excited about because it's all about making money loud. But before we get to that and remind you of course we are doing QA microphones are there and there are some for next panel if you have a question, write it down and we will get to you in a few minutes. Now if you raise a million dollars and you spend it, you no longer have it and if you raise 5 million and you spend that you still don't have it. So a good question is more conservative venture capital market is how can you make your venture capital money actually last? So to cap off this fine day we have TechCrunch is Walter Thompson. We've had a Maitre from our for Capital Group Frederick from GV and Rick from NEA. Give me a warm welcome
thanks very much for joining us today. Okay, so I really should have given the Benzema more recent photo I apologize. Happier literally are focusing or something. So today we're talking about how to stretch your venture dollars. Our panelists you've been introduced to, I'm gonna ask you to them to kind of go through their investment thesis really quickly and kind of set the table for the conversation starting at the end. Rick, you can go please.
Sure. So I'm working with NEA. We've been around for about 47 years, about $25 billion under management, very much a diversified venture firm. So we do both early stage growth all the way from from seed to pre IPO type investments across all sectors within tech and healthcare.
For doing that, I'm a general partner at GV Google Ventures. We are stage agnostic and category mistake Our VC firm with a sole LP alphabet, who is an inventor alphabet is our sole LP. We're not strategic to Google. And we have a billion under management and I'm excited to be here.
I'm Anamitra Banerji. I'm the co founder and managing partner at afford capital. We've been around about seven years. We exclusively invest in pre seed stage companies. We started off in 2016 with a $47 million fund and that was current fund is our third fund which is a $350 million fund. And we typically invest in companies and most of our pre seed companies don't raise very much. So this topic is really top of mind for many of them.
So let's start with a show of hands here actually. The audience can see a show of hands how many people here are working in ANGEL or seed or PC companies? Startups? Okay. Series A hands place. series Big. Okay, so a very, very early stage crowd. Good to know. Thanks for participating. Started the questions with the investor perspective. First order of business and starting with you Rick expressed in months what's a decent runway for an unprofitable pre revenue seed stage startup. Put another way, when is it time to start raising your next round?
Oh, that's a that's a tough question to answer. I mean, I think it really sort of pre product market fit and post product market fit because pre product market fit you want to have as much runway as possible, in my opinion, because that's really the goal of being a seed stage startup and until you can kind of prove that product market fit, whether it be through monetization or adoption and engagement depending on sort of what type of company you are. I think it's really hard to go out and raise that called series, a type of type of company and feel like you're benchmarking well, to those to those things. But even when you're, you know, you're showing product market fit. I think the goalposts have sort of changed, right it used to be, you know, maybe you have six months of runway left, and you go and raise your next round. Now, again, more is better because of the market being a little bit more volatile. And it's hard to tell, really how long a fundraiser is going to be and you also don't want to sort of be forced into any sort of situation when your fundraising
figure we could do anything to add to that.
Do you want a number
one number but I think it's one of those things where like people would would settle like anxiety if people had a number they could shoot for work towards.
I agree with Rick when he said that we need to have as much as possible like it's used to be six months, and then you would raise within one to two months and then be set up for the next round. This is much trickier now and I think if you don't have the right vision and the right unit economics, it's really hard to raise the next round. So you need to be very mindful about what type of KPI you're you're driving and targeting and when you're understanding what is the fundamentals of business and what's your path to profitability. It's crazy to talk about that at the series level. But I think there is a way where you may need to sustain the company and definitely if you can trace so this is really an exercise of building relationship with investor early on building great partnership with investor so when you set up to raise you make it it makes it easier for you and you understand what as expectation in terms of metrics. You need to hit to be able to raise the next round.
Yeah, I think just looking at our portfolio the last seven years 80 plus 80 plus companies who raise a precede and majority don't try to raise a Series A and the common pattern is around 18 months is it allows you to make a number of tries without over hiring. Pivot if you need to, to essentially figured out the first five customers a pathway to a million ARR and so on and so forth. And the other number that I see a lot from companies is they want to make sure they have at least six months of runway, at which point they definitely do start fundraising so you need to you're kind of aiming for a 12 month and with a 12 month low burn to ensure that you actually have something that people want. That gives you plenty of time, lots of iterations, lots of twists and turns. Those are the two numbers I see.
Are you seeing companies doing the smaller rounds more frequently or
I think founders in general would like to raise the largest possible round in the shortest possible time. And that's what they prefer. So if they can get that done quickly, they would rather do that. But I think there's a lot of capital available now. Just from angels or just from pre seed or seed funds. So getting to 500k to $2 million is very achievable in a couple of months timeframe.
I know revenue is a key factor. This is for you for the week. But what's an acceptable burn rate ballpark for an early stage startup? I've heard like the range of like maybe 50k a month but I'm not sure if that's true. What's your sense of them?
I think it depends on the cash you've raised. What type of size of capital you have on your balance sheet. I think it can raise it can go from 50 to 200k easy I would say the smaller the burns are better and better path to profitability is a better it doesn't mean you need to be profitable, but adding knowing what are your lever to get to that point if you need to and you need to extend runway is very, very important. And I would as a former product person I was familiar to Uber it's very important to focus on what's very necessary within your company versus what doesn't nice to have products. So really focus on your core value proposition and make sure that you Don't overextend your team or yourself into multiple type of product lines.
Actually, this is for the entire group for the entire panel. When you're talking to a founder do you expect them to know the their burn rate off top of their head? Rick?
Absolutely. I mean, I would expect them to be checking that cash balance pretty regularly kind of knowing it off the top of their head what it is, that's really sort of like the lifeblood of the company. At the earliest stages. I mean, cash balance burn rate is one thing but the reality is, while I'm talking to an early stage founder, it gives me a lot of comfort when they have basically thought about and are marinating and are obsessing over every aspect of their business, right? So they've at least thought about everything. They may not have the answer to everything but like they've at least like touched on it or thought about it and to me cash should be top of mind
and also understanding how your partner is going to evolve over time. I have some companies who have some strategic opportunities where they need to build more products or they need to build an additional feature that can have an impact on your cash and your burn. And so understanding I'm a big fan of free forecasting, or remodeling your your financial model if you have new opportunities to understand how it will reflect in terms of cash runway.
I think founders will absolutely need to know burn like like everyone's saying, I think importantly, they need to understand the difference between gross burn and net burn. So if they're making revenue, then take that off from the gross and if it's repeatable then then you can project a little bit forward. I see most founders to be fairly paranoid about brand, how much they're burning, how much it's going up and where that burn is coming from. Sometimes it's legal fees, which is one on one off that that won't happen next month, but it's a recurring ones that keep piling up that most of these headcount and people tend to over hire ahead of the product. Sometimes you have to if you find a great candidate, that's that's usually staying on top of that. I think it's really important.
I mean, are you seeing anecdotally Are you seeing people cut back with things like I mean, exaggeration, maybe a joke with like the mahogany foosball table, are these expenses still being offered? Or are they going away? Now?
I used to work at Twitter a long time ago, and I think we had $1,000 Polycom machines, every single conference room that never got used because people use their cell phones. So I think as companies get bigger, I think as companies get bigger, I think the bar drops a little bit. But I think companies at the very bottom who I think founders tend to be very frugal anyway. They don't have a lot of personal burn for the most part. They tend not to be spending too much money on anything in SGA anything outside of like, their their software or their other people.
I do think one of the things that's top of mind for a lot of companies right now specifically in AI is there's a lot of upfront capital going towards hardware and GPUs right now. So that's completely throwing off sort of the notion of what should a seed stage company be burning and you know, that's something that I would also expect founders in that space to really understand and be able to communicate sort of what the strategy is how that dictates capital raises down the road. You know what the ROI is that you're getting out of? A lot of this infrastructure that you have to build up front because it is expensive,
but it's something I heard a partner was telling me just yesterday today, actually, the LPC just give money to Nvidia directly. Because
one thing that is I think all venture funds do that very few venture funds get credit for and many other companies do is they give away a lot of credits. A lot of credit, AWS credit is your credit. All sorts of all sorts of software that you need to run a company is given out for free I think Brex Does it Ram does it everyone else does it. That kind of adds up to around I don't know maybe $500,000 in like totally equity free free money. For the most part that a lot of founders can benefit from
that's great. Actually, that was a question I don't have to ask now as far as a discount for
the same thing with marketing like we give as investor a lot of money to Facebook. And I would say really understanding what is your marketing strategy or go to market strategy for consumers to be what are your channel pay channel versus organic channel as the faster you get to more organic growth, the better you can pull your product market fit. So this is really important to understand how you can build self sufficiency or go to market efficiency to spend as little money as possible when you can.
Do you coach or do any of your firm's coach founders with treasury management or assist them in any way?
We do as part of being a board and understanding. I think SBB was a big catalyst to doing treasury and understanding how you do treasury management management but I think it's been an added basis.
We've kind of built out some best practices that we try to share with all of our portfolio founders and CFOs and CEOs, but it really is different for every stage of company. But a lot of it is you know these companies, these startup companies raise a lot of cash upfront and then sort of burn it down over time. And the CEOs and the teams want to be focused on building product market fit and talking to customers and and really kind of being engrossed in the building of the business and so the more you can outsource and reduce the risk of anything happening to that cash, I think the better right, so we just tried to provide some guidance around that.
Like, just like Frederik mentioned like until March of this year, treasury management was not something that anyone kind of looked at ICE. I certainly didn't. But since that time, I've seen founders in our portfolio, like dabbling into US Treasuries, taking a portion of their cash and putting into a short term US Treasuries, earning yield and interest. And that's kind of interesting to see that are unbidden. Some funders given fireable too much and they spend too much time on that. And now they're like, that's, that's bad. They spent too much of your time looking at that. So maybe that's not required. But I think there are some good options outside of thinking of just leaving in cash, maybe in short term treasuries as
long as you don't report it as a
follow up actually. So whose job is it to? I think I know it's the CEO but is it primarily the CEOs job to manage runway or is it is a shared responsibility?
I think the beginning until companies have a finance organization or a CFO and maybe that doesn't happen till Series B or maybe even Series C. It's all the CEOs job it's completely the CEOs job. I think it's number one to make sure they don't run out of money, but number one job and then ensure that everything else works, you get to product market fit you hire, don't run out of money.
And I think there is a partnership with the different C level people within your team. I I know I'm invested in a baby monitor coordinate and so it's a big effort. From the CFO to understand inventory management and payment terms to really understand how you can have too much working capital. So that's something that you want to have all your people within the CEO organization be accountable for money making sure they're the optimizer that cash efficiency.
I also do think that the board plays a role in cash and runway management and just understanding the landscape, you know, providing feedback and perspective on hey, you know, we've seen this happen, let's make sure we take advantage of these credits, you know, as we were mentioning up here, just to make sure that, again, anything that feels on original to making sure that a startup run smoothly and you can minimize as much risk as possible. They sort of shared and all of that goodness is just handled in a very efficient
manner. It's like drilling down into actual money saving tactics. And here's my first question. And forgive me I've actually I've asked this question to a lot of different VCs and I've never really gotten what I would call a straight answer. How much should a CEO of an early stage software startup pay themselves? Rick, it's a dependable
it's a very personal sort of decision, right? Because, in some sense, we can give data that shows what the averages are and as much benchmarking as possible with every situations. A little bit different in terms of that individual and you know, where they're on their lifecycle and sort of what their needs are. It's a balance between a you know, one way of the company and be making sure that that CEO or that executive is comfortable and doesn't have to kind of stress about things outside of the day to day stresses of maintaining and creating and growing a startup. Right. So that's, that's why it's really hard to answer a very specific number. But, you know, to me, it's finding the balance and just being very transparent about what's needed and what's not. And you can generally tell as either an investor or board member, that somebody's being really thoughtful about it, right and understanding that, you know, this is about the survival of the company and also, I don't want to be sitting there trying to make product decisions and talking to customers and worrying about paying rent.
I think CEOs generally take a pay cut to start their company, they're usually underpaying themselves for quite a considerable period of time, relative to what they could be earning at at a fang or somewhere else. But they also need but also obviously need the cash to make they shouldn't be worrying about the basics. At the same time, most of the companies in their equity. That's what that's what really is, is a moneymaker for them. And sometimes some founders eventually if they have an oversubscribed round are able to do secondaries to further for example, not to worry too much about the rent or put some money down into into your house, things like that. I haven't seen like significant excesses from founders. And also like being too frugal on yourself is probably not the right right path either if it's probably some balance in the middle, but usually the executives get paid more. If you look at the table of everyone at the company, the founders are usually taking less than, than then the salesperson or the head of product or another executive for the most part.
What are some near term revenue opportunity revenue? Opportunities that you've seen move the needle? Things like our pilot programs a viable option for for Legion, like, takes time to roll these things out. So like, if you're in a hurry, you need to actually collect some scopes and revenue quickly. What are some things that person could do like right now without having to like you know, break the bank or hire a whole new team basically.
One thing I've seen is many companies who are just getting started it's taken them quite some time to build a product. Now they have to start to sell it and selling takes some time. What they often do some sometimes what they do is to bring in some cash they do professional services as part of the sales process where where they do where they get, you can think of it as like consulting almost the company is selling to a customer the customer is paying the company for two months to implement the product this way then the company is making some money and also potentially getting a customer that will pay them for software eventually. That's one way to sort of roll they roll the roll in the revenue. Another thing that many founders do is instead of worrying too much about enterprise sales, where the sales cycle is very long, they sell to smaller businesses who make faster decisions, maybe not for as much as larger account size but they they're willing to commit faster and bring in contribute to revenue faster.
And I think it's also the idea of not being stuck into your eventual business model or go to market and the the creative of what will get you to survive or to extend one way and to generate revenue before the long term game is in place. Like you said, finding ways to monetize by selling seats versus one one charge fee versus selling by seats so you you can really get the product in people's hands and still generate revenues without being at a big pay a big expense for the companies you're parroting ways
and I haven't seen a company that has a product that customers want in a big market or and the founder is able to explain that market that may not be making a lot of money fail to raise around. If you can prove that there is a market even though you're not making a whole lot of money. You can you can extend runway by raising money if your investors are looking for breakouts and they're not really investing just based on the revenue today. Yeah,
I did two quick things. I mean, I think one is like ask your customers for money and you know the worst thing that will happen is you'll learn a lot about your product and your value proposition and where you may be resonating where you may not and you know on the flip side, if they say yes to quickly, you probably know you're also underpricing it and you've got something great on your hands. Right. So it's it's it's never a big deal to ask. And the reality is, you know most of your customers, whether they be consumers, or even enterprises, understand that a startup needs to kind of figure out monetization and sustain themselves. And they're not going to ding you for asking, even if it's one of those things where they're like, look, you know, we don't have the budget for it. And it's not quite there yet from a product standpoint, but at least you'll learn. And I think the second thing I'd add is there was a period of time where I think people really pushed back on these ad supported models, or sponsorships supported models. And what you've seen is, you know, even take the example of a very top of mind company like Instacart, right and seeing how they've really transformed the economics of their business. You know, most of their customers have no idea how much of their business is driven by ad revenue. And frankly, like even the investor base is driven by some of these strategic so you can always start to think about different monetization models that may or may not be involved, but the reality is like, at this stage of company, you're really just testing what works and see who's going to pay you.
Question for you for the week. How would you start? How would you start the process of refocusing a business or pivoting I guess,
yeah, I think that it's very easy to get distracted. I know. When I was at Uber we had the rider side of the business and the driver side of the business. And we had a team, a product team for each one of those does pillar products. And as a CEO, you have to be very involved in understanding what makes sense for your business. And I know Travis when they came into the room, we had a roadmap for riders and a roadmap for drivers and you realize like scratch everything riders related and we're gonna refocus on the driver side of the business so we can avoid surging because we are surging all the time and he said I don't care if it was 2012 and it's I don't care about lost and found. We can do it manually and we can have a bag of all the lost and found and have people go through it when someone has a request that you really need to get drivers on the road. And so having a fundamental understanding of if it's a marketplace, what's driving the business, it's supply or demand. In that case, it was a supply of drivers and really focusing your energy on what makes sense to build that marketplace. And knowing that once you have the drive on the road, you can actually get people to come and order a car is critical to your business. So as a CEO, you really want to understand what makes your business grow and what is critical for getting the demand. Come onto your platform and then we look at all your resources on that if Travis had been removed from that part of the product and just let us do what we wanted to do. We would have had a bloated team focusing on a rider roadmap and a driver roadmap and we would have probably been twice as much as we needed to when it was actually making more sense to just focus on the driver. So we're getting a good pulse on the business under understanding what makes the business hum and is very important. And so you want to be very involved in the day to day and understand what makes your product tick and then we focus your resources into that and remove any ego. It was very hard for the team to scratch on and off of the roadmap, but at the end of the day, you really want to do what's right for the business. And in that case, the brighter side of the business, the driver side of the business was a critical one. Next
question for you I want to meet you helped start the ad platform on the site formerly known as Twitter before shifting to BC the platform's new owner simply decided not to pay many vendors to save some cash after buying the place. I'm not sure if that's advisable. Have you seen founders effectively negotiate lower fees with landlords or vendors? Is that Is that something that works? Is it a practice?
It's not a bad idea to renegotiate. If you if you can I think I think in most companies, most of the brand comes from people that's probably 80 to 90%. And the rest of it comes from comes from vendors or software that Dubai I think with AI I think that might be might be going up because of the token rates etc. They do I haven't but this is a dramatic dramatic example where you stop paying someone I think that might be what you do at the end, perhaps to extend your runway where were courageous line up, but I haven't seen that all that much.
Actually, that good question like talent is the biggest expense obviously in the first place, people usually start cutting without getting into the whole like how to manage layoffs. How do you know? How do you sense when it's time to start cutting positions? And my final question is do you right size for today? Or do you just cut and feel the pain? Records are there?
Well, I think this is a tough topic I think taking a step back. The earlier you can make these decisions and punch above your weight class in terms of feeling resource constrained and performing at a level that with a small focus team that a bigger team couldn't I think that's sort of like the best place to be in. Right So the earlier you make these decisions to really be efficient as a team, the better because then you you hopefully don't run into these situations. I think the reality is if you kind of look at the situation that a big part of the market is in right now. It happened because a lot of forecast changed, right and so companies forecasted a certain amount of growth, built up resources built up people built up teams to hit those forecasts, and then a lot of things that were either you know, a lot of things that were outside of those company's control center run inside their their control ended up happening and you had to re forecast and then sort of like the existing structure of the company just didn't make sense for where the business was going. You know, there was a period of time where from a capital market standpoint, a lot of companies were able to raise capital in a fashion that was very different than sort of what the business looks like today. And so you could raise you could raise around that looked like a traditional round that would have been for a company sort of like two years down the road from where you are, and then people would build up their companies to look like what a company that would raise that much money was without necessarily kind of doing the fundamental analysis of like, where's our business today? What's the right size of that team? And so once you find yourself in a position where, you know, plans change, things change, you have to make a lot of those hard decisions and the longer you wait on those and even more painful it is and frankly, the less runway you have to benefit from making those hard decisions.
I'm a big fan of scarcity breeding innovation. And so I'm a big fan of refocusing and focusing on your core product and your core need and removing any distraction of nice to have because it's human nature to fill in the void. If you have more resources and you have more product ideas, it's easy to hire and over hire and sometimes refocusing your effort into your core product and being very discipline and maybe you realize that you need didn't need this other product on the side and and you want to be known for one thing and that one thing I know I ever was being known for being a transportation company versus Uber Eats diversity came after but we wanted to be a platform that was focused on transportation. And I think that it's very important to to be scarce in Are you building your business and to be very and it helps with agility. It helps with understanding if you need to pivot in this understand where you should hire better and and refocusing your strategy sometimes for for the best of the company. So I think that this is something that companies are always afraid to do and they always do it at the last minute when it's actually takes discipline to go through that exercise earlier rather than later.
Yeah. It's generally harder to do as a company gets larger and larger. It's just the cost is larger the emotions are greater number of people are impacted or greater. Just the planning processes is much busier. I think I know that I know. People suggest you should just cut very deep cut once and that's it. But I don't know how practical that is sometimes. I think I think multiple cuts sometimes are unavoidable. I have seen when something happened at the seed stage at least where companies that went from 2025 people and they will be they began to struggle mostly because of their product. Had some product market fit some revenue, but it wasn't a roaring success. And founders at that stage have made different decisions. They've either sliced off a piece of the team and in other cases where the company has gone down to saying we let's let's go back to being a root like a seed stage company just three founders working on an idea but working on a maybe a radically different idea with the cash that I have. And that requires a lot of investor support for it for a drastic situation like that, but I think investors get involved to help founders through this process.
I will get some audience questions but I had a couple of more want to get to. I met a founder yesterday in the hall, a biotech founder from Bay Area and he was looking for more funding because he was already capitalized. He had a lab he had built. He had equipment and everything. And he said he was weeks away from actually being able to capture revenue from customers. Unfortunately, a fire burned down the entire facility, which included his home and his brand new Tesla. So he's lost everything. And so he's looking he's here looking for investors who can help him get recapitalize get back up and running. SBB might not be a magic one. situation, what would you advise he do in situation like this? Right?
I would say first and foremost if he's taken funding already to make sure that he's built that relationship and has been very transparent with his existing investors because that's going to be the you know, deepest relationship and source of understanding of sort of where that company is, you know, the execution and understanding that like this is a completely random sort of external event that happened. So that's that's where I would start and secondly, like, there is a little bit of a debate over how much time you should be spending with investors that aren't in your business when you aren't fundraising. And my view is like as a founder or CEO, your job is to make sure that your business is capitalized and part of that is maintaining relationships with investors, probably not spending too much time on it. But making sure that you have kind of a core base of people that you get to know they get to know you, they get to see some of those data points along the way. So when something unexpected happens either on the upside or the downside and you're sort of in a crunch and and need to raise capital to grow the business that you'll have a Stable of folks that you can call on.
Is there some creative way to so creative way to get funded you can have a tranching way of doing it where it's tied to a milestone so you may be you know, I need to start from scratch but I'm gonna go faster on phase one. And so there is a way to say you know, you can get financed another tranching structure, where you can have 5 million upfront and then 5 million when you you reach a certain milestone and in that case, you may go to that first buy so much quicker, because you've done it before so that there are always some creative way to do it. I wouldn't advise to use that too much. I think that a lot of companies that have taken on debt and living on that, running their business on that right now I have a bit of a tough situation because if you cannot trace an external run it's only internal because the market being what it is. It can be really tough to refinance your debt. A lot of debt creditors are really focused on on being able to renegotiate if you have external validation versus internal validation from your insiders, and it can prevent you from getting into an m&a transaction because a lot of acquirer don't want to to integrate that debt. So I think that you need to be also very careful in terms of Do you want to secure that in that type of situation?
I find that successful fundraisers from founders usually emanate from a position of strength. When the founder feels confident, excited and optimistic about the business. They can present a very positive picture and get everybody excited because it's a sales process for external fundraising. But when the founder has had a tragedy, when they're against the they're on the ropes, and they're trying to survive, I think I think at that point, it's very hard emotionally to present an optimistic perspective about the future and so on. Or make a very compelling confident case. Because you're where you're emotionally is you're not at that place. At that point. I find that it's angels and the friends of the founders who actually believe in the person who have some context could be insiders could be friends could be angels, to put together a sort of like a bridge or an extension or something at a economically attractive price. Something just to get the ball rolling by three more months, six more months, so you can get out first of all, this emotional doldrum and then position the product and then rebuild a little bit and then go out, go out and raise and get yourself to be in a position of strength. But I think immediate bounce back immediately getting back on the horse is a little bit harder.
Thanks. We have time for some questions. There's anyone in the audience who's ready to ask a question. There's a microphone setup, I believe. If not, we can turn back right back to the Alright, I guess we're gonna go back to the questions. That's fine, too. Yes, please.
Hi. So I have a question when it comes to first time founders. How does how does how do they spend their time between you know user metrics product market fit on tools that you know promise to deliver in a retention like Mixpanel or hot jar? I'm not sure if you're familiar with the question I'm asking like how much time do you spend on like, like, creating your own Excel sheets and own data versus using some other third party tool
versus versus a third party tool? Oh,
I think I think there are some that you're basically measuring the business analytics to see if your thing is working. Or not. I think there's some free versions of these products. Even Google Analytics depends on how how specific and custom you get. Another thing to think about is free credits. You might be able to get maybe startup programs that some of these some of these companies have like amplitude, I'm not sure if they have it or not. There are some open source versions of these same products that our fear cheaper Jennifer analytics, I find that for the for the base cases, it may not be very expensive. I wouldn't. I wouldn't over rotate on analyzing the data unless it's really, unless you figured out exactly what the journey of the customers or the journey of the users and what you want to optimize. In the beginning, it is just a it's just a binary switch to figure out if if people are coming back and if they're using the product or not. I find the value of a lot of deeper analytics is about optimizing that journey, tweaking that journey, so maybe not too much. Time, just enough just collect the basic data to see if there is any interest or not. Another thing to do is to speak to the customers directly if you can, more than just looking at the data because sometimes they're not using it the way you want it to use.
I think I like that question a lot because a lot of understand that focused on measuring. And I mean dashboard. I think one of the strengths of Google is that we are dashboard on day one. And you want to be very disciplined about first understanding what type of KPI you want to, to measure. Like it's very easy to have a lot of dashboards and a lot of data but you need to get what matters and sometimes it's easier to build your own dashboard with that this write metrics. But finding a trade off where you don't need to invest too many engineering resources and cycles into building your own dashboard is very important. You want to focus on your product first and if you can outsource that to tools that already exist. Great, but really, I think the discipline to understand what type of metrics you want to track is actually very, very important because we are bombarded by data every day that you need to understand what actually matters.
Pay Per Click I think we can get to two more questions. I just have a quick follow up on sorry, where we really need to get to as many people as possible, but thanks. Maybe afterwards. Yes, on this side over here.
One thing we've done to extend our runway is build a remote first team and in particular hiring talent overseas as well, that are of a lower cost basis. And so I'm just curious from an investor standpoint how do you all think about remote first companies invest stability of that companies that have globally dispersed teams, visa vie companies that are like fully locally based in the same office together?
I think we might first can be great for hiring the right talents, that is not tied to a geographic location and also cheaper talent. I think the issue is when you're building a company, especially a very early stage companies that you're losing a lot of momentum in terms of development cycles, feedback loop, and iterating. I have a lot of my companies who started as remote first you're in COVID, while not trying to get back to the office, and it's incredible how much velocities are gaining by just being together even just two, three days a week. So it's a tough one but I would say finding a middle ground between being full time at the office and magnet at the office at all is is something you need to embrace is being at the office the same days. A few days a week is actually critical to really test your product market fit of teams collaborating and really have great velocity within your business.
A lot of it comes down to what is the culture of the company? Is that conveyed out in sort of the velocity of shipping iterating kind of collaborating? And from an investor standpoint, being able to feel that see that if it is remote first because it's just harder. It's just that's just sort of the fact of the matter is just harder to see that as an investor when you know, you're kind of like meeting with people over zoom versus going into an office and seeing people kind of interact right in front of your eyes.
That is all the time we have scheduled for today. Thanks very much the entire panel for the great conversation. Sorry, we didn't get to more of your questions. But if you see these people in the hallway, feel free to be bold and ask them your question and maybe they will have time to get back to you. Hopefully. Thanks again. I'll see you all. Thank you