selling to tens of thousands of of endpoints um so when you get one of those you try to have a big impact and you got to make sure you focus on retention you can see net retention um in lower left and I'll talk about some of our learnings on that front um and on historical headcount I just want to show um we're a Growth Company driven by product Innovation and you can see how the headcount is jumping our U R&D team product AI engineering jumping
significantly from 21 to 24 and our go to market team making big strides uh in 21 22 we had two reps the problem with two reps is you never want to let go one who's underperforming because then you're down to one and you're kind of held hostage and now we have a large sales team um Broken Out by payer provider strategic reps field reps folks Focus uh focusing on our install base and it gives us an opportunity to
continue to upgrade and strengthen the team all right so what are uh some of my critical learnings over the last eight years and uh Talent everybody talks about Talent talent's important I used to interview every single person we hired can't do that any longer I'm fascinated by those leaders who say they do it at uh sizes uh company's much bigger than ours I don't know how they do that I'm impressed by it I do interview every VP from our executive
team here's an interesting metric um I'm proud of it at times but I also question my own skill the average tenure of an executive on my team right now is 1.75 years if you take me out if you put me in there you know being here eight years it kind of bloats the number but 1.75 and the point of sharing that is we've steadily upgraded the talent as we've summited uh a new mountain and we're looking at the next and that might sound
harsh uh but it's really important and it's critical if you want to build a large and sustainable business um you know I heard an interesting quote I'm a sports uh guy played hockey I have two boys who play baseball and so now I'm like in the baseball world and I heard a baseball coach recently say to a player uh this is a college coach my job is to figure out every day how to replace you your job is to figure out how I can't and I think you have to think that way with Talent uh scale scale matters
particularly in vertical SAS that's the world we're in scale matters Point Solutions aren't going to survive uh and so we are moving aggressively down this uh inorganic organic path and so I if you're in vertical SAS I would think hard about how you scale we've done a lot on the Innovation front we did it when we didn't have Capital because we found Partners who believed in us and we innovated with them we had one partner very early on that leaned into us when we were talking
to big companies that we just didn't think they would pay attention and help us at time of need and then we ultimately bought the IP back from them as we got more scaled so I believe in Partners I believe in Partners but I believe you also need to know what is critical IP to you for you and to make sure that you get that back if it's not in your house today lastly on customer retention uh and it's a humbling one for me to share because uh I was one of the preeminent uh folks around customer
success before it was its own function and as I look back on my time leading this company we have had a couple of moments where we've stumbled on the customer success side and when you do that in vertical SAS and B2B with large deals that can be hugely disruptive we had a lighthouse customer that got noisy we thought they were being overly demanding we started to push price higher and then on July 3rd right before July 4th they send a notice of
non-renewal and it almost led to 30% of our company being laid off coming out of the July 4th holiday we launched a project to figure out how to grow through that and we successfully signed a company that was four times larger within about 60 days but it was a great lesson to not get uh if you have that kind of lumpiness in your company you need to be really smart about how you deal with those Enterprise customers and so we're leaning in really hard on our customer success team now to ensure that
that doesn't happen again all right so I think I'm at the end of our time hopefully I've done a good job of giving you uh insight into how we're building a billion doll business uh I think we're really on the cusp of achieving that for our investors it hasn't been easy um it comes through a couple of superpowers how we deal with product Innovation with our Ai and machine learning how we're using thoughtful m&a uh and how our capital and uh equity and debt partners are
fueling our growth and uh and hopefully you won't go through some of the uh you won't skin your knee the way I have over the last eight years and thanks for listening enjoy the rest of the day [Applause] [Music]