Stord’s Plan to Take on Amazon’s Logistics Advantage | Sean Henry

23:53Um, and it goes back to, you need, you know, a leader who has been in steeped in this, who understands the nuances of building something that's truly new and unique and differentiated in the space. Um, and so, yeah, like you can't replace that. Um, and it's not like you can go and get an off the shelf executive to go, to go run this. Um, and I think the conversation we ultimately had was, hey, it's great to be self-aware. It's great. It's great to be introspective. And like, let's go and essentially look at all the pieces that need to work for this to happen. Right. And that's, you know, go to market.

24:28That's your fulfillment, freight warehousing infrastructure. What do we do with freight? It's the software piece that, you know, we've made, you've made really incredible progress in. And really let's be patient is kind of the core point and let's not try to get to some mega scale at all costs by selling dollars for 90 cents. Right. And let's just understand that this business is going to compound. And I think the real sort of core of it was, you know, we're operating in a physical economy, kind of logistics space and the software space. Let's make sure, I think the conversation we had was like, let's make sure that we have a killer logistics business and that you can build that, like, you know how to build.

25:09There's examples of that. You understand the metrics that matter for that. Let's do that first and foremost, and then build kind of the cherry on top piece of that, which has been kind of the plan, right? I think it's really that kind of going back to fundamentals, knowing that we have a strong balance sheet. Again, kudos to Sean for having the foresight for that, and that we can take our time and be patient. And I think that's probably the most critical piece here. Yeah, I give Ilya a lot of credit in that period for both that founder conversation because you also pushed hard on basically, well, you've gotten this here and that clearly proves, let's say, you're right on more than 50 % of decisions or something like that.

25:53And at the same time, I think you used the statement like, don't let the tail wag the dog. Don't let all your investors and your employees tell you where the business is headed. We trust the plans. Have conviction and push forward on these vectors. And I think we step back And we say, okay, well, let's make that multi-year strategic plan and say, well, first, let's shore up whether it's our product, let's say, and our value prop for our ICP, then let's shore up these kind of unit economic elements of the business and kind of take the gloves off team by team and problem by problem. And I think that as a young founder and CEO, I saw a quote from a leader at Amazon actually recently, which was like, my biggest worry for young founders and CEOs or executives is you think you're supposed to hire the best possible team and kind of get out of their way.

26:44No, your job is to raise the bar on them every single day, push them to be better and faster than they ever thought possible, keep them aligned to the mission. And I think myself included failed at that in those early 2019, 2020, you're hiring like crazy, you're growing like crazy. There seems to be unlimited capital. You hire all these really big leaders and kind of say they'll figure it out and they can run that team. And then you really start to like introspect and say, well, if I know the mission and the problem, the customer better than anyone, and I have good scrappy entrepreneurial frameworks about what does good look like, how fast should we move, these types of things.

27:18No matter what team it is from products to engineering, to sales, to in-building operations, we can get in there and verify and push and hold teams more and more accountable. It almost feels like playing whack-a-ball where you're like, all right, this is the problem, now this is the problem, now this is the problem, but over a multi-year period, it all really clicks together. And I think for a business like us too, I think a hard part is every entrepreneur, well, maybe not every, I think it's a high probability you want some sort of flywheel in your business. And we were kind of pitching this like, as we get to more scale, we'll get lower costs, higher speed, our software will drive this leverage and our variable economics and our actual performance metrics.

28:01And we'll get all this consumer trust where we're now shipping to some 15 plus percent of US households per year. We're trying to build that trust and that repeatability. Early on, you're like, there will be a flywheel, trust it. And then at some point, you finally start to see the metrics click together and come together. And I think that's really what we saw towards the end of 23, beginning of 24 was that flywheel actually playing off where every customer in new order that came in drove so many structural advantages in our business. And so I think when you step back, that enables a lot more confidence to then push far forward into that flywheel even faster while you try to keep the same kind of controls and efficiency that you're driving in the business day to day.

28:42Last night, we were at dinner with a bunch of CEOs and founders and Sean was there. And I was like off to the side eating food or something. And I like there's kind of like a queue of founders waiting to go talk to Sean, which was kind of a funny moment that like he's the old head now and like people like look up to him, you know, and are like the founder that kind of they want to be one day, not to gas you up too much, but we're talking after and you're like going through all the excruciating detail over the last few years, as you described of whack-a-mole and like whack-a-mole kind of glosses over, how hard you have to whack the moles, you know, and like how painful that actually is over several years.

29:29And we have counter examples of, I think, a lot of founders that were unwilling to play whack-a-mole over these last few years. And I think now their business is not in the same shape as where stores is. And I give you a lot of credit for doing that because I think it's not easy. But do you think that maybe for both of you, the market changed? It was very obvious that the market changed. Every SaaS company, every logistics company, like they had to run their business differently. Everybody was running way too hot. AI was coming and now like very clearly here. And in many ways, like some people just haven't responded in the same way.

30:08Do you think it's the unwillingness to play whack-a-mole because it's so painful to like make all of these changes in your business? I think in many ways, you have to kind of break down your ego, go back to that early, it's called founder mode because I think it's taking you back to like day one of the business where you do everything and you're involved in everything. And I don't think I can sit here and proclaim that I'm holier than thou, better than founders who didn't do it because I just think it is very hard and you have to be kind of willing to be that one in every meeting going through every single headcount, every single expense, every single customer and saying, why, why, why over and over.

30:47And it's not like a fun position to be in necessarily. There's this constant tension with you. And you almost have to like kill the early optimistic founder of you. That was just everything's up and to the right. Everything's optimism's selling and go into like very aggressive operator mode and make sure we know every single metric on every single aspect of the business. But why is that hard? Like, is it though? Like, what makes that hard? I think it's both throwing out so much that you prior did and thought you were creating something great. You thought you structured this great team, this great product, this great segment of your business.

31:21So like for us, we had a trucking segment of our business. We ended up closing it and saying this is kind of incongruent with the rest of our model. We love fulfillment. We love last mile. We'll do the middle mile to kind of sort and rebalance inventory, but kind of standalone trucking. It's not really for us. It's not the same kind of commerce enablement as the rest of our platform. It was incredibly hot and requested from customers during 2020 when capacity was so tight. but it's not the same kind of value-added service. Well, that was a business that, I mean, actually we went to bat on of knowing bad examples of trucking business that haven't got well, my advocation for no, no, no, this is why we have to do it all the way to circle back to, I was wrong, we should close this down, multiple years of my time and energy, let's throw it away.

32:05So I think you kind of have to be willing to break things you prior thought were great and or just live in that place that doesn't necessarily, isn't congruent with your personality. I think a lot of founders are optimists, you're a builder, you want to go talk to customers and employees and push, push, push and build something great. And that is kind of incongruent with like being that daily operator, just pushing and being pessimistic on every number and being conservative. But I think going back to the point you said on let's first build an incredible logistics business, it also became kind of what's the best thing I could do for my employees and my investors.

32:43And we kind of said very transparently internally, here's what we're going through. Here's where we're trying to get and externally. And we said, well, how do we create the most, the best situation for everyone, which we thought was kind of limited downside, unlimited upside. So some asymmetric kind of risk and saying, well, what's really happening to most companies that are in a bad spot today? It's either that they have too high of a burn and they're going to be insolvent in some period of time, or that they're never going to be able to get to a size and scale that substantiates either their valuation or their kind of capital raised in their pref stack.

33:20Those are the two main issues people are talking about over the last few years. Well, how do we like take those off the table? Well, one is we can get profitable. And two is we can build a business the size that even in like our worst case is bigger and better than our prep stack or our valuation or otherwise. So that was kind of our, let's just build a fundamentally great business and then kind of go for the moonshot once we have this profit, once we have this scale. Not mutually exclusive, but like, let's focus on the blocking and tackling. And I think Ilya started to introduce the kind of like, in the fullness of time concept and more board meetings.

33:53Like, that's great. And we absolutely should do that. But if that's going to light X money on fire today, like that's probably once we've solved foundational piece. And so then once we get to this point where we have what we believe is the best fulfillment network available from a customer feedback and experience perspective, a speed perspective, a cost perspective, a reputation with brands, and we came such a far away. Well, not only do we have a great business that's now 10 times plus the scale of when we did our last round prior in those 2021 and two times profitable with raving customer reviews, growing faster than ever, 70 to 100 % a year at hundreds of millions in scale.

34:31We feel like we hit foundation, which is capped downside. Now we're in uncapped upside mode where if unlimited time and the foundation we've built, there's no question we can build this massive, massive, massive business. And so I think that was important, at least to me. And I hope it came across to our investors that this is the best asymmetric risk I profile can create for investors, employees, my customers, and everyone involved. I think it can feel like as a founder, I'm sure you have somewhere like a whiteboard or a list of things that stored could do and could be, right? Like your big vision.

35:08And I think having fundamentally doing these resets, headcount reductions, you know, killing a product line can feel like you're actually preventing yourself from achieving that big vision. I can feel like, hey, like actually my vision was too big. My business may be smaller than I thought. And I think that's a very painful thing to try to just kind of go through and think and reason about because you have this opportunity and you feel it when you're a high growth company. I think the biggest thing there is just understanding that sequencing really matters and is crucial. And I think, you know, you look at the iconic companies out there, you look at a Microsoft, you know, you look at an Apple, these like platform companies that have multiple product lines that are just giants.

35:52You're looking at Amazon, same thing. And I think you can forget that it took them decades, many decades to get to this. They started with one product added another product, added a third product, maybe made some critical acquisitions to then compound into what you see. And too often, I think, especially when you're in a high growth company, you can feel like you can fast track your way to being that platform. And so you spin up multiple products, you hire a bunch of people because you feel like, hey, I can get to that critical end state in a short window of time. And one 10th, essentially the time that it took these iconic companies to get there and you wind up, you know, peanut buttering yourself and peanut buttering your resources.

36:34And then you have to kind of course correct. And it feels like now you're not going to become that platform company that you had the potential to. So I think that's fundamentally at the heart of it. I mean, I think the other part of it is honestly, you know, it's the human piece of it. When you have early employees and you've convinced them to join you on this crazy quest, right? You've made them an implicit promise. And now you kind of have to to say like actually didn't really, it's not working out for you. I think that's hard to do. It's hard to do. It's hard to make those changes because you do have these commitments.

37:04So I think just the human aspect of it is also, it's pretty important. And I think that's where, you know, having that sequencing and thinking of, you know, what's my Maslow's hierarchy of needs? What's the foundational thing I need to build now to fulfill that future vision and the promise I'm making to my employees and doing that over and over consistently reviewing and sort of updating your assumptions is really important. And I think that's what folks essentially had to go through because by definition, if you made it to 2023 as a company through the pandemic, you had incredible tailwinds, right?

37:36You just had incredible tailwinds and those tailwinds actually turned into headwinds, massive headwinds. And adjusting in that moment, I think was very hard. And coming off of, you know, it's like you're driving at a hundred miles an hour and then you have to hit the brakes. So obviously it's going to be difficult to do. But I think if you did that correctly, and as Sean did with the stored, I think then you're on this path of unlimited upside. And I think that's, but that transition is hard. I would just throw out, I think there's one or two points I think you nailed in there too, which is when you're going 100 miles an hour, the speed you hit the brakes also matters.

38:12And I think that one of my biggest learnings was in that early 22 period, we're probably making those critical decisions over a multi-month, really introspective or thoughtful period and kind of worried about what may happen. And by 2023 or four, when we're seeing even the most progress, we're making those decisions in days or weeks and saying, you just got to decide today. And it's the classic snow decision is a decision ultimately, but that massive action is necessary. But I gave an example of a division we shut down because we did not think it was part of our future mission and where we were headed.

38:43But I think very thoughtfully, there's also the point you may shut down things that are part of your future vision and say, we just got over our skis and tried to do this too soon. And that's almost even harder because you're saying, no, no, we're not giving up that total horizon of what we're going to be in time, but it's the not right now. And maybe we took a step forward too soon. And having that kind of trust and conviction is also critical because it comes back to that hierarchy of needs of you can only get there if you're surviving in great business in the first place. And I feel like so much of this is the foundation and thankfully we nailed the foundation, but then it's also the acceleration of at the same time.

39:21A lot of it sounds very, very downside, very let's protect, protect, protect. I think the hardest thing we did was drive this profit, drive this improvement and all these structural advantages while also getting 10 plus times bigger over that time. And that was a hard trade off of so many businesses, particularly in our category, when you grow, you actually erode your economics and let's grow really fast at scale while enhancing economics. I think that became a big proof point. In many ways, you're basically having to commit to years of conflict every day, basically. You're going into conflict with everybody on your team every day to produce a better result.

39:58That sounds horrible. I don't want to do that. And in the meantime, you have this existential doubt where everybody's looking at you to have answers. Even last night, everyone's asking you about how to be a great CEO and all these answers. and we were walking into the hotel and you're like, Shubin, I don't like, we don't know. Like, do they think that I have all these like magic answers? You know, like we don't know. You know, nobody really knows. Like this is a unique business. So you have like this intense conflict that has a long duration of time coupled with this intense doubt because the path ahead has never been seen before.

40:37That's like really gnarly. Yeah, I think you saw way more people coming up to me than I did. No, I do think I get that a lot in terms of you think there's an answer once you see someone at a certain stage. And my learning, I mean, a young founder, a lot of investors early on said the number one determinant of a success in a founder like you is just pace of learning and how fast can you kind of see new patterns and adapt to them. And I think you only can actually learn fast if you also admit, like, I know nothing. And we're constantly just trying to make the best decision we can at any given time.

41:08But it even comes back to that point I made on hiring big executives. You start to hire people and everyone has like a framework for this is how it was done here. And this is why it's good because you do it this way. And you start to really see through that and say like, why is that actually good? Like, is that actually driving some sort of alpha in the result? Or you start to kind of learn this question everything pattern. Don't just listen to some position of authority and kind of cut through things even more rapidly. But to the other point, I think my co-founder and I, Jacob, joked a lot during that same period.

41:41I don't know the full story, but there is also a story of during one of Facebook's bad times a long time ago where Mark Zuckerberg would just come to work in a suit every day for a year to kind of signify this is the year we're getting serious. And no, we did not literally do that. But like I started going to the office every single day and started doing just all these kind of like, I started sending a weekly Sunday email for the last three years. I have like 200 pages of a Google Doc now of all these emails we've sent to the team of just that constant drumbeat of here's what's happening. Here's what we need to get done next week.

42:09And so it's like all these small symbolic items that shows your team like we're locked in. We're not giving up. We're pushing harder than ever. And that it is time to get serious. And I think what you start to see is that people appreciate it. If you have a very high performance culture, very like we want to hire the best. And I think in an operational business, you kind of have naturally that operational intensity excellence kind of built into the culture. So often where you're scared about a decision of will this like disrupt my team? Will everyone leave? Will this create issues? And I've never once really seen that happen.

42:45It's much more often that it's, oh, thanks for finally making that decision. Yeah, your team like already knows. That's the funniest bit of it. Whenever there is a fundamental change, headcount reduction, product direction change, anything. It's funny, I think as a founder, you sweat about it. You're so concerned about it. And then you kind of unleash it on the team. the team's like yeah like we thought you were going to do this like half a year ago like what's taking you so long that's by the way the risk of not hitting the brakes hard enough or the risk of waiting is the really good people on the on your team they see it they know it they get it they're waiting for you to make that call and if you don't make that call in time you know what they're going to lose confidence in your ability to lead and operate and they're going to go go elsewhere and that's actually more often than not the failure mode of not correcting uh effectively yeah and And I'm thinking back through that period, I think it is over communication too, because we also had a call right at the turn where we were talking about all the executive attrition going on across companies where people weren't believing in the value they signed up for.

43:46They felt underwater. They didn't know how to get their company to their side. Unfortunately, we had to make a lot of team changes proactively. But one other proud item is we didn't lose a single leader in the company, regrettably, in terms of them leaving in that time. And I think that is only possible from saying, here's where we're headed and here's why it is still part of that long-term mission and going to be so valuable for you, for us. And you also have to build a culture where they like working on the hard things. There's a lot of negatives to the kind of like Amazon, SpaceX type cultures out there you hear about in terms of burnout, employee morale, things like that.

44:21But there's also a fraction of the population that like loves that environment and loves that intensity. And over that time, we just oscillated and rotated our culture more to that side. And we found these people love working really hard, love going so above and beyond. And I would say we're talking a lot about me in this, but the reality is like it is our team. And we just got to the best team we've ever had over that period by being so disciplined. One of the founders yesterday was telling me about his routine to set pace within the company, which was he's in the office by 8 30 and he doesn't leave until I think 11 like every day that's like his routine right now because they're in like crunch time they're about to announce their series a they're about to ship the product like it's crunch time they're all here in New York and he was like I literally have a clock and I like clock in and clock out he's like I don't necessarily need everybody to be there during that time but like I have to kind of like the suit example, like I have to be there just to show that like, I'm here.

45:22I'm here. Like I'm not asking you to do anything that I'm not. You do the memos on Sundays. I'm curious, did you develop any other habits during that time? I think the memos on Sunday, early Sunday morning sets the pace for... Was Ilyan in the loop on those? No, I was going to say, that's not good. I didn't get the memo. Yeah, I got to send you some. They've been good. I think some of it is like stories. So like in those memos or even just in Slack, we'll celebrate team members who act with the same pace and urgency. We'll talk about companies and cultures and examples of them doing that as well.

45:56But I think it's all those micro examples. I have an incredible COO, Steve Swan. And he and I talk all the time about like we want to scare our team with being like omnipresent. We want like 24-7 basically to be like the first responding to something no matter how short and quick. on every call, almost questioning, like, how are they everywhere at every given moment? It's because we want the whole team to kind of see that pace and know that there's literally nothing I won't do that I'm going to ask you to do as well. I'll get on any plane, go to any customer, come to any hard meeting, whatever it is.

46:29And I think that's not always the case. And I think that sets the right tone for the team. Even in an interview recently, I thought it was interesting. I asked the person, I never asked him before, but it was for a role where I thought it was relevant. I was like, what's below you and what's above you beyond your capability? And the answer should be a lot and nothing. Unfortunately, the answer was a few things and not much. And I was like, that's the inverse. No thanks. Because really at the end of the day, at one point I was the person taking out the trash. I was the person doing every single thing in the business.

47:01And so what is the last few years done to my ego if I'm not willing to do those things? But I think setting the pace personally is really important. Have you seen the internal tech memes Twitter handle? The X internal tech? Oh my gosh. The emails? The email, yeah. I think the handle is called internal tech emails or something. Basically, through litigation. Oh yeah. Like all the emails come out from Steve Jobs and like all these legendary, all the legendary CEOs. And the thing that I always look at is the response times. Like if you look at the timestamps on like Steve's emails, emails, they're like, or Zuck's emails, like when they're going back and forth on debating Snapchat, and like, this is like buying Snapchat.

47:45It's like, unbelievable, the clock speed that they have. This is like Steve Jobs, like, like, this is like Zuck. The clock speed that they have is crazy. Yeah, I remember a VC telling me early on, like, oh, our main partner, he's so funny, so busy. Every one of his emails is five words and five typos. And it's just so fast. And I'm like, Like, well, it sounded funny at the time. Unfortunately, that's me today. And the typos are almost symbolic. Like, I am moving very quick. But I think to that, there's this weird fallacy I see across people, which is like, and this is not calling myself successful.

48:19The most successful and busy people have the fastest response time and are on it the most. And you'd almost assume it's the inverse. Like, oh, they're so busy. They'll never see this. They'll never get back to this. It's like, no, it's actually the opposite. You're really good at triaging and either like immediately deleting or immediately replying and just knowing that filter of like, what matters. And my team laughs at me, but I'm like, basically at inbox zero constantly, because I'm always always on the pulse and either a quick delete or a really rapid response. Oh, Ilya can hold me accountable when it comes to board.

48:49Sometimes it's a little too long to too much explanation. I was like, give me the one sentence. I actually think you're pretty responsive to actually, I think you're very responsive, Like you kind of set the clock speed internally too of like, I usually know that if I have something that I text you about, it's always text. Like if you want to, good luck trying to slack him or something. But if you want to, if you want to get a hold of Ilya, it's pretty easy over text. There's also no ego. Like, yeah, schedule something with my EA four days from now. It's like, hey, can we chat? And we're talking on the phone within like an hour.

49:17Yeah. But I think it's the point you made, which is, you know, you kind of have to have a pretty good filter. Otherwise you're going to get buried. Yeah. Right now, we're in a moment in time where everything is AI, AI something, okay? Companies that are far less in revenue as you, far less of a predictable business is where you are today. Like the chart that was read a few years ago is now green. It's profitable. It's growing like crazy. You know, these companies are not that predictable. They're certainly not profitable. They have relatively little revenue comparatively, and they're raising it crazy valuations like much higher than you.

49:57Do you have a little bit of like, what the hell? Like, like, is there any is there any of that? Like where everyone around you, it's like, do you feel that envy at all? Like that idea of just like, man, all these people. It reminds me actually a little bit of like the 2021 days where there's like all these people that were raising it in crazy valuations. Do you feel that? I wouldn't say envy because of what you just said, which is the 2021 days. Like I've lived the raise way too high for where your revenue and size is and then lived into it. And it's not a fun period. And thankfully we've lived into it, gone beyond that valuation and more.

50:31But some of those stories, not all of them, but some of them will fall into that bucket. And that's where I think that some investors early on did advise and did push on that point of like, you really never want to raise at too high of a value you don't believe you can live into because of the tension and issues it'll create for you. And so I remember Everett at Kleiner, when we were raising one of the rounds, he was giving me such thoughtful frameworks of every 100 million evaluation you're adding in this, that means you can deliver X of free cash flow at scale. Are you ready to sign up for that?

51:00And really helping think through. So I don't know if all those founders have experienced that same pattern over the last few years and may face it for the first time. There's also going to be many that just scale way beyond because of the promise of AI and how fast these products are getting adopted and more. We're now hitting a second interesting trend, which is I think businesses like us are becoming increasingly interesting because when you realize, okay, I can make all these vertical software applications with AI very rapidly and cheaply and scale them very rapidly. A lot of other people realize that too.

51:31And you see a lot of pricing pressure happening over the kind of multi-year period with these products that get released and grow so fast to so much scale. And so now I think there's a lot of trends saying, well, we love AI, but from the actual LLM layer, it is a little commoditized where all these applications are just jumping across 30, whichever is the best every single day. And from this layer, there's like moat and defensibility questions in some cases. And I'm not saying it's all bad. Don't take that. But now there's like a second order question, which is, well, what businesses could we actually apply AI into that either have some sort of data or workflow moat of the customer install base or some physical moat where you can't ever really take away that physical aspect to whoever has the best embedded technology to apply AI to is going to win.

52:20And that's where, as that trend really takes off, I think storage is going to be in a really advantageous position because every single order being routed, every single parcel being selected, every pick path in a warehouse, natural questions about what's going on with my order. There's so many applications of AI that don't even have to be sold to a customer. It just drives better economics to us and then really moves the needle for our customer. And we have the vertically integrated platform and the infrastructure to apply it to. So I think we're very excited about the chapters ahead because of the strong foundation we have.

52:52So you go through this time, things were red, things were green, very green. Then your chart of like business goals were red. Now we're in a moment of time where like Mojo's back, like up round, we're feeling good. Things are green to bright green again. Now what? Like what's next? I think even this, we fit the same patterns, right? Like when you hit profitable, we still have a good balance sheet. We're very much like, let's build for the long term. Let's build the fortress-like balance sheet that lets us continue to execute forever. Because I think the last few years have made me naturally very paranoid.

53:28Everything's green. We've had so many good quarters in a row. I'm just watching everything possible for let's not let anything disrupt this. Thankfully, there are great trends for our business. We just blew out Q1, hitting almost 3x our sales targets after four quarters prior of blowing out our sales targets. And so we are kind of locked and leaned in. And I think from our perspective, we are one of the most scaled players in our industry. And we have just such dramatic scale to when I started the business to think about to where we are today. We powered 1 % of Black Friday, Cyber Monday in the US.

53:59We're shipping to almost 15 % of unique consumers in the US per year. And those are just rising rapidly, powering over$5 billion of commerce annually. That I really do think there's so much untapped potential. This is a trillion dollar global market where basically a deviation of GDP is our market sizing. And so I think it's more, bigger, faster, cheaper for customers. And a lot of that is hitting our kind of second, third, fourth horizon opportunities as a business. I won't say what all those are for too many competitors out there, but the biggest trend we're investing in right now is really just consumer trust and consumer visibility.

54:38And one of the most fun things I have is now as we power all these delivery promises, post-purchase tracking emails, returns portals, you're getting a stored label on your doorstep. I get multiple texts a week of someone I haven't talked to in years, just like, I just got a package from stored. You're big time now. I just got an email from stored. And it's like, we want to build that prime-like brand where someone's checking out and says, oh, this is the best shipping experience I've had across any platform. I trust this brand. I'm actually going to convert at a higher rate because it's powered by store.

55:09And if we hit that layer, we, again, are really powering commerce. We're not just their delivery partner. And you're finally getting married. I just realized, is the reason you delayed the engagement to the marriage for so long was because you needed everything in green on the business? There's a long delay. I was like, I need to make sure I have a future first. No, I'm kidding. There's a long delay. We were busy. We got engaged in 2023. And Stuart is just about to hit a decade old, which is hard to believe. And I started the business when I was 18. So I won't say that the first one, two years was our fastest period of development.

55:42But ultimately, it's been a really fun journey to have Mary Ellen along for the ride. And we're getting married in September. Don't worry. I don't have crazy honeymoon plans just yet, coinciding with peak season. Put it on our calendar, your PTO, please. Yeah, just let us know. I think Elliot knows my PTO over the last few years. Sean needs to take more PTOs. Yeah, I had to drag him to New York at some point. I'm like, hey, just bring your, I guess it was your girlfriend at the time. And let's just go to dinner. Come to New York for two, you are redlining. So anyway, we got to drag you out of that office every once in a while.

56:16Thank you for doing this. Thank you. Are you hiring? Always, always hiring. Mostly at this time in our just core business, as we're growing 100 plus percent a year, there's a lot of roles across the team. Nationwide, I mean, we have 13 fulfillment centers. We have roles across from like industrial engineer to local on-site software engineers. Corporate rise, we're probably 70, 75 % Atlanta. So definitely that's our preference, but open after that. So stored.com, you can find our careers page and we'd love to meet you. But at the same time, really, we'd love to talk to brands. I think today, Stored is powering so much commerce and we have such a flywheel where our win rate last year in deals was probably one of the things that even helped drive this round.

56:59When you actually just look at competitive head-to-head, how we are in GTM, I think we booked something crazy like 25 times revenue of what we spent on sales and marketing last year. That efficiency is part of what I think is driving so much success in this round. We just closed more. But at the same time, my point is almost every brand we meet, we've now meet at this point where we can confidently say we can deliver faster, cheaper, and with a better tech infrastructure for your customers than anyone else you've met. And that's where we're just so confident going into new deals. So if you're a brand, particularly doing tens to hundreds of millions a year in GMB, we'd love to help save you money so you can redeploy that back towards winning more customers.

57:40When you hear the word grit, what do you think of? I think of that founder mode, probably. It's like the willingness to do incredibly hard things over a long period of time without certainty that they're going to necessarily pay off because I think you have to have conviction in something and be willing to do hard things. That's what grit brings to mind for me. Gentlemen, thank you. Thank you. That was fun. Thanks. That's it for now. If you liked the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production and I'm Juven.

58:14Thanks for listening.

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