1204: When Capital Conviction Matters More Than Market Timing | with Andrew Korn, CFO, EliseAI

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0:16Andrew Korn: Hello, this is Dave Larson, CFO of Feeds Eye, and you are listening to the CFO Thought Leader podcast. This is episode 1204.

0:30And when you're growing, you know, super fast, it's hard, maybe impossible to have, you know, exact ROI calculators for every individual investment that you're going to make. I'm not even sure it would be productive if you can. So we use a really rough heuristic, which is, you know, our business is focused on two things, building great products and then getting those great products into the hands of our customers. And so those are the two things we focus on. And if there's an investment that needs to be made, if there's a clear, articulatable way as to how that investment is going to directly achieve one of those two outcomes, then it's an investment we're going to make as a business.

1:13So that's how we make individual decisions on a day-to-day basis. It's very quick. It's very rapid. And then it's my job and the rest of the executive team's job to make sure we're looking about how that all rolls up to macro. Hi, it's Jack. On today's show, we speak with Andrew Korn, CFO of Elise AI. Growth companies rarely get the luxury of waiting for certainty. The systems, people, and capital needed six months from now often have to be chosen today before the constraint becomes obvious. That puts CFOs in an interesting position. How do you invest ahead of growth without getting too far ahead of the business?

1:59And when does financial discipline become excessive caution? Andrew Korn offers a useful way to think about that tension. His approach doesn't depend on constructing a perfect ROI model for every decision. It starts with something more practical, understanding what truly moves the company forward and then having the conviction to fund it. Our talk with CFO Andrew Korn begins after this.

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4:03Hello, CFO Andrew Korn is with us. Andrew began his career at the Boston Consulting Group before spending 15 years at Sageview Capital, where he invested in growing technology companies and served alongside several management teams. In 2021, he crossed from investor to operator, joining Elise AI as CFO. Today, he is helping the company scale its AI platform while navigating the capital operating decisions and financial discipline behind its mission to make housing more affordable. Andrew, welcome. Jack, it's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me. So, Andrew, please go back in time.

4:47I always enjoy when I see a strategy house up there as sort of your entry into the professional world. Take us back in time. What experiences do you feel prepared you? Well, before I was an accidental CFO, I was probably an accidental consultant. I took the LSAT, was pretty close to going to law school, and Team Green came by university, and I interviewed with them and ended up taking that job, and it set me off on my career. And that was a great formative experience. I only spent about a year at the Boston Consulting Group, worked on about four or five different cases across a variety of industries, and direct exposure to management teams, really my first exposure to the real world, to the business world, to operating.

5:31and I continued with that and brought that with me to SageU Capital, which as you mentioned, that's the bulk of my career. I spent about 15 years there. I joined right when the fund was founded in 2006 and saw it through its first 15 years with my amazing partners there. And that was another tremendous experience. We were always an operationally focused investment firm. We did a variety of different strategies over time. As you said, the bulk of it was in growth equity. And we really prided ourselves on having a concentrated portfolio. And so myself as one of the team members there might only have three or four investments at any given time, working closely with those teams, not too much in their business, not making decisions for them on a day-to-day basis.

6:18Only the management can do that. But really helping them, providing them perspective, providing them guidance and providing them advice based upon what we were seeing across the market. And that was just another tremendous experience for me. And I learned a lot about how to operate effectively from those wonderful management teams that I partnered with. Don't know if you want to share this with us, but I have to ask, what investment decision perhaps taught you the most from being wrong? I will not name the specific company, but it is a deal I didn't do. It was in 2013 or 2014, if I remember correctly.

7:00It was a company in the healthcare technology space. And me and the team at Safeview, we did a tremendous amount of really good work. And we concluded they had an interesting product. They had some really good traction. But the unit economics weren't tremendous. The LTV to CAC wasn't great. and so as we looked forth at how much investment was going to be required to get them to the promised land and this sounds quaint but back in the day about a hundred million dollars of revenue you can go public we said we don't know it's going to take a lot of capital we don't know if we'll get there good team we like it sorry not sorry uh it's not for us um comes to pass that uh we were right on a lot of those things but we were probably a degree too smart for ourselves and the capital was there and they achieved their goals and it was a very successful IPO.

7:54I know, I won't get the quote right, Warren Buffett talks about how you don't have to swing at every pitch. Only make sure you don't swing at the bad pitches. But more so than the specific pitch, I think that taught me sometimes you need to sort of step up from the analysis when you're an investor. You can be really smart, you can do a lot of really good work, but sometimes you need to make sure you're really focused on the bigger picture as to what a company can accomplish. Well, as I mentioned, you joined Elise AI in 21. And before we find out about the company, just more generally as an operator, what have you been surprised about as far as building a company that you might not have got on the investor side?

8:42But it's really hard. I think I knew that on the investor side, but I didn't know quite how hard it is. It is so rewarding and so fun, but it's constant. There's always something to do. There's always something to build. And there's no break. There's no rest for the weary. And I'm invigorated every day. But that constant pressure, that constant effort, and the team here all puts tremendous energy into that every day and it's great to work with them on that. But I'm not sure I would have fully appreciated that when I was an investor. And again, 15 years, one might have expected you to be a lifer.

9:29I mean, what finally occurs to you or what triggers your interest? you know as i as as i mentioned as an as sageview we were always operationally focused before that i had been a consultant so i was primed a little bit you could say um but you know you probably need a little bit of a kick in the you know what and um sageview uh is a tremendous firm um and i'm still you know very close with them there the firm has evolved over time as all good companies all good firms do and it evolved in such a way as to where my passions and my skills as an investor weren't perfectly aligned with what they were doing.

10:05And so that led me to look out at other opportunities. And candidly, I was looking at opportunities in the investing world and in the operating world. And I think if you were to replay that a hundred times, I would probably choose another job in the investing world most of the time. Just that's the path dependency that you're on. And it really came down to meeting Mina and Tony, the co-founders here at Elise AI, who I still work with, and feeling the vision, feeling the passion, feeling the alignment to give me the kick that I needed to take the risk. And so I was open to it. I was available to it.

10:41But it was really about the right opportunity finding me at the right time. As an investor, you got to observe management teams up close. You got to observe the chemistry within the C-suite when it worked, when perhaps it was dysfunctional. I'm wondering what your If you could just reflect a little bit on leadership As your own leadership Style continues to mature and evolve Yeah, I would say the number one thing that I learned over time That I think differentiates Successful from unsuccessful in that regard Has really been candor And I mean that in many senses of the word I think being honest with yourself And the people you work with And the people you hire as to what your expectations are of them, what you recognize they can do and can't do and should do and shouldn't do, and what you as a leader can do and shouldn't do, can't do, and what your weaknesses are and what your strengths are.

11:42And I think where things sometimes didn't go as well is when people weren't honest with each other about that. And so you have these misaligned expectations, you have misaligned areas of focus, and you have people disappointed in each other. And that's what I think breeds then mistrust, and that breeds discontent, and that breeds anger, and that's what I think sort of leads relationships breaking down. But if you're candid up front with those things, then, you know, things may not work out as you all intended, either in the grand sense for the company or in the narrow sense for a particular individual.

12:22But at least you can then approach that with a common set of ideas and understandings and discuss as adults how to move forward. And that leads to a positive outcome as opposed to the sort of negative emotions that I think come from that misalignment and from that lack of candor. Yeah, some nice insight there for us. Andrew, we might have a few more career-related questions for you a little later, but right now let's find out about Elise AI. Can you help us understand this business today? What's it about? Yeah, so we're obviously an AI company, as the name implies, serving two industries of fundamental human need.

12:58We serve housing and healthcare. And those two industries share a lot in common. They're both significant large industries combined to be about 40 % of GDP in the United States. And they both really struggle with some problems. They have a dependency on labor, high levels of regulation, legacy technology systems. And I think those all conspire to make it really hard for those industries to benefit from things like AI and other technologies. And so you have overwhelmed teams, admin work they're buried in, residents in the case of housing, patients in the case of healthcare that don't receive great service or are waiting too long for the service they need or paying too much for the service they need.

13:38And so what Elyse does is we step in primarily the communication layer, whether it's with your prospects or with your residents or with your patients, to automate and handle that communication and that busy work 24-7. We deliver real-time, accurate, compliant answers to consumers, to the patients, and to the renters that need them. We take actions 24-7 across all channels and across all of those operations to improve experiences. And the result of that is better performing businesses, better operating businesses that serve their consumers better across both housing and health care. So help us understand that perhaps the customer demand here, what's driving that?

14:23Where does your message resonate most? it's it's it's evolved a bit over time and actually before the you know chat gpt became a thing uh someone you know 2023 2024 it was really us more pushing it um more and helping people really understand it then i think obviously there's been a broad awareness of ai that's evolved that i think has really uh gotten us a lot more inbound demand um but even when we get that that inbound and people being more open to talking about AI, it's really important for us to work with our customers and our prospects to make sure that they understand really what they're signing up for.

15:02And we pride ourselves on delivering AI, not just for AI's sake, not just to put it on the website and say you have it, not just to tell your boss that you did it and you can get them off your back, but AI that really improves operations, improves performance, and improves the capabilities of your business. And so our best prospects, our best customers, and where we want to push all our prospects and customers to is helping us get with them a deep understanding of their business, a deep understanding of how AI can tangibly improve their business and have a real mutual willingness and understanding to partner together in very specific and tangible ways to bring the benefits of the technology to that.

15:45We want to know about your lines of sight into this business and what are the numbers or metrics that you're watching closely and daily. For those not familiar with the specifics of these two important verticals, what would you tell us? Yeah. So from a business perspective, like most other growth companies, the number one metric I track is our growth and our progress. so we announced earlier this year that we're over 200 million of annual recurring revenue we've continued to grow rapidly since then continuing to maintain over 100 percent year on year growth every year since i've joined the company four and a half years ago correlation not causation and our growth is even accelerating and in the recent quarter the second quarter under the second quarter we saw by far our best quarter ever from a bookings perspective and so acceleration in our year-on-year growth in ARR.

16:42I obviously track below that our gross margins, our burn rate just to make sure we do our burning money as a growth stage company. That is why we raise capital. We monitor it closely. We make sure our growth and spend is, we make sure our spend, excuse me, is prudent. And obviously, but looking very closely at that and making sure that those investments are going to the right areas to drive the growth of the business forward. We then obviously from a customer perspective, and this will get a little bit outside my most direct area of expertise, but an insane amount of data that we have as to the performance of our customers.

17:21And we really pride ourselves on that and reporting that to our customers and tracking it internally to make sure we have an impact. So that would include on the real estate side, the number of leases we help you generate, the occupancy of your buildings, which we directly impact, the amount of rent we help you collect, the number of maintenance requests we help you complete, and the number of renewals of residents we help you maintain. On the healthcare side, we're primarily automating around the patient intake experience and scheduling experience. So the number of calls we handle, it's a very voice focused medium on the healthcare side.

17:59The number of calls we help you handle, the number of appointments we help you schedule with our products. We're really helping our customers understand and drive all those business metrics in addition to the tangible savings we help them achieve on the expense side, which primarily comes from handling all these repetitive tasks that were previously not automated. Can you help us understand the mindset when it comes to investing in the business and what are sort of the determinants for an investment to be made as a finance leader? Yeah. You know, I can talk about that both on a micro level and at a macro level.

18:41And when you're growing, you know, super fast, it's hard, maybe impossible to have, you know, exact ROI calculators for every individual investment that you're going to make. I'm not even sure it would be productive if you can. So we use a really rough heuristic, which is, you know, our business is focused on two things. building great products and then getting those great products into the hands of our customers. And so those are the two things we focus on. And if there's an investment that needs to be made, if there's a clear articulatable way as to how that investment is going to directly achieve one of those two outcomes, then it's an investment we're going to make as a business.

19:24So that's how we make individual decisions on a day-to-day basis. It's very quick. It's very rapid. And then it's my job and the rest of the executive team's job to make sure we're looking about how that all rolls up to macro. And of course, we're looking at the sum of all those different investments. What's our burn? How does that compare to our growth rate? And we've been able to maintain, you know, as a business, a very healthy level of growth. We are basically growing our ARR on a net basis at double the rate of our burn. So every$1 we burn, we had$2 of ARR net. It's a really good metric. It's really healthy metric if you look across and compare it to a variety of businesses.

20:02And if we see the overall investment maintaining in that range, you know, we know that maybe not every micro decision is the right one, but on balance, we're making the right decisions and driving the business forward in the right way. I want to just touch on AI with you. We could go any number of directions, but I'm wondering where is AI, and I think you've already indicated this, but where is AI delivering the clearest value for at least AI customers? It's that customer experience, I think, but what would you tell us? Yes. Yeah. From our customers' perspective, we're proud to have been one of the first and now one of the leading vertical AI companies in the world.

20:42AI is our competitive advantage as a company, as a business. AI is what we built our company on. and we are winning customers and driving value from our customers because we're using AI in a way that they wouldn't be able to use without us. It's baked into every part of our product. And our North Star, as I alluded to before, is that it's not a nice to have, it's not cool. It is meaningfully improve the operations of our customers. So every product we launch needs to have those two things. One is it needs to improve some top-line element of the business. It needs to help you rent more properties, book more patient appointments, collect more rent, have more renewals.

21:23And it also, at the same time, needs to automate, do that in a way that you're automating a piece of labor that previously had to be done before. And so we follow those two things at the same time with the products we build. We drive our customers to understand that and work with us to help us achieve those outcomes. And it really does have to be a partnership between us and them. And if we do both of those things using AI, that we think is real tangible use of the technology in a way that benefits us consumers, our customers, and everyone else. How is AI perhaps changing the way your finance team operates?

22:04Yeah, it's really accelerated, I think, as you would see for many companies over the last six to 12 months across our organization. so I'll even step outside finance for one second engineering team using automated coding agents obviously with appropriate controls and in a compliant way and really giving them the free reign to do what they need to do and it's enabling them to build products massively faster so we're absolutely doing that our customer success and sales teams we've built a bunch of custom tooling to integrate and harness all of the data across our enterprise and really bringing it to bear and to how we serve our customers much better.

22:44Within the finance team specifically, I'd highlight two tangible examples that have come to bear over the last six or nine months. First, we've taken all of our internal communications, not unique to the finance team, but across the entire organization, running them through AI and using that to detect signals that directly help us project revenue, not just bookings but then also our revenue. And so we've been able to spin up in the last six to nine months a system for projecting our revenue that is easier, faster, and more accurate than anything we had before. What I had before is I would have to Slack someone about customer A and Slack someone else about customer B and then go read a document about customer C and I'm spending all this time and my team's spending all this time trying to find this data.

23:37We don't have the right data anyway. and the projections don't work, and sort of the power of AI enables you to harness all of that existing communication. The second example I'd cite would be on the accounts receivable, billing, and collection side. You know, our business is very interesting. We have about a thousand logos on the real estate side. Those logos represent well over 30 ,000 buildings, communities, apartment buildings that we serve, and we invoice each of them individually, which is sort of the standard in our industry. And so we have enterprise-grade expectations from a billing perspective.

24:17I can't just take my bills and sort of create them automatically and put them in a portal and say, hey, customer, you deal with that. But I do have the SMB-like volume from the volume of an invoicing perspective with all those different communities. And so I need to deliver enterprise-grade capabilities at SMB-like scale. And my team has done a wonderful job historically sort of putting in many long hours to make that work. But AI has gotten better and better. That team has gotten more efficient, hasn't had to grow nearly as fast as our business has grown, and is able to leverage AI to create invoices accurately, ship those invoices out, respond to customer questions about those invoices and make sure we're collecting payments.

25:00It's been a real powerful tool for us. Where would you say expectations haven't been met when it comes to AI or where maybe has AI been harder to apply? It's a very good question. I would say, you know, for us, from our technology perspective and from our product perspective, I'm really proud of the work our research and engineering team has done on the voice front. We have, I think, one of the best voice AI technologies out there. In order to deliver that really performant technology, we invest a ton of time in, obviously, performance, reducing latency, the naturalness of what we're doing. And we partner with some really great companies in order to sort of deliver that.

25:51But we have to assemble that and bring those different underlying technologies together ourselves. I'm not a technologist. I'm not an expert. But if I was sitting here two, two and a half years ago, it felt like the technology was moving in the direction of where that voice capability would be more out of the box by this time. And we really haven't seen it yet to the level of performance that we need as a business. And so our team has really done a really good job developing that. In my own personal life, maybe this is too micro of an example, but the ability to control browsers is still really lacking for me.

26:27And so I still feel myself very encumbered by this tool has an API available or an MCP available. This tool doesn't. For the tool that doesn't, I got to click around the browser. That doesn't really work. And I thought AI might have automated by now. Maybe I'm just not advanced enough. I'll get there over time. That's my personal observation. Given what we've been discussing here, your finance, the finance organization, when you, you know, the people that you rely on, how is that going to, how do you see that changing? I mean, what will it look like in five years versus today? And clearly, if you continue to grow the company, we would think, okay, there would be more hires, but where are they spending how might they be spending their time differently i guess as we move forward that's a very good question and you know i would say one thing is that i'm fortunate enough to be in a position as you mentioned where i'm expecting such extraordinary growth in the company that even if ai makes um people 2x 5x 10x more efficient i will not have to face difficult decisions, you know, as it pertains to the my people.

27:39And I recognize that I'm fortunate that I'm fortunate enough to be in that position, but some other people might not be in that position. You know, I expect my team, which has always been the case, but they're going to have a greater ability to do this going forward. And there's just going to be a greater priority going forward on how they think strategically on being in front of customers, which is a real key Elyse AI tenant. We think we've been really successful by talking to customers, understanding their pain points. The customer isn't always right, but the customer is always right as it pertains to what they're seeing, what they're experiencing, what they're feeling, and what their demands are at a given point in time.

28:23And it's our job to understand that and meet them where they are. And that applies to everyone at Elyse. But obviously salespeople or CSMs, but engineers, product managers, and yes, my team. And so my expectation is that my team will use that time to be more strategic, to get out in the real world, to talk to customers and help them solve problems for the business and for finance. We are up to what we like to refer to as our finance strategic moment question. And again, this might've happened anytime during your career, but it's a moment of insight or an experience you had that made you maybe think a little differently about finance.

29:04Anything come to mind? Yeah, well, I'm thinking about two, actually, as you speak. And if that's too many for your listeners, you don't have to give them both of them. But the first one would be our Series C fundraising. So I joined at least in 2021. At the end of 2021, the company had successfully raised a Series C, A, and B before I joined. Things were great. And I don't know if you remember what happened in 2022. but it was a really bad market. And we had always been aligned as a company since the day I joined as to how we approach the world, which is we're never in a position where we have to raise capital.

29:43We want to have control over our business to make sure that's the case. But at the same time, raising capital was going to be necessary if we wanted to fully achieve the mission we thought we could achieve. And so it was early 2023, the market was still pretty rocky. and we had to have a serious moment of discussion and we made the decision, let's go. Let's be first through the breach. And we went out there and it wasn't easy. It took a longer time than we thought it might otherwise would. We had to kiss a lot of frogs, as they say, not calling investors frogs. And at the end of the day, we stuck by our conviction.

30:21We found an amazing set of investors for that round led by 0.72. It wasn't the valuation we might've achieved in another market, but it was still a very good valuation. But having the courage of our convictions to go out there and do it allowed us to raise the capital. And without that capital raised at the time, we would not have set ourselves up on the course that we did set ourselves up on, which we then raised the Series D about 16, 18 months later, which made us a unicorn and then raised the Series E a year after that. So that was a hard decision, but really being thoughtful about what capital means, what capital doesn't mean and what the right time to raise it was very important.

31:01The second thing I'd highlight is I'm very reflective now. I don't know if you can see behind me, the scaffolding is still behind us. We're in this brand new office, two weeks now, some new investments to be made. And we've always been a New York company, proud to be it, always been an in-office company and proud to be it. And we've had some wonderful space, always historically, but we were beginning to outgrow it. And so 12 months ago, we began the process of looking for this. It was a difficult process. The commercial real estate market in New York is really tough right now. We had to look at a lot of different opportunities, worked with some great partners, and had to find the space that we're in now.

31:45And from a financial perspective, how to make a massive long-term commitment, which is not something we had to do historically as a business. And it's only two weeks into a 10-year lease. But as I sit here today and I'm actually looking out at our team in office, it's busy, it's crowded, people are collaborating, people are enjoying it. It's conviction that it was absolutely the right strategic decision to make as a business. But I can assure you, as the CFO, writing that check and putting my signature on that document, obligating the company to that expenditure, it was not easy at the time.

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33:34about and again you had you had obviously observed cfo and other c-suite members for years but there's just something about the role or the appointment you just didn't expect anything yeah a couple of things you know one is i i looked for it and i got lucky that i found it but that sense of of partnership and candor and alignment with the rest of the management demon And in particular, you know, I would cite Mina and Tony, the co-founders of Elise, who I work very closely with. I look back on this, look back on it. And, you know, I spent 50 % of my time during the process focused on that. And the other 50 % of the time focused on, you know, all the other stuff about the business dynamics and doing my diligence because I used to be an investor.

34:17No, I should have spent 100 % of my time on that. And it's great that it worked out. but you know if I had to do it all over again that is the thing that matters more than anything else being in the trenches with people that you trust and that trust you and that mutual respect is just so important to be successful you know the other thing I'd say is how little I was going to stay in my lane and how much I was going to be encouraged to go outside of my lane great companies great at least at our level great growing companies, great startups, I think rely on people that go above and beyond, that don't stay in their lane, that pick up what has been dropped to go where the problem is.

35:05And I've had to learn to do that more and more as I've been here. And it's been a great experience. Just curious, was there any other time where you almost left? Yeah. And I think part of that was because I was always looking at, and this is hindsight applied, I was always looking at other investing opportunities. And yeah, a headhunter calls you, a friend from the industry calls you, you take the call. but I loved where I was at SageU and it was a great firm and I was doing great work and so of course it wasn't compelling to me to actually make the jump so no I never got close despite having all of those conversations and I think the lesson is that I only actually made the jump yes when the time was right from where I was at SageU but also when I was honest with myself about what would make me happy for the next stage of my career and open myself up to a variety of opportunities in a way that I had not previously opened myself up to when I was, yeah, I was just taking the inbound calls from the people that were calling me about investment opportunities.

36:20And no one was calling me to go be the CFO of their company until I sort of opened myself up to that. Got it. We always like to ask our guests to reflect a little on the personal side for us. we always sort of toss this one out there. What's something most people don't know about you? What's something from your past pursuit and interest that you had? Don't know. That's a good one. Well, you'll know this about me if my Zoom filter doesn't work or if I fail to turn it on, but I'm pretty good at that, so most people won't know this. Right behind my desk in my office at home, there's a four-foot-long 10 ,000-piece Lego Titanic model.

37:00I'm not just a giant Lego person But in the last five years Something about it Ten minutes at a time It's my mental reset It's my soothing activity When I have a little bit of time Or just need to reset my brain And it's been great On the other side of my office One of my other biggest models Actually probably my favorite Is a Lego model of the Concorde I got my private pilot's license actually about 10 or 12 years ago. I'm now a CFO. I have a five-year-old daughter who's the light of my life. And so I'm not actively flying that. The license sits in my pocket. But the Concord that I stare at on the other side of my desk is a reminder of the pursuits I will have at my disposal again when I'm done doing the insanely rewarding and valuable work I'm doing right now.

37:53Those are great, great examples for us. What about, would you have a book for us or a resource, something that's influenced your thinking, something you've escaped with? I don't know. Anything? Book selection or resource? That's a good one. It won't be specifically finance, but it has been very particular or very influential as to how I operate here at Elyse. And it's because I was told to read it before I joined. And it's called No Rules Rules. It's the book about Netflix. by Reed Hastings. And unfortunately, I'm forgetting the name of the individual who probably did most of the writing for him, so I apologize in advance.

38:32But it's just a tremendous insight into how that company was built. We don't copy that culture line for line, but it definitely has a big influence on how we operate as a business. And it's just been a tremendous book. It was a tremendous book in terms of understanding how to make decisions, clarity of decisions, and how to build a really strong culture at a rapidly growing company. Yeah, great, great selection for us. Thank you for that. We're up to our final question, Andrew. We're going to ask you to look forward and what we'd like to know are your priorities as a CFO. What would those be for the coming 12 months?

39:12Well, you know, we're going to keep trying to grow over 100 % a year and that's, you know, there's the fog of war that always comes with that. and the fact that everything changes every day. So forgive me if this is evading your question, but my number one priority is for me and for my team to be nimble and to be open to receiving that comes its way and to be adaptable. And hopefully if you talk to me six or 12 months from now, I'll tell you a bunch of things we did that we didn't even think of today because they were driving the business forward and it's what we needed to do at the moment in time.

39:47If I were to be more tangible about it, I'd say we need to continue to drive AI throughout our business. Obviously, yes, in our products and how we serve our customers. But yes, be better as a business finance team and otherwise to be more efficient, to do more with less, to drive more positive outcomes. And so we're looking at new ways as an organization to measure how we do that, which is really hard these days. But trying to invest in that so that we're able to do that and continue to make sure that I, as a finance leader, ensure that the business is properly funded so that we can continue to make the investments we need to do in order to have the impact as a company that we want to have.

40:30Andrew Korn, thank you for joining us on CFO Thought Leader. Jax, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks for your time.

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