Merge's Unified API Bet in the AI Era | E2033

22:10I feel like I can uniquely be good at it. And I would really have to convince them like, no, the only thing that can be different is you're worse at it. You're not going to be uniquely better at this. It's something that is just not your core competency. And other things that are really tough were just the business model. We had to really understand what to do. We're not a transactional API. I think with Stripe and Twilio, it's a little like, okay, one transaction or one email, one text message. So it's a little bit easier to figure out what pricing looks like and customer support might be a little bit easier.

22:39But for us, all of it was so different. And the closest comparable we had was Plaid. But even still, it was different because they were mostly consumer focused and we were exclusively B2B. So yeah, a lot had to get figured out. And the customer buy-in process was really tough in the beginning. But that's kind of the value that you guys offer. one thing that APIs do is they abstract away complexity. So this is why people love Twilio. You could just use their API, send SMS messages anywhere. You didn't have to know anything about telephony. They handle all that complexity. And in the case of merge, you guys have gone out and talked to all the accounting providers, all the HR providers, et cetera, and done all the work to get this set up.

23:18And that forms essentially your moat in a way. But if people can follow up based on the work you've done and copycat you, does that, to keep the analogy going, does that drain the merge mode? So the benefit of merge is actually, so you know how I was talking about earlier, how there's like a long maintenance period and it's a huge pain. So there's a maturity curve for every single integration and also every single category that we have. And so one of the benefits of us being first and us just having so many customers onboarding and every single time our customers and their customers onboard, we find out more edge cases for what can happen in these integrations because API documentation is always hard coded.

23:54Like it's just not always updated and response bodies from APIs can vary wildly. Sometimes you think something will come back as a number, but it actually comes back as a string. And then boom, tomorrow it's an array. And you're just like, what the f***? And it breaks your code. But for us, because we have so many customers onboarding, we just have so many data points of what those edge cases could be. And so by the time our customers onboard onto a really gnarly enterprise integration, they're much less likely to run into a bug than if they had built it in-house. Because the first time you have a customer onboard, you're going to run into a bug.

24:23There's just no way it's going to work perfectly. So I was prepping for our chat today, and I was thinking about the ability for Merge to see data in motion, just because of how many different pipes you guys are running between different products. And I was curious if there was a kind of a data observability element to this. And I wasn't going to bring it up because it seemed a little bit off kilter, but you just made the point for me. Can you talk about how Merge is, from my view, kind of like a second order data observability firm? So we actually call it integration observability because it's specific to integrations and also the customer support side.

24:57So actually, a lot of times, once the integration is live with our customers, customer support teams mostly interact with Merge and our support team. The reason why is because we want to make sure that every single piece of data that is flowing in merge and out of merge is visible to our customers. Because we are specifically focusing on B2B, it's just the stakes are really high. Each end user can cost millions of dollars. And so it has to be extremely reliable. You have to know everything that's going on. And you don't want anything to be like what is going on underneath the surface. We want it to be very, very clear and transparent.

25:29And so we built a lot of tooling in our dashboard. It's mostly focused for more non-technical people. So like every API request, you can modify scopes and what data you want flowing in and out is fully searchable. So you can search like for Alex's name, if Alex came through or not. You can store it. Like all of this information is very visible. Same with like there's end user error. You can see it very easily in the dashboard. It's kind of like simulating what people would use Datadog and Sentry for when they were building integrations in-house. Because you would need to use both components in order to figure out what was happening with your integrations.

25:59But engineers would have to look at that. And with Merge, it can be a customer support person. Okay. I just realized we've been talking for like 25 minutes and I have to move this towards business stuff in a second. Okay, of course. Two quick, sorry, I love learning and I'm learning a lot. So thank you, Disney. I want to talk about two quick things before we move on. One is this product called Blueprint and it's a way that you guys are allowing people to essentially, it seems like crowdsource integration recommendations. What's the idea there? Yes. To be honest, it's mostly us just playing around with AI.

26:28Just us playing around with AI and seeing how potentially our customers could be able to contribute to our integrations down the road and it worked like it was pretty cool like we were able to get documentation and then we would be able to generate like initial mappings um it's obviously not going to be perfect a lot of building integrations is unfortunately very subjective it's not objective and so ai isn't quite there yet got it but it was really good for us to be able to see okay maybe we might be able to expedite part of the integration build with uh with ai uh but it's not like a full-blown product it one day maybe but right now it was mostly just like for us to experiment with it and see if our customers could start helping us out.

27:02And did they? Yeah, they actually did. So a lot of people started submitting different integrations. It was also helpful for us to gather interest in which ones. Unfortunately, the main blocker for building integrations is sandbox access. It's not documentation. So even if you have a great, there's great documentation out there and you feel like you know how to map it, if you don't have a sandbox account to test around and modify the UI and see how the response body is changing the documentation, the integration is not going to work really, or it might be okay, but you'll run into edge cases. So that's the blocker, even if we get documentation.

27:34Why is sandbox access hard to get? Because by definition, sandboxes are safe environments, ergo, they shouldn't be risky to let people tinker with. So in my view, the bar should be very low to get access to them. And yet several times today, you mentioned that sandbox access is an issue. What's going on there? Because it requires a pretty advanced partnerships motion. So for instance, And it's like, because you need to be able to issue an account to a partner and not bill them and understand that the purpose is purely for testing. Isn't that just a button you click? Like, do not charge. Click.

28:03And then this sounds like something the software could solve. A lot of categories aren't self-serve. Like, for instance, like HR tech is just not self-serve. Like, usually you end up having to sign it. And like, if there's payroll information, you need to make sure you don't actually process the payroll. Okay, that would be funny. I got paid 47 times today. Woo! Yeah. Some categories are really great. Ticketing and helpdesk is just always self-serve. And so that's very easy for us to get a sandbox account. But for instance, getting our Salesforce sandbox took a while. You began to fill out a bunch of forms.

28:33I'm shocked that Salesforce was a process. A company known for its bureaucratic efficiency and lack of unnecessary layers and VPs. So really briefly, merge definitely when you add a new integration, you make a big deal out of it. it's in, you know, it matters quite a lot. So the pay loss of you won from earlier, have startups come to you and said, Hey, we really want you to integrate with us because then we will get our, our, you know, our name on your site, our logo will be in your materials. So are you a distribution point for companies themselves instead of just something that people add on to let them talk better amongst each other?

29:05All the time, which I, which I love. Yeah. So all these companies will come to us and they'll be like, Hey, like I'm, um, you know, a 50-person CRM company, and I saw these customers, and I really want them to integrate with us. So can you please build an integration with us so that our logo will show up on their website, and then all of our customers will be able to benefit from using that product? Because if you're a new source of truth, and you're trying to compete with HubSpot or Salesforce, it's really hard to get that roadmap time from every single vendor that is integrating with HubSpot and Salesforce.

29:36They might not want to spend that time integrating with you. But with Merge, it's free distribution. And again, we're helping create an ecosystem around their product. So startup comes to you. Hey, hey, hey, hey. You know, we are a 50-person up-and-coming CRM firm. We would like to be listed and we kind of take part in the Merge ecosystem. And you say, how much? Is it free? It's free right now. Yeah, right now. Yeah, we'll just do it because it makes our product better. Knowing what to build is only half the battle. You also need the right team. And recruiting is so hard when you're a startup.

30:09You're competing with all the other bigger players. So you might need a little help. And that's where MicroOne comes in. MicroOne helps you scale your product team in days, not weeks or months. Think about that in days, not weeks or months. And they handle the search process, vetting, even onboarding and paperwork. Imagine you could tell your AI your precise engineering needs, and it could deliver exactly what you need right away. Well, MicroOne has built an AI engine that interviews tens of thousands of engineers, designers, and AI trainers every month, and they hand-pick the top 1%, and they'll help you onboard them into your startup while handling all the legal and compliance work.

30:46If your startup needs to accelerate its product development, but you don't have the time to vet mountains of resumes or the budget to hire recruiters, MicroOne has you covered. All you have to do is tell MicroOne what you're looking for, and they will help you find your next engineer in 48 hours or less, here's your simple call to action. Visit micro1.ai slash twist. That's M-I-C-R-O, the number one, dot AI slash twist to instantly wrap up your product team. And Twist listeners get two weeks of free development per hire plus 10 free AI interviews. That's micro1.ai slash twist. To me, someone coming to you asking for access is usually the point at which you can extract some value.

31:27And so I presume right now there's more value in not charging them cash? I think one day, but right now I still really want to just make sure we have the most comprehensive list of integrations. And it's definitely been on our mind. We've experimented a few times with it, but right now I just want us to have the best product. And that means just having the most integrations and the highest quality integrations and product. How far are you on getting to the point in which you go like, okay, cool. We have all the big integrations we need. Now we're going to go chase the last edge cases, but we've done 80 % of the work.

31:53Never because there's different regions and the world is just getting more international. So for instance, like a lot of our customers are moving to different regions, like whether it's Europe or Latin Am or Southeast Asia or Japan. And so there's an unlimited number of integrations that you have to build. So never. So I don't know, not to be rude about it, but like, are you guys getting faster and better at building these integrations? Or is that not something that you can actually accelerate given how much you depend on other companies offering access to sandboxes and so forth? Oh my God. Yeah.

32:21It's the only thing we do. And so that's one of the benefits of it being the only thing we do. Well, now you make me feel silly. I wasn't sure if you could speed up the process because you mentioned these other roadblocks, but okay. Yeah, because it's the only thing we do. We focus so much on making creating efficiencies with how we test. Testing especially is the part that takes a lot of time. But yeah, we spend a lot of time on just making that faster, more efficient, and higher quality for our customers. And then also whenever we make modifications for maintenance, it's also very fast as well.

32:47So it's mostly what we do is just making sure we're able to move very quickly. But Merge overall is not just a technically difficult product to build. It's also an operationally difficult company to build. So from the ground up, because we knew we wanted to be cross category, we knew we wanted to be like international. We just really wanted to make sure from the beginning, we were building the foundation and avoiding as much tech debt as possible. Well, and you guys had security on the mind early on. If I recall correctly, you guys had like SOC 2 compliance, like out the gate. Yes. And that's all credit to my amazing co-founder.

33:16Yeah. All right. Now one more product question before we talk about money. Merge for AI, Build your AI features with LLM ready data. My question was, is the merge AI product for companies to ingest their own data to a single point so that they can train their own AI features? Or is it for companies that have many customers that have different integrations to bring that data in to make an AI feature for their customers? So the latter. We never ever do any internal use cases. Like the price point just doesn't really make sense for us. But yeah, we have a lot of companies that have gotten started in the past few years, especially with the AI boom that want to be able to have more customer specific data in their products.

33:54So they can provide insights for like whether it's AI search or like AI SDRs or like, I don't know, you know, you name it. And they'll use our integrations to help enhance their product insights and also capabilities. And how big of a demand point has that been for Merge lately? So honestly, it's so it's been really, really prevalent in the S &B segment. like we just see a lot of companies just getting founded, pretty much like 100 % of companies are all AI. It's a little bit harder to tell in the enterprise segment because you can't tell, like everyone's just adding AI to their products. You can't tell if it's like AI specific or a product that has like a little bit of AI, but on the SME segment, it's like super, super, super relevant.

34:32The way this has been explained to me and the way that I've learned it is the more unique data you have to build your model, the better it will be, the more differentiated it will be. And the more of your own data you have inside of an AI predicated application, the smarter it will be, the more you can do with it. Ergo, unique data is this incredibly important thing. If everyone's moving towards using more AI, does that mean that the total throughput of information across APIs that Merge touches is going up incredibly quickly? Because it seems like it should be. I mean, that's what I think. So we've been seeing a lot more companies going from using mostly just one or two categories to all seven categories and asking us for more.

35:07Seven categories of integrations with Merge. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Because the more data you have, the better the insights you have. Essentially the AI boom, even though it is, I mean, not exactly what you guys have been working on. It is providing a nice tailwind to the business. Yes. Yes. As my CRO says, it's always good to be lucky. So we have been very lucky. Dude, better lucky than good is one of those things that I've learned is more, I learned that lesson again and again and again as I've gotten older. And so shout out to you guys for being both. All right. Now let's talk about money. So according to Crunchbase, Merge has raised 74.5 million.

35:42Last round was a$55 million Series B October 22. And PitchBook had that listed at a $315 million post-money valuation. So that's a couple of years ago too. In fact, the obvious question is simple. Are you guys raising more money? Not right now. We've been really efficient. And to be honest, we haven't spent most of our money from our Series B. One thing that I really invested on early on, just because of my finance and operations background, was I wanted to have a really good finance team. And so one of my old coworkers joined us as employee 10, and she was just like tiger momming all of us about not spending too much money and being really efficient, especially in this current market.

36:15So not right now. We have a long runway right now with how much we're spending and she's actively making sure we're keeping her cash in check. Is she like a CFO equivalent? Basically, yeah. Okay. So you have a CFO equivalent and you also have a CRO and you've only raised three rounds of capital. That is pretty darn early for a startup of your size. We only have one C-suite member or one CRO. Everyone else is a VP. Oh, okay. Fair enough. But I mean, you have definitely a more, forget the titles, you have a much more mature finance op than most companies do at your size. Oh, for sure. Yeah. For the founders who listen to this, that's the main audience for Twist.

36:52Just explain how you went about that costs and benefits. I think people would love to know what an early investment in the office of the CFO broadly does. So I hired Alexia when we were 10 people because there were a lot of operations and accounting things that I just wasn't going to be uniquely good at. And I also knew I wasn't going to be super strategic there too. We were starting to enter a phase where we might want to have more advanced pricing. At the time, we were just flinging numbers around to customers and that just wasn't going to scale. And I knew we needed to be really thoughtful about it.

37:25And if you hire a really good finance team, they can be revenue generating for you and really strategic in how you expand to different products, how you expand to different regions, how you're thinking about costs, compensation. And so we hired her so that she could really own all of that. And she ran lean through our Series A. And then she started expanding her team after our Series A. After your Series B or Series A? Series A. So then she had two people. And she didn't really expand to three people until Series B. But then we hired also a VP of RevOps and then also two RevOps team members because our sales team started expanding a lot as well.

37:57In general, for a Series B company, our finance and operations team is definitely pretty loaded. But I think just given how complex like our operations are, it's really been an advantage for us. And we have deep insights and understanding of our sales motion and where, and like, like pipeline and just like what the company looks like. When you raised that last round, that$55 million round that by the way, Excel led that if I recall correctly. Yes. Yeah. Okay. It's a big round. I mean, 55 million, even for 2022, was it relatively outsized? Were you guys at the time intending on being very conservative with that new investment when you raised it?

38:35Always. We always wanted to be really conservative. With our Series A, we actually hadn't even touched our Series A by the time we had fundraised. We've always been pretty careful about it. We knew we wanted to make some investments in some strategic areas with that$55 million, but definitely not spending all of it. Why were you guys so early to the, what if we didn't burn a bunch of cash startup movement? Because it feels like you raised a era typical round and then did non-era typical things with it and that's an interesting dissonance to me so the company that i used to work at expanse they were pretty lean too um like they got to they got acquired at a billion dollars like 200 people and um they mostly focused on like really large enterprise customers and now that i'm thinking about like how how it ran it was pretty efficient and they didn't they didn't spend a ton of money and i think because that we had a benchmark for what metrics might want to look like.

39:25And we started in June 2020 when it was really hard to fundraise and no one believed in us. True, true, true, true. We just knew also Merge was going to be an expensive business to build because everyone has to be technical. We were building in San Francisco, New York City, and I would much rather just never have layoffs. And I really wanted to make sure that as much as possible, I could protect the team and just hire slowly and make sure that everyone is really good and have fewer, better people. But it's also hard because we're an in-person company and that automatically limited a lot of what the pool looked like.

39:53So it was always going to be slower for us to hire. Even if we wanted 2x tomorrow, that could just not happen. That would just not be able to happen. That's actually the funniest thing I've heard in some time. If you are an in-office company, your hiring rate may be slower because your candidate pool is more constrained. So if you want to save money by not hiring people, return to office. Jason's going to love that. That's like half of what's been talking about this show lately, is returning to office. I refuse, but I do respect every company's right to make their own decision. It's funny that I hear you talk about this.

40:22Merge was going to be expensive to build. Lots of technical talent. We're in New York. We're in San Francisco. We're in person, which means you have office expenses. And yet you hadn't spent your Series A by the time you raised your B. You still have lots of your B two years later. It's funny to me that you manage this when most people don't seem to be able to spend less and keep growing. Here's an example of you guys pulling it off. It's just rare to hear this actually work, I guess, out in the market and not in a blog post. We have a really good team. And I think also just because my team, we're so close.

40:50And that's probably from just being in person. They feel comfortable calling me out like, hey, we invested a lot in this. We need to stop investing more in it. Or like, oh, right now, our expenses are like this. Hold up. You know what I mean? They force me to be really thoughtful. And I think because we're so tight as an executive team, yeah, we can really call each other out on things like that. For everyone out there who's listening and thinking, oh my gosh, they haven't spent a lot of money. Surely this company hasn't grown much. I went back to the TechCrunch coverage of the Series B, and you guys have said that at the time, your ARR, annual recurring revenue, had grown by 30x in the last 12 months.

41:25And then at the time, 2 ,500 companies now use their service to integrate SaaS apps. So I'm curious, in the last couple of years, how has growth been? It's been really good. So we've obviously tried to recompose what our revenue looks like a little bit, just because when we first got started, it was a lot of micro SMB and smaller companies building on the platform. But right now, I think To be honest, I haven't checked the numbers because I don't look at this as much now. But we have, I think, 16 ,000 self-serve organizations on the platform, free and paying. We have around 400 enterprise customers on the platform.

41:56And also, the size of them are just increasing. Yeah, it's been a really transformational past two years. And that Series B that we raised really allowed us to take the focus more on investing in that future and what we wanted the company to look like. And also, just making sure we could focus on product quality rather than continuing to expand the TAM. because one limitation with our space inherently is just tam there's tam constraints like when you first get started you decide am i going to go broad or am i going to focus just on like one or two categories and if you focus on one or two categories you just there's not enough companies out there you can't outbound enough companies and you can't get enough revenue and then you die but if you go broad then your product's super shitty and then you'd also die so yeah i the raising the money was just really great for us to be able to just double down on quality make sure existing like because we already expanded our tam enough and just making sure our customers were happy.

42:41So essentially you expanded your TAM by going broad, having more capital, allowed you to then go deep where you had gone broad and therefore you're not spread too thin. Yes. And we had kind of like alternated. Like we first, we went really deep in like two categories and then we went a little bit broader and then we went deeper and then we went broader and then deeper. And then we also had the benefit of just being first. So we had time. Yeah. Overall, like just, we've been spending a lot of time on like making sure it's been like efficient growth, especially just because of the market, we don't know where things are going.

43:06And I just really want to protect the team and make sure there's a good outcome versus like over fundraising and overspending and being like, okay, we ball. Like I don't, I don't want to do that to the company. This is the only company for me. Like I, this is it. So I really want to make sure I'm like being responsible. So, but I want to go back. You very plightly dodged around my question by saying growth has been good. Uh, talk to me about 2023. How is this year looking? I presume you didn't 30 extra ARR again. Oh my God. Yeah, of course not. Yeah, definitely not. It's been really, really good.

43:34We've like doubled the number of logos that we've had. Uh, we've expanded a lot of our product offerings. And there's some really big logos that we're hoping to close in Q4 that we just never would have even had conversations with last year. If those new deals land in Q4, like you're hoping they will, how much does that pull your ACV up? A lot in the enterprise segment, but probably not overall. Well, I mean, yes, because you have lots of smaller customers. But in the enterprise segment, would it be like a double-digit percentage increase in ACV? Unclear. Yeah, unclear. okay so because one thing that struck me was back when you raised the series b you guys were talking about going more up market and i was really curious to see how well that's gone so is the majority of merge revenue today from the enterprise segment it's growing a lot yeah when we first started it was zero percent so like none of no no none of them will use us like at all like that'd be chaotic like why would they ever use our shitty little product uh but now yeah it's been really exciting.

44:32We've increased the percentage quite a bit. And then in the enterprise segment, compared to these micro enterprises you were talking about earlier, are they in the same overall business categories or has going to market also opened up a new industry sector mix to the company? Definitely a different industry sector mix. There's certain companies that we'll just never be able to sell to. I can never sell to Chevron or Target, probably unless they have a B2B SaaS component. But yeah, financial services are now open to us and that just was not possible for us before. So, you know, right now you guys have capital, you have, it seems to be a pretty strong product market fit and the economy seems to be okay.

45:10Have you thought about changing up the way you guys approach cash and just trying to grow a lot faster? No, because I really want to make sure that if I spend, if I spend X, I know exactly what's going to come out of it. And it's not super clear all the time, especially with this current market. So I'd rather us just be a little bit more conservative and spend X and I know like it's probably going to be around why versus being like, okay, it's going to hit C. So I'd rather just make sure we're being smart with money. But thank you for saying that. Cause I wanted to talk about your go-to-market approach because I was going just literally reading back through historical merge tweets.

45:44And one thing that hit me is you guys are pretty active. So you sponsor product school. I'm just going back to this. You went to SaaS stock. And then if I went through, there's just tons more events and so forth. You guys are out there really... Tired, yeah. Well, I presume you're exhausted, but the approach seems to be present at industry events and kind of going around. And so I presume that the ROI on literally pressing the flesh has been good. So this was a big year of experimentation and a part of this$55 million was for us to be able to experiment with the go-to-market motion. So part of that was going to be events and us going to different regions and us just like meeting more customers in person.

46:20So yeah, definitely. And part of the, yeah, we've just meeting a lot of people in person now. And I presume that in-person stuff does a little bit better when people understand what you're building. So I presume unified APIs have become well-known enough that there's less education required in person. No, there's still a lot of people who have no idea. Yeah. And also like every time I go to a wedding, someone's like, what is this? And then I have to spend like an hour explaining to them. So most people don't understand it. And that's totally fine with me, but I just want to make sure that it is potent.

46:48And that's why some of the in-person interactions help a lot. Wait a minute. At weddings, you talk about what your startup does? Oh my God. Yeah. It's like I go through like a due diligence process every single time I go to a wedding. You should do what I do at weddings, which is slowly find the back wall and then attach myself to it and then don't move for three hours. It works every time. Okay. Noted for the next time. All right. I want to talk about pricing really quick and then I'm going to do just a quick reflection so i was just trying to figure out how you guys go about pricing for merge and in the the first of your three tiers um you get three free linked accounts and then it's um 650 for up to 10 and a linked account i believe is a customer um endpoint integration into the api correct yes uh pretty much so it's a connection so for instance if you your customer is lift and they're connecting their workday instance through merge that's one connection and then um you have another customer that's using Oracle, then that's the second connection.

47:44Okay. So Lyft connecting to, let's just say, Oracle through Merge for$65 seems to be like it's priced at roughly one one thousandth of the potential value for them. Why is it so inexpensive? Yeah, I know. So we probably need to adjust the pricing a little bit. But the thing is that we, at first, when we launched pricing, it was based on volume and it created a lot of complexity. So the sales cycle and also what we noticed was a majority of the LinkedIn accounts were smaller and so we were accounting for the few instances where it would be really huge and allowing that to sway what the pricing looked like versus just looking what most of the pricing looked like, which is why we just simplified it.

48:23So it's true. It is a steal for a lot of companies that are mostly selling to enterprise. And a lot of those enterprise companies will also make money off of the integrations as well because you can. And for SMBs, yeah, the pricing is a little bit more expensive. We have to work with them on pricing too. But I love leaving value on the table, providing a great experience for customers. I'm actually really in favor of that. I think it's a great way to go about it. But how do you decide as a business when you might be leaving even more on the table than you might want to? Yeah. I mean, that's always the question, right?

48:50And we do have a platform fee as well for the professional and enterprise plans. And so if you are a company selling to enterprise, you can't use the self-serve plan. It's just there's not enough security features. You need more support, especially if you're selling to enterprise and you don't know the nuances of Workday or SAP. You really need more support. And so you're going to be on the enterprise plan, which has a platform fee that varies just based on the company size. And then that also, that helps lean out the cost. Yeah. One more question about customers. There's been a trend that I've been tracking mostly through public markets of software companies reporting pretty poor net retention rates over the last eight quarters.

49:24Things have come down from 130 % to 105, 160 to 120, et cetera. Has that compression of ability to upsell customers impacted Merge's growth rate. So not that. It actually impacts us more when our customers aren't doing super, super well. And especially if you're selling mostly to S &B, then if they're not doing super well, because we're pricing based on the number of connections. So if they have fewer customers, then we can't charge them as much. Also, a lot of our customers would acquire each other, especially this year and last year. But the move-up market has helped us a lot with that. Like the NRR for our enterprise segment is just completely different from our S &B segment.

50:00So we're just pretty lucky that we ended up making that strategic move earlier on. Okay. Now, if you're not going to raise more capital and you're growing quite a lot, eventually you're going to reach scale. So I'm thinking merge IPO Q2 2027. Oh my God. I wish. I wish. I don't know. Seriously, if you guys end up some sort of horrible Frankenstein, super late stage series G company, I'm going to scream because it feels like you have tailwinds, you have good growth, you have good product market fit, your team seems good. If you can't go public eventually, then literally startups are so broken, we need to just rip all the papers up and throw them and start over again.

50:41That's my vibe. I mean, that's the dream. And I firmly believe that all tech companies that go public, and also just all companies that go public eventually become M &A shops where you have to strategically purchase other companies and just combine them in a way that is beneficial to the customer. But there are a few bets that we want to make that would be beneficial for us to do as a private company. And I don't think public, I don't think, yeah, I don't think the stock market would like treat it super well. So I'd want to make sure that we make those bets before we end up doing anything like that.

51:09And we're still a hundred people. So we're pretty far from that right now. But no, there's actually, there's no minimum personal requirement to go public. Oh, really? No, you can go public with two people. I mean, SPACs are essentially just zombie cash that's been floated, right? So, I mean, the question is, you know, do you have like 150 million trailing revenue no but will you by 2027 i don't know i've never seen a company say we grew 30x last year here's our series b haha like that's that that is a very impressive result and i'm hoping it's it's kept going because you know i would love you to see you drop new numbers soon i know you love numbers i've been listening to you for a while well explain what's actually going on um okay last question that i promise i'll let you go we were talking about ai earlier and tailwinds they're off and so forth has anyone tried to buy you guys lately no really i'm shocked because i feel like some company in the ai data space like databricks would be hovering yeah no and to be honest i don't think we'd be super down for it either i think the opportunity for what we're building is just too big and it would really be a shame i really i really feel like what we're building is like the infrastructure for the next generation of the internet because just data is so important and i i don't think it would be a good i don't think it's worth it especially where we are right now if you're going to become the data you know interchange for the internet if you will especially on the business side of things do you eventually drop the like the api focus and maybe get more agnostic about types of data in motion oh my god yeah alex that's what we're doing okay what does that look like I can't share all of it.

52:45But yeah, I mean, that's why we hate when people call us Merge API, because it's really just Merge. Because wherever your customer's data is, we want to be able to pull it and export it in whatever format that you want eventually. But yeah, for instance, now we have CSV upload. We've built some on-prem integrations too. We have SOTP. So world should be our customer's oyster. Well, I should have started with that question, but Shinzy, we're out of time. I have to let you go. But thank you so much for coming on. I really do appreciate it. And the next time Merge does anything, you just call me up and we'll have you back on.

53:14All right. Sounds good. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. All right, everybody, live news coming up. Lots more twists to come. Make sure you're subscribed. My name is Alex. We're out of here. Bye.