Acquired - Special—A Conversation with Microsoft's Head of Strategic Investments Brian Schultz

0:00All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired. LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

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2:01Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm, or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. It was a classic reload the page problem. Turn it off, turn it on, hit it a few times.

2:29Eventually, it works. Welcome to episode 27 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Today's episode is a discussion about M&A at Microsoft with Brian Schultz.

3:02Brian is the managing director and head of strategic investments at Microsoft and Brian actually started at Microsoft in 1999 in CorpDev and then left for a little detour into the startup world in the mid-2000s. He left and co-founded Antella here in Seattle which was ultimately acquired by Photobucket.

3:25And you did that with Dan Shapiro, who's now the co-founder and CEO of GlowForge here in town. Shout out to Dan. After that he came back to Big Tech and to M&A to Microsoft and has been back in Corp. Dev and now running strategic investments ever since. But remains very active in the Seattle startup scene and has been a friend to us and many others here. So, welcome Brian and thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah.

3:53We are super excited to, you know, we've had Taylor Berida from Adobe on who runs Adobe's CorpDev, but super excited to talk to you about kind of the bridging this world between kind of the big technology companies and running CorpDev there and strategic investments, but actually having gone and founded a startup yourself, how, you know, What's your perspective? What kind of brought you back into Microsoft after tasting the startup world? Right. Well, there's I think a whole bunch of different ways to look at it and You know, I think the one thing that I certainly believe is that it actually has made me a better cropped F person by far having been on the other side, if you will, you know, talk about empathy. Empathy, you know, having... Yeah, and having, you know, had to raise money and deal with these discussions that happened between strategic investors and acquires... Raise money and sell your company.

4:53all these things and so you're just having and as a CFO CEO of a startup having been on the other side both on the investing and acquiring side I also I think I hope have waited a lot of pitfalls and kept my you know captable clean and you know I knew a lot of things that I should be doing that I think a lot of folks can get trapped in And so I think having the diverse set of experiences is a great thing, and I wish more folks in Microsoft and other big companies, as well as in startups had that empathy to be able to reach across the aisle. And of course, now we're getting to politics and didn't mean to do that, but going back. Is there an election this year? I don't know what you're talking about. Block, completely blocked.

5:36One good example is in a startup, of course, you have trouble getting people to call you back. You want to do partnerships, you want to do fundraising, whatever it is, you're just out there trying to make yourself known and actually do things. Whereas in the big company, you almost have the opposite problem.

5:49We have too many people you have to deal with you know, and so I thinking specifically about M&A you know I acquired a company a few years ago That was about 25 people and I remember looking at the conference call You'll set up on my computer said you've 20 people on the call so to do the acquisition of 25 people I was talking to 20 people And was that a just an internal Microsoft just an internal call right and and you know if you think about You know all the business owners plus their lawyers in and outside of the company and It's just you know, it's a big effort now, you know, of course the that doesn't quite scale right and so even doing say an acquisition of LinkedIn you don't necessarily have a much bigger team on the inside But you know along with 10,000 people exactly well, yeah, definitely not hopefully not so you're you're the head of strategic investments to give a little bit of context to our listeners. Can you explain what that?

6:44looks like organizationally inside of Microsoft and what the process looks like when you're requiring a company. Like do you find the company and bring it in or does a business owner find the company and then loop you in to start the actual formal process? How does that look?

6:58The corporate development team within Microsoft sits under the CFO and we manage Microsoft's balance sheet activities. And so if you think about acquisitions, investments, investors, and joint ventures, when we do these partnership activities as it relates to the balance sheet, that's where corporate development gets involved. And how we find companies or find our targets and have these discussions is It's really a mix, although it's typically driven by our business groups in terms of the finding of the companies. And that is because our product teams, they know their markets much better than we do. And certainly at Microsoft, we have such a broad-based business in so many different areas. It would be really difficult for the central team to be all-knowing.

7:45You have to give them space. You guys obviously have these extensive maps of different spaces and it's constantly evolving and you have new players coming on board. In any given little micro area, you might have 10, 15, 100 companies. If you think about that at the Microsoft Scale, crossover products, you'd be looking at a really complex diagram. It's really impossible for a central team to keep up with all that. We really rely on the business groups to think about what's in their space as they think about their roadmaps. And most of the M&A, obviously the headlines go to links in and the large size acquisitions we do, but most of our acquisitions tend to be much smaller and are really driven by those product roadmaps in terms of where there are holes and what they need to fill and where they're going. And so those are really just square up the center of where the product teams are thinking. Yeah. I'm curious to kind of go back to

8:44the fact that you have actually been a founder and a startup and a successful one that raised money and then was acquired and then did M&A at Microsoft before and then came back to do it again. How did it change your perspective? Are there particular things that you're more acutely aware of now or that you think about differently than before? Because when you joined before, I think you'd been an investment-packing analyst, right?

9:12many folks who come into M&A roles at companies have been, which speaking from experience myself, you know, that's pretty far from actually being a founder of a startup. So how the perspective change? Yeah, well, you know, when I got to Microsoft, even when I was doing investment banking, I was thinking, you know, It's, you're almost too removed from what's actually happening on the ground in terms of doing something, right? I mean, you're kind of advising and moving things around the chess board, but you're not actually doing anything producing anything. Not building the chess pieces. Exactly. And so, you know, in investment banking, that's why I joined Microsoft, was I thought, wow, I really want to get into an operating role in a company, and that seemed like a good path to do it. And this was, you know, back in 1999, right, at the height of the .com boom.

9:58where everything was kind of going a little crazy, and my thought at the time was, you know, this is going to end somewhat soon most likely. And I want to go get my self-positioned in a place where, or I could actually, you know, still have a job in a year, and actually... Yeah, and actually learn something from it. And so that's where that Microsoft job seemed really appealing, and I'd never been to Seattle and hadn't really thought too much about coming here to do that, but it worked out nicely.

10:26and we were super active in those early days and then I got here and did a lot of fun things and actually helped create an internal startup at the time. I was advising the Windows and our kind of infrastructure teams, enterprise teams on security storage management and those types of systems and we started the security business group back then. Is that what became Windows Defender?

10:52Eventually became Defender and a whole bunch of other things and one of the first things we did was acquire, at the time, antivirus technologies and roll those in along with some stuff that we built. And so I joined this startup group and realized, hey, I really like this startup thing, but doing it with a Microsoft was not quite what I had in mind. And I saw the pros and cons of that and thought it would be really great to go and actually do it for real.

11:21And so actually, there was a company I co-founded before Antella, which was at the time known as Genesis, and then became Plectic's Biosystems. And there was a Microsoft co-founder that I met, and we went out and raised money for that company. And then I left that company after about a year, after we got a funded, and joined up with Dan and Charles, where we founded Antella. And so, the kind of that pathway, and what I realized was...

11:47kind of taking the business knowledge and the corrupt dev knowledge and general finance and business and strategy thinking and work with some really great technical and product folks was really a nice combination. And so that was kind of that role that I took on as kind of founder and then evolving into CFO COO. I'm curious, you're kind of getting into your specific role, which I assume probably takes.

12:13much if not most of your time these days in the investment side. How does that function in Microsoft? And Microsoft just relaunched Microsoft Ventures, which is early stage investing, kind of more traditional VC type stuff. You do later stage larger checks, right? Yeah, and that's actually probably gone through more of a significant evolution than the core M&A role has in those.

12:40three epics. So in that calm time frame, Microsoft was very active as an investor. And in those days, every company was going public a year after they were founded. The series B round was your IPO. Pretty much. And what was commonly accepted as one requirement of your IPO, it wasn't revenue. But it was actually having a strategic investor. And so the name brands of your investors, uh, lent a lot of strength to your IPO without anything else. When the number one VC question was, what are you going to do when Microsoft enters your space, right? That's, that's right. And, and so.

13:20Cisco, Microsoft, the big companies at the time were investing a lot in a lot of different startups. We were also investing. It was a really interesting time in terms of influence on how the world was going to play out. We were investing in undersea fiber cables and satellite companies and cable companies and telcos and DSL coming. You name it. We were really spreading around a lot of money. That didn't end so well.

13:50we didn't really get the strategic return. And of course, from a Microsoft perspective, despite having a nice balance sheet, our investors aren't investing in us as an investor. They're investing in us as an operating company who's delivering revenues and profits to our shareholders. And so even if you take a billion dollars of our balance sheet and turn it into two billion, three billion, five billion, it doesn't really impact your stock price in the same way as doubling, tripling revenue.

14:20and profit. The reason to do it was really strategic reasons of how are you going to take those investments and turn that into leverage plays on increasing revenue and profit for the company. That didn't really happen.

14:35And so we really stopped doing it for the most part throughout the 2000s. And I think one notable exception was our investment in Facebook back in 2007. And so what we did do is we said, you know, where it's really, really deeply strategic, we'll go ahead and we'll do an investment. And that's what we did in Facebook's case. But otherwise, we weren't really doing this, you know, kind of, hey, we'll put some money in our balance sheet, we're a partner, and why not, kind of kind of things.

15:04quick sidebar. I mean, the Facebook investment at the time the world thought you guys were crazy, right? Yeah, they were not billion dollar valuation, I believe. And that's right. The last round had been done at five, five billion. And so we took it up to 15. And yeah, they certainly ridiculed us at the time. Obviously in hindsight, that did okay.

15:25Turned out pretty well. Yeah, and I remember when I was there that began or this was this was after the investment but There was a lot of integrations like the companies were very friendly with each other there was one Windows phone was kind of Doing a lot of things differently than than iOS and Android were doing and kind of like integrating across networks. There was a lot of like Kind of proprietary first party type integration with with Facebook in the contacts and providing Bing back to them for mapping things and there was there was like a a very tight integration there. So I can totally see what you're talking about on the strategic side. Yeah, and that was exactly that case, right, where we could really deeply align with a partner and do the investment, create this whole win-win scenario. I think coming back to investments, they're often talked about as either ore, you can acquire as ore, you can invest in us, and I don't really think they operate that way as really

16:23substitutable goods because, you know, as a minority, oh completely. Speaking as a shareholder in lots of startups, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's very different if you create an exit for the company versus just put more money into the company. That's absolutely right. And if you think about, again, coming back to the strategic angle of it, you know, if we own, you know, 5%, 2%, 10%, even 20%, even with a board seat of any given startup, we really don't have any control.

16:53And we don't really have really anything. You know, yes, you have some equity, and that's obviously nice. But again, that's not really what we're here for. We're here to be partner. Our street is in confidence. This street isn't evaluating Microsoft's share price based on how good you are as an investor. That's absolutely correct. That's like a fascinating, taking a step back for listeners and thinking about how we normally evaluate companies on these episodes.

17:22Being an LP or let's say your eventual capital firm and you have LPs, the pressure on you and the expectation is very different than being an operating company with shareholders. The shareholders are looking for multiples that come from your operations and your ability to execute core business activities in a sustainable way.

17:45And when LPs are in a fund, they're in it for 10 years. They're looking for three times or so the capital that they put in, hopefully more. But really, it's like, can you guys sustainably make these investments? And I think as an operating company, to your point, it doesn't move the share price. It's not the business. That's right. And from an employee perspective, take this all the way down to the individual practitioners in any given corporate fund. And again, for any of you who are talking to different corporate investors, ask them how they get compensated. Most likely, if it's your typical corporate VC, and it's a balance sheet activity, they're employees of the company. Their compensation is going to come in shares and bonuses and salary from the operations of that company. It's not coming from whether or not you succeed.

18:35Whereas, obviously, VC investors in a different place. That's why you have to be really careful in this world of strategic investing and coming back to why we do it. With all that context and having done it in the past and realized it didn't work, what's the philosophy this time around?

18:53Yeah, and when you say it doesn't work, I mean, I think you have to be careful in terms of work to do what, right? And so if your objective is these really deep strategic tie-ups and or return on your capital or both, right, I mean, I think it's kind of hard to do both at the same time. And you think about setting valuation and being a difficult investor, sometimes you have to have hard conversations.

19:16as an investor with your companies and you think about obviously the hardest one that a board might have to do, which is changing out of CEO, as a partner, as a strategic investor, we're not good at that. We certainly don't want to ever have to turn to our partner and say, by the way, you founder, you CEO, you're not right for this company anymore as an investor.

19:39We're also even, you know, I mean, there's so many whole set of difficult conversations that come along with being an investor in companies. But, you know, one in particular I'm thinking about is, hey, now is actually the right time to sell the company. To sell the company? To fold the company? And so there's a lot of conflict there. And it's why, you know, I think if you want to do strategic investing the right way, you have to be really...

20:03clear on what your objectives are, and why you're doing it, or you create lots of conflict. And in many cases, they can backfire. And certainly something we want to be very cognizant of is our reputation among investors, among founders, and technologists, is we never want to damage our reputation as a good partners, a good technology company in order to achieve those investment returns. Because obviously that's Pennywise Pantfulish for us.

20:29So would you say that effort is more around creating strategic partnerships through investment rather than investment to generate returns? Well, so it's the way we've scoped it, and there's actually two components to this. One of them is relatively new, which as of earlier this year we created Microsoft Ventures, which is an early stage venture effort. Microsoft Ventures is out there looking for companies that are in generally our strategic partnership ecosystem, and they're looking to establish those relationships, starting with that equity check and developing a relationship. So they're out there looking on the cum.

21:08if you're using a craft analogy. And so, you know, the fact is that the early stage, you know, kind of your seed, your A type stage investment, it's hard to be a meaningful strategic partner to Microsoft because our scale.

21:21It's really hard to do. Now, you can be a potentially really interesting strategic partner. And so that's what Microsoft Ventures is there to do, which is to create those relationships and those opportunities and be in those conversations around how we can add value to companies. In some cases, that's going to come with that equity check and then a partnership in some cases.

21:43You know, come just from the partnership, but they're there to have those conversations. On my side of the house, it's almost the opposite where I'm leaning into companies that are already Microsoft partners.

21:54and that are in deep meaningful ones. And we're doing, you know, call it five to ten of them a year. And it's really more of an endorsement and ecosystem leverage and tightening that relationship as opposed to trying to find new and interesting partnership opportunities. And so that's why I'm more of a growth investor, if you will, because these companies tend to be a little bigger, a little more mature.

22:18Yeah, and are these companies like, for instance, that might be selling through the Microsoft Salesforce on the enterprise side all over the year? Yes. And so we typically look at, obviously, we have lots of partners. And those partnerships come in, when I look at a strategic investment, really three criteria at its core. One is, on the partnership side, is there really interesting technology product integration?

22:46between the two companies that makes this really interesting. And then the second piece, is there some sort of go-to-market sales marketing motion that makes the combination of the partnership powerful? And where I find really interesting components of both, right, because there are plenty of companies that have one or the other, but when you find a really, really impactful combination of those two things, that's where it gets more interesting as a strategic investment. And then the last part of the third part is, is there good investment?

23:16and just like any kind of growth investor will moderate a portfolio based on expected returns and make financially sound investments in those meaningful partners. As I have to imagine, as much as Wall Street won't reward you for being a great investor, Amy had Microsoft CFI might punish you for being a bad investor. Yeah, exactly. That's again why we tend not to do this In a hugely active way, again, I'm not out there spraying billions of dollars of her balance sheet money around because that really just creates a huge liability. And so we do it, where it's meaningful, where it makes sense, and where we think we're going to get a reasonable financial return, that's risk-based. And so over the last two years, since we've kind of started doing this in a programmatic way, we've done about 16 investments, investing about 250 million.

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26:02We want to move into talking about the state of the M&A market right now at large and It's you talking about a number of deals is a great segue into why have we seen so much deal activity this year both large and small and and the largest of which being obviously you guys right Well, yeah, I think in in those again, you know as we look at M&A They are they are different and and we're always looking for great opportunities for us to grow And so, you know, the question of, you know, those large companies, we're always evaluating everything, right? And the thing with the large companies, they tend not to be, you know, suddenly found opportunities. We do, we know about LinkedIn, we know they're there, you know, we know where all these large companies are, we know who they are. And so, you know, those are always being evaluated and obviously when something happens, whether, you know,

26:59Something flips between day one and day two or we decided okay now it's the time to acquire Skype now is the time to acquire LinkedIn and You know that there's a whole bunch of things that go into that and in terms of your you're asking about the trends you know right now I wouldn't say that there's anything on our side of the house that makes us a better time or more exciting time to acquire. I'd say it's almost on the opposite side where it might be a really good time to sell. There's a lot more companies that are trying to market themselves in that way. If you think about the technology cycle and how things get funded and how technology moves and waves and how startups get funded, there's certainly a lot of companies that are

27:44You're kind of coming to be a no man's land in terms of their growth relative to the last round, relative to their ability to raise more money, and really kind of reach escape velocity into independent land, if you will. And so I think there's a lot of companies that are certainly looking to sell. Do you think that's motivating? Let's zoom out for Microsoft and look at the industry at large. That's motivating why so many deals are getting done, because companies are so much better at marketing themselves as a great pickup.

28:13Yeah, I don't know if they're better at marketing themselves, but they need to. If your next funding round isn't going to go, you've got to do something. You either have to fund through cash flow or you've got to fund through investment. If you can't raise your revenues enough, relative to your burn, and if you can't...

28:32you're raising investment, then you really have one choice. Well, fair point, I'm talking about the company's actually have something, right? And so, yeah, there will be a price for companies that actually have something, right? So, how do you... I'm curious on that front. The fact of life in startups is unfortunately more companies than not.

28:54end up in that situation, where they've built something, they've built a product, it's getting usage, they have revenue, but it's either not going to get to a scale where they can cover their burn and thus the company has faces the prospect of going out of business or we see this plenty of times too, the business grows to a certain scale, it becomes profitable, but then the growth just stalls and you realize you're not going to get to a point where you could be a standalone independent company.

29:23I'm curious for you guys, like you probably see these companies, you know, many times a week. How do you think about whether they make sense, whether an asset like that makes sense for you? Yeah, well, it goes back to what you're saying about earlier in terms of who's driving that decision and it's, you know, and again, different companies are different here, right? And so we are typically a product driven company.

29:47when it comes to M&A and comes to our business generally. And so we're not out there looking to assemble and business conglomerate sense and amalgamation of random software companies.

29:58And so you could certainly have that kind of business where you go out and find interesting software companies that then you can through synergies of overhead and sales and other things can make good money at. We're not really in that game. We're here to grow our franchises and our products and really be a leading technology company. And so we're looking really at our technology roadmap and saying where things need to fit in, which is partly why we're less of that opportunistic buyer.

30:27that's out there, kind of just buying companies that have fallen angels, if you will. Now, there's still plenty of fallen angels that are interesting to us. But, you know, there's two things are different. Yes, it's related to the roadmap. And so, where the two things intersect, where you have a fallen angel that's on a roadmap, that's where things get exciting for us. And, you know, the other piece of that, again, from a Microsoft perspective, is we're simply not looking to acquire businesses.

30:52we are typically looking to acquire teams and products and technologies. And again, thinking about that roadmap piece where holes are in the roadmap, we sell the office suite.

31:03And so where things can plug into that, that's great, but if we're acquiring a business, you know, sometimes that's oftentimes it's incompatible with selling as the sweet. And so in some cases actually having a large sales force and a large business could be actually value destructive relative to how we think about things. And so there's plenty of companies that are great, but because they have such infrastructure and very such money, that it actually takes it out of our ability to really...

31:29find any interesting intersection of deal value relative to what they need and want to sell for? Well, that's fascinating to think about the the conflicts there because we listen to the show who have kind of listened to our more classic analyze a single acquisition episodes. We'll remember that we analyze whether a acquisition was technology, product, business line, people, asset or other. And we've got these kind of categories. And it's interesting to think about if it's a business line, That can't be incompatible with the existing business line of the the acquirer if the acquirer is not looking to create a conglomerate right of like separate and potentially even competitive businesses under the same management structure so for you guys I you know I know when when we did the LinkedIn episode we were looking at You know is like an 8x multiple of revenue That that LinkedIn was acquired for and we were like well, you know, it's actually a pretty good business on its own even if there aren't a lot of synergies and integrations

32:27And it's interesting to think about like you sort of pushing back on that notion of like, no, we don't just buy businesses because they're good businesses. And like, you know, we hope to cash flow them for the long term. It's actually a strategic integration and they have to be compatible with our existing business. That's right. Now, obviously, in this one of the reasons that you look at the larger businesses we buy, you know, like a Yammer or like a Mojang on the Minecraft side or like a LinkedIn, you know, generally you're So make those deals work, and you're generally not going to destroy their business. And so if you have enough critical mass, and it makes sense on the strategic side, that's a different game too. And so all these things do fit together, and every deal's different. But I'm just saying on the whole, when we're thinking about these things, those are some of the things we think about and consider, is how does that business play, as you said, with a thorough existing business? Is that something that we value, or something that we don't? Or in some cases, something that actually is a cost to us?

33:24One, kind of tying together both of these topics on growth and sort of the roadmap and strategic imperative for Microsoft at the opposite end of the spectrum trend that's emerged or re-emerged in 2016. And I'm curious, your take on and whether you talk to these guys is the appearance of private equity in the in the software market and sort of the p-fueled or p-led buyouts of software companies. In many ways, that's the exact opposite of what you're talking about. That is the, if not, in some cases, an attempt to create a conglomerate of multiple software companies together, but in other cases just

34:15You know, hey, we're just going to take this private solely for its own business line. Why do you think we've seen that emerge? Because traditionally P has far away from technology. These are typically not cash flow positive companies. You can't put debt on them. What's changed? Well, I think that has changed, right? I think there are a lot of now mature software companies that have legacy businesses where you have nice cash flow. If you think about your typical technology companies business where a lot of money goes to R&D because you're always trying to grow and chase the next generation. If you strip at all that cost, in some cases you can have a really nice profitable business because the marginal cost of producing and selling software is relatively low or I should say the cost of producing is relatively low. The cost of selling can be high but where you find that right

35:06that write model where if you strip out a lot of costs from the business and you think you have this pretty solid revenue stream from customers that even if you don't invest is just going to fade out over time. You can actually have some really nice traditional looking LBOs. And so we've certainly seen that. Those aren't always so exciting to us, but We actually have co-invested with some private equity firms in a few of these take-privates or LBS or re-settelings and the one that was announced is Informatica. We're Primera bought them and we invested in that and what's actually exciting about that one is there's a component of that business.

35:53that is legacy, but there's also a really good growth component to it, which is what gets us excited. And the opportunity to really go deep in a partnership with them was what got us excited about the partnership and the investment. And, you know, kind of on the quarter to quarter basis sitting under a public company, you know, street mentality of managing that. It's often hard for them to really make the hard decisions in both the cuts as well as the investments.

36:16that they need to make to kind of modernize that company. And so in many cases it's better suited in a private, you know, kind of private equity based format. And so that can actually be really interesting and really exciting. And there's certainly a lot of those businesses that are out there. I just want to highlight real quick for listeners because I'll admit I just Googled it. LBO's a leverage buyout.

36:38Oh, sorry. No problem at all. It's interesting. We've got a good mix of kind of like product and engineering types that was in the show as well as people that are kind of much more reversed in the corporate development and financial world. And I tend to perhaps over index on, hey, being a recovering investment banker myself, I just imagine everybody knows these things, but yeah, and typically, you know, The reason we're talking about this is it's only been very recently that private equity firms and LBOs have really started paying attention to tech and Brian for really really the reasons that you were saying that the industry is matured But typically these these firms would buy you know Like you know hinds catch up right the the types of things the richer half the way would buy Yeah, yeah, and actually I mean it was back when I was an investment banker

37:31that Silverlake, which I think was the first true private equity, traditional private equity tech-focused firm was formed. And I remember meeting with them thinking, you know, how odd, right? These two models are somewhat incompatible, but certainly over time, and being the first, they were able to create a really nice business to go and take that traditional private equity model.

37:54into attack and now there are a whole bunch of other folks that play in that space as well. Yeah, I think in quite short order, I forget it maybe two years, they three X Skype before selling it for soft. Pretty wild. Yeah. Which obviously then that was a tech biote that you played on the other side. Yep. That's right. This is actually a pretty good segue.

38:18On the Skype episode we talked a lot about the implications of having a lot of cash overseas and that Skype was actually a really great way to deploy some of that capital because it would have a pretty heavy tax burden when attempting to repatriate it. And so the question for you is are potentially changing corporate and foreign tax structures on your mind as you think about large deals? Yeah, we're certainly...

38:45always cognizant of the regulatory regimes and tax regimes. Most of these larger acquisitions have a large and complex international component to it, which means we're dealing with that anyway, even at the kind of more operating internal level of any given company. If you look at Skype, if you look at LinkedIn, if you look at a whole bunch, they all have pretty complex operations.

39:14they've got to think about. You know, Skype, of course, happened to be domiciled, not in the U.S., and so that was certainly a nice benefit that we were certainly aware of. But, you know, these things are always changing, and if you think about from the Microsoft overall planning perspective of how we manage those environments, it really has to sit within, you know, our overall management, and again, these things get really complex in terms of where IP lives, Apple and others have been in the news a lot lately in terms of how they do those transfers of tech and how that creates their avoids or distributes their taxes in different ways. And so, again, it's a very complex issue that we certainly pay a lot of attention to. Again, I wouldn't say that

40:08going back to why we do M&A in the first place, we certainly aren't financial engineers as a business. And so we're always looking out for the right strategic thing. And if that deal happens to be Skype that's based outside the US, or if that deal happens to be linked in that space here in the US, we go do the right deal, assuming we can come up with the right terms and structures that makes the deal work.

40:33We're not out there to be financial engineers, so that's certainly a part of what we have to do. I mean, just given the complexity of operations through these companies. I was always amazed when I worked in banking, like, how many...

40:46tax lawyers we had running around in every deal. But certainly part of those 28 people I discussed earlier. Yeah, yeah. In thinking about sort of the two different functions, you know, there's M&A activity when Microsoft acquires companies, and then there's strategic investment activity, which is what we've been talking a lot about on this episode where you choose to deploy capital into someone for strategic reasons. Do you have any good examples of investments that Microsoft has made in the last few years that ended up becoming product integrations or success stories for a business or some payoff with that strategic alignment. In terms of... Maybe you made the strategic investment and then there was something in the product in the ensuing years either on the Microsoft side or on that company side that took advantage of the sort of strategic alignment between the companies.

41:42Yeah, sure. I mean, we can look at a couple of examples in the recent past that I've been involved with. If you look at, say, four square, we've made investment in four square, and we've developed a great partnership around their data and data asset that feeds into Cortana. Oh, interesting. And so that's, yeah, that's pretty cool. If you look at a DocuSign.

42:07What does that look like with four squares? Is that like when people ask Cortana about what's a good place to eat and it surfaces recommendations from four square data? Yeah, I mean four squares is one of the sets of data that we leverage in that case. Yeah, I mean, we certainly have a lot of our own data as well. We pull data from multiple sources, but four square has a great set of data on location. And lots of square data gets used in.

42:32also it's a location use cases that aren't even related to, you know. That's right. And in fact, it's easy recommendations. We were kind of a prototype for them doing that kind of deal. And now they've basically created a whole business out of licensing that data to others. I'm just part of our investment thesis in that company.

42:50And then if you look at DocuSign, we had a different example, but we've had a great partnership with them going back many years in terms of how you could utilize our electronic signatures in Office 365. There's some good selling and marketing motions that go along with that as well that go in both directions and we participated in their last private round as well long after the partnership itself had come to be.

43:17And then if you look at a more recent one, which is Mesosphere, the container space, and we're doing a whole bunch of interesting things both with them and the other container players. And we really like that partnership as well, both on the technical and go to market sign. Do you ever see any sort of conflicts arise where you want to be horizontal and participate with everyone? Let's just say it's all the container players.

43:45um in a very democratic and open way and yet you have this strategic bet that you've placed on one of them uh we certainly do i mean you know we obviously depends on the space in terms of of how uh how democratic you want to be if you will. But again, we're first and foremost technology partners. And the commercial deals will speak for themselves. And so if we're going to go and do some sort of exclusive or some exclusive, whether it be kind of implied or purposeful exclusivity in any given area, the commercial partnership and how we do that and talk about it will mention that. And the investment is again a separate deal.

44:26And so one good example there would be if you look at a comical cloud flare that we invested in, you know, they actually, you know, doing what they do, they need to be and want to be, you know, kind of a neutral party. And to do that and to hammer it home, it was actually an interesting approach by that CEO founder to use his investment round as a way to reinforce that message of neutrality. And so he got Baidu, us, Qualcomm, and Google, all the co-invest together in the same round.

44:56Very interesting. You can use these investments as tools and, again, given the right commercial partnership, we certainly know qualms with those guys as investors. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

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46:44So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. Maybe good time to jump to, you know, we discussed with with Taylor and Adobe when we chatted with him a few months ago, kind of what the right way was for startups to, you know, build a relationship over time with potential acquirers. And he really stressed the importance of that it is a relationship. Don't expect that you're just going to call up a potential acquire one day and have a deal done by the next week. But I'm curious on the investing front. You guys, different companies have different policies on this and approaches to strategic investments. But what's the best way for an earlier mid-stage company to start building that relationship with Microsoft?

47:41Yeah, and I think you know piling on with with the Adobe guys on that you know, it is amusing On amusing sometimes where you know, we'll get these calls saying yeah, you know, we have a term sheet in hand from x You know, would you like to it's also put in a in a bid? You know, let us know within the next week To be acquired right and and that's it's generally not very productive And it is indeed a relationship and the thing to think about as a startup founders is You know, getting acquired is almost like going through a hiring exercise. And you do have to develop relationship and trust. And essentially, the acquiring entity is indeed making a hiring decision on the company as well as the specific people. And so if you don't have a relationship in place, it's really hard to speed that through.

48:27in a rapid way and so it's always a good idea to be developing those relationships with potential acquires well in advance and it leads into what I will say on the investing side which is certainly on the strategic investing side for me, all those roads lead through a partnership anyway. So you need to have that dialogue with us on the partnership side with the product teams. Yeah, with the business units and the product teams, to get those partnerships in place long before I could potentially invest. So that's really the best way to do it. I'm always happy to help get folks set up with the right folks in Microsoft if they don't have a path then otherwise.

49:09But that's really what has to start. And certainly then, as those conversations are going to then have a separate parallel relationship development with my team, this is certainly not a bad thing.

49:23But, you know, again, first and foremost, we're a technology partner and the investing thing is really secondary to everything we do. So, you know, if there's limited resources in any given side, I wouldn't bother with me as much as that hurts me to say. But, you know, and really focus on those strong relationships on the product level. It's also more leverage for them. I mean, if they can get a situation where...

49:44Yeah, there's cross-selling motions. I mean, the Microsoft field and sales team is really powerful. And I've certainly seen a lot of startups get a lot of leverage from that. And if you can make that work, that's really impactful to a small company. Yeah, and it's funny as we, anybody who's in the startup world knows, it always just happens to work out that anytime that you're very close to a major milestone, whether it be Cementing a partnership with somebody like a Microsoft or a sales milestone also just happens to be when you're running out of money And founders are tearing their hair out trying to balance the two of them Yeah, no, I mean it's and it's I certainly don't mean to make light of that that really difficult challenge and I've obviously been there and so

50:33One philosophy, though, going back again to our investing approach, we're not looking to make companies or make rounds except in those really rare cases like the Facebook investment. And so we tend not to lead rounds. And we tend to just put a little bit of money in. Again, we're not looking to be the primary funding source here in any given round or dealer company. And so we're not, You know, we're not your typical investor. We're not going to jump in and save a company if they're running out of money. And so we're the wrong folks to rely on, you know, on that basis anyway. And so the relationship can certainly be very helpful, and both on the M&A front and the investment front for us to have that dialogue. That's always a good thing. But, you know, if the running out of money thing is something that you're trying to avoid, it's usually not, I'm not usually a good partner.

51:28Yeah. Well, we'll jump back over to the M&A side of the house. One of the theses of this show when we first set out was to figure out what makes acquisition successful and selfishly so that David and I can really understand how to build companies that will become successfully acquired, and we'll fit into another business, or more recently, we'll actually have a successful IPO process. We realize that we were selling ourselves short. That's right. Our ambition is short. Right, right. In that vein, I'm very curious how on the M&A side of the house at Microsoft, do you judge acquisitions, and do you decide if this worked out well, and we're glad that we did this five, ten years later? Yeah, we certainly do.

52:12It's a really hard thing to do. And of course, the challenge there is that the destination is often changing as you're going through the process and certainly in tech, you know, two, five years hindsight-wise, things look a lot different. Yeah, maybe 10 is a good initially. It's the wrong number here. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, it's really difficult to think about how to judge an acquisition and whether successful or not on any really rigorous way in tech.

52:41you know that said we certainly try and so with any given acquisition we'll have a set of agreed judgment milestones, metrics, various criteria, which usually include retention. Are all the folks or some folks of the acquired companies still here, six months, one year, two years later? Are they happy? Have we shipped X, Y and Z product or feature? Have we done A, B and C integration? Have we pick the revenue targets or profit targets? Are there some sort of accelerated either schedules or unit volumes for some product or feature we have, you know, pick your set of things that form the basis for why we went and did a deal. And we lay that all out and we cement that in and then we do track that. And then the owner, you know, someone in Microsoft owns that and you know, someone in the product team, product teams owns that, that team and then signed up for it either that revenue or those features or retention or whatever it is. And so we certainly to judge those over time.

53:48That's, I think, the closest we can get. And again, even with that, we have to be cognizant of how things shift and change, and often that person might not be the same person who's managing them, you know, those acquired employees six, 12, 24 months later. Are there any that you think went particularly well in the last five years that are worth saying like, wow, that one went really phenomenally?

54:11Yeah, and I think there certainly are and one thing I think that's that's fun to watch is our changing approach to these things and You know, I think in a lot of companies and certainly in Microsoft it it used to be the case where you know, let's say you're the you know product team for outlook and you're trying to ship a mobile client And it's not going so well and then you get management buy off to go buy by a mobile client, in this case, maybe a company. Let's just say as an example. And then you bring those folks into the company, and now that startup that you just acquired is reporting to the same people who are failing before. That usually ended up being a recipe for, just not, let's just say that the acquired company is just more excited to be in that position, and let's say that the managing folks there, essentially,

55:03when and continue to try and do the same thing, but now just with new people working for them. And so that usually didn't end well, surprisingly. I think with the company and with other companies we've acquired recently we've done that differently and we've taken those folks and empowered them and assuming they've been successful we've continued to expand their scope and given them more and more and so I think you're seeing the benefit of that approach with Outlook, Mobile and iOS and how that's worked and so I think that's a case where I think we're pretty excited and you could say the same thing for I think a lot of the other copies we acquired recently. Yeah, it's interesting that I always love thinking about what those, you know, as the organization matures, you know, the Corp dev organization matures are meetup from

55:59My world, you know as a VC firm grows and sees many cycles and as individuals within those organizations grow, you know, you start to learn these, you know, VCs all about pattern matching. But you get these, you know, sort of senses that develop and kind of informal roles. And then what's really interesting is when you decide to break the rules. But I'm thinking about like, you know, one that actually be relevant to my carve-out. You know, in VC that you learn pretty quickly is, it's really hard to build a big company if you're not targeting a big market. And plenty, you know, I make that mistake, Moderna makes that mistake, even the other great VC firms make that mistake all the time. But, and then you always remind me like, God, why did I do that? But, you know, for you and for Microsoft now, you know, for

56:54decades having been able to practice the craft of, you know, of M&A and I think about, you know, BC is the same way. You definitely get these, you know, these rules that kind of evolve like, oh yeah, maybe we shouldn't, if we're buying a product to replace one that's failing, we probably shouldn't have them report to people who are, who are, who are not successfully shipping the current product. No, that's right. Yeah.

57:20One final note before we move into follow-ups, hot takes and carve-outs. Are there any other people or companies who you admire that you think do corporate development or strategic investing really well? That's a good question. I think you see lots of different models, if we're talking about just the investing side.

57:38Google has taken the approach of creating a separate fund and a whole separate team and creating those walls and trying to create a real VC. I think that's certainly one way to go. The market will judge over time if they're doing a good job with that or not. They're essentially out there competing with any other VC for dollars. That can take away some of the strategic components to it too.

58:06all sorts of views on the spectrum. Corporal VC has gotten really hot for some reason over the last number of years and just about everyone I think I was reading today. I think it was Tyson Foods, the folks who make chicken. They now have a VC looking at a new protein replacement opportunities. So Sesame Street has a VC, pretty much everyone has a VC in these days, right? I've been amazed. It's been...

58:34So much talked about in the last couple of years, but you can drive around in Silicon Valley and you see all the auto companies have their Silicon Valley centers now. Yeah, I mean, I did a deal recently with GE and Caterpillar and others. I mean, you know, kind of everybody's getting into the game and I think that's going to be interesting to watch over time and so to kind of flip your question.

58:54You know, I think there's a lot of folks who I'm not sure if they're doing it right, and we'll have to see. And again, going back to why these folks are setting it up and what they think they're going to get out of it. And as a former startup founder, certainly at the early stage, you certainly have to be careful about tying your wagon to, to really anyone, because you want to maintain an optionality at the early stage if you can.

59:19And so that's a hard thing to balance against the corporate entities and keeping in mind what we already talked about in terms of their incentives which is really for their company and their equity versus a traditional investor who's really looking to you to make a gain. And those incentives are very different and that manifests itself in the boardroom, that manifests itself in shareholder votes.

59:39from following rounds and all sorts of things that I think folks are going to have to be careful of. So I think there's a whole bunch of folks who are out there doing a good job. Qualcomm Venture certainly does and I think Google is a pretty good reputation. Salesforce is very active and we've co-invested with them before. So I've been very impressed with a lot of the teams I've seen in corporate VC and I'm going to have to see how the whole space shapes out. Indeed.

1:00:07Dude, should we do follow ups and hot takes? Yeah, let's do it. We've got some fun ones. I realized we were negligent last episode on the Marvel episode and didn't discuss, I believe, we discussed Snapchat's Snap Inc's spectacle launch and initial very positive reviews. I can't wait to try them. But we did not discuss the elephant in the room, which is news that they are rumored to be preparing to file for an IPO. Yeah, really interesting to think about. They're a younger company than Uber and a lot of these other kind of like super unicorns. And in true Snapchat fashion, just not necessarily going with the trend. Like they just continually think of themselves as a different company, or a different type of company than a lot of these other big companies, big private companies of their generation. And so I think, you know,

1:01:04There are reasons why it makes more sense for Snapchat to be IPO-ing in companies like Uber to be waiting. There's a lot of Uber in China, I think, is kind of the big reason they're waiting. But with Snapchat, I continue to be impressed, and I'm a buy at any price. But don't take my investment advice. Don't take my investment advice.

1:01:34Also, really interesting with Snapchat. I mean, one, you know, to kind of as we talked about on the Facebook IPO show and then afterward as well. I think it's great to see a company that is four years old, but clearly has achieved scale and is in the process of building a meaningful revenue business and eventually hopefully profits as well.

1:02:00Take this step and do this. They've achieved domestic scale. I'm very curious to see how they do international as they really start to expand there. Because I think we keep seeing Instagram copy a lot of Snapchat's functionality. And if you're already an avid Snapchat user, you often are not really compelled by the Instagram features. You're like, I can't already have my network, my habits. But then you think about all these people that are in countries where Snapchat hasn't gotten big yet.

1:02:27And now the sort of question is we'll snapchat ever get big in those countries since since Instagram kind of has a lot of that functionality now. And they already use Instagram all the time. And I'm still bullish because I this is one of those like sort of seed company bets where you just say, yeah, I wouldn't bet against that person. And like I want to.

1:02:50I have a lot of faith in their ability to figure that out, and that's why I feel about Evan Speagle and the leadership at Snapchat. But I think it's important to note a risk that they've achieved a domestic scale and we'll see how they do. Well, it'll be a very interesting S1 to read, no matter what. Yeah, the risks of the business section is going to be awesome. I don't think Microsoft is a shareholder in snapping.

1:03:19but Google Alphabet is as our several other strategic companies. I'm kind of curious, Brian, when you guys have had investments that then go public, what do you guys do with the stock? Yeah, we depends on the situation and we generally don't comment on what we do with it. And this goes back to the whole question around how How and why we're doing strategic investing is selling a partner is usually a really difficult thing to do. We generally don't talk about these things. So people will ask, Facebook, if you sold your stock, and we just don't answer. That's for good reason, which is assuming we're under the threshold, of course, for having to be. There's really no benefit whatsoever to talking about.

1:04:19Yeah, talk about how we, how and what we're doing with those, those stakes. Yeah, that are put into place. It's actually interesting. Something that I didn't realize even until I've been working in venture for quite a number of years, but I think most people don't realize about the VC ecosystem. It's actually kind of the same thing. You know, when companies go public, like it's not like there's a magic moment and like we sell all our shares.

1:04:43Oftentimes, we can't even if we wanted to. And so, you have VC firms that are holding shares of companies that went public long ago. And figuring out it's actually a big, it ends up being a meaningful kind of strategic discussion within VC firms for each investment. One is the right time to sell. One is the right time to sell. And we also have the...

1:05:05complication, we can distribute the shares directly to our investors. So we can just give them the shares rather than selling on the open market. So that's another lever we can pull. We can hold, we can sell, or we can give the shares away or give the shares back to our LPs. Is that LP decided or is that decided by the management of the VC firm? Decided by the management of the VC firm. And then so the risk of, you know, the sort of LP argument typically they want us to distribute as fast as possible because like hey you know that's our investment we invested in you these are shares they're now liquid on public currency we have people that manage public stocks you should give them to us right the tension though is if we do that and we think there's a meaningful chance that they might just sell those shares then that can be detrimental to the company if a whole slug of shares gets comes on the market at once that can depress the share price so it's a complicated situation

1:06:01Yeah. Hot take. This is just today as we're recording this. Amazon announced Amazon go. We got to talk about this. Yeah. So Amazon go is a driverless drive through store. Autonomous AI. It is all of these things. It's a grocery store here in Seattle that you walk into and there are scanners and sort of turn style like things when you walk into the store you scan the Amazon go app on your phone and then it identifies you and then once you're in the store you just pick up anything that you want to buy you put it in whatever you hold it you put it in your backpack you put it in your purse and you just walk out of the store no no check out aisle no cashiers no nothing just automatically tracks what you picked up and you pay for it

1:06:59through the app automatically. Yeah, I don't know if this will work, but I love it's impossible to overstate how much I love Amazon's muscle for experimentation and ability to like do tens or hundreds of these sorts of things at once. And it's interesting. I'd love to know how big the team was that pulled this off. I'm willing to bet it's a lot smaller than you'd think. Yep.

1:07:22What's also interesting, we don't know, but one of the cool things about how Amazon works is there are these small teams within the company that are focused on innovative projects that they're doing. There's a good chance this might be completely separate from the Amazon bookstore, which is in your village here. Certainly it's a very different model of the store. Super cool. Love to see this innovation. I can't wait to, it'll be open to the public in early 2017. I can't wait to go try it. Brian, what's your take? Can you check it out?

1:07:52I'm excited to go buy stuff and walk out and see what happens. I feel like I'm shoplifting but it being totally legit. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, this is going to create all sorts of consternation for shoplifters. I mean, how they're going to get around this is going to be an interesting question. Yeah, I wonder into the product and the model for this, how much they thought about that. I mean, shoplifting is like a meaningful...

1:08:19You know, it's a meaningful cost to retail stores and grocery stores. This solves that problem. Maybe. I mean, you know, obviously, if they have technology that solves that problem generally, you know, in theory, everybody, everybody who does retail is going to want to buy it. You know, you have, you have lots of companies, or actually lots of companies, but a few companies around that have antith...

1:08:40theft and shoplifting technologies. I did some work actually as an investment banker for a kind of called sensormatic. Back in the day, which has some of those, and they have some that you put in clothes, and if you try and walk out it, it does the ink splash across, across the clothes to ruin them, just like you find with bank robbers, they put in those ink things, they just blow it. Others that just make the thing go beep, but obviously shoplifting for your half-way is still prevailed, thanks. I don't know if it's intelligence, though.

1:09:07So there's an interesting question right with with tech that Amazon's using here as to how do they think this is gonna work Yeah, all right carveouts. Yeah, so mine is For years now maybe even a decade Okay, go has been producing really incredible music videos and up leveling their game every single one so for anybody that remembers probably like 10 years ago. The treadmills video where it went totally viral and they shot at themselves in their backyard and you know, there's people dancing and they just choreographed. The band members having a choreographed dance on treadmills and they up level their game over and over and over again and maybe a year or two ago they did this incredible drone shot one where it was you know

1:09:54The first music video that I saw that that really took advantage of oh my god What if we have this slowly rising drone go into the sky and you know, you can see patterns formed by thousands of people on the ground all wearing different things and They've they've upleveled their game again, so they're they're new video for the one moment The entire video is shot in a super high frame rate camera and snapchat spectals now yeah it's not it's not but it's um it's exploding paint and like bullets going through things and it's also is it's like the matrix it takes place in like four seconds like the whole music video but it's super slowed down and so you have like three minutes of of super high frame rate footage oh that's cool actually lines up with the words are singing and the music it's it's really really cool that's really cool

1:10:48That's really cool. I gotta watch that. Mine, which I alluded to earlier on the show, is UC Berkeley. I just found out about this recently and read it. They do this really cool oral history, this program that does oral histories with people that have been instrumental in kind of the development of the Bay Area. And one of the aspects is business in the Bay Area. And they have Don Valentine, who was the founder of Sequoia. And he founded Sequoia in the early 70s. He had been, he was a Fairchild Semiconductor. He was not part of the traitorous state that I believe was the traitorous state left. Where was it?

1:11:38They founded Fairchild and then he went to National Semiconductor and then he founded Sequoia. But these were like, this was the birth of Silicon Valley. Anyway, there's this great kind of 75 page. It's all a transcript of hours of interviews with Don and it's fantastic just to hear him talk about that history of the early days. The Valley and the semiconductor industry, but also the philosophy behind Sequoia, how it started, how they...

1:12:06evolved their thinking process about things and they're still among the best in the business and how they've evolved over the years. Really cool. We'll link to it in the notes. Cool. Brian, we know you've got one too. Yes, yes, I do. I find this particularly in light of everything that's going on right now in terms of the election is an article that O'Malley published in the New Yorker about a week ago called Silicon Valley has an empathy vacuum.

1:12:35And I think it's just a really interesting thought piece for all of us just to think about. how what we do affects everything and everyone else and whether or not there's more we could or should be doing or less that we could or should be doing relative to that and that's relative to job displacement relative to changes in society that our technology can foster such as how we're impacting journalism, how we're impacting culture and communities and all sorts of things and so it's really interesting.

1:13:11Yeah, it's a great piece. And certainly something I and Ben and I in the show have been thinking about a lot over the last month or so is, you know, lots of questions to be asked, but I don't think we can, I don't think we should as a tech industry continue to operate just in ignorance of even trying to think about the broader impact of what we're doing, especially as we head into, you know, this age of artificial intelligence and You know all of the great things that are gonna come from that and all of the social challenges as well So it was a great piece by by home. Yeah, and to just pile on like it's I'd recommend everyone read it for sure Something we have struggled with I think David and I and a lot of other people that that I've talked to in the last few weeks and even before the election

1:14:08We celebrate a lot of the things that technology does, growth to hyperscale, being... Instagram having 13 employees when it was acquired. In shock and awe of the, you know, the model...

1:14:25actually originally kind of created by Microsoft of incredibly high fixed costs, but then oh my god, you can sell licenses to this software with zero marginal cost to the world at gigantic enormous scale. And now with the internet making that even more accelerated. Yes, generally in the long term, more jobs are created after a single one or two generations of a gap by an advanced technology, but it As an industry, we really do over-celebrate these gains in the short term and really do not come up with solutions for all the people that are disenfranchised because of it. And I think that this piece is really great. I think we are about to have a self-driving truck huge change. And if anybody looks at that...

1:15:19a graphic that was floating around the internet, about a year ago of truck driving is like the top job in 20 states. Yeah, including California. Including California. And like auto has just, like acquired by Uber has just completed successful self-driving truck trips. Like it just doesn't feel like it'll be too long now. Can't ignore the consequences. No, no. And I know I'm rambling a little bit on this, but it really, we're glad you brought it up, right? Yeah.

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1:16:49All right with that yeah awesome well Brian. Thank you so much To our listeners out there if you aren't subscribed and you want to hear more you can subscribe from your favorite podcast client if you've been a long time listener of the show or maybe you're a new listener and you just want to Help us out. We would love love love a review on iTunes or a tweet or a share on Facebook or Any way that you can help help grow the show. So thank you so much. Thanks for listening Thanks to Brian and we'll see you next time. Yep Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now?