Building & selling a product into government is tricky — Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins shares critical advice for getting it right

Brett Berson: thank you so much for joining us.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: I'm so happy to spend time with you.

Brett Berson: I thought an interesting place to start just might be really broadly, um, for you to share maybe some of your, thinking and what you figured out as it relates to building and selling products into government. Um, I'm excited to get to explore this with you, cause I just think there's not, much that's been explained or open sourced around this topic and you've had this really interesting winding path to figure it out at promise.

And so maybe we could just sort of start really broadly kind of what comes to mind when you think about some of the things that you figured out when it comes to early product building and selling into government.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. Um, one, I think selling into government is hard. And I think it is especially hard if you don't have respect for the process. And there are two things that I think have been really interesting for us to learn. One is some government is really large, like the federal government and has long-term procurement and is much more difficult.

Some like local and state government.

does tend to be a bit easier to get into. Um, we were lucky as a company, but not obviously as humans during COVID that there was a real crisis of need for support. And so what that meant is that we were able to move much more quickly than if it hadn't been a non COVID time.

So basically during COVID, there was kind of emergency procurement that happened. And, and so that's been really interesting for us as kind of a growth opportunity is to recognize where are there kind of unusual moments that exist that allow you to grow. And then I think what we've learned is that there's different types of procurement, right?

There are sole source, which means you're the only people that do a product. And that sometimes is the highest bar, but in terms of timeline. And, um, then we learned about things like cooperative agreements, which we just had no idea before. So for example, and we did this in partnership with example for the city of Buffalo, which is the water utility where it's a cooperative agreement contract, which means other jurisdictions can use the exact same contract because it's been publicly bid.

And so there's also kind of a lot of specialties and learnings about how to make the system work much more quickly.

When you think about, how, your customers, in this case, local governments think about buying software or solving their problems. What, what have you figured out there are sort of, would you say there's kind of a consistent psychology way of making decisions or a way of seeing the world that you found across these different, um, local municipalities.

and one thing that's been interesting for us, that's pretty consistent is it's scary for someone to be the first. And so a lot of folks are waiting for something to be tried and tested. Every government official. We meet talks about the fear of two things, one a startup, for example, that people used. I don't know if you remember for voting right where you set up this new startup, the voting is often like you're on the front cover of every national news.

And so there's that fear in general about startups. And then the second fear is kind of the, there was a large networking contract in California where people are going to jail for kind of handling procurement poorly. And so what we have found is that there's that common fear, which means then you do have to address the fear of like, how are we making sure that the procurement is done in a way that is, um, as quick as possible, but also meet the standards where people feel comfortable.

And, and so we have seen that consistently. The other thing that we've seen consistently is a real challenge with it in some places. And, um, it's because, you know, a lot of the systems that government uses tend to be very predictable. It tends to be Oracle or, you know, large systems that don't have a lot of changes.

And so figuring out how to make our software as easy to use and as, um, uh, making it not complicated at all has been really, really important because we found people want innovation, but they want innovation without risk, which is the opposite. Sometimes we think about it in the private sector, which is the greatest risk has the greatest rewards.

And so we spend a lot of time thinking about how to de-risk our software, because we find consistently that most folks in government, you know, worry about risk much more than actually the private sector does.

Brett Berson: So maybe to pull on that thread a little bit, that sort of insight is interesting to sort of de-risk or de-risk on their behalf or simplify things? What, what does that actually look like for you? What are some examples of how you've leveraged that insight in building promise?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. And so, uh, one, it would be just example of like doing a cooperative agreement, right? Realizing that how do we make it so that you don't have to even think about the language? You don't have to think about, you know, the terms because you're following someone else. So if there is a risk, it's the person that you're following.

Right. Which makes it shared. So now it's no longer just individual risk. And the more people that go into that contract, the, the, the less, the risk is so. One thing we've learned is just how do we create conditions that make it as little risk as possible? Um, the thing we did wrong, which we really learned through mostly error, which I could say it was trial and error is, you know, like we, we, when we were doing integrations, we looked at models and we're like, oh, we're going to do these.

Like, we're going to make this, whatever you want it, we're going to work with your systems. We're going to, you know, which are both costs are very expensive and become centers of cost. And actually then assume that the other, your partner in government, in this case are able to handle that level of customization.

And so we thought, you know, what, what actually seemed really compelling, right? If that's what I want, right. As a company, when, when I, my favorite part of startups is like, I'm going to get the best service they're going to do whatever we want. We're going to give them product fees. And what we realized is most of our clients didn't want that they wanted standard.

They wanted consistent, they wanted stable. Now we have, you know, incredible repayment rates and, and other things that, that make it worth it. Um, we also had to learn how to subcontract, right? It's much easier for government if you already, um, if they already have a contract with someone for us, just to, you know, go under that contract instead of creating a whole new contract with you.

And so thinking about national partners that we are working with has been really critical. So, just trying to make it as easy as possible, both on the application and, um, in terms of how you get it. And, you know, the thing that I, you know, we observed as like most places care deeply, deeply about customer service.

And what we realized is in government, sometimes it's more about stability and predictability. Um, than it is ju you know, about the way that I might normally think, like I am obsessed about the customer experience. I want every person to feel touched, heard, seen. And, you know, when you want to write beautiful reviews about our experience, that isn't necessarily the bar.

And so I thought about it, even if you ever look at like a website by a government tech company, and I'd say like, oh gosh, why is this? And I realized, like, we didn't have to add everything we didn't need to when we needed it to when it really specific things for growth. And, um, and then we could think about which things we could overall change the conditions, but we weren't going to congeal the conditions of which government works at every level, every piece of beautiful software changing the way that they work, changing the way that they there's no longer punitive for people.

Like all of those things could not happen at one time.

Brett Berson: can you give the example of, one of these partnerships that leverages this idea of, subcontractors?

Yeah. So one is just before the approval of a large, one of the largest, largest 10 cities in the country. And, and so that is working with an large partner and, um, uh, a large public company. And, um, we are working under that large public company who handles this is in transportation and it's going to allow, um, payment plans for, uh, parking in a large city.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: And so the city says, Hey, which is public. You know, city says, Hey, we want to do this project. And in this case, it happened at a city council meeting. And then, um, the government agency says, you know, we would love to do this, but we can't offer it right away. We would love if you could work with the large contractor, this contract's worth, uh, hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the large.

And, um, the large contractor in us, it took a year just for a sense, because these large contracts sometimes are even more difficult than government. And, um, it took a year, so we just got a finalized agreement with them. And now the scope of work is before the large city. And then what's great about it is we do that.

And then we think about partnership, not just in that city, but then you're able to think about partnership in multiple jurisdictions. Um, another example might be that one was really guided by the city, wanting it to happen. Another example might be, um, a company that's a private company that we're working with right now, um, where we're looking at, um, 60 jurisdictions.

So for us, it's an incredible opportunity. They do payments, um, and, um, you know, it's an ability for them to be able to offer an additional service to their clients and it's an ability for us to grow. And so I think the partnerships for us will be an incredible part of growth for our future.

Brett Berson: So I want to come back to some of the things we were just talking about, but I first want to zoom out and something we didn't sort of kick off talking about is how have you approached figuring out who to target, what at what the right level is, what state and or local municipality who inside of those government organizations has the power to, to sort of potentially adopt your software?

Like what what's been the overarching strategy in, in terms of the who to go after.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: um, one, I appreciate we're doing this because the number one question I get from other entrepreneurs is how do we do this? And I'm going to send the link to this

Brett Berson. : Exactly. That's

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: and

Brett Berson. : dream source and

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: right. I was like, I'm going to be like, every question you just asked me. Um, so for us, you know, we had to make a decision about time.

Like, do you, do you want, did we want to grow very quickly? Or did we want to have large contracts? And because of COVID, there was a clear crisis in this case because people were, you know, access to Y. Access to food, access to housing we're being limited. And so we wanted to make sure make it as easy as possible.

So for us, local governments made more sense. The crisis was there. The impact was there and we knew that people were moving more quickly. Um, and so we decided, um, local contracts made the most sense because we thought we could grow more rapidly instead of, um, state and federal. And we thought if we started with the local contracts, we proved who we were, that then we would more easily be able to move to state and federal government.

So that's where for us, it was decided. The second thing I think that we did that worked well, which we did wrong before. Again, really through error is at first we tried to sell as like new entrepreneurs and we didn't have people from government that people recognized. and so we actually hired someone who'd been the number two at a large public water utility.

And she is the best sales person, because she knows who to find. She believes in our product. So she doesn't think of herself as a salesperson. She believes in what we're doing. And for example, once user groups, we're having a user group, cause she's like, oh, I want everyone to grow and be able to communicate.

And so for us, it was not just where we thought made them a sense, but where we could move most quickly. And then who I think, figuring out the who from a sales strategy. And so for us, well-respected leaders works really well. We try to hire kind of people who had done traditional sales to government before, and it just didn't work well.

And, but having someone who had seen the problem understood the problem and believed our product was the best solution was the way for us to sell. So we, we chose local governments for growth. We realized if we hired folks who knew people, we could move much more quickly. And now once the product's in the market, it's, it's much easier and we're beginning to hire kind of traditional salespeople, but that's how we got into the market.

And we're just now going into state and federal.

Brett Berson: And so you started by hiring one or two people full time that sort of had a set of relationships.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah, we, we hired both. We tried an enterprise person. Who'd been, who'd done enterprise sales to government, and we tried someone who had been in government and never done sales before. And the never done sales before is the number one sales person in our company by tenfold.

Brett Berson: that's, that's such an interesting insight. And then that person called started by calling on the people that they knew from career. And that sort of basically the sorting of which local municipality to go after.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. and I think it's, you're really using that person's credibility. So figuring out who is credible, and I think people do this a lot in military sales. That's what we learned is you hired the general who used to be in government. Right? I just, we hadn't seen that model. And, but, but once we did it, I was like, oh, of course, this makes sense.

And this is why people have boards that come out of, you know, come out of government that then sit on their boards. And, um, and so for us, yeah. But, but I thought, oh, we're, you know, those folks won't know how to sell as well. I think over time, our model is really going to be that person with an account exact right. you have an AAE with the person who has deep relationships. That's probably the right model for us. Um, but you definitely need the person with relationships. Otherwise, your, you know, you're just, you're starting from scratch, right? It's not just the product you're trying to make them trust you. It's, it's a lot more difficult.

Brett Berson: and do you think you could start out having that person be an advisor or part-time or to get going? You need a, you need to recruit one of these people to be in the seat. Full-time.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: I think it wouldn't have worked for us as an advisor, but it doesn't mean it might not work for someone else. I think because our contracts are not large contracts, so you need to get volume and also it still takes. So even as I think about our revenue, like we've booked a lot of revenue, we booked in the tens of millions, but we haven't made in the tens of millions because it takes a long to get a contract. And then from getting the contract to actually then executing the contract. And so in advisor just means less firepower. And, um, so I think they're, they're helpful, but probably it wouldn't have been the right model for us.

Um, but certainly would understand why it might work for someone else.

So what is a great first meeting look like? When you're first sort of reaching out, you get a meeting, maybe this individual sort of driving it, and maybe in the early days you were there, what is the architecture of that meeting look like? And maybe how has that evolved as you've been building promise?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah, I think what's changed is we used to think of good meeting was where someone said, oh my gosh, this is the best I want to use it. And now we know that not is not necessarily the best meeting, unless the person who's executing it is the right person. And so oftentimes we would meet, we would think, oh, we want to meet the head of something.

And then you meet the head of, and they're like, this is great. And then you meet with their team and they're, and they're just like one more idea that we're just going to outlive you longer than the person who told you to do it. And, um, so now we're much more thoughtful about who we need as really the people who are for us.

We think of them as levels. We want levels of commitment. And so we're really looking for people who are committed and the closer to the execution that the person is, the better off it is for us. And so a good first meeting. Now we know as let's say customer service or a CFO or someone who's going to use our software, we want that person to fall in love with us.

And so a good meeting looks like the person who's going to have to manage it, actually falling in love with the product and then seeing the value and making their work better because it, what we've discovered is it isn't in government, just like something is good. It has to be something good that also saves time and saves energy.

And I think in traditional SAS software, one would assume like when someone buys the software, you're doing that because you know, those things, I think what's different in government is sometimes software. Hasn't been great for government and people don't build beautiful and easy to use software.

And so there is not the same assumption that software will make their world better. And so we have to figure out how to demonstrate, not just the overall value, but specifically. So when we think about this in a place like the county of Marin, we do payments for. And, um, what we've discovered is they're the, like, which seems so insane to me, but the people who work with them before they have, software that you make payments for courts, but they don't even recognize the person.

So like you go in to make a payment. So if you say, Hey bro, I'm here, I'm making a payment. You can just put how much, so you could be paying the wrong department, you could be paying the wrong amount. And, and so just by being able to, for us say, Hey, we're going to start recognizing people so that we're going to make sure how much the person knows, whether it's the right person.

Like that's a transformative difference for the accounting department there because they were doing individual interactions with every email. And so you have these smart, capable, the woman who runs the financial services is so smart and amazing and, and we were able to make the system better.

And so I think we could have sold the software, like, oh, we have Venmo cash. Or we could sell it as now. Every person is not going to get an email. The counting department, every time someone makes a payment and hand have to do that. And the person who is a citizen is going to be able to make the payment and not pay the wrong amount, pay the wrong department.

And so there's just some things I think we've learned as a team that are much more compelling for folks, which is it makes my life better.

Brett Berson. : So on that point, let's say, I want to come back to this idea of levels of commitment, but in, the person in Marin, um, w what does that translate into a first meeting? You sit down, maybe in this case it was on zoom or whatever else, how do you run that meeting? Like, what is, are you doing needs finding, are you immediately selling the time-savings and ease of use value prop?

Like, what does that actually look like?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. Well, one we're pretty lucky that there was a case study done on our work that documents a 93% repayment rate with people were already. And so I think having, having an outside source of that people trust saying, Hey, this works means that we don't have to convince people that it works. And so, so that's been helpful.

And I think also because other governments sell best to other governments, way much better than I think we as an individual ever would do. And so for us, it's really kind of allowing that process. And then we think through, um, we're less likely to just say, you know, like I used to run revenue team and for a private sector that does, uh, home care and needs, you know, like we, I would tell the team, listen, like?

you know, what are people looking for?

What are their issues? We, we don't do the sales discovery in the same way here because sometimes people don't know what the issues are. Right. So many of our meetings when we meet with someone, they don't know what their repayment rate is. They're not sure they think they have a payment plan, but they don't know.

And they don't know how broken. So we always try to get that information ahead of time. But usually what we are trying to do is just get that person to commit, to going to get the information. So our first sales meeting is usually the discovery of what the problem is. Not in a way of, as though the person can articulate it, but helping coach that person through how do they find out what the issues are?

Because most people, you know, we do installment plans for folks, and most people have a payment plan, but what happens is because most software doesn't include payment plans. It means that the team runs it manually. So if I'm not the person who's executing, I don't know that. So I'm just like, oh, we have payment plans.

So we have to say, oh great. How many people on them? What's the repayment rate. And 90% of the time someone says to us, you know what? I don't know, let me get back. Um, now it has started to shift a bit as there's been success, right? Because then people are going, wait, you're in Louisville where we had a cute study, done.

People go wait you've bought millions of dollars. And I would say we did pricing wrong in the beginning. Right. We charged way too little for what the return was. Um, but we do much more kind of, I would say education before we do discovery. And in a way I would highly tell people not to do, if you were doing home care sales,

you mentioned this a little bit in terms of why a given person inside of a government wants to acquire, procure a piece of software. Um, but maybe you could kind of expand on kind of what you've noticed in a little bit more detail, meaning. Is it generally cost savings? Is it TA cost and or time savings?

Brett Berson. : Is it potential to increase revenue? Is it potential to create a better citizen experience? Is it some mix of that? Is it similar across municipality? Like what sort of comes to mind for you in that area?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah, it's not consistent. That's what we've learned. And it isn't like, you know, in my other jobs I could say, okay, I got it. Here are the three reasons. And then let's prepare responses and here's what we see. Um, it's really different. And so for some people, it is a values judgment. I think that people should be able to have their water bills paid.

if you're poor, you shouldn't have to pay interest and we should get you a. Cost savings as quickly as possible on every program you qualify for it. We should do, and we should make the experience as good as possible. So some people find us and I think this is a lot of the initial folks values-based okay, this is the way we should handle it.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: We shouldn't charge people who are struggling, um, high interest rates and we shouldn't, we shouldn't have a punitive system. And I think the, the reality is COVID made people believe there were a deserving poor, which, which is counter intuitive for me. And somewhat, I felt a violent reaction to, but I think that it made people say like, oh, this isn't someone's fault.

And so people were much more generous in the, their assumptions of programs in a way I've not experienced. And so, so we saw a lot of growth where people are like, oh, um, you know, Louisville, the one that did the case study, 40% of people were behind, I think, in water bills. And so that's a large amount of people, right?

It's a system. Can't handle it in some way. And so, um, that really is the values places. Then we have some complete opposite, which is a large city, um, where we met with, you know, someone who ran parking and he said, I wish we could boot people the day they miss a payment. And so you have extremes, right? And then we have probably most folks fall in the middle, which is they want to do a better experience.

They want it to be good, but they want to make sure it makes sense for them. But there is, there is not a common, we haven't hit the commonality yet of this is what everyone agrees.

Brett Berson. : got it. And so does that mean that you, you start with a lot of needs finding when you're engaging one of these local governments to figure out kind of, okay. This, they tend to care about this. Shape our value prop around that specific dimension that they care about.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Less so than if we were doing something else because we have to make the case for our rules. So for example, a lot of people have punitive systems, right? You miss a payment, you have a consequence, you lose your driver's license, you get your water, shut off, you get your electric shut off. And so the most important thing we can do is help people understand why those rules are wrong.

So we can't do, we can't let there be a lot of customization because if we do a lot of like, what's your needs, then someone says, oh, I want to do it this way. And I think at the beginning we thought that was right. Right. You know, like help understand what their problems are. But then we now have to instead convince people of our solutions more than we can just hear their specific problems.

Cause we don't want to modify. And our big problem becomes, you know, if people want to modify, like I want to use your software, but for example, if people don't, um, pay on the day, it's due, I want to cut off their. And for us as an example, we don't want to do that because we know that, you know, almost 80% of people, if you give them two more weeks, we'll make that payment.

So we find term works better than like the monthly assumptions or the payment dates. And so we can't have the same level of, you know, kind of just like, what are your problems? Let me just better understand that me. Here's how the solves, what we just have to do is say, here are the things we can solve for, and for the first time where like, we may not be able to do that.

Because for example, if you're someone who wants to boot people, the day that they get shut off, we know we're going to have problems because we want to give people as much flexibility as possible, because I can show you data that you're going to actually receive more back. But I think the product response, like as we think about.

what works for our product, we can't be in these relationships where it's very punitive.

Cause I think the reason people answer our phone calls respond to our text messages is because it isn't a punitive system.

Brett Berson. : So that's really interesting because it, it, to your point, it's kind of the opposite of, of modern enterprise sales, which begins with understanding what are the problems that the customer has and then how the solution maps. And so on this point about educating a customer, is there anything you've figured out about how to do that?

Well, it seems like one approach is bringing a lot of data or case studies that this smart other city did this and look at the success that they had. But I would assume that a lot of the people that you're spending time with have been doing something a certain way for a very, very long time and educating someone, getting someone to change their mind, getting someone to try something new in a local government context seems exceptionally difficult.

And so anything that that's really worked or that you figured out specifically around educating and teaching people about kind of a new way forward.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. Data actually has been really helpful for us in a way we never, I've never used Salesforce. I never used data in sales before. At least in that first meeting, because when I was, you know, building a sales team before I would say we had a 90 10 rule and I would say, you should listen, um, 90% of the time, and you should only speak 10% of the time.

It's all about like he letting someone say, here's my problem. And then at the end, you're, oh God, here's how our solution works to your problem. Now it's really different. Now we think about, we want you to understand what our product does and then you need to make a decision. Does it make sense for you?

And I want to discover what your issues are, but like, I know now what we can solve for is repayment, rates, customer experience. I can't solve for, if you really want to boot people, like, you know, like there's just certain things we can't do. And I think it sets us up for failure and it's not a business that I think we can scale. so for example, now we've learned if someone says that they're probably not right for us, they're probably a year out and we want to keep cultivating them, but we need to have even more data where we say the reason we can't do the five things that you've already done, that you, wanted. Is because it doesn't work well.

And so we, we are, are even having that conversation with a current client, right. Where they want to be a bit more punitive. And we just said like it here, now I can say to them, this is what it costs you to do that rule because here are the people on a program here that people are not, you've lost 24%. you know, you've gotten 24% more income from being able to do it our way. And I think maybe for clarity, for us as a software company, what we think is really important is we fundamentally believe people are structurally poor and they are not making the decision to not pay. They are struggling to pay.

And so our obligation is then to create systems that allow people to pay, because we think people don't want to lose her driver's license. They don't want to go lose their water. They don't want to not have power. So if you believe that the system is it's supposed to then figure out how do you create flexibility and how do you recognize repayment?

You know, like it's probably an antiquated idea that someone gets a paycheck every two weeks for the same thing. And so the systems can't look like that. And so I have to that alone is transformative for a lot of people, right? The idea that we shouldn't be punitive. So I can't, I have to educate people with data to your specific point, but I also just have to make sure people understand.

And so like, we always say, you know, the same way you buy a Peloton for, if you, you know, if you're, if you're wealthy, we create flexibility, but the people who need it most, we make it as difficult as possible. And so we think it actually makes more sense to make it easy for people who are struggling, not just to make it easy for people who already have money.

Um, but yeah, so it's definitely different. And so we focus our education on why it makes more sense why they're going to make more money, why it's going to be better customer service. Um, and, uh, and then we always say, you know, blind, shop us, call our phone number. You don't need to talk to us, call any of our clients.

You don't need to have us. We'll connect you if you will. But that's why I think the experience stuff matters because that's the best sales for us is to have someone experienced with.

Brett Berson. : and so do you start a lot of these relationships off by sort of painting them a vision of what the future could look like? And here's, if, if you, if you adopt this methodology, you're going to see this type of return. It's you start, like everything begins with this education.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: absolutely. So we began like, this is how, much debt you have. Here's how we think it could work. Here's what the customer experience would look like. We showed their bus ours. And so I can say, okay, got it right now. If someone wants to go on a payment plan with you, they have to come into the office, which means they have to take time off of work.

They have to pay for parking. They have to apply. They have to bring a copy of their taxes to be able to pay you money back. And they often have to pay interest. In our experience, someone can just get a text where, you know, how much they owe, they can sign up for a subscription payment and we'll send them reminders and we'll give them flexibility.

And so you don't have to take time off. It doesn't cost you, you don't have interests, which would you choose. And that's the reason why we have a higher repayment rate, you know, but, um, being able to walk people through that I think is really helpful.

Brett Berson. : how, how did you figure out the cold start problem? Like now that you have data and case studies, I can see how impactful that can be in the sales process. How did you jumpstart that before you had like, you know, effectively quantitative proof that your methodology was superior?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Um, I think in the beginning, like I appreciate everyone who gave, you know, trusted us because I don't know. Right. I mean, we didn't deliver, so maybe they're really smart, but I think it's always scary. Right. You're going to a government, which has, you know, high has real, very low tolerance for risk. and so I know how we do it now.

I think the only reason we did is because we happened to meet the moment of COVID. Cause I cannot imagine anyone else in this moment would have worked with us now, you know, we have track history and we can show people, but I'm not sure absent of the crisis. Like we just, we met people were where they were in that crisis We were capitalized, so we could take risks, but, but I think it is more of that moment. Um, and what's different about us is normally, you know, government people who are selling software to government go to small cities, we went to large cities because a crisis was larger. And so I definitely think it is counterintuitive the way that we grow.

Brett Berson. : and the crisis sort of allowed. Kind of created urgency and created this early adopter mindset. And then you were able to sort of take that those people that were really pulling this from you have the quantitative numbers and then start to kind of expand from an, you know, an ideal customer profile now that you actually have proof points.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah, I mean, and we made assumptions that seemed crazy at the time, which is, you know, we hired the person. Who'd been whatever chief data evangelists, whatever they call it at Looker who now runs data for us. And so we had a big data team for a company, our size. And, but it means that I can say, here's exactly how much of your money you're going to make.

Here's what it looks like. We didn't have a big sales team. Right. We had two salespeople and we have more people, you know, on the data team. And so I think understanding also what works for sales for us was really important. So being able to demonstrate results was probably more important than having salespeople.

Um, and, and, You know, that's been, that's been very true for us.

Brett Berson. : You touched on this a little bit, but in these first couple interactions with the local government city, et cetera, what are the early signs that they're going to end up converting and becoming a good early customer versus maybe the false positives that, you know, you used to leave the meeting and say, this is a slam dunk.

And they ended up being tire kickers or kind of not a right fit for right now.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing is we've discovered. I actually think most people want to use our software. We have very few nos. The real issue is execution time. You know, like we have one contract in a large city that's been voted on and approved, but it's been like eight months. And, and so, they have to, you know, go back through some processes and stuff like that. so I think one is what we've learned is it isn't even just getting to yes, it's then figuring out who's going to move it through the process and who's going to have urgency associated. And so it is the early things I think that we saw is that we continue to see, I think our one is people saying they want to do something is, does not mean they're going to do it.

There's much more kind of, I think kindness in government of this seems like a great, yeah, we want to do this. And, and just kind of on the other side is people say, oh, this seems really difficult to determine. And I don't know about this. Those people are often yeses. And so hearing that as not your awful, I don't want to use it has been really important because I think we have had probably more sales from people who didn't tell us.

No, but it sounded like no in the beginning. And so learning what a no and a yeses and for us, it's sometimes people process all the problems first, but that doesn't mean they're a, no, it just means they process problems first.

Brett Berson. : so, so what does that actually mean tangibly? Let's say, you know, you're in a meeting now, a first meeting or a second meeting and you leave, what, what gives you conviction or what do you what's happening or what are they saying that you think means that it's likely they will become a customer in the short term, given that interesting kind of insight that you had, that some of the people that kind of seem least interested actually become most interested.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. So now, for example, I know if someone lists specific problems about execution that they probably are. Yes. Because they've been spending the time in their head trying to figure out how to make this work, versus if someone has emotional issues. I don't know. Here's how we think about this. I, you know, like the kind of the metal level issues that person probably is.

And if someone, again, on the yes side go straight to execution, they're probably really a yes. Again, if those metal level, yes, this would be great. You know, we would love this we're people who believe in equity, we believe in cost savings. Those are probably not real yeses. So I guess the key probably is when someone thinks through what it will be like for our product to be executed.

Brett Berson. : So something that we haven't talked a lot about is, you know, you have sort of an early qualification and education meeting. What, what is, how have you designed the process after that? You know, on one end you have a first meeting and on the other hand, you have thousands of citizens, X number of months or years, having a really positive experience with promise.

How does that get chunked out now to sort of increase the probability that you end up sort of at that end state?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. I think probably the biggest thing for us to work On is, um, procurement and contracting. So we mostly get to yes, which is great, but it is the thing that we're having to do is we hired a CRO we're hiring sales ops folks is because we just have not been excellent and have to build a team at escorting the contracts through the process.

And so that is, so that looks like, okay, you've got to, yes. You even get to yes. On terms. And then you go to contract with one thing we did wrong is we didn't realize that people don't know their own contracting process. Um, because most contracts happen to a procurement office or something else. So when someone is actually driving something, oftentimes what they think is going to happen is different than what's gonna.

And so one is we have to know the contracting process. And so we're getting better at that. And then two is we need to have someone who shepherds that. And so, and that means in some ways, staffing and supporting the people on the team on the government team is they try to get things through. And so I would say the biggest learning for us at getting to, from yes to contract is staffing and supporting the person who's getting the contract through.

Um, because we've seen things like a union says, oh gosh, I don't want that. It means it's going to replace workers too. Um, oh, we need more time. And so all of those things we have to be able to deal with and we, we, we, I just want to be clear, we have learned about this mostly through failure. Right? We have not learned it.

We're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Of course we should think they don't know anything about their own contracting process. And so, so just for clarity, we we've built a system out of it, but it almost every lesson was because we did something wrong.

Brett Berson. : On that point about, you need to really understand the procurement and contracting process. How do you figure that out? You know, assuming that the end person that's driving this integration to your point is actually quite separate from this. Well, how do you discover that early in the process?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. I mean, one thing is we now ask people in the beginning. Okay, great. You want to do this? What is your contracting process? And now we understand very quickly someone does or doesn't know it. And, um, and we mostly would discover it when someone would say, okay, I think it's all done. And then they'd be like, oh, I didn't know.

It needed to go through it. It actually, or someone voted on it, you know? So a lot of our learning now is we ask up upfront, okay, tell us what it is. And then someone say, okay, I think it's this. And we'll say, great. Is it in writing somewhere? Can we see a copy of it? Is there somewhere? Cause we can look for it and we will have already gone and looked for these things.

The challenge for us as a software company is that there's not a lot of installment payments, separate countries. So it's not something that is normally been handled. So usually, you know, a person knows how, how it's done. I get the procurement office handles everything, but because this is a different type of contract that doesn't exist, it's often, um, you know, it takes a different, it's like creating something new.

And so that's just different. And so now we know we have a checklist, we, and now I know to ask, do you need to go through it? okay, does there a city council meeting, Is there also a subcommittee? You know what level, for example, most general managers of a department can do a contract that doesn't require a board level agreement.

So now I would say, oh great, what's the threshold so that you don't have to go to your board. You just like understanding that list of questions about what's the easiest and quickest thing to do. And also all of our contracts are written as renewable. So in some ways it doesn't really matter what happens to your one because we want to get to year two and year three.

And, um, and so that's how we think about it now is now we, you know, ask questions about what do they know. We already have checked their website. We've probably called the procurement office to be able to understand. We've asked, do they take GSA schedule? Is it better to work on it? Subcontract? Um, we might even have an idea because we would have looked at the contracts about who the best sub would be.

Um, but it's, it's much more systematized. Now. Now we have an AEU who can handle it?

When you think about the folks that you're selling into in the, in, in a local government is the way that they think about their job in career, similar to the way that a for-profit employee thinks about it.

Brett Berson. : Are there some, some difference. Um, you know, because in, in a normal for-profit a lot of the way that you sell early on, it's like, how do you make this person a hero? And if that person's a hero they're going to grow in their career, they're going to get a promotion. They're going to hit their quota.

And so oftentimes you're selling to somebody and the aim is to make that person, the hero in their team, in their, uh, company, more broadly, et cetera. Does any of that translate to the individual sort of line level person that you're selling to, or the ecosystem is very different in the way that people think about it at an individual level.

Brett Berson. : What they're trying to do in their career is just different.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah, I think, I think it is different.

And, um, I think a lot of people, one, we have, uh, worked with some of the most amazing humans and I think the public sector doesn't get enough recognition for people who want the world to be well. And they are in a world that often doesn't incentivize and reward innovation.

And so it's scary, right? Like if you were going to be in the newspaper, because you thought you were trying something new, even if it's not like you're personally benefiting, but just this, the software fails. Like it's not, it's a big public fail, right. If I'm at a private company and I do something and it doesn't work out, it's not on the front page of the newspaper.

And so I do think they're in a system that doesn't reward it. And, um, and, and they might have a good manager who thinks about this, but overall there's a system. So I think. We are often not trying to make people heroes, we're trying to make them safe. And so making sure they have information and making sure the contracting is clear, making sure the product performs, but it is definitely different than saying, like, you're going to be the star of the next board meeting or your going to be, um, you know, this is going to be the way that you kind of take yourself to the next level.

It's much more people are going to be happy because there's good customer service. You're going to have less time with people on the phone because we're going to be able to interact with people in a way that makes it easier for them. It's much more about how to make the workload more bearable and, um, how to make the experience good.

And then how it's still low risk, much more of that. I don't, I don't know that we've ever sold from the you're going to be a, a hero kind of perspective.

Brett Berson. : so maybe building on this, something we haven't yet talked about is building early product and maybe how sort of, some of these insights translated in terms of what you built in terms of government facing, and maybe how you thought about the product you needed to build. Um, on the citizen facing side

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: I think we probably invested most heavily in the user, the end user. And the reason we did that one is because our team felt so compelled. And I think there something, you know, like why people are driven to the work and we are driven because most of our team wants honor and dignity for people who are struggling.

And we recognize how hard it is and that the choices people are making are unfair and, um, and stressful. And so our team that grew that, you know, like customer service was like the team and everyone wants to be on it because there are these calls where you're literally, we're just saying, how can we help make it work for you?

We totally get it. And so people get prayed for on the phone again, you know, and, uh, we put a, um, we have a box on, uh, comments where you can say whatever you want, and we have never had a negative comment, which I'm sure is accurate. And what you will get from my perspective is actually bad. So I'm always like, well, let's put prompts.

Like, what do you hate about like the system? And, um, but it's just because people aren't used to, when they're struggling having flexibility and being treated with. And, um, and it's been very affirming for us to see our repayment rate when we've treated people well on behalf of these governments. And so, so our end users, I think the product stuff was really easy.

And the way we began the product is we went to the city of Oakland and met with the mayor. Totally lovely. And we couldn't get her team to do it. And, um, and our national merit team couldn't get the city staff to do it. And, um, the reason is, is because, and I'm sure it's we had not enough hubris. Right. We walked in and you know, we were judgmental and, and I just was like, oh yeah, this is like, you have to take off work.

You have to bring your taxes. Like you have to owe at least $500, which means someone has done these fees and fines like that doesn't make sense. Here's how you should do it. And they basically were like, whatever, we're not interested in you, your little tech, how old are you guys in terms of company? How much money do you guys have?

People are going to Sue us, not you. And so we said, look, we Can build a better product. And they said, no, And thankfully I'm so glad they said no way, because what that allowed us to do is we basically, I mean, we didn't basically we did, we scraped their system and we paid people's tickets. And in the beginning we took risk.

And what that taught us is I think if they had been our first clients, we would have tried to build a product for them, which wouldn't have had a high success rate rate because we would have taken all the rules that they had doing it for ourselves meant that we built product based on what the users wanted.

So for example, we try to use Stripe on for some of this stuff and we, um, we're talking to people and, uh, the team there. We said to them, you know, the, the way that their system works is that like, let's say you have a repayment that's due, you know, Friday at five it's on the 15th.

So it takes the same. It takes money out the 15th at five, the same thing, no matter what. And we said, you know, we want money to come out in the morning. And they said, well, why? And we said, because you know, people get paid in the morning and they're like, well, why does it matter? The day someone gets paid if it's in the morning or the night.

And I was like, oh, I said, cause people's money has gone. And they said, how could someone's paycheck be gone? The day they got paid? And I realized that their experience or cultural experience in billing payments was they couldn't even imagine a world where someone did not have money the day they got paid.

Whereas we knew people whose money was gone before the day they got paid. And so it's forcing ourselves to have to build the product and to take risks. I think made the product that we have built today because we would not have built it if we started with.

Brett Berson. : Can you explain more by what you mean, take risk and sort of you started by scraping their system. I, that sort of didn't come through.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yes. So the way it works And is that, we, um, we built a front end to their website. So we created a website, like, I don't know, city of Oakland payments or tickets or whatever promise. And, um, you could go to our site instead of their site and pay tickets and then scraping meaning that we would essentially be using their website as the operations.

So we would get your information, your, um, you, you would get your phone number and your name. And then we would be, have a F a S um, software basically think about it in front of that website. So you're really using the city's website. We're using their database you're we are. And then what we did is we paid the ticket, we paid the full ticket, and then we allowed someone to pay us back.

And so meaning that the company took risks on the beginning, promise actually fronted the capital to pay someone's ticket. And we put them on a payment plan with us, which is different than right now, where we use software. We have software that the government takes risk and we help them manage their debt.

And so in order to get people to trust us and to just know how to do the product, we took risks in the beginning, we loaned our own capital to people. and then the scraping, just meeting that we were, we were using, we didn't build our own system in terms of getting the data because we didn't have it.

Like we didn't have the ticket information. We didn't have, you know, what your, all we could do is, is, is look at their system. And so we use their data and, um, we paid the tickets and then people paid us back in 90% of people paid us back.

Brett Berson. : so in some cases you didn't even have any relationship with the government. You just intercepted the, the citizen at the

right time.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: In the

Brett Berson. : How did you, so how did you do that?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: we just.

Brett Berson. : front of the citizen?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: We just created a website and we bought Google ads.

Brett Berson. : That's so cool.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah, we had no clients.

And so we just, at the beginning took risk and we just created a site and we bought, you know, when someone searched for things, we bought Google search ads and we put up a billboard. Like we, we don't, we, we tried all these different things to see what worked. And that also works now because now I can say don't buy billboards, big waste.

We thought we were so clever, big, wasted, How do you think about creating a cohesive culture when you have maybe part of your team that's coming out of government and maybe part of your team that maybe knows very little about government and is really sort of startup oriented. Is there anything that you do to kind of keep everyone on the same page and, and, and limit the chances that you kind of have these odd factions or divisions that form

Yeah. I mean, I think one is we have common values, which is really important. We also now know what I think probably less about in terms of factions in the company. And more about is the onboarding. So for example, when we hire people from government, we realized they're used to having it teams and they've never heard of slack.

And, um, they've never made, like, I always get a call. Like how do I make a zoom meeting? Cause they've not ever been the person who like created a zoom meeting before. And, um, I, I think that sometimes government folks are, are, what am I old world I would think of as big company people like, we'd always joke when someone came and said, who's gonna put my desk together.

We knew they weren't gonna last long. And that's what a lot of our folks who come from government, like it's the cultural stuff more in terms of how do you do stuff? Which feels sometimes not scrappy to people who've been in a scrappy environment. And I think on the other end, I think we have to make sure to cultivate a high respect for government because a lot of folks are really super smart and kind and good.

And so we have really been purposeful about hiring people who have a high level of respect for that. And so I think as long as we are hiring people have respect for government and we understand that the onboarding of government folks, that that is actually where we see tension less so on kind of the day-to-day culture stuff.

It's really the beginning and the shock of like these systems operate totally differently. Um, and, um, and so I think that's why kind of like on the sales side it's partnership, but you know, at the end of the day, the mission of the company is to make money and do good. And so those are the measurements that people need to use.

but I don't, I don't, I probably don't think about culture in the way that a lot of folks who come out of tech, I think of it much more as a service, which is. You know, we are really lucky. We get paid to try to create a model that honors and provides dignity to the people who I think deserve it and need it the most.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: So you either care about that or you don't, and that's the culture. I think we, I always know someone's not going to make it when they, when I interviewed them and, and the, the questions they ask. And, um, if you, if that is not, what's, that level of service is not what you care the most about. If you're not aggressive about growth, because if you don't believe, I believe if people don't get our program and they don't use our software, that they are more likely to go to jail, not have water, not have electricity, that's the core of the company.

And, and so that's the culture, I think, more than anything else.

Brett Berson. : I guess maybe an interesting place to end, which I think is normally where people might start is you've talked a little bit about this, but you had a really interesting iterative process to land on promise the product and go to market that it is today. And I be curious, kind of how you navigated that.

And maybe you can kind of share the story for other people that are kind of iterating and pivoting and in maybe a similar space.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. Um, well, we, we first did a product that was, um, focused on, we thought, you know, scaling bail reform. And what we realized is there was not a product that was venture scale. Um, if we didn't want to exploit people and if we wanted, and the reason is just because most of the people we were selling to were great people in the beginning, but as we started to think about growth, you know, the system incentivizes people per person per day.

So like, if I'm a sheriff, I get paid for every person that's in jail per person per day. And so I get rewarded with a more people that are in the system. And so trying to create software, that's getting people out is counterintuitive and there was a lot.

Brett Berson. : land on that, that sort of starting point? How did you land on building that in the first place?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah, we thought there was a great opportunity because one, we landed on it. My co-founder, um, is a criminal defense lawyer. Who'd long been in advocacy. And we thought there was this moment, which is true, which you can see policy-wise that there was like going to beaver up bail reform everywhere, and that people were not going to know how to execute.

And that is clearly happening, right? It's clearly clearly happening, which is there are these changes, which are the right policy changes, which is like, if you, you should not be incarcerated because you are poor. And what we found is that two thirds of the people in that were incarcerated in jails were people who had not been convicted of the crime they were arrested for.

So it's a lot of people who just can't afford to get out. And so there was both legislation happening. There was litigation that was happening, that was changing the way in which the system operated. And what we were clear on is that governments weren't going to know how to do that. Well, and I think what we didn't realize is that.

There were going to be like that the system wasn't going to want to be designed well. And because the, it actually was better for people. If bail reform failed and more people went back to being incarcerated and it was really great. Two things happened that were really clear to me. One, we were in a state and meeting with the county and the county was bragging to us that they kept someone arrested for a pretrial for seven years, meaning that they'd been incarcerated for seven years without being convicted of a crime.

And they were like really proud of it. And I just thought I'm never going to sell a product to about getting people out to people who are boasting to me about keeping people in jail who have not been convicted of a crime. And moreover, I don't want to sell to these people. I don't want these to be our clients.

And, um, and so actually to build trenches credit at first round, I called him and we were lucky we'd made some money. So I said, we want to return our money. We don't want to do this anymore. And, um, he said to me, when we invest, we, he said one, you, of course you can, and we'll invest in you in the future.

And he said, but we invest in founders. We don't invest in like, in just the idea. So go in the woods, make sure this is what you, you want to return all the capital. But, you know, he just was very supportive of me as an individual. Um, and, and what he did that was so important that I, I wish for all people and their investors is, he said, we knew exactly who you were.

Right. So he didn't have any expectation that if our, we couldn't build a product that wasn't exploitive, or that was not in line with our values, his expectation was that we would not. And, um, and so that was really a turning point for us. And that's, we felt so much more bold because we're just like, Okay. we've now, you know, told our investors, you know, they had their chance.

We think we're going to make money, but we've said everyone could have their money back. And, um, but we're like, we're going to do, we're just all in And whatever we think that could have the most effectiveness. And what we were looking for is something that had aligned incentives. What we realized is our incentives were off before we wanted to get people out.

The sheriff wanted to keep people in. What we like about payments is government wants to bring money in and we want money to come in because we don't want people to face the consequences of not paying their debt.

Brett Berson. : Okay. And so how did you, how did you get from that conversation with bill to this insight?

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah, what happened is I was in, we were on that same trip and we were at a county and we were looking at their highest failure to appear rates, which is the people who are least likely to show up for court. The time we're still thinking about the bail product. And they said the people who were, um, least likely to show up for court where people on a suspended driver's license.

So those people are considered the highest risk. And it just seemed insane to me. Like why would the people like who. You know, got a ticket who they couldn't pay, be the highest risk. And, and then why would the system be more punitive with those people? And so it made me realize, you know, like we saw people go to jail for parking tickets, and that just seemed so insane.

And in some states it's not even just like the government gives you tickets. It could be, you get a ticket at the shopping mall. It could, the private sector can give you a ticket. And so a system that criminalized people who couldn't pay a ticket was broken, but what we realized is government just wanted the money, right?

They didn't actually want the consequence. And what's different about government is they, they have to pay for the consequence and the failure. Right? So for example, one, they actually want you to have water. If you don't have water, um, the longer you don't pay, they have to pay to shut it off. They have to pay to shut it back on.

Like it's, they, they pay for the consequences and they share the costs. And, and what was so clear during COVID is just so many people who were impacted. And so in my mind, If the government was incentivizing, um, you know, pop, like if you, if you're criminalizing poverty, something is broken and you need to find people like the treasurers love us, cause they just want more money.

And we want people they don't and they realize they have to pay for the consequences child support, you lose your driver's license. And that means you're least likely to continue paying because you can't get to work. And so they could realize like some people just choose us because they get more money in and they don't have to spend a lot more, we cut their costs or we bring in more money and we cut their costs.

And I think that's as good as it gets in SAS.

Brett Berson. : And so when you kind of had this early insight, what ended up, what did you end up doing to get to conviction? Like, okay, this is where we're going to go. And this is the future of the company.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Yeah. I think when we created the websites that we could pay people's tickets, I was shocked at how many people paid us back because we didn't even have their address. We had no enforcement powers. And so it taught us that people actually have a deep desire to pay their bills it's that they cannot, and that the system is broken.

And so the fact that we could have a 93, I think, percent repayment rate with no consequence, we literally couldn't have sent you a letter if we want it. Um, that taught us, that people actually would pay if you created a system for them to pay. And that was what gave miss real conviction. And then part of it just as a human is I liked doing phone calls because it just helps me understand like what people, like, what they don't.

And at least I did until the team doesn't like me on phones anymore. He used to let me now they're like, okay, thank you. No more of you. Um, but I like being on, I liked, I do it less now. I'd like to be on the phones because I just think, I feel so lucky that our job is to be able to say we get, you know, like we always think about, you know, w you know, buy now pay later, but now we're saying you already received this service.

You should take as much time as you need to be able to pay this off. And you're not going to face a consequence. And we don't, we've never turned it into a collections agency. We've never turned off. You know, we've never reported someone. And so it literally is we are rooting for people's success and people have responded in kind.

And so I think taking risks taught us that we had no consequences. We had no, nothing we could do. And people paid us back at really high rates. So that convinced us that it is just a system that makes it easier for people to pay. And that was it. We took risks and everyone's like, oh gosh, you're gonna lose your money.

And we talked to like these people who had done, uh, short term loans, but they were charging people like 36% interest. And you know, it just, it convinced us that people are smart and get, especially people who are struggling, they get when they're treated well and they respond in kind.

Brett Berson. : such, such a cool pivot, such, such a cool story. Um, where, where I often like to end is, is sort of the question of when you think about maybe its promise, maybe it's your broader career, which we could spend multiple hours talking about, given how interesting it's been. I'm always interested who were the people, maybe it's one person, two people who have had kind of an outsized impact on you and maybe what, what is it that they taught you or what did they do for you?

That's kind of positioned you for building this company.

Um, well, when I worked with Prince uh, one of the issues was I, um, I had to be, I was the main person a lot, and I probably would do it differently now, but there are some kind of financial stuff that had to be cleaned up. And so I spent a lot of time having conversations with people where they, like, just wanted to spit in my face and I'm sure thought I was the biggest jerk ever.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: And I called him kind of crying because this person had said, I'm not coming to Paisley park. if Phaedra's. there And I was like, oh gosh, I just wish I could be nicer white, you know? And I, and I, um, I just, I didn't, like, I knew it was the right thing to do, but it just, oh, it hurt my feelings so much. And he, um, said to me, like, you have to decide if you're going to play in Madison square garden or in your backyard.

Cause no one boos you in your backyard. But if you play in Madison square Garden someone's going to boo you. And I think about that a lot as we build this company because we both do wrong things and we do right things. And I think when we started people critiqued us, whether on the left or the right.

And I just remind myself that as long as I think we're doing the right things and we're acting in integrity in the things that we believe in, I just have to get used to boos because the impact I want is Madison square garden. Not my backyard, even though it feels better and people are kinder and it's better.

And so I think it's definitely impacted the way we grew the company. Um, because our north star is no longer affirmation, which I think for a lot of people, it is like people saying it's the right thing to do. At least for people like me who want to think, want social change sometimes. Um, and so that's been really impactful.

but I feel very lucky because I don't go to events. I have kids, you know, like I live outside of San Francisco, which seemed crazy when we started a company.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Um, and so I think w I have a very small world. Um, but I think I've been very lucky that it is incredibly supportive, um, con. Um, because the reality is, I believe we will succeed. I feel very confident, but we don't have a model. Like there, there isn't some model we can look at where companies not being predatory, where when the company wins, the people who rely on the service when at least for poor people and people of color, because most systems are exploitive.

And so having, you know, people who root for you, who I have called are like, I have called more nights, our investors and just spend like, you know, I thought we were going to be here now we're two years off, you know, like, and we had just had consistent support. And so I just, I wish that part of the experience for every entree.

Brett Berson. : such a great place to end. Thank you so much for spending this time with us, Pedro.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being here and, uh, as always appreciate all of the support and love.