Deep Dive with David Kidder

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my friend David Kidder. David is a multi- time founder, most recently founder and CEO of a company called Bionic, which was acquired last year by Accenture and is now called Accenture Song. David has also written a very large number of books, including a book called The Startup Playbook, and we'll talk about that today as well. David, welcome to the Daily Bolster.

David Kidder: It is so great to see you. We always love my time with you, and we spent a lot of time together in your CEO forum, which was a great part of my personal growth, so thank you for that.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, no. David and I were in a CEO forum together for many years, five to 10 years, somewhere in that range, while you were running Clickable. And what I love doing with the in- depth interviews on Fridays is to do arc of career. And I realized today when I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, I actually don't know much about your time before I met you, so before you started Clickable, which was your third startup or your fourth startup?

David Kidder: It was third at the time. So prior to that I had two, one bootstrap, one venture- backed startup, both in software at the time. So it was a lot of work done getting to Clickable and happy to share and jump into anywhere you'd like around those journeys.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. So real quickly, what were the three, the substance of the business and what were the outcomes of the business? Let's start-

David Kidder: Sure. So I had studied industrial design at RIT, and I had a good fortune of running into a founder named Bill Gillette who had a company called The IDEA Group. And The IDEA Group was the beginning really of the internet, 1994. And he was an early adopter, and as a result myself, of a lot of the silicon graphics technologies that you probably are familiar with, like the WebFORCE, Boxes, and Aurasma, and Wavefront, and Pro/ ENGINEER, and all these amazing things that created the first Jurassic Park and otherwise, but they got quickly into the whole web serving business and we built web- offering tools in a web service company and I was age, I guess 20, 21, and we built that and we sold that I think two or three years later to a company called Target Vision, who you've never heard of, but they built those closed captioned communication systems way back in big buildings. And today you ride an elevator, you see ads, and you see education, and big companies used to be big televisions and they did that type of communication and they acquired us to be their internet division. And so we built that up and I joined New York and did a roll up back by Omnicom with a whole group called THINK New Ideas for about two years and then left and started a company called SmartRay. And SmartRay was one of the first pioneers in WAP- based devices, which is the beginning of mobile communication. And so in partnership with TIBCO, and Sprint, and all these web companies, our web- based mobile companies, we built SmartRay to be basically an alerting company. So you're on your device, you're getting a text to your phone and you want to know this idea, knowing what the weather is helpful, knowing the value of your flight delay, but a flight delay from an economic perspective is actually the value of a cup of coffee. But if your flight is canceled, it's worth 100 times more because you have cars, and hotels, and things. So message to moment marketing was just beginning. And so we pioneered this. We raised up$ 5 million in venture. We actually almost sold the company, practically did, to about. com and our friend Scott Kernet and Bill Day and on a purchase point adjustment ended up having that deal not closed. But we had a great banker in Broadview, we ended up being acquired for a little under$ 40 million, about half the value of the prior deal, by Life Miners, which was in the email marketing space, and you're probably familiar with that way back with return path. And so integrated that and then spent out two years on the road traveling to about 42 countries on a backpack and learning in my late 20s, having that success behind me. And then Clickable, and life, and family, and kids began a couple years later. So really wonderful journey when we first met.

Matt Blumberg: And then what was the Clickable story? Give the same sort of synopsis of the Clickable story.

David Kidder: Yeah, it was very similar the nature of the whole message- to- moment marketing. So the complexity of managing search and social, which hadn't even really existed at the time across multiple API meant I had to learn multiple systems. And so the data that you would ingest from Google, and Bing, and Yahoo at the time was fairly archaic and complex to the degree that we basically built a patented idea around this thing called an act engine, which would study your data and tell you how you're doing, what you need to improve every day. So it's sort of thematically building on that same thing of SmartRay, which was in the mobile learning space, this case it was on the APIs of advertising. So we are making the average marketer just better, stronger, and faster, synthesizing and alerting early days of machine learning quite frankly. And so this act engine became this beautiful interface, Apple- like simplicity across those marketplaces. The challenge was is that we did two things wrong in that business. One was we built in two marketplaces, we did a huge partnership with a big credit card company to take our platform to their millions of customers who are spending more on that card than any one of their customers on Google. And then we are also serving this enterprise marketplaces. So we built this beautiful Siamese twin- headed kid that was serving two problems in the world, which is basically fatal. The second challenge that we have faced is that our APIs, which were built across those three platforms, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, turned out there was one winner and it was Google. So you consolidated your value that across platform friction became to evaporate because there was one monopoly quite frankly. And two is we're building in two marketplaces. So despite a wonderful culture and amazing people, we ended up having been acquired after about six years and sort of separated that Siamese twin- headed kid. We put one half of it back to the S& B marketplace and we took the other half to enterprise.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. I mean, look, the role of timing and luck in startups can never be understated. And that one strikes me as one, and I remember that because I sort of lived through a lot of that.

David Kidder: You lived through with me, yes.

Matt Blumberg: Timing and luck had a lot to do with it because yeah, platforms did consolidate down to Google, but then not afterwards.

David Kidder: Yeah, just to mention that because there was other platforms that emerged in the social space. In fact, we had two significant offers, one from the company we partnered with for over$ 100 million and didn't close. And the second one was from a big sort of 120 some- odd character company that didn't also close. And you're right, I mean, I remember in writing The Startup Playbook, which happened thereafter, I asked Reid Hoffman, " To what degree would you attribute your success to good fortune and timing, and not luck so much, but luck is for little people, but still good fortune and timing"? He said this remarkable thing. He said 80%. " 80% of all of our success was being there when it happened," which means with the right people, the right intellect, the right cap, the right idea, when this outside force changed the way a behavior existed or a new behavior emerged and went mainstream, not so early we're dead, and not so late we lost. And it really transformed the way I thought about predicting the future was less about being right and more about being alive.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. It's Woody Allen, right? 80% of life is showing up. It's actually 80% of life is showing up at the right time.

David Kidder: Yes, that's right.

Matt Blumberg: So one of the things I have always appreciated about you is that you're a student of the game, and through all of these startups up through Clickable, you really had an opportunity to be reflective, I think to sort of document your own learnings and frameworks about what worked and what didn't work in building a startup. You then write the startup playbook, write/ curate the startup playbook where you went out and you talked to people like Reid Hoffman who built businesses and distilled more and more and more learnings. Before we talk about Bionic and sort of how you applied those learnings in your next job, what stands out to you as a top three things you've learned from your own experiences but also curating those of others? So maybe fortunate timing as well.

David Kidder: Yeah. I mean, a couple things, and these are just as you prepared me for this, we wanted to keep this very loose. This is less sort of like some didactic, this is the play and this is the part, but more about, " What did I expect and who I was becoming?" Is really the question. So one of the traits as I look back, this actually came from a very interesting conversation I had with a beloved founder you and I both knew, the founder of Zappos when I was with a couple years ago, and he said, he's a guy who didn't have kids, but he was always fascinated about raising kids and also family and all that stuff. And he asked me what's the most important trait of raising my sons? I have three sons, you have three kids. And I said, " Grit. It was kind of Duckworth view of the never- give- up perseverance thing." He goes, " That's funny." His response to this was, " That's funny." I would've chosen curious. At the time I was kind of like, " Oh, that's a nice quality. It's important quality." But as I've reflected over the years, I think it's actually probably the most important quality is because asking the question of why, that relentless why on your interior life, in your relationships, and the problems in the world is the atomic value of creating something in yourself, of yourself, but also things in the world. And so curious is probably sort of the central thing I'd say is if that doesn't exist in yourself, it doesn't exist in your company, you're really not going to have any success. The second thing is the expectation that kind of like what I was saying before about good fortune and time is that most likely you're not going to be successful in the first several goes. Entrepreneur's not something you in the middle of your career decide to do in the same way an entrepreneur doesn't decide to be a surgeon in the middle of their career, it's like it takes a long time to be a good entrepreneur, to be a good CEO, to be a good leader. These are skills to develop challenges, which means that success is kind of a bad educator. You have to accept the fact that you're going to struggle until you learn. So part of that journey, curiosity, one second one is to be able to deal with brokenness, you're going to go through brokenness. And in the brokenness comes the learning, and in my view, all of the key learnings. The last part about this is really in the context of brokenness and getting through that, the curiosity piece is there is some things that are really true about creating some things that matter. And so that really leads us to The Startup Playbook, which is why did I do that? It was in the middle of the Clickable journey and we have lots of good friends who serve my board together, we both love and admire intellectually and personally. And one of them in particular, Albert, in one of my more challenging conversations that he had with me was I kind of asked him, I was like, " How come I didn't know? This is such an obvious thing, looking back, why did we do this? And also, you're the CEO, so you own it, there's no one else." So you have a great board and all their geniuses and their success, but at the end of the day, you're in the weeds leading and you own the outcome. That buck stops here when you really accept that is so profound. So I decided to go do basically 20 years of learning in one year, and that was really The Startup Playbook journey was to ask this question of these fantastic entrepreneurs, of which I believe you're one of them, was how do you bet your life? And if you listen carefully and you're curious, in this case 300 hours, they effectively all said the same thing over, and over, and over again that most ideas pass through these criteria, these journeys, the first three years, where the idea becomes true. It kind of becomes dead to undead through these criteria. And I'm happy to share those, but the reality was is that these learnings were kind of universal at that time.

Matt Blumberg: Of everyone you interviewed for that book, who was kind of the biggest reach? Was it Reid Hoffman or-

David Kidder: Well, there's Elon.

Matt Blumberg: Oh, Elon. Right. Okay.

David Kidder: Elon, Sara Blakely were both in there. Some pretty Roddy Brooks. I mean, there's journey people, people you would know who I love and had a lot of success but also kept going, they just never stopped, and I consider myself one of those.

Matt Blumberg: So Elon's a really interesting one, because this book was way before anything.

David Kidder: Way before he's famous.

Matt Blumberg: Tesla was functioning up and running, but probably no SpaceX and none of the other things he's done since then.

David Kidder: They were at the early stages of this. In fact, I met him through the Founders Fund and I have a funny story about having to follow him at their investor date through Fund one. He had just launched his first successful rocket, he had a GoPro stuck to it. And then I had actually literally followed his presentation with Clickable and my little animation after you see this in his forecast of like$3.5 billion from NASA, which he did end up doing. So very funny stories. And also, one of his best friends and brilliant wild friends is Adeo Ressi, who's part of his whole story. They studied physics together at Penn. And so I know have met him many times through that relationship, but he is not a personal friend. I did get a chance to invest in his companies as a result of that and I'm very grateful for that, but I'll share what he said to me, which was the time he just said very simply, and I won't tell you all the circumstances around by which our interview is very amusing, I'll tell you offline. But he basically said, " I can boil this down into a single idea," which this is now a famous idea, but back then it wasn't, he goes, " Wishful thinking is the enemy." And I got to tell you, you know me very well, which is it took me a long time on the spectrum of successful entrepreneurs, you don't have a lot of irrational pessimists, but you also equally don't have as many pathological optimists. Right in the middle is a rational optimist, which it took me a long time to become that CEO and founder. Clickable brought me there, but because I had such radical optimism and belief that that lesson he told me, wishful thinking is the enemy, was like a gestalt moment. It was like this foreground snap and I suddenly was changed really forever. So I have a lot of gratefulness for that book, I learned a ton, but there's some iconic moments like that that really changed me.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, that is a great quote. That is a truly great quote. I don't remember that from reading the book, but I think I need to write that down and post that somewhere.

David Kidder: It's such an incredible truth.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. All right, so let's talk about Bionic. So you, student of the game, curate the ideas of some tremendous entrepreneurs, and you start a company to bring the entrepreneurial spirit to the Fortune 500. I don't know if that was your mission, that's inaudible.

David Kidder: It wasn't. It was a crazy journey. I mean, I really didn't have any plan. I think I remember this interview that someone did with Brian, what's his name? The founder with Imagine Entertainment, Brian, I'm blanking, it'll come back to me, but brilliant guy, Brian Grazer. And he said, he goes, " When you really know, when you discover your purpose, the goals really don't matter. Your success is inevitable. There's an inevitability to it." And the concoction of The Startup Playbook, while I wasn't sure what it was going to become, there was an inevitability to the journey that this is going to produce an impact in the world. And that impact came through Beth Comstock. And Beth Comstock, who my office is named after, I love her. She was family to me. She was at the time one of the most forward- thinking leaders in the world, still is in a lot of ways. And she invited me to come speak at GE's global leadership meeting, which I didn't really understand was such a significant deal until I did my research on my way there on flip flops on stage with an interview with a couple other people. And she asked me at the end of this interview in front of 800 people, she bought 800 books. It was crazy. A mountain of books, you know how big that was. Mine were heavy at the time. And she said, " What are your big questions as a radical outsider to GE?" And Jeff Immelt, top 10 CEO at the time in the world, wonderful guy, still is, despite all their challenges and now looking back some really difficult times, I said, " Jeff, how many$ 50 million companies did you launch last year?" Totally off the cuff. It's sort of silence. And I said, " Well, I bet the answer is zero." And I said, " If that's true, that should just be terrifying. You have 300, 000 employees at the time, $ 90 billion in the bank. How come that doesn't happen all the time?" So Beth, in a horrified, quite authentic horrified, says to me, " Tell us how you really feel." And I laugh and there's a golf clap and he got offstage, and to his credit, and he deserves a lot of credit, Jeff comes back and he says, gets out of the seat, comes backstage. And he goes, " You're going to come fix this." And like I'm not asking you type thing. He goes back on stage and he says this verbatim line, he goes, " That's the most important question in 37 years since Jack Welch started this conference and we're going to blow it up." And he did. And so a month later he wrote to all 900,000 shareholders, he's going to base a lot of the way the company thinks on two books, one The Startup Playbook and two, The Lean Startup. So Eric Ries, and I owe a lot to Eric inaudible.

Matt Blumberg: By the way, just not for nothing. But yesterday I sort of record these episodes in batch, yesterday I recorded with Eric.

David Kidder: Eric is utterly brilliant. I mean, Eric is off the hook smart, he's a Yale guy or Prince guy, one of the two that you are close to. So he led the way and really pioneered a lot of the early thinking on build- measure- learn for enterprise, the lean for enterprise. But about a year into this, me doing the opening Startup Playbook, growth mindset movement, which we really started, and him doing Lean, I realized when I was talking to employees that the employees are saying, " We don't have a lean problem. It's really leadership. It's really capital allocation." So I started working, we realized is that the problem was is that these large organizations don't think about growth in the way that growth investors think about growth. They're really the big to bigger, they're efficiency based, zero- sum, share base view of the world people, where growth investors and growth creators, entrepreneurs and venture investors, think through a lens that are based on the total addressable problem in the world. That's really based on the outside in. It's an outside force, it's just what we do. The big companies, masters of business administration think from an inside out view of the world and the bridge to create it was really a missing capability that we invented called the GrowthOS.

Matt Blumberg: The thing I've always been fascinated about with big companies, and I talked to Eric about this in his recording as well, is the concept of moving the needle on a company with$ 10 billion in revenue or 100 billion in revenue. If you can't create a startup inside that company that has a clear shot to$ 100 million in revenue, or$ 250 million in revenue, it's not worth their time in a lot of ways because it's never going to move the needle as much as driving 1% more retention in their core business or 1% more acquisition in their core business. And yet, startup people like us think like, " Oh my god, $ 100 million dollars business, that's lightning in a bottle. That doesn't happen very often." How do you reconcile those two things? And then as a lead in, what is Startup OS or GrowthOS?

David Kidder: So there's this myth that large organizations can't do it. And so if you look back, I'm not going to name the company, one company in particular, which is a very, we help really transform turnaround, an iconic company. We went through a massive activist moment and we survived that and being one of the most successful turnarounds really ever, we were central to, we look back at their last billion dollar revenue company that they built, and you would know it by brand, I'm just not going to mention, but when they look back, it took them 13 years to get that idea from zero to a billion dollars. But when they looked at it really deeply, it actually took them 11 years to go from zero to$ 100 million, and two to a billion. And this is fundamentally a problem, which is it's really zero to$ 100 million. So the reality is that they only tried five times in like 10 years. And when you think about it in that context, and then you start looking at the data that we know, which is this, is that 70% of all the money you make in portfolio returns comes from 7% of capital deployed. So if you look back and you say, well, if you're the CFO, you're saying, " Well, okay. If that's true, then I want to get through the 93% that's not going to work as fast and cheap as possible, i. e. lean, and I need to have the mindset to say, 'Well, why did we originally invest in the 7% that became the unbounded returns?'" And there are two investment signals that create all that value. The first is conviction and conviction describes a belief on evidence that doesn't reflect the core data. It's new evidence that you are right on time. Outside force mean proprietary gift. We believe that's becoming true, that's conviction. But the challenge is really the second signal, which is when you look back and say, " Well, why do we invest the company mail money?" It's actually because of an investment that's predominantly based in non- consensus investment criteria. You make all your money from the ideas with the highest disagreement rate, which is exactly the opposite of how they deploy capital. So if you can fix that, if you can take leaders and give them growth boards and not committees who can do high conviction, non- consensus investing in portfolios, that radically increase the volume of bets and failure to get that disruption in the zero to 11 years to create to$ 100 million where they build, buy, partner it, they know what they're building, they win. And that's what we did. We built a system. I always jokingly say we built the anti- McKinsey, anti- Six Sigma of our generation.

Matt Blumberg: It's so interesting. When you talk to people who work at accelerators, they will tell you that between one in 50 and one in 100, somewhere in the middle, like one in 67 I think was the last number I heard, startups create all the value in the portfolio. So these are the earliest, earliest stage investors. It's going to be very different if you're talking about a late stage investor where no investments lose money, some make more than others, but the earliest, earliest, earliest stage one in 67 is the number I've heard quoted a bunch.

David Kidder: Well, it's funny you mentioned that. Personally, I've done 85 direct investments in the last 15 years. I've been fortunate to have access to a couple that are really outliers, which really aren't even that relevant. The SpaceX of the world, the Palantirs, the Airbnb, the Stripes that really, if you take those out because they just are so math busting. So if you talk about 80, call it 80 investments just this year had my first 100x return. That's not public, but it only happened in the last four years. So if you look at that, that's 15 years of lighting your money on fire, getting good at this skill, very, very difficult of capital that are locked up for 15 years of illiquidity before you get good at it to get something you had a chance, so your math is spot on.

Matt Blumberg: And is that the same math that the CFO of Boeing is doing, or General Electric, or General Motors? Is that the same math? Like they just have-

David Kidder: So the math that they have is, the element that they are not missing, but we are missing in startups is the power of acquisition. So the reality is that if a company can discover why us and why now. Let's say there's an outside force AI or it's blockchain or it's something that's truly new proprietary gift we need to bring in, and we have a portfolio where we understand that this new need world or need that's shifting is so radical that we have to win it, we must win it. We'll radically increase the volume bets. So we're not going to make five big bets, we're going to make 50, but we're going to do it across the spectrum of venture bets, partnerships, incubations, accelerations in the core, outside the core, because we're trying to surround the problem and along the way we're going to discover how we will win it. And that's the question which is if you have, let's say you take Citigroup for example, if they're getting disrupted by inner country transactions of money, which is a real thing, transfer wired or otherwise, once they discover how to solve that problem and they decide, they find the company who has a common business model that's winning it, they can move a trillion dollars to that platform. They don't have to wait. So that's how you solve the zero to 100 is they understand why so now, the missing pieces, they build around it, and then they decide whether they're going to scale it themselves organically or they're going to move the future forward because they're going to take their client or customer base and just move it to that platform. That's the advantage. And we know as founders, that's real. That's a real thing, it's a proprietary gift we don't have. That's where scale becomes the disruptor, so we solve that.

Matt Blumberg: So interesting. So when you, and I don't know how much of this is public or you can talk about, when you think about all the mammoth companies that you worked with over the years at Bionic and all the businesses you helped them create and launch, is there one you can point to that's the biggest success or the most unexpected success?

David Kidder: Yeah. I mean, one that I think is on all those levels is a company called EverGrain that we helped launch with Anheuser- Busch, AB InBev. And we built this thing with the CEO, the prior CEO, and the leadership team called ZX Ventures, and we deployed a tremendous amount of capital through it. We launched 143 companies basically, and not bets, companies. Over a dozen really became significant, especially during the pandemic, but the mindset shift of moving from TAM to TAP, Total Adjuster Marketplace of the world, inside out share base view the world to Total Addressable Problems or needs from the outside in transform them from saying their global strategy from two beers a day, let's convince people to drink more beer to, we're actually in the business of enhancing experiences of being together. We happen to use beer, but there's a lot of experiences we can enhance by being the enabling force of that. Like for example, from TAM to TAP, if you ask the question of what's their proprietary gift? One of them happens to be protein. So they are one of the biggest protein creators in the world because they create more yeast than any company in the world because of fermentation. And years ago, six years ago, seven years ago, when we first started working with them, they used to dump that either to a farm for a penny for pound or as garbage sludge. But if you hired a biotech company to come look at that and you had a bunch of brilliant PhDs, wish they have, and you can extract that protein, it's dozens of times more powerful than even whey protein. So if you ask, " Well, where's that proprietary gift valuable?" One of these issues of the world we live in is the sustainability of meat. There's just simply not enough meat, sorry, energy in the world to put into the world of beef or cattle or beef or cattle, chickens and pork to be able to supply the demand that comes from our lifestyle in the world. In fact, we're predominantly lighting the world on fire between methane and that production. I think it's 17 to one pound in, pound out. Well, we're going to live in a lab- based meat world, and one of the most complex aspects of that world is the supply chain for the protein that creates that meat of which this company, AB InBev, has built a company, EverGrain to solve that problem. And why is that interesting? Is because about 11 months before Wuhan and our life as we know it being disrupted, African swine flu hit China and destroyed 60% of the protein- based pork. 160 million pigs globally buried alive. Very sad. It was like going from landline to mobile. We're going to live in a lab- based pork world, China is, and the rest of Asia because there's just not enough energy in if they bought every piglet in the world for the next seven years to be exactly where they are today. So that's about being quote, unquote, " Right and on time." We were years in the work of solving that complex problem when an outside force happened and changed their reality. So EverGrain is a perfect example of radical thinking, radicalized, but learning as a skill. There's others, but that's my favorite one.

Matt Blumberg: That's a tremendous, tremendous story because it's not just right, and you got the timing right, it's that you thought it up or someone thought it up. I mean, that's just fascinating.

David Kidder: But the lesson is proprietary gift and this is a profound iconic idea, which is when you back up and you say, " What exactly is our proprietary gift? Either now or in the foreseeable control of the future, how can we build something that's literally an order of magnitude greater than anybody that is impossible to replicate or we already have that? How do you unlock that?" That's really what the heart of it is. And that's same for small or big companies.

Matt Blumberg: All right. So last question maybe. You now find yourself at Accenture, so you spent your whole career in small companies, starting small companies, running small companies, scaling small companies. The biggest one you've ever scaled was probably still small relative to anything.

David Kidder: Oh, yeah. We all are, yes.

Matt Blumberg: So now you find yourself for a few years shepherding your business at Accenture. You're probably, I don't know what level you are at Accenture, a VP?

David Kidder: I'm a managing director of the growth and product innovation group, which is really Accenture Song's growth business. It's now really all the spine and ribs of that was our core business, the GrowthOS, which has now come together in around that. So it's a multiple billion company business that I'm sitting sort of evangelizing in and on.

Matt Blumberg: And what are you finding now that you're on the inside of a giant iconic American business?

David Kidder: So I'll tell you a couple of things. I mean, first of all, the reason why we did that deal, we had a number of opportunities for big, like Microsoft and other companies that were very attractive. But the reality was is that our business, its ability to grow in its scale was really limited by the number of access to Fortune 100 to 500 CEOs and that's something Accenture dominates in a lot of ways. But we're not in the business sort of like the theoretical physics of services, we're the applied physics. So that's a really good fit for us because we build things, we're thinking and deploying capital and building things. And Accenture is probably the best in the world, best especially when it comes to cloud and technology and otherwise. And then also culturally, the type of company it is, there's just a tremendous amount of good people. The intentions are always good. You might not like the system. So the answer to your question really was really my closing, my last town hall at the day of the acquisition. And I'll just tell you what I told the team. One was is embrace the suck, so the idea that a small company doesn't have a suck is just simply not true. It does. So the question is in your mind, you can overlook it, but it can be 5% or 10% of your job is going to be the labor of building the company on versus in. And I said, it's really no different. There might be a little bit more, it's just going to be different. So great Navy SEALs just embrace the suck to get through things, so don't pretend there's not. Just embrace the new one. And I'm doing the same thing. So it's a big company. Yeah. Okay, fine. It's just different. Let's not pretend it's different. Don't be nostalgic about the crappy parts of your job. Just embrace the new ones. That was one. Two is, and having been through, this is my fourth exit to really work to where more asset transactions was surrender, is that if you come to the table with fear of change or nostalgia looking back, you're going to fail. You have to surrender because it is different. That's the whole point. Nostalgia is the enemy. I had this model, this mental model of Bionic called the Timberlake years. And Justin Timberlake, unlike Taylor Swift, these other legendary actors have incredible chapters where they go from the Mickey Mouse years to the boy band NSYNC years, to the solo act years, to the SNL, the coming of age. And I frame the chapters we're going through in the Timberlake years or the Swifty years, we call it, you can just pick your actor because one, the imagery of his life are crazy, they're hilarious. And the second is that you really can't leave that chapter until you all agree that those problems that you're looking back on are solved good enough and we're moving forward together. But when we leave that chapter, we're not looking back at those all problems and trying to solve them again or say they were even fun. It's like looking across the Red Sea and being like, " Well, it wasn't so bad in Egypt." No, it was really bad. We're here for a reason. So I had trained the company's mindset for years to, in chapters, moving Accenture Song was the SNL years. We were not looking back, the NSYNC years were not great. We had a couple hits, we looked like idiots. The Mickey Mouse, really bad, a couple hits. It's okay. So they surrender, embrace the suck, relieving the Timberlake chapter. We are now the SNL coming of age years.

Matt Blumberg: I love it. That is a great place to end. David, thank you for being here. So many great notes that I'm going to take from today. I think my favorite one is wishful thinking is the enemy, but there are a bunch of good ones. Thank you so much for joining me.

David Kidder: Always grateful my friend.