SPEAKER_00: have startups come to you and said, hey, we really want you to integrate with us because then we will get our name on your site, our logo will be in your materials. Are you a distribution point for companies themselves instead of just something that people add on to let them talk better

SPEAKER_02: amongst each other? All the time, which I f***ing love. Yeah. So all these companies will come to

SPEAKER_06: us and they'll be like, hey, like I'm, you know, like a 50 person like CRM company and I saw you these customers and I really want them to integrate with us. If you're like a new source of truth and you're trying to compete with like HubSpot or Salesforce, it's really hard to get that roadmap time from every single vendor that is integrating with HubSpot and Salesforce. Like

SPEAKER_07: they might not want to spend that time integrating with you. But with Merge, it's free distribution. And again, we're helping create an ecosystem around their product. Is it free? It's free right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: Right now. Yeah. We'll just do it because it makes our product better.

SPEAKER_11: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Coda. Coda empowers your startup by bringing words, tables, and teams together. Strategize, plan, and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place. Go to coda.io slash twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Open Phone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. And Micro One. Micro One is an AI recruitment engine to hire world-class engineers fast. Visit microone.ai slash twist to get 10 free AI interviews and two weeks free per hire. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in

SPEAKER_17: Startups. My name is Alex. I am Alex over on X. Now, APIs or Application Programming Interfaces are the software intermediaries that allow two pieces of code to talk to one another. If consumers use GUIs or GUIs to interact with software, well, software uses APIs to interact with more software. And they have become incredibly big business. Companies like Twilio just a couple years ago nearly turned SaaS on its head by offering their products via an API, with pricing often set to hinge on usage instead of a flat rate. Today, offering an API is table stakes, but as the number of API has exploded, so too has the complexity of working with so many different software products, data types, and points of integration. One startup, Merge, is tackling the problem with its own API that offers access to a lot of other APIs. So please welcome to This Week in Startups, it's Merge co-founder, Shinzi Ding. Hey, Shinzi, how are you?

SPEAKER_19: Hi, good to be here.

SPEAKER_17: All right, I'm not going to lie. I wrote that before we started recording. How did that do?

SPEAKER_21: Oh, I thought that was awesome.

SPEAKER_17: Ladies and gentlemen, you are all welcome to bask in my presence.

SPEAKER_25: You're a natural podcaster. I mean, yeah, your voice was, yeah, it's kind of weird actually seeing the video component because I'm so used to just hearing your voice.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah, well, what's funny is no one's a natural podcaster. You just end up doing it so much,

SPEAKER_00: you lose all of your inhibitions and like self-doubt, and then you just ramble for a while and then shows come out. It's easy. Anyone can do it. So, Shinzi, I wanted to have you on the show because I had heard a lot about Merge because I was very interested in APIs, I think as everyone was back in the 2000, 2021, 2022 era, but a bit like no code to a degree, they became this thing we all talked about. And then the talk kind of faded away and everyone used them. And so it seemed like a good idea to kind of, I don't know, just sit down with you and talk about the state of things. But I want to go back in time to start because the founding story for Merge, I think underlines pretty well the problem that you're going out to solve. So can you take us a little bit back in the past and just quickly run through how you and Gil, your co-founder, started the company?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm actually in New York City right now, as you can probably tell from my

SPEAKER_06: janky background, but it started in New York City. So Gil and I both went to school in New York. We were studying computer science. We were in all the same classes, group projects, social group, and we were just essentially just really big nerds. We were actually on engineering student council together, class president, vice president. And it was the start of a really great friendship because all throughout college, you would have different class assignments and you'd really find out basically whether people would do what they said that they would do. And Gil would always do what he said he would do. And that's super, super, super rare. But it's something that I remain to think a lot about and also remember, especially when we decided to start a company much later on. But we ended up going down different paths. Gil was a really great software engineer. I was more okay. I mostly did it for fun. I think it was like intellectually stimulating, but it wasn't something that I was going to be uniquely good at. And I did feel like one gap that I had was understanding the business side. And I had no idea how to evaluate whether a company was good or not, whether an idea was good or not, how to understand financial statements. And I really wanted to learn that. So I went into investment banking in New York City at Credit Suisse, RIP. It was a great two years, really started understanding how to read financial statements, how to read 10Ks. And it taught me a lot about businesses, but I really wanted to go back towards tech. So moved to San Francisco, joined Silver Lakes Growth Equity Fund and reconnected with Gil. He helped me find my first apartment, got my first car. And I realized that investing was not close enough to actually operating. A lot of times, yeah, and I'm sure, yeah, it's just really not quite the same experience. I would read a financial statement or like a see a model and just like, oh, just increase revenue and decrease costs. Simple. Why doesn't everyone just do that, Gen Z? Come on. Exactly. And we would go to some of the board meetings and I just didn't really understand why that was so hard to do. And so I really wanted to actually work at a company, understand what it was like to do that. And I interviewed at a few startups and I found a

SPEAKER_46: company called Expanse, back then called KDM. And I joined as the chief of staff to the CEO.

SPEAKER_17: Pause there because this is off topic, but I really think that the chief of staff role is not particularly well understood outside of folks who have either had one or been one. So just for everyone out there who's heard chief of staff, what does it mean?

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. I mean, in essence, you're basically the CEO's bitch. I know that's hard. Like there's

SPEAKER_50: no other way to word it. You just do whatever they want so that the company can be successful.

SPEAKER_06: And I think it's quite popular in situations where like there needs to be a guarantee of execution. And my hot take actually is I don't think that if there's a chief of staff, usually I think there's actually an operational problem at the company because it means that you can't guarantee that when you hand something to someone that it's going to get done. And so a lot of my job was just like making sure things got done and like, you know, documentation and like random, like I did like random recruiting stuff. I like helped out because hiring his executive assistant, but it was all just like random things. And, but the essence of it was just making sure that when he wanted something to get done, it got done.

SPEAKER_00: The joke about this is I'm so glad we invented the term chief of staff. So that way men can now be secretaries without using that title. And I thought that was hysterical, but it was chief

SPEAKER_17: of staff are very useful. And if you ever work near a CEO of a company over, I don't know, 15, 20 billion value, you'll run into them. They make sure everything works. They're essentially like the COO for the CEO is the way that I think about it.

SPEAKER_55: I think so, but probably less strategic. It was more execution oriented. And, but I will say the one

SPEAKER_06: benefit of it was I got a ton of exposure to the CEO and Tim is, I don't know, actually, I think he was in this week in startups a few years ago, because I prepped him for the meeting, or I prepped him for the interview with Jason. And yeah, he's just brilliant. Like every single thing he knew about politics, he had a PhD in cyber warfare. And especially in like 2018, 2019, it was a really interesting time to be learning about tech and politics and also how it impacted, you know, different global dynamics. So yeah, it was just a really interesting experience for me. And every time the company would run into something that was potentially detrimental to the business, he would just figure out a way to solve it. And that was, that was really cool to see.

SPEAKER_17: But it was that expanse during this time of your work life that you noticed that essentially integrations were becoming an increasing sticking point for the business.

SPEAKER_06: Yes. So one benefit of being chief of staff was I would join a lot of executive meetings and also sensitive meetings. And every executive meeting, we would end up talking about things that were causing us to lose deals or, and what competitors were better than us at. And starting after like the first year or so that I was at the company, integrations kept coming up as a reason why we were losing deals. And we prided ourselves on having the best products. Like we were really proud of that. And we were really confident in that fact. But our competitors that had a less high quality product were able to win just purely based on features, like specifically integrations. And our sales team started really like just yelling at us being like, we need more integrations. Why don't we have any, this is so table stakes, let's just start building them. And since I was on the finance and operations team, I was really seeing it from a P&L perspective. If we didn't build these integrations, we couldn't close deals. And that was going to hurt us on the revenue side. But building these integrations were going to be super expensive because we would have to hire San Francisco engineers, and it would really impact operating expenses. And then even if we tried to move to a lower cost area, which we ended up trying to do, it's still a lot of engineers, and you have to permanently maintain those integrations. And it becomes a permanent line item that you can never get rid of. Because there is a maintenance component to integrations that a lot of people don't think about. It's not like you can just build it and let go of it. You have to continue maintaining them. And so from a P&L perspective, I was like, this really sucks. No one's really solving this problem. I don't understand why this is so hard, and is really building these integrations that difficult. And it was really fortunate that at the same time, Gil, my co-founder, he was head of engineering at a recruiting tech company, and they were pretty lean. They were series A stage. And they had like 10 engineers or so, but everyone was busy. They didn't have enough engineers. And so he ended up having to build the integrations for his company. By himself. By himself. Because there was just no one else. And because of that, he actually had a really deep understanding of why it sucked so much. And I asked him, I was like, why? It can't be that hard.

SPEAKER_10: I was a software engineer. You just read the stuff. And he was like, well, first off, we had to get access to the API. And we had to get a partnership. And that took a while. Then we had to

SPEAKER_06: get access to a sandbox account. And that cost us some money. Some API providers are nearly impossible to get access to because they're closed gardens. And so you might end up waiting years to get access. And then once you actually get access, then the product manager and the design team has to figure out what this integration looks like and what that workflow could be. And then they started building the integration and they built it into the wrong API because some API providers can have multiple APIs for different functionality. So they spent three weeks on it, ripped it out. I had to do it again. And then once they-

SPEAKER_16: Three weeks, by the way, of engineering time is a lot of dollars. It's not just three weeks. It's an enormous amount of money and opportunity cost. That's a lot.

SPEAKER_75: Yes, exactly. And then actually to finish the full end-to-end, correct integration, it took six weeks or so. They were a lean series A team and Gil's brilliant.

SPEAKER_06: And he worked really hard and fast and it still took six weeks. But what he said was the worst was that actually when they went live at the integration, the engineers actually had to keep helping answer customer success questions. Because customer success team members would get questions from recruiters who were their customers being like, Hey, I gave you an API key. Why isn't my data syncing? Or like, why is Joe's name missing from this candidate? Or like, why is my resume not uploading? And a customer success team member isn't going to know all the answers to these questions. And so they're going to escalate it to the engineering team. So the engineering team ends up having to allocate a percentage of their time continuously to help customer support, troubleshooting. And then a lot of the times it's end user error. Like they gave you an API key that's incorrect or someone got fired and the API key no longer works. And all of this was really just

SPEAKER_70: not handled by any piece of software at all. Listen, are you spending too much time as a

SPEAKER_81: founder, all tabbing between your team chat, maybe a document editor, spreadsheets, database as well? It's time for you to consolidate all of that knowledge into one platform. And that one platform that I use every single day is Coda. If you don't know Coda, it's like a new category of software, best described as like a collaborative workspace. It pulls together all the stuff you got going on in documents, spreadsheets, maybe a database, maybe a built-in app. And it's super easy to learn. It's incredibly powerful. In fact, we use it and we run Founder University on it. Then we had a new project, twist500.com. We wanted to make a database for the listeners of this podcast that essentially profiled the top 500 private companies. It was a no-brainer. We said, oh, we should make a website. So I got twist500.com. And I was like, what are we going to do this for? Everybody in the meeting was like, Coda. Coda can do that. And that means I don't have to buy new software. It means I don't have to hire a dev shop. I can just do it myself. Coda empowers your startup to strategize, plan, and track all of your goals effectively. Take advantage of this limited time offer just for startups. Coda.io slash twist today to get six months free of their team plan. You're going to save at least a couple hours a week per team member, and you're going to feel like you're in control. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Coda dot I-O slash twist. Okay. So you're sitting in meetings,

SPEAKER_17: noticing that deals are going out the window because you guys didn't have the right integrations

SPEAKER_00: or as many as you needed, even though your product was better. Your co-founder actually had to go out and build a bunch of these things, seeing kind of upfront the issue. Clearly, you guys both saw the pain point, but you couldn't have been alone. And to me, what Merge has built, and we'll get into unified APIs in a second, is such a reasonable and smart solution to this. Why hadn't anyone solved this already? APIs weren't new when you founded the company. The problem wasn't new. So how would the market not close this gap?

SPEAKER_05: Well, at the time, there were some really, really popular companies like Trade.io and Zapier

SPEAKER_06: and Workato that were just super, super prevalent. And I think the belief at the time was that the onus of building integrations is actually on the buyer and not the vendor. So it was still pretty common for Expanse, for instance, to sell to, I don't know, some Fortune 500, like AT&T or something. And then AT&T purchases Expanse. And then they also purchased Splunk. And then they also purchased MuleSoft or Workato or Tray. And they connect Expanse and Splunk. And then you now have three

SPEAKER_77: pieces of software to make to connect. And it's just kind of a pain. And you have to maintain that

SPEAKER_70: integration forever while also spending like 30 to $100,000 on MuleSoft or Workato or Tray. So that

SPEAKER_06: was just a really common workflow. And Gil's company at the time would actually try doing that a few times. They'd be like, oh, we don't have an integration with Workday, for instance, so you should buy Tray. And that would end up still blocking the sales cycle because it's an additional amount that you have to spend. But at the time, it was still common. And software wasn't that fragmented. And it was still pretty common for companies to just purchase a whole suite of Oracle software or Workday and SAP. And then you just wouldn't really need integrations. So I think integrations just weren't that common at the time still. So that's when no one really thought about it. And I think even if they did think about it, they were like, well, you can still use a workflow provider to kind of do what you need to do. I see. So essentially, at the time, software was

SPEAKER_00: less fragmented. People had existing solutions to a degree. But as you found out, they weren't enough. So you went out and you founded Merge. And the idea, if I boil it down to the absolute nub, is that instead of having 6,000 different APIs to integrate with things, why not have one API that is the conduit for all the other APIs? It brings them all together into one pipe, essentially.

SPEAKER_06: Yes. And one nuance is, so technically is one API because the credentials are the same and the pagination and rate limiting is all the same. But we do have different objects or data models per category. So for instance, opportunities are unique to CRM. And there are no opportunities in HR systems. So it's per category, there are normalized data models.

SPEAKER_00: Yes. And that allows you to, I presume, have more total partners, because if you have normalized data fields, then it's easier to probably link in new sources of information.

SPEAKER_06: Yes. And fundamentally, within every single source of truth, the data model is very, very similar because humans just want to simplify and think about things in a similar way. So among Salesforce and HubSpot, there are stages and there are opportunities. And they might order different things, but fundamentally, they are the same thing. Same with in recruiting systems, there are candidates and there are applications and there are stages and notes. And some API providers might be missing some of these components, but fundamentally, there are core common models that everyone just boils down to. So I want to touch a little bit more on the people

SPEAKER_17: need integrations to land sales, because you mentioned software fragmentation. And to me,

SPEAKER_00: that sounds like so many different companies out there have a different mix of software solutions that trying to sell them something new is going to be essentially impossible, unless you have every single incoming port, if you will. So how many pieces of software do companies have today? How many are

SPEAKER_17: they trying to tie together? I don't quite understand how much of this is a day-to-day issue for companies.

SPEAKER_46: So I think the number now has increased around 200 or so. I saw a recent report in the vendor

SPEAKER_06: procurement about how much software each company has. And for us at Merge, we're 110 people. We have a ton of software providers. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. And we expect every one of them to just sync data with each other. It's a huge pain to have to download a CSV and re-upload every single time there's a new update. That's just going to be impossible, especially if millions of rows of data are getting updated every day or every second. That's just not going to work. And because the expectation now of the buyer is so high, there's so many different vendors out there. Why would you choose a vendor that you then have to do that manual work for? You just want to purchase something that just you click a button and it seamlessly syncs with all

SPEAKER_70: of your other vendors so that all the data is consistent across all of them and there are no

SPEAKER_17: data silos. That makes perfect sense to me. But I'm curious about the people you partner with. I mean, for example, you guys announced very recently that Merge is now officially a Paylocity partner. Is there any tension between you guys providing a unified API and individual companies that offer their own API and perhaps them not wanting to be aggregated politely into someone else's service and instead have more of a direct connection to customers?

SPEAKER_06: So when we first got started, definitely. And it took a lot of evangelism. I think I reached out to like someone I hadn't talked to in like six years to like get in contact with like a private equity firm that was on the board of like one HR platform that was a closed garden. And then I ended up

SPEAKER_05: meeting. You reached out to an old friend who, wow, that's a very tenuous dimension.

SPEAKER_107: I wouldn't even call him a friend. But I had to, you have to do whatever you have to do. They might say this, but real.

SPEAKER_105: That's true. But you have to do what you have to do to like, because in the end, a lot of partnerships is about like networking and just shooting your shot. And so at the time we were five

SPEAKER_06: people. There was just no way I was going to be able to get a partnership with this like, you know, 10,000 person company unless I really did whatever I could to get in front of like the the C-suite. And so, yeah, so that's what we had to do. And it took a lot of evangelism, but that became one of our best partnerships because the CPO, CTO and CEO all like felt and understood what Merge was trying to do. And we were trying to make it easier for them to have an ecosystem around their product. The dream for every source of truth is to do what Salesforce has done. Like it is impossible to not use Salesforce because every single sales ops tool is built on top of it. And if you don't build on top of Salesforce, it's like, if you don't use Salesforce, and you're kind of screwed because there's just so many tools that are around it. Like, sure you can use like some of these really long tail providers, but it makes it really difficult. It makes it harder. That's why if like, even regardless of whether you're in recruiting or HR or help desk or ticketing or project management, like you want companies to get built around you because then you become a source of truth and you're critical and it's really hard to churn.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And if you want an example of this, think about, I think the company was Encino, which was the first Salesforce platform company to go public. So they built an entire public company just on top of Salesforce's platform. And that's great for Salesforce because more data, information and business flow through their operations. Ergo, Mark Benioff could start another 5,000 people to dream force to ruin the city slightly more quickly.

SPEAKER_115: I thought it was fine.

SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry. I lived in SF for a long time. And like, there would always be this weird week

SPEAKER_00: when you go out to the bar and then you would get there and there'd be a little sign out front that said close for a dream force private event. And you would just hate those people because that's your bar. How dare they?

SPEAKER_50: Honestly. Okay. So when I lived in San Francisco and I would, and it was dream force week, I felt the same way, but then now I'm like old and I went to, I went to dream force. And then I went to imagine dragons and I was like, wow, I've officially aged because this is like the most fun

SPEAKER_122: I've had all. Okay. Look, imagine dragons is not great, but they did have some bangers for

SPEAKER_124: league of legends. So I'll take it. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna judge. Speaking of nerdy things. Yes. I do know the soundtrack from league of legends and which bands made the songs.

SPEAKER_126: They have a lot of bangers. Oh yeah. I forgot too, but they have a lot of bangers.

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SPEAKER_130: and get 20% off. So you found it merged back in 2020, which is not that long ago, frankly,

SPEAKER_17: I know in technology terms, it's a couple of cycles, but companies at the time, I presume, were a little bit skeptical because you were a small company. As you said, how fast did that

SPEAKER_00: change? How fast did you guys go from, you know, going through friends and around back doors to

SPEAKER_17: being able to knock on the front door and kind of get a deal done? Because you have a lot of

SPEAKER_10: integrations. I hope it's gotten easier. It was really, really hard. And it kind of sucks because now of course we see a lot of copycats who benefit a lot from the evangelism and the education

SPEAKER_06: that we did back then. But it was really, really tough because a lot of people were skeptical that we would be deep enough that we would be able to solve their use case. And also I know a lot of people, there's a lot of composable software, but like every single time there's a new idea for some type of composable software, you still, people are still skeptical. Like, and I felt like what we were doing was very similar to convincing people to move from on-prem to the cloud because a lot of people felt like, no, like I want this like in house. Like I feel like I can uniquely be good at it. And I would really have to convince them like, no, like the only thing that can be different is you're worse at it. Like you're not going to be uniquely better at this. It's something that is just not your core competency. And other things that were really tough were just like the business model. Like we had to really understand what to do. It's, we're not a transactional, like API. Like I think with like Stripe and like Twilio, it's a little like, okay, one transaction or like one, like one email, one text message. So it's a little bit easier to figure out what pricing looks like and what, and customer support might be a little bit easier, but for us, like all of it was so different. And like the closest

SPEAKER_136: comparable we had was Plaid, but even still it was different because they were consumer, mostly consumer focused and we were B2B exclusively B2B. So yeah, a lot had to get,

SPEAKER_06: a lot had to get figured out and the customer buy-in process was really tough in the beginning.

SPEAKER_122: But that's kind of the value that you guys offer. One thing that APIs do is they abstract away

SPEAKER_00: complexity. So this is why people love Twilio. You could just use their API, send SMS messages anywhere. You didn't have to know anything about telephony. They handled all that complexity. And in the case of Merge, you guys have gone out and talked to all the accounting providers, all the HR providers, et cetera, and done all the work to get this set up. And that forms

SPEAKER_01: essentially your moat in a way. But if people can follow up based on the work you've done and copycat you, does that, to keep the analogy going, does that drain the Merge moat?

SPEAKER_91: So the benefit of Merge is actually, so you know how I was talking about earlier, how there's like a

SPEAKER_06: long maintenance period and it's a huge pain. So there's a maturity curve for every single integration and also every single category that we have. And so one of the benefits of us being first and us just having so many customers onboarding. And every single time our customers and their customers onboard, we find out more edge cases for what can happen in these integrations. Because API documentation is always hard coded. Like it's just not always updated. And response bodies from APIs can vary wildly. Like sometimes you think something will come back as a number, but it actually comes back as a string and then boom, tomorrow it's an array. And you're just like, what the fuck? And it breaks your code. But for us, because we have so many customers onboarding, we just have so many data points of what those edge cases could be. And so by the time our customers onboard onto a really gnarly like enterprise integration, they're much less likely to run into a bug than if they had built it in house, because at the first time you have a customer

SPEAKER_50: onboard, you're going to run into a bug. There's just no way it's going to work perfectly.

SPEAKER_17: So what I was prepping for our chat today, and I was thinking about the ability for Merge to see data in motion, just because of how many different types you guys are running between different products. And I was curious if there was a kind of a data observability element to this, and I wasn't going to bring it up because it seemed a little bit off kilter, but you just made the point for me.

SPEAKER_35: Can you talk about how Merge is, from my view, kind of like a second order data observability firm?

SPEAKER_06: So we actually call it integration observability because it's specific to integrations and also the customer support side. So actually a lot of times, once the integration is live with our customers, customer support teams mostly interact with Merge and our support team. The reason why is because we want to make sure that every single piece of data that is flowing in Merge and out of Merge is visible to our customers. Because we are specifically focusing on B2B, it's just the stakes are really high. Each end user can cost millions of dollars. And so it has to be extremely reliable. You have to know everything that's going on. And you don't want anything to be like what is going on underneath the surface. We want it to be very, very clear and transparent. And so we built a lot of tooling in our dashboard that's mostly focused for more non-technical people. So like we have every API request, you can modify scopes and what data you want flowing in and out is fully searchable. So you can search like for Alex's name, if Alex came through or not. You can store it, like all of this information is very visible. Same with like there's end user error. You can see it very easily in the dashboard. It's kind of like simulating what people would use Datadog and Sentry for when they were building integrations in-house. Because you would need to use both

SPEAKER_70: components in order to figure out what was happening with your integrations. But engineers would have to look at that. And with Merge, it can be a customer support person.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. I just realized we've been talking for like 25 minutes and I have to move this towards business stuff in a second. Okay, of course. Two quick, sorry, I love learning and I'm learning a lot. So thank you, Disney. I want to talk about two quick things before we move on. One is this product called Blueprint. And it's a way that you guys are

SPEAKER_17: allowing people to essentially, it seems like crowdsource integration recommendations. What's the idea there?

SPEAKER_10: Yes. So to be honest, it's mostly us just playing around with AI. Just us playing around with AI and

SPEAKER_46: seeing how potentially our customers could be able to contribute to our integrations down the road.

SPEAKER_06: And it worked. Like it was pretty cool. Like we were able to get documentation and then we would be able to generate like initial mappings. It's obviously not going to be perfect. A lot of building integrations is unfortunately very subjective. It's not objective. And so AI isn't quite there yet. Got it. But it was really good for us to be able to see, okay, maybe we might be able to expedite part of the integration built with AI, but it's not like a full blown product. One day maybe,

SPEAKER_70: but right now it was mostly just like for us to experiment with it and see if our customers could start helping us out. And did they?

SPEAKER_46: Yeah, they actually did. So a lot of people started submitting different integrations. It was also helpful for us to gather interest in which ones. Unfortunately, the main blocker for building

SPEAKER_06: integrations is sandbox access. It's not documentation. So even if you have a great, there's great great documentation out there and you feel like you know how to map it. If you don't have a sandbox account to like test route and like modify the UI and see how the response bodies change in the documentation, the integration is not going to work really, or you, it might be okay, but you'll run

SPEAKER_46: into edge cases. So that's the blocker, even if we get documentation.

SPEAKER_17: Why is sandbox access hard to get? Because by definition, sandboxes are safe environments, ergo, they shouldn't be risky to let people tinker with. So in my view, the bar should be very low to get access to them. And yet several times today, you mentioned that sandbox access is an issue.

SPEAKER_02: What's going on there?

SPEAKER_06: Because it requires a pretty advanced partnerships motion. So for instance, like if you, because you need to be able to issue an account to, to a partner and not bill them and understand that the purpose is purely for testing.

SPEAKER_157: Isn't that just the button you click, like do not charge, click. And then like this, this sounds like something the software could solve.

SPEAKER_06: A lot of categories aren't self-serve. Like for instance, like HR tech is just not self-serve. Like usually you end up having to sign and like, if there's payroll information, you need to make sure you don't actually process the payroll.

SPEAKER_159: Okay. That would be, that would be, that would be funny. I got paid 47 times today.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. I mean, some categories are really great. Like ticketing and help desk cat, like it's just always self-serve. And so that's very easy for us to get a sandbox account.

SPEAKER_44: But for instance, like getting our Salesforce sandbox, like took a while and we needed just like, you began to like fill out a bunch of forms.

SPEAKER_00: I'm shocked that Salesforce was a process that a company known for its bureaucratic efficiency and lack of unnecessary layers and VPs. So really briefly merge. Definitely. When you add a new integration, you make a big deal out of it. It's, you know, it matters quite a lot. So the pay loss that you won from earlier, have startups come to you and said, Hey, we really want you to integrate with us because then we will get our, our, you know, our name on your site, our logo will be in your materials. So are you a distribution point for companies themselves instead of just something

SPEAKER_02: that people add on to let them talk better amongst each other? All the time, which I, which I love. Yeah. So all these companies will come to us

SPEAKER_06: and they'll be like, Hey, like I'm, you know, like a 50 person like CRM company. And I saw that you, these customers and I really want them to integrate with us. So can you please build an integration with us so that our logo will show up on their website. And then all of our customers will be able to benefit from using that product. Because if you're like a new source of truth and you're trying to compete with like HubSpot or Salesforce, it's really hard to get that roadmap time from every single vendor that is integrating with HubSpot and Salesforce. Like they might not want to spend

SPEAKER_07: that time integrating with you, but with merge, it's a, it's free distribution. And again, we're

SPEAKER_00: helping create an ecosystem around their product. So start it comes to you. Hey, hey, hey, hey, you know, we are a 50 person up and coming CRM firm. We would like to be listed and we kind of take part in the merge ecosystem. And you say, how much is it free? It's free right now. Yeah. Right now.

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SPEAKER_00: To me, someone coming to you asking for access is usually the point at which you can extract some value. And so I presume right now there's more value in not charging them cash.

SPEAKER_06: I think one day, but right now I still really want to just make sure we have the most comprehensive list of integrations. Okay. And it's definitely been on our mind. Like we've experimented a few times with it, but right now I

SPEAKER_46: just want us to have the best product. So, and that means just having the most integrations and the

SPEAKER_17: highest quality integrations and product. How far are you on getting to the point in which you go like, okay, cool. We have all the big integrations we need. Now we're going to go chase the last edge cases, but we've done 80% of the work.

SPEAKER_06: Never because there's different regions and the world is just getting more international. So for instance, like a lot of our customers are moving to different regions, like whether it's Europe or

SPEAKER_70: Latin AM or Southeast Asia or Japan. And so there's an unlimited number of integrations that you have to build. So never.

SPEAKER_17: So I don't know, not to be rude about it, but like, are you guys getting faster and better at

SPEAKER_152: building these integrations? Or is that not something that you can actually accelerate given how much you depend on other companies offering access to sandboxes and so forth?

SPEAKER_136: Oh my God. Yeah. It's the only thing we do. And so that's one of the benefits of it being the

SPEAKER_174: only thing we do. Well, now you make me feel silly. I wasn't sure if you could speed up the process because you mentioned these other roadblocks, but okay. Yeah, because it's the only thing we do.

SPEAKER_06: We focus so much on like making creating efficiencies with like how we test. Testing especially is the part that takes a lot of time. But yeah, we spend a lot of time on just like making that faster, more efficient and like higher quality for our customers. And then also whenever we make modifications for maintenance, it's also very fast as well. So it's like mostly what we do is just making sure we're able to move very quickly. But Merge overall is not just like a technically difficult product to build. It's also like an operationally difficult company to build. So from the ground up, because we knew we wanted to be cross category, we knew we wanted to be like international. We just really wanted to make sure from the beginning, we were building the foundation and avoiding as much tech debt as possible. Well, and you guys had security on the mind early

SPEAKER_17: on. If I recall correctly, you guys had like SOC 2 compliance like out the gate.

SPEAKER_06: Yes. And that's all credit to my amazing co-founder. Yeah.

SPEAKER_122: All right. Now, one more product question before we talk about money. Merge for AI. Build your AI

SPEAKER_17: features with LLM ready data. My question was, is the merge AI product for companies to ingest their own data to a single point so that they can train their own AI features? Or is it for companies that have many customers that have different integrations to bring that data in to make an AI

SPEAKER_06: feature for their customers? So the latter, we never ever do any internal use cases. Like the price point just doesn't really make sense for us. But yeah, we have a lot of companies that have gotten started in the past few years, especially with AI boom that want to be able to have more customer

SPEAKER_70: specific data in their products. So they can provide insights for like whether it's AI search or like AI SDRs or like, I don't know, some, you know, you name it. And they'll use our integrations to help enhance their product insights and also capabilities. And how big of a demand point

SPEAKER_06: has that been for Merge lately? So honestly, it's, so it's been really, really prevalent in the SMB segment. Like we just see a lot of companies just getting founded, pretty much like a hundred percent of us companies are all AI. It's a little bit harder to tell in the enterprise segment because you can't, like everyone's just adding AI to their products. You can't tell if it's like AI specific or a product that has like a little bit of AI, but on the SMB segment, it's

SPEAKER_70: like super, super, super relevant. The way this has been explained to me

SPEAKER_17: and the way that I've learned it is the more unique data you have to build your model, the better it will be, the more differentiated it will be. And the more of your own data you have inside of an AI predicated application, the smarter it will be, the more you can do with it. Ergo, unique data is

SPEAKER_00: this incredibly important thing. If everyone's moving towards using more AI, does that mean that the total throughput of information across APIs that merge touches is, is going up incredibly quickly?

SPEAKER_06: Because it seems like it should be. I mean, that's what I think. So we've been seeing, we've been seeing a lot more companies going from using mostly just one or two categories to all seven

SPEAKER_05: categories or, and asking us for more. Seven categories of integrations with merge. Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_46: Yeah. Because the more data you have, the better the insights you have. Essentially the AI boom,

SPEAKER_17: even though it is, I mean, not exactly what you guys have been working on, it is providing a nice tailwind

SPEAKER_10: to the business. Yes. Yes. As my CRO says, it's always good to be lucky. So we have been very lucky.

SPEAKER_17: Better, dude, better lucky than good is one of those things that I've learned is more, I learned that lesson again and again and again, as I've gotten older. And so shout out to you guys for being both.

SPEAKER_00: All right, now let's talk about money. So according to Crunchbase, Merge has raised 74.5 million. Um, last round was a $55 million series beat October, 22 and pitch book had that listed at a $315 million post money valuation. So that's a couple of years ago too. In fact, the obvious

SPEAKER_06: question is simple. Are you guys raising more money? Not right now we've been really efficient. And to be honest, we haven't spent most of our money from our series B. Um, one thing that I really invested on early on, just because my, my finance and operations background was I wanted to have a really good finance team. And so one of my old coworkers joined us as employee 10 and she is, she was just like tiger momming all of us about like not spending too much money and being really efficient, especially in this current market. So now right now, we have, we have a long runway

SPEAKER_70: right now with how much, uh, we're spending and she's actively making sure we're, uh, keeping

SPEAKER_198: her cash in check. Is she, um, like a CFO equivalent? Basically. Yeah. Okay. So you have a CFO

SPEAKER_00: equivalent and you also have a CRO and you've only raised three rounds of capital. That is pretty darn

SPEAKER_06: early for a startup of your size. We only have one C-suite member or, uh, one CRO. Everyone else

SPEAKER_200: is a VP. Oh, okay. Fair enough. But I mean, you, you have definitely a more, I mean, forget the titles.

SPEAKER_00: You have a much more mature finance op than most companies do at your size. Oh, for sure. Yeah. For the founders who listen to discuss the main audience for, for twist, just explain how you went about that costs and benefits. I think people would love to know what an early investment in the, um,

SPEAKER_06: office of the CFO broadly does. So I hired, um, Alexia when she, when we were 10 people, because there were just, there were a lot of operations and accounting things that I just wasn't going to be uniquely good at. And I also knew I wasn't going to be super strategic there too. Uh, we were starting to enter a phase where we might want to have more advanced pricing at the time. We were just flinging numbers around to customers and that, that just wasn't going to scale. And I knew we needed to be really thoughtful about it. And if you hire a really good finance team, they can be revenue generating for you and really strategic in like how you expand to different products, like how you expand to different regions, how you're thinking about like costs, compensation. And so we hired her so that she could really own all of that. And she ran lean, um, through our series

SPEAKER_70: A and then she started expanding her team after our series A. After your series B or series A?

SPEAKER_06: Series A. So then she had two people and she didn't, she didn't really expand to three people until series B, but then we hired also a VP of RevOps. Um, and then also a two RevOps team members because our sales team started expanding a lot as well. In general for a series B company, our finance and operations team is definitely pretty loaded, but I think just given how complex like our operations are, it's, it's really been an advantage for us. And we have deep insights and understanding of our sales motion and we're like, uh, like pipeline and, um, like, uh, just like what

SPEAKER_17: the company looks like. When you raised that last round, that $55 million round that by the way, Excel led that, if I recall correctly. Yes. Yeah. Okay. It's a big round. I mean,

SPEAKER_00: 55 million, even for 2022, was it relatively outsized. Were you guys at the time intending on being very conservative with that new investment when you raised it?

SPEAKER_06: Always. We always wanted to be really conservative. Like with our series A, we were really, we actually hadn't even touched our series A by the time we had fundraise. We've always been pretty careful about

SPEAKER_75: it. We knew we wanted to make some investments in some strategic areas with that $55 million, but not definitely not spending all of it. But why were you guys so early to the,

SPEAKER_00: what if we didn't burn a bunch of cash startup movement? Because it feels like you raised a era typical round and then did non era typical things with it. And that's an interesting dissonance

SPEAKER_06: to me. So the company that I used to work at expanse, they were pretty lean to, um, like they got to, they got acquired at a billion dollars, like 200 people. And, um, they mostly focused on like really large enterprise customers. And now that I'm thinking about like how, how it ran, it was pretty efficient and they didn't, they didn't spend a ton of money. And I think because of that, we had a benchmark for what metrics might want, might want to look like. And we started in June, 2020 when it was really hard to fundraise and like no one believes in us. True. True, true, true, true, true, true. We just, we just knew also merge was going to be an expensive business to build because everyone has to be technical. We were building in San Francisco, New York city, and I would much rather just never have layoffs. Um, and I really wanted to make sure that like as much as possible, I could protect the team and just like hire slowly, um, and make sure that everyone is really good and have fewer, better people. But it's also hard because we're like, we're an in-person company and that automatically, uh, limited a lot of what the pool looked like. So it was always going to be

SPEAKER_136: slower for us to hire. Like we would never, even if we wanted like 2X tomorrow, that could just not happen. That would just not be able to happen. That's actually the funniest thing I've heard

SPEAKER_157: in some time. If you are an in-office company, your hiring rate may be slower because your candidate pool is more constrained. So if you want to save money by not hiring people, return to office.

SPEAKER_122: Jason's going to love that. That's like, that's like, that's like half of what's been talking about this show lately is like returning to office. I refuse, but I do respect every company's

SPEAKER_00: right to make their own decision. It's funny that I hear you talk about this. Uh, merge was going to be expensive to build lots of technical talent. We're in New York. We're in San Francisco. We're in person, which means you have office expenses. And yet you hadn't spent your series A by the time you raised your B. You still have lots of your B two years later. It's funny to me that you manage this when most people don't seem to be able to spend less and keep growing. Here's an example of you

SPEAKER_196: guys pulling it off. It's just rare to hear this actually work, I guess, out in the market and not

SPEAKER_216: in a blog post. We have a really good team. And I think also just because like my team, we're so close and that's probably from just like, to be honest, being in person, they feel comfortable

SPEAKER_06: calling me out like, Hey, like we invested a lot in this. Like we need to stop investing more in it or like, Oh, like right now, like we're expenses are like this, you know, like hold up. You know what I mean? Like they, they, they forced me to be really thoughtful. And I think because we're so tight as an executive team, yeah, we can really call each other out on things like that.

SPEAKER_208: For everyone out there listening and thinking, Oh my gosh, they haven't spent a lot of money.

SPEAKER_00: Surely this company hasn't grown much. I went back to the TechCrunch coverage of the series B and you guys had said that at the time your ARR, annual recurring revenue, had grown by 30X in the last 12 months. And then at the time, 2,500 companies now use their service to integrate SaaS

SPEAKER_05: apps. So I'm curious in the last couple of years, how has growth been?

SPEAKER_06: It's been really good. So we've obviously seen, we've, we've obviously tried to recompose what our revenue looks like a little bit, just because when we first got started, it was a lot of like micro SMB and smaller companies building on the platform. But right now I think we, to be honest, I haven't checked the numbers because I don't look at this as much now. But we have like, I think like 16,000 self-serve organizations on the platform, free, free and paying. We have around like 400 enterprise customers on the platform. And also the size of them are just increasing. Yeah, it's been a really transformational past two years. And that series B that we raised really allowed us to like, take the focus more on investing in that future and what we wanted the company to look like. And also just making sure the product, we could focus on product quality rather than continuing to expand the TAM. Because one limitation with our space inherently is just TAM, there's TAM constraints. Like when you first get started, you decide, am I going to go broad? Or am I going to focus just on like one or two categories? And if you focus on one or two categories, you just, there's not enough companies out there. You can't outbound enough companies and you can't get enough revenue and then you die. But if you go broad, then your product's super shitty and then you'd also die. So yeah, the raising the money was just really great for us to be able to just double down on quality and make sure existing, like, because we already expanded our TAM enough and just making

SPEAKER_17: sure our customers were happy. So essentially you expanded your TAM by going broad, having more capitalized, you didn't go deep where you had gone broad and therefore you're not spread too thin.

SPEAKER_06: Yes. And we had kind of like alternated. Like we first, we went really deep in like two categories and then we went a little bit broader and then we went deeper and then we went broader and deeper. And then we also had the benefit of just being first. So we had time. Yeah. Overall, like just, we've been spending a lot of time on making sure it's been like efficient growth. Especially just because of the market, we don't know where things are going. And I just really want to protect the team and make sure there's a good outcome versus like over fundraising and overspending and being like, okay, we ball. Like I don't, I don't want to do that to the company.

SPEAKER_175: This is the only company for me. Like I, this is it. So I really want to make sure I'm like

SPEAKER_00: being responsible. So, but I want to go back. You very plightly dodged around my question by saying growth has been good. Talk to me about 2023. How is this year looking? I presume you didn't 30X your ARR again. Oh my God, no. Since then.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, of course not. Yeah, definitely not. It's been really, really good. We've like doubled the number of logos that we've had. We've expanded a lot of our like product offerings. And there's some really big logos that we're hoping to close in Q4 that we just never would have even

SPEAKER_17: had conversations with last year. If those new deals land in Q4 that you're hoping they will,

SPEAKER_135: how much does that pull your ACV up? A lot in the enterprise segment, but probably not overall.

SPEAKER_17: Well, I mean, yes, because you have lots of smaller customers, but in the enterprise segment, would it be like a double digit percentage increase in ACV? Unclear. Yeah, unclear.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. So, because one thing that struck me was back when you raised the series B, you guys were talking about going more up market and I was really curious to see how well that's gone.

SPEAKER_122: So is the majority of merge revenue today from the enterprise segment?

SPEAKER_02: It's growing a lot. Yeah. When we first started, it was 0%. So none of them will use us at all.

SPEAKER_06: That'd be chaotic. Why would they ever use our shitty little product? But now, yeah, it's been really exciting. We've increased the percentage quite a bit.

SPEAKER_17: And then in the enterprise segment, compared to these micro enterprises you were talking about earlier, are they in the same overall business categories or has going up market also opened up a new, a new kind of like industry sector mix to the company? Definitely a different industry

SPEAKER_06: sector mix. Um, there's certain companies that we'll just never be able to sell to like, I can never sell to like Chevron or like target probably unless they have a B2B SaaS component. Um, but yeah, like financial services are now open to us. Um, and that just was not possible for us before.

SPEAKER_00: So, you know, right now you guys have capital, you have, it seems to be a pretty strong product market fit and the economy seems to be okay. Have you thought about changing up the way you guys

SPEAKER_239: approach cash and just trying to grow a lot faster? No, because I really want to make sure that if I

SPEAKER_46: spend, if I spend X, I know exactly what's going to come out of it. And it's not super clear all the

SPEAKER_06: time. Um, especially with this current market. So I'd rather us just be a little bit more conservative and spend X and I know like, it's probably going to be around Y versus being like, okay, it's gonna hit C. So I, I, I'd rather just make sure we're being smart with money, but thank you for saying that.

SPEAKER_00: Cause I wanted to talk about your go to market approach. Cause I was going just literally reading back through historical merge tweets. And one thing that hit me is you guys are pretty active. So you sponsor product school. Uh, I'm just going back to this, you went to SaaS stock. And then if I went through, there's just tons more events and so forth, you guys are out there really, well, I presume you're exhausted, but like the approach seems to be, be present at industry events and kind of going around. And so I presume that the ROI on literally pressing the flesh has been good.

SPEAKER_06: So this was a big year of experimentation and a part of this $55 million was for us to be able to experiment with the go to market motion. So part of that was going to be events and us going to different regions and us just like meeting more customers in person. So yeah, definitely. And a part of the, yeah, we've just meeting a lot of people in person now.

SPEAKER_17: And I presume that in-person stuff does a little bit better when people understand what you're building. So I presume unified APIs have become well-known enough that there's less

SPEAKER_06: education required in person. No, there's still a lot of people who have no idea. Yeah. And also like every, every time I go to a wedding, someone's like, what is this? And then I have to spend like an hour explaining to them. So most people don't understand it and that's totally fine with me, but I just want to make sure that it is potent. And that's why some of the in-person interactions

SPEAKER_05: help a lot. Wait a minute. At weddings, you talk about what your startup does? Oh my God. Yeah. It's like, I go through like a due diligence process every single time I go to a

SPEAKER_122: wedding. You should do what I do at weddings, which is slowly find the back wall and then attach myself to it and then don't move for three hours. It works every time. Okay. Noted for the next time. All right. I want to talk about pricing really quick and then I'm going to do just a quick

SPEAKER_00: reflection. So I was just trying to figure out how you guys go about pricing for merge. And in the, the first of your three tiers, you get three free linked accounts and then it's 650 for up to 10. And a linked account, I believe is a customer endpoint integration into the API, correct?

SPEAKER_06: Yes, pretty much. So it's a connection. So for instance, if you, your customer is Lyft and they're connecting their workday instance through merge, that's one connection. And then you have another customer that's also that's using Oracle, then that's the second connection.

SPEAKER_17: Okay. So Lyft connecting to let's just say Oracle through merge for $65 seems to be like it's priced at roughly one, 1,000th of the potential value for them. Why is it so inexpensive?

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I know. So we probably need to adjust the pricing a little bit, but the thing is that we, at first, when we launched pricing, it was based on volume and it created a lot of complexity. So the sales cycle, and also what we noticed was a majority of the linked accounts were smaller. And so we were accounting for the few instances where it would be really huge and allowing that to sway what the pricing looked like versus just looking at what most of the pricing looked like, which is why we just simplified it. So it's true. It is a steal for a lot of companies that are mostly selling to enterprise. And a lot of those enterprise companies will also make money off of the integrations as well, because you can. And for SMBs, yeah, the pricing is a little bit more

SPEAKER_17: expensive. We have to work with them on pricing too. But I love leaving value on the table, providing a great experience for customers. I'm actually really in favor of that. I think

SPEAKER_122: it's a great way to go about it. But how do you decide as a business when you might be leaving even more on the table than you might want to?

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. I mean, that's always the question, right? And we do have a platform fee as well for the professional and enterprise plans. And so if you are a company selling to enterprise, you can't use the self-serve plan. It's just, there's not enough security features. You need more support, especially if you're selling to enterprise and you don't know the nuances of Workday or SAP, you really need more support. And so you're going to be on the enterprise plan,

SPEAKER_70: which has a platform fee that varies just based on the company size. And then that also, that helps lean out the cost. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: One more question about customers. There's been a trend that I've been tracking mostly through public markets of software companies reporting pretty poor net retention rates over the last

SPEAKER_17: eight quarters. Things have come down from 130% to 105, 160 to 120, et cetera. Has that compression of

SPEAKER_191: ability to upsell customers impacted Merge's growth rate?

SPEAKER_06: So not that. It actually impacts us more when our customers aren't doing super, super well. And especially if you're selling mostly to S&B, then if they're not doing super well, because we're pricing based on the number of connections. So if they have fewer customers, then we can't charge them as much. Yeah. Also, a lot of our customers would acquire each other, especially this year and last year. But the move up market has helped us a lot with that. The NRR for our enterprise segment is just completely different from our S&B segment. So we're just pretty lucky that we ended up making

SPEAKER_00: that strategic move earlier on. Okay. Now, if you're not going to raise more capital and you're growing quite a lot, eventually you're going to reach scale. So I'm

SPEAKER_01: thinking Merge IPO Q2 2027? Oh my God. I wish. Why not?

SPEAKER_17: I wish. I don't know. Seriously, if you guys end up some sort of horrible Frankenstein, super late stage Series G company, I'm going to scream. I know.

SPEAKER_00: No. It feels like you have tailwinds, you have good growth, you have good product market fit,

SPEAKER_56: your team seems good. If you can't go public eventually, then literally startups are so broken, we need to just rip all the papers up and throw them and start over again. That's my vibe.

SPEAKER_06: I mean, that's the dream. And I firmly believe that all tech companies that go public, and also just all companies that go public eventually become M&A shops where you have to strategically purchase other companies and just combine them in a way that is beneficial to the customer. But there are a few bets that we want to make that would be beneficial for us to do as a private company. And I don't think public, I don't think, yeah, I don't think the stock market would treat it super well. So I'd want to make sure that we make those bets before we end up doing anything like that. And we're still a hundred people. So we're apart from that right now.

SPEAKER_274: But no, there's actually, there's no minimum personnel requirement to go public. Oh, really?

SPEAKER_17: No, you can go public with two people. I mean, SPACs are essentially just zombie cash that's been

SPEAKER_00: floated, right? So, I mean, the question is, you know, do you have like 150 million trailing revenue? No, but will you by 2027? I don't know. I've never seen a company say we grew 30X last year. Here's our series B, haha. Like that's, that, that is a very impressive result. And I'm hoping it's,

SPEAKER_122: it's kept going because, you know, I would love to see you drop new numbers soon.

SPEAKER_279: I know you love numbers. I've been listening to you for a while.

David Friedberg: Well, numbers, explain what's actually going on. Um, okay. Last question that I promise I'll let you go. We were talking about AI earlier and tailwinds there off and so forth.

SPEAKER_17: Has anyone tried to buy you guys lately?

SPEAKER_122: No, really? I'm shocked because I feel like some company in the AI data space, like Databricks, would be hovering.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, no. And to be honest, I don't think we'd be super down for it either. I think the opportunity for what we're building is just too big and it would really be a shame. I really, I really feel like what we're building is like the infrastructure for the next generation of the internet, because

SPEAKER_70: just data is so important. And I don't think it would be a good, I don't think it's worth it,

SPEAKER_17: especially where we are right now. If you're going to become the data, you know, interchange for the internet, if you will, especially on the business side of things, do you eventually drop the, the API focus and maybe get more agnostic about types of data in motion?

SPEAKER_285: Oh my God. Yeah, Alex, that's what we're doing. Okay. What does that look like?

SPEAKER_105: Um, I can't share all of it, but yeah, I mean, we're, that's why we hate when people call us

SPEAKER_70: merge API because it's, it's really just merge. Um, because like wherever your customer's data is, like we want to be able to pull it and export it in whatever format that you want eventually. But yeah, for instance, like now we have CSV upload, um, we've built some on-prem integrations too. Um, we have, uh, SFTP, so world should be our customer's oyster.

SPEAKER_90: Well, I, I should have started with that question, but you shouldn't be right out of time. I have

SPEAKER_00: to let you go, but thank you so much for coming on. I really do appreciate it. And, um, the next time merge does anything, you just call me up and we'll have you back on.

SPEAKER_291: All right. Sounds good. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00: My pleasure. All right, everybody. Live news coming up, lots more twists to come. Make sure you're subscribed. My name is Alex. We're out of here. Bye.