What startups get wrong about enterprise | Lindsey Scrase (COO, Checkr)

When you go and look at many people with your backgrounds, the pattern is you worked at sort of a massive at-scale business, then on a relative basis, you join a startup as an executive. And a lot of times, it does not go well. And that person often goes back to operating at some massive scale after some stint. And it feels like after a decade of doing, you know, real at-scale building, you went to something very small and have had a really prosperous sort of last four plus years. Why do you think you've kind of been able to adapt and really do well in a very different environment where it feels like the default is like, it doesn't go particularly well? Yeah. I mean, it often doesn't go well. You're right. I think that there's a few dimensions to this for me. I think there's like me as a person, and then there's the experience I've had, and then Checkr. Like what Checkr needed versus what I was bringing. I think me as a person, I have always really enjoyed going into completely new contexts and understanding like first principles, but even just like being an expat in a different country, immerse myself in a new experience. Like what are different ways of doing things and really learning from that versus taking my point of view and foisting it on, you know, where I'm going. So I've, I've always liked that and been excited about it. At Google, I joined Google Cloud when we were a few hundred people on the go-to-market side, you know, a few hundred million in revenue. And so not dissimilar to the size and scale that Checkr is. People think, you know, Google had a ton of resources. Obviously we do like unlimited funding in some ways for like the startup that was Google Cloud, but it was very hands-on, scrappy building and scaling with very little resources and scale. And so we had no enablement, like pretty much seven of the 10 years I was there for any of my functions. We had like very little like RevOps or sales ops or systems folks or anything like that. So it was really building and figuring out how to do that at scale. So when you kind of take that to the Checkr context, we had a lot more built out, frankly, at Checkr when I joined than I had at the similar stage at Google. So there was that. And then I think that what, what Daniel was looking for, I joined as CRO and he had, he had had several CROs before then. There's no scarier job than being the first CRO at a startup. It is a terrifying job. First to blame when numbers aren't hit, which is hard because it's, is it the person or is it the product market fit? It's very, it's very difficult. It depends on who you ask. If you ask the CRO, it's the, it's the product. If you ask the CEO, it's the CRO. I think that where Daniel, what he was looking for at the time when he was hiring me was someone who could be incredibly data driven, who was very operational. We were at that point, had been very successful in with gig companies, selling sort of verifications, background checks. And we're looking to, we, we kind of dabbled in enterprise. We'd some in mid-market starting in SMB and really wanted someone to think multi-segment, operationally data-driven, high-velocity sales layering on top. And so that was something where I knew, like, what he was wanting to buy, I was selling. There was like a really strong product market fit, so to speak, from what I was able to bring. And we really vetted that throughout the interview process. I didn't want to go somewhere where they had the, you know, illusions of what I was going to do or what I was going to be, and I wasn't. And there was a really strong fit there. What do you think is unique about building a business like that where there's already a category leader and you're trying to gain market share versus a business where maybe it's a new market and you're, you start out as the leader, or it depends on maybe how you look at the checker market, but maybe when you joined, it felt like in their sub part of the market, they were the category leader. What are your like reflections on like business strategy, order of operations when you're trying to go after a market with a clear leader already? I think it requires a lot of humility to understand like where, where are you gaps versus, you know, an incumbent. With Google, we were going up against a Microsoft or, or an Amazon and Google's a category leader in other aspects. And so I think at first there wasn't the right understanding of like the investment we need to make in marketing and the investment we need to make in, in product go-to-market. Like, Hey, we'll, we'll just do this. And at Checker, I'd say it's, it's been similar over the years where we like early lead in, you know, all of the gig economy high-volume hiring and then shifted to enterprise. And again, like this is six plus years ago, but had some failures where I thought like, Hey, we could just do this enterprise is the same and it's absolutely not. And you have to think about it in terms of focus, I would say is very important. You can't go from being a challenger in the market to capturing everything overnight, but really thinking about where is that focused vertical or verticals where, you know, you can win. And so whether it's a Google Cloud, like innovative companies or, you know, high volume, like our high growth startups is where we, we really leaned in, but those will become the big companies. And they were going immediately to cloud, not kind of shifting from on-prem to cloud. So that was a big part of the strategy. At Checker, it's where we know we are huge value add versus like entrenched incumbents. So people industries like staffing, gig, retail, hospitality manufacturing, we're doing a lot of hiring and they need the benefits of our technology and accuracy and scale. So that focus is really important. And then the other thing is the, the company, the whole company has to be behind it. I've kind of said this multiple times, but I can't reinforce it enough. At Checker a few years ago, we said, let's go into enterprise again. We're, we're evaluating the strategic decision because it's an investment of resources and really our, our, our ND team's time. And we had to like, literally like shake hands around the table that, you know, in engineering and product in legal and people, obviously all of go-to-market, we are investing across the board. This isn't just something you can pilot. And then there needs to be that like really tight learning loop is probably the other most important thing where we have our chief product officer is meeting with customers daily. Our product managers are on the calls with our customers daily with us to really get that very fast cycle and loop of, of feedback to know where we're still building. And, you know, if you're a challenger, you have to be able to be agile and you, and you can't just assume you have the right product. And there, there's a lot of needs that enterprises have. So it's, it's a huge undertaking and one that, you know, Google Cloud has been obviously very successful at. Checker is, I think we're seeing a lot of success as well over the, in our most recent few years here and a lot more to come. This topic that comes up with so many scale-up startups, which is you generally build the business on the back of venture-backed tech or mid-market buyers. And then at some point, everyone realizes that like most revenue exists in the global Fortune 10,000. And so we're having all this success for this widget sold to this mid-market customer. We're just going to take it to enterprise. You look at tons of companies that do that. It's so much more challenging to make that work. And a lot of companies have done it, but a lot of companies have almost blown themselves up over trying to sort of dominating enterprise. Why is it actually much harder than someone imagined you have this great product and this go-to-market that's working to sell it to call it 200 person companies and now you're selling to 25,000 person companies? I think that why is it hard? And that there's so many things of why it's a challenge. I think that there's, obviously if you do the math you're like, So many years, and they're often a year plus long sales cycle. And why, though? The decision-making process at large companies is long. They're shifting often big decisions like this, like if you're going to switch your cloud provider, if you're going to switch your email provider, or switch your background, your verifications platform, this takes a lot of internal resources as well, from an engineering or, you know, development timelines perspective. So it has to align with the timing of their contracts. It has to align with their strategic priorities as a company. And if they're not, this isn't something they care about on the top 10 list, then you've got to figure out how to make it up there. And so even like that, that discovery with the customer to try to find and uncover pain and kind of paint that future vision is hard. The sales acumen is incredibly important. You're not order-taking. You're not doing one or two pitches and closing a deal. You're engaging in a, you know, very complex sales cycle where you're building trust. You're multi-threading. Or if you're like you're talking to the HR buyer, you've got to figure out, okay, well, who's the ultimate decider here? Is it the CEO? Is it the CHRO? Is it the CFO? Is it the CEO? You're doing like reconnaissance across the company to try to really get a good understanding. So there's a lot of challenges on the go-to-market itself. And you may be faced with like lack of brand awareness in enterprise, especially if you're coming from being a, you know, scale-up or startup snow you only. Like there could be billboards all over San Francisco, but your buyers are in like Dallas and Atlanta and Chicago. So it's a different audience. And then, like I mentioned, the product roadmap. Enterprise customers, there's always going to be the last long tail of requests for any customer. They're rarely buying it off the shelf. There's got to be something unique for their instance. And you mentioned, like in G Suite or Google Workspace, there is things we, you know, we thought product was complete and done, but the list of, you know, whether they're regulatory or certifications that are needed for certain industries, or just like bells and whistles, but they're really important to that customer, you have to build those. So that's all the reasons why it's very challenging. I think that what can make one successful in this is doing multiple things, but one on the product development side, it's really hard to differentiate what's a deal blocker versus a nice to have or something that a customer wants versus something that they really need. And oftentimes I think where people can go wrong is anything this customer asks for a prospect asks for, like, I'm going to commit to building. So suddenly your product roadmap is a complete snowflake for every single customer, which is not going to work. You're spread too thin. And the flip side, or you're too arrogant and say, hey, we don't need to do any of this. And you can't close anything. You can't close the deals. And then it's like product and sales pointing fingers, like, where's the issue? The other part I mentioned is focus and making sure that, you know, I've seen enterprise sales leaders fail where you're running sales teams, you're kind of doing this in a repeatable fashion, but you're not getting hands-on into what specific accounts, why? How do we run targeted plays? You know, so for Checker, for example, like getting the outbound motion, if you're going through enterprise, you have to get outbound pipeline generated. When I came in, it was not, we were not working. I'm like, okay, this is the strategy issue. It's an execution issue. It took like a year and a half to really uncover all the issues of why it wasn't working. And it was people, it was processes. It was the right strategy we were going with. And so kind of tinker with it to find the right thing. But eventually figuring out and really getting laser targeted and who are we focusing on? What events do we need to show up at? How do we think about getting their attention? Buyers are incredibly busy. I get a hundred emails a week from people trying to sell me something. I don't read any of them. And so you really got to get creative in figuring out, and especially in today's world of like AI slop outbound in terms of people's attention is more distracted than ever. How do you get their, get their focus? And so when you do really well in enterprise, you're able to focus on the right target accounts, figure out the right messaging and the right, like what's the pain they have and how do I address that and get, get ahold of them. And then, and then like running that sales cycle, you know, and being tenacious throughout, you know, what could be a year or a year plus. So where do you think a company should start? You have a lot, let's say you have a lot of success. You're at a couple hundred million dollars in a mid-market business and you want to go build an enterprise business. How do you break that apart? Just in the way that you articulated it, it's so multifaceted. It's, it can be so complex. Do you think there is a way to begin that's correct for most companies or it's totally context dependent? Translatable for any company is figuring out, do we have the right people on the bus, so to speak? So hiring enterprise experienced sellers is, it's just, it's very different. Thinking about enterprise marketing is completely different than traditional growth marketing and demand generation. So you need account-based marketing, you need event strategies, et cetera. Having the right product and engineering investment to be able to do last mile needs and build for the enterprise specifically. So those are like table stakes. And then the how is to start in a focused approach. You can't spray and pray. And so often people will get like, I have a small pilot in a specific large enterprise. I'm like, okay, we're, we're good. We're in the enterprise. We're a startup that they got when they were, you know, let's say DoorDash was one of our first customers that was a startup when we, we started with them. They're now obviously a large enterprise, but just because you've scaled with that company doesn't make you enterprise ready. And so focusing on four traditional enterprises, where can you win? And even being as narrow as possible, like we closed, you know, a lot of car dealerships, very large, like fortune 500 car dealership companies. Like that's one where let's just keep taking them down as an example. How did you figure that out? You need a really data-driven rev ops and sales team. We got like very, very granular using a lot of the tools out there you're using AI, but just like, just people who are really focused and inquisitive. And then we started doing very quick iterations of like, we're, we're starting to see good takedowns in the specific, we call them rich niches. But then let's spin up more and more campaigns targeting that and like, you know, you have referenceable customers, you're seeing a good takedown strategy. But do you think because of that, that again, let's say you're mainly a mid-market business. Should you be more in explore mode at the beginning where you're more spray and pray and you're trying to find these niches or you need to find a more efficient path to start to stack the niches on sort of top on top of one another. I would look at where are you performing well in the mid-market? Like do a really deep vertical analysis. Talk to customers and know like where are you acquiring customers really well, where are they thriving, your NRRs high, GRRs high, and then start there in a few areas. I wouldn't kind of go tackle the beast head on because it's a lot of money and you want to get the quick learning. And if you're spread too thin across too many verticals, that's just really hard. Unless you have a very completely horizontal product, but even if the buyers are different. When you think about sort of getting this enterprise motion off the ground, should it be cleaved off and you have a few sellers or marketers or whatever that you're kind of creating a new business? dedicated people, trying and like moving quickly and sharing information together. I don't think it needs, so I wouldn't put it like totally embedded. Let's put this through the exact same process for the rest of the company, but it it shouldn't be like in a basement corner somewhere. When we started this, we had a small group of sellers. We had product managers that I said, if we're going to do this, we need one dedicated product manager because there's not an enterprise. It was the entire product stack, but we need one person who is embedded with the team and is like the person and leader. And that was a hugely beneficial move because he was in the customer calls. He was coordinating with all the folks in engineering and product. That just helped us move and scale so much more quickly. So I think having some separation is helpful. And that could just be like specific named individuals. Like in marketing, you're the person and product. They don't have to be completely separated. Did you find that you had to pre-commit to X number of roughly, we're going to spend a third of our engineering resources on what's coming from the go-to-market and product team that's with enterprise, or it was much more organic? It was more organic. And every, every quarter, we're looking at that breakdown. And what we did align on is that there's going to be an unanticipated work that we're going to have to do and we all need to align that like we've got to figure out how to do that because even at the beginning of a quarter, you set a roadmap, but there's stuff that's going to come up from a new prospect where we've got to figure out how to fit it in or an existing customer where we just ramped because there's a lot of unknown unknowns at that point still. Do you think the, it's clear that the AEs need to understand enterprise and that being an enterprise AE is different than being an SMB AE or, you know, some version of a seller down market. Do you think the person leading revenue also needs to have enterprise experience or you can have somebody that's much more in a transactional mid-market be successful at building out enterprise? I mean, you always could have someone be successful. I come from SMB mid-market. So I was not the deep enterprise expert when I came to Checkr. And at that point, we weren't going big in enterprise. So for me, it was really important to hire a sales leader who had done this multiple times and done it in an environment that was gritty and challenging, not where, Hey, they're the market leader running an enterprise org. And that's valuable at some point, but no, Hey, I need to go figure out what accounts to go after, how to take these down. And so that I think is, is very important. And then on the sales reps, we've got a great like internal mobility program where you can grow from being an SMB commercially up into enterprise. But what's very hard to train if they don't have it already is like that outbound demand generation hunger. So if you're taking and hiring someone, even an enterprise, but who's just had leads pass to them, they're in a market leading position or they're not having to do that. Like we were like that. That's a no-go for us moving forward. So everyone needs to know, like grown up through, you work, you make your own pipeline. Which is hard to teach that if you've not like grinded it out on the phones or doing outbound without like a fresh, warm book. One of the things you mentioned briefly, that's always fascinating to me is basically forever in go-to-market events tend to be very useful. And it takes in every possible flavor of taking people to VIP thing at F1 through cocktail hours, dinners, educational. And it feels very odd that still in 2026, that it's very effective and it's generally very high ROI. What's going on with like events and selling products and why they tend to work very well, regardless of the who the buyer is or you could go through and it just tends to work well. Yeah. I mean, I also, you know, especially post-COVID, like events were dead and we stopped doing anything. And then we piloted it and saw returns, watched it closely and over the years have invested substantially in this. I think the crux of it is like a sale is a, it's a, a big, it's a leap of trust. And especially at that enterprise level, you're making a big decision often. You're as a buyer, your career, this is a big strategic thing. You're, you're recommending internally. You don't want to, you know, take risk on behalf of the company. And so a lot of that comes down to like the trust you're making in the individuals. Like humans are humans. I don't think any time soon, and especially in enterprise sales specifically, that's going to be replaced like on like the AI or on the agentic side. But it's that human to human contact is, is kind of the biggest fundamental pillar. And then I think also, and where we try to focus our events is giving people something that they wouldn't get otherwise. So like, I'm sure you get invited to events. I get invited to a lot of events. Most of them, I've got children at home. Like there's opportunity costs of going to an event. If like I could work on my own work or be with my family is very, very high. And so it's creating enough interesting, compelling events, whether that's experiences they wouldn't have otherwise, like not just another basketball game. It could be that, but like we've done like Houston rodeo or devil wears product premiere and just something that's different. Or like very strong thought leadership. That's going to help you in your job. And so it, it can't just be like, go to the same events. It's going to be targeted and high value. And then lastly, like at a lot of these events, they're meeting their peer set, which is for any leader. I always tell my leaders, that's an important part of your job is to break from the day-to-day to get external contacts. And for most of these, they're with a bunch of other folks upside. And that's hugely valuable for them. So events are not dead as, as, and I don't think they're dying anytime soon. If you think about going from CRO to COO in the context of Checker. What was by far the hardest parts of that? The mental shift, especially in a large company like Google, even though we were Google cloud smaller when I joined, but you're, you're managing your own functions and you're, you're working to push cross-functional teams. That is your direct area of accountability. And so it was, I think a few things. One was inserting myself into other people's business who were not on my team. So like, let's look at the supply chain, you know, which is owned by another function at that time. Like how can we improve that? Or our recruiting velocity and our hiring approach, like, is this working well? Hey, let me partner with you on that. Looking at our metrics, like I, from with our CFO at the time, like, hey, I don't think we're necessarily measuring all the right metrics. Let's look at adding some other ones that better define the business. So that was an adjustment, especially like, no, those people don't, those are my peers objectively, but I had to, to lean in and push them. And then also working with Daniel, he, we spent a lot of time intentionally on a few things, but one is continuing to build trust, continuing to give him feedback. And he wants to be pushed as well. Give like feedback both ways, obviously. And then figuring out the right balance of, Hey, running the, like I do our company business reviews and, you know, and he stopped back more, but making sure that he's, he's a founder. He cares deeply. This is his baby and, and making sure that he's aware of everything he wants to be aware of, even though he's not in the day-to-day. So that's, and, and he and I are always working through that and, and finding the right balance to make sure we're on the same page. What did you figure out about how you go about solving these problems that sit outside of the part of the org that you're directly responsible for? Like one would imagine, why are you involved in what I'm doing here? Or like very easy to get defensive, very easy to get territorial, very easy for you to like, for that person then say, well, what let's talk about your part of the, you know, or like all the interpersonal things. I think it starts with trust and, and building that trust with each other. I think we, one thing. You know, we do offsites together and like ways to connect in a deeper level so that we can have difficult conversations. Same with our VP level, our director level, all of that I coordinate. But so that's a big part of it, where you can, you have the license to push each other. The second is that I had to get out of my own way and like, this is my job. I debate, I push, but I like harmony. And, you know, I, I, I had to tell people explicitly what I was doing. Like, hey, this is my job as COO. I'm, you know, I want to partner with you. Like, this is, we're like a lot, like we're working on this together. I don't have the right answers always. And, and I get a lot of benefit when they push me, like, hey, you're our, our chief product officer. And he came and said, you're the sales collateral is not very good. He's like a very strong enterprise focused product leader. And, you know, you're right, let's like go improve this together. So there is some, there's, you know, it should go both ways. I think that the, from a mental framing as an executive in this role, it's that this is what is expected of me. And it's, we're not doing well if, like, go-to-market is functioning well or operations is functioning well, but there's issue over issues over here. This builds on what you were saying a second ago about, you know, building cadence and systems and processes you scale. And it feels like if it's not done well, you end up in corporate bureaucracy land and people spending more time filling out OKRs than they do like doing the work. You kind of, it feels like you have this fundamental tension where you're trying to figure out how do we have as little work around the actual work that people want to do? But I think you get to, it's almost like a law of physics. You get to a certain size company and it might be 30 to 50% of the time if you audit what someone's doing, it's not doing actual work to make the product better, deliver for a customer, on and on. And so like, what's your general philosophy on the role of process and standardization while also sort of allowing for judgment, agility, pushing decisions to the edges of the company, sort of the tension and sort of those two things? Yeah, I mean, decision-making is one we've been actively working through right now. And that's, it's a very hard one because that drives a lot of, like the more process you have to kind of take things up the chain, so to speak, the more people are spending on internal stuff versus getting work done. We, especially in a founder-led company, the reason the company took off so well is that we've got incredibly bright founders who make a lot of decisions. And I think at Checkr, kind of got into a routine of a lot of the decisions just naturally flowing up. If you give an executive a decision, they will make the decision. And so we've worked to try to, you know, turn that in an intentional way and just like very practical things. But like, first of all, Daniel and I sat down a couple of years ago and said, okay, what, what are the decisions that you need to make? Let's like just document it. So what are some examples of that? Like deals above a certain size or any major brand campaign, not like a demand gen, but like any major brand decision, any product modernization that's going like in a completely, like we're a consumptive model, like changing a product to SaaS is an example. Our CEO cares about swag. So it's like what we put out there, people are wearing. Like that's, that's like an exception. He gets, that's not, you know, a big one. And we keep looking at it and saying, like, where can we push that down to, you know, the next layer, the next layer. So there's that. We've also, like, I tend to think there's like the whole like rapid, racy, I think sometimes it's just like too much process, but what we've rolled out is two things. Um, one for every initiative or anything happening, like who's the DRI, directly responsible individual. And it's just in our lexicon because we, we saw a lot of like swirl happening around, like unsure who was taking the next step to own something, codifying who is the decision maker. Because we, we saw naturally everything was just flowing up and then, and it wasn't always obvious that certain executives were deciding everything or everything was flowing up to VPs. And so it forces us to say like, oh wow, this, I'm the decision maker on a lot of things. Like push it down. Like as an executive, as a leader for how I think about my time is the ROI of my time on a decision should be high. So if I should be able to do distinctly better than someone below me or, or deeper in the organization. And if I'm deciding things down there, then I'm not getting shareholder value. And so that's like one big thing we put in place in terms of like mechanism to flow decisions. And so with that in your world at this point in the company's life, what do you think the things that you should be DRI on? And maybe what are some things that other people might think you should be DRI on, but you've sort of very strongly believe it should sit somewhere else in the org? Key DRI, like what is our, how are we thinking about like major product roadmap trade-offs? Like that's probably the thing we disagree and debate on the most as a company is there's so many massive opportunities ahead of us. We could go run after and capture revenue very quickly. How do we sequence those? What do we not do? So that's at the, at the exec level decision, because it really should tie to our three-year roadmap and strategy. I think an example of something where I maybe decide on, but I push it down is like, what, how many sales rep should we have and going into next year? We're going through that decision right now. And I think that if you're aligning incentives of everyone, like people are getting paid on the things that are right by the company. If their goals are really thoughtfully aligned, then like a lot of those things are people are going to make the right decision. Big like M&As is one where we're, those are like, you know, one-way doors that we, you know, are hard. And then hiring is really important. So key, you know, any like VP level and above, those are, If you get that wrong, like that's going to be obviously have a ripple effect on the whole company. You know, I have to do it too. I'm a perfectionist. I am very data driven and, um, and I always tell people like, once I have your trust, like you, you go make the decisions. When I have a new hire, a new leader, I'm investing more time upfront. Like here's how I would make a decision. Here's, you know, like, let's, let's like, look at this one together. And then after the next one, like you go with it. So there's like coaching involved as well. What do you consistently find in terms of actual decisions are very challenging, even if you have high quality judgment and you have context on the organization and it's in your remit that for whatever reason, there's it, it's oftentimes very hard to get it right. I think hiring is one of the hardest things where, especially executive hiring or people just are really good interviewers at that stage in their career. And the stakes are high in terms. And so I've made bad calls there, either maybe over-indexing on someone who's got like a ton of relevant experience, um, or, or betting on someone who's not at that exact level, but has the intrinsics who could turn the corner and negotiations with very high stakes where there's not perfect information and there's no perfect decision. And I think that what I've learned over the years is that you're, you could make a really good decision and still have a bad outcome. Or you can make a really poor decision and have a good outcome. And how do you become good at the process of making decisions? Which for me as a, as a recovering perfectionist, it's like, you're going to make the best decision you have with the information you have available. And you have to make a decision. Nothing worse than that is like no decision. I'm working on it. And then like with my team as well. Like if you know how to, if I trust your process of making a decision, then like, hopefully you'll be right. And nine times out of 10, you probably will, but there will be some misses and I might've- Can actually sort of have a feel for like the business, or there's this risk that you turn into like a Dilbert exec that's like so separate from everything. And so you have to stay close to the metal? Absolutely. I think it's easier than ever now. Staying close to your team, but then like the broader organization. I, even in our office, I have a, um, Daniel and I are going to sit together and, you know, one area and then I have a separate place I just sit with the team like in sales floor or whatever just to kind of hear through osmosis what's happening, talking to people in the hallway, etc. But now with AI, with boot, we're heavy Slack users. We have a channel for every single customer, every single deal. You know, we're very structured about this. I, I can regularly keep pulse of everything. Getting that like felt sense of intuition and sentiment is what's important to me. Like I'm very data-driven, but an intuitive decision maker, you know, layering the data into it. And so if you're not getting that, if you're not, if you don't have a process by which to, to glean that, then You're often operating blind. I believe that the best way to make a decision is getting as close to the customer as possible. And often the people on the front lines have the answer. We're just like sitting over here, like pontificating. And so to me, it's often like, let's bring the people who actually are close to this into the discussion, either directly or like, let's make sure we're getting their input. I've seen this in both ways. I've been like, you know, in an organization where people are making decisions, what's completely lacking context. I would think one of the things you, you spend some time working on in your role is like incentive design. I mean, maybe in the most extreme, there's so many important things as it, as it relates to running a go-to-market team and figuring out like things like comp. What are some of the things that you figured out as it relates to incentive design or Like mistakes that you've had to correct or sort of things like that as you try to figure out how to incent and align many, many, many, many people. I mean, the biggest experience I've had in this and learnings has been in the like sales compensation and moving from a SaaS model to consumptive. So at Google, we were in G Suite, a SaaS, like you book a deal, like you give rep credit. You don't really have to do anything. It's incredible. And then where it's consumptive, you have to close the deal. They have to ramp. You have to predict how much they're going to spend. And so I've lived through this transition twice now. When I came into Checker, we people were comped on bookings. So it's like how much the customer is going to spend, how much do you think they're going to spend? In reality, we don't collect revenue until they spend like how many checks they're running. And so we, you know, people were getting way overpaid for things that maybe weren't going live or the actual revenue realization was very different than expected. So incentives were completely off. So we had to do a pretty dramatic change. And we're doing this with companies we acquire too, where you're comped on revenue. And then therefore I know like if you're, if you're comped on this, you're aligning, you know, your pay is aligning with value to the customer, which is then aligning with revenue to Checker. And we've had to like tweak some things here and there, like what's the sort of leading, leading thing we can give them when the deal is closed. But it's been a game changer in terms of the way like customer engagement, because we're doing what's right for them and we're not just overselling them on something or overbooking things. And then making sure that they're going live and that rep is like very attuned to make sure that that all happens seamlessly. That's a big one. I think it all comes down to what are we trying to achieve as a company? What is this person uniquely positioned to influence? Because you give them someone too much scope, then they're not, they're not getting incented on anything. Like if you're, if I'm comping my sales leader on total revenue for the company, it's like that's, that's not, you know, a high leverage for me. And then, you know, just giving them the guardrails so that we, we don't go out of bounds. For sales incentive comp, like if you do all of those things and then you can set up to have a winning sales organization, then Then it's like these decisions are easy. Like, should we add more reps? Like how do we treat this one deal? Like it, it all, it just makes everything easier than if you have like this shadow approach that's not aligned with your company's success. And oftentimes like for, for founders or for leaders, like a sales leader will come in and say like, no, no, no, we need to do it this way. And like, no, you don't really think first principles. What are the reflections you have about uh variable comp for sales? Because I feel like you have a bunch of, you know, founders that want to think everything from first principles and a lot of them begin with, there shouldn't be variable comp for reps. And in the fullness of time, I think that basically every single one of them eventually gets to the point that says no, we should have variable comp. There should be sales commissions. And I've always wondered why aren't more PMs on variable comp? And why aren't, pick any of these functions? Yeah, I mean, I haven't thought deeply about the product or other functions like engineers, but I, but I on the sales side, absolutely. They should be on variable comp. And I mean, by nature, you want people who are incredibly competitive, hungry, and you're gonna take this risk of 50% of their compensation is, is at risk. Like sometimes I get asked, like, why do salespeople make so much? I'm like, you want to go take a quota and have your salary cut in half? Like, have at it, right? I feel like that would be interesting. I, I feel like a PM should be able to say, I'd like to be eligible for 40% more comp, but I'll cut my base by half. I think the hard thing there, which is, I think, love any thoughts you have, but measuring the effectiveness of the, yeah, is hard. And like, we, we talk about this all the time. Like, how do you know you have a high functioning org? Is it the number of things they ship? Is it the quality? Is it, you know, there it's, it's harder. I think the harder it is to have that scoreboard that you can look at objectively, um, the harder it is to put on a variable comp. But when you are very clear on like the input that's made, like the output that they're driving and that there's, it's like a non-negotiable, very clear scorecard, it works well. There's like MBO plans where you're, I've done those for certain roles where it's like, it's like five categories and you're, you're rated on them at the end. It's just like a ton of overhead. It doesn't drive as much the same behavior. And like sales success breeds people staying. And enterprise AEs is like a hot commodity. They can go other places. If they know they're going to make a lot more money or be more successful somewhere else, they'll vote with their feet. And so you want to have a good plan where there's a lot of upside. And that's another thing we've looked at is like, if you can get really stingy and be like, oh, this, we like, you know, we have accelerators. If you're making above your quota, it's going to go to accelerator, accelerator mode. We've had, I've had times where like, there's caps on that or we're stingy on that. It's like, that's not the right move. Like to what, to what end? And if your unit economics are working, if you've done the math, right, which, which you should be doing, then it all makes sense. Like this, this math works. Shouldn't, I think people like the, the, the highest performing AE should make a lot more than a lot of people in the company. It does feel like the fact that the, the work tends to be easier to measure makes it easier to comp in that way. Which is that there's an unfortunate part of that, right? Because like a superstar, theoretically, maybe the average PM should be comped at X, but maybe the superstar PM should make 3X or whatever. And it's, and, and yeah, you have career ladders and this and that, but it doesn't work the same way as, as sellers. I think, and I think that's where things are moving more and more, is like differentiating, paying more for performance across all roles and especially with, um, you know, with like leveraging AI, you can get like 10x more out of a certain amazing engineer than an average one. In working across some then not what is the difference between the best one and the worst, but the folks that are good and the person that's like the head and shoulders star on the team. People like have the misconception about sellers, like, oh, it's the most like outgoing guy over there that's going to be the best seller. A lot of them are very introverted, I find. They have to turn it on, you know, and then need to re-energize. It's probably two ingredients for me. I mean like building trust with customers, being able to do that is a gift and it's something or something that's a skill that you have to really develop. But outside of that, I think it's really diligent, strategic thinking and planning and it's like thinking through what are all the moves I'm going to make? How do I structure those? How do I rally all the resources? And it is a team sport and I do that in a thoughtful , like like a captain of a team and I think reps who don't who are good... Even that are IC reps, they have to think about the world that way. They have to think about the world that way and, and they're just exceptional at like the, the drive, the tenacity of executing that strategy and they're they're not flying by the seat of their pants. They're not doing it on their own and then be like, oh, I've got to bring along an SE or, oh, like this is, I didn't get approval for this last minute. I see a lot of that. But the, the great ones are like exceptional project managers in a way of like thinking through how to how to get into the customer and like bring, bring all the resources around them. Going back to sort of the transition from CRO to COO, did you find it at all hard not to just spend time and focus on all the stuff you're already very good at? Like I would imagine you spent a career in, in various flavors of go-to-market. You're very good at it because you're still doing it and so you're the COO but you know, the CRO hat kind of keeps calling you back because you're, you know, really good at that thing. Yeah. No, absolutely. And that's the, that's the ongoing push, you know, that I'm looking at, like where am I spending my time working on with Daniel on like what are the next big strategic things we need to be thinking about? One of those, for example, is a company we have acquired recently, or a year ago at this point, but integrating that in across the whole company and accelerating that business. So that's like a go-to-market angle, but like really leaning in more directly. It's hard because I don't have a CRO. So I'm still managing all of the functions as an effective CRO, but I have like exceptional leaders. What else can you share about the dynamic of managing a leader that is outside of your domain? And like, it feels like there is a difference for you coming up as a CRO, managing a VP of sales, then you managing a VP of marketing or CMO or whatnot. Yeah. I mean, I think that I've, I've had this so many times throughout my career. I think the first time is like, I mean, I took over sales engineering and at one point in Google for my, my world, my segment. And I had not done that or, so I think that there's been a lot of times of this where I've kind of cut out that process of like, oh, I don't know what I'm doing. Like, can I add value? And I think it's just about, you know, as you get more and more senior, your role as a leader is to help remove obstacles, help think through strategy, help think through like talent on the team and structure of the team, but it's not necessarily to be a functional expert by any means. And I am very transparent in the hiring process too of like where, where I spike, where, you know, I'll partner with them or need them to lean in. And I ask the same of them. And then I think it's just having that mutual trust where, you know, I, I think that, you know, you'll flag to me like I want to say that I'll push and ask the right questions or I'll ask a lot of questions. And it's really because I'm trying to learn and pressure test, but you know, that the trust is there that, you know, they know that I'm going through that process with them and asking questions to make it better. So when you look across the way, the rhythm and cadence of the way that you run your org, what are the rituals and touch points that happen weekly or daily or quarterly that are the most important things that you've put in place? There's like the company-wide and then my team for the company at the C-suite level, we meet every single morning. Um, and there's no structured agenda. And when I joined, this was already in place and I'm like, this is crazy. This is so much time. Yeah. And I've become a convert. I mean, there's like, you know, one time out of several that it's not, you know, maybe not as high value, but it creates that trust. It creates this opportunity for us as a leadership team to know each other as people, to know what's going on in each other's personal life, to be able to align on any fire that's happening, whether it's a customer issue, an engineering incident, uh, an employee thing, very real-time. And it really like supports that first team mentality. Like this is your first team. It's not your function. So that has been, I think it's, it's a key part of how we operate and helps us function very well. And there's it's 30 minutes or an hour or... 30 minutes, 30 minutes. And there's no agenda. You just show up and talk about whatever. Yep. Yeah. There was like an unwritten rule in the beginning that's like, the first half is about non-work stuff, but I'm typically the one that's like, all right, let's get to work. Let's talk about this, you guys. But it is, it is very, very conducive to building that trust I talked about earlier. Every two weeks, we do a review with all of our kind of top 20 leaders of the entire business. And so that is a, we're a document culture, which is, you know, we do the silent read, comment and discuss after. And that review of that document is kind of the, the, the cadence by which we're reviewing. And the document's like a business review. It's a business review that covers, we have strategic goals we set at the beginning of the year. We spend a lot of time on those. So it, it tracks input and output metrics across all of those strategic priorities we're driving. And then it also covers some functional metrics and like the revenue, like the forecast revenue overall as a company. That is critical. And that's kind of, there's cascades up to that with each function. I do like a revenue business review every two weeks. On the, but on that review, like what is then happening? So everybody sits down and reads it and then what's the meeting used for? It's a kind of intake of information. So everyone's clear on what's happening across. And then there's a, then we discuss, people flag, Hey, I wanna discuss this. And so there's like, you know, five to 10 topics or any goal that's, that's red or off track. We will discuss as well. And we'll go through, problem solve live, you know, Hey, if there's an issue, an engineering issue over here or Hey, like there's a customer situation here. What do we need to do? And kind of set a DRI in place to go address and then follow up. It's a way to, you know, make sure that we're, we're tracking with rigor. And then if, if like certain goals are off, like quite off track, we will do a separate deep dive one hour where we'll go into that. And we, we do those monthly as well. And then you were saying you have every other week is a revenue... We have a revenue business review, just on the, on the revenue organization. Twice a year, we bring our top like 80 leaders together in person, kind of get them aligned at the beginning of the year. Like here's the strategy, here are our goals, very intentional cascading with them. And then we do a company-wide kickoff. And then mid-year as well, we meet with that set of leaders again. These are the leaders who are like, you know, it's the director of demand gen or the director of platform engineering. Like they are driving the, you know, the, the company. And we're at that stage where we're not big enough to have like completely federated approach, but you know, um, so we, we bring everyone together and, and make sure that they're aligned. That, that was a big change I made coming to Checker. We're, we didn't really think about middle layers at all. It was like the whole company and then the like executive team. And so, and that's really critical to get, get people the information before it's spread to the whole company, whether it's an org change, whether it's a strategy shift. And so throughout the year, you disseminate through those 80 people. Exactly. So like any... regular virtual meetings with them as well, but it's a time investment, but it's a high ROI. And is it just if you get to a certain level in the career ladder, you're auto added to that group or there's a judgment piece or... You're auto added to make it very straightforward. And then what's the difference between that group and the top 20 people? The top 20 is VP and that top 20, we're meeting in person as well, two additional times per year, just that group, usually off-site. And that's a mix of like setting the strategic goals for the year. It is thinking, you know, kind of bringing people along on whether it's our strategy with M&A or investors. And then it's a lot of trust building as well, like how are we functioning as a leadership team? And I mean, that goes, so we do this and we do it twice a year with our C-staff. So a lot of touch points intentionally built to allow us to just move more quickly in the off-season. It's just like as work, as everyone's executing, that alignment is really important. Do you think if you were to be a CRO again, it would be marginally helpful that you had this role or it's like, would be a big deal in terms of your overall effectiveness? I'm such an operator at heart and so data-driven and the way I've operated, it hasn't, it would give me the bigger picture perspective, but I don't think it would like fundamentally change for me personally, like the way I'm operating because I just have that bent naturally. On sort of the data piece, what, where have you found that data has led you in the wrong direction or had mass something that you could only know qualitatively or there are these like pitfalls if, if you get too focused on managing through a dashboard? There's like strategic direction and products inside that you can't glean through data. I mean, it was customers regularly as possible, try to hear the insights from calls. And um fraud is an area that just keeps coming up more and more, but it wasn't shown in the data. Like people, people are seeing more and more inadvertently hiring North Koreans into their company and like wondering like what line of code did this person change to having someone that's stolen a SASA and is on multiple platforms. Like, so all of these things, you know, we kind of knew here and there there were issues, but as I, you know, started to talk to customer A, you know, customer B, our chief product officer, and our sales team hearing more and more, like that, that's just gleaned from, like, you know, connecting dots and that has formed, again, a really big strategic investment for us and like kind of where we want to go and product investment. And that's the kind of thing if you're just focused on scoreboard and metrics, you're like, we don't, this, this like may, maybe we do this for free or maybe this is like a very low identity verification is like a low ASP product. Like we don't need to spend a ton of focus here. But it's incredibly strategic in the bigger picture. So that's like one example where you can't just be looking at data. You have to supplement that with customer, as many customer conversations as you can. And for reps who are having those calls every day, they're not in the right, like they're not in the right role to be able to like share that information up or to push forward strategic direction. It has to come from you. And it, would you say that the customer is where most goodness comes from in terms of supplementing context on top of data or there are other pockets? I think that's the, like the ultimate gold you're trying to get. I think the, you know, in terms of what's going well, what's not going well, where do we need to invest strategically for the future? There's various ways to get that if not the customer, like the, from obviously, like the, the teams and, you know, we've, we've built a whole customer LLM. That's like got all the knowledge on all the customer support calls and all the sales calls and whatnot. But going to direct to the source is, I see like the highest value. And also like hearing, you know, you just, like having that empathy ongoing is really important. And that's, that's actually probably like a hard part about being in the COO role is that. You're, there's obviously like a lot of demands for your time, but pulling you into a customer call, like I said, like, I want to talk to like, you know, as many customers per week, et cetera, et cetera. There's hesitance, like, oh, well, when's going to be on the call? Like, what's the agenda? Like, what is the, like, is the customer want to do this? Is the, you know, is the rep, so it's, it's like, you have to really force yourself in because the, the default inclination for the team is like, we've got this, like, don't, don't bother, you know. Do you find that figuring out what the governing metrics for the company are is relatively easy or is it tricky? You're trying to represent in some ways, something just enormously complex in a set of numbers and you can't have 300 numbers, generally speaking, but you also can't have one number like revenue and any reflections on like that process of trying to kind of articulate the business in something much more numerical. I think that we have probably too many metrics. It's like most companies do. We're very data and metric oriented. I'd say like the, the key is like starting with revenue and breaking it down into the component drivers. So like when, when I started, we looked at revenue by acquisition channel, but it was like, okay, now we need to break it. Like new versus existing and upsell versus, um, you know, like retention, new logos versus like size of deal. All of that, like just did math equation, the algebra is really important. And then structuring goals and owners across each of those. Yeah, it feels like if you have a very, if you have a consumption-based model with incredible NRR, you run the risk of actually under emphasizing net new business because you can hit these incredible, you know, annual goals. And then when you pick it apart, you don't have enough new seeds being planted to blossom into bigger cows in the future. Yeah. No, I'm a, I'm a big proponent of this and separating out your sales force into new logo hunters and then existing account reps. I think it's very problematic for a growth company to combine those into one role, which a lot of people do and explicit goals on new customers, new revenues that there's a discrete owner for. If you're growing well and don't understand that, I think there's just as what's the driver, it's just as bad as not growing in some ways, because you, you don't, you don't have control over it. It's like the classic thing. If you, if you exceed plan by 20%, everybody says you're amazing. If you miss plan by 20%, everyone's very angry. But in both cases, you miss, you were unable to predict. I mean, I'd rather exceed plan, but this, but if you don't know why I will lose trust in you. Like you, you better know why you're exceeding plan. Yeah. I mean, I think that the metrics, one thing that we do at Checkr is like, there's obviously the financial metrics, like the revenue, new revenue, margin, EBITDA, which kind of govern our financial plan. But I mentioned, I mentioned earlier, we have strategic goals we set. We spend a lot of time in Q4 every year, like outlining those, deciding what those would be. And then we track those rigorously the following year. And so those are the things where they're outside of the financial plan. It could be like percentage of revenue from this new product area that like we, we've got product market fit, like we want to scale it up, for example. Or it could be a strategic investment in, we're building like a people data graph, which is like just work outside. This is not directly monetizable in the short term, but it's strategic long-term. So those types of things, like having those set communicates to the company. And then everyone's like, knows when you're trying to make trade-offs, like you bias toward doing these things and not the, the long list of other things. So having metrics on those is also really important to, you know, the inputs and outputs. And then we try to simplify that down to, you know, like 10 things that we've got metrics on. So those are pretty clear. And then, you know, beyond that, there's a proliferation of metrics, but having key owners. So like. Own it. Or that means like no one owns it and you're not going to see movement. So you need the metric. You need a goal. And we like to set goals that are... it's better to set a goal that's ambitious and you slightly miss than to get like 130% of the goal because that means you weren't thinking big enough. But I feel like one of the downsides of setting particularly ambitious goals is, you know, there's something about this sense of as a company, we wanna feel like we're winning and we set the goal and we hit the goal. And like, if you do like the classic OKR thing where you want to get 70 or 80%, I forget what the number is, and that's great. It doesn't create a culture of feeling like we're winning. Have you noticed that or do you? Yeah, absolutely. We've had a lot of debates about a similar thing. My take is similar to yours. For the metrics that matter from a financial perspective or like the sales team quota overall, that should be ones where we want to hit that within like 5%. Strategic stretch goals and initiatives, we label them such. Like, hey, this is a stretch goal. I want you to think ambitiously. We're doing this for H2 right now. We're saying, okay, what are some, for lack of a creative term, 10x goals. But you get the gist for H2 that we know they're impossible, but I want you to think really big and think sort of like you have to rethink the way your team works. You have to like leverage AI in new ways to hit those. But I think it's defining them as such so that you're not in this situation where you're either losing or no one's thinking big. Yeah, because I think to the point that you're making, sometimes if the goal is 5x versus 10%, you have to fundamentally rethink everything to get a 5x. Then, you know, you can eke out a 10 or 20% gain and lots of small changes. And it's really hard for someone in seat to think about, completely be thinking. And so, like, you have to force them to. In the purview of your part of the company, what is the way that you guys have leveraged AI that has made the biggest difference? So not like cool demos and all this other stuff that, like, but like, in production, in the way the team is running and working, it has made like a profound impact on what you all are doing. Let me start within my organization. But in operations, this is like all of our supply chain, pulling data, customer support, candidate support, disputes, you know, as part of the core processes, all of that's being done by humans in the past. We have an incredibly AI forward thinking SVP of operations. And his team are phenomenal. And so they've built AI. We've taken our AI resolution rate. We've got goals to get that to, you know, 90 plus percent over time where it's not only like a chatbot interaction, but it's generative AI addressing the customer issues. We've taken customer satisfaction on interactions from before generative AI and post, like improved like 3x in terms of CSAT. And we've been able to substantially scale without adding more headcount. And, you know, the cost per, you know, revenue dollar has gone down dramatically. And like in a given day or a given week, how does that impact the business? It allows us to know where to invest our roadmap or even what customers might be showing signals of growth opportunity or like distress in some way. Because, hey, there's these customer support tickets or this like international product is picked on. Like that's one where, hey, we were seeing this come up on several calls for this country. There's maybe there's maybe an issue there. We need to like prioritize this more quickly to win more customers or prevent churn of this, these like 10 accounts or something like that. So it's like a real time signal so that we're not in this like annual planning process and quarterly, but real-time capturing opportunities for growth or churn reduction. So that's great. And then also, the other part is just like cost avoidance on the agentic side. On the sales side, we've had AI STRs as basic that that happened a while ago. We've done billing with a partner, but an entire orchestration layer for outbound. That was an area where it's like, to do this well, reps have like 20 different systems they're having to go into to do all the things. And so we built kind of one agentic layer that they use and that when they wake up in the morning, it's already outreach to specific accounts based on signals, customized content. And so we're six months into rolling that in and obviously takes investment to continue to improve, but that's a big bet we're making. And has that shown tremendous promise? It's shown promise. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, I mean, we're, our outbound pipeline is a percentage of total pipeline is continuing to grow. And another area where we're early in, but like account-based marketing, it's like test theory manual. Can we like hundred X that in H2 through this and other tooling we're stitching together. On the engineering side as well, we're, you know, over 8% of our code is now written with generative AI. So that's another area. So there's very fundamental, like in production use cases. And then, as I mentioned, we've got pretty like really like blue sky goals for H2. If we get like 40% there, they'll be very meaningful to do this well. I mean, that's the hard part. And I've seen, like, we pushed AI tools to the entire company pretty early. Like everyone has a cloud license, a lovable license. And, we did hack days at like non-engineering hack days to like drive this. And so it was like, first, everyone's just building stuff for their own productivity. Just like, great, but like costs money and it's not, it's maybe, maybe making you marginally more efficient. And then the push is to move people to build like an app that is business impact. Like, Hey, like, hey, you know, a customer 360 skill and cloud or agent that, you know, will help us actually have a better insight to this customer. Everyone's like building the same thing. And so then it's like getting those shared agents that everyone's using the same ones. Someone centrally manages it. And then eventually like workflows and systems is where we need to move to because we don't want AI for AI's sake, but like, give me the signals that a customer is challenged. Send that to the CSM immediately to like activate this outreach sequence. Like that type of thing is where we need to move toward. So we're investing a lot in the knowledge layer to be able to query queryable companies, like all the rage. But we're investing substantially in it. And so have you found that like a lot of the work needs to be more centralized or have you found that it's hybrid where you have this drumbeat of getting every line level employee to be playing and building and tinker. Like, it feels like it's been a little bit like you've kind of gone in multiple directions. And now is it kind of, we want to try every conceivable. We're moving toward more centralization, but it it's important that we get everyone up to like a higher level of AI fluency. And so we define what those levels are and are assessing people on that moving up. But we don't need every single ops agent building an app, right? Team needs to be handling tickets or we don't necessarily need every SDR to be building the next app for that. So, but they should know the art of what's possible, which is why there was a heavy investment upfront. And they all came up with the things that like now are figuring out how to scale. So we're going through that journey right now. If someone is a bit earlier in their career and they are thinking about like, where do they want to take their career? And like, okay, being a COO could be really interesting based on what I'm interested in and my own set of skills, et cetera, et cetera. What's your perspective other than be excellent at the thing you're doing and continue to be excellent and grow in your role? Like, are there certain things that have been five years or seven years or at some point in the future, they want to be a COO that they should spend time on or grow in this way, or I know it's not in your purview, but you should be doing this when it's that sits outside of your role and ops or go to market. Run revenue, sales teams, specifically at some point. Understanding what it's like interacting with customers is important, unless you're internally only focused COO, which can be, but interacting with customers, having that, engaging and to really understand what it's like to own the number. Understanding the intricacies of motivating and driving and running a sales organization. I think that there's, it's a bigger leap to go from, you know, kind of support function to COO owning revenue if you've never done it. So I've seen people who, you know, go from that to like being an AE and then, I mean, that combination is huge because you know the operational part, you've done sales or sales leadership, and then and taking that. If you're in the sales leader track or CRO track and you want to be a COO from there, you've got to really double-click and understand the data, the numbers, which you know, there are a lot of more and more sales leaders now have that acumen and ability, but it has to be intentional, understanding the like, you know, closest to you is like the RevOps team and the components there, thinking about the broader company metrics and spending time on that and understanding what is important financially to the, to the board, to the CEO. I think often so much times like a sales leader is kind of this, is so narrowly focused on the quota, the number and doesn't spend time getting that insight and learning. And, and that I think would, could be a blocker to being, to becoming a COO at some point. What else, maybe just to wrap up, when you reflect on your own abilities and skills, do you think has served you so well and allowed you to sort of grow into a COO other than just like hard work and intelligence? I think it's the mix of incredibly data-driven and operational, but also really care about the humans and the people. And I know that that was one thing that Daniel, the combination that Daniel valued of like, hey, I know that I can trust that Lindsay is gonna like hold like a lot of rigor and be as like, you know, detail-oriented as I would be so I can step back and let go, but also really be intentional and think about the culture and the people and building trust. Like low, low ego is really important to us at Checkr. Like you're in it for the company's success. You're not here to build an empire to do it for yourself. And so I think that's, that's also served me well in this context because I'm really, I really want to make Checkr successful. I want to make Daniel successful. And like that partnership and trust is really important. All right, great place to end. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.