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Our guest in this episode is Jon Gelsey. Jon was the first CEO of Auth0, a leading identity-as-a-service platform, which grew from 5 to 300 employees during his four years at the helm. Auth0 was acquired by Okta in February 2021 for $6.5B. After Auth0, Jon served as CEO of Xnor, a computer vision and machine learning spinoff of the Allen Institute. The company was acquired by Apple for ~$200M in January 2020.
When Auth0 first started in 2013, there were already several authentication vendors in the market. Okta, ForgeRock, and OneLogin had all built considerable scale by the time Auth0 launched its product. Not only did Jon and the team build a successful company in a very crowded space, but they also did it their way. While all of Auth0’s competitors were running a top-down GTM motion, Jon made a critical decision to adopt a bottom-up, product-led growth (PLG) strategy. Instead of relying on traditional marketing tactics for demand generation, Auth0 built an extensive content rollout plan to help drive inbound interest in the product. To date, Auth0 is the only PLG company in cybersecurity to achieve a multi-billion dollar exit. On Inside the Network, Jon talks about building go-to-market strategies, identifying the right buyer personas, and establishing success metrics for customer acquisition.
In addition to his experience as a serial entrepreneur, Jon worked on the M&A and strategy team at Microsoft from 2007 to 2014 where he led several acquisitions for the company. Jon shares the tips and tricks founders need to know to plan, negotiate, and successfully close acquisitions with potential buyers.
Creators & Guests
What is Inside the Network?
Welcome to the inside track of cybersecurity entrepreneurship. We bring you the best founders, operators, and investors building the future of cybersecurity.
Welcome to Inside the Network. I'm Sid Trivedi.
Ross Haleliuk:I'm Ross Haleliuk.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:And I am Mahendra Ramsinghani.
Ross Haleliuk:We've spent decades building, investing, and researching cybersecurity companies.
Sid Trivedi:On this podcast, we invite you to join us inside the network, where we bring the best founders, operators, and investors building the future of cyber.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Our guest today is Jon Galsey the former CEO of Auth0 and Xnor Jon was the first CEO of Auth0, a leading identity as service platform. Under Jon's leadership, the company grew from 5 to 300 employees during his 4 years at the helm. Auth0 was acquired by Okta for $6,5 billion, the largest ever private transaction in Seattle's history. After Auth0, Jon served as the CEO of Xnor, a computer vision and a machine learning company.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:This was acquired by Apple for $200 million. His previous experience includes responsibility for strategy, acquisitions and investments at companies like Microsoft and Intel Capital. Jon started his career as a product manager for Mentor Graphics, HP, and Convex Computers. Today, we'll hear from John about what does it take to find
Mahendra Ramsinghani:product market fit, work with the very best founders in the industry, and how to win the toughest negotiations.
Sid Trivedi:Hey, Jon. Welcome to Inside the Network.
Jon Gelsey:Well, thank you for having me here.
Sid Trivedi:We're gonna talk about 4 different topics, Jon, with you today. And the first one is around finding product market fit. This is an area you have, in my opinion, having known you now for almost 10 years, you've you've really perfected this art. So we have a number of questions that we wanna go through with you. But the first one is when Auth0 was started back in 2013, there were already several authentication vendors in the market.
Sid Trivedi:There was Okta. There was Fortrock. There was OneLogin, and probably half a dozen others who had all built considerable scale by the time that you launch product. So how did you and the team figure out that you had sufficient product differentiation to start a new company in an already crowded space?
Jon Gelsey:I guess the short answer of that is that we had no idea. But sort of the the more useful answer is it's all a series of experiments, ideally very low cost experiments, to try and understand what resonates in the market and what's what doesn't. And so you're you're really to me, your first step as an entrepreneur is you create those experiments. What's the absolute cheapest way I can see that somebody is likely to pay or better yet actually does pay at least a nickel for this? Because there's, like, this massive step function between 0 and a little bit of you've actually got a solid product that somebody's willing to pay for as opposed to, wow, that's technically amazing, but I'm not sure I would do with it.
Jon Gelsey:And so the sequence actually Alcero Inc actually didn't start till I became CEO. We had a consulting essentially, a consulting business in 2013 that Eugenio and Matthias had had started, Auth 10, I think it was called. And the concept for the Auth0 product, just sort of an amazing, amazing product, which they were able to get in a very early form, one of one customer, somebody that Matthias knew from his consulting background, to try to integrate with and then deploy. And so having actually, and I guess we'd call that these days a design partner, having a design partner is not a bad thing. But with that proof that sort of the concepts were good and the technology for as far as we were able to get in those early days was well implemented, because they seem to like what they saw.
Jon Gelsey:So the first thing we did as auth 0 actually was make it available online, gonna say, in a low risk way. And what that really means is that we had a free version, the free sample that people could try out, and then we had paid versions. I think it was, like, $19 a month, $99 a month. 4.99 a month is what we put in place. It was, like, mid January, so, like, a couple weeks into the existence of Auth0 Incorporated.
Jon Gelsey:And the the goal there was to see how many free are we getting free users and what are they saying about us? And are they free users because they're playing with us or because this is actually valuable? And so one of the reasons for the paid versions was to see if somebody found it valuable enough so that it's like, well, you know, if you convert to paid, you'll get better support. And, eventually, we added things like, you know, you can have, you know, corporate SSO with the paid version. But, you know, you don't get that with the free version other than I think, initially, it was, like, with a small number of users, and then, eventually, it was, like, no.
Jon Gelsey:You you need to pay if it's gonna be for, you know, clearly corporate use. Our general philosophy with this in terms of pricing was, hey, we don't get paid until you get paid. Find it useful and find it useful in production, not for, you know, you're just playing around, you know, then pay us something. Otherwise, have a good time. Now the dynamics of the product were awesome for allowing this because our COGS was very low, or our marginal COGS COGS, I can say.
Jon Gelsey:You know, once we're set up on on Azure or AWS, which we we actually did both in the this was, like, the 1st year and a half or so in order to have be able to instantly fall back from one cloud to another when they had problems, which certainly back in those days, they had a lot, Our sort of marginal cost if you signed up as a free user and you're going to have, I think those days, it's like maybe less than 10 corporate users, like with a corporate single sign on or less than a 100 or something in the that order. Our cost was low because transaction costs were low. We had and maybe this is another secret to this, is we had awesome documentation, you know, really great quick starts and really clearly written. Eugenio's background just before, he started the LLC, sort of consulting business, in effect, with, with Matthias was patterns and practices at Microsoft, I. E, like, here are the sort of the right ways to implement code efficiently or excuse me, implement a concept efficiently.
Jon Gelsey:And so and a part of that is, you know, being able to explain it really well. So he wrote a lot of the documentation and, you know, sort of set the tone for that. So you could come in as a big buyer at a top 4 US accounting consulting firm and look at our free sample, go through a a quick start that sort of in 5 minutes would be, wow, I just set up authentication with my corporate credentials, and you know, Google and Facebook and a custom database simultaneous, all of those working simultaneously. And I did this in, like, about 5 minutes for this, like, hello world application in Node or Java or or whatever. You looked just by following the recipe for the quick start, and then you, like, looked at the documentation, and you saw things like arc sensibility through Auth0 rules.
Jon Gelsey:Wow. This looks like it actually could work in my multibillion dollar enterprise with 1,000,000 of users. Let me see. And that allowed a completely automated customer evaluation and hence customer, or I should say SQL, Sales Qualified Lead Acquisition. And so our marginal cost for acquiring a customer was like pennies because, hey, we're keeping the servers going and, like, we're trying to maintain the documentation and, you know, we gotta have you know, work on that and such.
Jon Gelsey:But it's really cheap. And so we could allow, really, thousands of people to come in, and that didn't really cost us any didn't cost us anything. You know, it's low cost. And a reasonable percentage, a single digit percentage, it's always small, it's like, hey. This looks really good, but, like, hey, I need a number to call if things go to hell because this is going to be in production use.
Jon Gelsey:It's like, hey, I need to be able to show my boss that you guys are actually a credible partner and not like some tiny little startup in Seattle, which, of course, we were. This was sort of the the secret to the early days of of of success for finding product market fit. You have a cheap enough way to reach a large enough number of actual serious users who are then giving you feedback on your comments on your, maybe a blog post or in your forums or we got we actually, for quite a while, had the this documentation is wrong, you know, click here to help us edit the documentation. So we had in addition to that super low cost customer acquisition path for these dynamics, we also had a super low cost product management path. We had the amazing instincts for sort of just the right level of abstraction that we needed to to give to ordinary developers so they could be essentially authentication experts, I.
Jon Gelsey:E. Get it up and running in sort of minutes for something simple or sort of days or or a week for something super complex. Okay? We had those instincts accentuated by sort of the comments we were getting because we had a wrong base of effectively design partners. You know?
Jon Gelsey:Really smart people. And, you know, especially when it's online and it's the anonymous person posting online, they're gonna be super honest. This is really shitty. Although this offer here is pretty good. You know, like, oh, cool.
Jon Gelsey:You know, maybe some modest feedback. That to me and this was cheap. I mean, very low cost. Our initial funding, Matthias and us, Eugenio had come up with for funding development of the sort of the MVP that we could, like, show to the first customer and, you know, try others. It was $20,000.
Jon Gelsey:$20,000 for a company that eventually exited for 6 and a half 1000000000 to get the MVP to market. You know, then we you know, after I came in, all of us sort of raised our hands and sort of we had some friends and family people come in for, you know, some reasonable reasonable additional funds, still 6 digit. It wasn't the the giant 7 digit precede funds you're seeing seeing fundings you're seeing these days. You know, and then use that to bring on several more engineers to, you know, further refine some some some products. This is sort of to me, is the ideal way to do product market fit.
Jon Gelsey:Now it depended on the dynamics of how the product works that we were able to do that, and I've got a sort of a different prescription for something like XNOR where these dynamics didn't work as well. But this is if you've got an enterprise infrastructure product that is at bottom line sort of a low cost to run, this is an awesome way to to do it to find product markets.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:And I
Sid Trivedi:think from the competitive angle, what you found different, John, here was the ease of use, you know, that Auth0 provided versus an Okta or a OneLogin or a 4th rock was second to none. Is that fair to say the ease of use for developers to embed authentication in using Auth0 was different?
Jon Gelsey:Yes. That's absolutely the right thing to say, and there's a sort of a sort of sort of detailing that a little bit more. There were competitors, you know, on the early days, but I think, like, AWS Cognito came out in, I wanna say, 2016 or something like that. And it's like, here's you've already got an AWS account, so it's really easy to, like, check the box and just get another service, and probably you don't have to, like, argue with your boss. And there were other folks who were trying to sort of approach Rich Dad use.
Jon Gelsey:The what and I give sort of Matthias and Eugenio the, you know, full credit for they came at this as not, we are building a security product for security engineers to implement better authentication. They instead came at it as, we are helping ordinary developers become heroes. So you're an ordinary developer and you understand authentication, but authentication is, at one of our customers, you know, authentication is a tarball covered with razor blades. Every time you touch it, your fingers get bloody. And it's there's asymmetric risks involved with authentication.
Jon Gelsey:You know, you do it wrong, everything gets compromised, and your company goes out of business. And so you really you really, really wanna get it get it right. Okay? So we made it really easy for the ordinary developer to get it right and get it right very quickly. And so that, in fact, there's another customer who described he said, Hey, I've done this was a CTO.
Jon Gelsey:He says, I've done 6 digital transformations in my career, and I'm here at this company. This was actually AGL, the largest utility in on Australia. I can't remember the gentleman's name, but really smart guy. He's visiting, and he says, I've done 6 of these. This is my 7th.
Jon Gelsey:The previous 6, we are where we were in year 2 of all of those previous 6 in month 2 with you guys because you made the authentication issues, which are so key to a successful digital transformation, so easy to to deal with. So, one, it was the abstraction layer. You have this portal. You you wanna do this. And, look.
Jon Gelsey:Here, we're gonna help you connect to your 16 active directory silos and your crazy custom database over here. And we had a second massive advantage that I don't understand why other people aren't doing because it's so advantageous. We had this great extensibility capability called all 0 rules, now called all 0 actions. We would allow you in the portal, you could write code which you could interrupt the authentication flow to do whatever. It's like, hey.
Jon Gelsey:I want to I wanna do an additional factor of checking on, you know, geo IP. Only people in the Washington DC area or only people within this firewall can do it. Or, actually, it was arbitrary because the way you would write these, it was ordinary. It was a we invented effectively invented Amazon Lambda before there's Lambda. It was a serverless function to support any language, but everybody used JavaScript.
Jon Gelsey:It's like, hey, I'm going to do a JavaScript check to see what the phase of the moon is and the last three things Taylor Swift said. Cool. We could do that because, you know, there's an easy call to third party APIs. You can look this up. You can make decisions.
Jon Gelsey:You can do processing. So that would be like an additional factor check, or I could do we could do metadata enrichment or modification. It's like, hey, you know, john@gmail.com just logged in. I'm not getting much out of the Google metadata about this guy or user. You never know if it's a dog on the Internet.
Jon Gelsey:And so but I'm gonna reach out to 6 Sense or Raply for somebody like that, and I'm gonna do a bunch of enrichment. And I was like, oh, it's actually this 35 year old guy. You know, he's got an income of a $130,000 a year. And he's like, oh, I'm gonna use that, well, 1, to be able to feedback to marketing. It's like, hey, by the way, here's what this user looks like.
Jon Gelsey:I could be able to dynamically decide what landing page to send this guy to. I even send him to the, oh, here's the upsell product, which is great, and not the, here's the really cheap entry level that you'd send the student from Germany to or something like that. We could do that in literally tens of milliseconds. And that was super valuable because our users didn't have any other way of doing that. We never envisioned things like you want to integrate your authentication solution with your marketing automation tools to dynamically select landing pages.
Jon Gelsey:That never occurred to us. Because we had Auth0 rules, we could see a new form of usage of our product. And now, again, that's the automated product management. It's like, oh, look, you know, here's this do we wanna, like, strengthen that? Do we wanna make check boxes in the portal as opposed to making them write, you know, 20 lines of JavaScript?
Jon Gelsey:That was another, like, super powerful way to to enhance the product as we learned over time.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:That is a very interesting observation, John, how a new form of usage for Auth0 started to open new avenues. Using these flow checks, if you could tie in authentication with marketing, that clearly would lead to more developer delight, adoption, and, of course, rapid scaling. My brain is still stuck at that point where you talked about $20,000 to get from initial concept to early product market fit. And I think that's a great lesson right there for our audience. Try to achieve early product market fit with frugality, great documentation, identify customer evaluation, and qualified leads.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Those are very fundamental building blocks in achieving product market fit, but but at the same time, improving the product where the notion of enrichment, the notion of rules allows for opening new doors. Let us talk about competition and especially the go to market motion now. When all of your competitors were going top down, pitching to CISOs, Auth0 decided to go bottom soft. Talk to us a little bit more about how that go to market journey played out.
Jon Gelsey:Oh, I'm sorry. You actually brought up that competitive point earlier, and I only addressed it tangentially, so let me address it heads up. So we looked at the traditional marketing of the ForgeRock or Ping or StormPass or other, how shall we put it, less successful products like that And said, well, number 1, our focus is on making developers happier by making them I think allowing them to integrate into the authentication environment they've got in their their price already, and that's actually a pretty easy sell. Developers don't have any money, but on the other hand, developers have enormous influence. And, there's no better friend and no worse enemy than your developer for for your solution.
Jon Gelsey:So we wanted to make them really happy. And so that was sort of the Trojan. It's like, hey, here's an authentication product, a security product you normally go to CSO with, and we're instead going to go to developers, and have the developers use it and like it and actually incorporate it into their products. And then when they move to production, say to the CSO or CFO or whatever, it's like, hey, you need to send a $100,000 to Auth0. But after they were we were sort of already integrated because it was all, like, really low friction point or way path to integrate us in without asking for permission from the the corporate bureaucracy.
Jon Gelsey:And it was only when you were ready to generate revenue that you need to ask permission to pay us. And, of course, nobody's gonna get in the way of revenue, so it was fairly easy to get paid in that percent. Not much selling was required there. K. So that was but again, we started with we're going to make developers really happy.
Jon Gelsey:I think it's fair to say that all of the traditional products at that time thought that they had to sell top down because, of course, it was the CISO making it a decision or at least highly influential and security products to acquire. Okay? And so this is a grand experiment on our part. You know, for all we do is gonna fail, fail miserably. In fact, one of the things, to tell you the truth, when I came in, when I was first, like, looking at looking at OCRO, it's like, I think the way we're gonna get to a $100,000,000 of of revenue, sell to a 1000000 developers who are using us because it's sort of easier to get past this point, and eventually, we'll get displaced by active directory or whatever for a $100 a year each.
Jon Gelsey:Okay? We're gonna do the make developers happy. And and very quickly, like, our first 6 digit annual subscription was in month 7 or 6. Our first order getting close to a $1,000,000 annual subscription came in the door month 7, and I think we closed that month 10 of 0s 0 Incorporated's existence. Okay?
Jon Gelsey:So what we found, I thought, well, we're gonna be making a bunch of money in small dollar segment transactions for the credit card swipes. That very quickly we found that because we built a product that was so appealing to developers, that was so well architected by Matthias that it could scale to billions of users and handle all of these corporate uses, then very quickly, the awareness we generated amongst these tens of thousands of developers, because we we were getting lot of usage very, very quickly very early on, translated to large enterprise subscriptions. It was awesome. Okay. ForgeRock, the StormPass, Ping, who else is out there, Gigya Gigya, all those other guys back then, they all kept, like, pounding the door and having these, like, super long and painful sales cycles with the the CISO and the CTO and the VP of engineering and such.
Jon Gelsey:It was rare that we had to talk to those guys because we spent a lot of time making developers really happy generating that army of, you know, 30 developers who've tried you and said, this is great. We have to have this. And telling their management who tells the CSO we have to have this. Having the dynamic were incorporated into our products, so they try and switch, they're interrupting revenue because they can't sell the product. Having the online reputation through our marketing tactics of extensive content marketing that generated very positive online sentiment.
Jon Gelsey:Like when you would Google for, you know, authenticate Active Directory Google custom database, we'd always show up as number 1 or number 2, you know, and certainly the half or top half of it. Page. Now those were all the dynamics that allowed us to have a very different and much less expensive and much faster customer acquisition cost and sales cycle than the traditional guys like Ting, etcetera. All that being said, because we were selling to our initial thought on day 1 was my first find the paperwork creating all 0 Incorporated. It was, well, we're selling developers, you know, that's a different approach.
Jon Gelsey:They'll they'll give us a niche that team can't approach because they have a hell of a lot of difficulty just convincing the developer just to try them out. So
Ross Haleliuk:let's double click on the content side. So you as you've just mentioned, you have built an extensive content rollout plan to essentially help drive inbound interest to the product. What were your top 1 or 2 insights for how cybersecurity startups can leverage content to use it as fuel for their growth? And can they even do it if they're not selling to the engineering persona, for example?
Jon Gelsey:Sure. I'll talk about how to how to generate what kind of content. And then if you're you're not selling to the engineering persona, it becomes a lot harder because you you need someone who is self confident enough to say, well, let me just try this out. Oh, wow. Look.
Jon Gelsey:This works pretty well. And if you're selling to the, if you're selling to the business analyst, you can do that because they'll try that if it's cheap and easy. If you're selling if you have a really complex product, you know, that takes sort of 30 days to set up and such, you're from this perspective, you're screwed or having to go down the ordinary ordinary enterprise sales path of, you know, cultivating senior management, the POCs, and the budgeting cycle, all of a sudden it's 18 months before you see your first dollar. So let's see. The kinds of content we started with our kinds of content being, well, blog posts, of course.
Jon Gelsey:Very early on, we stumbled across tools as an awesome way of content to your your ICP, your ideal customer profile, or or at least your ideal influencer profile. We had created Matthias' team had created for themselves a web page or web application that would allow you to translate a JSON web token, the encrypted bag of bits it is, to plain text, so they may get the right, token to decrypt it. And it was like on one side was plaintext, on one side and the other side was encrypted, and you know you could play with either and the other side would change, and this was I think, like, a day or 2 of effort on their part. It was pretty simple. You know?
Jon Gelsey:And Matthias was one of the, sort of active members of the committee that actually created the original JWST spec and said, you know, he knew it really well. So, you know, this wasn't very hard for us, for him and his team. And, you know, pretty early on, like within, again, a few weeks of Austira Incorporated being in existence an actual SaaS company instead of a consulting company, it was Matthias was like, hey. You know, maybe we should just, like, put this out because it costs us sort of nothing to run, and so, you know, see if this is useful to folks.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:So I
Jon Gelsey:was like, cool. Because our thinking at the time with our blog posts and other content we were generating, like, the quick starts in our documentation. And, of course, all of our documentation is on the other side of the outside of the firewall, so it's easily indexable by Google. And so that's another form of content. Was like, hey, this is gonna be useful developers, and we wanna have this cultivate this corporate persona that we're the developer's best friend.
Jon Gelsey:We're trying to do the try try to help them out whichever way. We can. That thing was a friggin' workhorse. People would use it for 6 months before realizing, noticing at that time, it was sort of on the bottom, kinda subtle, you know, hey. Brought brought to you by with with love by Auth0 that it was actually sponsored site.
Jon Gelsey:And then they'd, like, click on the Auth0 logo and, like, come through to our site and, you know, see what we were doing. That thing still generated. Like, the time I left the company about 4 years later, you know, 3 100 employees, it was generating an 8% of our total web traffic. I mean, at least to the austero.com, you know, public website. It was awesome.
Jon Gelsey:So so, yeah, so tools are great if you have a tool that's sort of useful and could be made into everyday use as it's generating trust and cultivating positive sentiment and a positive reputation. It's also generating better SEO, which is your your top metric of, how well your content marketing is working because people would tell other folks on discussion forums or in Twitter or whatever. It's like, hey. Use jwt. Io.
Jon Gelsey:That's a really easy way to go back and forth. It'll help you with your your debugging process. We, of course, tried the conference presentations as a form of content and content conference attendance, and I guess I'll stop here and say one of the smartest and luckiest things I ever did was not appoint a marketing person to marketing. Well, okay, I did initially, but then that quickly changed. I appointed an engineer who actually understood our product well.
Jon Gelsey:Okay? And it was an engineer, Martin Goncubnik, is brilliant guy, and he he had a good sort of instinct for what plays well for engineers because he is 1. In fact, he originally interviewed for the engineering team and then came to me and said, hey, I find out I sort of enjoy talking to people, talking in front of crowds and such, and I've got to be the developer evangelist. I'm like, Yeah, sure. I don't know if you need a developer evangelist, but I'll try it.
Jon Gelsey:Let's see what happens. Keep collect the data of what leads you're generating. See who's attending, try and do something. You know? We did, like, early days.
Jon Gelsey:One of our fun things was, like, having Bitcoins, couple of Tsuchis, or I forgot what, you know, cost us and that thing. Of course, those cards were probably worth $1,000 each today. But, anyway, you know, we do that, you know, do do stuff so that people would engage, and we'd have some mechanism of doing attribution as to whether the prospects that came to see Martin or read Martin's blog post or whatever, his developer evangelist work, was generating actual MQLs, marketing qualified leads, I. E. They came to our website, you know, then, you know, they engage or ask that.
Jon Gelsey:And so once as a placeholder, when I needed a new head of marketing, I said, hey, Mark Bontu. Why don't you become head of new head of marketing as a placeholder, and we'll we'll have a real professional in a few months after I finish my search. And after a I don't know. It was only after a month or 6 weeks. It's like, Gonto's kicking ass.
Jon Gelsey:Why would I ever replace him? This is great. So let's see. So blog posts. So then he shepherded so that we wouldn't have to be distracting the engineers to write blog posts because you have to have engineers writing posts for other engineers for it to be credible.
Jon Gelsey:Believe me, I tried, and mine was incredible, so I stopped doing that. Blog posts, tools, like jw.i.io. We also did something called samaltool.io that wasn't as wasn't as, as effective, but we tried it. Did conferences, we found that attending conferences was a and our figure of merit was leads generated per dollar spent. Was it a good use of of our dollars?
Jon Gelsey:We were doing much better with our online stuff. Oh, we were curating social media. All developers I think even today, it's fair to say all developers talk to each other on Twitter. And so we made sure that we were being watching on Twitter and making sure that we were authentically engaging as it made sense to engage. We found that when we would try to sort of pitch, you know, yeah, we're the best authentication solution that would perform poorly.
Jon Gelsey:So instead, we do things like, like a blog post. You know, it's like, here's the crystal programming language. Here's the 1,000 words or whatever on, you know, this new thing. It was, you know, new whatever it was 10 years ago. That would perform really well because we were, again, informing developers and making them helping them become better at their jobs as opposed to doing something that was an obvious advertisement.
Jon Gelsey:Of course, where we could work in, it's like, hey. By the way, we have a authentication product, but there's other things. We sponsored Jared Hanson's, Passport was it passport.com? Passport.js? Anyway, his his website because Passport was the the most one of the most popular I think it was the most popular NPM module, and it was authentication for for for node application.
Jon Gelsey:We're like, hey. You know, open source, cool. We'll sponsor the open source project. We'll give you money. We've got a bunch of designers, and I gotta get to that as a for content in a moment, bunch of designers.
Jon Gelsey:They can help make the website look better, shape it up. This is not gonna be an advertising. All we ask for is that you mentioned that we're sponsoring you and that you are a free alternative. You're welcome to say you're a free alternative. I'll see you're out.
Jon Gelsey:You have absolutely no need for us. And he would say that, but then he would also say, but, of course, you know, that's your node. And if you want sort of a more universal solution or there's other things, other limitations that that I have. And so he was was a very sort of honest honest and transparent form of a sponsorship as opposed to sort of an just a just brilliant ad. We found actually if we did technical presentations at conferences, they started to become more economical or, excuse me, more higher yield in terms of the dollars for leads that we would generate.
Jon Gelsey:So we actually ended up sort of stopping going to conferences other than we had an opportunity to do technical presentations. So those are the the kinds of things we would do for content to apply to developers. But because of all this, now it's like, what do I do to, again, to go after accountants? It's like, I don't know. Or do accountants hang out online?
Jon Gelsey:You know? I don't know. Maybe I could do, like, the accounting education site for, you know, erudite accounting thing, something like that. But it's it's a, it's something that sort of, differs for every market segment you have in terms of the messages you're sending in your content, although maybe not the forms of content.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:We've talked pretty extensively now about product market fit, go to market, and creating inbound demand using content. Let us now switch gears to the next section, founding teams. John, prior to joining Auth0, you were working in Microsoft in corporate development and strategy. It would have been a pretty cushy job, I might add, a nice opportunity to continue building your career. But you decided to leave Microsoft and join this 5 person start up at Auth0.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:The fact that you build it from 5 people to 300 people and from a pre seed stage company to a 6 and a half $1,000,000,000 exit is a testimonial to not just you as a CEO, but also how well you worked with the founding team. Eugenio and others had already started to build 0 when you joined them. Similarly, at Exnor, you came in, worked with 2 technical cofounders, and helped them to get a $200,000,000 exit to Apple. Please share some of your criteria in picking and working with teams. They are clearly best in their own categories, but how do you engage with them?
Mahendra Ramsinghani:How do you build trust? And more importantly, how do you lead them to success?
Jon Gelsey:I think sort of the first thing to say is that we're bringing in that outside CEO. It's like selling your company. You can't sell your company. You have to be bought. And so I actually, for both of those companies, when the idea of, you know, me becoming CEO was virtually brought up, I said, no.
Jon Gelsey:I have zero interest. Thanks. With Allcio, you know, I sort of this pushy work dev m and a strategy job with Microsoft. It was, you know, a lot of fun. You know?
Jon Gelsey:It's Microsoft, so you can go do a $1,000,000,000 deal, and that's, like, just not a big deal because there's only $1,000,000,000. You know? So there's and, you know, Microsoft is a great place to work. You know? You you're always learning there.
Jon Gelsey:For the founding team members, I guess, more than anything else, you look at their reputations, what they've what they've done before, and importantly, what other people think of them. Okay? And then you do, as much as you can, sort of that gut feel, because I would say sort of the most important thing for your cofounders is that they are honest and earnest, you know, as well as, of course, being, you know, highly technically competent in their their field. You know, like Eugenio, like, you know, he published a book on authentication, you know, but Matthias has spent years years in the in the area and, you know, had a great industry reputation from that as well as an online reputation from his contributions to open source projects or participations and things like the, the the JSON Web Token, you know, standard. So it's like these are just good people, and they'd be fun to work with, number 1.
Jon Gelsey:You know? Number 2, clearly top players in their field. And so I don't know. And then sort of my sort of thought process was like, you never know, because it's always a crapshoot, because you never know how things are going to evolve. But it's like, this feels pretty good.
Jon Gelsey:So bottom line there, it was a gut feel. I mean, DataInform, but a gut feel. With Exnor, sort of the kind of the same thing. You know, they're I was just sort of I had been playing around a lot just as a hobbyist, you know, a super naive hobbyist. So my background is just in as a computer engineer with doing ML, playing with ML training, and sort of learning coming up to speed on it.
Jon Gelsey:I hadn't had time to ever get involved with it since the big breakthroughs happened in 2012 or so for object recognition. And that catalyzed an introduction by the one of the investors in Exnor, Matt McElwein of Medrona. And to Exnor, it's like, look, they're academics, they're great. They'd love some help, because they don't really enjoy the general management. They enjoy the invention and the engineering management and such.
Jon Gelsey:Maybe you can help. And I'm like, well, I'll talk to them. And I got myself sort of looped into I said, fine. I'll I'll do some consulting to help sort of set you on the on the right way. I said, I'll do 3 months of consulting, half time, which, of course, immediately turned into full time not being paid.
Jon Gelsey:I just worked full time because it was so fascinating. And, you know, then they were like, well, you should be you should reconsider the CEO thing. Oh, okay. 3 months later. And it was because it was fun.
Jon Gelsey:And Ali and Mohammed are forces of nature and have amazing reputations in the ML world. Now the technology that they had developed materially advanced AI research, and I think it's fair to say still are doing that. Ali right now is the CEO of AI 2, which is one of the preeminent artificial intelligence research organizations in in the entire world that's here in here in Seattle as well as, of course, maintaining his professorship at University of Washington, which is also, I think it's fair to say, the the premier, if not, you know, one of the very, very most top topmost premier AI research organizations. You know, Mohammed Owen Ali invented the with coinventors like Joseph Redman. One of the, even today, standards for multi object recognition, a model called Yolo, you only look once to the was the very first multi object recognition model and still the one of the absolute very best models that are out there.
Jon Gelsey:I actually spoke with an entrepreneur, a very successful retired entrepreneur, or not retired, but, you know, able to sort of mess around on his own. I'm like, hey, what's the current, you know, state of the art multi object recognition? So I want to play with it. I'm going to be playing with it for a concept that I have. It's just, oh, you definitely want to use YOLO.
Jon Gelsey:It's the best. I don't know if you've heard of it. I'm like, yeah, so much familiar with it. Mohammed had invented a technique called binarization within, when was it, 2018? Yeah.
Jon Gelsey:Which is the technique DNNs, deep learning neural networks, are are basically, you know, it's a bunch of math. A lot of it's just multiply it adds. And traditionally, you had to use multi multi precision, 16 bit, 32 bit floating port operations, which is why GPUs are so useful. So Mohammed invented a technique so you could do binary operation, single bit precision. It's essentially making a decision of, hey, is the answer on the left or the right side of the number line here?
Jon Gelsey:And that meant you could run and get good results, you know, very accurate, very fast, which means you could run on like really dumb, cheap, simple CPUs like an embedded processor as opposed to having to have expensive GPUs. And so it was great for AI at the edge. Okay? You know, that was, you know, that's sort of seminal research. Nobody People have tried it before, and nobody ever got good results.
Jon Gelsey:And he was the first one to be able to actually get great results. And I'll only work with him on on on that invention. So those are the kinds of people I saw in addition to, well, this is just a lot of fun. I mean, it's brilliant people. I believe Mohammed had attracted an amazing team.
Jon Gelsey:Those are made of Matthias was able to attract an amazing team of engineers around him because of their reputations. So, like, you know, this is it's been fun working with these really smart people. Let me let me just try that. But all of this comes down to, you know, like, how do you find, like, the best people? It's like there's all these elements, but it it then ends up to serendipity.
Jon Gelsey:You know, you get lucky. You happen to make connection to the the person who's, like, the most amazing in that area in the world. And you're like, wow, maybe we can work together. If I would be helpful, I'd be happy to work with you. I think that's what a typical entrepreneur, the path to be able to follow to to have the same level of of luck because, you know, they were discount luck in, that that I had with with companies like like Akshnoor and and Alt 0.
Ross Haleliuk:How does the go to market strategy impact the kind of people start up should bring on board? Like, what are the kinds of skill sets founders should make sure that they have on the team?
Jon Gelsey:Let's see. So so the way to answer that because or answer that in an actionable way, the foundation of any successful company is product. So I think your your number one goal before you do anything else is find really amazing product people, excuse me, and engineers who can build product, and also have sort of a bit of a product management sensibility, so they're building the right features as well. You know, product great product solves all everything else. And so number 1 is technology.
Jon Gelsey:Okay? So if your cofounder considering has no product development expertise and, you know, has product development expertise, but sort of no no relationship to what you're doing now, if they're purely software and 0 hardware experience. I would tend to be cautious because it's it's kinda hard to come up to speed on on stuff like like that quickly enough for the for the start up to to do well with the limited funding that start ups always have. Your next element, to say the truth, I think, is, is your go to market, your marketing. And there, I think what you want is somebody with a either a track record or, you know, a clear capability and intent to experiment.
Jon Gelsey:And experiment means you know, marketing in general. Because, you know, you've got a product to announce, like, hey, I want to find the first 10 customers. How do I go find this? That's what marketing is. Well, by experiment, it's so many marketing executives today tend to be, well, here's the 6 programs I did at the last company I was at, and we're implementing those here.
Jon Gelsey:You know, here's the conferences we attended, and, you know, here's the ads we created, and, here's the proof of concepts that we we we put a place to convince them. And the thing is you don't know if those techniques are gonna be particularly well suited for your new startup. So instead of the marketing person who says, you know, look at all the things that I've done before, therefore, I'm gonna do it for you. Instead, say, what are the experiments you're going to run to figure out what are the right messages? Hey.
Jon Gelsey:Buy my product because of x, and what is the right channels, media? You You know, it's like, hey. Can I just, like, tweet this out, or do I have to do an ad, or can I do a a I don't know? You know, flyers under windshield wipers, which, of course, is a stupid idea until you experiment with it, and then maybe it turns out not to be a stupid idea. Not that I've ever seen it work for a tech company, but, you know, just for illustration saying that.
Jon Gelsey:So the the marketer who's a good experimenter, the the second thing you want to that marketer is someone who can speak in an authentic voice and therefore be respected by your ICP, by your the people you're selling to. And again, so many marketer I've seen so many marketers that don't have enough of a tech background, which doesn't mean you have an engineering degree. It means that, you know, you've been able to hang around and learn enough so that you can talk to those people. And so they sort of spout buzzwords or have sort of warm, fuzzy text that doesn't actually tell me anything about why I should, as a buyer, why I should sit up, spend spend invest the time to look more closely at this. And so finding a a marketing a head of marketing like that is actually really difficult.
Jon Gelsey:That's a that's a hard hard job, but I think that's your your critical next next hire that you you really need. And, and the absence of finding that perfect candidate, because they are really, really rare. I mean, I think every board I sit on right now, the complaint is, you know, how hard it is to find effective marketing people. I would just find an engineer, find one of those x percent of engineers who are actually extroverts and say, hey. The marketing stuff's easy to learn.
Jon Gelsey:Why don't you try this to expand your verizons? Because there's a hell of a lot easier to teach somebody how to do marketing blocking and tackling than it is to for them to go through the technical training that's necessary to actually being able to speak in an authentic voice to the ICP for your complex technology product. You know, if you're you're putting together a, I don't know, a new online marketplace, yeah, that's actually fairly easy because there's a lot of people who could talk authentically to other buyers of stuff online. You know, if you're selling an authentication product or, you know, a new laser or a fusion reactor or something like that. Now the ordinary marketing people, ordinary, I.
Jon Gelsey:E, they don't understand the tech, but they understand all the marketing techniques. Those are you need those people. But after you've hired this head of marketing who's setting the direction instead of vetting the messaging and the media to reach the the ICT. Because, you know, again, they know a lot of the blocking and tackling to to make it easier. And so those are all staff those can be staff members of your head of marketing to be able to more effectively convey the effective messages through the effective channels that you've your head of marketing through his or her experiments have come up with.
Sid Trivedi:John, let's move on from, you know, talking about working with people to talking a little bit about what we define as the art of deal making. And at Auth0, you raised over $60,000,000 across 4 different rounds of funding from the seed all the way to the series c, and you raise it from some of the best investors out there, funds like Bessemer Venture Partners and Meritec. And I was involved in 2 of those rounds. I remember the process, and I thought you ran an amazing process. You kept things competitive, but at the same time, you were very fair in terms of what you wanted, and you ended up with the best outcome for the company.
Sid Trivedi:What advice do you have for founders on running an effective fundraising process?
Jon Gelsey:Thanks for your five words there. I certainly didn't feel particularly competent as I was going through those processes, which, by the way, is something to point out to all the entrepreneurs. It's a tremendous burden list a tremendous burden off your back when you finally realize that everybody else is just as stupid as you are. You know, nobody sort of knows the quote right way. It's all instinct and such.
Jon Gelsey:And, you know, yeah, just do your best, and you will be fine. All that being said, the the first thing I wanted to do let's step back. When you're talking to VCs, it's important to understand the psychology of VCs. And, of course, please raise your hand as I misstate the psychology of VCs. But to be to be very cynical, but is it a good framing, is they're greedy sharks that are trying to improve their return as much as possible.
Jon Gelsey:Cool. And that doesn't mean they're bad people. It's just that's their job. That's what they were required to do. You know?
Jon Gelsey:Just like a corp dev guy at a big company. You know? They're they're gonna get the best deals. K? What does that mean to a VC?
Jon Gelsey:Well, he wants to make sure that he's got as low risk as possible and then be able to put it in enough so that he has a meaningful impact on his fund if if he's right that, you know, the risks are low, and therefore he gets his 10 or a 100 x or whatever it is. We we did have a a fairly healthy 3 digit x return for the early investors in Alcero. And so, really, what you're doing is conveying the information transparently and honestly to the VCs about, first off, what are you doing, you know, sort of convey why you're different and such, but then secondly, why the risks are well mitigated and the that they're gonna be investing in. Okay? So often, I've seen VC pitches from companies where it's like, oh, we have a black box to make detecting security anomalies, you know, amazing so you can prevent all ransomware attacks.
Jon Gelsey:It's like, cool. Everybody says that. What exactly are you doing here? Here. Have a succinct pitch which says, hey, we're doing this.
Jon Gelsey:We've, you know, trained in LLM over the last 2 years, and it does this amazing thing. I'm just making this up. Probably, I'm sure somebody's doing this out there. But, therefore, has, you know, very high success rate detecting anomalies, and that's why we can do think we can do a better job. We've got these people with a background in enterprise and, let's see, building technical organizations.
Jon Gelsey:That's a risk. Can you actually do it? You're not just, like, a lone engineer who, you know, will fail as a as a manager. We understand how to market and sell to my buyer. In this case, it would be to the technical organizations.
Jon Gelsey:And even specifically, it's with this, I I don't have the ability to go to some sort of lower level, so it's used by a little group. I know how to sell the CISOs. Like, like, one company, the I have a friend who's who's got a company, and he just has, among other things, this amazing CSO Rolodex. He, like, knew all the CSOs. And I was like, I'm gonna go on all of these CISOs.
Jon Gelsey:And in fact, I've gone to a dozen of them. And I explained the concept, and I said, I'll give you more details of exactly how we're doing it later. But what do you think of this? And they're like, man, I would buy that in 30 days. So now now you go to the VCs with all of the quickly I here's what I'm doing, and here's here's how I've mitigated all of the risks.
Jon Gelsey:And now you're having a really easy conversation. Now when you go in with the not a clear description of what you're doing, it takes a long time to get to the point of, you know, we're doing this ransomware attack, you know, prevention, You know, with with that without a clear explanation of how you've mitigated all the risks that you're you're seeing, then you're gonna have a have a hard time. And then do you finally, to your point of of competitive, you you really wanna you're doing your yourself a disservice. And in fact, I'll I'll dare say you're, you know, violating your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders, I. E, your employees initially and, you know, and so on your other investors, if you don't have a competitive process.
Jon Gelsey:You know? Go to go find in fact, your your your first investors will be very helpful in finding your your next investors. You know? Go have them sort of guide you. I'm like, here's 3 or 4 likely candidates you could go to.
Jon Gelsey:You know? Go go pitch to them, see what happens, and get multiple term sheets because you really don't know what your company is worth. You'd love to say it's like, well, look at all these comps. I'm worth, you know, $15,000,000 in the series series seed with, you know, 2 guys with a dog in a garage. What does the market say?
Jon Gelsey:You know, sometimes the market says you're right, but, you know, more likely the market says no, you're worth, you know, $12,000,000 or whatever. And so that those are sort of the processes is to think about what the VC's real real problems are, you know. You wanna give him the ammunition, him or her the ammunition so they stand up in front of their partnership that the that they're not embarrassed by what they're saying. And instead, it's like, look at this awesome deal I found. You wanna make them a hero.
Jon Gelsey:In parallel, your company product should make your buyer, the person who champions in you within the company, a hero. Wow. I was able to get authentication done in a, you know, a week instead of the 3 months it took with, you know, whenever we tried to use Ping or Microsoft. Wow. He's a hero.
Jon Gelsey:You wanna make that VC a hero the same same way. So think about so try think like a VC and try and think of what information you need to give them to make make them heroes, and that'll make your fundraising process really, really easy. But, again, it all depends on you actually having a a pretty compelling product. So focus on that first.
Ross Haleliuk:So you were on the m and a and strategy team at Microsoft from 2007 to 2014 where you led several acquisitions for the company. What did you learn on the buy side of the business? And, also, how did this help you in negotiating the acquisition deal as a CEO of several companies?
Jon Gelsey:Oh, you know, the very first thing that I found was a on the buy side that surprised me. You know, I came there after I was a a VC, an investor with Intel Capital. You know, it's just one of the biggest VCs in the world. You know, I did lots of deals. But, you know, by its nature, VC has a lot of gut feel.
Jon Gelsey:It's like, wow. You know? These are 2 guys with a dog out of garage. They got a great concept, and they got the track record, and it's a giant market. And, yeah, sure.
Jon Gelsey:What the hell? Let's go for it. I was astounded how equally or similarly emotional an acquisition process can be even at a extremely well run corp dev, you know, organization like Microsoft. It's like, hey. I'm the vice president of x, and I wanna go buy this because I wanna expand, and it's a new product line I wanna expand into, or it'll it'll create a new product line, and it's gonna be amazing.
Jon Gelsey:And I really wanna wanna do this. And it's like, well, yeah, but do we have any, like, actual evidence that our customers really wanna buy this? It's like, oh, you know, we're absolutely confident that it is. I cannot guess that you have any evidence. And so you have a lot of emotion that can go into that buying process at an acquirer.
Jon Gelsey:And so as a seller, that's important to understand is that, you know, hey. Is there a real business justification? The the best kind of acquisitions for a big company are the ones where I'm gonna buy you because I could add you as a new feature to this product that's already generating 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year. And that new feature is like a quick checkbox. It's easy for us to sell, for the big company to sell.
Jon Gelsey:It doesn't take much explanation because it's, you know, it's clearly a useful feature. Those are the the best ones because you have the most compelling, the easiest to realize value for that big company who is buying you, and therefore, the the deal is gonna go through with the least resistance. So that would be a a start, I I would say, for advice if you're you're getting acquired and sort of things that I learned.
Sid Trivedi:Let's go to the last section in talking about advising start ups. You've now spent most of your time since the sale to Apple the the XNOR sale to Apple advising start ups and serving on boards, and you now work with over a dozen different teams. And what's the one advice that you keep finding yourself sharing with each of these founders? Is there one advice that keeps popping up again and again?
Jon Gelsey:I would say one of the things that early stage startups, especially ones that are starting to show some some traction and generating some awareness in the market, is they get acquisition reach outs fairly early on. And and, of course, if I'm a CEO with no no transaction, no corp dev experience, it's like, oh my god. What's gonna happen? Hey. I just got this reach out from company x, you know, the multibillion dollar company.
Jon Gelsey:It's like, wow. How what should I do here? There's always a process that a big company goes through in making an acquisition, you know, which includes essentially a formal formal committee meeting where, you know, all the stakeholders, you know, could be you know, usually, it's the CEO. Sometimes, it has to include the board. If it's a really large company, maybe it's just a divisional president or or SVP.
Jon Gelsey:But there's a formal decision making process of, yeah, this concept makes sense. Go ahead and and engage. There are corp dev people, inquirers, that will ask you for a bunch of information actually before they go through the process. And, of course, that's enormous distraction for a start up, which is, you know, to put together all these historical financials and answer these questions or maybe even let's share copies of contracts and such. And so I find over and over again, you know, all of the CEOs, like, oh my god.
Jon Gelsey:We had to reach outreach out and, you know, they're asking for this, and, you know, this is amazing. And I say, wait. Wait. Let's go back and ask specifically, have you gone through the formal process? And they've said yes, you know, so the CEO has agreed that this is worth looking at.
Jon Gelsey:Or if not, well, what's the minimum? Hey. I I believe you. I trust you that, you know, you're seriously looking at us. What's the minimum I can give you to sort of answer the question of whether we're we're worth continuing to to look at?
Jon Gelsey:In in fact, what I really want and your your figure of merit as a as a as a CEO is, you know, what price range would you consider? And when they say, oh, you know, difficult, we need this and we need that, it's like, you guys are experts. You've looked at the field. You know what the general range would be based on the number of employees we have, or maybe I told you my revenue projection for this year, next year, something like that. Give me a range.
Jon Gelsey:I'm not gonna hold you to it, you know, and just need to know if this is gonna be worth my while. A lot of times, that makes them go away. I encountered I remember early on a an offer, I don't know, in the first year and a half, 2 years at Aussiero, you know, an offer of pretty substantial, pretty robust 9 digit number. And I'm like, this is great, and this is clearly a board decision. And so is the board have you discussed who's who's the board?
Jon Gelsey:Is the board fully signed up? And he's like, well, that's that's what you and I are gonna be working on together. And I'm like, no. No. No.
Jon Gelsey:We're not. I don't have why would I have credibility with your board? You know? Go go talk to them and see if they wanna talk have the conversations because I don't wanna be sharing all this information with you because it's an enormous distraction from us building the the company ever busy answering your request. That's one thing that I sort of surprised me is how often those, you know, acquisition outreaches happen.
Jon Gelsey:It's I I don't know. It's bad for on the hard part of the big companies, in my opinion. They shouldn't ask unless they're serious. So
Ross Haleliuk:Many of the founders you work with come from technical backgrounds and haven't been CEOs before. What advice do you share to help them on their journey?
Jon Gelsey:I think, Sudha, the the first one is is that, don't worry. Your instinct of how to react to that is to x. Whatever x is is probably pretty good. You know? Don't second guess yourself, or don't do things because people tell you or you believe this is the the way to do things.
Jon Gelsey:Think about the situation, and then sort of think think about what you think is a sort of a reasonable response. Again, you can test that. And in fact, a lot of the work I do with CEOs is they'll say, Hey, you know, I'm thinking about this, and I think this is the right way, but I'm not really sure. And so I was like, Here, let me frame it up. Your way is actually a great way.
Jon Gelsey:There's, like, these two other approaches. Here's the pros and cons of of all 3. I'm giving you additional information or additional food for thought for you to make your your eventual call, but your instincts are right. You know, I kind of agree with you that option 1 was probably the best, but don't forget there's always option 2 or 3 if you wanna consider it. So that would be 1, is sort of don't second guess yourself for for CEOs.
Jon Gelsey:The second thing I that's important, especially for deeply technical CEOs or some CEOs, is don't confuse your technical wizardry with market excitement. You want as early as possible to try and figure out some way of determining whether the product that you've built so far or contemplating of building is actually gonna resonate in the market, and somebody's gonna pay you a dollar for it. Okay? So how will you do that? Is there an MVP that's, yes, from your perspective, it's a piece of crap because it's really 10% of what you really want to do.
Jon Gelsey:Can you get somebody to pay you for that or make some other form of sort of proxy to revenue of, you know, design partner or an LOI or this, you know, something that really convinces you the right path. Because I've seen a lot of developers who go down a long way down a path, you know, and say, look at this amazing thing, and nobody wants it because it turns out to be, I don't know, like, massively difficult to install properly or, you know, it's got a bunch of confusing features that for for the giant company the founders worked out made lot of sense. It makes no sense to sort of their initial, you know, mid market, you know, 10 to 300 person companies, things like that.
Sid Trivedi:So Very last question to end the podcast. What's next for John Gelsey? Are you gonna continue the advisory path that you're doing, or are we gonna expect to see John back in the CEO seat again?
Jon Gelsey:Oh, the the problem with that question as, as Yogi Berra, you know, it's really hard to make predictions, especially about the future. You know, I'm enjoying what I'm doing now with being an adviser, sitting on on boards, working with VCs in, you know, a formal and informal capacity because I get to see a lot of things, and it kind of it's emotionally satisfying to or it gets to see a lot of things, which satisfies my as an engineer, it's like, wow. Look at this cool thing that this person's you know, this company is doing and how they're doing it and wow. And it's always fun to work with smart people. The, you know, that that being said, it's, I guess, I wouldn't fully rule out another CEO role, but I'm not really sure that that's would make the most sense, you know, especially because the sort of the emotional satisfaction I get, again, for the learning, but also sort of from the paying it forward, helping helping CEOs work through friction points that I had to essentially work through on my own as a as a first time CEO, you know, help them get through those through those friction points a lot more more quickly and hopefully in a way that preserves more value for themselves and for the company over the long run.
Jon Gelsey:So so we'll we'll see. But, right now, I'm pretty happy with the with not being a a CEO.
Sid Trivedi:Well, thank you so much, John, for joining us on Inside the Network, and and thank you for all those years of spending time with me personally as you look through two rounds of companies as well as the several boards that that we've been involved in both on an advisory and a formal capacity at your case.
Jon Gelsey:Oh, you're welcome. Thanks, Ian, for inviting me.
Sid Trivedi:Thank you for joining us Inside the Network.
Ross Haleliuk:If you like this episode, please leave us a review and share it with others.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:If you really, really liked it and you have some feedback for us, wrap it on a bottle of Yamazaki and send it to me first.
Sid Trivedi:No. Don't do that. Mahendra gets too many gifts already. Please reach out by email or LinkedIn.