00:56:27 · Adam Bry
[00:56:27] S1: to take more bets at the same time? It's an interesting question. So the, for a long, so we've been through different cycles as a company, like when we started scrappy early stage company, my co founders and I didn't come, you know, wasn't our second or third company where we could just like snap our fingers and raise a $100,000,000 or whatever, And also, you know, the Silicon Valley environment at the time was very different. So, by necessity in the early days, we were very scrappy with very small teams where prioritization was kind of everything. And we started to expand enterprise and government customers in 2020, money sort of became free, you could raise a ton of money. I think like a lot of companies we got ahead of ourselves there and kind of over hired and lost that kind of like lean, scrappy muscle and then, you know, took us longer for that business to really work, it took a long time for DOC to really mature and then we like, you know, we had very limited ability to raise money and we had our backs against the wall and by necessity we had to like to get lean and we, you know, we basically had headcount like flat or slightly down over a multi year period, but the output within the company like grew exponentially over that time as we just like got that sort of lean muscle back. So now, you know, we're not constrained by capital, but that lean muscle I think is like really core to identity as a company. And if you look at the size of our team and the revenue scale that we're at, it's remarkable. Mean, you can look at like comps that I look at on the public markets that build hardware software products, we're literally like a half to a quarter of the headcount with products that I think are like an order of magnitude more complex in their technical sophistication. So even though we could like, you know, raise as much money as we needed, grow the team as much as we wanted to, we're just not going to do it. Like the constraint that we will not shy away from is truly exceptional teams operating in an efficient, high velocity way.
00:58:22 · Adam Bry
And I've learned the hard way, you can't keep doubling year over year in terms of the size of the company and maintain that until like, you know, you can go on like LinkedIn and look at companies where they've like doubled year over year over year, and I just, and especially the ones that are building hardware, like, I just know with like a 100% certainty that there's like no way there, it's just not how the world works, that they're operating efficiently and effectively internally. And having been on the wrong side of that, we won't do that ourselves. And so that's really the constraint, is like having exceptional teams with awesome people that are aligned and doing great work, and we'll scale that as quickly as we can, but no faster, and that affords us the capacity to do a certain set of things, which is way less than the opportunity we're exposed to, and so then it's just the prioritization game, and I think that that's healthy, there's there's a bunch of things where it's like very obvious, if we built a product to do this, we would unlock a bunch of value, and we're not doing those things because we don't have the capacity to do it, so we have to be really thoughtful about what we do, and I think that's actually like, having been on all sides of it, think that's like the right healthy place to be.