 So good afternoon. Hello everybody, welcome. I'm Michael Wellman. I'm the Chair of Computer Science and Engineering here at Michigan. And it is my privilege to introduce our distinguished lecture speaker today. Bob Muglia is an alumnus from class of 1981. Back when we had a program that was called Computer and Communication Sciences. And he is our College of Engineering Alumni Merit winner in CSE for this year. Bob has had a successful career creating software products and will share some of the things he's learned in the business with us today. Bob was CEO of Snowflake for five years, starting in May 2014. Prior to Snowflake, he spent two years at Juniper Networks and 23 years at Microsoft. Early in his career, Bob helped to start the SQL server business and he managed Microsoft's visions including Visual Studio, Office, and Windows Server. From 2007 to 2011, Bob was the President of the Server and Tools Division, growing that business to over $17 billion. Bob currently serves as a board director for Fyvetran, Fauna, Dr. Ugami, and Julia Computing. Please join me in welcoming Bob Muglia to CSE. Great, thanks Mike, appreciate it. Well it's great to be here and first thank you very much for taking some time on a Friday afternoon. I know 3.30 Friday, you probably have all sorts of things, you have lots of work to do and hopefully some fun you'll have over the weekend. So thanks for taking time today. What I wanted to do today, I wanna do something that I hope would be valuable to the people here. And my passion is really products and creating products and helping people to grow in their career and creating teams and ultimately companies. And I thought that could be a topic of interest to a lot of folks and while this is a topic, this is a talk that has a lot of different things in it. It covers a broad area. You could dive down and spend hours on any one of these topics but I wanted to give you an overview and leave you with some learnings that are some of the learnings I've had over the years that hopefully leave you with something, the value that you can take away from today and hopefully make you think a little bit. So my career quickly, I graduated in 81 here at Michigan. I spent seven years at Rome in the Bay Area. Rome was a telecommunications company building PBXs then. I then, my wife and I then, Laura Ellen is here with us, went up to Seattle and it was really Laura that helped to get us to Microsoft. She was the one that really drove us to get there and we were fortunate enough. Laura had the insight that the PC and applications together would be the future in 1987 and that drove us to Microsoft and she worked there for a number of years and then I spent 23 years there doing a number of different things and then following that, I was at Juniper Snowflake, five years at Snowflake. I started in June of 2014 and left in 2019 and took the company from zero to about $200 million in revenue, about 1,200, 1,300 people from about 35 and right now I'm on the board of Fauna, Daki Gami, Julia and Five Tran and I'll use some of these examples. Throughout this talk I'm gonna use some examples from my experience in working with things that hopefully bring some stuff to you. But my first job, my first computer job was here in Ann Arbor at a company called Condor Computer. Condor was one of the first relational databases in the 1970s. This was really before Oracle took off, Oracle existed but it barely took off and it had a true relational database, it had a join command but it ran on a Z80 microcomputer in 16K of memory. Can you imagine that? Trying to operate on databases with 16K of memory. It was a big upgrade, we got to 32K. And so I worked at this company called Condor and then I was really a consultant building software applications including for the city of Ann Arbor which was one of my first clients. My first product at Microsoft, I joined Microsoft was on SQL server and this is the box that we created. I have this in my office, picture of this. This is the first version of Microsoft SQL server. It was actually Ashton tape Microsoft SQL server. We bought, we OEM the product from a company called Cybase. And this is an interesting thing, you can really tell the difference between a cloud world when you look at this. This product was installed on an OS2 computer at the time. At the time, the box, a lot of the things, a lot of the stickers have disappeared, the writing has disappeared over the years but I'm thrilled that the one that's most important stayed which is this box contained both five and a quarter and three and a half inch floppy disks inside it. And to give you an idea, there were 72 floppy disks inside that box and about 10 pounds of manuals. Now think about that in the cloud world and think about how different it is to distribute software and work with your customers and your feedback loop on your customers, how different and how isolated you were because there were distributors and value added resellers that installed the software. You were so distant from that. But I put that box together myself. I loaded the software on all those floppies. It's the only production software ever wrote at Microsoft but this was the beginning of the auspicious beginning on the specialist beginning of SQL server way back when at Microsoft. In my career, I've had some hits and misses, some great products like SQL server, Visual Studio, Windows NT, System Center and then Snowflake. I'm pretty proud of the work that the teams did there and was pleased to be able to help folks. Probably more important though is I've had plenty of misses. I've made a lot of mistakes in my career. I've learned hopefully from them. Some of my misses were things like NetDocs and Cairo. Those were projects that were ahead of their time at Microsoft. NetDocs was a new version of Office that was written in the web. Kind of, there was this thing called Google Docs that came around later that did it right but we tried it at that time. And Cairo FS was the really early versions of what Microsoft was trying to do with information and getting access to information everywhere. We called it information in your fingertips and those were ahead of their time. But probably more interesting is the DOJ lawsuit. If anyone familiar with that, that Microsoft was sued by the government in the early 2000s? Well, I was very directly involved in that. I was one of the 12 witnesses that testified. My wife and I were in DC together. We recall it well. It was pretty nightmarish. You come out changed in something like that and part of that is you realize the importance of values. I learned a lot. We made some mistakes at Microsoft. We didn't do everything right and we learned a lot and the company changed and it's doing very well right now. Certainly Saatch has taken it in a great direction but these things change. You learn about what's important in life. So I'm gonna use this structure throughout the rest of the talk. Talk about building products and companies. And this is an idea that there's a set of phases that every product, every product goes through regardless of the size of the company. Every product is born and someday it dies. Products don't last forever. Companies don't last forever either. They may last longer than products but there's a life cycle associated with that. It starts with incubation, creation. You have to mature it, grow it. If you do your job right, you hit leadership and then ultimately you decline. This picture shows a straight line that never happens. Never, it's never that simple. Even snowflake, which is pretty much as close to that straight line up as you can get. We had our setbacks. At one point I went out to raise money and I got 24 nos from VCs. Everyone said no at the time. So nothing is this simple but it's a good structure to think about things. The beginning, it starts at the beginning when a founder has an idea or a developer or anyone in a big company, an idea for a new product. What could this product be? And the first question you need to answer in thinking about whether this is a good idea to go spend your life on is what's the impact that this will have on the world if we do this? Is it taking something in an existing market and replacing it? Is it totally new and is it totally different? Whatever it is, what kind of impact does that have on your customers and on the people who'll be using the product? That's called total addressable market. How big is the market opportunity for what you're building? This is a slide from Gartner, it's on the web. It explains a little bit, I like it because it says that, hey, your actual potential market segment opportunity is they talk about it. What you can actually tackle is actually probably quite a bit smaller than what you think it might be. And the question is, is that going to be something of great value to organizations and is it worthwhile to build this thing and put so much energy into it to create something that others hopefully will use? Now in the case of Snowflake, it surely was. Snowflake went into a market, the market for Snowflake is called data warehousing. We were the first built for the cloud data warehouse so we were distinguished because we scaled. But there was an existing market, it was called the on-premises data warehousing market. And IDC and Gartner estimated those markets at about $13 billion. Now I knew it was actually bigger than that because I knew the cloud would expand this. And this is a slide off of Snowflake that Snowflake just had at their last earnings call. That 14 billion number, which is what I went out when I got those nos in 2016 talking to those VCs. I was talking about this number. They didn't believe me, by the way. They thought Amazon was gonna kick our tail. But now they talk about this number because they see the market is bigger. Now they're in the cloud and they see a broader opportunity. And then when they look at all of data and what's happening analytics, they see an even bigger market opportunity. And when I talk about market, I wanna emphasize that what I'm talking about really is the utility or the value of what you're delivering. Is it valuable to your customers or not? Will they adopt it and will it change the way they live their lives and do business? And it's measured in dollars because it's a good way to measure things. But it's not really, at least for me, it was never about the money. It's not about the money. It's about what value or utility you're delivering. And sometimes these indicators. In fact, market indicators are the best indicator of value delivered. But it's important to remember that besides the market opportunity, the what, there is always a how about how you do things. It's one of those lessons I learned really early. There's the what and there's the how. And how is about company values. And I'll come back to this again and again in this talk. But I wanted to set that up and say, when I talk about money and numbers, it's really about an indication of value to the customer more than anything. And that is always balanced with the values or the how about a way a company works. The beginning of what you're trying to do is to create something that's known in the industry as a minimum viable product. The minimum thing that a customer will buy. It's right to check for. That's the minimum thing you want to create and you want to start very narrow because you only have so many resources. And the relationship between a product and a customer is like this. And there's some companies like Apple that think they know better than everyone. And maybe they do, because I have an Apple phone in my pocket. But I'll tell you, I've never been able to operate like that. I learn from my customers. We learn so much by talking to customers. Customers help you create the product. And it's by this direct interaction of listening to the problems that customer have and responding quickly to that. And in the cloud, you can respond at a speed that is like unheard of. We used to get a complaint. We would see a query. I mean, it was possible for us to have a query fail in the morning for a customer. We saw it. If query fails, we saw it. And if we had time to look at it, we could get it fixed. There were times when a customer, we would see a problem. Maybe the customer saw it. Maybe they didn't. We had it fixed that afternoon. That's amazing, that sort of turnaround. But it's that interaction of working with customers. And now in a cloud world, you have all this telemetry. You know everything that the customer is doing. That's a privacy issue you have to work on. But it's a really helpful thing in building great products. Now in the process of building such a great product and understanding your customers and responding to them, there's always what's known as a virtuous cycle. Every successful product has a customer virtuous cycle that feeds it and makes it successful. This one, I'm gonna use this example from FiveTran. This is literally their flywheel, they call it. FiveTran is a data pipeline company. They're a cloud company. They take data from sources like Salesforce, NetSuite, all the broad business applications, as well as databases, Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, on and on. And they take that data and they move it into a cloud data warehouse for the customer. That's their job. So this is their flywheel. Build standardized reliable automated data connectors. A connector is something that connects to data source. That track customers and increase connector adoption. There is no limit to the number of connectors needed. They have about 200 right now. Our goal within a year or two is to build several thousand. So we have to scale out to a large number of these connectors. We can improve the reliability through centralized bug fixes. When we fix a problem for one customer, we fix it for every customer. This is huge. In the non-cloud world, that didn't happen. You fixed a problem, you put it in your source code maybe your customer installed it six months later. Maybe it was two years later, you never knew if the customer was gonna install it. Five-tran is always up to date as a cloud service. Row reputation and demand for connectors. That's happening. Grow monthly active rows. That's the measure of usage. It's the measure of success. And then invest in profits and continue to build better product. That's the virtuous cycle for five-tran. Every company has something that is like this. It's important to figure out what that might be. So the key is customers improve your product. And once you have an MVP and you start this process, this learning from customers process, that really leads to the future of what you can do. And it's interesting to see the kinds of products that catch on. What is it that makes things so successful? When you learn from, can you hear from customers, what are the things that drive, that separate the really successful products from the ones that aren't as successful? And if you look, video conferencing, this is such a great example. Video conferencing brown for a really long time. And I used to, I remember using WebEx and all these things. It was a nightmare. It just was a nightmare. It never worked. Every time he stays like, well, we're doing a video call today. The first 10 minutes we'll be spent setting it up. That stopped when we switched to Zoom. It just worked. That's what, why is Zoom so successful? Because it works. That lesson is so important. I wanna leave that because it's almost, it's the one that's so often forgotten, that simplicity that it just works. And they've been rewarded incredibly well. Now again, I'm using market cap as an indicator of utility here, of value delivered. And it's a way to think about it. Market cap is a great indicator. In fact, I'd argue it might be the best indicator of future value expectation, expected value creation. And in fact, the market measures that every minute of every trading day in the business. And you can kinda get an instantaneous look at this. So these measures are really good things to measure value. And if you're successful and you build something that it begins to take on, you can start to invest with the growth. You expand your sales team. You expand your engineering team. And those are the two growth engines of any business. Any tech business. The engineering and product team builds the product and they're the heart and soul of what the product is. And the sales and marketing team are the team that really connects directly with customers and sells to customer. Every other group is important. They're all critical in this process. But those are your two engines of growth that really drive companies. And here it's important to emphasize that the attribute that drives growth is performance. And the measurement that Wall Street looks at is clearly revenue and future revenue potential, future earnings potential. But there's another side of this that's really critical to the success of companies and that's the value side. The how things get done. And at this point, when a company is at this point in their life cycle, they need to have established their values. And they need to have those in place as they build their team. You can do it a lot earlier. I have some companies that do it really in that incubation process, even that early. We weren't that early at Snowflake. We did it really while we were in the learning from customers phase. That's where we sort of took it before we got this far along. But values become very important. It's a part of how companies operate. If you are successful, and that is a big if because 99% of products are not successful. They fail, by the way, most products fail in the very early stage because they missed the market and there is no TAM or they're mismanaged. Mismanagement is everywhere. But if you are successful, you can become a category leader. And these are some examples of category leaders. They have succeeded in hitting the top of the pyramid for their category. And it's sort of what you really hope for with any product. And at that stage, and by now these companies are typically, they're typically public companies. So they're available for people to purchase and they're very, very closely watched as a result of that. What the investors care about is maximizing and being able to achieve profitability. But there's, again, I'm gonna say there's always a balance here and often you have to push back against investors because you want to invest in things that will drive the next phase of your business. Some folks like Amazon were super successful at that. But nonetheless, at this stage of a life cycle, there's a tremendous opportunity for companies to grow, to be out there serving a very large set of people and making some money for their investors, making some money for their investors. But ultimately, products get old. Every product gets old. No product lasts forever. And you have to be renewing things all the time. If Microsoft was still selling an office product that looked like the office product was delivering 10 or 20 years ago, it would not be successful against things like Google Docs. They had a lot of response they had to do to Google Docs. But now office is a service and it's delivered a service. So it's transcended into the new world. Many products don't transcend. But the way it transcended was to get reinvented. And you always have to do that reinvention. And if you don't, what happens is you sort of go into this decline sort of spot place and down she goes. And that process, that downward process can happen really fast or it can take decades. And in fact, if it's taking decades, it can probably be milked and continue to generate revenue and generate profitability for a long time, but it's not really creating something new. It's just supporting something that's been in existence. To me, it's the less interesting part of a life cycle. But it's quite important. Sort of the bottom line on this is customers help to create the product. And when you're running a service, you are working with your customer day in and day out all day. And customers, you earn their business every single day you interact with them. And you need to think that way. That you're there to help your customers to be successful. And if you do that, you can build some really, really cool things, really cool things. So let's talk about companies now. Shift a little bit from products to companies and talk about that. These are the stages for companies. Companies go through the same stages that products do, but they operate in their own time. And depending on the company, you might have multiple products. This is an example of a funding sort of how you might fund something you start a new product. Now I'm talking about the venture world now. There's an equivalent inside a big corporation if you're starting a new product there. But you have a seed investment in the early days to help a founder invent something. You have a begin with a series A to create the product and actually build it. And then B, C and beyond is how it matures and growth and eventually hopefully it becomes a public company. And then that stage of decline is often handled by organizations called private equity organizations that are really spreadsheet managers by and large that manage the profitability of a product in a company typically during the decline stages. But these are sort of the cycles of that. As you can imagine, I'm much more inclined toward the early stages of that. The characteristics, I've had the fortune to work with a lot of CEOs, startup CEOs. And the fortune to talk to a lot of them all the time. This is some characteristics that I find common in all of them. Passion for their idea. They are so excited about what they're doing. They have endless energy. God, they work hard. They work harder than you can imagine. And they invest in connections to people of influence. I cannot describe the importance of this. Successful people work with other successful people. They know successful people. They learn from successful people. So getting connected, finding ways to connect with people you can learn from. Probably the single most important thing. Great CEOs are fantastic recruiters. They can recruit, they're great salespeople actually. And they're actually strong leaders. What is a leader? Leader is an interesting thing. What is a leader? Pretty simple, really. A leader is somebody who people follow. There are other definitions. I like that one the best. What are the attributes of leadership? Strategy, structure, and people. Those are the three things. Great leaders, whether you're the CEO of a huge corporation, or you're leading a team in the creation of something, a team dynamic in a project. If you're the leader, these are the characteristics you have to have. You need a strategy, you need an approach, a structure. Maybe that's an organizational structure, but it's certainly a structure for operating. And you need the right people on the project. In my experience, you have those three things, the right things happen. You don't have one of those things, the wrong things happen. And as a leader, if you can put those things in place, you've established the foundation for how your company or your team can be successful. Coming back to the industry and companies, I said they're category leaders which are product related things. So products can lead in a category. And then there are companies that maintain those products. Industry leaders are companies that have leadership products in multiple categories. That's true without exception. Think about it. Think about all those companies have multiple leadership product, that category products inside their portfolio. And that is actually what makes them an industry leader. And then they need to manage that balanced portfolio of things. But that's the sort of life cycle. I was fortunate enough to work at one of those companies. So I have a fair amount of knowledge about what it takes to run a big multi-business company. And it's complicated as you can imagine. A lot of things to consider. Now, again, when I'm talking about equity value here, again, think not just about the money, but think about value created for the industry and for people. If you look at the life cycle and how companies, the value gets created, this is a pretty good curve. This is pretty much the way the curve looks. It starts pretty low. And then when, during that growth phase, it goes up and then it hits a plateau and it can stabilize there. And then eventually it goes back down. I double, it turns out FiveTrend just did a funding this, we announced a funding this week and I plotted it into there. And I actually had to adjust this a little bit when I did this and I realized that there's actually another order of magnitude. I realized when I did this, this first wrote this chart out, that I was missing an order of magnitude in the potential for growth. It's amazing the difference between the latter successful companies and the more successful companies in terms of value created. And again, you can say this is market cap and this is dollars, but I think it's a pretty good, it is the best indicator of industry value or utility that's created. Now if you look at this from the perspective of an individual employee, somebody working at one of these companies, something like everyone in this room that I see who is here studying computer and engineering, you're gonna go out and probably most of you will go into industry in some form and you'll be looking at different kinds of jobs that you might take. The thing I wanna say is that the value creation, a large part of that happens on the equity side if you choose the right companies. And again, early is better, founders do incredibly well if they're successful and early stage it goes down. I was just last Thursday, I was at a party it was a year anniversary of the IPO of Snowflake and so it was a party with a bunch of the founding engineers and the founders and it was so wonderful to think about how much success was created there and how successful people are. And it's honestly the thing I'm the most proud of at Snowflake, I said this to them and the thing I'm the most proud of is that we were able to share the success of Snowflake as equitably as I possibly could amongst the employees. And I can tell you I didn't do a perfect job but I did about as good a job as I could have to try and distribute that in a way that was equitable amongst the people and I'm very proud of that. And the bottom line here is that the best companies can generate as much as 100 times more value over the one for employees compared to the ones that aren't successful and it's hard is how do you know what company will be successful? It's a hard question. But if you find the next Snowflake it's a really great place to be. It's a really, you know, and the thing that's so important about this is these are the best jobs that are being created. So when I left Snowflake there were 1,200 but when I started there were 35 people when I left there were 1,200. That was 1,150 plus of the best jobs on the planet being created. It was the best jobs in the world. And I'm gonna go back to a lesson I learned long ago and we go all the way back to Roman here in this lesson is that I used to work on a product called CBX that's the product we built. It was actually an earlier version of this than this. I couldn't find a picture on the web of the early one. And I worked on a software production system for about two years that would build offline. We had to generate the software configuration for these devices offline because they didn't have enough computing power to do online configuration. And software production was all screwed up when I got to Rome. They didn't even know where their source code was and they were literally not able to deliver product because they couldn't build the software. So it was a board level issue. And I spent about two years and God knows how many hours fixing it. It was great. I presented the board, it was really great. Got done with that. Spent another year and a half work in there in that software production group. I realized nobody cared about what I did. They cared a lot about fixing it and then I kept sanding it and making it better, better, better. Nobody cared. And that's when I realized that it's just as hard to work on something that nobody cares about. So focus on things that matter to others. That's the key point. What matters to others? What's important to the industry? What's important to the management team? Focus on that. It's one of the things I've always learned to stay ahead. And ultimately, these things are always about people. As I said at the beginning, I care about products and I love products and building products. And I care about people and helping people build their careers and their teams be successful for their family. See them be able to reach their dreams. This is the ship picture of Snowflake which was taken in June of 2015 when we shipped what we call general availability. We hit our first MVP, so to speak. We called it general availability of Snowflake and this is the team that did this. And it's fun, I still know a lot of these folks. I saw a lot of them a week ago. And it's just incredible to think that these things, these products, they're cloud services but underneath they're all about people. I used to say that with Snowflake, I used to remember how when we had problems in the middle of the night and the people were on the phone and on a Slack call and on a Zoom call and they're working in the middle of the night. I used to say that I'm not sure with Snowflake where the silicon ends and the carbon begins because the people is what made the product. And if at any moment in time, the people stopped fixing things and doing what customers needed, we would get swamped. We would have gotten run over. So ultimately these products are always about people. And when you get to thinking about people, you come to values immediately. And to me this is the way you provide direction to people. Values are guidelines. They tell people how they should behave but we don't always do it. It's very different than a principle. It's the difference between a value and a principle. A principle is in violet. You cannot violate it. Thou shalt not kill. That is a principle. It's also a commandment but it's a principle. But a value is different than that because you make mistakes all the time. And the words at the top I think are pretty important. Our values represent who we are at our best. We seek to exhibit these values every day and in every interaction. That indicates we don't always do it but we try and be better. And they're a little different than you might think. And what's important here is these are guidelines and the words are really important. So integrity always is great but look at the words under it. You're not maybe not what you would have expected. Maybe not but when you think about it yeah they're pretty dead on. Be open, honest and respectful. Speak up and communicate candidly even when it makes you uncomfortable or maybe something others don't want to hear. That's an essence of integrity in the snowflake world. Now those are snowflake values and we would never want to impose values on anyone else but they're important. And you learn a lot from looking at others. There's a lot of great things out there. One of the places that I look at and learn a lot is from Amazon and what Jeff Bezos did with that and these are the Amazon leadership principles and I think there's some of the most amazing things written in terms of team dynamics ever. They're so Jeff Bezos. Laura Ellen and I, my wife and I were fortunate enough to have lunch with Jeff one day. Pretty much just the two of us. It was just the two of us I think Laura and Jeff and we were able to spend about half hour with them. Man does that guy understand the customer. Oh my God, does he understand the customer and the customer obsession. Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention competitors, they obsess over customers. That's such a great principle, leadership principle. Such a great thing. And to me, I mean these are values essentially, these are values. And the top, we use our leadership principles every day whether we're discussing ideas for new projects or deciding on the best approach to solve a problem. It is just one of the things that makes Amazon peculiar. That's pure Bezos. But it's really important in the essence of that company. The reason, one of the reasons that Amazon is so successful is because these principles, these leadership principles are imbued in the people at Amazon. You talk to an Amazon employee, they talk about leadership principles. Talk to a snowflake employee, they talk about values. They're really important. And the reason they're so important in tech companies. Why are tech companies different? Because we are building systems where the values of the organization are part of the product. Human values are encoded into cloud services. That has been true since there were cloud services. They've been encoded in products to an extent. But man, is it clear now in a cloud world how the organization's values become part of the user experience. And this becomes more exacerbated with machine learning where the attributes that are learned are very much values-based attributes that become part of the products. And if you look at these products, you can see attributes of values inside a company, inside a Facebook or inside a Twitter, or even inside an Oracle or a Salesforce. If you look closely enough, you can see some of these things in there. And they do tend to be very tightly encoded in that. And of course, because they impact so many people, they are in fact part of society and therefore judgment is passed on. And there's a balance in every company between that performance-based side that's generating revenue and driving the next business result and the values of the organization behind it. And those two must stay in balance in some form. This is the what and the how and those two work together to build the success. And as I thought about this, I thought about how that balance is interacted and I thought about different ways to draw it. And I decided to draw it like infinity because I think it's infinitely related to each other and there is constantly a balance that is happening between the drive for performance and results and the values inside the organization. And in today's world, employees in society judge the values of successful tech companies. And competition and a changing technology forces organizations to constantly reassess how they take their values and they apply that to new technology and new products that are being built. And those two are always interrelated in some way in every tech company. And it's interesting to think about that and it's crucial to consider it as companies are built and as their organizations take shape and are formed. And so I'll leave you with one final thought today and then we'll have some time for questions which is in this balance, you know, it's about the what and it's about the how and it's really about doing the right thing and doing that thing in the right way and keeping that in balance. And then I'll add to that and say that if you make a mistake, which you will, own it and fix it and learn from it and be better. In my career, I've made a lot of mistakes. I've had quite a few setbacks, some pretty big ones too, pretty big ones, pretty big setbacks. And I guess what I'm probably most proud of is every time that's happened, I pick myself up, not always easy, but I pick myself up. I've tried to learn from it, taken the time to learn from it. I think I've been better, I believe I've gotten better. I'm a better person and I can work and be more effective as I go on from the mistakes I've made. Cause we all will, we will all have success of some form and we will all have failures of some form. And I think what really distinguishes things is learning from those failures and being better from it. So with that, I thank you very much and I'll be happy to take any questions you have.