Just by paying attention to the work that was happening at all levels of the company, from the lowest to the highest, by paying attention and being like, 'Hey, that's a really good idea,' or 'Have you considered this?' It made a culture of it's okay to have ideas and have them move up and down. And by the way, people would challenge me, and in challenging me, then they felt confident that like we were going to get to the best idea because it wasn't just my idea. Creating this sort of non-hierarchical culture that's not bound by time or geography or role. Really powerful.
Okay, this episode is with Tom Hale, an old friend of mine who's the CEO of Oura, of Oura Ring fame. When I was in my early 50s, I had a very bad snowmobile accident and drove a snowmobile up a cliff. And you can't see my body, but it's absolutely chock full of metal. And I thought I was going to die that night. I was lying at the bottom of the cliff. And I've been a CEO of HubSpot for 15 years. Like, I'm done. I'm tired. I'm done. I'm burnt out. He went the other way. You know, he had been kind of a corporate exec at some really interesting companies his whole career. In his early 50s, he's like, 'I want my shot.' And so we talked about that, what he didn't expect from the job, the good, the bad, and the downright ugly of being a CEO. He's pretty thoughtful about that. What really is interesting to me about Tom is he spent his entire life in companies between 200 and 2,000 employees. That is the messy middle. That's where things slow down. That's where bureaucracy happens. That's where middle managers happen. That's where you really slow the gears of progress down. And we talk a bunch about what it takes to keep that engine revving through that and how not to get caught in the quagmire. We also talk, he's got a team in Finland. This company was started in Finland and he's got a team here in the US. And man, are they different? The Americans are obviously very capitalist creatures and the Finnish are much more on the socialist side. And we talk about how to manage those two. And a lot of you are in the US now and thinking about going international. I think there's a lot of lessons here for you. So, lots of good stuff. I'm going to go back at the end with my take on what he had to say.
Thanks for being here.
Hey, thanks for having me, Brian.
Um, I have a little story for you.
Four years ago, I was snowmobiling in Woodstock, Vermont,
Yes. And with my son, and the snowmobile went off a cliff.
It hit the bottom. Snowmobile's in a million pieces. My son and I were in a million pieces. And at the bottom of that, and no one knew where we were, and it was 4:00 in the afternoon. I was pretty sure we were both going to die that night.
And while I was sitting there at the bottom of the cliff, I said, 'I need to make some big changes in my life.'
Yes, that too. But the biggest change was I don't want to be a CEO anymore.
Uh-huh. Why did you want to be a CEO after all these years?
Wow. It's a good question. Um, I think the obvious answer and maybe the really the true answer is it was a bucket list item I had to check off my list. And the thing is actually, and maybe this is TMI, but I also wanted to prove to myself that I had it.
Yep. To do it. Is it everything you had hoped and more?
Really? Um, much, much harder than I thought. And I'm sure you can appreciate that, and any CEO in the world will appreciate that. Much harder. Much harder than I thought.
What's harder than you thought?
Um, it's not the work that's harder. It's the responsibility and the stress. It's the waking up at 4:00 a.m. and being like, 'Oh my god, is this going to work?' And what is it going to take to make it work? Um, that I think it's pressure, it's stress, it's responsibility, it's all the people that you have. You know, they've put their faith in you, whether it's your board or your employees or your customers, and you have to carry that. And you know what they say, the buck stops here. Absolutely true.
I felt that too. I was pretty calm in the first four or five years of HubSpot. But I was kind of stricken with stress and started having, I never had them before, panic attacks like five years in. And it was that, it was like, 'Oh man, we have 100 employees that are really counting on me.'
100%. Um, that was the... What do people misunderstand about CEOing?
Well, I think they think it's a lot more fun than it is.
Uh, no. I mean, I don't think actually it's not fun. I think there is fun. I just think that the sort of ratio of kibble, you know, to champagne favors the kibble.
Than the champagne. And I think that part of it is the responsibility which we just talked about, but part of it is also you kind of the things about work that I really enjoy, like building something in a fine grain of detail and making it beautiful and owning that and feeling pride in that. And I still get that but just not as much. Um, or feeling the success you get, everyone gets to participate in the success, but in some way like it's really your team. It's not you who gets to own that success. But you know what? Participating in failure, you get to own that failure because in many cases like it was either your decision or your direction or the system that you set up. So I think that's the thing people get wrong is they don't understand. They think it's glamorous and it's this and that and you're on podcasts or whatever. Like that's sure there's an element of that but like that is not the main portion of the experience. At least not for me.
I called it the shit umbrella. You have to like absorb all the shit for the company.
I think that's right. I mean, my analogy is that you're on a boat and that boat, if it's going great, your job is while everyone's over on this side of the boat being like, 'Hey, everything's great over here.' And you have to be on this side like, 'Everything's terrible. We have to think about that.' And vice versa, when everything's terrible, you got to go to the other side of the boat and be like, 'Hey guys, there is light on the horizon and where we're going is going to be great. It may feel terrible right now, but we've got to get there.' And I think that's a big job, a big job of responsibility and it's hard. I had some CEO heroes that I copied. I copied Steve Jobs, Jerry Garcia, and my dad. They were my Mount Rushmore of inspirations.
Well, you know, Steve Jobs, I think we'd make it for sure. Um, and we're kind of, we're probably similar age and I think people who grew up... I got to work, you know, tangentially. We were an ISV on the Apple platform. So, we got to meet him a couple of times and he was a hero. Yeah, the person who came back and recovered Apple from its demise was a hero, bonafide, and the sort of champion of creative professionals. So he would be one. I think not necessarily a CEO, but Gandhi, partially because he sort of as a man of the people, and I think humility is such an important both value for me personally but also for a CEO it's important. So Gandhi would have it. And then god, if I had to think of one more, oh I know who it would be. So Maya Angelou, not because she's such a great CEO but because she said something which I really believe is, which is like people will remember how you make them feel. And I think as a leader, the unintended consequence is actually the greatest risk, not the intended consequence. And if you leave people feeling, you know, in a way that you don't intend to, I think that could be devastating for a company. A lot of CEOs of the generation younger than we are, it's not Jobs, it's Elon. Yeah. And they've absorbed his, for better or worse, his work ethic. Yeah. And 996 and hardcoreness about it. Um, this whole generation of founders is kind of like that. What's your take on that? And is your company like that?
Um, I am somebody who probably works 996 or, you know, something like that, some approximation of that. And I think there is value in it. However, I would modify it one bit, which is that if you're working 996 or your version of that to the exclusion of making sure that you are thoughtful and recovered and in a good state of mind, if you're in a constant state of anxiety and a constant state of activity and you don't leave room for any kind of recovery or reflection, you're probably not doing it right, at least in my book. And so at Oura, and what's interesting about Oura is that we make products that are there to help you be healthier and to find mindfulness and recovery in your life. Um, I actually, when I came on board, we had to sort of push a little bit towards the performance and, you know, we never say 996 but we say like, no, like we get the job done and we do what it takes to get the job done. And so I had to shift it a little bit in that direction. But at the same time, we never lost the values of rest and recovery and the importance of it. I think it's like finding that balance. That's what we talk about. We talk a lot about balance. How do you find balance? And I think one of the ways to think about it from a CEO perspective is that different parts of the company at different times in the year, different stages of the product cycle are going to be at peak, okay, 996. And other parts are going to be at recovery. And that's like you just ship. You know what? Probably shouldn't go back 996. Take a couple days, recover, rest, think about what you want to do next. Be intentional. And so, I think that kind of idea that you can't run everybody at the red line all the time. You got to dial it up and dial it down. You got to recognize that if you're on the bomb run to ship, it's going to be 996 or whatever it is to get there.
Okay. Speaking of your employees, you're CEO of a company that was founded in Finland.
Yeah, they should be. Um, and you should be. It's a wonderful company. Um, tell me a little bit about your first trip to Finland.
Yeah. So, I have worked with, you know, Finns in the past. So, I had a little bit of experience, but had never been a leader of Finns. I've been a partner and a colleague. And so, um, there's also, I think, a good tradition, I think, in Finland of like, um, they're not hierarchical, right? Not a lot of respect for, I mean, not, they don't have, they're not disrespectful, it's just like, look, you know, we're all, it's very socialist, non-hierarchical society. So I show up and, you know, they're like, 'Well, we're going to go do some sauna.' And of course, as you know, it's a Finnish national tradition. So we go to the sauna, get in the sauna, it's hot, I'm very hot, and then we, you know, we go outside and it's very cold and we get in the freezing, freezing cold water and you're shaking and then you get back in the sauna, it's great. And I was like, this is amazing, I feel like I've passed the test, I've shown my true fitness. And then of course we went to a second office which is in Oulu, which is a little bit further, closer to the North Pole, and we did the exact same thing except no sauna. You know, and so this time like literally I'm not even getting hot to get in the water, I'm just like, you know, I'm stripping down to my skivvies, I'm walking into a river where it's freezing cold, I'm sitting there for 45 seconds, I'm monitoring my heart rate on the Oura Ring app, mostly to say make sure I stay alive, and walk out and there's nowhere to get warm, just a towel.
Okay, so you passed. Sounds like you passed the test.
I think I passed the test, but maybe just barely.
Okay. You referred to Finns as socialist. Um, Americans are very capitalist. Of course, you've got, call it close to half your employees in each country. What's it like with two different, very different cultures and trying to blend them and manage them? Like what, maybe this is a philosophy of culture which is that you can't make a single culture. I mean you can, there are elements of our culture which are shared across Finland and the US. Um, you know, passion for the product and a sense of mission around health and, um, you know, blah blah blah. But the thing is they're very distinct.
I think culture begins and ends at the door. The Finnish culture is actually different from the US culture. And what makes the company strong is that those cultures can coexist and they can stimulate each other and they can, you know, propagate ideas across. They're not, they're not like, they're not one monoculture. They're two cultures and they generate ideas and they generate activity in ways that are different and quite frankly I think, you know, it's part of what makes a company good is to have a diversity of cultures and viewpoints.
Okay. I would imagine you kind of like at HubSpot and lots of other scale-up companies post-pandemic, people got a little more hardcore and more into performance culture and just started pushing harder. Yeah. Not easy. What was, it sounds like you kind of went through something similar. What was that like in Finland with the Finnish employees? How'd that go over? How'd you manage through that?
You know, um, well, first of all, I think COVID in a weird way was a health crisis that everybody on the planet experienced. And so in some sense, you had a huge commonality weirdly, and as a healthcare kind of oriented company, it actually pulled people together. Yeah. And in a weird way, it also changed a bunch of other norms about how you work, you know, remotely and all that stuff. And actually quite positive. But to kind of go to your question, um, when, you know, post-COVID, you sort of had everybody, um, I don't know, I felt like the whole civilization of humanity was like in recovery. Yeah. Post-COVID. And so, um, you know, one of the things that I felt really strongly that we had to do was to sort of establish norms of getting people to work together, um, in person, but not come to an office. And so what we did is we set up like a fund and a practice of bringing people together, having them stay together for two or three days, making it really intense, a lot of connection, and we shifted budget and time and energy to do that. And that actually I think made a huge difference.
Make sure I got it. You're kind of a remote culture, but you fund get, you know, whatever.
Yeah. At the team level, at the organization level, at the company level, and get people together in person. Because it turns out, I don't know, 100,000 generations of humanity have optimized for connecting in person, right? Like, you know, I can read your face and know that like you trust me or you're listening to me or you care about what I'm saying. And that just reinforces all this cultural and social capital that you have as a team that you're sort of banking so that later when, you know, things get tough or you're remote or whatever, you can draw on it. So that was a big part of what we did. I think the other thing that, you know, maybe this is what I did personally, was I made a point of being incredibly visible. Um, even when I couldn't be, you know, we had hired a bunch of people during COVID, so I can't drop by your office, but you know what I can do, I can kind of lurk in your Slack chat and if I see some really great work, I'm going to comment directly right on that. And, um, I think this is maybe this is a hint for other folks or maybe if they want to do this they can, just by paying attention to the work that was happening at all levels of the company, from the lowest to the highest, by paying attention and being like, 'Hey, that's a really good idea,' or 'Have you considered this?' It made a culture of it's okay to have ideas and have them move up and down. And by the way, people would challenge me, and in challenging me, then they felt confident that like we were going to get to the best idea because it wasn't just my idea. And he would do that. We did that in Slack or we did that in these meetings that we pulled people together and like creating this sort of non-hierarchical culture that's not bound by time or geography or role. Really powerful.
Okay. Um, just kind of back to you. You've had a super interesting career. Um, you've kind of lived in that kind of call it 200 to 2,000 employees roughly.
Yeah. Um, a lot of the founder CEOs I work with are kind of in that spot. Yeah. Or about to go in that spot.
Yeah. What goes wrong between 200 and 2,000?
Yeah. Um, yeah. Let's start there. Well, Steve Jobs famously said, right, you know, when the bozos come, right?
They did. Um, I think in every company in that scale you end up hiring a lot of people and sometimes your hiring is maybe the stakes are, I don't know, slightly less high or something like that and somehow some bozos might come. And so the key is like you want to resist that, you want to identify, you know, that and move to correct it if you can. And by bozos, just to be clear, you know, they're people who are well-intentioned but maybe not as committed or as mission-driven or as focused or whatever it is. So in that scale, you have to be careful. That's probably the biggest risk I can see. The other risk of course is that you lose whatever it was that got you to 200 people, which is that kind of like that passion, the spirit, the sense of mission that brings everyone together to accomplish a common goal that's very difficult, but requires everybody to like, you know, put their shoulder against the wheel. And I think what's interesting is that if you can preserve that between 200 and 2,000 people, it's the most interesting time in a company. More than 2,000 stops being interesting because you're managing managers who are managing managers and your influence is muted. At 200 to 2,000 is a, I'm not a founder, I'm a CEO, but as a CEO, I can be in touch with directly those 2,000 people and I can touch them just like I was talking about this sort of idea of like going into someone's, you know, small group Slack and being present and being visible. You can do that and people can talk to me. They can walk up to me and I can know their names and know what they're working on and have an idea about like what they're doing and I can say that's not just hey, clap on the back, great job, you know, it's more like, you know, I noticed what you did here and it was really great. And those little moments with a CEO,
I didn't do enough of that.
Huge. I mean like I remember coming up as a staffer, if the CEO noticed what I was doing and gave me a compliment I could go for a year, you know. And so I do, I make a big effort to try and pay that forward in some way.
Okay. So I took two things away from there. Um, be careful not to hire a bunch of bozos.
How do you do that? Oh, and my second takeaway is okay. Be very present and give positive affirmation from time to time.
And negative, too. Yeah, you have to be able to let people know when they're not doing a good job and I'm kind of disappointed in you. And it's not like, you know, you're fired, whatever. It's more of just like, hey, I expect more from you. And the thing is that that's a personal accountability that's really powerful. One other thing, and it'll come back to your question, I think one of the things about 200 to 2,000 is that there's an asymmetry. In a startup, there's this amount of work and this many people to do it, so you have to be really selective about what work you choose to take on. In 200 to 2,000, there's this amount of work and this many people, which actually means you can grow someone's career really fast. And that's a great trade: work hard and we'll move you quickly through the organization. We'll give you experience that you could never get at another company. That's a really powerful way to sort of get the most out of your human capital. Above 2,000, you have this much work and you have this many people, which means they're fighting for the best work. And that's politics. And everybody talks about how they don't like politics.
You fight like hell to make sure that that asymmetry still favors work versus people because that's sort of the root cause in my mind of politics. Well, you do other things too. You say we don't have a political culture or when you see someone behaving in a political manner, you make an example of it. You say this is not how we behave. We don't do this. I think that's, you know, sort of setting a norm. Um, hiring leaders who are not political and then allowing them or encouraging them to model non-political, non-hierarchical behaviors. But I think the fundamental is this asymmetry of work to people because what happens is people get territorial and they start to protect their work or they start to protect their opportunity and then that becomes you're talking to each other about what you should do versus your customers.
I really like that. I'm going to, do you mind if I borrow your little...
You're welcome to completely steal it. I'm sorry. Someone told me, I just forgotten who it was. One of the things I notice in these companies is like it's the director layer comes in.
And that it's by definition a middle management layer. Um, and I encourage founders to push that director layer off as long as they can. Um,
Do you have any advice for like when that comes in, how do you make that productive? How does it not turn into Dilbert? Well, um, and by the way, for those of you who don't know, Dilbert is a late 90s comic strip with the pointy-haired boss. I guess everybody knows Dilbert, or maybe I don't know. I think my kids, if I asked my kids, I'm sure they'd be like, 'What are you talking?' That's a good point. Thank you for... Okay. No, just... Okay, just standing there. I talk to a lot of millennials and a lot of Gen Z now, so I got to be really honest. Um,
You got a lot of Gen Z, by the way.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Um, no cap. Um, so like stuff just slows down. And like the to-do list for HubSpot, like it just got shorter. Like the bigger you get, the less you get done. You have tricks on how to keep the pace going.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I got a couple tricks. I don't know. Um, I think they work, but here's one. Okay. So the first thing is you keep as few layers between the top and the bottom. Meaning, you know, you don't have senior directors and directors and VPs and senior, like you just try and kind of resist that for as long as possible. I think this is famously a flat organization if you can do that. So I think that's one way to do it. I think the second one is when you think about middle management, um, I often favor promoting people internally in the company into middle management as opposed to hiring them. No, I don't always do that, but one of the reasons you do that is because you're able to identify both the kinds of people who might be good at it, but also you're able to identify are they true blue believers and do they have the passion and the mission? Because the worst thing you can have is somebody who's in middle management who has no ambition.
Because that's actually the Dilbert. The Dilbert's like, I don't want my life to be complicated. I want my work life to be as manageable as possible, and I'm going to manage everything to be managed. And that's the definition of an empty suit, right? What you hire is an ambitious middle manager whose ambition is to be a CEO and know that at some point they're going to leave because they're going to have to. But that ambitious middle manager is one of the most effective prophylactics against sort of the propagation of bureaucracy. I think the other thing that you do is you say, listen, we really are going to empower you and we're going to hold you accountable. And then you make that true. You can't hire a dog and then bark for them. You have to hire somebody and say like, you have got to do this and I'm going to hold you accountable for it. And I might have some advice for you and I might have some guidance, but you've got to do it. And it comes back to sort of a variation on ambitious middle management, but it's basically we're going to give you the keys to the car, so drive fast, but don't crash. And I think the last piece of it is you create a company culture that reinforces that. That's like risk-taking. You know, we're going to let you take some risk and, um, but we're going to support you through that and we're going to give you the best advice we can. It goes back to this asymmetry thing where if you have enough time and energy to talk to people in middle management, you can one, root out the people who are the Dilberts because you're talking to them. And then two, you can find the ones who are not the Dilberts that you can encourage them and model and say, 'Hey, do what Sal's doing. Sal's doing an amazing job.'
Okay. Related to this, this is more in B2B than B2C. And you worked in a bunch of B2B businesses. As the layers come in, the distance between the CEO and the customer increases. Do you have any hacks for... Okay, you got a bunch of layers. How do you stay in touch with the customer? How does that customer's voice propagate through the org?
Yeah. Well, I worked at SurveyMonkey for a couple years and this was one of the things that we did was like to make sure the voice of the customer was sort of both programmatically pulled into the company and then distributed within the company. So I think the ways you do that are like, you know, NPS surveys and sharing the verbatims and you have rituals and meetings where you do that. And I can't remember, was it HubSpot that where they had a customer at the table every time?
Right, you always had like...
We still do. At the board meeting we invite a customer, you do a customer panel.
And I just, I think that's what you do. You set a culture that says it is part of your job expectations that you're going to have customer interactions, if that's cruising Reddit or talking to people on airplanes or going to, you know, B2B, going and talking to customers, you are just going to do that. That's part of the job expectation. And you create both the time and the expectation that you do that so that you end up with more customer input. And then you say, by the way, this is how you're successful in this organization. You're successful when you're framing things in terms of customer needs and solutions for customers and customer narratives and customer values. And in health in particular, like it's actually really easy because the customer stories for us are things like you saved my life, you got me pregnant, you saved my father's life, you helped me change my life for the better. And those narratives, by the way, are incredibly motivating. Those kinds of narratives, like people wake up in the morning at Oura and are like, 'Man, I could save someone's life today. What am I going to do to make that better?' And the thing is that that flywheel of like both customer understanding means you do a better job but also customer empathy for something, you know, that's important. It just drives like, I don't know, extra 10, 15, 20, 30% of performance because people believe in what they're doing.
Okay. A lot of founders are asking me about this, the kind of the missionary to mercenary ratio and the mercenaries start showing up around 200.
Hey, listen, if you're in sales and you're not a mercenary, right? Um, and so I mean it's different by different companies, right? I mean some companies are more sales-driven, some are more marketing-driven, some are more product-driven. So I think that ratio, by the way, you need both. You need missionaries and mercenaries. I think if you have mercenaries in your product and engineering work, probably not the right place for mercenaries. You want people who want to build beautiful things that are amazing, that express who they are.
You do if you're building something boring.
Same, you find the people who are passionate about it, you know, I mean, uh, you find the people who care about what it is that they're doing or you find a way to make them care. I mean, SurveyMonkey, it's interesting. SurveyMonkey, um, we translated the mission into giving a voice to all the people who don't have voices. And the thing is like, okay, sort of true. Yeah. But the reality is the people who came to work were like, 'Yeah, I'm amplifying the voices of like employees or customers or whatever.' And that was a reason for them to be committed to their mission. So I think you got to find something that does it. Um, I just think it is so important to have missionaries in the company and to elevate them. At the same time, you know, if you're going to market, you want people who have commercial instincts. And commercial instincts are correlated highly with a mercenary viewpoint. Now I think mercenary is also a caustic term. Yeah. It basically implies that you're willing to kill for money. And I don't think... No, but that's what I'm saying. Like that's what that term means. And what you really want are people who like they want to solve customer needs and drive a commercial outcome. And that's what, you know, the thrill of the chase, the sense of victory when you have a customer win and you know it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game or like the customer loses if the company wins. And by the way, that they get their jollies out of seeing the numbers and putting them up. And I just think you need both.
Maybe it's 80/20. I don't know. I'm making it up.
Okay. You've been through some dramatic moments in your career. Um, and I want to get to that, but one of those dramatic moments was you made a business model shift. Uh, historically, you just bought the ring and that was it. Typical hardware model, right? You introduced a $6 a month subscription service. Can you, and it was controversial. Your customers were not happy. Um, just take us behind the scenes of that decision. Was that kind of percolating in the org, in your head? Was that the first thing you did when you came in as a CEO? Was it contentious within the leadership team?
Um, I think the answer is it was the strategy. Um, and the strategy was in order to be the most competitive hardware company in the world, you needed to be a really great software company. And to be a really great software company, you needed a business model and a way to deliver periodic software value. The problem with the hardware model is that you ship your hardware and it's fixed and that's it. And you might ship a, you know, a little bit of a software update or firmware update, but like really you're not really changing the value proposition for that product with new capabilities. And the reason why is because when you ship the next version of the hardware, you want all that value to go in that next version of the hardware. So someone moves from their iPhone 13 to their iPhone 14. Totally. So you're disincented actually to provide value to your customer over time. The power of a subscription model is that you got to kind of earn your stripes with your customers every month.
Every month. Now, by the way, $6 a month for Oura is kind of a low bar, whatever. Two cups of coffee. And if you're delivering information that helps you with your health, the value of that is so priceless. Like the two times, you know, that like we help you get to bed early or we predict that you're going to be sick or we tell you when to, you know, procreate in order to have a baby, like the value of that is so high that the ratio of value to price is measured in...
Was it contentious inside the org?
Okay. So, I'm getting to that, right? So, but so I'm saying it was our strategy.
Yeah, it was our strategy.
You brought that in as your strategy from what I understood.
Uh, well, no, actually it had already... it was already there and I think there were things that I did maybe to sort of tune it a little bit but and I don't even say I, I'd say the team did this. But the, was it contentious? It was contentious and partially it was...
Contentious because going against the grain of expectation, hardware should be a single price. It was contentious. And this idea that, like, I don't know, you probably have some subscriptions that you would be really sad if you stopped paying for them, right? Like Netflix and Spotify or something like that. You probably use those things, and if you were forced to give them away, you'd be really sad. Yes, right? So the idea is, like, well, if you can do that, then you probably have a right to charge for a subscription. Now, that being said, there are lots of subscriptions that you probably pay for that you don't get any value from, and you continue to pay because of either inertia or whatever. And those things, we used to call them in the back of the days, we call them zombie subscriptions. And the customers who used them were sleeping bears. And you know what you don't do with sleeping bears? Poke them. Yeah, you don't poke them. And so as a result, what you want to do is avoid the situation where you got a bunch of customers who are not getting value, but you're still collecting price, in which case the value is low and the price is high. You want to avoid that. So I think we felt that that was the strategy and that was okay. So that controversy part actually was relatively easy to kind of navigate because we said, listen, one, there's a reason that we're doing this. We're creating a business model that will allow us to invest in software value and deliver feature value and analysis value on your health over periods of time. And like, the product will get better every month, and like SaaS, you're getting a new release every time. And by the way, turns out that worked.
