Jan Oberhauser, Founder & CEO at n8n: Freeing employees from repetitive boring tasks

0:00Jan Oberhauser:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Today on the show, we've got Jan Oberhauser. Jan is the founder, CEO of N8N Workflow Orchestration Tool for AI-powered Applications, which has absolutely blown up in the last couple of years. It has become one of the most exciting AI companies, automation companies coming out of Europe. And Jan is not only a phenomenal entrepreneur, but he's also one of the staunchest advocates for European tech and tech more generally here in Europe. So I'm very excited to have him. Jan, thank you for joining me. How are you doing today? Good, good.

0:27First, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. Thank you for all the amazing work you've been doing over the last years. And yeah, excited to be here. Love it.

0:36Jan Oberhauser:No, well, look, I love doing it. And it's a real privilege to get to talk to kind of founders like yourself. One of the first things I want to get into is the recent strategic investment from SAP, valued NA10 at 5.2 billion euros, which is a phenomenal achievement. Can you talk a bit about what that investment, where it came from and the implications for NA10? Sure. it started actually at some point Philip from the CTO reached out to contact with me we met up, had first conversations and then I met other people of the team as well which has realized there's a very nice win-win situation for both organizations where obviously they have access to a lot of, actually more or less all of the enterprise clients that really exist worldwide and we have a platform that kind of really would help the clients a lot as well.

1:25And kind of that insight of SAP would just again help both sides very strongly. And so we kind of started the first conversations regarding how a partnership could look like. I mean, it was very important for both sides to kind of really ensure that the customer experience is as good as possible. It just really kind of meant that people don't have to sign additional contracts or have to install anything or had separate billing that is also really just built into the platform very deeply. And then we agreed on the terms there, moved forward. We also agreed that not just obviously with a very deep partnership, we also want to obviously like have also like on the commercial side, we also want to have like make sure that we also very strongly aligned also on the investment side means that we are kind of really having this kind of bond that's hopefully going to be strong for many, many years to come.

2:16So we said, hey, actually investment, which makes sense as well. So we got both things done in a quite fast pace, especially considering how wide this kind of partnership was, the investment, and obviously how big an organization, as a bigger organization, SSAP, and then we got it done and announced it at Safe Fire a few months ago.

2:37Jan Oberhauser:And so, you know, the SAP are doing interesting things. In the German ecosystem, they've made some investments thinking parlor conduct. And they seem to be playing like a really interesting role of sort of promoting the next generation of great German tech companies. how valuable do you think this partnership could be i know i spoke to the founder of conduct who was like wow like the the actual tangible benefits have already been huge in terms of distribution are you starting to see the benefits already sure like first there is a lot of potential like one is obviously just with the partnership itself this is obviously again i said i think 99 of the top 100 companies worldwide use sap so it's like obviously um if all of them can also the use directly now end at end that is this amazing huge opportunity so it's definitely something very big there but also like if second secondary effects like for example like as a startup um you always have the the problem that people just don't trust you yet and like us announcing like a partnership with sap or like also with mercedes um once at the same time like that just gives people that trust they see it very differently if it's no hey like Like if an organization like SAP trusts you, like, hey, in my organization, like they are enterprise ready.

3:52I can trust them as well. I can use them internally. I can build on top of them. I think for that reason, it was super important for us.

4:00Jan Oberhauser:Yes, that stamp of approval, the credentials that it brings as well. And the valuation of$5.2 billion is a remarkable achievement. I think it's over doubled in seven months. can you touch on what happened in those seven months that enabled you to go out and i guess raise the money from sap and that strategic investment at a much higher valuation sure in the end it's like you said mentioned seven months a lot of happens in seven months especially a lot of growth happened in seven months both on the adoption side and on the on the sales side as well where our revenues obviously increased a lot and for that reason it would often not make sense to kind of raise at the same valuation then more or less everything else has been growing very rapidly since then and that's why obviously and the valuation changed as well yeah yeah it seems like it's just been sort of explosive growth in the last couple years but especially so in the last seven months and i think the revenue and the valuation always tells one story but the story i'd like to get also into is the value that these companies are seeing.

5:02Jan Oberhauser:That can sometimes be harder to see from the outside looking in. But, you know, SAP is obviously seen, you know, you're working with companies like Mercedes-Benz, they're obviously seeing it. Can you touch on maybe some of the key value that some of these companies that you're working with are getting out of N8N? Sure. In the end, it's like the world is moving very fast. It's moving fast than ever. You really have to kind of ensure that people really spend their time and resources on something that's really meaningful and makes a difference there and you cannot have people wasting it on things that could be automated or could be done by ai since like the the use cases are literally go from anything it's like we have a company like we have some pre-i use cases like something like a vodafone which uses us more like a secure orchestration tool that is saved like over 5 000 person days and over 2.2 million in costs kind of really automating a lot of those tasks to also like a Deliver Hero, which kind of what is automated password resets and it saves them a few hundred person hours every month to organizations like, for example, we have a big online travel agency that automated their support team.

6:14I mean, it's like they have like a support team and they have AI on the side and the support team has now like more time to actually spend more on this kind of more complex use cases, but at the same time kind of automate a lot of this kind of more repeating simpler ones where I kind of I think where I think what I like about that case study a lot I think and if we release it by now is that not just that it's obviously kind of allowed the company that people kind of invest their time better on things that's more impactful but also the customers I get a big advantage by it as well because even because the customers actually happier with the support agent, the AI support agent versus the human agent because obviously like the person, like the AI agent never gets sick, never gets bored, has all the context, works 24-7, speaks other languages.

7:06It's like there's this, people always very often focus on, hey, how can I save cost? But it's also like, it's a lot about like how can I actually provide a better experience for my customers or how can I provide a better experience for my employees? It's like how can I actually elevate them by taking away this kind of very boring, mundane task? Or actually, how can I ensure people actually have the time and their mind space to actually worry about these bigger problems rather than being constantly backed down by these kind of simpler things?

7:35Jan Oberhauser:And so there's a combination of save the time, turn the man-hours, but also actually we can increase quality for your end users. When you or your sales team are going out to pitch it to potential customers, how much of it are you saying, you know are you anchoring on productivity and time saved or how much of it are you trying to educate them and actually say look we can actually add more value than just saving time this is definitely very important i think like most people start with with time saved till they actually realize what it actually could mean for the whole organization if they kind of not just think hey how can i save a little bit but how i actually kind of make sure kind of my whole organization actually works differently, especially like in this AI world where everybody thinks like AI is the most important thing.

8:22Like I think people very often forget that all of the companies have the same models, access to the same models, have the same tools. Like literally all of them have that. What makes the biggest difference actually kind of is the employees in your organization. They are really the ones that use the tool to kind of really bring the organization forward. So you really want to ensure that they kind of use the time the best they actually stay happy they stay engaged they don't churn they actually get kind of get used to the full potential i think that is just things people very often forget about it's like hey they kind of mandate people to kind of use ai with actually kind of ensuring that actually gets used the right way and kind of gets used to actually kind of provide this kind of long-term

9:04Jan Oberhauser:benefits for the whole organization and when you look at the companies that you work with is there something special about the companies that are getting 10 times the value from a NA10 versus a company that you've sold it to who's only getting one extra value in the end it's definitely like a lot about education and kind of tipping people alongside it it's like like you're not set up for success if you actually bring in AI and you talk about hey how can I replace 80 % of my workforce with AI like who wants to use AI then but it's like a very different thing if you kind of ensure you kind of you actually bring it in to actually empower your people in your organization again to make them more successful and help to to to to understand hey like by really embracing ai they're actually not gonna be let go they actually kind of are empowered they kind of go wherever whatever level they are right now they have like so much more potential to go and grow it in the organization and they can be more successful and again if they're more successful the whole company is more successful they have a secure role they have a more interesting role it's like really again bringing people along is actually one of the most important things i think in this current ai world that a lot of people forget because they just think hey by having using the latest model or by using as many tokens as possible that makes them successful the more important thing is again using it the right way with the right people it is in a tennis seeing a difference in maybe adoption of value regionally and i think that's also tied to selling as well like are you selling in a different way are you seeing value in a different way but in European enterprises versus maybe US enterprises, which I know where you're growing really quickly at the moment.

10:45No, as far as I know, I don't have any data that would back it up that one side is much more successful than the other.

10:53Jan Oberhauser:Okay, that's good to hear. You know, sometimes I hear that like either European enterprises are more risk averse or a bit slower. There's obviously the difference is like, I thought we talked about organizations that chose to adopt us. Yeah. I think there's the opposite that maybe there's certain organizations that are a little bit more risk adverse in Europe, I agree there. But organizations, again, we announced our partners with something like a Mercedes. It's like they really embrace it. They kind of really have huge hackathons with 1 ,500 people. They kind of really push things forward. So I think, again, organizations that normally choose us are the ones that I guess that how they realize that something has to be done and actually also do that actively.

11:38Jan Oberhauser:Yeah, okay. So sort of self-selecting, I guess. I want to talk about this inherent, maybe some sort of tension between, you know, being a community-led organization from day one, you've got like 1.7 million people building on it. You've been very big on really providing value to that community, educating them, creating something valuable to them. But at the same time, you have to service your large paying enterprise users. How do you balance the needs of the two groups? First, we always try to ensure that we actually don't see it community versus enterprise, but we just see it like there is one community and there are people that use it privately and some people in big organizations.

12:19We literally just had last week with our N-Fest, but it was just an event where people just came to town and had a good time and people from literally the whole spectrum came and visited there. I was talking with, again, a private home user. I talked with people from Accenture. I talked with people from Telecom. Like, literally everybody was there, and that's just super exciting. So there's not, like, there's just one community. But within this community, there's, again, obviously different use cases they kind of, they use the product for, they have obviously very different requirements. And I agree that there's sometimes some kind of tension.

12:52How we always seen it is, like, we really want to ensure that our product gets used as rightly as possible and gets as much adoption as possible. So we always kind of ensured to kind of first and foremost really make the product better for everybody to kind of really drive this adoption. And then really ensure that to empower the enterprise organizations by kind of unblocking them for certain things that actually require to actually bring it into the organization. Again, talking about enterprise readiness and kind of really making sure they are not blocked there and they kind of get everything they need but not being backed down by very specific requests like very often if you work with a very large organization they have very often like requirements that only they need and nobody else and we rather focus on which are the the functionalities that literally all of them need they kind of empower all of them and very often kind of rather kind of say sorry like this one specific thing we are not able to do because it would maybe allow one use case for one organization but actually would either kind of block us and work with something else that would have more impact for the whole organization or would actually make the product worse for all of the other people.

14:02And so we really just try to be very focused on kind of the, I think, rather more long-term, how can we really build this platform to really become the default rather than being this kind of one very specific niche enterprise tool that, again, is great for this one organization or this three. We always focus them more on the mess and kind of really think the community first. again which includes the whole community and when you talk about that hulk community you're right

14:27Jan Oberhauser:there's different values or use cases in there how has that community changed shape over time because i guess in the early days it was you know much more maybe smaller individual users and now you do have this much larger like much larger organizations in the community itself so how has that profile of the community changed over time and how has that impacted the business in the end you arrive at the beginning we had like more private the users and smbs and over the years it grew more and more also in the kind of enterprise space interestingly like we got into all of those enterprises by the first group it's like then again then we got this more professional enterprise community members because of the first group which again very often already worked in those organizations but they used them more privately and kind of brought it into the organization.

15:17So in some sense, they were often the same users, but kind of the use cases they used the product for actually got very much got broader there. So it's like it did maybe not change as much as you maybe would expect in the sense of the absolute users. But I guess, sorry, I actually forgot the beginning of what the actual question was about.

15:41Jan Oberhauser:The question was about the changing nature of the community from how, you know, and how that's impacted how you think about the product roadmap, how the business operates. Again, about the impact, yeah, for product roadmap. Again, we started, if you look at the kind of teams inside of NNN, in the beginning, we had like multiple teams and we had like one enterprise team that kind of really specifically looked for this kind of enterprise needs. as the organization grew and the whole the amount of engineers also grew and the resources we had internally and now we have actually multiple teams kind of working on those very specific needs so we definitely kind of put more resources behind it as the whole organization grew but at the same time it's very important for us to again not forget that we actually like we think you don't win by like kind of, I think it's, if you go like all on an enterprise, you're literally going to lose all the rest and you're going to be very back down there.

16:46By investing still very heavily into the free product and kind of making sure you have the best product, you can actually win the whole space because I think enterprise products had a very long time, a very bad reputation because they were more the tools that kind of were forced on you and you had to use them. But I actually think, hey, we really want to have a product that people actually want to use. Again, that's why they bring it an organization. But just by still investing very heavily still in the main product, much more heavy than in just this very enterprise-first features, again, where we have still more resources on the more generic one than on the enterprise-first ones, enables us to be very successful in the long term.

17:23So even though we put more resources on there, do we still focus so many heavily on kind of making the product literally better for everybody rather than just this one group? I think that is the winning formula because people, like I think in the past, especially at the AI, it feels like there is so much more choice and having the tool that actually people want to use when there is so many other ones out there is I think the winning strategy rather than just kind of really going all in enterprise. which I think probably sets you up for a more secure win and kind of making sure that you have to reach a certain size.

18:03But I think it probably kind of limits the kind of opportunity for you because the opportunity is being really kind of this default tool that literally everybody's using to build anything from automations to the most complex AI agents out there.

18:18Jan Oberhauser:Yeah, and I guess casting a wider net enables you to learn a lot more from a much wider group of users. I always want to ask about how your role has changed. You know, the first three or four years of the history of NA10 has been very different to the last couple of years. So, you know, the first three or four years from the outside looking at it, it's like, you know, building, building, building, trying to get something that really sticks. And then you have that breakout moment where you kind of use that strategic pivot. It still took a bit of time, but there was an inflection point. And then, you know, in the last couple of years, it's just absolutely exploded.

18:50Jan Oberhauser:the valuation has you know gone to five billion dollars revenue over 100 million euros company i think now a couple hundred people um so i want to ask how have you found that transition as a founder ceo and how is your role changed from those first few years where you're just like building trying to trying to build something that sticks to the last couple of years where you're sort of i imagine just trying to like manage the growth sure yeah it definitely changed a lot and for getting you I'm a solo father I'm a solo father I'm a solo father I'm a solo father I'm a solo father to do everything I guess in some some things I did better some I did worse and as a once I got funding I kind of could get the first people in to kind of really compliment my capabilities a lot and we definitely saw that making a very big difference so it means like there are certain things I gave up very fast and I really want to give up and some things were obviously harder for me because again I'm a developer at heart.

19:48I love to be building. It's also quite interesting that to some things I got back again. But to answer your question, like in the beginning, it was all myself. Then I kind of read more and more people on and kind of gave away more and more things from, hey, writing literally all of the code to having a lot of people writing code, just reviewing it. So at some point just merging the PRs to literally kind of being from the day-to-day development side quite removed obviously it's always very close to the product side of things because that's actually not just a thing I actually enjoy and I think I'm good in but I think it's also that's very important for NNN then over time what definitely changes like from doing the actual work to actually having more meetings and having people doing the actual work and I think that was quite strange for me to kind of sit in the most day in meetings, most of the time in meetings.

20:48But what I also realized over the years, especially in the last one, is like kind of it's super important to kind of stay as close as possible what's happening out there in both the AI space, but also kind of how people actually using the tools. And I think in between, especially when we had this explosive growth that you talked about i think i got too far removed and i always like i i read a little bit about those tools but i was not in there deep enough so what i'm doing now right now is literally like i i block off normally my whole fridays just to really have time to kind of see what's going on in the space use those tools and actually kind of build again myself and i kind of right now i'm i'm working also on a project related on NNN, around NNN, to kind of think that could be an interesting addition moving forward as well.

21:45I think that's, again, very important for me to just be able to, like, why did NNN become successful in the first place? Because I built a product that I wanted to use that I think really existed. I think if I get too far removed from it, like, I lose that. and I think that and if I lose that I think part and it's part of it and it's losing it as well and that's why I think it's very important to kind of really spend this time on on the product on AI and kind of really building I think I probably realized it too late again I'm doing it now but in this in between phase I definitely did it way too little and I think it kind of it's also hard to get back into it again because this AI space is moving so fast in the past because we can be out of touch for it for a few months is kind of with this was currently going on because the space didn't move that that crazy fast but with the eye if you kind of fall behind too much it's

22:41Jan Oberhauser:really hard to kind of catch up on it again anything you can share about what you are seeing so when you embed yourself in the communities on a friday and you're seeing the different products you're seeing how people are using these tools what is it what are you taking away from it have you've seen the ecosystem change any predictions for the future what I'm seeing is like I can definitely see that everybody wants to use the tools and I think now nobody kind of wonders about the that there's a real opportunity there and it's something because it's happening but at same time what I'm still seeing is people are struggling to kind of really using it efficiently I think there is from anything from the products that I think are still built probably the wrong way to kind of use the good enough let's take the internet um like the internet appeared and everything was super hyped um but if you think about how long it took till we actually kind of ended up where we are right now that they kind of really kind of we had the right frame if we had something like Ajax that you kind of use it in real time and found like a fun fun kind of made sense for me from a technical perspective but also kind of what actually use cases should exist in internet some of them burned very fast and didn't make any sense and other ones are kind of most exciting ones took literally years to kind of really develop and I think that is what what I feel like when I look into AI where people kind of try to stick it put AI on literally everything but at the same time not having enough understanding yet to kind of really get the most use out of it.

24:20And that's why you get things like token maxing where people just think, hey, more AI is probably better rather than actually kind of thinking about like, is more AI really better? Or kind of should I maybe get rid of it in some parts totally? Or should I use it in some parts more extremely? I think that is just something I'm thinking about more and more. how can we really ensure AI gets used in the right way and how can we empower our community to really get empowered to actually do that and give them more guidelines. So for example, we have an internal AI and automation team that's not just, the idea is to kind of transform whole and transform the whole organization because we set this internal goal to reach a billion users with less than a thousand employees because we say, hey, our users come to us to help them transform the organization and we can only help them to transform the organization if we actually transform the NNN as well and kind of really be ahead of the rest to kind of really empower this other organization to kind of reach its step as well.

25:22So kind of just so means we build an internal team up there where it's again less about building it's more about empowering people in the organization and then they kind of share this learnings with our community as well and say hey this worked, that didn't work. And again, why we actually realized this doesn't work. So kind of, but it kind of creates this learnings and kind of then use this learnings and kind of promote them externally as well. Because in the end, the whole idea about editing is about empowerment. I think again, now it's about empowering the people to use AI in the kind of right way.

25:54Jan Oberhauser:And how do you empower your own employees given this token maxing, whatever, like how do you think about it as a leader? In the end, it's like, I think there's probably multiple things from anything like just making sure that they have like it's easy to say use ai more but um or kind of use ai which i think a lot of people are doing but again i think you want to focus less on the kind of the input which is kind of how many tokens did you actually burn it's more like what really did get out of it you also want to ensure they actually have the kind of the the amount of time that actually it requires to think about it and kind of really build up those solutions or kind of do internal sharing or having like multiple sessions like for example our finance team legal and finance they had an in-person event here in Berlin but it also brought like external people into kind of really make them to rethink how could you for example use cloud code also the finance org it's like we kind of really want to expose people to as many tools as possible and kind of really ensure that they kind of think differently but honestly i think there's those i still don't think we do an amazing job there to be honest like we're also learning as well i think it's so much easier if you say hey this people figure it out and and we do the same thing but i think like in this again in the i world right now nobody seems like figuring it out yet and you just have to be able willing to experiment and also to fail because i think that's the the other important piece of people you the last thing is you want to kind of punish people if something went off because they kind of they burned a lot of tokens again it can happen this is one thing but also kind of hey we invest a lot of time and resources there and it didn't work out um i think that this is other important piece and just say hey we want to experiment we want to try failure as part of it and then again it's kind of sharing this kind of learnings hey this didn't work because because of that and think that's maybe especially internally could still get a lot better in kind of creating more insights and kind of sharing them with other ones as well just to make sure that the same mistakes don't get done twice and kind of maybe also see like similarities like why did those things fail because maybe on the surface they look very differently because but underneath they actually may be more or less the same and have kind of some some the common reason behind it.

28:20Jan Oberhauser:I mean you're talking about because of building a culture of experimentation, letting people fail, trying to figure out the right way forward. How does that impact recruitment? Are there certain characteristics or traits, whether it's technical or cultural, that you really screen for during the recruitment process? In the end, like, one thing is the smartest, like, curiosity is, like, just kind of being very willing to kind of really just try out those new things. Like, we definitely screen right now always every candidate, hey, like, do they already use AI heavily? Like, do they kind of try what's really possible?

28:59They also kind of look for literally every candidate. Like, do they kind of, do they use AI because they just feel like they should or they're actually excited about it? Because, like, if the people, there's a lot of people that maybe use AI, but they actually feel more threatened by it or they actually feel like, I do it because I have to, but actually they really say, hey I'm super excited like I tried this yesterday it didn't work but I tried it again today in a different way and it actually did something I think that's great and then apart from that I think like what we generally screen for is like hiring people that are just excited about their role about NNN about what we are doing like having just people that really love their role and kind of are excited about it works us very differently like we are very careful like the last thing we want is that people actually burn out and i think like we are not this kind of how is it 996 culture i think we can people work very hard but they don't work hard because we tell them to work hard like they work hard is because they're actually excited about what they're doing and kind of really the the love and being able to empower other people they kind of love and then the role and opportunities this brings i think like this you kind of people still work hard but kind of because it's not just a role, it's actually something that kind of drives them forward, they kind of realize, they kind of learn.

30:22I think that is how you ensure that the people, again, stay long-term, they don't burn out, but especially kind of they're very happy and excited about themselves because, like I mentioned before, like in this AI world, everybody has the same models, everything, they have the same tools, but again, the people is the thing that really makes an org special and make it stand out and by just burning through people like people very often think the feel right now that you can't just burn out people like nothing because they're just more out there and with AI you need less anyway and I agree like you want to build a very efficient org so you maybe need less people but I totally disagree that you can burn people out because like that is not just from a human perspective horrible but also like not even from a comedy perspective like the best people you want to keep they have all the context they kind of they live your culture like you cannot burn them out like they're very often almost irreplaceable obviously at some point they may leave they cannot avoid that but you obviously want to keep the people as long as possible in your org and I think you achieve that only by by thinking people first there and not and not hey and seeing them as this one replaceable thing that you can just get another one person in by tomorrow

31:37Jan Oberhauser:it's a really interesting point that you make because you're sort of you're saying you don't really agree and you kind of push back on the 996 mentality and the kind of culture that was sort of like infecting from the US but I guess your approach is almost like have a product first and a people first and a mission first culture where people want to work hard but they also they also have that space to take the breaks that they need how you know I guess like if I was a founder or a CEO watching this I would be thinking to myself how can I instill that culture where people want to work hard but have the freedom to take the time off and to rest how do you think you've built that i think like that the very first person i had to let go i didn't let go because the person was doing a bad job i let him go because the person was not as excited as the rest of the people we had we were like a team of five people then and everybody was just saying hey we could do this with anything we could do this and like they were super excited about everything that all the possibilities and the person wasn't um and i think like we from the very beginning just got people like the right kind of people in and then i guess other pieces and just like we are the last we're the last ones that kind of control anyone it's like when people if people work start to work at eight and or people start to work at 12 or have a break from three to five like like we don't care like because like some everybody works differently some people were better in the morning some people better at night like like if you had a while like there was this thing is like do you want to write messages at 10 p.m at night and and for a while like i i thought hey no actually you don't because you want you don't to set the precedence um that the people work they're very hard actually i was more the person saying hey please stop working like have a life spend a bit of time and family and i think generally I think that's still what I want.

33:35But at the same time, by making that assumption, also means that people, I talk with a few employees, they actually say, hey, I took off again three to five because that's when I get my children and I spend some time with them. And then after they embed, I then work again at 10. It's like, we see more like, hey, you can send a message whenever you want, but we don't expect you to kind of work at 10 at night. We don't expect you to answer then. So we just say, hey, we hire a lot of adults. all of them can work and kind of choose that by themselves but we don't force anybody in one specific way of working obviously if they're company meetings we expect people to be participating there kind of making their work somehow but we are not the people that kind of forces anybody to kind of work very hard or kind of do things we don't think are right like one of our company values is do the right thing even when it's hard so I think we have a lot of people that again try to do the right things we never I think nobody would work to less or would force anybody to do anything bad they don't think is right I think like I think if you if you think about culture very early on and we did very early on like I was part of the Sequoia program when it was literally just myself and I said some complete values then and then kind of we did the values again probably a year after the first people started maybe around 15 people and we just we did it again just a few months ago i think that is something you want to do you want to think about this this culture piece early on you want to see you want to think about how does it evolve as the company scales and thinking about what is actually important for the kind of organization you want to build especially also for the kind of scale you want to reach and i think in our case i think it worked out very well again if it's going to work out in the long term it enables it i really hope it does but i think um um there's obviously still so much potential in in in and but also the world is moving very fast and i think by us thinking people first i think that is sets us up much more for success than working 15 hours a day like i talked with one ceo a while ago what he said is like the 10 to 12 hour like at a company doesn't make a big difference for the company but it makes a big difference for your personal life and I think that's a very important thing to think about is like you can work yourself to death but again does it actually kind of set you and the company up for a long time for success probably not because if the partner leaves them if they're estranged to their children if they don't have any friends like what kind of a good employee will you have there they're gonna burn out they're gonna leave they're gonna be unhappy like that's not in the interest of the company how have you found that trying to find that