect people's identity when they want their identity to be able to be protected are very good ones, and I think at Braze, we've always been focused on being respectful to the customer, making it so that the value exchange that happens is reciprocal. So, if you're going to lean into a customer's first party ecosystem, you're going to get something out of that in the form of more relevance and more personalization and better quality of service from the brand that you're engaging with, and we always talk about being a good listener versus being a creepy detective, and there's a big difference there where, like, a brand can pay attention to what you do when you use their product, and they can leverage that to understand the context around you and what you care about, be able to deliver more relevance to you through customer engagement and through product delivery. Unfortunately, what a lot of brands were doing before with respect to their data strategy is they were just trying to figure out who you were and then trying to go figure out things about you that came from that identity, and that's where you end up treading into places with data sets that are dodgy, potentially wrong, etc. You end up mistaking people for their households, or you end up mistaking one persona that a person has for another one that they wanted to keep separate, and, in general, we try to really encourage our customers to look at and respond to the behaviors and the revealed preferences, which don't actually need to be tied to someone's identity.
Bill Magnuson:You can learn about what someone cares about and deliver more relevance to them without figuring out, like literally, who they are, and I think that that, in particular, I think is a place where the identity chain whether we're talking about IDFAs or cookies or what have you and you mentioned cookies being super useful because they can remember the last thing you did on the website.
Bill Magnuson:That's a kind of a more simple version of what I'm talking about, which is just being a good listener, trying to understand what people care about, try to understand their context and to adapt and morph the product experience as a result of that, and so we always encourage brands to think about it that way first, and I think that one of the great benefits of that is that it creates reciprocal value and it does so in a way that's respectful.
Bill Magnuson:If you work with first-party data in that way, you don't have to worry very much about what's happening in the regulatory landscape, what's happening with respect to the browser or the platform changes, because you're really tied to things that are actually delivering value to consumers, and therefore it's a lot less likely for that to end up getting regulated away or for that to change. On the other hand, if for that to end up getting regulated away or for that to change, on the other hand, if you're just harvesting people's identity and selling it to the highest bidder, that's not something that's necessarily creating value for that consumer, and so if that's what your business model relies on, you should expect to be playing a cat and mouse game with regulators and platforms from now until the end of time.
Auren Hoffman:It's funny because the worst offenders of the data brokers, the spam, the SMS spam, et cetera, all the politicians themselves. They are spamming people like crazy. They're literally moving data around without anything of privacy because in some ways, like they know, they're not going to be regulated. So they're like literally the worst offender.
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, I actually have a funny story on that. We had a political organization that was trying to work with us and they wouldn't agree to our acceptable use policy and their argument was that because they were a political party, their communication was political speech and therefore it was protected and so they then don't need to follow the law around KSFAM or whatever jurisdiction we're in, jurisdiction we're in. And we were like I mean, okay, great, that's kind of between you and the courts, but Gmail deciding whether or not they're going to put your email into the inbox or the spam folder is not a matter for the courts to decide.
Bill Magnuson:Right, Like this entire industry around deliverability and spam monitoring and IP blacklists and everything else Like. That's actually a bunch of private organizations, and not only are they not going to listen to your opinion about the law and whether it applies or not, they're not even going to tell you what their own rules are, because this is adversarial. They're actually trying to fight against legitimate organized crime and fraud and a whole bunch of other things, and so they don't like publish the rules and let you follow the letter of them instead of the spirit of them and then adjudicate on the topic. They just ban your IP range, right, and so, as a provider, this is non negotiable. We are not going to allow our own reputation to be impaired because of your poor sending practices, and we kind of agreed to part ways and I don't know where they ended up, but wasn't with us because we take those things super seriously.
Bill Magnuson:But I just thought that was a really interesting example where people don't really understand that, at the end of the day, whether or not your message actually gets in front of someone and resonates with them and is valuable is really about the value that you're delivering to them, and it's very different from in the advertising world.
Bill Magnuson:You can go and be like, yeah, I'm allowed to buy whatever advertisements I want because of this, that or the other thing, and the advertising platform can decide that, but in that case you're actually renting the eyeballs.
Bill Magnuson:You are paying someone else to access that consumer attention. In the world where you've actually earned the right to put something in front of someone because they've given you access to their attention, you need to be a steward of that and you need to take that really seriously and you need to be respectful about it or else you lose that asset. And I think that that's a really important mindset shift that people need to go through from like marketing, where you're renting the attention, versus marketing where you're relying on the attention that you've built up the right to be able to access. And that's why one of those things is like discretionary marketing span that gets cut in a downturn and only has low marginal ROI, and something where you're literally building an asset for your brand that gives you optionality to be able to build more wholesome business overall, which is a lot of the opportunity we've been talking about through this podcast.
Auren Hoffman:Why is it that Google can do a great job dealing with spam in your email inbox, but they can't do a good job dealing with spam in your SMS inbox? Why is the SMS so hard Like? It seems like it would be an easier one to solve.
Bill Magnuson:Why does Google have like 12 different messaging tools?
Auren Hoffman:There's a lot of questions to start with Like why can't Google, yeah, and Apple is like horrible, you get so many SMS spams. They're just unbelievably bad.
Bill Magnuson:It's definitely coming. In the newer versions of Android, the default messages app does a lot more aggressive job of sorting out promotions. None of the political candidate spam ends up in my inbox anymore. I don't see it. Occasionally I go into my SMS spam tab and I notice a whole bunch of it there. The platforms have been slow on that. They're going to catch up. I think that the carriers, unfortunately, were. They had perverse incentives on the topic. They're making a lot of money from these things. The CPAS providers are the same way. They've been making a lot of money on it. They probably knew they should crack down. They were pretty slow to do it.
Bill Magnuson:Sms traffic pumping is another one that I find really frustrating. For people that don't know what that is, it's basically the equivalent of a 1-900 number, but via texting, where various, often criminal organizations will direct a bunch of SMS traffic through premium phone numbers where they're getting a cut of the money that's being spent on that. So like if you don't protect your two factor off login page with some sort of rate limiting, they could write a bot that applies for a new account over and over again and the phone number they put in is one of these premium phone numbers and you then, unfortunately, are texting this number, the login code, and you find yourself with a surprise $10,000 bill from Tulio or whatever. Oh wow, there are now protections for that rolling out, and we obviously have protections for those at Braze, but the industry, I think, was slow to respond to that, and I suspect that it's because there was a profit motive at play, and so with some of these things, it's important to remember that it's complex, there's a lot of incentives involved, but I think what prevails on the longer time horizon is really that customer experience.
Bill Magnuson:Consumers are not going to continue to put up with that, and while there was a bit of a gold rush around SMS because everyone opened every SMS that they received and they always wanted to be an inbox zero and there were not that many other people that were in someone's SMS inbox as soon as marketers rush into that, the law of diminishing click-through rates starts to come into play, and also the platforms respond, and when things get noisy, they're going to work hard to ensure that the noise gets controlled, and so we're already starting to see that. And then, of course, where you find yourself is right back where you could have started, which is that if you stay focused on customer relevance and on delivering value to them in a way that's respectful, then you don't have to worry that much about ending up in the spam tab with someone's SMS inbox. But if you were doing things that were not really focused on that, then that becomes an existential threat to some of your business strategies. And so at Braze, we're always really focused on are we really producing value for the customer? Are we doing it in a way that's respectful? Are we using the channel in the way that it's meant to be used? And if we stay grounded in those things, then we don't actually need to worry that much about a lot of these other evolutions that happen in the broader ecosystem.
Bill Magnuson:That's really good for us from an R&D perspective. It means that our customers are not out there like chasing their tail, and I think it's just more conducive to building these long term customer relationships. But here again, if you're not doing that, you're in the cat and mouse game with the latest version of Android or the latest version of the messages tool on the iPhone, changing the rules and modifying things. So we're always just like let's stay connected to things that are consistent about humans and value that you want to create in a way that's reciprocal and respectful, and then you, by and large, don't need to worry about those things as much.
Auren Hoffman:Now a decent size B2C marketer will have in the hundreds of MarTech vendors that they use and a company like Walmart will have in the thousands of MarTech vendors. If you look at those logo slides like that Loom Escape and stuff, they're just like an eyesore. Is the number of vendors let's say a company has? Is that going to increase or decrease over the next five years?
Bill Magnuson:I think it depends on what part of it you're in. One of the things that I've been really interested in seeing, especially across big global multinationals, is that a lot of them will even have 10 different pieces of software to do the same exact thing, like send email, as an example and one of the reasons I think that that has happened in the past is that marketing in general was procured in a regional way. You wanted to be able to adapt your message to the local market, and your event strategy or like whichever media organizations you're working with or whatever, changed from place to place, and you would therefore work with an agency of record in this country and a different one over here, and then they would bring the technology with them as well, and so you ended up with adaptation, which then led to technical sprawl. Now there's a couple things happening. One of them is that more of the platforms where, for instance, advertising is being purchased are global. So, instead of needing to work with and buy from a thousand different newspapers and a thousand different TV, broadcast networks or whatever, there's one Instagram, facebook and like through meta, you can access that, and then, through Google and TikTok, you've got global reach from just three counterparties, and so that is, I think, a marketplace dynamic that has changed, which leads to more consolidation. You also have the rise of platforms like Braze, where we are not only able to coordinate messaging across mobile web, email, sms across being able to deliver surveys, etc. Across all these different platforms and channels, but actually, when you do a good job of delivering and orchestrating all those things together, you are getting more value out of that investment and your customers are getting a better experience, and so there's a bunch of pressure that is pushing to consolidation.
Bill Magnuson:But, of course, in other places we're seeing a continued explosion of new innovation, and so, where I think we're going to definitely see there be more consolidation in terms of the orchestration of customer engagement, I think that we're seeing an explosion right now in a lot of data science, tooling, the ability to do bespoken, interesting modeling, like a lot that's happening from a reporting perspective, being able to bring transformers into the picture, and new machine learning techniques that are going to plug into that ecosystem. So there's a lot of really interesting, exciting things that are happening there. You're seeing a little bit more of a collapse in the data warehouse space, but those data warehouses are now places like Snowflake or Databricks or what have you, but now on top of them they've actually created a platform by which there's going to be a really interesting ecosystem of other applications that plug into those more easily. So, while you might see a collapse in the data warehouses, you'll see an explosion that sits on top of them. Similarly, I think there's a collapse and we already see this in terms of a lot of customers consolidating in all these single channel solutions that they had for a separate one for sending SMS, from push, from delivering surveys, etc.
Bill Magnuson:You consolidate that all together and braze. But there's a lot of inputs to Braze from a creative production standpoint, and I think we're going to see a lot more tools that are being used by teams that are experimenting with new content. They're trying different approaches, like we'll obviously build in machine learning to be able to help with content prediction and content production, but there's also going to be bespoke approaches to those problems. There's going to be vertical solutions that are going to help people move in in a more specific way, and so I think there's a certain budget that an organization has to deal with vendor complexity. If you will and if you gain the ability to consolidate in one place, that, more likely is just going to lead to you bringing in even more vendors somewhere else because you've got room for it, and I think that's what leads to a lot of great innovation opportunities that there's consolidation happening, but on that consolidated place as a platform, you create an opportunity for more expansion.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, and these middleware providers. When we started LiveRamp, like the bet was that there would be more vendors in the future than there were in the past, and that's obviously good for any middleware business, like a Zapier or something like that, and they're becoming easier and easier to use and there's now, like all these competing middleware businesses, also to help you, or even like a segment, or even like a snowflake in some ways to distribute this around. Yep, now on M&A a lot of these MarTech companies have really expanded through M&A. You guys with Braze, I mean, I think you've made one or so acquisition and I don't even know if it was a big acquisition. What are your thoughts on this kind of like build versus buy?
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, just to kind of clarify the history with Braze we have just made the one acquisition. It was primarily go-to-market as well, so it didn't have any bearing on R&D or the product. Definitely, acquisitions will be part of our future strategy for sure, but one of the filters that we'll always place on it is that we need to make sure that it's part of our integrated architecture and part of the integrated strategy that we have around customer engagement. I think that solving the problem of customer engagement a while ago transitioned from it being technically hard to just get messages through pipes to it actually being a problem of managing the complexity that's inherent in taking a nonlinear customer journey across a lot of different platforms and channels and kind of showing up at various points over time in unpredictable ways, because the customer now decides when they engage with you times a lot of different goals that your company might have from a strategic perspective and if we kind of believe a lot of the things we talked about earlier on, we'll see more and more companies with more divisions and more facets of the customer relationship over time that we'll be able to feed into each other in really positive ways. But of course that does introduce more complexity to trying to organize all those different goals against each other times the customer preferences, and then there's all the different ways that you would communicate with them, and when you look at how all those things stack up, it's this competitorial explosion of complexity. And so I think that the hardness of the problem in our space has just as much to do with the technical hardness of being able to run a stream processor at scale that processes 10 plus trillion data points in a year and is able to dispatch messages to people quickly and in a personalized way, and that's definitely a hard technical problem. But there's also the complexity that needs to be managed within the system so that a customer can actually feel comfortable going in and continuing to experiment with new ideas, expand to new channels, new platforms, etc.
Bill Magnuson:I think when you look at the prior generation of cross-channel marketing automation tools, in arguably all of them you have a customer base which is primarily in a single channel it's usually email and they finally get themselves deployed and set up on that.
Bill Magnuson:And there's so much complexity in how both the system itself runs They've layered different acquisitions on top of each other over time and also when they then expanded to other channels, they usually did through acquisition, and so you find yourself with disparate feature sets, whether or not you're sending an email or you're sending something to a mobile device, and it's like this is available in real time here, but over here you got to wait for the CTL to get it to this other architecture and like these features are available here but not here, etc.
Bill Magnuson:It's all just cognitive overhead that adds complexity to the system and keeps people from really being able to expand and deploy new strategies, get into more parts of the customer journey, etc. And so I think what we've seen is actually a long history of mistakes that were made by the legacy clouds that we compete against, that were born of their acquisition strategy because they introduced additional complexity as they were trying to get more features. They didn't control for the complexity sufficiently, and that has now created an opportunity for an integrated architecture like Braze to come in and provide differentiation in what is a much more demanding, much more competitive, much more real-time problem space than it was before.
Auren Hoffman:On the one hand, thinking of it from first, principles, like that is going to lead to a much better product. On the other hand, like by doing an acquisition, you can get to market faster. So if you think of like Twilio, like at one point they acquired SendGrid, they could have maybe really focused and built that email solution, but they made a decision. How do you decide? I imagine these are very, very tough decisions.
Bill Magnuson:I think that's a great horizontal expansion for them and it was a way where it was like it was very similar to their SMS business. It was another channel, it existed at the same layer of the stack as well. It had a similar customer base really a great expansion for them to do, and to be able to do that at speed by doing it through acquisition made a lot of sense. One of the other interesting things in the marketing technology space is that Braze is built with a real-time event-driven stream processing engine and the vast majority of the marketing technology landscape certainly all of it when we started and even the vast majority of it today is still using bulk processing of data. It's getting faster over time, obviously, but it's not a real time event driven stream processing architecture. And so in the Twilio example with their SMS, cpaas and then SendGrid, it was at the same layer of the stack. The APIs worked in similar ways. They were kind of stateless transactional message sending highly reliable Braze.
Bill Magnuson:Actually, when we've looked at other technology companies in the space that we could plug in, they haven't been architected as stream processors, they have been architected with batch processing, and so in many cases we felt that we would probably have ended up throwing the technology away or big portions of it, and that the integration process would take a long time to build. So in those cases, we passed on it and we ended up deciding to build on our own. Now that's not going to be true forever, and there's a lot of companies now that are being built on top of platforms like Confluent and Kafka instead of being built on top of, like SQL and Redshift or whatever. There's this new generation.
Bill Magnuson:Or even like the old Hadoop stuff.
Bill Magnuson:Exactly, there's a lot in the marketing space that was like that, because when all you were doing was sending campaigns, the technical demands on sending a campaign are more about eventual throughput and the overall amount of time it takes to send that. It's very different from needing to respond in the moment, right in the middle of a product experience, where, like, even a couple hundred milliseconds of latency really really matters. So there's just very different technical demands when you are in the product experience, and that means that a lot of the natural targets that you would look at and be like, oh, maybe Brace should buy that and plug it in, or buy that and plug it in their plug, doesn't fit. It was a different approach to solving the technical problem, but as more startups get built up today on more modern data foundations, on streaming platforms, et cetera, I do expect that to become a more target-rich environment for Braze over time, and so we're going to continue to pay close attention, but I do think that maintaining that integrated architecture will be super important for us.
Auren Hoffman:Now Braze went public 2021, peak tech, peak market. Then you had to deal with 2022, which was just like a disaster for tech Everyone's down. I think everyone was down like over 50%. Now you guys have recovered your stock price, but I imagine this was like super stressful, like walk me through being a public company in 2022.
Bill Magnuson:It wasn't as stressful as a lot of people surmise that it was, and part of that was that we were right at the tail end of the bull market. To like, it was late November 2021.
Auren Hoffman:We were one of the last just got out.
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, we were like one of the last, like three or four, depending on how you want to count it companies that made it out, and the declines actually all started before our share lockup even expired. Okay, got it.
Auren Hoffman:So you couldn't sell it.
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, there was no one that even had like a sense of loss because it was never really there.
Bill Magnuson:You never even had the option, and so there was really no choice but to just stay focused and continue executing and build it back up, and, from a company priority perspective, nothing changed.
Bill Magnuson:I think it's also important to remember that an IPO is a fundraising event, so one of the benefits of raising right at the tail end of the longest uninterrupted bull market of all time is that we top ticked our fundraise right, so we had the confidence that we had the balance sheet to be able to invest in the ways that we needed to. Even well, maybe the stock price is suffering in the short term, that doesn't mean that we can't continue to invest in the business and drive toward our long term goals. And so, from a company focused perspective, I think things stayed relatively consistent. Now, as the CEO and from an investor relations standpoint, we did have quite a mess on our hands Because, as we get to the end of 2021, we still did the roadshow, virtually, so we met with tons of investors, but they were all on the same TV screen, in the same room and zoom, and we were probably the 150th company that they evaluated that went into IPO that year and let's be frank about what was going on in the investment world.
Bill Magnuson:They probably weren't really evaluating very much like everything was going up and to the right, and so most investors were just trying to pile into every IPO one allocation Yep they weren't really doing their homework necessarily, and so then, when the bottom starts to fall out of the market and everyone whether they're like sell everything in the front office or sell everything, that's marketing right or whatever we just got bucketed in with everyone else and the investors hadn't really done the work to get to know us. There was a lot of noise in our space as we IPO. We had Twilio rebrand themselves as a customer engagement platform, Like basically, as we started our roadshow, they announced Twilio Engage, like right, as we started talking to investors as we were preparing for IPO, and so we are trying to emerge into this new category. We made the call to call ourselves customer engagement right and really drive toward that category we've been creating, instead of trying to fall into a pre existing one. That has a lot of value, as you can create a new category, but it also requires a lot of work be done in order to really build up the analyst understanding and the investor understanding, and so not only did we already have a hard task, but there was a lot of noise in the market around us as well, and there was a lot of noise in the market overall because so many companies IPO that year, and so we really actually just had to pound the pavement. Basically, and in every opportunity after earnings we were on the road me, my CFO, our president as well as our head of investor relations.
Bill Magnuson:We would divide and conquer, go out, try to tell our story to as many institutional investors and long onlys as we could, to try to help build that base and to be able to engage with the analyst community. And it was a lot of days on the road, it was a lot of dealing with. So I've done a little bit of work on the name, but could you just start at the beginning, Like needing to go through that over and over again, and there's a part of me that really hates that repetition. But when I look at the investor base that we built through that time period, it's a really great one. We've got a lot of long only supporters. Now We've been able to build a really great base of institutional investors.
Bill Magnuson:We did that by going out and really telling our story, helping clear up their misunderstandings, help define the category for them, help them understand where value is being created, where the real points of competition are. There was a lot of misunderstanding out there, and so that was an important work that we had to go and do because of the way that the market acted. But I think that from an internal perspective, it was really important to just stay focused on our goals, to be able to build long term value, knowing that we had a war chest to be able to go and do it, and that, if anything, an environment where the macro is bearing down on people and the market is bearing down on people it's happening to your competitors as well. And so if you find yourself in a position where you have a war chest and you don't need to worry about that quite as much and you have the notoriety we were basically the only company or category that did make it out, so we had the notoriety and the brand awareness benefit from that.
Bill Magnuson:We had the war chest. That's the time to go out and make progress against your competitors. Where it's going to be harder for them to raise. They're gonna have to worry about all those other things. They don't have that advantage of having made it out public. They're going to have to deal with the angst of that for who knows how long and counting. And so we really looked at the opportunities and the benefits that arose because of the environment just kind of getting harder around us, and we've been leaned into that for a while now.
Auren Hoffman:Two more questions. What is a conspiracy theory you believe so?
Bill Magnuson:I know that you asked this question a lot of guests and I was actually at dinner two nights ago with my wife and my oldest child and I brought it up to them.
Auren Hoffman:I was like all right, guys, inspire me, like, what do we got?
Bill Magnuson:And my wife. She's been complaining recently about captchas getting harder, taking her more time, and so I had a good point.
Auren Hoffman:Yeah, I accused her of like maybe being a robot and so she was like well maybe it's that I'm a robot.
Bill Magnuson:And then my kid is like well, I actually subscribe to the theory that you all are robots and I'm the only one that's not. And I'm sitting at the dinner table. I was like these things are compatible with each other, actually, so maybe we'll go with that. I like that one, Okay.
Auren Hoffman:This is great. Last question we ask all of our guests what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?
Bill Magnuson:I reflected on this one as well and one of the things that I've noticed and speaking of going through 2022, a lot of companies went through layoffs and cuts and things like that and when you look at how companies speak to their employee base and the way that they talk about themselves, I think that one of the things that is way overused in the startup world are analogies to family. We talk a lot about the importance of being a human being, an individual. We want you to be a part of the rich tapestry of individuals that make up Braze. We invest a huge amount in community, but we don't have a cute name for ourselves. We are colleagues at Braze, we are employees of Braze.
Bill Magnuson:I don't talk about us being a big family and the loyalty that's associated with the family. When you're a part of a professional community, it has different connotations and I think those differences are really important, and I think that a lot of companies rely on these analogies to family to try to get people to make sacrifices for them and to do so in a way that I think in many cases, becomes pretty unhealthy. We put up with a lot of things from our family because you can't choose your family and family can be pretty problematic and it's an important thing for you to invest in. But I think actually, in many ways you should demand more of the people that you interact with professionally as part of a team when it comes to behavior and commitment and other things like that. And also like there's a lot of people at Braze that I've now been working with for more than a decade and we have strong relationships that are familial type relationships. Go and use like terminology around that when I speak about how we as Braves, are a global employee community, because I want people to be able to have that separation between their professional endeavors and literally their family. We can have the right level of expectations that we place on everyone to have that professionalism that exists while we contribute to a community.
Bill Magnuson:And so I don't know if there's necessarily wisdom out there where people are giving advice to go and treat their employee base in a way that is more akin to like cult leaders and abusive family patriarchs than it is to running a professional organization.
Bill Magnuson:But maybe just a reminder, because I do see it so often and I would just say like, don't take that lightly. I think so many people felt like betrayed rightfully so by organizations as they had to go through really difficult layoffs and redundancies and such, and it's like I can't blame people for being betrayed when their leadership has been talking about their company as a family the whole time. They've been there and I think it's just really important that we're honest and upfront with ourselves and with each other about what we're building. And the thing that we're building is awesome, right? We're building this incredible professional global community that's accomplishing great things together as a business that impacts the lives of literally billions of people and helps businesses become more sustainable and build more optionality for themselves in the future, and that's a really fantastic thing. I don't need to wade into those other waters in a way that I think misrepresents what the relationship should be.
Auren Hoffman:Netflix has this idea that they're really a high performance sports team analogy rather than like the family. Is that a better way to think about it?
Bill Magnuson:Yeah, I mean I think that they've leaned into that, they're consistent with it, they're honest or upfront about it. It's not like I would go and implement their playbook to a tee. I think every organization is different and it's very path dependent and a lot of it depends on your history and how you scale and how you built your company. But I do think that they're direct and they're transparent about that and I think that that is to be applauded for sure.
Auren Hoffman:All right, this has been awesome. Thank you, Bill Magnuson, for joining us at World of DaaS. I follow you at Bill Mag on Twitter. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun.
Bill Magnuson:Thanks for having me and have a great rest of the day.
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