Madhavan Ramanujam - How to Price Products - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY]

22:53Can you talk about what those three things are as we start to move from how to have the conversation to actually arranging the product, whether it's for a segment or overall? Let's say you're testing a whole bunch of benefits, then you need to assemble these benefits or let's say even features that you're building into a product. That's a packaging exercise. Or you might actually take multiple products and come up with a bundle of different products. Either way, it is basically configuring what you're actually selling. So the leader fillers and killers sort of principle is useful in determining what to productize, like how to configure your product.

23:28The easiest way to understand this is if you think about a McDonald's Happy Meal, your burger is a leader product. That's what people are actually coming for. Your French fries and Cokes are the filler product. If you put it in a bundle, more people would probably take French fries and Coke. If it's all standalone, probably people are looking still for the leader product, which is the burger. Killer products are the ones that you need to be careful about because if you put it in a bundle, it'll kill the bundle. For instance, if you package a coffee along with a French fries, Coke and burger, it's going to kill the bundle.

23:59No one needs a double dose of caffeine, hopefully, when they're having a burger. But there are people like me who disproportionately love to have coffee with a burger. So what happens is the coffee is stripped and sold standalone at a higher price point because I'm actually willing to pay for it. If you put this in a bundle, what's happening is it just depreciates the price point for everyone because majority of them won't pay for it. So you're actually selling it at a much lesser rate. So the idea is to take it and say, OK, that's an add on. How do you come up with a bundle or package which has leaders and fillers, avoids the killers?

24:32And then you need to determine whether the killers can be standalone products or simply stuff that should be not productized per se. What are some of the biggest mistakes or traps that you see companies fall into? when running this process? So even if they're doing what you've said so far, they're having the pricing conversation early, they're thoughtful about segmentation and productizing for segments, all the things we've talked about so far. What are some of the big mistakes that still happen? Let's assume that you had the conversations early, you focused on segmentation, you had the right product.

25:06One is thinking about pricing as just how much to charge as opposed to how to charge. What we tongue-in-cheek often say is how you charge is way more important than how much you charge, as in what is the right pricing model or monetization model and keeping that in mind. And the other one I would say is talking features and not benefits. If you don't speak the value of your product, people won't get it. And you need to be able to speak benefits as opposed to talking features. Let's take those in reverse order. Maybe give an example of, or even a rule of thumb for what is a benefit versus a feature?

25:45Like, how do I know that it's a benefit versus a feature or vice versa? I can probably take an example to illustrate this. And we discussed this example also in the book. I mean, I'm sure you've probably heard of a company called SmugMug. They used to have a pricing plan, which you needed to probably scroll down and actually see. And it was all the features that were listed, everything that was actually engineered. What they did is they didn't do any changes to the products, but they just simply changed the way they communicated their products to customers. They actually started focusing on benefits.

26:18And for them, let's say the benefit, let's say, was the ability to sell photos online. That is a benefit. But there's probably 10 or 15 features that actually need to be in place to enable that benefit. Initially, they used to talk about all the 10 or 15 things. But then once they started talking about benefits, the ability to sell or the ability to have personalization, this is the benefit. It was double-digit improvements in revenue, no changes in products. Just the way you talk about the product and the value. I mean, having that articulation becomes key. And one of my favorite examples of value communication also comes from Porsche.

26:55I think it was when they were launching the Taycan, I think their CEO said something like, Taycan is not one of the most affordable electric vehicles you can buy. That was never Porsche's goal. First and foremost, it is a Porsche. Something like this is dramatically resonating with their customer segments, right? I mean, like, how do you pitch the value fast and how do you talk about the benefits becomes key? And if you don't, then you're left with features and then you'll leave the customers to interpret what benefit they're actually getting. Ideally, you would be able to also tie your pricing strategy in terms of your pricing model to the benefit that is being realized.

27:31And that's part one of the misstep. Simple way to think about this. A benefit is what your product does for them and a feature is how they use your product to do it or something like that. Like the what and the how. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. What did you build and how does that impact the customer? If we go back to the how to charge your customer, I think in the book you highlight memory serves like five distinct models for charging. Maybe you could just tick those off. We don't have to go through each in detail, but I would love to hear at a high level how you see successful firms triangulate on the way that they're going to charge.

28:06Some things are just obvious. For a burger, you're going to charge for the burger. You're not going to probably not going to charge like a monthly subscription, all you can eat to McDonald's or something, although maybe that's possible. maybe just take the five off and then we can talk a little bit about why this is so important for success. So we talk about different pricing models and the most common ones are, should you have, let's say something like a subscription model, which is more on a predictable basis, same price month over month, for instance, or should you actually be more on a pay as you go or usage based models?

28:38This is the second one. You're basically paying upon consumption. And of course, you can have a hybrid with a portion of it being in subscription, portion of it being in pay as you go. Then you also have models like the dynamic pricing models. How do you price in such a way that it's an equilibrium price between supply and the demand side? How does it actually change over a period of time? There's also models like, for instance, completely being freemium. That's also a pricing model. To what extent should you build a freemium? And what is the difference between, let's say a freemium and a premium pricing strategy.

29:11So there are various models to consider, but I think the key thing is not to gravitate to one or the other just because someone else is doing it, but to truly identify what is the right pricing model and then sort of build around it and focus on the how you charge questions. We even talk about an interesting way of quickly getting to the pricing model. I mean, we even do some experiments. For instance, if you put someone in a thought experiment and say, okay, look, if you're selling an item for$100, if I charge you, let's say 10%, or if I charge you$5 and 5%, or if I charge you$10, are you indifferent among these or do you prefer one?

29:53I mean, everything that we learned in school, mathematics, economic, human being, rational stuff would say that I'm indifferent. I've done this experiment. I simplified it, but I've done this kind of experiment thousands of times. I've never seen the indifferent actually. There's always a model that just makes intuitive sense for your customers and identifying that. And if you can tie it to the value being generated, nothing like it. It's kind of another version of the same thing you started with, which is the important thing is to have the conversation and have it in relative terms, not absolute terms.

30:26Is that kind of the basic sum up? Yes, that is the basic sum up. And I think, like I said, Tying it to the value is, at the end of the day, if people can understand why they're buying in a certain manner, that actually is super important. Not just rushing to, let's say, subscription versus usage, but truly trying to understand what makes sense for your product and your business situation. Do you find that most of the time, the value piece of all this boils down to the same few common denominators? Like one example would be, I could sell you time, I could sell you money, I could sell you signaling value or something like that.

31:01there probably aren't that many core motivations if you keep asking why. Do you find that that is true? Yes, that is definitely true. Time money is probably a great example. Are you able to do certain things faster compared to like, let's say, existing alternates? Are you able to do it better? That could be better in terms of, let's say, starting as basic as better resolution to like a better way of approaching things and people actually relate to that. And of course, is it saving some money and it's an efficient process, et cetera. But then what is it? I mean, the level two is probably important.

31:33The level one is probably these high level dimensions. But what exactly is that? For instance, if I'm saving money, where is that coming from? Is it inventory reduction, for instance? What service level can I actually achieve from that inventory reduction? What kind of pricing strategy can I have for a software that lets you reduce inventory, but keep the same customer service level? What gains do customers have? Is that a problem? Am I solving it? Is there an economic value that is generated? And what portion of that economic value can I capture? So that's literally how this conversation goes.

32:06And as a rule of thumb, what we have seen is you should be able to capture at least 20 to 25 % of the economic value that you are actually bringing to the table. This is a good range to be in because if you're around the 50%, most likely you're leaving space for someone to disrupt you. If you're less than the 20%, you're under monetizing. So at least 20 % is a good rule of thumb of the economic value that you are generating for the customer. This could be time savings. This could be efficiency gains, money savings, whatever it is. Does that insight translate into net margins, operating margins, gross margins, some combination of them?

32:43Like it sounds like a margin insight. Which margin? Before I rush to like a margin framing, I would frame this as you're trying to align your price to the value that someone ascribes to the product. And then you need to control your cost structure to maximize your margin. This is why you have to make a distinction between your pricing strategy and the market willingness to pay. So everything that we have been talking about is the willingness to pay of the market. That determines the price. And of course, your cost structures and how you can improve it will determine margin. So this is not a cost plus margin strategy.

33:18That is famously called the cost plus pricing strategy. That is usually very suboptimal. You need to be more value-based pricing strategy, which is by definition, leaps and bounds better. What are some things that you tell entrepreneurs as you're talking about pricing their product that tend to most surprise them? I think it starts with even understanding that there is a science behind this because they all approach this as an art. It's often an afterthought, but it's also driven based on gut feeling. To substantiate this and say, no, there's actually a science behind measuring willingness to pay.

33:54itself is a revelation for many entrepreneurs. This is also why I wrote the book to give back a bit of what we actually know, to educate people that there is a science and an art to pricing. The second thing that probably surprises entrepreneurs, which you already talked about, is having that conversation early and often and not postponing this to the very end. Because most entrepreneurs or companies, especially in the tech side, are so fixated on the product that they are not thinking about how to have a commercial conversation with their customers till the very end. And by that time, it's probably too late.

34:30And they might end up building one of the four failure types that we talk about in the book on four monetizing innovation failure types. The idea is to build the fifth category, which is called the breakthrough category. For that, you need to have these conversations early. That's probably also equally revealing for entrepreneurs. The third one I would probably say is thinking about what to build and who are you building for? Because often we think about our customers and say, we are the best proxy for our customers and start building something. And that's sometimes, or probably most times, not true.

35:03So like thinking about segmentation and productizing to segments, I mean, which we just talked about is also a key unlearning a bit of what they already are used to, which is build a product and then try to somehow sell it in the market as opposed to build the right product for the right segment. Obviously, everyone wants to avoid being one of those four failure types. At a high level, what are those? Those four most common categories of failure. The first monetizing innovation failure type is what I call as a feature shock. These are products where there's simply just too much going on. I mean, if you hear things like our customers don't know what they want, let's just pack this in.

35:36Most likely you're building a feature shock and it's just an excess. And at the end of the day, it does not resonate with anyone in particular. You've just thrown in the kitchen sink and you hope for the best. Swiss army knife. Exactly, right? I mean, the idea is to probably productize into different segments as opposed to just throwing everything in. I mean, it happens in some of the most successful companies of our times. I mean, if you take the Amazon Fire Phone, I mean, Amazon is a ridiculously successful company of our times, but the Fire Phone, I mean, MarketWatch actually documented all the plethora of features that no one wanted.

36:08And the phone started at$179. In six months, it was 99 cents. and they wrote off that entire business because people were not willing to pay for stuff that was actually there. I mean, in fact, they would say, why am I paying for this? The second one is probably more prevalent in tech companies. It's called minivation. So this failure type happens when the product or the company or the entrepreneur build the absolutely right product market fit product, but they did not have the courage to charge the right price. So we call that as a minivation. To give you an example, one of the semiconductors here in the Bay Area, their companies, they came up with a groundbreaking revolutionary chip.

36:48And this was just game changing. And there's this thing in semiconductors called Moore's Law, where every generation, there's an expectation that the price would decrease because the farm factor is decreasing. So your cost to produce the goods is lesser. But they knew that they had come up with something truly innovative. So they said, let's undo Moore's Law. And the previous generation was 65 cents. They said, let's priced it at 85 cents. And the product flew out of the shelf. Secret in the room was that everyone knew that they could have charged more, for instance. They went and did a post-mortem two years after this product was launched.

37:21What they found out was these consumer electronics companies that ended up using these semiconductor chips could actually charge$50 of premium from people like you and I simply because this chip was inside. And when you look at 85 cents for$50 of economic value that was completely unfair. And in fact, most of them laughed saying you could have gone all the way to$5 and we'd have been just fine. I mean, you multiply that with the millions and billions of these chips that were actually sold, how much money was left on the table, that is staggering. That's some innovation where you had the absolutely right product market fit, solving the need, but you just didn't have the courage to ask the right price.

37:58That's some innovation. The third monetizing innovation failure type is what we call as hidden gems. So these are products that kind of go against the grain of your company or your DNA, and you just don't want to productize this because you're worried about cannibalizing your existing business. So you just put it in a shelf and it's hidden. The famous example here is Kodak, which had the IP for digital photographs back in the 1970s, but never productized it because they're worried about cannibalizing the entire print business. But if you take someone like autotrader.com or cars.com, these are multi-sided marketplaces where consumers can go and buy cars from dealers.

38:33They were started by the Chicago or the Atlanta Daily Newspaper because they realized that ads were actually going to shift from newspapers to internet. So they built multi-sided marketplaces. And that's actually a fascinating example of harnessing a hidden gem. Usually these hidden gems happen when there's an inflection point, like a software company going hardware, hardware to software, offline to online, or the other way around. So looking for them is important. If you don't go looking, it is mostly hidden. And the last category of monetizing innovation failure, probably by far my favorite is what I call as undead.

39:04So you can call them walking deads or whatever, right? These are like in classic science fiction movie fashion, you should have never produced them because they come back to haunt you. And they come in two varieties. They're either the wrong answer to the right question or they're an answer to a question no one cares about. Either way, productizing it was a bad idea and you should have stopped it. I mean, happens all the time. And again, even in some of the most successful companies, if I take Google, for instance, super successful company, the Google Glass initiative was a complete dead-on arrival in two months, right?

39:36I mean, priced at$1 ,500, the paparazzis wore it for two months and it sunsetted the product. We actually wrote in Monetizing Innovation that better strategy would have been to actually take segments that are willing to pay for this and productize and perfect the product before going consumer, like the B2B segments. For instance, if I was a technician and I could have my hands free when I'm doing a repair job, or if I could have my hands free when I'm a surgeon and I'm doing a surgery, there's clearly a willingness to pay for these kind of use cases. And how can I productize to these use cases and build a glass?

40:07Would I have been a better strategy? This is productizing to the segment that we talked about, not just building a product and hoping to position to different segments. We haven't talked at all about the companies and how they look behind some of these success stories, who is it that tends to be doing this work? Is it the CEO of the company? Is it someone else? And is there anything you've noticed about the way organizations work or are structured that either leads them to be more or less prone to doing this kind of work well? We run the world's largest pricing study every other year. I mean, as part of our work at Simon Kutcher, which is where I spend my time.

40:43What we found is that 72 % of innovations fail to monetize. But then the clear question is, what do these 28 % do? And there are only two success criterias that actually is relevant for these companies. One is the price before product, which we have discussed. The second one is C-level involvement, as in a CEO, founder, or at least a C-level involvement when it comes to topics around monetization, growth, or monetizing innovation. And we were able to benchmark that companies that had this involvement, we're 35 % better than companies that did not in all kinds of KPIs. And to me, pricing, monetization, growth, especially when you think of it as a growth, as a topic, is a 100 % CEO topic.

41:29And in the book, Monetizing Innovation, every chapter, we end the book with what questions a CEO must ask in, let's say, meetings. This does not mean that the CEO should rush and roll up their sleeves and start setting price books. That's not what we're talking about. But it's about setting the right culture, the right tone, asking the right questions so that you build a culture around profitable growth and not just growth at all sake. I love the idea of senior involvement. It seems to be the answer to a lot of problems in companies, lack of focus, this sort of thing. When you see someone that's doing this well, and they're especially trying to choose how to deliver the pricing.

42:07So the models as you mentioned, pay-as-you-go or usage-based subscription, et cetera. Do you find that there are good rules that these leaders can use, like heuristics almost, to have a general sense beyond just asking, like, which way would you prefer to pay us? Because sometimes usage-based just may not work for the economics of the business. It might work really well from a revenue standpoint, but have some cost problem or vice versa. Any heuristics you've developed for knowing which path to guide people down around how to charge? Yeah, absolutely. I think let's maybe keep the focus on subscription versus usage-based models, because I think those are the ones that are commonly used and also commonly misused.

42:48There are certain situations under which a subscription model could make sense and certain situations under which a usage-based model might make sense. When you think about subscription models or how to charge based on subscriptions, it It totally makes sense when customers, let's say, demand predictable bills, as in they want things to be predictable. And hence, you are by definition tied to subscription. Or it could also make sense when, let's say, the usage is similar month over month. For instance, if you're ordering tight pots, it's not like suddenly you start washing more clothes in May compared to June.

43:23It's kind of predictable. So a subscription would actually make sense because the usage is similar month over month. or it could also make sense when usage is highly variable because if you don't have a subscription and you have a usage-based model your pricing is going to fluctuate too much month over month so then having a subscription is probably a better customer-friendly model as opposed to giving a heartburn every other month so to speak or it could also make sense when the usage is intermittent but the value delivered is ongoing. So the easy example here is if you take someone like LifeLock, for instance, an identity theft protection product, there is a value that is ongoing because they're actually giving you peace of mind.

44:04The usage is very intermittent. It only happened once when your identity is actually compromised. If you start saying, okay, I'm going to price based on at that moment on usage, if your identity got compromised, that's the worst pricing model you can actually have, right? I mean, a subscription makes total sense because you're paying for peace of mind, as in the usage is intermittent or episodic, but the value delivered is ongoing. And the last probably way a subscription could make sense is when simplifying the conversation is to your advantage. For instance, if you look at the famous example of Netflix versus Blockbuster, they simplified the conversation that was to the advantage and it just made sense because people had all kinds of reactions to Blockbuster's pricing model back in the day.

44:48If you think of pay as you go, when does that make sense? I mean, it makes sense when, first of all, you have a situation where people want to commit less and it's a low commit, less friction kind of model, makes it easier for users to onboard. So the AWS model is a good one. I mean, you don't have to plunk in a lot of money for infrastructure and server needs, but you're actually paying in chunks as you actually consume. So that in those kinds of situation, it makes sense. Or it could also make sense when customers demand transparency and fairness. I think this is an absolute distinction that people should keep in mind because transparency and fairness has nothing to do with being predictable.

45:27Most people confuse this. They would say, oh, I'm predictable. Why? Because I want to be fair to the customer. No, that's actually completely different. Transparency and fairness is typically linked to usage and to the value that you deliver? Am I paying the fair price for the value realized? That's how you should think about fairness. For instance, if you don't use a subscription for a few months, is it fair to charge the customer for those months? That's fairness. So we should not mix fairness and transparency with being predictable. Those are very different things. A few more situations, I would say, if your usage is intermittent or episodic and the value delivered is also episodic and not ongoing.

46:06So it's a bit of a different case than the LifeLock example, which means that it's like booking a flight or you want to go to a movie. You call the McDonald's example. You go there, you have a transaction. Of course, you can think of a subscription for some users, but for most users, the usage is intermittent or episodic and the value delivered is also episodic and it's not an ongoing value delivery. That's when a pay-as-you-go can help. Also helps when the underlying costs which scale with usage. I think AWS is a good example. There's a cost to infrastructure that highly scales with usage. So if you don't have that and you just have a subscription with more usage, someone might actually be a negative margin customer for you.

46:45But the alternate to have a pay-as-you-go model would make sense because then as much as you're using, you're also paying. The other fundamental thing to keep in mind on pay-as-you-go, which I find many companies struggle with is you need to have a metric that you and your customers clearly agree to and there is attribution. Not just rushing to a model based on usage, but you need to be able to track this. You need to be able to measure according to this metric. You need to be able to show value delivered according to this metric. And that is also important. And often that does not exist in many SaaS products.

47:22And if you're not very clear about attribution on where you're actually delivering the value, but you just know it at a high level, maybe the easiest strategy to be is on a subscription model rather than pay-as-you-go. It's a fascinating set of ideas. Like you said, different heuristics, different situations under which one or the other would work. I love three-dimensional plotting of a business of frequency of usage, frequency of value delivery, and the cost of value delivery. You could kind of put all three of those together and plot businesses in that space and see fascinating results. It's definitely an exercise I'm going to start doing.

47:57And it makes a lot of sense. Twilio and software, they have a very high cost. They have low gross margins relative to most software. And the same with AWS, the usage-based model jumps off the page. I love it. I think it's a fantastic way of thinking through the problem. As you were talking, it brought to mind another question, which is the behavior changes or the things that you've learned as the absolute price goes up and down. I saw something interesting recently, which was that for something that's very high priced, and this was a software centric, but I guess it could apply everywhere. It almost demands that you have to educate the customer.

48:30And if something's very low priced, you better not have to educate the customer. It's just not going to work. It has to be incredibly simple and intuitive to use. Have you found anything like that in your exploration of the absolute price curve that monetizing something at a million dollars a user is very different than$10 a user and points of interest in between? Yeah, I think a couple of things. First of all, price needs to be a measure of value, like we discussed. And often people use pricing as a cue towards, is the product actually good or is it valuable? So we have to keep that in mind because there's a behavioral component.

49:04I mean, if you walk into a, let's say a safe way and you see a$10 wine and a$100 wine, chances are you would say the$100 wine is better because most people would probably say that with higher prices, better quality, et cetera. But then on a blind test, actually fail it completely. When you think about higher price, that also signals high quality in some way, shape or form. So if your product is, let's say, emphasizes quality or like iPhone is a good example. When they came out, it was emphasizing quality, brand, et cetera. So then having a low price for those kinds of products would actually be counterintuitive.

49:38It will actually work against you because you didn't emphasize what people should learn about your products. And pricing is how people learn about your products. If it is a low-priced product, often you probably need to have land and expand where you're probably acquiring people on a low-priced products, but then you have something else to upsell them over a period of time. So those products need to have pricing that just makes, like you said, intuitive sense, and it's a no-brainer price. And often it's the acceptable pricing that we talked about rather than even the expensive price, but a product that just brings people into the ecosystem and then you can monetize more as and when their needs, as and when the customer needs actually increase.

50:18I wouldn't oversimplify it to saying that if your pricing is low, you don't need to educate. And if your pricing is high, you need to educate. I would probably correct that to say it's your job to educate your customers as to what you're charging based on the value that you deliver. I mean, you need to educate people on value no matter what. And as a consequence, defend your pricing strategy and your price integrity. If you think about the thousands of episodes of this that you've seen firsthand, is there a pricing genius, a person out there that most pops to mind? Like when I say pricing genius, does any one person come to mind?

50:52Yes. Steve Jobs was a pricing genius. When most people think about Steve Jobs, they think about a product genius. In fact, I even get a question sometimes saying, yeah, you talk about willingness to pay, market validation, customers, everything else. But famously, Steve Jobs said, I don't need to ask customers anything and I would just come up with stuff. To me, let's say most misunderstood concepts. This is just according to me. And I think that lazy approach is to say Steve Jobs didn't test with customers and I don't need to. But if you look deeper, I think what he was trying to say is that it's your job as an entrepreneur to come up with a solution to a problem.

51:28And there is no point in asking our customers to dictate that. Similarly, there's no point in asking customers, what should I build or what should I charge for this product? You'll get garbage back. The idea is to identify these problems and unmet needs and then solutionize yourself. And then the prototypes try to understand, is there a willingness to pay and would markets actually pay for it? If you look at Apple or what Steve Jobs did, he just didn't launch a product, but he actually had a clear pricing strategy in mind. When you think about, let's say the iPhone came up at a very high price and there was a skimming strategy, which we talk about in the book.

52:04Launch the product at a high price and over a period of time, the price is reduced, more generations actually come out. It's actually built to like different segments. Like I said, there's a price, there's an iPhone at$299,$399, all the way to$1499. So they didn't even price the product. They productized to different price points of willingness to pay. Then there is also the emphasis on what type of pricing model might make sense, how to educate customers on the value of these products, the behavioral pricing tactics. Everything that we talk about in the book has been emphasized in the launch strategies.

52:35I mean, if Steve had been sitting around a room and said, let's price this product at 99 and we just need one version, we need to get growth, that would be the absolutely wrong thing that they would have done. I mean, not to say they wouldn't have been probably successful, but they wouldn't have been successful to the scale that they are, which is being the most profitable company on the planet. I consider Steve Jobs as a pricing genius, not just as a product genius. And I think the most misunderstood concept is that he's just a product genius. In chapter two of the book, I actually wanted to title the chapter as, I haven't said this before, but I wanted to title the chapter as, You Are Not Steve Jobs.

53:11And the editor thought it was too provocative. So we actually toned it down to why good people get it wrong. Same concept, less memorable. You mentioned in the book that you have these questions that leaders can and should ask as a result of the ideas in the chapter. If it was your job to boil everything down to a single question, and you knew that tomorrow every business leader was going to ask themselves a single question, what question would you pick? I would probably ask a simple question. How do you know that our customers would pay for this innovation? And that will probably lead to a very good discussion.

53:46How do you truly know? This has been one of my favorite books on this topic. It can be an intimidating topic. Like I said at the beginning, it's certainly one that comes up all the time, working with entrepreneurs trying to figure out this problem. I think the refreshing thing about your book and this conversation is that it is approachable. It requires a lot of work. You have to go do it. That's the most important thing. But there are strategies for doing it. And I think we've talked a lot about some of the best ones today. And I really appreciate your time. I ask everyone that I talk to the same traditional closing question.

54:17What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I would probably say that I'm blessed to be surrounded by some amazing people, both in my personal life and my professional life, who have been super kind and supportive, and I wouldn't be here without them. But I think for the podcast, maybe I'll keep my answer to like a business context or professional context, if you will. I think many, many people have taken a bet on me earlier in my career, have given a helping hand, being kind and supportive. But one example that comes to mind is Duncan Robertson, who was actually the CFO of OpenTable at that time.

54:53And I worked with OpenTable many, many years ago, like probably 10 years ago or something as a pricing consultant. And he was very impressed with the work. And out of his own account, he came and said, do you want to meet Bill Gurley and discuss the outputs of your work? And I was like, hiding my excitement? I was like, sure. But I was like, internally, hell yes. I mean, that would be awesome. And he introduced me to Bill and Bill was on the board of OpenTable back then. And he did this out of his own kindness. I met Bill. We have stayed in touch over the last decade. And Bill has been incredibly supportive of me and a big proponent of the work that I do.

55:26I can confidently say that 100%, I would not be here today without support from folks like Duncan and Bill. I can't thank them enough for their kindness and support. But there are many, many more examples, but this particular one probably stands out to me. Well, thank you so much. Bill Grierle, definitely a good friend of the podcast. I think he's actually our most frequent guest at this point, which makes that a fun closing answer. Thank you, Madhavan, so much for your time. Thanks, Patrick. If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning.

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