Let's kick it off. Hey everyone. Thanks for joining us tonight for this conversation about leading and kind of scaling modern engineering. Org. My name is Anthony Licata. I'm a PMM app merge. Don't worry, I will not be participating in this conversation about just in traduce our guests. So the panel will be moderated by Gil five. He's the co founder of merge, which builds unified API's for b2b companies. Previously, he was the head of engineering at Canvas and he's also lead products at wealth front and LinkedIn. Gil is a graduate of Columbia University and he lives and works in San Francisco. Tito is the co founder and CEO at koala, a b2b SaaS company founded a few months back prior to koala he was the Chief Product Development Officer at segment where he oversaw segments r&d teams, which includes engineering product design and security and segment was acquired by Twilio in 2020. And lastly, we have John de neige. Antone is CTO. At Platte. He oversees plaids Global Engineering platform and security teams with over 300 engineers across North America and Europe. Prior to joining clash on Donita was director of engineering at Dropbox. Super excited to have all three of you here tonight. I'll pass it over to Gil and let's get the show on the road.
Thank you, Anthony. So I guess we'll we'll start off with just some general questions for Tito. And Dr. Danny. I think one thing we've learned about you too, is that you invest together. So we will not understand how you met. Was this at Dropbox?
Ah, yes, John, the knee turned in just about the worst interview I had ever seen. When he was applying to Dropbox actually gave him a strong No, it was probably my worst read of all time interviewing. He managed to get the offer somehow. Anyway, what language I forget you turn in some very esoteric programming assignment Gemini, I wrote on
my did all my interviews in closure, which is not yet popular at the time.
Anyway, we managed to, we did some follow ups to that interview, and he ended up blowing us away. And yet tech leading the monetization team, I think it's like 100 million of revenue driven within like the first two years or something. We had a lot of low hanging fruit at Dropbox, but Jhangiani turned out was incredible, despite his interviewing decisions.
The only thing I remember? Oh, yeah, the only thing I remember is, and this is a management tip for everybody. I shouldn't do this. But one day in a one on one with Tito, and he was my manager at the time, he'd like to read to me verbatim, the full feedback, that basically meant that I shouldn't have had a job at the company, which is a very strong move to pull as a manager and not recommended.
We became friends and started investing ever since.
I love that. And so I guess over the years, you've invested together, maybe since you've met, how have your approaches to leading changed?
I think I'm a lot nicer than I used to be. It's probably the short, the short answer of it. Look, I don't think personally, I don't think leadership is something that you're ever great at. Because it's very situational, right? You're always there's always a new problem that you haven't seen before. And if there wasn't, you know, you won't have to be a leader, like someone else could solve it for the company. So I'm much more willing to embrace being wrong than I was when I was more junior and I would say I'm a lot more curious about the the opportunity for answers that aren't the ones that you know, I would be naturally drawn to to help solve a problem. I think that curiosity is what served me best as a leader. And I think when I was when I was more junior, and when I was a manager for the first time, I definitely thought I was had all the answers. And I was almost a little too proud of of being correct at times. And so, you know, a healthy dose of humility and respect for other people's abilities has been probably the biggest change for me.
For me, I've gotten more and more obsessed with hiring and trying to perfect the craft of hiring. I think I've realized that basically, it feels like insanely hard work upfront and you have like, you're supposed to hire 12 engineers this quarter and you're behind on your goals, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is always the case. But time and time again, I've found that slowing down really thinking about what it is we really need at the company what I'd like the two to three must haves and then really being careful and conscientious conscientious about how we go about that hiring like really perfecting the pitch for the role just has these very huge dividends down the line when you hire that person who's on a rocketship trajectory, and you can sort of like coach them through the next several levels of their career over the next three, four years, there's something very magical there, it does require actually slowing yourself down a little bit at the hiring stage. I think earlier in my career, I was just like, very impatient to sort of get the hire done, get the metric checked that we made the hire, and that can just lead to mixed results. And spending a little extra time upfront, leads to great things. I think that's been probably the biggest change I've made.
That's great. So yeah, Johnny, you mentioned kindness and humility and Tito, you know, just more obsessed with hiring, you know, for what matters. But as you look forward, you know, what's, what skills experiences or styles are going to become more valuable for leadership in the future?
You want to take this on the air, I have to,
why don't you start with this one? Yeah.
I think the thing that that I've really felt just shifting in a huge way. And I think it's totally the right shift is just, there's immense amount of like, power. And like, there should be power shifting to like ice employees. And I think it's just so important that as you know, it, employees, especially ice engineers, are this incredibly scarce. And just amazing resource. I think, like really thinking about how to nurture these folks in their careers, how to challenge them. I mean, I look at engineers now versus engineers 10 years ago, and like, I feel like I'm talking to a VC often when I'm like, trying to explain, like, why this company is so exciting. And I just think the sophistication of the engineering community, and just employees in general has gone up through the roof, which is awesome. Because like, that is sort of the biggest bet you can make on a company is like, I'm gonna go invest full time for four years, or five years or 10 years on your however long it is of my time. And so I should understand that this is not just like this equity is not just a lottery ticket that I like, kind of casually understand, I actually need to understand this as if I'm making like the biggest investment. And so I think all of this power dynamic like has shifted to engineers, which is like absolutely the right thing, because these are the folks like building the, you know, the next generation of the product, and really building the company in some sense. And I think, as a leader, you need to be prepared to really like help folks, you know, really think through their next several years of their careers, how you can be kind of constantly challenging people out of their comfort zone. And so I just think there's been like just a huge shift in the level of sophistication and how important it is that you can show up as a manager who can create clarity for people on the next phase of their career.
I don't think I have, I only have tried answers. But the biggest challenge that I feel when I look at my leadership, and for the next few years is getting great and remote, which is like an obvious, obvious statement in today's world. But I feel like I was a great manager in some respects in person. And I relied a lot on relationships and walking around the office and like connecting with the team to be to be successful. I just don't get that anymore, I have much less of a sense of what's going on day to day, I think my modes of communication aren't as good as they could be. And I think a lot of us are still struggling to create, like very deeply connected teams. But I think if you look, if you think about Silicon Valley, you imagine that like to Pizza team, you know, people really care about their product, or going to the office, if open plan, you got a whiteboard, they're collaborative, they understand their customer, you know, they're, they feel like, they're, you know, they're, they're really excited to work together to have this amazing outcome. And that's true, whether you're a startup a small company, or if you're in a bigger company, like you would have that you'd have teams that would have that strong identity, that that strong affinity for one another. And in a world that's distributed and remote, I think you lose that you lose that that connection. And that connection is what I think can make groups of people work really well together. So the big question for me is, how do you recreate that connection in the future? And you know, for people like me who are older, you know, have to rethink about all of the principles of management and think that like, my approach may no longer be the right one. And I think everyone's struggling with it. So I think if you're better at doing this at adapting, I think that could be like a big driver of success for your startup or your company.
Yeah, I totally agree with that. And when you remote you can gather respect by just running around the office cracking jokes anymore. So gotta gotta adapt and find new ways. Cool. And so I guess you know, one of the things you're mentioned is is nurturing challenging folks in their careers making sure that you know, we help level people up. How more specifically do you think about your sponsibility to mentor and guide new and diverse leaders.
So anyone starter,
I got a, I got a hot take, let me start with the guiding and mentoring new leaders. I used to think I started plaid when we were the team was about 20 engineers, and today we're, you know, 400, or something. So it's been, it's been a really good and challenging five years. And when I joined early on, I felt a lot of pride at, you know, taking ICs and helping them become managers, taking first time managers and helping them become leader leads and kind of mentorship and just guiding people who I saw with so much potential. And it was like, you know, they can do it, right. If I, if I spend more time with them, if I provide them coaching, structure, incentives, they will become like fantastic leaders, I think we've had a really good track record at that. So I would have said before, like, I have a huge amount of responsibility to do that. I think, today, when I look at my org, the biggest responsibility that I feel is more towards bringing people who are not in tech, and to tech, much more than I do about mentorship and growing that people within my team, I still care about that a lot. So I'm sure someone from Platis here is like, oh my god horrific. He's saying he doesn't care about going team members. I care about that a lot. But I view that as something that's been figured out, there's lots of great companies that are really good at mentoring, and go in people's careers, and take a ton of pride. And that's awesome. And I think that's a testament towards kind of the people, the people oriented structure of a lot of Silicon Valley companies. And you know, the power and value that we see and great individual contributors. But I really want to bring that the people who didn't go to the best schools who didn't study computer science and who didn't do those kinds of things. So the place I applied right now, I see a lot of responsibilities, or apprenticeship program, which is about taking on engineers and getting them their first job in engineering, because I know if they can do that applied, then, you know, they can even go to another company, and they'll get the mentorship and the growth that they want. And just by the way, for anyone who's listening here, and you're looking at where you want to have a career, you can look for mentorship and guidance, and that's great. But really, you want to look for a company that's growing quickly. Because that's, that's gonna be that has opportunities. And you know, there's, there's the growth that can be created for you by someone else. And there's the growth that you can find, because you're an environment where there are more challenges around you. And I care about that. Right. So I think at pod I focus more on like, Are there enough opportunities for everyone to thrive more than the individual mentorship or guidance? Go for it?
Yeah, I think when I left segments, the thing I was probably most proud of is my role was replaced by two is kind of split into two GM roles, both of those GMs were women, I look at maybe the top 10 or so, employees that kind of were in some of the most senior roles, I think at least half of them were women, fair amount of like racial diversity, fair amount of just, you know, diversity, quote, unquote, for whatever lens, you want to look at it. And I was trying to reflect sort of how we got there. And, you know, I obviously, lots of you know, lots of focus on top of the funnel, lots of focus on sort of reaching out to various underrepresented communities. But actually, the clarity I sort of got to there was, I actually think that the biggest thing we did is we just had a more fair lens for what we actually were looking for what the job actually was. And, you know, I think like you rewind 20 years, and you have these like insane whiteboard questions, which are supposed to be really tricky, and algorithmic and have this big aha moment, and you're effectively screening for people who are at the top of their undergrad, CS class. And then you look at the skill set of like, what you was actually required by the job. And like, it turns out that like being an absolute whiz and data structures and algorithms is maybe useful, like one out of every two, one day out of every two years, you will actually hit upon a problem that like, you are glad you have an out data structures and algorithms background, and then the other, you know, the rest of the year, you're spending on much more mundane things and advanced algorithms. And so I think back to this sort of obsession with hiring, I do think you can get to a spot where you think critically about what you actually need. And one of the best ways to level the playing field is actually doing that thought, exercise and not just sort of lazily thinking about, okay, I want like brand names from these 10 universities or I want like brand names from you know, Fang companies actually segmented almost no hiring from Fang, we just found it was not really worth the effort and there was all of these other incredible sources of people. Anyway, I think that there was operability here is really about thinking critically about what you're actually looking for. And then really running an incredibly fair and thoughtful process that tests for just that thing, not like all of this other random noise, which like for whatever reason, the valley has roughly decided is important over the last 30 years. And I think that led to some really great results. Obviously, lots of other work went into play a segment. And certainly I was not like the person most responsible for a lot of the great things. There were many, many, many folks who pitched in. But I do think like that ethos of what are we actually looking for? And how do we fairly assess it in like a reasonable way, really can take you a very long way. And I know that sounds like incredibly basic and simple. And when I'm advising startup founders, they like, look at me, like I'm a little bit nuts when I start with that, but I actually think there's opportunity in almost every hiring process, that that comes back to doing a better job there.
Yeah, honestly, right. Go ahead. I just want to like plus one that I think in the in the a lot of the playbooks that we all use to build companies to recruit right to run projects, they're the kind of copied over from a slightly different time in the valley right there copied over from a Googles and Facebooks that were operating in environment, when they were going really fast. That's not the same that we're in today. They're also Google is a company that has very hard technical problems, like very deep and hard technical problems that may have required a lot more like data structures, like traditional CS stuff than you might need if you're building a business, that's just a CRUD app. And I don't mean that in a way that's disparaging towards a CRUD app, right? I mean, every company needs different people, and different skill sets for specific business. And you'd be silly to interview like Google, if you're not building Google, it just doesn't make sense. But that's what that's what a lot of the value is, right? Because you're hiring every generation of companies, hiring managers and leaders from the previous generation. And often you're just taking the playbooks as they are, and doing what he does suggests, which is I think, from first principles thinks about what makes your business different. Think about the kind of culture that you're trying to create. And yeah, then it means you're not recruiting everybody, but you'll have a lot higher percentage chance, but the people that meet those criteria.
Yeah, I totally agree with that. And the notion of, you know, asking someone to write an algorithm that no one in your company has ever written just just inherently makes no sense. Cool. And so, you know, we've talked a bit about sort of some of the problems we've seen with existing recruiting processes, how have you seen them change over the past decade, and maybe some changes you all hope to continue seeing?
Yeah, well, definitely start that, I do think there's been a huge shift. And the fact that a lot of the best companies are thinking much more critically about what they actually need. And like designing interview processes backwards from that point, instead of like, you know, copy pasta of some loop that someone heard of, you know, at some company from the last generation of huge companies, there's been a huge shift, that is a very positive one, I still think there's quite a ways to go. And I think like, one of the things that segment really leaned on in terms of staying ahead of the market, and like, recruiting really, really good candidates for many years was just like continuing to push the boundaries of making a more natural interactive pair programming heavy interview process. So I do think it's come a long way. But there's still a ways to go there. I think that yeah, I mean, I touched on this earlier. But I think the other thing that just blown me away is just like how much more sophisticated all of the engineers and really everyone seeking jobs is about equity and thinking through equity. And I think that's just such a positive change. That segment, maybe six years ago, at this point, one of the big differentiators we had with the sort of closing process was I had this equity deck and it wasn't like it. It was really not geared toward a used car salesman type approach of like, What could this become and like pitching, you know, 50 100 $200 billion company exits, and like what that would be worth it. It was really not about that it was about teaching people the basics of equity one on one, I can't tell you how many conversations I had with people that were 20 years into their career that had never sat down and bothered to understand sort of the basics of how equity works. And I do think it's come a long way and just people are much, much, much more sophisticated. There's also more room to grow here. But I think the more you can be transparent about like how this works, what various outcomes could look like what assumptions you should make, to think about various outcomes, and really leaving the decision making and the like, Okay, I believe this but not this in the hands of this incredibly capable and smart person that you're about to hire. I think that's the trend that's happening. I would love to kind of keep pushing that too. Then for the next several years, like making the assessments more realistic, and then making the like, pay, and especially around equity, which is like a confusing topic, like more transparent and clear. So that's sort of the shift I'm feeling. And I think it's a great shift. And I still think there's a bit of room to grow, go on it.
Yeah. I don't have a ton, a ton to add, generally, I would say, one, one change that's still ongoing is the respect and kind of evaluation of soft skills, which is very difficult to do just in a few hours with somebody, unfortunately, but I'm seeing more and more companies really emphasize that. And a question asked for myself is whether we should testing like writing much more than we do today, I have does a couple of smaller companies that I advise, you know, their, their interview process starts with writing a spec, for example, like, that's part of the interview process, like they give you some requirements, and they're like, hey, like, explain what you're doing. As part of, it's like a take home kind of assignment. And when you think about engineers at teams at scale, like you're just not, you're not writing code all the time. I mean, maybe you're writing code like 50% of the time, right? You're, you're writing specs, you're like reviewing other people's plans, you're working on architecture, you're talking to customers, like there's all this other stuff that makes a great engineer, a great engineer, that just doesn't happen in the interview process. So I think we're moving more towards practical skills. And I think we're going to figure out how to get more signal on that. So that would be one trend. The other trend, which is a weird one, and you don't see it in bigger companies, but you see it at smaller companies is like, honestly, more emphasis on performance management. Earlier on, right performance management and, and recruiting are two sides of the same coin, right, because you can either have interview process, which makes you feel really, really confident that you've got the right person joining your company, or you could have an interview process, that's more lacs, I don't, I'm not making a normative judgment about the bar, I'm just saying that like, maybe a little more open ended. But then once people join the company, you're doing more work on like growing them, or mentoring them, or getting them to align with your values. And if they don't separate away with them, like letting them go. And I'm seeing like, more companies actually be more comfortable with the the latter half of that journey. latter half of that is something you see at the bigger companies like, you know, mature HR orgs. But I'm seeing a lot of startups that are like, hey, like the market for talent, I know. So crazy, that young, take more risk, some people I'm going to look a little more outside the box. And then if the person doesn't work out after three months, like that's just what it is, and I'm ready to make that decision. And now you find managers and, and and founders who are mature about doing that early. And, you know, it works, I think you can build a great business like that, at least early on. So I think that's an alternative strategy that maybe doesn't get emphasized enough, but I think would be worth looking at, especially for smaller companies.
I really agree with that. I think especially looking for soft skills at a smaller company, it matters everywhere, but especially at a small company where these people defined your culture from here on out is is really huge. You know, like, are you going to hire someone who on day one slams in 20 pound tub of protein powder on their desk? Are you going to bring someone in who wants to wants to, you know, focus on on the right things. But anyway, I digress. So I guess, Jonathan, you back to you, I'd love for you to start this one. And talking a little a little bit about some engineering leaders that you look look up to, and you know, what you learned from them how you go about learning from them?
Yeah, so I don't as a general life practice, I try not to look up to other people. I think everyone's flawed. And so I like to feel that I'm appear to everybody else. And everyone's appear to me. I actually don't have I mean, I I've read books by engineering leaders. But I wouldn't say there's anybody that I look up to, but I do have is a set of engineering leaders like Tito who are going through web companies that are roughly the same size that Platt has been over the years, and we slept together and we grabbed dinner every once in a while, and I have their phone number, and we share the experiences that we're going through that are that are similar. And I find that I learned a lot from peers, because their mindset is, is where I am right now. Right? And they they're going through a lot of the same kind of struggles. So that's like my, that's what I would say I spend 70% of my, the mentorship I look for is more peer mentorship. The other 30% is more situational. And so I always try to connect with a few leaders that are companies that are that are bigger than where I am just so I can understand a little bit what the future might look like. But I don't that doesn't look like mentorship to me. It looks more like once in a while, like every quarter, every two quarters. I reached out to a few of those people. I take him out for lunch we talk about a bunch of stuff, you know, they tell me interesting stories I tell interesting stories and I try to triangulate what I need. What I need to be good at for my company from that. And then what I've learned from them, I don't have learned, you know all the things from from different things. But also, you know, I think we all Tito who's here like a thing that I learned a lot from him early on after I joined plaid was like, how do you build an engineering brand? Right? And how do you think about recruiting at scale, something that he was doing at segments segment was bigger than we were. And, you know, again, he was like, a little bit more senior. But it was like, I felt like a peer like, I felt like we were going through similar problems. So yeah, I've been
fairly similar answer, I would say, I've always been fascinated by this idea of stealing superpowers, which was introduced to me by it was a Dropbox onboarding program by this woman named Kenton, who ran Biz Ops at the time, and she had like a really awesome how to Dropbox deck, I think it was, and this was maybe my favorite concept and the whole deck. And the idea was, you know, you can really kind of go around, like learning from from every one. And really everyone has some kind of superpower to offer. And I don't know, like, the longer I've sat with that I've now been sitting with this thought for about a decade, like, the more I appreciate it. And so I think of like, leaders, or engineers, in particular, I can name a whole bunch of people whose like superpowers, I have tried to steal. But it's not just like, yeah, as Romney was saying, it's not just people more senior than me, it's often people on my team, it's often people who are like, you know, in some other part of the org, and I'm just like, they are insanely talented at this particular thing. And then I just try to go get next to them on a project and see if I can pick it up by osmosis. And I mean, this is everything from you know, recruiting, I would say, like my manager, Aditya at Dropbox as the CTO there for a long time, I learned a ton about recruiting from him, maybe sharpened to some of the recruiting muscles, from someone who's on my team at at segment, a guy named Albert Strasse time. Certainly, all of the segment co founders, I learned a ton from various things, maybe not all traditional engineering leadership pieces. I learned a lot from our, our CFO, Chief Information Security Officer at segment her name's Colleen, just someone who thinks about the world quite differently than me. And so I learned a ton about security at first and some of the functional security things. She taught me basically everything I know about that. But then even more than that, I think, how to just think about risk. And like, I mean, that turned out to be very useful as we had a global pandemic for the last few years. And so, you know, thinking about risk classifying risks, sorting it, I mean, it was like a random topic. But Colleen is like the deepest expert you could ever hope to meet across, you know, 15 different kinds of organizational risks that come up. And so it just like, I think you kind of going around life, like looking for people's superpowers and kind of trying to like, just hitch onto that wagon and figure out what you can learn has really served me well. And so it is a hard question for me to answer as well. I do think it's sort of a flawed concept that there would be one person who is your mentor who teaches you everything. And I think like a much more realistic and, or at least positive framing for me is this idea of stealing superpowers. So I would challenge everyone to think about their peers, people on their team, leaders at the company, and the superpowers they can steal from them. I promise you, if you look at this at it with this lens, you will learn a lot more, a lot more quickly. That's great. I
really love that perspective. So we have about nine minutes left here before we go into a q&a. So we're just going to kind of fly through a few more questions here. And so make sure everyone everyone is listening. If you want to formulate some questions here, we'll we'll have some time for that at the end. But next question here is for TITO specifically at segment. I know one of your focuses and something you guys didn't quite well was building a strong engineering brand. Can you talk a bit about what you describe as an engineering brand and why it's important?
Yeah, absolutely. So I would say my first year or so at segment, my number one job. And frankly, maybe my only job was to hire engineers really, really, really quickly. We were sort of classic like exploding at the scenes. With the data volume. We were processing the systems that had been built, you know, many of them had been built a little bit more with an AI to kind of prototype planned. And then suddenly, we're getting relied on by these incredibly large customers to get data perfection. And as you can imagine, things were not always going super smoothly. And frankly, I think my first year segment I failed pretty hard at at actually doing this hiring thing kind of ironic since that's when John and he was asking me questions about some of this stuff, too. I would say more than me helping him we were maybe failing together and feeling good that at least we we had a company in our misery but I think about a year and Peter my boss's CEO and co founder of segment said hey Tito, like you know, it's amazing that we sort of put all of this effort into the recruiting machine. And like, you know, we've hired an incredible recruiter, we just like it wasn't feeling right. Like our close rate wasn't very good. I want to say it was like, in the 40 ish percent, maybe 50%. So we were like spending a ton of time interviewing candidates, like, only to find out that they weren't going to close because we had they were looking for, you know, cash. And we had like high equity but lower cash offers, or we found out that they had 19 other offers, and, you know, they had applied to us as the 20th company. And often we would come in second or third and that race. And so we're just having all this frustration. And I remember it really came to a head because like, there was just so many ENTJ interviewing hours that were happening per accepted offer, which I think is actually a really nice, like Northstar metric to Well, I mean Northstar metric, I guess should be how many successful awesome people are you hiring but I think it'd be a nice metric on just like how well you're sort of attracting talent is you don't want to be spending a ton more than about 2030 hours per offer, except on sort of interviews that didn't work out. And so Peter came to me and said, like, hey, you know, appreciate all this work that's gone into the machine. But I have like a counter intuitive suggestion, I'm actually going to suggest that we stop worrying about how many number how many people are making it through the pipeline, and how many offers are accepted. And just like for two quarters, like let's just really get into engineering brand. And this kind of scared the crap out of me, because I don't know if this was just like the only topic we had talked about at the board meeting every quarter, which is like not fun to do like a repeat topic for the third time at a board meeting. And so like, just it seems very counterintuitive to me. But I leaned into the idea. And I think it was turned out to be one of the most important things. I did a segment in retrospect. And what we did with that time that was not being spent in sort of inefficient ways running the recruiting machine is we said, like, we're gonna go figure out why every single engineer at the company joined the company, there's probably about 25 ish engineers at the time. So we sent out a survey and turned out that there was basically three major reasons that people had joined. One was, or two major identifiable reasons that people had joined, and then one was referrals. So I'll skip referrals, since that's only something you can do so often, but the two strategies that were working with people were fine. We're finding out from us from the awesome blog posts that Calvin essential and our co founder and CTO was writing. And then the other major one was like open source work that we had done, basically, a lot of early segment had been open source. And we were like finding people contributing to the repos that we had open source. And so we ended up kind of looking at both options, we decided to really double down on the blog, as opposed to open sourcing just because when you are open sourcing a lot, it incurs a lot of work to actually maintain the open source blogs. And so we just, you know, tripled down on that. And we freed up Calvin's time we had Calvin's start spending, like, you know, maybe writing about a blog post a month, and like a blog post is like a big deal as at least 20 hours of Calvin's time, if not, occasionally 40 hours of Calvin's time to really get a written, edited, kind of, we get feedback from, you know, a dozen different people and make sure it was sort of a really sharp and punchy story. So anyway, that ended up being the foundation of our engineering brand. I've done like tons of talks with other engineering leaders. And it's always so funny, like everyone has like a totally different way that they go about engineering brands, I by no means am I saying this is the only way to do it. But it ended up having like making all the difference in the world. Like, I think our accept rate went to 80%. Actually, later on in segments probably closer to 90%. For many years in there. We started having awesome material where we can outbound candidates, we can engage candidates mid funnel by asking them to give feedback on our blog posts that we're writing. And just so many more people had heard of segment because they had come across a blog post or an open source repo, and just created this trust, which like doesn't exist by default. If I just named some random startup name, you wouldn't think like, Oh, I bet they have really great engineers. The default assumption is like, Oh, I bet. I don't know. I've never heard of them. They're probably a bunch of clouds. And so this brand, lets you sort of counteract that. And it just started the conversation right with so many candidates and made so much difference over the years. And after about a year or two of pretty intense focus on the blog. We actually, I would say lifted the foot off the gas a little bit there. And then it was sort of the quality of the team and just the obvious pneus of how strong the interviewing team was, that really was the brand that kind of carried us for many, many years to come. But I think really jumpstarting the brand with the thing that was already working for attracting candidates was just such a huge unlock for us that segment.
