Snowflake’s first sales hire on scaling from $0 to $3.5B | Chris Degnan (Former CRO, Snowflake)

Brett: Well, thanks for doing this. I'm excited about it.

Chris: Thanks for having me.

Brett: Want to start with the very simple question of what is the job of a CRO.

Chris: It depends. So, when I first started at Snowflake, I was not the CRO or even the VP of sales. I was the director of sales. So, as the first salesperson on the ground, your job differs greatly than when you're the chief revenue officer of a $3.5 billion organization. So, how you do the job day one is, you have to be the best salesperson on the planet. You have to know how to sell the product. And when it's a $3.5 billion public company, you're spending a lot of your time on strategy and problems. I always would say, if I'm coming into your region, it's probably not the best thing because there's a reason I'm there, and the reason is not good. A lot of times you're really thinking a lot about organizationally, how the organization is operating, what things you should do that are not just tactical, individual by individual, but like, "Hey, are there themes that need to happen? Is there sales processes that have to change?" You're thinking about a lot of things differently as the company scales.

Brett: Maybe to pick that apart a little bit, let's talk about sort of the 10 to 100 range CRO role and maybe the 100 to 500, 700, a billion, something like that. What is the difference between good and excellence maybe in those... And maybe you'd break it apart in different categories, but if we sort of chunk it down, what is excellence do you think?

Chris: As a sales leader in general, these are the things that I learned. I learned really my selling career at EMC, which is now part of Dell. I was part of the commercial sales organization, which is a very transactional mid-market sale. And what I learned there is true for any startup, is that you have to recruit great people, you have to develop those people, and then ultimately drive revenue as your third thing. If you recruit those great people and they know how to sell the product, then they'll drive revenue. And so, you think about things in that order, that becomes incredibly important. And then, as you look at your leadership team, it's incredibly important that they know how to sell the product. So, I'm very much a lead from the front sales leader. I need to know how to sell the product better than anyone else. And that was my thing. I needed to be a really good salesperson and understand the technology and then be able to articulate that back to the founders, the CEO, whomever, about some of the challenges that we're seeing in the market. So, ultimately, as the head of sales from 10 to $100 million is, it's about the people. I mean, it's always about the people. You have to find great people. You have to develop those people. You have to trust them. And then you have to continually evolve as a sales leader from being the person that does every deal to not doing every deal, enabling these people, trusting these people to actually do deals that you were doing. And that's kind of the evolution of scaling from 0 to billions of dollars in revenue.

Brett: Why do you think it's so important to have that level of product knowledge or be excellent effectively in an IC role when you're managing an organization of hundreds or a thousand sellers?

Chris: Because if you went on a sales call and you don't know what good looks like because you're not knowing how to sell the product, how are you going to be a judge of if you've built the right sales organization? So, to me, it drives me nuts if you have a sales leader... And I've had sales managers in the past that are spreadsheet managers, that sit behind their desk and they look at numbers. And that's, in some ways... towards end of my job at Snowflake, that was more the job than being the lead from the front seller. But I still took pride in being able to get on sales calls and talk about the product. And I think if you have second-line leaders in your organization who don't know how to sell the product and say, "Oh, they're hiring great salespeople," how do you know they're hiring great salespeople? How do they know what a good sales call looks like? Because if they can't sell the product, then how can I trust the forecast that they're giving to me? So, it is about this trust that you have to have in your leadership, in your sales team. And if all of a sudden you lose touch to what's happening in the organization and you'll lose touch pretty quickly, then your organization can be pretty flimsy.

Brett: Going back to sort of the scaling journey of a CRO, how would you break down your different chapters over the 11-plus years? And when you looked at version 1 of you and 2 of you and 3 of you and 4 of you as you went from 0 to 10 to 100 to 500 to a billion-plus, what was hard in what you had to do?

Chris: Before Snowflake, the largest team I had ever managed was probably 12 people, maybe 10 or 12 people. And so, all of a sudden I'm managing a very large sales team, even probably two years in, managing the largest sales team I'd ever managed. And the hardest part is, when you're a front-line leader and even a second-line leader, you know everybody in your work. And it was like at Snowflake, I knew everybody at Snowflake. I knew how they were, I knew who they were, I knew their families, all this other stuff. And then, when you're managing hundreds of people, there's a chance that you don't know people that are working for you. And when you grow like that, you're in this rocket ship. There's a lot of people that want to jump on that rocket ship. As Frank Slootman has a famous saying, it's like there's passengers and drivers. And you want the passengers to get off the bus or the rocket ship. And so it's really hard to figure out who's the truth tellers, who are telling you the truth, who are doing their job, who are working hard, and who are the fakers, the liars, the manage-uppers. So, like, there were peers of mine that were really nice to me, but not nice to people that work for me, or they were really nice to my boss, but not nice to other people in the organization or didn't know how to do their job. There's a bunch of stuff like that. So, that's the hardest part, is, if I meet you first day on the job at Snowflake and you're BDR, I'm the same person to you as I am to the CEO of the company, as I am to the board of directors. I don't change. I mean, I am who I am. And that's not always the case in an organization. And there's a lot of people that do a very good job on managing up but do a terrible job, and you have to see through that. So, you have to find those fakers, those people that are the passengers, and really vet them up.

Brett: How do you do that? What's the skill that you developed?

Chris: Number one, sometimes it's hard. If you're a third- or fourth-line manager, reaching down in and making sure that you're having one-on-ones with reps, making sure you're having one-on-ones with front-line managers, making sure you're out in the field, going and having a coffee, a breakfast, a lunch, a dinner, drinks, whatever it is that you do when you're out in the field, going to run with them, it doesn't matter. But getting them to trust you, you have to have those people that you trust. If you lose that element of, like, "I know I could pick up the phone and call anyone in the organization," or you don't do that and you just sit in your ivory tower and things are great, then you won't be good.

Brett: When you think about a world-class CRO at a scaleup company, a few hundred million in revenue, do you think they could be effective at any scaleup enterprise business if they're truly exceptional? Or there is a real fit element where the CRO has to be matched correctly with, it could be the go-to-market motion, the values of the CEO? Or is it interchangeable? You plot you into X company, it looks like these type of ACVs and you should be equally as successful.

Chris: I just had this conversation the other day with one of the founders that I'm helping, and he was talking about industry expertise versus just sales experience. And I'm going to pick the athlete over the industry expertise every single time. And so, for me, I asked that question. So I was fortunate enough to have John McMahon on our board. When John left the board, I asked him the question. Because I managed to effectively stay on my job with four different C-

Brett: Cast of CEOs.

Chris: Yeah, four different CEOs. For each time, there were moments in time that it wasn't going to work, for each one. And the thing I asked John is, "John, what feedback do you have for me?" Why was he able to keep my job? And what he said stuck with me, and I think it's important for everyone to realize this, and it's a combination of that and what Slootman says is... Slootman said to me is, "Hey, people in Silicon Valley think, because they've made a lot of money, that they're exceptional. And that's not true. There's so much luck that's involved in what we do. Yeah, you could go work your butt off selling whatever, siding, or whatever it is that you're trying to sell, or you could get lucky and sell for a company like Snowflake." And so, you have to put yourself in that perspective. And then you have to be super open to feedback. And so, if you have someone that works for you, if you have a board member, if you have your manager, a peer, if they're giving you feedback, you should not just brush that feedback off. You should listen to it and you should take it, and if you take action. So, John McMahon said to me is, "Hey, Chris, you would listen to feedback and then you would take action on that feedback, no matter what scale stuff was at." And that's really how I think ultimately I kept my job. I was really good at selling the product. Okay? Slootman saw that. But there were things that I had never done. And there was things that he thought I was making a mistake about. And so, he's like, "You need to do these things." And he said it. He would be really tough. He'd be like, "Either you do these things or I do them. But if I do them, why are you here?" And you're like, "Okay. Noted."

Brett: "Registered."

Chris: Yeah, yeah. "Yeah, I got it. I got it, Frank." So, I think that's the thing. I was super fortunate to have world-class people like Bob Muglia, like Mike Speiser, like John McMahon, Carl Eschenbach, and the list keeps going of just these world-class operators, world-class leaders that I got to work with.

Brett: What are some of the things that when Frank came in, he explained, "These gaps need to be closed," and he was correct? And were there things that he pointed you at that were incorrect?

Chris: Frank said to me, "Chris, you're a deal jockey, and that got us to where we are today, but it's not going to get us to where we need to be."

Brett: He meant that more in your superstar IC capacity or something else?

Chris: I was involved in every deal, every deal. When Frank came in, we were trending towards 500 million.

Brett: And you were that involved?

Chris: I mean, the first thing I had a... My first one-on-one with Frank... They fire Bob on a Tuesday, and then on Thursday, I have my first one-on-one with this kind of legendary, very scary guy in Frank Slootman. And I remember clearly, I walk into the one-on-one and I said, "Frank, there's two things I have for you." I said, "We have $100 million dollar deal," which is still one of Snowflake's biggest customers. "We have $100 million deal that Bob was in the middle of. I need your help on this. This is what I need you to do. And number two is, we have the best marketing department in the world. Don't screw with that." And he was like, "Well, that's refreshing because everyone else that has come in has thrown their peers under the bus." I'm like, "Well, I got nothing bad to say," which I certainly had plenty, but I wasn't going to do that then. So, I think what he meant is, "Look, I was involved in all these deals and I was grinding on all these deals that I would push people aside and say, 'I'll take this deal.'" Okay, great. But he said, "You're going to kill yourself, and it's not going to work if you're in the middle of every one of these deals. So you have to have people that you trust," which is important because I was forced to hire some people from Frank's past that I still was doing their job for them. And that was scary to me too as I went to Frank and I'd be like, "Frank, I'm doing this person's job for them. I don't see why you think they're good because they're not." Frank was very pragmatic and he said, "They're my guys in that I expect them to do their job." But he's like, and this was the difference between Frank and Bob, is, Frank's like, "Do you think the board is my friends? They're not my friends. They will fire me in a heartbeat if I'm not delivering shareholder value." So the same thing holds for your organization. There are people that I like, but if they're not doing their job, then you hold the right. You're the person that's responsible for running this organization. You have to make that decision. And so he would hold me accountable to doing that. And so he let me fire people that he forced me to hire. That's big on him. And so I think that was that... I think the thing I mentioned earlier about optimization, we should have done some of the changes he recommended in terms of I segmented the organization. I brought in a major's organization, which was covering the top 250 accounts, super important to cover them differently than a traditional 2,000-, 3,000-person organization. You can't cover them the same way. That was important. So that was helpful. But what he said to me was, "Not all new logos," we call them cap ones, "Not all new logos are the same." Turns out he was wrong. So we took our eye off the ball, new logos. So, I'd say that he was right in that it made us a ton of money because we went out to this day, the largest IPO. I'm sure someone will break it this year because there's companies that have much more revenue than we did. But we're the largest software IPO ever and enterprise software IPO ever. And there were a bunch of things that we did right at the time. We optimized. We were generating free cashflow that matters. Now it seems like back to growth, growth at all costs. We were playing in such a huge market. Snowflake's still growing at an astronomical rate. And so, that market is so huge that we should have kept the foot on the floor and kept hiring and kept going harder. And those are things that I think back to that we could have done differently.

Brett: When you think about the scaling of the sales org, explain a little bit more about as you got bigger and bigger and evolved your thinking over time, how that expressed itself in the way that you designed the org and broke the org up sort of across the journey.

Chris: We were very much an outbound organization. So everything was just cold call, cold call, or spam, spam, spam. We had no PLG. But then, all of a sudden when we became more of a name brand, there was more awareness. So there was less... I didn't need to be in front of every customer. So there could be 150-person startup, 100-person startup, and I didn't need to have a face-to-face sales organization there. So, really, at the beginning, we started trialing out at, I think, 200 employees and below, we started building out an inside sales model. And that thing worked gangbusters. It worked really well.

Brett: And the motion is somebody trials the product and then they get in touch?

Chris: Yeah. Well, combination of. Yeah. So, marketing would try to get a bunch of those people to our on-demand page, and then they would sign up for a trial account. And then there would be some outbounding, but it's more like, okay, people are more familiar with you. There's more case studies, more references, that kind of stuff. When you have a Fortune 100, Fortune 500 company, those companies buy just differently. Their evaluation processes are so long. When Frank joined... one of the largest banks in the world, he joined, and one of the first meetings I went with him on, I went out to New York, went to this meeting, I'm like, "We're never going to get these guys as a customer." Because they had been kicking the tires for two years and they kept telling us we were going to buy. Turns out that they did. Turns out they're a huge Snowflake customer, but it just took forever. And you have to treat those salespeople... they need more resources, but the upside potential, these are, like, 20, 30, $50 million a year accounts eventually, and you have to treat them differently. And that was where Frank recognized that I was not doing that. The U.S. is such a huge market. And then you start to run the same plays in the international markets as well.

Brett: What are your thoughts on process and systems as you sort of scale over time? And do you have a way to think about too much process, too little process, sort of those types of things?

Chris: I'm a firm believer of MEDDIC or MEDDPICC as a sales methodology. MEDDIC is just a sales process and it's metric, economic buyer, decision process, decision criteria, identify pain, and then it's champion and competition. That's how you... if you think about your deal, every deal that way. And so if you have a rep, a manager, a second-line manager, third-line manager who thinks about MEDDPICC and qualification that way, and if you say, "Hey, no champion, no deal," if you say, "Why do they have to do something now?" and they say, "Because they said they want to," well, that's not a real reason. Either they're just lying to you or they have no compelling reason to do a deal. So, that's your compass for a forecast. And so when I look for hiring sales leaders, I want someone who's had a MEDDIC background or been in a MEDDIC organization. But in products that are really hard to sell... So, prior to Snowflake, I was at a really crappy security software company, and it was a bad product. And so we had to be maniacal about how to sell it.

Brett: I feel like that's where you really cast your metal as a seller.

Chris: [inaudible 00:17:19]. That was hard.

Brett: If you can sell a piece of junk, you know what you're doing

Chris: Yeah. That was hard. Look, the reps that we had there were incredible reps. They're unique individuals, incredible. But that was really hard. And so, I took a lot of what I learned and brought that to Snowflake. But at some point when you just... all of a sudden things go, like, you're just limping along, all of a sudden it just goes like a hockey stick up and to the right, you have to be flexible. There are going to be things that you're going to say, "Okay," like, "Okay," and you're not going to... It's hard to be that maniacal about everything. But eventually, the hockey stick flattens out and truth comes and you have to then... And so that's where you make... in that hockey stick era, you make a lot of bad hires, you make a lot of mistakes. And so you have to center that on having that. So, look, I think sales methodologies matter. And I always tell this to founders, is, "I can teach someone MEDDIC." This spring, I'm ironically teaching MEDDIC at Stanford Business School, which I have no business stepping on that campus, but let alone teaching a class, but I am teaching a class on MEDDIC there, and I always tell founders, "I'm a firm believer of hiring someone that's been raised in a MEDDIC sales organization because at least they have that baseline, like what it is, how to think about things." If you don't hire them, then someone's going to have to teach them that, or no one's going to teach them that, because you don't know it.

Brett: Explain why you think it's so important and so foundational.

Chris: Kind of like what I said, there's this... At some point, if you're at this incredible company, there's this rocket ship time, and you could get to $100 million. And especially in this world of AI, there are companies that are getting to $100 million or $200 million, and they don't have to sell value. But at some point, there is a day of reckoning. I moved to California late '90s and it was the dot-com boom. People were like, "Yeah, it's never going to go away. The dot-coms are..." And people are just throwing money at these stupid companies. And eventually the reckoning came. AI, same thing. There's going to be a reckoning. There's going to be... There's a bunch of stupid companies out there or people that aren't operating in the right way. If you really dig your feet in and you actually build a really good go-to-market team grounded in this sales methodology, then you know what? You will have made some bad hires, you will have made mistakes, but you'll have made less of them. And then you will have a more fundamental focus on the right things that matter around the forecast, around are you taking feedback from customers, all those things that matter. So, that's the difference, by the way, on a lot of PLG companies. PLG companies, I don't need a great sales team. And then eventually you do. Eventually you do. And so, that's the thing, is, you may not need it today, but you'll need it eventually. And I think that's the thing that... I think I look at a lot of these, the large language model companies now. They're in that same boat. It's like-

Brett: They all have enterprise team and say, "Oh-"

Chris: Yeah. And who knows if they're good? There are a bunch of people that went at Salesforce like, "Hey, no disrespect, but you're selling water to... Salesforce is water to the sales team. That's not selling. You don't know how to sell. You don't know how to do a deal. It's order-taking." And so that's what the LLMs are doing right now. They're order-taking. At some point, if you build a world-class organization at one of those companies, they'll win in the long run.

Brett: What are your thoughts on metrics? Outside of the most obvious, ARR, net retention, what are the metrics that you obsess over? You were talking about earlier you got to a certain scale where you actually did spend a lot of time in spreadsheets. What are you looking for? What are you using to govern the business?

Chris: Working for an engineer was quite interesting. And my last legs at Snowflake was, Sridhar could build dashboards literally in front of me, and I had no business building dashboards. And so he'd be like, "Do you know that this is happening in here?" And I'm like, "No, I did not know that." So he would surprise me with a piece of data constantly. But I think the thing that really you look at is, "Okay," and we got really good at this, is, finance would give it to me, but it'd be better if I had it on my fingertips. Number one is the leading indicators. Okay, the leading indicators, how many sales calls is your sales team going on? Are they going on two? Are they going on five? How many net new business meetings are they going? That's okay. That's number one. Number two is, how much of those meetings are then turning into actual qualified pipeline? Are they converting those meetings into pipeline? Okay, look at that. You measure that. You look at the pipeline that's going there. And then how much of that pipeline is new logo pipeline? And how much of that new logo pipeline are you closing? How long does it take you to close those? Those are the things that I took my eye off, off the ball, and those are the things that matter. Because if you keep your eye on the ball on that new pipeline generation stuff, then that's the thing that keeps the company going and going and going. Because at some point, a customer who's growing really fast will flatline.

Brett: Right. And your point is that if you're just looking at top-level numbers, it masks all of the leading [inaudible 00:22:21]-

Chris: Masks. And it did. It did for me. I mean, I'm like, "High five," and, "Yeah. Hey, great job." But in reality, there was some bad news coming. There was some bad news, like, "Hey, we were going to miss our new logo goals." "Who cares? We're hitting our revenue goals." Well, it turns out it did matter, and it slowed our growth. And then we put our foot on that gas again or that pedal again, and that re-accelerates net retention rate, that re-accelerates growth. Those things really, really, really, really matter.

Brett: If I were to watch you when the business was part of the way through your tenure is doing 500 million or 6 or 700 million, what goes on in a week for you? How did you spend your time?

Chris: Since the beginning of time at Snowflake, I would have a Monday morning forecast at 9:00 AM, and I would expect every one of my direct reports to be on there. And they would give me a commit, meaning it's basically worst case, "Don't miss this," a most likely, and a stretch number. It's for the quarter. I'd pull up Salesforce and I'd go through and I'd pick three or four of their top biggest deals and I'd ask them questions about those deals. And they may not know the answer, but they have to get back to me within the day of what's happening in that deal. Then from there, I would go to the CEO's staff meeting, and you would report, "Here's what's happening in the forecast. Here's what the competition's saying." And you talk to the founders, you talk to the CEO, you talk to the CFO, whatever it is, you bring up issues in there. And you'd have everything from, depending on if I'm going out in the field or not, customer calls. I do one-on-ones that week with my entire direct reports. So 30-minute one-on-ones. I'd have a staff meeting, which was non-revenue generating staff meeting. So it's like, what are the top issues that are happening? You hear from your SE leader. You hear from your alliance leader. You hear from professional services leader, whatever it is that you're bringing up. It's problem solving. That's real issues. There would be skip-level meetings with different people in the organization. I'd prioritize customer meetings as often as possible, so whenever there was a customer issue. A lot of times, especially later stage, I was dealing nothing... Everything was an issue. Everything that made it to me was an issue. So I was dealing with nothing but problems. But that was it. It was basically Monday through Friday in the office dealing with... doing one-on-ones, doing forecasting, having strategy meetings about... Your strategy ops leader becomes really important. People call it RevOps, but strategy ops is incredibly important because they're the people that are supposed to be looking around the corner for you. And I'm not as operationally good. I'm more like lead from the front cell, kind of read the room-type person. I need someone who's more intellectual, thinking about, "Here are data points that are problematic." And so I would have a monthly analytics meeting and I would say, "Bring me some piece of data," whether it was pipeline reviews, and I'd bring the marketing team. It was revenue. It was new logo stuff. I would want to review a bunch of different stuff. Every seventh week of the quarter, my Monday morning forecast call would turn into a out quarter, so the next quarter forecast call.

Brett: What sort of, when you think about your line, your directs, what is important across every single one of them? What is the thing that ties them all together?

Chris: I needed to believe that people knew how to do their job. I had sales engineering people working for me. I didn't know how to be a sales engineer. I had professional services leaders working for me. I didn't know how to be a professional services leader. I didn't know anything about the professional services business. So you really need to listen to them, understand... Because different people... Or different orgs, you hire these different people. They're different personalities. They're different types of people sometimes in terms of how they think. And so you have to be open to working with these different type of people, taking feedback, understanding their challenges and helping them solve those challenges. And so, my head of professional services, there were times where he would be complaining about something and I'd have to say, "Is this a real complaint or not?" listen to him and then react to it. Or my head of sales engineering, they'd say, "I need every one of your sales reps to be able to do demos." And I'm like, "I don't think so. Why?" And that's what your jobs are. But have a good conversation around that. But ultimately, I needed these people to be well-respected by their organization. So you needed to hear, are they bad managers? All this other stuff. You needed to provide them feedback, like, "I'm hearing this about your org," and them... Kind of same thing that I learned from Slootman was like, take that feedback and act on that feedback, and that's what you're looking for in all your leaders.

Brett: Any other thoughts of how you know if someone's excellent in something like sales engineering that you are not excellent in versus I assume your SVP is sales, you could do that job, you've done that job, you know what excellence is. Anything else on managing effectively when you haven't come up in that sub-function?

Chris: The number one thing is, are they recruiting and developing their people? It goes back to that. Are they recruiting great people? Are they developing those people? Are you retaining people? Are you losing good people? These are all things that if all of a sudden you have a rash of good people leaving the organization and you know they're good, on the sales engineering side, you know they're good, if you pick up the phone and you call three of the sales reps that work with that SC and they like, "Oh, man, that was a loss," okay, then you dig in, you find out. So that's where you start to figure out, "Oh, well, let me have a conversation with this person." Like, "Why are you leaving?" Most of the time it's, "I hate my manager."

Brett: And that's sort of the number one thing you're on the lookout for?

Chris: Yeah. And sometimes it's okay. I mean, sometimes you're like, "Okay." Sometimes it's not okay. And that's the other thing in that, going back to the hockey stick example, is, if people are making a lot of money, they'll put up with a lot of crap. And I've had managers that were a little bit of a nightmare, and I put up with them and I shouldn't have. And that happens.

Brett: What do you want the people to say that have worked with you in your org about you when you're not in the room?

Chris: That I'm honest. I'm direct. I work hard. I'm very passionate about what I do. Those are the north stars. I'm not the smartest guy. I'm not going to outsmart everyone. As long as they think that I've been direct with them, I've been honest and I've worked hard, those are the things that matter to me.

Brett: You touched on this in various ways, but what have you figured out around compensation in the go-to-market org and what works, what doesn't? Are there specific landmines or patterns of things that will blow up in your face at some point?

Chris: One of the challenges that we had at Snowflake is the way that I had structured the comp plans early on was, prior to Frank and Mike Scarpelli, the CFO of Snowflake at the time, coming on board, I did one-year comp plans where it was a growth ACV and a renewal ACV. And then I had gates for most people on new logos. That was how we structured it. So, what would happen is, all of a sudden when we started to become more well-known in the industry, you'd get these big deals. And so you'd go out and get a big booking. And then that rep would say they got a $2 million, $3 million booking on a new logo. Didn't happen a lot, but it happened. And because our commission rates were not built to get these $3 million deals, you'd have a rep that might make a million bucks on that deal. In fact, we did. So the rep makes a million bucks, and then he sees this large, very, very, very large company, Fortune 50 company, land the deal, and the rep has a renewal quota going in the next year, and he's like, "They're not going to renew at that rate," because we let them roll over any unused consumption for a dollar. As long as they renewed the contract for a dollar, they could just roll it over. And so the rep quit because he's like, "I'm not going to make any money this year." And so you have to balance that of, how do you pay someone to land the right-size deal and stay with the account, incentivize them to get the account to grow. So, that's where I got rid of the renewal number and then paid them on consumption, but then paid them on growth ACV and consumption. But even then, that becomes problematic because to a public company, when you close a renewal, that means you're invoicing the customer for a large dollar amount. And what invoicing means, it means free cash flow. But if you don't incentivize renewals and just add on capacity, that becomes problematic. So, there's all sorts of different tricks that I've learned in the process.

Brett: Is sort of the takeaway that you have to be constantly nurturing the comp philosophy in every chapter of growth? There is not a globally correct way you eventually land on and then you can just leave it and let it-

Chris: Well, I think it's by segment. I mean, you could look at it by segment of accounts. If you have a, I don't know, Fortune 50 or G2K account that's spending $10 million a year, you might manage the comp plan differently. And so you would have... For some of our largest accounts, we would have custom comp plans, because we'd want to incentivize the right behavior. We knew that XYZ company was going to be potentially our largest customer. You look at that account and say, "How do we incentivize the sales rep? How do we incentivize the SE?" So you might have, I don't know, 10 to 20 customized comp plans specific to those large, massive accounts.

Brett: Now that you've been spending a lot of time with other founders and CEOs as you've been doing advising and helping folks out, what have you found when you think about the classic product and technically oriented founder that you spend time with, what do you think they don't get about go-to-market? Or what's the misconception?

Chris: I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, is, I can just hire someone who I have a good interview with, but they don't come from any background of any methodology. What I'm seeing now in the AI space in particular, there's these really, really smart guys or women out there that are building world-class companies, but they're young and they've never potentially even managed people, let alone run a company. They think they know. And-

Brett: Because they've had success, right?

Chris: They've had success. They're hiring the wrong profile people. It's like, I'm the old grandfather at this point. Some of these founders are close to my daughter's age. So I'm talking to these kids and I'm like, "Okay, well, this is stupid. You're not going to do this." But sometimes they do and they make the mistakes. One of these companies I advise, the guy was like... I'm like, "You shouldn't hire this person." [inaudible 00:32:59] "I think I'm going to get away with it. I'm going to do it." And then he calls me two months later, he's like, "Yeah, you were right." I'm like, "Yeah, I know. Because you weren't hiring for the type of customer you're selling to. You got to look at who you're selling to."

Brett: What are the normal mistakes you tend to see in terms of early go-to-market hiring as companies-

Chris: They don't know. They just think, "Oh, you were at..." like, "Hey-"

Brett: Good company, yeah.

Chris: "... you're taking a meeting with me and I can make anyone successful." A lot of the security companies that I advise, they all want to hire people from the security space. Who cares what... Like, "I want someone from the enterprise technology space who's sold enterprise tech," because, first of all, learning a technology and articulating the value to that customer, that's important. If you can do that, you can sell anything, right? You can sell anything. And so, I'm looking for people that have sold something that's hard to sell, they've successfully done it, they have a proven track record of doing that and show me that you've done that. So, I'm looking for that. And I'm looking for people that have been brought up in those types of organizations that have track records of developing their people. So, that's what you're really looking for, is those types of people.

Brett: Why do you think that's not intuitive to most of these founders?

Chris: Because most of them are engineers. Another company I'm with, they have zero understanding. They don't know what marketing does. Zero understanding. Like, "Wait, why am I spending 200 grand for this on marketing? I'm an engineer. I build a product. I give it to you, salesperson. Go sell it." Okay. But branding matters. You have to be out there. People have to know who you are, depending on the company you're at. AI is growing so fast, you don't want to miss it. And so you have to spend money to get out there. And so there's different things. They're naive. And the question is, are they naive and arrogant? Or are they naive and willing to take feedback? Those are the things that you're really looking for.

Brett: Why do you think you... Something you talked about earlier in the conversation, you've shared before, is kind of this learning, curious orientation that you have, feedback orientations. Everybody gives feedback all the time. Most people you check in, they do nothing with it in a month or two months.

Chris: Nothing. Nothing.

Brett: What about you? What's going on with you that you were oriented, particularly as you had more and more success, somebody else came in and you would actually listen and actually go to work on it?

Chris: First of all, it's a survival instinct, I think. I think it's probably trauma from my childhood. But I think you have to figure out, "How am I going to get myself out of the situation?" in terms of, "Okay, how am I going to solve the situation?" Kind of one of the more interesting sales experiences in my career, I was in Japan and I was at one of the car companies. And they had tried Snowflake. We didn't have any employees over there. We were just hiring the beginnings of the sales team.

Brett: And are you in a suit and a whole thing?

Chris: Oh, yeah, suit, whatever. And in Japan, 90% of the people don't speak English. We walk in, and the user of the product was there, and he's nice enough guy, and the Japanese are very polite people. But the procurement woman came in, and she just was frowning. You're just abundantly clear.

Brett: Sounds like a procurement person.

Chris: Right. But it was like, she was angry, angry. And there was some stuff that we screwed up on. And total... out of nowhere, I just get up, I walk around the table, I walk over to her, I bow to her, and I said to her, "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean for this to happen. I understand you're upset. I will fix this." Yes, I have a translator, but she sees me physically doing this. I walked back around and her whole demeanor changed. The sales engineering leader was with me at the time, and he said, "I don't know anyone that can do that." And I think that's the thing. It's like, you're reading the room. You have to pay attention to people. Sometimes reading the room is not great. When you are in the room and you realize that people don't like you and there's nothing you can do about it, it's not great. It's a skill that I do have. Maybe it's an insecurity as well. But I think those are the things that are super helpful, the survivor skills that I think get you through things.

Brett: What about the role of hunger and just wanting it really bad?

Chris: Desperation. Yeah.

Brett: How important is that do you think for scaleup CROs?

Chris: Yeah. It's incredibly important. I was just talking to guy that I've tried to recruit in the past, and he's at a company that's done really well. The company's getting bought. And he's made a bunch of money. I had talked to the founder of the company and he's like, "I like this guy." And I'm like, "I like this guy too. I know him." But the conversation I was having is, like, "You've made a lot of money." And it's a lot of money. And I'm like, "You've made a lot of money. Are you hungry to go do that again?" And we had that conversation, like, "How old are your kids? Are you going to coach tee-ball? Does your wife like you around seven days a week? Do you like being around seven days..." These are the things that you have to kind of figure out. Because the conversation I have with any head of sales, the thing that's hard about the head of sales job is... There's stress hitting the number, all other stuff. The hardest part is the travel. If you're doing your job right, you're out of your house, you're not sleeping in your bed 8 to 10 nights every month. 8 to 10 nights every month, you're not sleeping in your bed. You're on the road somewhere, you're out, you're eating, you're drinking, you're having breakfast with people. But if you're doing your job right, that's your job. And so the question that I always am looking for is, are you willing to do that? Are you willing to get on the road? Are you willing to get on that plane and sit... When Snowflake was private company and not... "Who knows if we're going to be successful?" I wasn't sitting in the first class. I was sitting in middle seat 30. And so you have to be able to put that grind on and do that. And that's the hard part of being a successful sales leader.

Brett: Is that why you aren't in the role now?

Chris: I will lose my United Global Services status this year, and it's a spike-the-football moment for me. Look, my daughters are now in college. They've lost a lot of time with their dad. It's afforded us a lot of great things as a family. But my wife and my kids paid the price, for sure. Some of these LLM companies have come at me. They're incredible businesses. And it's like, you sit there for a second, you're like, "Man, this would be really fun." But then you remind yourself is... and that's what I said to one of the companies, as I said, "I'd probably kill myself doing it. I'd probably die." And because it's like, as soon as I stopped traveling and having the stress, I lost 20 pounds, not because I was just eating all of a sudden way better, drinking less. It was due to the stress. The stress and the travel was a lot.

Brett: Why do you think that's required for excellence?

Chris: You're the front line. You're in front of these customers. You have to be uber... If you are selling a product that is worth anything, there's some competition that's trying to eat your lunch. You have to be hyper-paranoid about that competitor. The worst thing is, if you do a forecast review with a sales team and like, "Who's the competition?" "No one." Bullshit. You're a bad salesperson. There's always competition. And so, that's the way that I operate, is, I was always operating of a state of like, "Who's eating my lunch?" And there's a company that I'm advising now that we just hired a head of sales there, and he's like, "I'm just so worried about the deals we're not in because this is a huge industry and a huge market." And I'm like, "Great. That's a great way to feel. Now go get in front of as many customers as you can and be super paranoid about it." So, yeah.

Brett: Yeah. "Let me know how it goes before [inaudible 00:40:28]."

Chris: Yeah. "Good luck with that."

Brett: Yeah. Exactly. You talked a little bit about hiring at your exec level or your direct report level. When you think about exceptional IC sales folks, what do you think is required to just be unbelievable in the role?

Chris: They have to be curious. You have to be super curious and asking... The best salespeople you'll meet are going to ask you way more questions than talk. If you get in there and they're just like... There's this misperception that everyone thinks that salespeople are super social people. A lot of great salespeople are not. They don't like big crowds. They don't like to be around a lot of people. They're really good at getting you to talk. So, number one, they ask... It's like, in interviews... My favorite interviews are the people that are asking me questions, not reverse. Pepper me with questions. And that always-

Brett: You think you could hire somebody based just on the quality of the questions they ask you?

Chris: I mean, yes. I'm looking at their LinkedIn background or whatever, but yes. The answer is yes. I mean, I remember one of Snowflake's earliest sales reps. He came from Oracle and I didn't traditionally like hiring Oracle people. But this guy got on and just boom, asking me this, this, this. He's almost like a sales engineer, but he was a sales rep and he was asking me all the right questions. And I'm like, "Man, I love this guy." And so, it's like, I walked out that being like, "I don't need to grill him on all this [inaudible 00:41:54]-"

Brett: And they turned out to be exceptional?

Chris: Yeah. He's still there. Yeah.

Brett: So, one is sort of curiosity. What else do you care about in an actual rep?

Chris: Curiosity. Being a self-starter. I always say a lot of times you're hiring a remote sales team. There may or may not be an office in that region. I can't tell you to get up every day and take a shower and shave and put your shoes and socks on and go on sales calls. I'm not a babysitter. I don't want to be a babysitter. I look at the metrics. The metrics are a spreadsheet that tells me whether or not you're going on sales calls. But are you actually going out and doing it? That's on you. And if you're calling me and saying, "I need help on this thing," I like you. If I don't hear from you, I'm assuming you're not doing anything. So, bring your problems to me. I'm okay with that. There was a crisis over the holidays with one of the companies I'm involved with. Loved it. It was not a great situation, but I loved being a part of it. I was super excited to be a part of it. And those are the types of things that gives me energy. And I think that's the type of sales rep I want, is like, bring me into a tough situation. I'm okay with that. I like that. I like solving those problems. So, I look for those types of people that have that willingness to be direct, that are self-starters, willingness to pick up the phone and call me, and that are intellectually curious. Those are the things that matter. And then you're looking for... We used to do assessments and I was looking for people that were really pessimistic, smart, intellectually smart, pessimistic.

Brett: Like, personality assessments?

Chris: Personality assessment and intellectual assessments. You're looking for someone who's smart and pessimistic. Why do I want pessimistic? Because I don't want someone with happy ears. If you're happy ears and you're nice and everyone's nice and you like everyone, well, guess what? There are going to be a bunch of deals that you're not going to get because people are going to lie to you. Buyers lie to you all the time. Procurement people lie to you all the time. You have to know that. You have to trust your instincts.

Brett: Do you think selling and closing top talent on your team is similar to selling software or entirely different?

Chris: For sure. Yeah. I mean, finding great talent and closing them, but you also have to be willing to walk... In top talent, it's a little bit of a dating game. You have to be able to walk away.

Brett: When you're a CRO, you're wearing different hats. One hat is you and your org. One of the other hats is a peer to the other execs. What have you found about playing that role and what it means to be an excellent peer? And/or what does a high-performing executive team look like versus doesn't look like?

Chris: I think transparency matters. I wrote a book with Denise Pearson, Make It Snow. And Denise and I worked together for seven-plus years, and we had this very direct relationship. And it wasn't like we were friends. We were friends, but we didn't get together outside of work. We didn't go to dinner ever. We didn't get coffee ever. But we were friends and we would share honest feedback with each other. So I think what I liked about Denise was, we were direct with each other. So if there was someone in her org or vice versa, in my org, that was a bad actor, we would tell each other. If there was something that was really urgent, Denise was not like, "Let's wait. I'll deal with that in six weeks." No. She'd pick up the phone and call someone right now and say, "Let's deal with this right now. Let's change..." She would make a change immediately. And so, I think that's the best way to-

Brett: If you think, that's both of your default way of behaving and you came together or you actively work to create that type of working dynamic?

Chris: I think it's a combination of. I think we had that culture together-

Brett: Because the normal dynamic is the salesperson blames the marketing person and the marketing person blames the salesperson, right?

Chris: 100%. By the way, sometimes founders like that, and that's not the right-

Brett: Why?

Chris: It's create this competitive culture. And it's like, "Hey, marketing throws up the slide that says, 'Here's all the leads that sales didn't follow up on.'" And what Denise centered on is like, "Okay, well, revenue is the number one metric for the company." She was world-class at her job. Her team was world-class at her job. So she would certainly care about like, "Hey, Chris, your team isn't following up on these leads." But she'd come to me direct. That was something that we did together. But she also... That was something that Frank Slootman encouraged. He always said, "Go direct." Like, "Don't go to dad and have dad go and deal with that stuff." So that would be like, "Yeah, I'll go directly to Denise," or, "I'll go directly to Christian Kleinerman," who's the SVP or chief product officer or whatever he is at Snowflake, or Mike Scarpelli, who was the CFO. You'd always just go direct with those people. And that's a culture... That's the way that Frank operated. Sometimes you might not like the answer that you're getting, but at least you're going direct to that person.

Brett: When you think about the... I assume there were phases along the 11-plus years where there was dysfunction in the executive team.

Chris: Yes.

Brett: Was most of it just the inverse of that? Or how would you define a non-productive exec team?

Chris: Towards the end of Bob's tenure, there were a couple execs that were empire builders. They cared more about what the size of their organization, the type of their title, that kind of stuff, than actually doing their job. And then they would be hard on their people, but not good at their job... Kind of one of those things like, "I expect you to be good at your job." Well, turns out you might have people that are good at your job, but you're not good at your job. And we had the same thing sometimes with a handful of people under Slootman as well. So, look, at the end of the day, there were execs that I worked with that were manage-uppers, very good, managed really well up to the CEO or even up to you, but then doing their job underneath was not great, or they just hired really crappy people, or they managed their team really badly, that kind of stuff. And you start to see that. And so, you would confront these people, and then they'd be overly nice to you but still bad at their job. And to me, that becomes problematic. And that's what I appreciate about Frank, is, he'd be like, "Man, I see this immediately." And he would take action. As a leader in general, if you see bad behavior, taking action on that behavior, that establishes so much credibility with your entire organization. If you let bad behavior exist for a long period of time, then you develop a really bad culture.

Brett: And maybe sort of on a similar note, when you think about the journey that you went through at Snowflake, what are the few, the two, three, four, five decisions in your orbit that you made that you think really mattered a ton, that were the input drivers? Outside of... most of it was, I think, as you said, doing the work yourself and building the team and-

Chris: I think culturally, it was, I brought the mindset of a very transactional organization, of a MEDDIC-built sales culture that was maybe not as hardcore as I needed to be at my previous job of MEDDIC, but very much bringing this sales methodology of... and going on a bunch of sales calls, very transactional. And that was the right thing for the company because we were all about... Our original investor always said, "Go and get market share before the competition gets product." So, we had product, but we didn't have market share. We're competing against Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, on top of their platform. So we had to get as many customers as possible. That was probably incredibly important. And then there were some tough human decisions, like firing some people. The worst part of being a leader is letting people go. But there were some decisions on firing people that I probably made too late, but I'm glad I did. Because when you make those types of decisions, as the company gets bigger and there's more money at stake for people, they're less willing to take risks on giving you information. But when you find this stuff out and you make the decision, falling on the sword. So there were very senior guys that worked for me that I fired and I had to go back and apologize to people, and being honest about it, saying, "I screwed up. I'm sorry."

Brett: Your current team, the team that you were with, you had to get rid of somebody and then go back to your team and say, "I-"

Chris: Not just my team, my entire sales org. I mean, I had to do a mea culpa to my entire portion of my sales org and say, "I'm sorry I screwed up on someone."

Brett: There's sort of this thing that everybody says, which is that you let go of people too late, generally speaking. Why is that, even sort of at very... you as a very, very senior leader?

Chris: I was fortunate enough to work for legendary leader in Frank Slootman. Frank has this thing where it says, "When there's doubt, there's no doubt." And I clearly remember this, when he first came on, he told me I had a problem, major problem. This is when he said, "Either you fix it or I fix it, but why do I need you?" That's where it came from. And I'm like, "Okay, I'll go fix it." And I did some research, found out, okay, went and fixed it. And then I remember coming to him and I hired another really senior person under his guidance. I mean, he interviewed the guy. Great. And then Denise, CMO, comes to me, and goes, "This guy's terrible." Three months on the job, "This guy's terrible." I'm like, "What? No, he's not terrible. Okay, Denise, I'm not going to argue with you. Let me go do some research." Week later I came back, I'm like, "Okay, yeah, he's terrible."

Brett: And the work you did is to talk to the people you trust around the person and fact-check.

Chris: Yes. Yes, fact-check. And so, then I start fact-checking and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, this is a problem." And then I bring the information to Frank and Frank's like, "Chris, what I'm going to tell you is you have too much empathy. You will not regret getting rid of this person as soon as possible, but I know it'll take you some time." And I had a one-on-one with that person an hour later and I'm like, "You know what? He's so right." And it was so awful. Because I had to, within an hour, call HR, "This is what I'm going to do," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I had someone else on the one-on-one, I had to kick them off the one-on-one and be like, "Dude, I'm sorry, but this isn't working." And he's three months on the job, and he was a very senior person somewhere else. And I'm like, "This is just not the place for you." He's like, "No, I can change." I'm like, "You can't change."

Brett: What was the core issue?

Chris: Very good at talking this way, very bad at execution. So, couldn't execute.

Brett: Seems like that's a real... the number one pattern is one of the things I'm taking from the conversation, that sort of flavor of behaving.

Chris: 100%. That's the favorite part of anyone that I work with. Do you have someone that actually does a good job or do you work with someone that just does a bunch of hand waving and points at people and says, "It's their fault. It's their fault. It's his fault"? No, it's your fault. Take ownership of it and then take action.

Brett: How did you over time get better at sussing this out in the interview process? If I looked at when you were hire more senior leader three years into Snowflake in the last year, and you're obviously very attuned to this because it seems like a real problem in hiring senior leaders, what were you doing?

Chris: I think that the unspoken thing that people don't always think about, you think, like, "Hey, I am hiring this person from XYZ company. Oh, my God, they've been there for 5 years, 7 years, 10 years. He must be great." Well, you really do have to go out and the number one thing you need to do is go and back-channel reference these people. And they might've been great at some point, but they may have lost that. And so you really do have to ask those questions of, like, "Tell me what it's like working with this person." Don't just be like, "I hear..." The most awkward thing for me now is I've had people that have worked for me that weren't necessarily successful at a specific job that are calling me and asking me for references now, because they want, "Hey, call Chris Degnan," right? And I have to be like, "Okay, well, this is what I'm going to say." I tell them that. And it wasn't great. I had someone call me and I had to tell her and she started crying, and it was not great. This happened quite recently. It's not great. But I'm like, "I'm an investor in this fund that is... They're going to call me. This is what I'll say. This is why I'll say this." And she called me the next day and said, "Thank you." And she still want me to be honest and say that... I'm like, "Okay, great." But yeah, it's awkward. It's awkward. But I think be honest, be honest, be honest, be honest, be honest. That's the thing, is, if you bullshit people, it's not going to be good.

Brett: But do you find when you're doing back-channel references that you know enough people that they will be honest with you? Because I feel like you're one of the... Most people you do a back-channel reference or you call somebody, and unless they're very close with you, "Oh, they're great," they're not going to be on... It seems like one of your core values is transparency and honesty. I feel like that's not the case out here with so many people.

Chris: It is not. It's not. You have to ask... That's why it's like, just like, "Hey, what was it like working with them? What were they good at? What were they bad at? Where would you develop them? This is an ex-Snowflake rep that someone wanted to put in front of a company I'm advising." I didn't know the rep. He worked in my organization. So I reach out to the guy who managed him, and he's like, "Yeah, he's a B player." And then I'm like, "Okay." So I'm talking to the head of sales about him and he's like, "Yeah, I don't want to talk to him," because of the reference I got.

Brett: Right. And you don't need to do sophisticated referencing if you have a [inaudible 00:54:24]-

Chris: But that's a guy that I know... That's a guy that I know and trust. Right?

Brett: ... care more about their relationship with you than they do with the individual.

Chris: Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Brett: And that makes things much easier.

Chris: Yes.

Brett: I wanted to wrap up by talking a little bit... And you hinted at this. You've worked with some extraordinary people. And I think given sort of your learning orientation, they've all really shaped who you are as a CRO. When you think about a few of the ones that have made the biggest difference for you, what have they imparted on you in the way that you approach being effective in the role?

Chris: Each CEO that I've worked for, I've learned a ton. I mean, look, I owe the majority of my career at Snowflake's success to Bob Muglia. Bob came on nine months after I was on the job, and I was suspect of him because he had managed 10,000 people at Microsoft and he's managing, I don't know, 30 people at Snowflake. So I was like, "What the hell is this guy going to do?" Turns out I was dead wrong. He was incredible, incredible for so many reasons. But I was the director of sales. And then I went to Bob and I said, "Bob, hey, people are calling me the VP of sales. Can I call myself the VP of sales?" He goes, "Sure, but I'm not going to promote you. I'm not going to give you more money. But you can call yourself the VP of sales. No problem." "Okay, great." Bob felt pressure from the board to bring in CRO over me. And he was like, "Well, why? What are we looking for that Chris is not doing? You've asked him to hire great leaders, he's hired those great leaders. You'd asked him to open up Europe, he's opened up Europe. You've asked him to hit the revenue targets, he's hit the revenue targets. I don't know what I'm looking for because he's it." And he took a risk and he promoted me to chief revenue officer. And look, the thing that Bob had the guts to do is take a risk on me. And I think that's something, a lesson for any leader is, you want to develop people. And there were so many little things that Bob did. I remember I came from EMC where very much it was like a sales-driven culture. You could bully your way through things. And just this classic example of Bob developing me was-

Brett: You mean the internal culture?

Chris: Yeah. You bully your way to get things done. And I remember Bob... So, Bob came in and he took the contract, the master license agreement that we had to sign with customers. And he made it two times as long, double the word count, double the number of pages. And I freak out on him and I'm like, "Bob, no way. You're going to make us fail. You're going to ruin us as a company." Because the hardest part for us, the contractual process was awful, still is with Snowflake. It's terrible, terrible, terrible because we take ownership of data. So you take indemnity, liability, security obligations, all this stuff. And it was awful. So, I freaked out on him. He goes, "I have one question for you." I go, "What's that?" He goes, "Did you read it?" And I'm like, "No, I did the word count. I counted the pages." And he said, "Okay, read it, redline it, send it to me, and we'll review it." And dude, it was such a great development opportunity for me because instead of me bullying my way and winning, which I didn't, he said, "I want to hear you out, but you have to be thoughtful about how you come back to me."

Brett: So, what was going on with him, though? The normal reaction is someone like you getting very angry, I would get very angry-

Chris: Because he's an incredible leader. He's like, "Okay, tell me what's wrong with it. I'm humble enough to take feedback." And that dude, that's incredible of a leader. Like, Sridhar Ramaswamy is a humble leader. You can tell him really awful things and he'll take that feedback and internalize it and then argue right back. So I think those are the things you look for in leaders, is like, "Hey, man..." So, to Bob's credit, A, I learned a lot from that experience.

Brett: You start to behave more like that?

Chris: I did, for sure. I learned. I learned a lot from that experience. A lot... By the way, it's not great to just force people to do things because you say so. Get them to understand why. The why. And that's like, Bob would explain, "This is why we have to do it this way. This is why we're doing it this way." And now we're like, "Oh, that makes sense." And so, bring people with you. You can... I mean, dude, Silicon Valley's full of super arrogant people that are successful. But man, I enjoy working for great people. And that was one of those great people. And Bob's just world-class.

Brett: Why do you think you and others, so many other talented people have followed Frank when he seems so difficult and hard? And what's going on with him that there's such followership?

Chris: Because you... This goes to... Earlier, I said, if you let bad behavior exist, you create this terrible culture. And that's the thing that you appreciate about Frank, is, once you make it through, he's relentless, so he'll never let you be that comfortable. But once you make it through, you're like, okay, you're one of those people that can survive in that environment, and you want to be around a bunch of other people that are like you. You don't want to be in a place that's a bunch of passengers, as Frank describes them. You want to be with a bunch of drivers. And that's the culture that he tried to drive. And I totally appreciate that. And organizationally, that drives this incredible culture.

Brett: Cool. Good place to end.

Chris: Yeah.

Brett: Thank you so much for the conversation.

Chris: Thank you. It's great.

Brett: I appreciate it.

Chris: Yeah, appreciate.