SIERRA CXO Summit: Blueprint for Enterprise Leadership with Bill McDermott of ServiceNow

Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Good to be here.

Well, thank you very much, Tim, for the warm welcome. And ladies and gentlemen, great to be with you. I guess I really am pretty proud of the journey from the corner store to the corner office. But I have to also tell you, it's been a long road in the sense that you know when my mom and dad went to my first grade teacher review and they sat down with the parent teacher conference, and I was sitting next to my mother and father and sister, Jean Agnes in my Catholic school at the time turned to my mom and dad and said, 'He's a good boy, but don't expect too much of him.' And my dad said, 'What?' And she said, 'Well, you know, maybe a cab driver, could be a truck driver, but don't put a lot of pressure on the boy.' So, you know, I figured with that as a backdrop, I had to live a life where I could control one controllable: that no one would ever out-hustle me. And so at a young age, I was delivering papers and pumping gas and stocking shelves and waiting tables, working for the town. Any job I could get my hands on, I did. And I started in this delicatessen working at it. And lo and behold, the people that owned it decided to sell it. And nobody wanted to buy it. And the price kept coming down. So finally we cut a deal at $5,500 and owed $7,000 with interest, and if I didn't make the payments, everything I put into it was taken back instantaneously. That was the deal. So the urgency of leadership and taking charge hit me young, and I certainly made my share of mistakes starting out with the store. But one of the things I learned quickly is you got to know your customer, and you got to understand who's paying the bills, and it's your customer. And you know, I was in the early days of DoorDash because I found a senior citizen complex close to my store. And what you learn about senior citizens, they don't want to leave the house. So we delivered. And then there were the blue-collar workers like my dad. They were flush rich on Friday night and they were dead broke by Sunday morning. So we gave them credit and they signed everything out all week long in a notebook, and they always paid me back on Friday night. But the big trick was getting those high school kids to walk a block and a half past 7-Eleven to my store. After all, why would they? They're right next to the high school. So I go down there one day, Tim, and I see 40 kids online with only four kids in the store. And I said to them, 'Why are you all online out here when there's a big store in there?' And they said, 'Well, they think we're going to take things.' I said, 'Don't worry about that. You follow me down to my store. Let's go right now.' And I had built the video game room. I wasn't very handy, but my brother was. So we built the video game room, and I got these video games. Did you know they were $7,500 list? Asteroids and Pac-Man and some crazy dinosaur game, right? But I could never have afforded that. But what I did do is cut a deal with the guy that owned them. He kept lowering the price. Finally got to $4,500 per machine. And I said, 'Dude, there's no chance. So why don't we do it this way? You put the machines in here. They'll always belong to you. You can pick them up anytime you want, but let's split the quarters.' And don't you know, in 90 days, those video game machines paid for that store. So it was a lesson that really hit me early on because at the end of a long day, one of the young people came up to me and said, 'Bill, when we want to play video games, eat good food, and be treated with respect, we come to your store. And when we want to steal stuff, we go to 7-Eleven.'

I love it. Well, I started out knocking on cold doors for a living, door to door, at 21 years old. And by way of background, that job meant everything to me because I didn't want to own a Subway franchise. I wanted to sell the deli, get my parents a beach house, do a few things for my family, and then move into the big city, Manhattan. As Frank Sinatra once said, 'If you can make it there, baby, you can make it anywhere.' And I wanted that challenge. And so I did a direct mail campaign to IBM and big companies like Xerox. And Xerox was the one that I was most interested in. They invited me in. The day of my interview, my house, which really often flooded, happened to flood. So I'm in my $99 suit from the mall that I charged on a credit card. And I got to get through four feet of water. So my brother picks me up as I'm coming down the stairs and carries me out as the tide started to subside in Amityville, Long Island, to my dad's car. So he drove me to the railroad tracks. This is an interesting dynamic because you need the background to understand the psyche. And so I'm in the car, love my father, look over at him. I said, 'Dad, I guarantee you I'm coming home tonight with my employee badge from Xerox in my pocket. I'm 21 now.' And he said, 'Bill, you're a good guy. Don't put all that pressure on yourself. Just do the best you can.' I said, 'No, I guarantee you that statement from before. Don't put pressure on Bill.' 100%. And so I go up the escalator. I read the annual report on this company's CEO who was reinventing this company called Xerox Corporation, which at one point was the Google, the Microsoft, the Amazon. It was the one. And you got to remember things happen fast in tech. So this CEO saw it and he's like, 'I got to reinvent this company now on total quality management.' Took the Deming quality principles from Japan and bring them into the US. By the time I was done with my train ride, I wanted to be him, but they weren't going to give me the CEO job at 21. So you better get the damn sales job. So I come into a room like this at the top of the Sixes in Manhattan with great-looking people like you. And I look around. Long Island kid running a little business. Went to a Long Island college. And I'm in a room with brilliant people like you. And I look around and I'm like, 'Damn, I might have oversold it a little bit with my dad.' And you know, Yale this, Notre Dame that, University of Chicago the other thing. And I could have panicked. It ran across my mind. But I figured, what is going to come of it if I panic? So I did what I always did. I talked to people, which I did every day in the store. 'What are you in for? What are you trying to get done? What's your goals today? How'd you make it into New York? Where are you coming in from?' And I got answers like, 'Oh, I'm playing the field. I'll see what they got. There's Morgan Stanley. There's Burroughs. There's this, there's that. We'll see.' And that was when I got my superpower because I knew I wanted it so much more than they wanted it, and I wasn't going to be denied. So I get to my last interview after 10 others with the top boss at 9 West 57th in Manhattan, Emerson Fullwood, who today is still my great friend. Imagine that. I'm on a bench waiting for the interview. And as I'm waiting, I'm sitting next to another guy, David Anderichel, who's one of my great friends to this day. And the secretary's name is Joanne Siciliano. Joanne's one of my friends today. And I say, 'Please register with Mr. Fullwood that I'm here. I'm willing to wait all night. I just want to know I'm here. No problem.' She carries the message. I'm invited immediately in. And this is where the story begins and how it all goes. I was not in a job interview. I was in a fight for my life because if I get that job, I'm in control of my own destiny. So as I look over his shoulder to Central Park and I realize this is the shot of a lifetime, everything went on fire inside me. And so we have a great meeting and he tells me, 'Bill, very interesting young guy who's a really terrific conversation. You might have heard this in your career at some point. The HR department will get in touch with you in the next couple of weeks.' I said, 'Mr. Fullwood, I don't think you completely understand the situation, sir.' He looks at me like, 'What is this kid up to?' Tilt his head again and I said, 'Look, I haven't broken a promise to my father in 21 years. And I guaranteed him I'd have my employee badge in my pocket tonight.' He said, 'Bill McDermott, as long as you haven't committed any crimes, you're hired.' I said, 'Well, I certainly haven't committed any crimes. Are you sure I'm hired? Is that a positive? Yes, sir. That's a positive.' I get up about where you're sitting. I pick him up, move him around a little bit in a bear hug, put him safely in his chair, zoom past Joanne Siciliano, and of course David and Michael too. I get to the 38th floor elevator, go down to the street, 57th and 6th. I run to the corner to a phone booth. Then you had to put quarters in phones. I put quarters in phones. Call up mom and dad. And I said, 'I got good news. We got the job. Break out the corbell. We're partying tonight.' Now, some people in California actually don't know what corbell is, especially in Silicon Valley. It is Long Island Crystal. It's great stuff. Cost about $2 a gallon. But then I worked my way up and when I was 24 years old, I didn't want to be an individual contributor. It didn't matter that you're number one in the world and you're making a lot of money. I got my high out of helping other people get their success, get their high, and teaching a craft and honing that craft. So I got these 17 young people right out of university. We had North South, Bronx, Harlem, down at 57th Street, River to River. And I was putting everybody in position to win. So Tony Garcia is going to do better in the South Bronx than Everton Harrison's going to do in the North Bronx, and Bill Atkins is going to do in Harlem. And by the way, we had an equal number of women even then and men. And it was an incredibly diverse, unbelievably talented team. And they all had one thing in common. They knew the standard was to be number one in the world. They knew the standard was that every single person would be successful, would make not just their quota, would make the President's Club, which is the top performers in the company. That was the standard. So we had our goals as a team. Each person had their goals as an individual. The world has gotten away from goal setting. You have to have goals. And with your reports, you got to think about what their individuality is all about. What are their personal goals? They trying to put a kid through school, make a car payment, get a house. What are they into, man? And so they had to write it down. We put it on a wall and we celebrated each other. But here was the lesson. 80/20. 80% of what you do is what you're best in the world at. The other 20% of your craft you have to share. And we're going to co-mingle the talent. And no one gets left behind. And I cut a deal with the top person in the company, Barry Ran. He ran the whole outfit. And I said, 'Barry, when the team, not if the team, when the team all makes Winner's Circle or President's Club, I kindly ask you to come to Hawaii and sit down and have dinner with that team. Don't do it for me. Do it for them. And show that when something extraordinary is done, you'll get on a plane and demonstrate your recognition to them personally.' And who was he? He was the president of United States customer operations. Later became the number two in the company, CEO of Avis and some other things. He's a legend and he was the top guy in the company. Long story short, he did and they did and we did. And I think the main theme here is, you know, what is the standard? If you look at your companies today and I realize that you do many complicated things in the technical community, but also you rely on other people to sell your product and that's what turns you on when customers derive value from that product and make a difference for their companies. That's what you do, right? So knowing what you know now in an example like this and knowing that probably your average sales team has only 40% tops making 70% of their quota, right? This sinks in a little bit. So that's how it all started.

Yeah. I did not like conformity. I did not like boring meetings and pretending that I was listening when the person who was talking did not actually have the same passion for the customer that I had. So I'm like, why am I wasting two or three hours looking at stat sheets when I can be on the loose in the market with this team doing great things? So I always cut a deal. And here's the deal. I explained that performance is the price of freedom. And if you perform, you should not be constrained by corporate bureaucracy. You should actually be reinventing it. And so they let me alone. And I was on the loose. And this team was on the loose. And we were tough on each other. Like we met every Monday first thing in New York City 8:00 a.m. We closed it down on Friday. We knew what our goals were at all times. We knew where people stood at all times, but we didn't have to do memos and form festivals and filling out this and that. We were on the loose with customers. And that to me is missing in corporations today. Everybody is too knotted up with details instead of creating new stories, new dreams.

Well, my dear friend Ahmed is here today, president, chief operating officer of a great company called ServiceNow. And it's been so fun working with him, a great technologist, a fantastic leader. And he'll tell you the topics I'm on right here, we're doing that within our own company. So we use the ServiceNow platform to run the corporation. We now have 28,000 people. We do have a financial system. We do have an HR system. We do have a quote unquote, if you want to call it, a CRM system. There's nobody in the entire company that even knows that. They look at only one thing. They have one portal, an AI-driven portal in a secure way. They have access to everything they need to do their job, including their AI teammate. And we want AI to be the helping hand to make people better. And so that coupled with a tremendous passion for the customer. We do not play games when it comes to the customer, their net promoter score, their happiness, the endurance of their expansion, their utilization, the value they derive from the software. And we're really into how are we helping this company be the best they can be? And that's where we get our high, whether it's in industries, it's in geographies. And I would also furthermore say the ecosystem, building out an ecosystem where there's many more thousands of feet on the street than you could ever afford in your own company, right? Really good idea. And so we're an open platform. We welcome our friends. We're good for it. If we tell you we're going to do something, we're going to do it. And we want to be the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. That's what I came here to do. And people say, 'Well, what does that mean?' And they don't really understand that you could have a dream where you're the one that wants to define an entire category. And for me, what it meant coming in here, because I left a great job at SAP by not renewing a 5-year deal. I came in here on the intent of taking what is a great platform and realizing that it was born in this century and all the other ones in the SaaS space that are well-known were born in the last century. So if we're going to define the enterprise and we're going to be that company, the 21st century really came into play. And I was kind of making a point when I did it. And now 28,000 people could tell you that. I even have some board members that want to tattoo it on their body. I said, 'Please put it in a quiet place where nobody knows and make it small.' But they do celebrate that a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, by way of background, you got to remember I was at, as you rightfully point out, Tim, I was at SAP 17 years. I was on the cusp of signing a five-year renewal. I liked my job very much and I was not leaving. But this is the buildup to that. There was an interesting situation that developed. I had no single view of my customer at SAP. We went on a bit of a shopping spree. We had to take a great core ERP. We had no cloud revenue in 2010. Right? You'll remember that the 2008 financial crisis changed everything. We lost a billion euros in pipeline in 24 hours as an example. And you saw the on-premise software world quickly evolve to the SaaS model because the CEO wasn't funding big capex projects anymore. They were telling their leadership team, 'Hey, if you want innovation and you can self-fund it with OPEX, have at it.' So what you saw happen was a tremendous tech sprawl. But you also saw a great time for SaaS where these platforms multiplied like rabbits across the whole enterprise, right? And SAP was sitting there in 2010 with no cloud revenue. So we went for the constellation around the core. And now fast forward to your question of 2019, SAP was growing in the cloud like 40% year-over-year complementing the core. So why leave? Why leave is because I had no single view of my customer. I couldn't see my customer because I had acquired companies. They had different platforms, different release levels. Some's in the cloud, some was on premise, all the stuff you guys deal with. And even in my own company, I might have multiple ERP systems in different regions of the world. So what did I do? I asked my number two to figure this out and give me a single view in preparation for the board meeting, and he said, 'Hey man, we can't do it.' I'm like, 'Hey, I got 20,000 engineers running around here. What are they doing all day?' And he said, 'It's an architectural issue.' He explains it to me and I said, 'Who can do it?' And he said, 'ServiceNow.' And they did it in record time, shoestring budget compared to any numbers I'd seen before, and it worked. And I was blown away. So John Donahoe becomes the CEO in like 2017. I was the first guy in his office on Sand Hill Road before he even went to ServiceNow. I flew in from Germany, I sat down with him like this and I said, 'John, do you know what you have here?' And he goes, 'Bill, I really don't know much about the enterprise. What do I have here?' And I explained it to him. And of course, I wanted to buy the company, right? But I already had Germany at this point at like 9,500 RPMs on the engines running hot, and we had a big number to take out ServiceNow. But I say to John, 'Let's form a partnership.' We go to a golf outing in 2019. Okay, now we're in the zone. And in that golf outing, it's John, very good golfer, by the way. Great guy, too. Andre Iguodala, basketball player. You probably know him from your great Warriors. And a top guy from Morgan Stanley. We're at the ninth hole, and John said to me, 'Bill, would you ever leave SAP?' I said, 'John, why are you asking me that? I'm about to sign a five-year renewal. Why are you asking me that?' He said, 'I want to be your agent.' Okay, everyone needs a good agent. No problem. So I go to the dinner. I give a talk on his dream that night. And lo and behold, chair of the Nom and Gov committee, lead director. We end up in a conference room and I knew what ServiceNow could be. So that was where it all started to move in 2019. But I came in leaving something else that I really love, too. So I wasn't going to do it if we weren't going to be the best. And so you're right. I did a global road show for the first 100 days in 2019. And I met every employee and the top 100 customers in the world. And that was a stroke of luck because that was the fourth quarter of 2019. The first quarter of 2020, COVID hits. And just think of it in our lives, we have to be in front of the action. You got to meet the people. You got to meet the customer. You got to know what's going on. And so the trust bridge had been built. And you know, remember trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. So we had the foundational layer. And in 2019 through COVID, we basically went into a room in Santa Clara and we were going to come up with blue sky thinking to create the next generation of ServiceNow. And I'm looking around the room and everyone's like, 'Nah, we got to solve for COVID because if we don't solve for COVID, we won't be a great brand. And we want to be a brand-led company because your brand shows up way before you do and people talk about your brand after you leave the room. We got to do this.' So we really focused on getting a release of all of the safety protocols of COVID, not only within the offices where our customers operated to continue their operations, but with the suppliers and the pharma companies to manufacture it, ship it, deliver it, monitor it, and keep it going with all the new updates to the COVID shots and so forth. And what we realized is entire countries were now relying on ServiceNow's platform to keep their people alive and safe. And that took us to a new level of mental commitment to what we could be someday. And you know that was the first 100 days. That was how we managed around COVID. And I've always believed that you just take every pressure point, every setback in your life as an opportunity to rise and do the best you possibly can and show the grit and come back stronger for it. And fortunately for us, we actually got stronger through COVID, right? Even in a remote world. And you know what was crazy? I learned something that I did not expect. The CEOs were so easy to get to because they were home. So I literally started the day at like 6:00 a.m. and closed it down in California with Asia late at night to make sure that every CEO in the world that we could possibly have a conversation with could understand the power of this once in a generation platform. And they did. So it actually really was a catalyst for us because we covered so much ground so quickly. I mean, if you're meeting them with airplanes, that'll take you a while. Zoom, you can get eight or nine in a day. That's how it went.

Sure. Happily do that. I got one really fun example. And Megan, you remember this because we were together in New York City. I was meeting with Gary Bettman, who is the commissioner of the NHL. And we have a very nice meeting, very good friendship. And I'm talking AI and really using an agentic AI portal that's highly secure to manage the NHL, all of its people, but also the 32 teams. So everybody would just have one agentic experience to improve their world, their job. Get things done faster, better, cheaper, but also invigorate each team with a consistency around the NHL. So there wouldn't be 32 NHLs, it'd only be one. This is really interesting because the people that were influencing that decision are excellent people, but the go-in position is always, 'Let's delay it. Let's postpone it. Let's go another six months. Let's do a proof of concept.' Those are everybody wants a proof of concept. And I said, 'You know what? Why don't we just do it and why don't we just prove to you that it works and it'll make you a lot happier, a lot more successful.' And I think we did that in two weeks and they were up and running. They call it Home Ice. They're deriving extraordinary value. 90% of the people are very satisfied and they feel their job is substantially improved, and the teams love dealing with the league, which is a really important thing. So ours works and it works because we have great engineering. We started building, I know there's a great representative here from Nvidia, my wonderful friend Jensen. We started building our domain specific model with him six years ago, and we came out with an AI version of our platform in COVID, I might add. And now it's just gotten so refined that it's in about 1,600 companies around the world. And since we do business with the Fortune 2000, and that's the biggest base, we do many more too. You can imagine the biggest companies in the world are doing it. We ourselves now have 90% of our customer service, our IT service, and our HR service being done by agents. As an example, in HR, we have one agent for every 800 employees. Our head of HR thinks that one agent can handle 1,600 soon. So these are quantum leaps of improvement of productivity.

By the way, we don't lay anybody off. We're still hiring because we're a growth company, but we're lifting and shifting humans into jobs that they actually prefer much more. And we're letting AI work for people. And it's really lifted up our culture. That's big. And the other thing I did want to mention on this topic, Tim,

Is the CEOs, and I do pride myself on these relationships, and every day minimum, there's two or three of them, two or three meetings a day with CEOs. Today was 120, but they were consolidated into one place. It was very nice. But what they're telling me is that they want less platforms. They want to make bigger bets on bigger partners. They're tired of the proof of concept game. It's wearing them down.

Most of the POCs that they choose with companies that are pretenders pushing agents everywhere are failing. As you know, MIT, and I'm sure you're way ahead of me on the study that 95% of the AI out there is not delivering positive ROI. And people say to me, 'Man, that's crazy.' No, it isn't. 85% of the digital transformation projects in the world for the last 25 years haven't delivered a positive ROI. And you say why is that? Integration. One department doesn't talk to another. One system doesn't talk to another. So what we wanted to do is create a platform that scaled across all enterprise domains: all IT, HR, customer, engineering, all the departments. And Amit calls this east to west. AI that goes east to west. AI is cross-functional. It is not operating in a silo.

So if you want to operate in a silo and you want to buy somebody's agents, have fun. You'll make 20 people more productive and they might like you for it. But if you want to change and transform a company, one clean pane of glass that's AI-driven that goes across all of it, that can connect to any cloud, any model, and any data source. That's the game we're playing, and I really see the early signs of this in a world where there's a lot of questions, there's a lot of confusion, especially at the C-suite.

So I think that this is an unbelievable opportunity. You know, it's going to be a $22 trillion market by 2030. And what I love about AI that works on real platforms is it does not discriminate because you can both grow, that's a $22 trillion numerator I gave you, and you can also take cost out to the tune of $4 trillion by 2030. And a lot of people say, 'Wow, that's a big market.' Yeah, it is. But by 2040, it'll be $40 trillion, right? And so this is a new world order of things. And I do want to make one thing clear. A lot of people feel that AI isn't good for people. And I don't agree with that. And I think every tectonic change in technology has always worried us about how humans will survive and thrive in this new world order of things. What I see is the demand for people and soft skills of people, the real talents of people. Obviously, you great technologists, engineers, leaders of technology enterprises speaks for itself. We, Ahmed, could we survive without them? Not even a chance. But it's also, think about even people that touch the customer. Whether you're in a support function or a direct function, the human capacity of people is actually really being more appreciated now than it used to be. But the expectations have also risen that if people are going to give you their time, they're expecting you to be great at using it wisely. So I'm really excited. I have never seen an opportunity bigger. And I just feel like this world is going to be your oyster if you make great products, if your brand shows up well, if you can tell a great story and you're building a strong ecosystem, which I see a lot of friends in here. And then ultimately, we really make technology and AI in particular good for people.

Great question, guy. I think the main thing is, you know, we've been a public company since 2012, and we have proven AI with use cases, references in every industry, in every geography in the world. We can show the facts. So having substantive customer references helps. We have a very large ecosystem that has built their franchise on the ServiceNow platform and the brand, and they're expanding with the company. So you want to be with a company that's thriving, it's going places, there's investments being put into it. You also want a platform that is a cross-functional AI platform because business processes, while that might seem like a term that you understand well, the problem with business processes, whether it's order to cash, procure to pay, design to build, recruit to retire, I can go through many of these concepts, they are very broken and disconnected in companies today, and CEOs have invested billions in technology and, as I said earlier, not gotten positive ROI out of it. So what company platform can go in there where it makes you stronger in your hyperscaler relationships, which are very mission-critical to many companies, that connects with all the other language models because they're all good and they all do something important, but let's make sure we have the integration with them so you get the business benefit out of them. The other thing we have to connect with all these systems and all the data in these systems, and we have invented a RaptorDB database, an in-memory post-process SQL database that we think is the best in the world. Others can have their opinion of it, but I can ingest any data at mass scale in the enterprise now. So customers have choice: do you want to move the data into this AI platform for business transformation and do it all in ServiceNow? Oh, probably sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Fine. We make a zero copy of any data source. So I am unaware, and if you are aware of another company that has a platform that goes east to west and north to south, up and down the stack, across every industry in the global economy with thousands of happy customers and a thriving ecosystem that's beating expectations on Wall Street every time, I would say who are they? I want to meet them.

All right, brother.

Love Moo Works.

Well, I think it was really more about, you know, what's the difference between SAP and ServiceNow and how did you modulate the strategy? I think it's much more about recognizing that every culture is a little bit different, and you have to really be very keen on the culture. You also have to be very smart about things. We had a very strong engineering culture at ServiceNow and we were building great products that were in the market and succeeding, and we were early in the adoption of many dreams and visions we had for what the platform could be. So we did not go for large-scale M&A, which was an incredibly different strategy than I did at SAP. And neither one is right or wrong, but both of the strategies were proper for the company and where it was in its development and its engineering capability and go-to-market capability. Now, with SAP, and let me be clear, I love SAP, and we needed to do the M&A moves because it's 2010. We have a great ERP business, but I got nothing in the cloud and I got a buying center and CEOs that want SaaS, and not to respond to that would have hurt our core. And so what I learned is as we were doing these deals, we were also increasing the growth rate in the core. And if you got a great core, you got something. So I always felt like companies that are truly great have a great core. So if you look at ServiceNow in the world of IT and service management around it, it's the standard. So if you look at SAP, the ERP is the standard. So the question is always, how can I expand the perimeter either organically through partnerships or even M&A? And that's what we did in both cases. They were just different approach shots.

Of my career? You know, I gave you the first job, you know, at Xerox because like I said, it wasn't a job interview. It was a fight for my life. Another great moment in my career, I would have to say, is really coming off of an injury that nobody expected me to get up from. And walking in and facing 100,000 people with cuts all over me and just coming off a really tough injury and realizing that it takes courage to get back up. A lot of people can surf the wave when it's perfect, but when it busts you and it takes you into the sand and everything hurts, who are you really? And so I really think that was a moment, and actually I thought that it made me an even better leader in the sense that I have a higher empathy and a greater depth for the pain that a lot of people deal with every day, whether it's them personally, it's their families. And so by me being vulnerable and getting right out there, it was kind of like everybody had an invitation to get closer to me. You know, he bleeds like everybody else, and he's real and he's here because he wants to be here, not because he has to be here. And so I think that was a real moment, and I think in many ways it made me brand new again, and everything became brand new and fresh, and I still feel that way. So I think some people who have near-death experiences, they're gifted by God with a new appreciation for everything. Man, I'm grateful for everything. And you know, I pass people, they could be sweeping the floor, and I'll tell them, 'Thank you. My experience in this building would never be nearly as nice if you didn't keep the floor so lovely. Thank you. I appreciate you. I see a receptionist. I might be going in to see the CEO. That receptionist is just as important to me as that CEO. She matters.' What would I be if not for Joanne Siciliano taking that note into Emerson Fulwood? So all these genetic things that have always been there, they're just like at a peak, a heightened awareness that I find just such a blessing. And I think that we all have our path, like we're all going to get hit with a thunderbolt, and the question is how are you going to get up from it? And in my case, I really believe destiny plays a role in everyone's life. And man, I probably wouldn't have volunteered for what I went through. Oh yeah, Bill, would you volunteer? Like, let's do that again. Probably not. But when you do it, do it well. And that's really a question no one's ever asked me, but that's the one. I would definitely give it that one.