EP 134: Minds Matter: The impact of psychology and authenticity on hiring success with Amit Yoran, Chairman and CEO at Tenable.

Are you ready to challenge the way you think about hiring? Join us for a compelling episode as host James Mackey and his guest Amit Yoran, Chairman and CEO at Tenable, share the keys to hiring exceptional talent, emphasizing the transformative power of intellectual curiosity and self-awareness. Discover how these traits can reshape your team and organization, and gain practical insights on detecting them during interviews. 

They also discuss the impact of psychology, mindset, and unconventional influences like martial arts on discipline, authenticity in communication, and the vital role of self-awareness in achieving success. 

   0:39 Amit Yoran's background
   1:32 Lessons learned in hiring great people
12:39 Entrepreneurship, startups, and fundraising
16:39 The importance of psychology and mindset
24:51 Leadership, coaching, and personal growth

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Our host James Mackey

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackey. We've got a great guest today. We're joined by Amit Yiran. Amit, thanks for joining us today. Oh, thanks for having me Excited. Everybody tuning in. Amit's a good friend of mine, really looking forward to this conversation and we're going to be talking about all sorts of stuff. Amit, just to kick us off, I want you to start with a quick background on yourself and then we can dive into the topics.

Speaker 2: 0:48

Yeah, great. So I was born in New York, both my parents were immigrants. Raised in upstate, rural New York, joined the military after high school and spent five years serving after military academy and doing cybersecurity stuff and basically that's been the focus of my career. After getting out, I have done a couple of startups from scratch. I went back in a public service at DHS for a short while and then one of the startups was acquired by RSA, stayed and ended up running that and left boy almost seven years ago left RSA. So I'm happy to come join Tainable and been here for about seven years.

Speaker 1: 1:29

Nice, nice, yeah. So I'm definitely looking forward to talking to you a little bit about hiring and then honestly just about leadership and a bunch of other things. But just to start on some down the pipe hiring stuff, I wanted to see if there's anything that are the key lessons that you've learned throughout your career and when it comes to hiring great people. And of course, I think it's probably going to depend on the type of roles that you're hiring for. So I guess we can just really start at a high level. If there's anything that's consistent across the board, or any strategies you've implemented, or if you want to get something that's something more specific, like a certain type of role, right, whether it's like something technical or whatnot, or leadership, we can start there. But curious to see if any thoughts come top to mind when it comes to hiring folks.

Speaker 2: 2:09

Yeah, great question. I'd say, when it comes to hiring, there's a few characteristics that I think are just foundational, just fundamental, regardless of what role you're trying to fill and at what level in the organization you're trying to fill. And to me, two of those are a an amount of intellectual curiosity in what it is someone's going to be doing. So hiring somebody who is passionate about their profession or passionate about what you're hiring them for, that is not just going through the motions and punching the clock, but they're really. They're trying to better themselves, they're trying to learn.

Speaker 2: 2:51

If it's a technical role, somebody who's setting up labs in their home environment, they're constantly testing things and trying to. We're going after certifications. However, you want to measure that intellectual curiosity. Or, if it's outside of technical roles, someone who's trying to always step up their game. And I think if you get people with that hunger, that thirst, that drive, you can always augment their skills with areas they may have gaps, but if somebody has that passion and drive, I feel like that's just a prerequisite to success and driving the organization forward and themselves.

Speaker 1: 3:28

Yeah for sure. I think to some extent, of course, like intelligence is important, right, the ability to learn and execute, but the right, like just the curiosity and passion, like that aspect. I think curiosity is really important. Honestly, I feel like that's one of the most valuable traits that somebody can have in general, and to me I think it's probably at least equally important to intelligence, maybe even more so in some cases, because if you're a curious person, you're going to be a lifelong learner, right? And I think typically curious people are a little less defensive too, right? Like they're more open to feedback because they constantly want to learn and improve and so just to piggyback on that. Beyond that, too, I also look at just self-awareness in their environment, and I think typically curious people have that as well. How aware are they about, essentially, like their point of impact within the company and how the work that they're doing is supporting, like the overall mission of the department or the whole company, and they understand how that work translates?

Speaker 1: 4:18

Yeah, it's really important too.

Speaker 2: 4:20

Yeah, and I think that's where you touched on a whole bunch of topics. The one that I want to focus on is where you said, hey, someone who's got that self-awareness and I would pair self-awareness with self-confidence or confidence and so this is where it depends on what level and what role you're hiring within the organization. Now, tenable is a little bit of a larger company. I always tell people it's like a big startup. I refuse to say we're a big company. We've been public for five years now and about 2000 folks but it still doesn't feel like a big company to me. I still want to have that startup passion and culture.

Speaker 2: 4:58

When I'm looking to or when I'm interviewing folks to join our board of directors or interviewing folks to join our leadership team like the executive staff of the company, if you will one of the most important questions I ask them is, first of all, anyone interviewing for that role. You look at their LinkedIn and you're like holy smokes. This person is like accomplished a lot in life and they're highly competent and they're very proficient in whatever their function is. One of the questions I love to ask is tell me about your biggest failure professionally. Tell me when you wake up in the middle of the night and you face palm and you're like, oh shit, I can't believe I did this. I wish I made a different decision at this particular point or this juncture in my in my work life. You get all these. Really, you get greatly varied responses to that.

Speaker 2: 5:55

Some people I have a bad work life balance. You're like, all right, this is someone I never want to talk to again. There's just no there there. And then you hear people with these really crazy stories like oh, I was working at this company for 15 years and I got caught sleeping with a co-worker in the parking lot and blah, blah, blah or whatever. And or I made a bad decision and 32 people got fired and we lost $16 million in revenue or sales and I really screwed this up. And to me, I've never heard that anybody admit to being an ax murderer, but I've never heard anything that I couldn't get past.

Speaker 2: 6:36

Because to me, someone who's willing to say that in an interview is telling me that it's more important for them to speak their true voice and to be honest and authentic. That's more important to them than getting the job, and to me that's an incredible, especially when you talk about executive ranks or the board of directors. That's incredibly important because I know when we're in a meeting and I say we got to go right, they're going to have the self confidence to stand up and say no, you idiot, going right is a terrible idea and here's why we shouldn't do it, and they'll help prevent us from making a lot of mistakes. That's one of those things that I know that when you said it, it triggered. Yeah, that's really important.

Speaker 1: 7:26

Yeah, yeah, I feel in the early days I started my career in sales, I started working for a big staff and company called K-Force and I started off as an intern and I did the SDR thing. I did all that kind of stuff, and one of the things that I would do is, whenever I would lose a deal, I would think to myself okay, how much was that deal worth? Maybe it was 20,000, maybe it was 100,000, whatever it could have been Okay. So this was a $100,000 lesson. How do I get $100,000 worth of value from this experience? And until I have, then I need to do more work and uncover exactly what went wrong and how I can correct it and that type of thing.

Speaker 1: 8:03

And I think it's to your point. Right, like just being aware of failures and realizing that it's just part of it. Right, you're going to fuck up and make mistakes, and sometimes they're going to be substantial, and particularly as a business owner. Now, there's been a few over the years. Right, it's a little bit higher leverage, what do you make a mistake or whatnot. But I truly believe too, it's like from a competency perspective, we really get better when we're making a mistake or when there's a tough market condition or these types of things. It's like lifting weights right, like when you have that resistance and it's tough and it's difficult it's usually. That's when you grow and get stronger it could completely agree.

Speaker 2: 8:38

Tough markets nobody enjoys them, Nobody wants to go through them, Nobody's. Oh, I wish it were harder to sell and budgets were smaller and the like, but it does it definitely. We separates the wheat from the chave and it gets companies which make those and leaders which can make those tough decisions and steer through those turbulent times. I think it definitely serves them well.

Speaker 1: 8:59

Yeah, hey, check this out.

Speaker 1: 9:00

So, like, when I talk with VCs and this is primarily toward like startup and scale ups, right, so not you guys said your big startup, right, but they're not necessarily talking about companies similar to Tenable, but they're talking a lot of the VCs are thinking a lot about now when they're hiring executives finding folks that are a lot more potentially like financially savvy, that really understand, have a better understanding of like unit economics at scale or how, like a P&L can scale and finding a path to being profitable and these types of things and finding ways to grow.

Speaker 1: 9:29

That doesn't include hiring like 50 salespeople and just burning through millions in cash, like within a year. They're seeing like a different. They're definitely focusing on a different skill set, executive skill set. And I'm wondering, like for a company similar to Tenable, when you think about leadership executive hiring, is that something similar? Do you feel like in a down market, you look for something a little different, or is it more like long term you just that's a core thing you need in any executive, because, again, it's just weird, in the startup world it seems that there's been a shift, but I'm curious if that translates like into public companies, right?

Speaker 2: 10:04

Yeah, it's a great point and I would say you know great leaders and great companies have a lot of consistency in their behavior. You don't get too far ahead of your skis in a frothy market and things are good and go and burn, and you don't get too defensive and hunker down to a point where you can't grow in tough markets. I think good companies and good leaders are making solid, responsible, tough decisions, operating with discipline in good times and, similarly, operating with discipline in bad times, and it's I'm going to go off on a little bit of a couple tangents here, but I think it's incredibly important. It's lessons that I've learned and have tried to share with others over the years. I always challenge folks on our team, like the natural thing for any company, for any bureaucracy, for any department, even in a small company, is hey, we're going into the next year, how many more heads do we need to add? And I always push my leadership team and say, hey, great leaders do more with the same amount of resourcing or disproportionately accelerate their business with modest resourcing, versus saying, hey, the only way we can scale is linearly. So whether it's doing things different, evolving how you do things, doing things more efficiently, investing in tools, technologies and people that will help you scale versus continuing to do more of the same.

Speaker 2: 11:40

Just to go directly to your question on the burn and hiring financially minded people, there's two things I would say. One is nobody will be able to replace or displace a founder's level of passion and insight into in the particular market that they're operating in. And I would say it's a common mistake for VCs to say, oh, I just need to get more adult supervision here, someone who's more financially minded, blah, blah, blah. Yes, you need those people in companies, but that does not replace or would not displace a CEO founder with a passion in the market, the gut feel for the market, with someone with operational experience. I do think a lot of founders don't have that operational experience. And you do need solid CFOs, solid COOs, people that can be mentors from within and help that company grow and mature and operate with great fiscal discipline and responsibility. But you really need both sides of that equation.

Speaker 1: 12:43

Yeah, for sure. So I remember when we were randomly in LA at the same time, we met up and you were talking to me a little bit about building your first company and you were just sharing a little bit about how you did that and you gave me some advice, and one of the things that you told me is that it really makes sense to try to probably stand up a board of advisors. You talked about the importance of, of course, the founder passion and everything that you and your team brought to the table your founding team but you also said it was also beneficial to have the other side and have people that actually have the operational experience as well. So that's exactly what I did. So this year I stood up a board of advisors that was like, very tailored to my specific business. Like I got a guy.

Speaker 1: 13:26

Actually, you helped me negotiate the package. That's ideas. Yeah, you helped me a lot with this. So you like sold probably the most successful company RPIO company in the tech industry in 2021 for an absurd amount of money and very successful. So he's chairman now. And we got another couple of folks, like one guy who raised like 70 million from private equity and another one that build one of the fastest growing recurring revenue services companies in tech, and so we got this like little team together that was tailor fit like specifically for my company and, yeah, I think it's like there's definitely from a passion perspective, it's like the founder needs to leave the charge, but also like from the operational standpoint. That's actually been super helpful as well. It's been a game changer for me.

Speaker 2: 14:11

As it turns out, you learn more. All of these sayings have so much truth to them. You learn more from your failures than you do your successes. So I look at my first startup. We raised $43 million of venture capital. At one point we were burning literally $2 million of cash a month. Don't laugh.

Speaker 2: 14:33

There was a time and a place where the go days of the internet, where that was like it wasn't about sales and revenues, is about how quickly you could build out infrastructure and capacity. And then we got the position. We got the company in position where we needed to raise more money and it was, you know, after the dot-com and burst. It was exceptionally painful and I still have a couple of scars right back there as a result and dealing with venture capitalists in those pressure cooker situations and I don't blame them, I blame, you know, myself for the mistakes and the decisions that I and we made put ourselves in a company, put the company in a position where we needed additional capital to survive and to continue to operate Well.

Speaker 2: 15:18

Fast forward to the second startup. We did raise about ten million dollars of initial capital and took us about seven million dollars to get the company technology built out and sales starting to occur and we went cash flow positive about seven million dollars of invested capital and then we operated with positive free cash flow for the remaining almost four years of the following four years. And so you just again, you experience something. You make mistakes and strong leaders and people that are self-aware. You'll learn from those mistakes and if you say, oh, I had a success, they say, wow, that one part was really painful. I don't want to do that again. I want to make all new mistakes.

Speaker 1: 16:04

Yeah, I know for sure. That's actually like sometimes when I'm talking to my board, I'm asking them like hey, like they're telling me all these things to do, I'm like what did you, what would you have done differently to Like how did you screw this up? What was the part that was the screw up? But they're all like incredibly successful. But it's what did you learn? What would you say? It's also that's been interesting too, and they're all like very open people like you mentioned, like very comfortable, and it's interesting too. It's, I feel, like the higher up you get in terms of folks that are really successful. I'd say, in general, at least my experience is that they're typically type of people that are just more open about those types of things, right, because they have to have that awareness often to get where they are right.

Speaker 2: 16:39

Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1: 16:41

Yeah, the other thing that I wanted us to talk a little bit about is I know we're somewhat we're both passionate about Marcel arts. I know you do a lot of wrestling and you're still involved at Langley right it in Northern Virginia doing wrestling as well. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, from like a psychological perspective, the importance of psychology in business and possibly how experiences that you've had Marcel arts wrestling might have impacted your life, how you think about business or just like life in general. So I know that's like a big question. We can start anywhere and I think we'll just find like different rabbit holes to go down here. But do you have any? Do you have any initial thoughts on that?

Speaker 2: 17:16

Yeah, we started off talking about hiring and what you're looking for and that intellectual curiosity, that mindset. And then we went on and we were talking about hiring people that are self aware and people that have the confidence and maturity to be vulnerable, to share their failures with you and be honest, and how important that is, especially in the executive ranks of as you go into more senior roles in companies. Got so much of success in life in the world, and certainly in business, is driven by your mental mindset and I do think that there's a strong connection. I always feel like wrestling is a mentally tough sport, like you have to have the discipline. You have to condition your body. You have to have the mental discipline and be willing to stick through grueling and tough workouts you have to have which is a very close parallel in business, because nothing is easy in business and in startups. You have to learn the moves and the motions. Right, you talked about having advisors around you teaching you what worked for them and what didn't work and, similarly, whether it's some form of martial arts, wrestling, it's understanding the moves. You'll never be a great wrestler just being well conditioned. You've got to understand what you're doing and how you, how to do it. You've got to get the muscle memory working and you have to be willing to go out there and compete and unless you're KL Sanderson, you're going to have a loss. You can have a couple of losses, maybe more often than not, especially in the early innings, but it's that learning, it's that willingness to face your fears, being willing to lose.

Speaker 2: 19:02

You talked about starting your career out in sales and making mistakes. How many doors have been slammed shut in your face? You try this, you try that, you try this pitch. You know that didn't work, this didn't work, that didn't work and you keep going until you find what does work. And that's what startup life is about.

Speaker 2: 19:20

Right, you have a vision, you pursue it. Inevitably you'll make lots of mistakes and have lots of poor and shitty conversations. You figure out what works for your customers and what works for investor pitches and what works for partners out in the market, and that's kind of like that's wrestling right, you got to work hard, you got to learn what you're doing. You got to recognize the mistakes that you're making. You have to be willing to go out there and go into battle and lose and not just walk away with your head held in shame, but learn from it and be committed to evolving and getting stronger and better based on that one. So I just think there's so many parallels between those types of tough, gutted out sports and success in business and in life.

Speaker 1: 20:07

Yeah for sure. So I used to teach Muay Thai and that was my specialty, but I also taught a little bit boxing, mma as well, and I had to actually a team, like a fight team. Before I got into my career that I have now, I was basically training full time Like it was my job. I was doing internships and stuff like that, so I'd work in the mornings and evenings at the gym and I do internships during the day. I had a team, probably around 15 people, some of which were fighters, and we ended up going. We won 9 out of 10 fights that we had.

Speaker 1: 20:41

And then at that point I transitioned into recruiting exciting world of recruiting. But yeah, it was one of the things that when I'd have essentially like new recruits, like new people come on the team, I would ask them and these were like fighters that would come from different camps, that kind of stuff and I would say OK, how much of your success do you think is your psychology in fighting? Like, how much of your success, would it be Right? And so people would inevitably say usually 50%, 60%, sometimes 80%, like it was usually a pretty high number, right? Ok, so your psychology is 50% of your success or whatever it might be, how much time do you spend focusing on it? And then people are just like none, zero.

Speaker 2: 21:19

Right.

Speaker 1: 21:21

So you're saying something, you said something that counts for 80% of your success and you've given it no thought, and so it's interesting. I really saw like martial arts as this way to ingrain like a very good, solid psychology for folks on like how to be successful and how to approach adversity and these types of things, and so actually when we would do these training sessions, we would spend the first like 15-20 minutes often talking a little bit about psychology and how they're approaching everything from their workouts to thinking about their fights and preparing and these types of things, and there was all sorts of like little interesting things that we would do Like I noticed that this is a really interesting thing that I feel like I learned when people were in a highly like emotional state, like in a really hard workout. It's almost like you can imprint like psychology or like the things that you want to in their mind like a little more easier. It's almost like emotion is what ultimately translates thoughts to our subconscious or ingrains it into our brain. It's almost hard to think back to our childhood and remember things that weren't emotional.

Speaker 1: 22:22

We usually only remember stuff that has some kind of emotional attachment, and so we would ingrain different psychological aspects and mindsets to our fighters while they were in like these states where they were getting punched in the face or right afterward or hitting tie pads or whatever it might be. And we were able to take a couple of people that were probably like mediocre fighters. And I remember we had one kid who you know, probably a little under a 50-50 record, wasn't always like the hardest trainer, he just wasn't as consistent, and we just put him on this regimen where we focused a little bit more on psychology and I remember he got a first round knockout, this head kick, just one minute into the fight and it was like night and day and it was just really cool to see like the impact of focusing on psychology and then, of course, like that mindset that's developed in martial arts people can carry forward into other parts of their life. Right, it's so true.

Speaker 2: 23:19

I'll add two things to that. One is that your mindset, where you are emotionally and we all have ups and downs and highs and lows, and but where you're at emotionally is so important to the people around you, especially in startups. Because, look, people are smart and they're perceptive. And when you're having an off day or when you're pissed off, or when you're scared or when you don't have confidence and can't exude that confidence to your team in, hey, we hit a bump and that's okay and we're learning from it and here's how we're adjusting and there's how we're going to succeed going forward. If you have the right mindset, it's contagious, it studies the wheel and it motivates people to drive the change that the organization needs to be successful. And when you're in the wrong mindset but people pick up on that.

Speaker 2: 24:10

So anybody listening out there if you think your job sucks, I have an executive coach. Imagine being my executive coach. There's a few. I can't think of a worse job than trying to coach me. My executive coach, who's been doing this for over 35 years. He's actually, by profession, a clinical psychologist and so he knows organizational cultures and dynamics and people and motivation and all that. But his formal training in education is in clinical psychology, because so much in business and life is how you interact with people and your own mental mindset. So yeah, I'm a firm believer in everything you just emphasized.

Speaker 1: 24:55

Yeah, for sure Are there. I don't know if there's anything you'd be open to sharing with us on some of the stuff that you focused on or that you feel like you've learned through working with an executive coach.

Speaker 2: 25:06

I'll share two things just top of mind. One is Please call 10, depending on your, and again, it's in keeping with some of the themes we talked about earlier. I guess people that know me, especially in the business world, would say I have a very unorthodox style and I think one of the things that my coach really helped me focus on is just be authentic, just be you Like okay, learn the content. There's a script. You got to know the script. You have to understand that and then, once you've learned it, put it aside and just speak to people, communicate, have it come from the heart and even if you screw up a couple of words here and there and you didn't get this right or that, the authenticity to people matters so much more emotionally and impacts their motivation so much more than you getting every word carefully scripted and calculated. And when you come across with that authenticity, it matters more than how we spend 90% of our time prepping. That would be one thing that for me personally has been very helpful, especially as I moved from startups to larger organizations. I felt at first felt no, I need to conform to how the work likes to operate, and the answer is no, actually you don't. And then the second thing I would say is I recently was going through some stuff and I found myself becoming very frustrated and having a little bit of anger about certain things.

Speaker 2: 26:38

And his comment was listen, frustration, if you don't deal with it, turns to anger. And if you don't deal with anger and if you don't deal with frustration, they can turn to depression. And there's nothing that will debilitate an organization as much as having a leader that is frustrated, that is angry, that is depressed, that feels like, hey, what we're doing is it working? What we're doing isn't going to drive us to success. People aren't achieving the things I expect them to achieve.

Speaker 2: 27:10

And so he asked me a very simple question. He said hey, what are you grateful for? And he also was like hey, I'm grateful for this and this. And he said gratitude is so much more powerful of a human emotion than anger or frustration. And if you feel yourself going into this cycle of frustration or anger, just take a step back and focus on what you're grateful for and it'll get you in that positive headspace to where you can help not just shift yourself, but you can help the people around you and the people that you're trying to lead make that shift and I know it's a little bit of a bullshit Jedi mind trick, but I've been doing it and it totally works. So I would say, just make sure you're very aware of your headspace and whatever tricks you use to improve it to help drive you and the organization to where you want to be.

Speaker 1: 28:04

Yeah. Do you feel like that's something that you've gotten better at over the years, like it's a skill, or is it more so? Just you just have to remind yourself. I'm just curious how much you feel like that's been developed over the years it is.

Speaker 2: 28:17

So it's something I'm working on. It's like a wrestling or Muay Thai move or a jujitsu move. It's like a little bit of it is. Hey, the first several times you do it it feels a little bit unnatural and you have to be really thoughtful. Maybe you do it in slow motion and then over time you increase your speed and proficiency and then you find little twists on it that work better for you than the way you were taught or the way it's supposed to be done, and over time it starts just becoming muscle oh, not muscle memory, it starts becoming mental memory. Hey, I get to this point. If I'm going to help lead this organization in a constructive way or in the most efficient way, here's where I need to shift, and so you do have to be thoughtful about it.

Speaker 2: 29:03

I'd say one thing that many years ago, when I was young and thin and didn't have the gray beard, I went to West Point, and it's an organization that is very focused on the teaching of leadership and leadership attributes and characteristics, and throughout my life adult life I've always tried to be really thoughtful about okay, I need a charismatic leader, and I've had the opportunity to work for and with some absolutely amazing people and I always take a step back and think to myself what is it about this person that draws me to them, that makes them charismatic to me?

Speaker 2: 29:40

And some of it is the authenticity and some of it is their conviction in what they're doing. Some of it is really simple things like listening All of the great leaders that I've worked with and for presidents and secretaries and department heads and CEOs of Titans and industry they listen to you. It puts his hand on your shoulder and says what's going on in your business and how can I help you be successful? And you're like holy shit, the sun is shining on me and I know this because when I'm talking to people, I'm pulling myself on, so I have to continuously remind myself. Okay, I need to put it away, be in the moment, be thoughtful about how my headspace and what I'm doing is impacting the leaders around me, because they're going to impact the people that work for them.

Speaker 1: 30:30

Yeah for sure. I feel like this is also very topical based on what's happening right now in the tech industry. It's just like a brutal market, right, and I think it's been crazy to see we're seeing companies that were even a little bit more financially conservative start to go out of business. Now, right, financial leaders were saying, hey, try to preserve 12 to 18 months of runway if you're not profitable organization, and that's. We're getting to the point where we've been in this correction for over a year now, and so I think, like a lot of leaders are probably going through it right now just like a ton of layoffs. I think even they haven't even stopped. I don't know if you heard this. Linkedin just laid off another like 700 people.

Speaker 2: 31:11

Yeah, listen, this is a brutal, unforgiving market and this is one of those areas where you know steady hand on the wheel, understanding of the financial metrics and the performance characteristics of the business. Getting experts around you are worth their weight in gold Doesn't change the vision, but it might change how you execute, how you drive to that vision. And it's also loved the advice we get from VCs. But many venture capitalists not all, but many of them they invest, they provide an abundance of capital to companies and cause them to swell up and higher and swing for the fences. And not every business is a swing for the fence business. Right, some can be really nice singles, doubles, maybe a triple but the venture capitalists are contributing capital at very historically very modest cost and encouraging organizations to overspend.

Speaker 2: 32:06

And this is one of those things where having the self-awareness, really understanding your business and the opportunities. Not every company should be swinging for an IPO, not every company should be burning $2 million a month, as my scars have shown. But really understanding your business, how to operate it. Are you a hyper growth, hyper scale type of company? Are you a modest grower, high margin profitable company? Are you a balanced grower, really understanding that? And companies can shift and evolve over time, but understanding your business characteristics and where you are in those cycles is incredibly important and that's where you got to marry up the passion of the founder and the startup with the experience and the battle scars of operations to really get that balance right.

Speaker 1: 32:55

I love it, man. Hey look, we're coming up on time here, so I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining us today. I know everybody tuning in is going to learn a whole lot, so I really appreciate you contributing your thoughts and experience with everyone.

Speaker 2: 33:06

Yeah, next time we do one of these, it's over a beer.

Speaker 1: 33:08

Yeah, sounds good, let's do it again sometime. All right, james, take care. All right for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll talk to you soon. Take care.