SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back to This Week in Startups. My name is Alex. I am one of your two co-hosts here at the show. Today, my co-host, Jason Calacanis, is under the weather and therefore unable to attend and chat with us. But don't worry, it's not going to be a whole hour of me just talking to you. Instead, we have some absolutely amazing guests today, including one from Twist 500 company, Sayera, and recently 3x Unicorn, and we're going to hear from the founder of Cake Equity, along with a number of major news hits, including the service

SPEAKER_01: titan IPO, and we're going to dig into other critical news stories from today.

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SPEAKER_00: To begin, I have a little bit of a treat for you, kind of an amooj bouj to the show, if you will. And it is the following video clip that I think details all the progress we have seen in self-driving crossed with, well, the fact that there's still a little bit more

SPEAKER_08: work to do. Now, if you're listening to this on the audio version, what you're not seeing, but you can find over on the internet, is

SPEAKER_11: a Waymo car, completely kitted out in all of its AV technology, going around a traffic roundabout and not stopping. It's essentially like what happens when an American sees one of these for the first time and has no idea how to get off, but because it's a robot driver, well, it just kept going around and around and around and around and around again. Now, Waymo does say that there wasn't a passenger in the car, so no one got stuck on this really terrible flat roller coaster, and they've already put out a software patch. So, great work by Waymo, but I have to say, not a great look for a company that's currently trying to expand all across the United States. Now, to begin today, we are going to have a

SPEAKER_00: company back on the show that I talked to a couple of months back. The company is Syera, C-Y-E-R-A. And last time we talked to the company, I hung out with co-founder and CTO, Tamar, because I wanted to learn more about the company, its growth, and its fundraising. Since then, it has bought another company for $162 million and raised $300 million more. So, please welcome the other co-founder of Syera. It's Yotam Seger. Yotam, hey, how you doing?

SPEAKER_15: Hey, Alex. Great to be here. I used to do those roundabouts for fun, just staying around about when we

SPEAKER_00: were 16, but now it's happening with AI. Funny that you mentioned that. Going around roundabouts was actually about two-thirds of the entertainment in my hometown, given that there was nothing else going on whatsoever. So, I'm actually with you on that. Although, back then, it sounds like we had the same childhood experience. Well, I mean, when we were growing up, not to get off topic here, but like there wasn't TikTok. Netflix was a DVD mail service. Online gaming didn't really exist in the way that it does today. We actually had to go outside and do things. So, traffic circles were kind of like the

SPEAKER_16: TikTok of our day, I think. And we still had a social phenomenon that has since gone extinct called boredom. People were just bored.

SPEAKER_00: Yes. Actually, I've heard, and this might be a little bit of a tangent, but I've heard that some people in Gen Z and Gen Alpha are going out on walks, and they had this new philosophy. They go out on

SPEAKER_11: walks without headphones in. They just walk. And yeah, you can do that, turns out. I didn't know that was something we had to reinvent, but yeah, going outside, everybody. Very good for you. Anyways,

SPEAKER_00: Yotam, how are you? I hear you have another kid on the way. Yes, yes, I do. Well, I'm glad that you're going to have two, like myself, because it means you'll have plenty of time to work more on what you're building. So why is your company back on the show? So last time I had your co-founder on, we were talking about the $300 million, I think it was a Series C, valued the company at about $1.4 billion. Since then, however, you guys have gone back to the fundraising well and raised another $300 million in a Series D. This just over doubled the valuation to about $3 billion. So to start, why did the company go back and raise so much money so quickly

SPEAKER_23: again? So first of all, you know, the timing was more of a preemptive situation where our insiders, Accel essentially put a very, very, very compelling offer in front of us and made it very easy for us to raise more money and continue to accelerate the company. This was after we executed on the acquisition of Trail. So it came in a very good timing. And I think a company like us needs a significant

SPEAKER_24: watches to be able to continue to accelerate into the market and to consider all of the opportunities to grow our platform organically and inorganically. So we were very happy about that situation. But again, I think fundraising has never been a focus for us. We focus on the customers and we focus on the product. And if we do that well enough, then the fundraising doesn't present as much

SPEAKER_26: of a challenge.

SPEAKER_00: Yes, but isn't, not every startup has major blue chip investors coming at them with preemptive term

SPEAKER_11: sheets six months or so after they raised their last nine figure round. So I mean, I agree that it's great to focus on customers and let the fundraising just happen. But come on, Jotam, that is a relatively rare position to be in. I mean, not every startup has that luxury, I suppose.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah, I agree. We're in a very privileged situation where the traction in the market and the

SPEAKER_24: total addressable market of our space and the strength of our opportunity to go and build a

SPEAKER_23: legendary company in that space is, is making it easier, easier than foremost.

SPEAKER_11: So let's start there. So I know that people are probably have heard of Sarah, but I do think it's good to talk about what you guys do in more detail. So the company today, after the acquisition of Trail Security, and we'll get to that in a second, it started off doing data security posture management or DSPM. And the way that I think about this is it helps a company figure out what data it has,

SPEAKER_29: where it exists, and then also who can access it. Is that fair?

SPEAKER_30: That's more than fair. We have many roles open in sales. If you're looking for a side gig or for

SPEAKER_15: something to, for a little bit of a different experience, that could work, could work very well.

SPEAKER_00: I don't think that I would be the world's best salesperson because I'd be like, you get a discount, you get a discount, everybody gets a discount. I do want to say though, one thing that you guys do as part of your DSPM product is use machine intelligence to actually go and help companies categorize their data. Can you break down for me a little bit how that works?

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, absolutely. So in Sarah today, we're looking at becoming that data security company, that data security platform for enterprises. You look at the security space, there's all sorts of

SPEAKER_15: assets that need to be protected. You've got CrowdStrike that are the masters of the endpoint. You've got Palo Alto networks that are the master of the network. And you don't really have a

SPEAKER_24: hyper-growth innovative company that's really focused on the data. That weird intangible asset that all of us are creating so much of and collecting in so many different places today across the cloud, on-premise, endpoints, and even third parties. So that's the asset that we're focused on as a company. And that's the part of the security stack that we're trying to consolidate and simplify for our customers and make into a very, very effective high ROI program.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. Actually stopping there, thinking about the way you phrased this. So essentially CrowdStrike CrowdStrike endpoints, that means devices at the edge. When we think about Palo Alto networks, they're actually securing the pipes that move data around. Firewalls keep people outside of your network. And then inside of your secure area, if you will, there's a bucket of data. And that's where Sierra

SPEAKER_16: currently plays. Yes, except that that inside, when you look at the world today with cloud and with third parties, it's not

SPEAKER_24: exactly in one place, right? So when we look at enterprises today, we've got customers that have us connected to more than 10 different environments because they have AWS, Azure, and GCP, and Snowflake, and Databricks, and MongoDB, and Office 365, SharePoint, and Box, and Salesforce, and Google Drive.

SPEAKER_39: Other than that, it's not very complex at all. No, no, it's a very simple problem to deal with, right? And they have their endpoints as well, which also have data on them because people still download spreadsheets to their laptop, right? So it's a fairly, very complex ecosystem where enterprises have data. And when incidents do happen,

SPEAKER_24: the first thing they need to answer is what data was potentially exposed. The problem is they don't know,

SPEAKER_39: right? And they don't know to a level that it's hard for people to imagine. We talked about the cars in the beginning. So I always joke that if you ask people on average, how good of a driver they are, the average people tell you on a one to 10 scale is like an eight, right? But if you ask a security practitioners, or enterprise practitioners, IT practitioners, how good are they at data security, the average you're

SPEAKER_40: going to get is a two. So people just can't imagine that everybody else is as bad at this as death. So

SPEAKER_39: that's how bad the problem is for customers. They believe that they're the worst at it because they just can't imagine that every other organization they're coming in contact with is so immature in this aspect as well.

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SPEAKER_29: Terms and conditions do apply. Here's the thing that kind of blows my mind about this because I know that Sierra was an early

SPEAKER_00: advocate for the phrase data security posture management kind of helped set the term in the market. We've been having cybersecurity issues since forever, but especially since the dawn of the internet, I suppose. And to me, what we're talking about here feels very fundamental to a good security posture, especially at an enterprise company, i.e. one that has lots of data, lots of employees, lots of devices, lots of networks. So how the hell did it

SPEAKER_29: take until you guys decide to build the company to get DSBM actually set up as its own category in cybersecurity?

SPEAKER_39: Okay. So I'll share a bit of the history of the space for my perspective. So first of all, not only is it not a new problem, it's actually the oldest problem. Because if you look at the title for the person responsible for cybersecurity in the enterprise, the title is not chief cyber officer. The title is chief information security officer. And the entire profession was called information security. That was where we started. And as a cyber

SPEAKER_24: attacks became more prevalent, the focus shifted from information security to cybersecurity. And a lot of the a lot of the terminologies we've used became threat detection response became very cyber focused. But what has

SPEAKER_39: changed? So I'm a pretty young guy. And I still remember the floppy disk, 1.4 megabytes at a time as the best way to move data from place to place. Where do we live today? I like with two clicks of a button at the end of

SPEAKER_40: the end of this show, I'm going to upload, I don't know, 14 gigabyte video to a Google, to a Google drive that the producer sent me. And that's going to take 10 seconds, right? Like the ability to move data from

SPEAKER_39: place to place has changed completely. The amounts of data being generated in the world today, completely disproportionate to what we generated 10 years ago. It's on a personal level, it's on an enterprise level, it's in every part of our society. There's more data being generated this year in the world, then all of the data across the history of the history of the world that has ever existed before.

SPEAKER_01: I can't wait until the first year if that's not true. So I feel like we've been saying that for a

SPEAKER_00: couple of years now, eventually, we have to go, okay, we have enough data, let's go back and look at it. But for now, my God, okay, so it sounds like we had information security morphed into cybersecurity, and

SPEAKER_29: now, just kind of looking at here, we're bringing the center of gravity back to actually securing

SPEAKER_39: information. Yeah, so what has changed? Like what was the approach in the past? The approach in the past was that every enterprise employee will manually classify sensitive documents by applying a tag to them, right? But people don't like to do that. People don't like to do anything, right? Like, especially

SPEAKER_24: not to tag their documents if they're top secret, restricted, confidential or not. And that approach just didn't scale. It just didn't manage to scale with the enterprise with the duplications of data, with the amount

SPEAKER_39: of data being generated. And what DSPM is all about, DSPM is all about automating that. And that takes us back to the question you asked me earlier, and I didn't answer, which is why it's so important to be able to differentiate automatically between the data that matters and the data that clutters. Because 98% of the data doesn't matter. And you don't really care if it's lost in a breach, or you don't really care if

SPEAKER_24: it's accessible to the entire company. But some data matters so much.

SPEAKER_29: Okay, so the automated categorization of corporate data to me is an awesome, awesome idea on paper. And I

SPEAKER_11: know you guys say that you're up to 95% accurate, if I recall the marketing materials, but how can you look at a company's enormous, vast, diverse, cluttered, messy data, and then go in and say, okay, here are the important documents. Does that require a lot of learning from the new customer company about how they classify or what they do? Or is your system kind of agnostic in terms of which customer you're talking

SPEAKER_15: to? So if it would require a lot of learning from the customer, we wouldn't be able to raise two funding grounds in one year of $300 million because the time for adoption would be so slow and

SPEAKER_39: so cumbersome that nobody will enjoy it. But if you think about that question, I look at it as two

SPEAKER_24: different tiers. The first tier is what is the data? The second tier is how important it is. Now, if we have a very good signal on the first tier, and we really understand what is the data we're

SPEAKER_39: looking at, then the second tier becomes much easier. Right now in the second tier, enterprise practitioners, security practitioners always have a saying, they say the business owns the data, and the business will tell us what data is important. Now that is completely true. There's only one challenge. The business has no way of owning up to that responsibility. And what we're doing with DSPM is we're helping the business, we're giving the security practitioners the mechanism to help the business own the data. Because if you show me as a business leader in my organization, what data I have, and if you show me this is the data we think is sensitive and should be protected and how we plan to protect it, it's much easier to have a conversation than if you just come to me blank slate and tell me,

SPEAKER_40: Hey, Mr. Chief Marketing Officer, what sensitive information does the marketing department collect? Where do you keep it? And how do we need to protect it? Well, I don't know. I've never thought about it in my life. I can't answer that question. Right? So that's the way we're rephrasing the business

SPEAKER_39: process within the enterprise from being something that either the business needs to give us the answers, or we just have no answers to something where we're creating an actual map of reality. What is out there? What do we have? And once you have that inventory, it's so much easier to really focus on what matters the most and what you can get rid of and what you want to remove and what we didn't even intend to have this data in the first place.

SPEAKER_40: We don't do PCI for six years in this company. So why do we still have a stash of millions of customers'

SPEAKER_39: credit card information from the old days? We don't want this information anymore. We just want to get rid of it. So visibility is a huge, huge, huge accelerator for action and for accountability. And that's the magic we've created with the SPM. And to explain why that visibility is possible today, the only thing I need to give you is a very simple example that we all understand because we all have ChatGPT today. So imagine taking a 50-page wall document, right, sticking it into ChatGPT and telling ChatGPT in four tags, tell me what this document is about. Is it going to do a perfect job? No, but it's a heck of a lot better than anything we had two years ago. And if you can do that at enterprise scale, over the hundreds of millions of documents that our customers have in their corporate environments, and the hundreds of petabytes that they're collecting in AWS and GCP and in the Snowflake and Databricks,

SPEAKER_24: if you can do that, then you can actually give them visibility to this incredibly valuable asset that they have, the data, and allow them to do so much more with it.

SPEAKER_29: Right. Now, on the accuracy point, if you're at 95%, give or take now, how hard is it to get to 96, 97, 98? Is the incremental improvements to close that last gap a difficult challenge or one that's just a matter of time?

SPEAKER_24: Obviously, it's improving every day and every week as the engineering team continues to improve the classification engine. And we're also dealing with advanced use cases around data classification.

SPEAKER_39: So it's not just about that one dimension of what is the data. That's dimension one. But what about whose data is it? What about is it real data or is it synthetic data that somebody generated for testing purposes? What about use cases like I'm a B2B enterprise with many different customers? Every piece of data, I'd like to understand whose customers, which customer's data is it? Is this data that I was given by this business partner or by that business partner? Does this, let's say we're talking about personal information. Does it belong to my customers or does it belong to my employees? Does it belong to European citizens, Canadian citizens or California residents? All of these challenges are advanced classification use cases where AI can help us automate and really give that information to the practitioners out of the box. And that turns this visibility we're creating into something that is so actionable for them.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And also it does kind of solve the question of what are we going to use AI for in the enterprise?

SPEAKER_11: Well, at a very minimum, it can help us clean up a lot of craft or clutter, as you said, that is both dangerous to individuals and also kind of a corporate liability. Okay. That all makes good sense to me. I want to talk just a little bit about trail security.

SPEAKER_00: So you guys bought this company in October, you announced it. And if I recall, it was a $162 million cash and stock deal. And they do or did now you guys do data loss prevention DLP, if you want to use the acronym. And essentially, as far as I understand, that means that when a company has data that's in motion being transmitted or pushed somewhere,

SPEAKER_11: it provides visibility into that. So just tell me a little bit why that is incremental or creative to what Sierra was doing originally.

SPEAKER_24: So when we talk to our customers, and that's what we try to do most of our time, what we hear from them are two challenges.

SPEAKER_22: The first challenge is the one we've addressed with the SPM is we don't know what we have. This company is so big. It's moving so fast that we just have no assurance that we have a good inventory of our data, of our assets and what we need to protect.

SPEAKER_24: And if we don't know what we have, how can we protect it?

SPEAKER_15: That was the first problem. So easy to understand, you know, even on a personal level, on a family level, you know, that you don't know where all of the documents are and where all of the things that matter are, or where you left your passport in which drawer, and hopefully it's in the house and you didn't leave it at your parents' place when you visited them.

SPEAKER_24: Right. So we all understand that problem. The second big problem, the position to us, and we up until the real acquisition, we didn't have the tools to help them with is exactly that, the data in motion. Well, I want to be able to detect and to block this data from going to unwarranted third parties from going to a outside of organization to people's personal Gmail addresses or to people's personal Google Drive. I want to be able to know how data is moving out of the organization's control, even though we're no longer talking about an data center on premise, you know, sphere of control. But whatever it is that composes our perimeter today. Right. So that's where trail comes in. And trail have an engine less DLP approach that sits on top of the existing choke points that you already have, because everybody's got something that looks at the email and everybody's got something that looks at the end point. Everybody's got something that, you know, looks at their SharePoint Office 365 environment and trail sit on top of that. And they bring the quality classification of DSPM together with the context of identity, other activities that are happening in the environment. And they're able to orchestrate this effort for the customers. Okay.

SPEAKER_29: Now in, in, in very kind of like crass business terms, when you guys bought trail, was this an acquisition that was mostly about adding a feature to the existing Sierra platform? Or was this deal also something that brought in a noticeable amount of revenue to the business that you already had?

SPEAKER_24: So this deal definitely did not bring a noticeable amount of revenue because we, we acquired a very young company on its way up. I'd like we, we caught them with the momentum on the way up. Just before they, they launched into the world on their own. What it has brought us, it's brought Sierra into a new market. The DLP market is a very significant market in data security. It's a market with 20 years of technology, 20 years of software, a lot of mature, mature, at least old implementations in enterprises. And it's allowed us to enter the space with an innovative approach, with a cutting edge approach, and really disrupt some of the incumbent activity that's been there for so long. And broaden our story from DSPM to the story that we're really excited about, which is that full data security platform story, becoming the leader in data security for the, for the industry.

SPEAKER_00: Absolutely. Thank you for the beautiful segue. So going back to the fundraise and the thing that I was really curious about is you guys raised a bunch more money. I don't think you were low on cash and you just did a big deal that used some cash. So when I saw this and then I put the two together, it really sounded to me like, well, you guys might be pursuing more M and a. So I'm kind of curious as you look to complete this data security platform. How are you weighing build versus buy and how is the startup market today in terms of being an acquirer? How attractive is the pricing out there? Yeah.

SPEAKER_24: So I think M and a, from our perspective, being a young company ourselves, being a very cohesive company, right? Like the company culture is very strong. People who work for Sierra, love the company, are dedicated to the company.

SPEAKER_15: And they have a certain attitude about them, right? Like it's, it's not a, we're not a big corporation yet. And how many employees will 400 people today.

SPEAKER_40: That's not small. You're dumb. It's not small, but it's intimate, but it's intimate. We had our New York city, we had our New York city Christmas party last night. That's not a big corporate party. I'll tell you that. You haven't seen this much dancing sense.

SPEAKER_39: Like it's, it's a very strong culture. So when we look at M and a, we're not just looking at weighing and build against buy. It's like getting married.

SPEAKER_69: You have to really, really, really love your partner to be willing to have kids together. Yeah.

SPEAKER_39: To go to their parents for, for the holidays. Like you really choosing somebody who letting into the family and letting into, into a very,

SPEAKER_15: very, very cohesive and close knit team. So it has to be absolutely right.

SPEAKER_24: I'd like, it's not worth accelerating the development by six months, but bringing on people that might not be the best cultural fit to what we're trying to do at Sierra, to how

SPEAKER_15: we think about our mission, to how we think about our customers, to how we like to operate. And like, you have to be very sensitive of those topics as well. We're not some, you know, huge corporate that just needs another product to, to shoot down the stream.

SPEAKER_24: We want the right technology, but we also want the right people that will help us to really make this, make this fantasy, make this dream, make this vision come true.

SPEAKER_16: Okay. So let's talk about, um, uh, both past and future growth then.

SPEAKER_29: So clearly trail was a purchase. You guys had customers say, Hey, we want this.

SPEAKER_16: So not a revenue buy, but certainly something that you can now go to your existing customers and say, Oh, we're already selling it. It's selling like buns. Right? Like it's selling like hot buns. It's, uh, customers love it. So that will both help your revenue growth rate next year.

SPEAKER_29: And also make your, just to get into kind of SAS metrics, your net retention look fantastic. Um, does that mean that say, I was going to grow as fast next year as it grew this year? Yes.

SPEAKER_11: And how, like, give me a ballpark for percentage growth. Is that like 100, 200, 500, 10,000% growth?

SPEAKER_76: Like, what are we talking about? Next year?

SPEAKER_23: We're looking to triple, like to triple the, the company's revenue to triple the new ARR.

SPEAKER_77: Did you do the same thing this year?

SPEAKER_29: We did a little better. Did a little better. Okay. That explains why the investors came to you and plonked it down a preemptive term sheet.

SPEAKER_81: Okay. That's very impressive. If you listen to this podcast, you obviously care about what's going on in the world.

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SPEAKER_29: Last thing I wanted to get to was the AI question from the customer perspective, because when I think about anyone working with data today, I just kind of presume that their customers are coming to them saying, Hey, we want to use our data in an AI context. We have to keep it safe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I presume that's been a tailwind for Sierra.

SPEAKER_85: My question is, is it still as big of a tailwind? Has there been any deceleration?

SPEAKER_86: It hasn't even started Alex. It hasn't even started. Like we're in the very, very, very early innings of enterprise AI adoption.

SPEAKER_24: I think I got to say, I think our generation, we're all getting a little too hasty, right?

SPEAKER_40: Like I think AI or everything we're seeing now with AI, it's the preliminaries, right? Like I'm not even sure the game has started yet.

SPEAKER_39: We might be in the pregame, right? But like we're seeing early AI adoption at the enterprise.

SPEAKER_24: We're seeing early, let's call it AI adjustment. The organization is adjusting to be AI centric, to promote the use of data, to solve and create efficiencies in their business.

SPEAKER_39: Like we're seeing those things start to happen with the most innovative players in the enterprise space, in the market, right?

SPEAKER_24: Like, but it's still the earliest innings of what I believe is the AI revolution we're going to see over the next decade.

SPEAKER_39: Like all of this AI buzz, if you think about it, it's what, 18 months now, something like that.

SPEAKER_40: Like it still takes time to implement and adopt technology in the enterprise, even if it's the best technology.

SPEAKER_39: Even if it's amazing technology, it still takes some time until it becomes mainstream and embedded.

SPEAKER_24: And I think that we're only in the very early innings of the AI adoption. We are working with some of the largest organizations in the US to support them on their secure AI adoption journey and responsible AI governance and allowing them to control this thing while enabling it to move fast. But it's the tailwinds are only starting, right? Like they're going to be much greater next year. And I believe they'll continue to grow for several years to come.

SPEAKER_11: Oh, okay. Well, that answers several questions all at once then. So essentially no slow down, we're still accelerating and the acceleration will last not just for quarters, but for years.

SPEAKER_00: Well, that bodes very well for your future revenue growth. Um, which brings me to another company. Wiz. Wiz is one of the hottest names in cybersecurity I've ever seen growing super fast. And I was just going back through their product offerings prepping for our channel today. And I didn't know they also do, um, DSPM. And so I'm kind of curious if people that are also building younger, faster, higher cadence, cybersecurity and data security companies are, are they showing up in, in, in deal competition?

SPEAKER_84: Do you end up running up against them? And if so, how are you guys doing?

SPEAKER_22: Wiz for us, uh, first of all, a huge ally, huge partner and an inspiration.

SPEAKER_24: I like one of the companies that I think I've done the best for the customers over the past few years. And, uh, we look, look up to them and we, uh, try to learn as much as we can from their success and the way they've managed to sell their customers so well. I think that cybersecurity, like many markets, but maybe even more than some markets is a very competitive space.

SPEAKER_40: And for every dollar, there's going to be at least 10 contenders raising their hand up and saying, I'm here, I'm here. I can take it.

SPEAKER_39: I can give me that dollar. I'll, I'll give you what you need.

SPEAKER_24: And that's the nature of our market, the nature of our space. I think Wiz has a huge mission that thereafter in the cloud security space focused on infrastructure and vulnerabilities. And that's got endless depth to it. We're operating in the data security space, DSPM being a core product for us with hundreds of engineers working on the space. And the depth of the use cases that the customers require is endless. Right? Like, it's not like Sierra that this, that we've been investing in the space solely.

SPEAKER_39: We've cracked it all. We have all the answers. We are done. Right? Like our customers are looking to us and saying, this is a great start.

SPEAKER_13: We need more. We need a heck of a lot more. Get going.

SPEAKER_00: That was the most polite way I've ever heard someone say that they're beating a competitor in a certain market niche. You went off with, we love Wiz. We love what they're doing. We love what they're working on, but it's really hard.

SPEAKER_13: It's so hard that we, the dedicated company haven't even cracked it yet. The market is so big that there is room for so many players to succeed and do well.

SPEAKER_23: And Wiz is a dear, dear, dear friend, partly an ally to us. And, uh, we only wish them a success in, uh, in their journey. Okay.

SPEAKER_28: Well, also one last thing about Wiz is that they are going to go public eventually, and they've talked about that publicly.

SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't going to harass you with future IPO questions because it seemed a little bit too early, frankly, but this week service Titan been public. And I'm not going to lie to you. It did much better than I had expected. And so I'm just kind of curious as a CEO with really infinite access to private capital, seeing an IPO like service Titan, does that change your long-term thinking about future exit timings?

SPEAKER_24: I think the IPO market is becoming more of a reality for us as a company, as we continue to mature and grow quickly. And it's also becoming more of a reality objectively for every SaaS company that is looking at that, uh, at that opportunity in that space. And, you know, the ability to, to launch, right? Like at this point for us, we're focused on our customers, focused on our product and focused on growing our business and making sure that we have the best data security platform to offer our customers the best team to continue to work and execute in the market with immense energy and immense dedication to the customers.

SPEAKER_39: And if we do those things, right, then I'm sure we'll, we'll find a way to, to liquidate the company at some point, whether it's through IPO or through many other vehicles that exist in the market. But if you build a great business, then that business is worth something. So I'm focusing on that.

SPEAKER_95: And when we get to that point, we'll, we'll find the best avenues, uh, to, to meet the market. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: It'll just be interesting to see if, if the IPO market warms up to the point in which companies like yours, frankly, which can raise as much money as they want in the private markets might find the public markets more appealing earlier. I'm going to be sad if, if you guys don't list until you have, I don't know, 5 billion in ARR because then the value has been so captured by the private market. There's not as much left for index fund investors like myself to, to share in, I mean, frankly, some of the upside. So don't go public too late. I guess this is my only request.

SPEAKER_99: You know, Alex, look at the, look at the crazy world we're, we're living with in with service now.

SPEAKER_15: Like as an example, I like that, uh, the international market for software for enterprise software is so large that even at 10 billion companies can still grow 25% year over the year.

SPEAKER_24: Right. And, and I think that that's a lot of the appeal that, uh, investors seen companies like Sierra is that potential ability to go and become a billion ARR billions of ARR companies. With hyper growth. And I think that we have like our generation is looking up to those companies and saying, okay, what did they get right? What did they do from a product perspective, from a go to market perspective to lay the right foundations for them to continue to capture such a, such attention in the market for so long?

SPEAKER_29: Well, I'm looking forward to seeing your company pull that off and we'll have you back in six months when I'm sure Sierra will raise yet another $300 million on the nose. And doubles its valuation. Once again.

SPEAKER_16: Um, you know, Tom, if people want to find your company, tell us the URL before you go.

SPEAKER_13: C Y E R A dot, whatever you choose. I. Oh, calm. It will all, it will all get you.

SPEAKER_102: It will all get you there.

SPEAKER_29: But that's what you get when you buy all the TLDs. Well, you don't thank you very much for coming back on the show. Congrats on the fundraise and the acquisition. And really the next time you buy something, if you do call me, we'll have you back on.

SPEAKER_28: Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Thank you so much. Thank you. See you soon.

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SPEAKER_29: So, I did not bring up, everybody, the Service Titan IPO kind of, you know, in the abstract there. I do want to talk about it. Now, as a reminder, Service Titan is a vertical SaaS company focused on the trades. Think about people who swing a hammer, use a crowbar.

SPEAKER_00: Those folks need software too. And Service Titan has found an enormous niche in that area. And I am a bit of an IPO nerd. I'll just admit that. But when the company dropped at its S1A and said, hey, we're going to list between $52 and $57 per share. I looked at that and I said, based on what I understand about the company, the market today, and just going public in general in the last couple of years, that feels pretty much right. Then, Service Titan came back with a new S1A filing and said, hey, actually, it's $65 to $67 per share. Two things. One, to see an IPO range narrow if it gets raised, not a huge shock. Companies tend to have more information at that point, so they can just give you a more narrow range. Then something kind of weird happened because they didn't actually price in that $65 to $67 range. Instead, they sold their IPO shares at $71 a share. So they beat their raised range. That is an incredibly bullish thing for the company. Then the news got somehow even better. Once Service Titan actually did debut yesterday, they opened at $101 per share, went up to as high as $105, and are worth $101 as of this morning. So essentially, they had a great IPO pricing run, they listed well, and then they traded very well. Now, at that price, $101 a share, give or take, they're worth about $8.9 billion. Call it $9, which is very close to $10. Why does that matter? Well, we're kind of seeing what it takes to go public today as a SaaS company and be a Decacorn or at least very close to it. So what does Service Titan have on offer that investors gave that valuation to? If you're a founder and you want to go public at about a $10 million price tag, this is what you need. So in the third quarter, the company's midpoint revenue range guidance is $198.5, so call it roughly $200 million in quarterly revenue. The company's net loss was $47 million at midpoint in Q3. That's mostly share-based compensation and some other stuff, not a huge concern for a company growing as quickly as this one is. And it had non-GAAP operating income of about $1 million. So essentially, the company on an adjusted basis is now break-even and it's still growing well.

SPEAKER_29: Now, at its valuation, as of the end of trading yesterday, the company had a roughly 11x revenue multiple. So if you're growing at about 25%, have about $200 million in quarterly revenue, and you're roughly break-even on a non-GAAP basis, huzzah, congratulations, the market will give you a roughly $9 to $10 billion valuation.

SPEAKER_11: The thing that I'm kind of curious about is just how much or how many unicorns that are in the market today don't actually meet that threshold?

SPEAKER_29: And then what might they actually be worth? Because if that's what you need to get to 9 to 10, there's a lot of companies that have a $3 to $5 billion price tag from 2021.

SPEAKER_00: So you could think, well, they only need half of that to get out and go public and not lose a lot of their extant valuation. But I'm not sure that's actually true.

SPEAKER_29: One thing we've seen is that companies, as they get larger, tend to get a little bit more valuable, as if the market is saying, congrats, you're bigger. You get a premium for that, even if growth rates do slow. So there's nuance, but I will say if you wanted to end 2024 on a very strong, positive high note for the IPO market, for startups, for everyone in this space, I don't think you could get a better Christmas present than what Service Titan just delivered to the market. Before we move on to a couple of other short hits, and then we're going to bring on the founder of Paik, I do want to say that the company did have to take a haircut to get out. So, yes, it traded from 71 to 101 after listing. But I do want to point out that in June of 2021, the company was valued at about $9.5 billion after it raised $200 million. That was the series G for folks keeping track at home. Then, in November of 2022, according to PitchBook data, when the company raised just under $400 million in a series H, its valuation fell to $7.6.

SPEAKER_00: So, it went up, it went down, it went back up again. But the gist is, it hasn't really made a lot of new value since that 2021 fund raise.

SPEAKER_29: That's the hangover we're still dealing with from the era of peak ZERP. But I will say, one more time, Service Titan, you crushed it. Congratulations. Next up on the show today, and again we have cake coming up in just a second,

SPEAKER_00: is Broadcom reaching $1 trillion worth of market cap? So, here's a fun game. There are now 10 companies in the world that I'm aware of that have a market cap of $1 trillion or greater. Here's the game. How many of those are US-based companies? I believe the answer is nine with only Saudi Aramco on one side. And Broadcom is the latest company to join this mix. Companies like Apple and Tesla and Microsoft, you know, you know all those names. So, how did Broadcom pull this off? Well, it's up about 20% today because its last quarter's earnings were very impressive. The company beat in terms of earnings per share, $1.42 above $1.38 expected, and revenue came in roughly in line. So, what's changed at the company? A couple things. One, it did buy VMware. That did help it post 51% revenue growth in the most recent quarter. But I think what matters the most is that its AI-derived revenue is scaling very quickly. So, the company said, and I'm going to go ahead and quote here. Semiconductor revenue was a record $30.1 billion in the quarter, driven by AI revenue of $12.2 billion. And here's the key bit. AI revenue grew 220% year on year and was driven by Ethernet networking and their AI accelerator chips. That is really impressive growth. And as we just heard from Yotam, there's anticipation in the market by founders and large companies. That enterprise AI adoption is just getting started. If that's the case, and Broadcom is seeing this kind of growth today, well, you can kind of imagine what we're going to see down the road. And if that does come to bear, well, the company is going to make oodles and oodles of money. Here are some numbers that I pulled from the Broadcom earnings document that just blew my mind. The company's adjusted EBITDA margin in its most recent quarter was 65%. Now it's an adjusted figure, but still that's a gross margin number for a lot of companies, not an adjusted EBITDA margin number. And then also the company had $5.5 billion of free cash flow in the last quarter. That's a free cash flow margin of about 39%. Again, that's crazy and incredibly strong. And I think it speaks very, very well to not only the company itself, but also the AI boom. There's another name though, that I do think you should keep in mind also now public, sadly. But Astera Labs went public earlier this year. They build stuff for data centers to keep it in very basic terms. And they listed at $36 per share today, before the show started, they were worth about $130 per share. That's pretty crazy. You don't see companies usually list and then what, 4x very, very quickly, 5x almost. Why is this happening? Well, kind of the same thing. In their most recent quarter, their fiscal Q3, the company's revenue of $113.1 million was up 47% sequentially and 206% year over year. That's absolutely bonkers. And I think both these stories underscore why we here at Twist need to dig in more deeply to the part of the technology economy that's dealing with just the nuts and bolts of making AI work.

SPEAKER_29: Because Astera Labs is kind of a boring company, but its results aren't. And Broadcom is kind of a boring company, but again, its results just aren't.

SPEAKER_00: I'm very excited about both these companies. One more tiny story that I wanted to slip in here before we get to cake equity, and this is that Texas' Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing not only Character AI, but 14 other technology companies, names like Instagram and Reddit and Discord, regarding their privacy and data practices with minors.

SPEAKER_29: Now, we all want to keep kids safe, that's perfectly fine as a stance, but I do think it's notable to see a number of Republican-backed efforts, both COSA in the Congress, and also what Texas is doing, that are taking tech companies to task for data privacy issues, because we've been talking quite a lot about less regulation.

SPEAKER_00: But here, it does seem that we have a bit of a discordant note. It doesn't quite mesh with the melody that we have been weaving. So, as we talk about regulation, and privacy, and data security, just keep in mind that it's not a single-serving issue. People have different perspectives, and even people inside the same party can have very different takes. But Texas has been pretty aggressive in policing tech company data practices. How that's going to bear out next year, we'll see. But certainly, there's not just one party out there that wants to regulate. Everyone has their own pet issue they want to put the clamp on. Alright, let's talk to our second guest today. We have Kim Hansen. He's the founder and CEO over at Cake. Kim, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_80: Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_119: It's awesome.

SPEAKER_29: I also have to give you 10 points for wearing your corporate shirt. If you don't arrive in your corporate t-shirt, you get minus five points immediately.

SPEAKER_00: So, well done, Kim. And I got to say, I really dig what Cake's doing. Prepping for the show today, I learned quite a lot. But why don't you tell people just up top what you're building, and then I'll dive in.

SPEAKER_80: Absolutely. So, first and foremost, just take a step back.

SPEAKER_122: I love startups. I think it's amazing when a group of founders and teams can get together and be aligned around a big mission, what they can achieve in the world. It's just phenomenal. And the human potential that we can unlock is just incredible. So every day, you know, I get out of bed to build tools for these people and to help them on the mindset because it's such a freaking top journey. You know, so I encountered. So I've built a lot of tech. That's my background. I've led tech teams. I've seen what their capabilities are with technology. You have new technology with AI. Super exciting. So how that can scale. I went through shareholders contracts. I didn't understand the contracts at all. It was just complicated legal shotgun. In my former company, I was lucky to get some equity in the beginning of the early days of that company. And I tried for two years to set up an ESOP plan inside the company, but it was just impossible. Pausing you there, Kim.

SPEAKER_29: ESOP is ESOP. Can you break down that acronym for folks who are listening?

SPEAKER_122: Yeah, and it's an employee share option scheme. So basically, it allows employees to get ownership similar to the early founders of the company. And I believe strongly that every person in a startup should have ownership. So I tried for several years to get that through. It was just too difficult, too much legal hurdles. It was too expensive. And it was so frustrating. So I just built all of these frustrations up. And when I got a chance, I founded Cake to solve these problems. I also felt the journey is so hard and long that you just got to give better tools. So basically, yeah, we set up Cake. It's a very easy to use modern platform. It's very scalable. It's extremely flexible.

SPEAKER_125: It supports global teams. It's the best out there.

SPEAKER_29: And just putting that into very simple terms for everybody. You guys make essentially cap table management software that helps companies issue equity, handle options pools, get four and nine evaluations, essentially all the nuts and bolts that are in the background. The boring financials, but critical stuff that underpins who owns a startup and who works there.

SPEAKER_80: Absolutely. I can wick through a little bit of a demo if that helps. Sure. If you want to.

SPEAKER_128: We love a demo here on the show. Let's do it.

SPEAKER_80: Also, it means less people staring at my face. So, you know, I'm totally here for it.

SPEAKER_129: When you come into the platform, it's super easy to set up. There's a freemium, really big thing we have, especially for early stage startups that need to learn a lot.

SPEAKER_122: We have incredible guides that will take you through all the complicated stuff all at your own pace. When you come in, we have an easy to use checklist that will guide you through getting you activated, getting upfront value right away. We're always a call away if you need, if you get something, if you get stuck with something. But 80% of our users are self onboarding and can get value right away within minutes. Now it's super hard to understand who owns what. Often that's hidden in spreadsheets or clunky interfaces. So we have a very elegant interface that clearly says that has all the information you need. You can easily dive into each stakeholder. We support all the different types of stakeholders in the platform.

SPEAKER_29: So all of this is this interface that I'm looking at here shows a lot of different stakeholders and how many shares they have. Is this the view that a founder would have?

SPEAKER_28: Or is this the view that I would have if I was an employee, say, of, you know, startup Inc?

SPEAKER_129: Absolutely. So we'll get to this. This is the founder view. Okay. So, but it's really a collaborative effort. So you as a founder come in at different states. That's why we have the checklist.

SPEAKER_122: We have the guides. But this is really used together with your advisors. That can be your lawyers that understand this, the power users. So you have all the nuts and the bolts. We basically took all these complicated shotgun of equity and broke it down in pieces and made each piece like as much as we can, a one click solution and super simple to follow through. But honestly, you're going to work together with your advisors. Now, the really awesome thing and what we're working on is to accelerate startup team motivation through equity. And that's really the connection between founders and employees that is so powerful and helping that language because it's really difficult for founders, depending on their maturity level in equity, to explain what it's worth and all of those things. So we have also, you saw before the founder view. This is the employee view. So we have an employee app where you clearly can see how much you own at the current state of the today. This is 63% earned. So every month you're typically investing a bit more of your ownership and you can see that ownership comes up. Every time you do that, you can send kudos back and messages back to the founder. So we have all this kind of organic communication and let's go to let's let's win this when the price when the valuation of your company goes up, hopefully over time, you will follow that directly. Now, each employee or investor or something investors also have access to that is on their own pace of learning. So we have these little flashcards that are super popular.

SPEAKER_129: Each person on their own journey can go through this little snack bites.

SPEAKER_122: Um, it lifts lifts off the burden for founders as well to, to explain all of these things. Um, so that just makes it a lot easier for you to have fun. This is built for mobile.

SPEAKER_130: Um, so it's really, you know, you can, yeah, I can, I can tell it looks super simple.

SPEAKER_28: It's not enterprise. It, you know what?

SPEAKER_11: It doesn't feel like concur, which is, I think everyone's had to use concur at least once. And this is the opposite of it.

SPEAKER_129: It's a lot of, it's a lot of, it's a lot of different colors and building a visual language.

SPEAKER_122: And ultimately we're on this journey of taking equity, this complex legal shotgun and building a visual language that is fun and easy to use. And much more value comes out of it. That also builds more trust. When you actually understand it, uh, it creates more transparency, which means that we can get to a more fair solution for everyone.

SPEAKER_117: So that's kind of where I wanted, I wanted to pick up on, on questions because, you know, uh, I I've used Carta in the past and you guys have competition also from companies.

SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know, diligent and pulley people are working on this problem from the startup perspective. But like my question, Kim is, you know, can you make this simple enough and functional and enough markets that more companies can offer equity to their staff apart from just startups? Because startups are cool, but they are a very small fraction of the total global, you know, business world. So can you guys make sharing equity or giving equity to employees just more common full stop?

SPEAKER_129: That's the long term vision. I think every employee in every company should have ownership, should have a portfolio of the companies that they go through.

SPEAKER_122: Uh, you know, there's a long way to go with that. The startups are leading the way, but even the startup landscape is changing now with bootstrap companies that don't necessarily get the, you know, that are not using funding to grow. Of course, the employees should have ownership as well in this. So we're going to get there and you can, you can use the platform for that as well for any type of company that are maybe less startupy as well, even though our sweet spot. It's for C to series a startups that are really in that growth phase and they need to move fast.

SPEAKER_143: So how fast do you, one go up market inside the startup problem going through companies that are, you know, all the way up through.

SPEAKER_29: I don't, we just had, um, a company on that raised another $300 million series D, but like how long until you're ready for the oldest companies and then broadening the base. What does that look like?

SPEAKER_129: Yeah. So it's, it works super well if you're in that C to series a, but it also works really well for an earlier stage company.

SPEAKER_122: Uh, typically that's, I showed you all the, the guides that, uh, you have. So we get a lot of freemium content that is really, uh, providing you, um, the information you need at that time. It's free for up to five stakeholders on the platform. So you can get a lot of, and you can get the standard legal contracts and lots of insights already. So you can kind of get warmed up at that stage. You don't have much money. So it's really about providing as much value as we can. Uh, you know, ultimately, hopefully we can get to a point that it just gets more and more free for early stage startups because they shouldn't have an extra, uh, spending because they, you know, they don't have too much money. Now, even though our sweet spot is the C to series a, that growth phase, uh, scalable phase, you know, we have, um, series B, series C companies on, on cake and we have a very, very low churn. So we don't really have a point where, okay, they can't use cake more because they become too mature. We're not targeting, uh, these companies, uh, directly. We just are, we're just building for them all the time and maturing the product and making sure that, you know, we target the really ones that can get value right away within minutes on cake. But then they stay on the platform and we kind of mature and grow with them and, and listen to them and understand what they need. So we like to grow with the companies that are on the platform and build that close relationship, uh, of support.

SPEAKER_96: Going back to the, the, the point about, you know, people being able to self-serve their way onto cake.

SPEAKER_29: I presume that there's a pretty serious automation component to this because one criticism that I've heard of Carta over the years is that it's so services based that it almost feels like a consulting business with a tech arm versus a tech company with the, you know, a people component to it. So how much work has cake done on, on automating the boring paperwork side of things to make it possible for companies to kind of show up on their own and get started?

SPEAKER_121: First of all, that's really hard. It's really difficult to take something like equity and make it fully self-service.

SPEAKER_122: Um, and, but we actually managing to do that for 80% of the companies so they can onboard themselves within minutes that usually with a human that takes four days. So that's a huge frustration for if you're a founder and you're like, some advice is that you need to have a better solution for your company. And then you have to wait for someone to be on a call and all of that. So it's super important. Now, the technology behind that, if you go back in the days, I built a contract engine when I was still coding in cake in the early days. And that was basically because I saw you had the spreadsheets and then the solutions were there, which is kind of glorified spreadsheets. But for me, the value is really when equity transact hands from founders to employees, et cetera. So we need to solve that. I built a contract engine that is integrated with the cap table, the who owns what. So the flow really works well. And that's basically a way to have the contracts so that you have all the common themes in there and you can kind of edit them easily. But it sets up a standard contract for you. So it's really how we use that also with technology is we use a lot of AI to analyze what is the behavior? What are the actions that are needed to take for the founders to get value upfront? And then we guide them through that and make checklists all over the place and make it super easy with the guides so that they can actually mature as they go in their own pace. So that's giving that onboarding experience. You can set yourself up within seconds, minutes, and then you're ready to go and you can start inviting your stakeholders and send them the cap table, which also helps founders make the investors impressed and the employees and say, hey, we're part of this journey. In the old days, getting an ESOP or getting options in a company was getting a paper contract.

SPEAKER_129: You know, you sign it, you put it in the drawer. It's you don't know what it meant. It's you burn out. It has no value, right?

SPEAKER_122: And then the digital versions came of that, but really, really taking the next step with a modern tech platform with a lot of data driven analysis of what's the best behavior to get the value out of equity.

SPEAKER_121: So how many people work at the company today? How big is the staff?

SPEAKER_129: We have 27 people. It's a global team. We have photos here. We're in the US.

SPEAKER_122: We have a team there. It's growing. We're not here to hire hundreds of people. We don't believe in that. We use a lot of technology, including LLM and machine learning to automate everything that we do so we can really scale. Inside each, I think every cake store is a knowledge worker. Independently of their title, they're observing the customers. They know how to solve the problems. And then behind the scenes, we're recording and automating with LLMs. That's incredible powerful now to automate all the decision making, strict track contracts, insights that before, you know, that's unstructured data. Before we couldn't do that. Now we have a lot of opportunity to do that.

SPEAKER_29: The staff question was my very polite way of wiggling into the fact that you guys are originally an Australian company. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And I love it because I don't talk to enough. Well, one enough Aussies in general, but also I love hearing about companies that are building stuff that are not based exactly inside of San Francisco. So it's always nice to hear that people from around the world are working on this problem. But I'm curious about the Australian element of this. Does that nation have a similarly, I don't know, welcoming approach to the legal side of startup equity?

SPEAKER_129: Yeah, so one of the challenges obviously is to make a product work in different regions, especially when the legal can be quite different.

SPEAKER_122: So we looked at the common patterns for equity usage and built a very flexible platform that support that. So we looked at Silicon Valley from the very beginning. We looked at Australia. We looked at Singapore, Southeast Asia support. We looked at London and we designed the contract engine and the rules and how the options are vesting and all of these things to support all of this in the same way. We looked at how an organization is set up. So the specific organization IDs and all of these things that are important for each region need to be separated in a database. So it was architected to be extremely flexible from the beginning, also with the contract engine that can support different contracts from different regions. Now, you know, Launch and Jason Calacanis came in in August when we were in the StartMate Accelerator and invested in us. And since then, we 15x our revenue. So that's fantastic. You know, great belief and happy for really, really grateful for the support that you showed. With that, we won Australia. So we are the leading capital provider here. We since then launched in 50 countries. So the platform works in 50 countries. And now we're seeing a humongous demand in the US. It's growing. We had our biggest month in October. That was beat by a mile in November. And that's being beaten now in December. Again, what it looks like, but to be a mile. So, yeah, it's just fantastic to see how well accepted and wanted our product.

SPEAKER_125: And I think it's also our values and our culture that is wanted everywhere.

SPEAKER_29: I'm curious where the growth is mostly coming from. You said you've kind of won Australia growing in the US, but you also mentioned Singapore or Southeast Asia. So which markets are driving the fastest percentage growth for Cake today?

SPEAKER_162: Right now, it's definitely the US. It works super, super well in the US market. And it's such a huge market for us.

SPEAKER_130: Our growth package is, you know, ripping off the shelf. So it's just an entry to that demand.

SPEAKER_163: I believe you. I'm not trying to say that I don't.

SPEAKER_00: But when I think about seed through Series A companies in the US, I mean, it's, it's, it's thousands, maybe, maybe low for low five figures.

SPEAKER_29: That, that doesn't seem like the world's biggest Tam to me if you're focusing on that particular niche. So what am I, and there's competition. So what am I missing in terms of my incorrect mental market sizing regarding Cakes growth potential here in the US? Yeah.

SPEAKER_122: So definitely we want to capture a market share in that sweet spot seed to Series A because those, a lot of those companies will mature into the next stage. And that's we, we also have a pro package. We haven't launched that in probably in the US yet. We've launched that in Australia, and we have low turn on that as well. So that's really where our time grows like crazy. We will eventually get to selling other services as well, but we're extremely focused as a company. So it's really getting that sweet spot, making building the brand and the awareness in the US that here is a different path. This is who we are. We are founder friendly. Uh, you know, we, we want to support you. This is the modern data driven platform. Uh, it's, it's very different from what's out there. So it's really building that brand. And then we expand and it's, it's both ways that we expand.

SPEAKER_117: I'm glad we had you on because I'm sure you saw this, but Carta, one of your competitors was recently, um, criticized very publicly over their subscription.

SPEAKER_29: Uh, ethics and how hard some founders said they made to make it council to cancel their service. So when you talk about founder friendliness, sure, that means also, you know, features and capabilities, but also how you treat customers. So just for the sake of being fair to everybody here, how do you guys handle customers who want to go from cake to a, a rival service? Do they have to schedule a call with you guys?

SPEAKER_28: Do you have an export feature? Uh, it seems to be the of the moment question for cap table services. So how do you guys handle that?

SPEAKER_122: Absolutely. And, uh, I think we have cheaper plans as well. So you're not locked into these very expensive plans. Uh, you know, each company has the different path. We want to be very founder friendly. That means that you can easily downgrade. You can pause as a founder. You're going to go up and down. You think you have a race is almost done, but you know, things takes three months extra, and then you might not need it's maybe not such an urgent need for the cap table. So it's very easy to pause on our, uh, on our app. So we make sure when an employee leave, when a, when a customer leave, we have enough boarding for them. Uh, it's really, really important. They own their data. Um, you know, they are in the driver's seat as a founder. Um, that's our philosophy. Um, it's not like we own the data. We use the data to make the, to make each equity decision easier, but, uh, founders own their, their data. Um, so all of these are one click solutions again to, to get off. Our mode is not in, in holding on to like, um, hostage the, the founders and the startup teams. Uh, I think our mode is, is, you know, being really, really founder friendly and building the easiest platform to use the most flexible, the most scalable. Um, that's, that's our mode really.

SPEAKER_29: Well, I mean, I, I wish every company that had a subscription product had the same perspective, but given that they don't, I can actually see how that view, that, that ethical standpoint will make you stand out because who doesn't want to be treated like an adult by their service providers. You know, I mean, just that seems like such a basic thing to say, but yet many companies don't meet that standard. Now, just one last thing before I let you go. One thing that Carta does that I, that I love is they take a look at their kind of data from all their customers and they pull out insights from it. So Kim, I'm kind of curious, are you guys going to build eventually an in-house data team to kind of extract insights from the information you guys have anonymized, of course privacy safe and so forth.

SPEAKER_11: But I, I love to learn and you guys have such on the ground data that I would love to know what you're seeing in it.

SPEAKER_129: Yeah, absolutely. And we've actually already built that into, to cake.

SPEAKER_122: The first features that you can actually see is, uh, when you're giving options to an employee, it will have the guidelines. These are the standards. So you can, you have a little slider, you can just choose how much, and you're being guided all the time. What's the best practices? What's the standards out there? Uh, we launch, uh, frequently reports. We've done that in Australia. We'll come to the U S very soon about the data learnings that we're learning about how you treat employees. Well, what's the standard, how mature is the market? What's the, what's the best setup? So we're not here to give, uh, financial advice, uh, or legal advice, but, uh, we always bringing out these are the standards. This is what we see as best practices now, um, make it, make it, make it easier for the founders. So yeah, a lot of that is coming more and more, and we have definitely a data team to take care of that. All right.

SPEAKER_131: Well, I'm excited to see how you guys grow next year. Whenever a company says we crushed October, November, and we're going to crush November and December, you know, something's cooking.

SPEAKER_29: So I can't wait to hear about growth next year.

SPEAKER_84: I am presuming you're looking at at least triple digits in 2025. I expect that. Okay. Awesome. Well, come back on in say June and to let us know how it's going and, um, how the U S expansion goes.

SPEAKER_29: I love hearing companies coming here to the U S to do business.

SPEAKER_00: And if people want to find cake, what's the URL? Cake equity.com. Simple enough. Don't go to cake.com. Like I did for sure today. Turns out not the right company.

SPEAKER_29: All right. Um, Ken, thank you so much for coming on twist. We'll let you go now and people can go to cake equity and check it out. And for everyone else, this has been yet another twist. My name is Alex. Jason will be back on the show early next week. And then you won't just have to stare at my face the whole time. There'll be two of us here. Quite a lot going on lots before the holidays. I'll see you then. Goodbye.