 Anyway, hello everyone. Thank you for coming to this session. I'm really excited about it because my name is Ryan Floyd. I'm an early stage venture investor and I work with a lot of companies and one of the common things that I deal with every single one of them is how do you get those first customers? You know, it's so hard. How do you get the first 10, the first dozen, the first 30? And then in addition to that, how do you figure out who to partner with? You know, especially now in the open-stack communities, it's really matured. I mean, you know, three years ago, it didn't have the large companies that were such a big part of it as it does now. And so I think start-up, small companies, it's really important to figure out how to partner. So we've got three great guests here today. We'll walk through really how did they do it? How did they get their first customers and talk a little bit about how to figure out how to partner. So why don't I just go online and let you guys quickly introduce yourselves and maybe just a little bit about your company, but keep it very short and then we'll get into it. Sure. Thanks, Ryan. My name is Francesco Paola. I'm CEO of Selenia. We are a software and services company that helps enterprises adopt open-stack and overall open infrastructure as well. I can probably hear you. The self-distributed storage system. Now I can really hear myself at school. So partnerships and stuff. So we have a mic here. So please let's make it interactive. We've got 40 minutes, but I would love to hear your questions for the folks here. So please jump up, raise your hand. You don't have to wait till the end and get involved. So maybe, Francesco, let's start with you because I was always amazed at the caliber of customers that you guys were able to get at the very beginning because for most startups, no one really trusts you, right? I mean, you don't have anything. You guys didn't even have an office. No, we didn't have a lot of other things. Did you even have a phone number? No. So how do you go from that to convincing a company like Hyundai to do work with you? Sure. So first of all, my co-founder and I, Ken Pepple, saw an opportunity in the market. I spent 18 months at Cloud Scaling. Cloud Scaling was one of the first services companies to help organizations adopt open-source technologies to build clouds. So one of our first customers was actually Korea Telecom. Then we worked with Samsung, worked with AT&T, and as you all know, Cloud Scaling decided to move into the distro space and kind of let the services go. And we saw this tremendous opportunity to help organizations accelerate their ability to use this technology. And so Ken and I started the company in January 2013. And before we started the company, we started making some inquiries with our former partners when I was at Cloud Scaling, when he was at Internet. And one of our partners in Korea actually said that there may be an opportunity at Hyundai, the fifth largest car company in the world. And we're like, well, let's try. I mean, we had a few consulting gigs just to bring some money in the door. We actually didn't take a salary for about four months, but we brought some money in the door so we could actually pay for some of the logistic requirements and whatnot. And we got a phone call one day from our partner in Korea and that Ryan knows very well. And he said, look, I know you guys are just starting this, but if you can be here in a week, I can get you in front of Hyundai. It's the right people. I'll be there to support you. And I said, sure. So Ken and I looked at each other and we're like, we didn't even have a name for the company. We didn't have a name. We didn't have a logo. We had nothing. Just Ken going out at the time in Moscow of all places to bring some money in the door. And so we said, look, let's get something going real quick. And we said, let's try to come up with a name. So we went through the, and you've seen Silicon Valley. Actually, that's actually what happened for us, right? We threw some names on the board and we said, yeah, we like this one, this one. We went to the URL. There's no URL. We're like, time was running short. We said, let's pick, let's use a URL that I had from a previous company and let's use that for now. And then we'll change it. We'll change the name because we need something right away. And then we're like, well, we need a logo, crowdsource the logo. 99 designs in 48 hours. We got a logo. We like that one. We'll take it. We need a website. And Ken said, okay, I'll put five pages together. And overnight, he had a website. And in the meantime, I'm writing the methodology to give a story to actually what we were going to be doing, right? Business cards, FedEx Kinko's 24 hours, we got the business cards, use my home address, doesn't matter. I get on a plane. I get to Korea, I meet the client and based upon, of course, I had to put a pitch deck together on the flight there. But based upon the the partner that we had, and I'll explain the partner when we talk about the partners based upon the partner relationship based upon the credibility that Ken and I personally had in Korea because they knew that we work with Korea Telecom, they knew we'd work with Samsung. They actually made inquiries. We had letters of reference written by KT and Samsung in terms of for us personally, not for our company, to vouch for us. Three months later, mid April, actually, the project kicked off in the middle of the Portland OpenStack Summit. So we sent some poor project manager out there to start, you know, get get the thing going. But, you know, 18 months later, and millions of dollars later in revenue, there's still a customer of ours, we wrote a case study, which is available on the Open Stack.org website. But the key there was the fact that we were very, very focused on the end objective. The end objective was to portray ourselves as high value providers of services as experts. We had the backing of former customers, even if it was prior lives, that they were willing to vouch for us. We were very, very focused on quality of how we presented ourselves and quality of the work that we've done in the past and to portray that quality using case studies, for example, and ultimately the relationship that we had on the ground work. But it was it was a fly by night operation. But even if it sounded fly by night, we knew what we were doing because we knew that what was it was important to a customer like Hyundai. They needed to trust you. They needed to build a personal relationship. They needed to see that you were for real. It wasn't just a couple of concerns. It wasn't just the Ken and Chesco show when we got off the plane. And ultimately the trust that we built in those few weeks of meetings and discussions and having the partner there really helped us to see the deal. It sounds like if I was to blow it out a little bit, there was there was kind of the fake it until you make it part of the strategy. Yes, exactly. And and then really pulling on some of these relationships that you had with prior customers to really push you guys forward. Adam, how about with you? I mean, you guys have been at it for a little while now. Yeah, what is some of the secrets? I mean, in terms of how did you get, you know, convinced those first customers to take a take a risk? Yeah, for us, for us, it was a it was a long journey. We started back in 2010. And, you know, we're a technology company. We had to invest several years into getting our network virtualization to a point where it was ready for production, right? So when we started going after those customers, you know, finding the first one to take the chance on us is certainly very challenging. We had to end up, you know, going after the ones who are also willing to take a risk. And it's a risk for us as well. So we ended up going with, you know, a startup who is basically doing a the first open stack public cloud in Norway, Zeta IO. So they were, you know, just a just a guy with some servers. And he, you know, didn't have funding yet. And but he had some some previous customers from his previous work. And he, you know, was trying to build this open stack cloud. And was there a prior relationship there? Or how did, you know, no, no, it just he, you know, we were involved with the open stack community for quite some time. So I think that he found us through the community, looking at the options that were out there, who's working on networking in open stack. And our name came up and we, you know, we had a conversation, you know, we got him to do a demo and try it out, kick the tires, get comfortable with it. And, you know, he finally made the decision to launch his cloud service using our stuff, going into production, which was very scary for us, you know, because, you know, we had been building this up for so long. And, you know, of course, we QA it and we run it on internally but doing it, you know, doing it live with real customers, where he has customers paying him was kind of scary, right. So that was that was the challenge for us to get that first small customer. But then, you know, they become a reference. And they will talk to the other people that we're trying to get to use our stuff and kind of slowly build from there. And that's kind of how we've done it from a lot of word of mouth. So start from one, it scales out, you know, very slowly and then starts expanding to more and more reference accounts. And so exactly. So, you know, we've got fake it till you make it. We've got, you know, leverage all the relationships you've got. Sorry, I don't mean to trivialize that. Look, I'm a venture investor, you know, leverage all the relationships that you've got. Right. And maybe don't be picky about those first customers, you'll be able to use those as reference points. That's right. You know, going forward. So Ben, you know, you're, you know, it's an interesting situation with anything because your first customer was dream host, I guess, kind of, I mean, if you call it right, but it's not, you know, I when I think of first customers, you can't really count your brothers, your sisters, your cousins, right? Your mom, your dad, which dream host, for those you don't know, ink tank came out of, you know, dream host. So, so, but I guess you could still use it as a reference. So is that part of what enabled you guys to grow so fast? If you take dream host as the kind of creator of the use case of what we're trying to solve, which was very much there, and particularly trying to solve storage problems in an open stack context, what we wanted to do is deliver an elastic block store that was available to open stack customers. There was no real project that was available that could do something like that. And at the same time, internally, Sage Weil, one of the founders of dream host had spent the last eight years of his life building this amazing distributed object storage system that could do block and file an object all in one. Our requirement was if we're going to use open stack to build a cloud, that we're going to use stuff to back that to be the storage layer of that cloud. So, you know, even before ink tank was a company, that was my goal. And I was the GM of emerging technology as a dream host at that time. And, you know, the big part was trying to figure out what platform we decided to pick. And we looked at all the different platforms that are available and realized that the only one that we can really influence and felt that had longevity in it and had the right open source credentials at that time. We were pretty picky on what we meant by open source was open stack. And it was in a maturity phase where we were immature, open stack was immature, we can kind of grow together. It was a good bet. And what happened was when we made that decision and started getting involved in the open stack ecosystem, everyone who was involved in the open stack ecosystem started coming to us and saying, we'd like to use SAP to be a lost block store in your cloud, to replace Swift as object. You know, and that's what really kind of started getting us going. So those proof points were really important. So by the time ink tank was founded as a company and it split off as a separate entity, we already had a list of people that were lined up to be our customers. So we hit the ground running because there was eight years of work that went into it. Plus we found a really interesting market fit and we solved a real problem which wasn't being solved by traditional means. Cool. So another interesting part of your story, though, I think that, you know, just maybe transitioning a little bit. I mean, with with ink tank is, you know, one of your close kind of partners, customers was Red Hat, right? So, you know, tell us a little bit about how that worked. I mean, talk a little bit about partners. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, it is a little funny working at Red Hat now and being in charge of storage partnerships, particularly when you're kind of in the other side of the house. And we were partners with the RELL OSP team, the guys that deliver the RELL OpenStack platform. And, you know, they have a fairly wide ecosystem of partners and a lot of them are different storage partners. They have met up as partners, they have scality, they have, you know, they have solid fire. And we were also one of those partners that were like, yes, we would like to plug into Cinder and become an official partner of Red Hat, so that if we have joint customers that we can support each other. At the same time, there was an internal division within Red Hat that was Gluster and we competed against them and they marketed us against us as well. They saw a lot of traction happening in the SAP product and they were putting out marketing material to compete against us at that time as well. And it got a little tricky, you know, we were trying to figure out how do we partner with a company and then they also have a division that kind of competes with us. The good thing about the Red Hat is very clear is that the lines were, you know, pretty clear between how we interacted with RELLOS-B. The RELLOS-B folks said, look, we're interested in building an ecosystem. They never stopped us working with them. We never really had any tremendous issues on that side. But we also just knew that out in the market, we would have to face Gluster and answer some hard questions on how we performed against Gluster and where we went. And at the end, I would say that, you know, our growth continued to go up and we became an attractive acquisition. And Red Hat decided at some point we would like to have Ink Tank as part of our portfolio. So now I represent the storage BU as well. And within the BU, I deal with partnerships with SAP and Gluster. So my job has kind of changed a little bit. Sleeping with the anime. So how about just, you know, from I'm interested in, any of you guys can take this one. I get this question a lot about, you know, good customers versus bad customers. I mean, when you don't have any customers, I mean, any customer is a good one. But can you give us some insight? I mean, as you learned, you started to develop some of these, you know, some of the customers and grew the business. What's an example of some, you know, a bad customer? Is there such a thing when you're starting out? And if so, what are some of the characteristics of a, you know, maybe I shouldn't say bad, tough, tough customer, maybe not best for the business. Yeah, I mean, I can go first. I mean, the lifeline of a company that makes its living on primarily on services, which is what we do today is to handle the customer. I mean, there was when I was at a previous consulting company, high level IBM executive came over to be the CEO. And he said there's three rules to consulting. It's number one is handle the customer. Number two is handle the customer. Number three is handle the customer. Right. And so not all customers are perfect, not all customers are great, but ultimately we need to understand is how can you align their objectives and your objectives to achieve the same goals. And that's ultimately what happens more often than not when you are in a challenging situation with a customer where you're not setting the appropriate expectations. For example, you're not making sure that the right people in the organization are getting the right credit. There's many things that you can do to right a wrong. Ultimately, sometimes you do have to walk away from a customer or you get kicked out of a customer, which has happened many times, not at Selenia, but in prior lives. But ultimately, you do have to make sure that goals and objectives are aligned, that you're always communicating, that you develop a relationship. And ultimately, whatever is in the contract, the lawyers will say holes. But ultimately, if you have that relationship, you can work through major issues. And there's always a give and take. I mean, so that's that's for us. It's always you're always on 110% with a customer. You're always in negotiation mode because everything's a negotiation with them. And ultimately, as long as your goals are aligned, you will get there. Yeah, one of the things I've been talking about a few times with some people today is, you know, this is a marathon, right? And we don't know how long it's gonna take until we get to the point where we are really, truly successful. Where our company is very tied to the to the speed at which OpenStack adoption grows, right? It's fortunately, you know, this year has been great. We're getting a lot of new customers. We're seeing a lot of new deals coming in. But we still aren't sure, you know, at what point will OpenStack reach kind of the mass market? Startups have a limited runway. And I think Medocorp is in an interesting position because we didn't take typical capital from a venture capital firm. We raised money from some strategics and primarily from a Japanese government sovereign fund. Their outlook on returns is much longer than a normal venture capital firm. So it has allowed us to say no to some of the opportunities that come in, which may be a bad idea. You know, we had conversations with a very large internet company who wanted to do a project, you know, it would be multimillion dollars per year. But they wanted us to re-architect our entire product for their use case, which probably only fit in their use case. For a starving startup, maybe it's very hard to say no to that, right? I mean, that could keep you going, pay the bills. But at the same time, you end up going down a path and you may not be able to turn back. And your product may end up only working for that person, for that one customer. So that's something that I think we were fortunate in being able to walk away from, that not everyone has the ability to do. So I think one of the important things we're learning is we have to be very careful about how fast we scale the startup. We can't just hire a ton of people and hope that the business comes because we may run out of money, right? So I think that's one of the interesting things that I've been thinking about recently that was kind of fortunate. There's some negative aspects of the way we took funding as well. We don't have all the great connections that a VC from Silicon Valley may provide us. But it did allow us to basically turn down some opportunities like that, which I think in hindsight would have been a bad idea. Yeah, so trying to keep the business scale to the opportunity set and then I think also the employee size. I mean, Sir Chesco, you got to deal with the same thing. I mean, you know, with mainly services, you got to have bench strength, but you don't want to have 30 folks on the bench and not be able to feed the family. I mean, it's yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So it's a delicate balance. I mean, you know, we've been fortunate where we haven't had to chase revenue for revenue's sake. We actually been very diligent about growing the company at a measured pace. We're trying to grow faster now, so we're looking for outside funding. But ultimately, Adam's completely right. You can't sell your soul for the purposes of revenue, even if you're a services company, right? It's better to take your foot off the accelerator from a growth perspective and stay true, because ultimately, we had opportunities to go and work on cloud stack projects. And I had done that when I was a cloud scaling. But we knew that we needed to be true and stay true to our mission and our goal, which was to become the premier provider of services around the open stack ecosystem. And we stayed true to that. But but that's there's a compromise there as well. Did you see that Ben as well at Ink Tank in terms of some some tricky customer situations that you didn't want to take on? Well, I'll tell you straight up, we've signed some awful deals. And I think it's OK to sign awful deals. What made an awful deal? Well, there's there's a lot of elements to awful go. I can get that into a second. But I think you got to understand what the goal is when you're small, right? If if your goal is growth, if your goal is customers on the board, relevance, growth, then maybe you optimize to be able to get those things as long as they fit within your category of this is a customer that, you know, fits my mission can prove that I've hit certain milestones. When you're in midsize, you know, you change some of that, you you might say this particular type of deal is not scalable. I can't do this long term. I'm going to deprecate this product line or I'm going to change my approach over here and do something a little bit different. When you're a big company like Red Hat, you can't do anything unless you can have it scale out to, you know, the eight thousand people that work in this company be pushed out through the sales force and through the channel and sold in a completely different way. So there are things that we could have done. Nimbling is a startup that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise. So it isn't so much the elements of the deal. It has more to do with what stage size what size company are you in? What are your goals are you trying to achieve? What's the thing that's going to get you to that next milestone? And startups have this built in funding milestone unless you're super loaded that it's a good it's a good health step to be able to say to yourself as well as the rest of the world. Yes, I am achieving my targets. I am validating a market. I'm hitting the growth targets I'm interested in. If I continue to go at this rate, you know, if the metric you're looking at is is profitability, then you can push for that. If the metric you're looking at is customers, you can push for that. If there's some other metric that you have that you're that you're looking for, you push for that. But you can sign some pretty awful deals. And once we got acquired, I had to roll back, you know, a handful of partnerships and be able to tell those partners, you know, we really did value you guys. I'm sorry we have to let you go now. Go in peace. So dirty what? Yeah, I mean, it's tough. It's honestly a little bit tough because it has nothing to do with, you know, you not valuing the partnership or the relationship or anything like that. It has to do with your your goals. Your your goals as a company and you're trying to achieve what you're trying to do. Yeah. So it changes a little bit. So so, Adam, I wanted to talk more about partisan. I was wondering from a customer strategy standpoint, was was open sourcing minor not part of that strategy because it's sort of unique where you you did that kind of later in your life as a company, right? So it quickly kind of tell folks that that help accelerate the gain of customers. And it was an interesting trick. Not every company can do that, obviously, but I wish I could say that it was a brilliant strategic move to wait until a certain timing. But probably the timing was would have been better if it was earlier now in hindsight. But but, you know, we definitely were all of the people, most of the people at the company did not have a lot of open source experience, but they did see that, you know, the space that we're very tied to open stack is is heavily open source, right? A lot of the vendors are open source, a lot of the the solutions that are being chosen like SEF were open source, right? SEF was gaining, you know, massive traction, you know, partly partly because it's an awesome project, but partly because it's also open source, right? There are other proprietary solutions out there that did not have the same, you know, kind of thing happen. And on the networking space, you know, we were watching this very closely every six months there's a user survey, what's happening, you know, you see SEF kind of rising up and eventually taking the top spot. But on the networking side, you know, basically what you see on the networking side for neutron plugin usages, you see the reference implementation of neutron, the OBS plugin having some usage and then there's the long tail of all of the the various plugins there, right? And it's basically, you know, very fragmented. So none of them are really taking the top spot. And we know, you know, that the OBS plugin, it's really a reference implementation. It's not totally meant for production. Most people who are doing production workloads are using some solution there, right? And, you know, the reason why we felt that this was the case was because there wasn't a great, you know, open source project out there that's vendor neutral that really fit the bill. And, you know, we several of us internally were always pushing for open source, but convincing, you know, your board and your your your investors and your other employees that this is a great idea, you know, we've, you know, done building this code in the closed source fashion for three plus years, invested a lot of money and people and then suddenly we're gonna, you know, go to GitHub and click, you know, public, it's kind of scary, right? Scary that it's a button click essentially to make that happen. But we were able to make that decision finally and we did it. And, you know, that was back Paris summit six months ago and now, you know, coming here, you know, spending a couple of days here is very clear that this was definitely the right decision. I mean, since since Paris we have had a lot of traction, you know, in the first two months of this year, you know, we had more people coming and trying our stuff and moving towards production, paying us for the enterprise version than, you know, all of last year by far in the first two months. Crazy. Last year was very slow. This year is, you know, we're super busy. And coming to the conference this time, seeing where we were much more well-known, whereas six months ago, one year ago, we were, you know, some weird Japanese named company that people kind of heard of. Very interesting and definitely a, you know, proof points that, you know, it was the right decision for us. And the customers, you know, come to us and tell us the reason we are trying you is because you're open source. And the reason we chose you is because you're open source among other things. But really, that's one of the main factors. So it's really about finding the gap in the market and going after that. And it's, you know, you never know the right timing, but it's even when it seems too late. At the time it might have seemed too late. It's not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big leap of faith. Yeah. Sure. So, you know, getting back to the the partner comment that you may have been is interesting, you know, having you haven't seen it. And now obviously you're on the side of Red Hat where you're managing a lot of these partnerships. But, you know, this challenge of, you know, your situation changed, getting acquired and and then having to basically tell these partners to go away in in peace, right? So maybe you could talk about how do you think about it now as Red Hat? I mean, what advice would you have for folks in the audience about partners? Is it even important to partner with companies? What does that mean? What are they, you know, what should someone expect to get out of a relationship with Red Hat? You know, what what insights you have? Well, the stuff product is and it's a it's the storage layer. So if you think of a distributed storage system, you have server vendors, you have networking cards, you have controller cards, you have hard disks, you have flash drives or flash flash vendors with arrays. You have people that are building appliances. You have people that are trying to take the software and actually put it into their software solution and deliver storage out of it that way. You have service providers that want to build a cloud and charge Amazon type rates. But they want stuff to back their cloud. So they need some sort of service provider licensing licensing. The whole ecosystem of partners is very, very big. The vast majority of partners, vast majority, were able to keep. But there was a small amount of partners that didn't fit. And some of it is like canonical or what is right? That probably a tricky relationship to hold on. No, canonical, not so much. But there's there's others though, right? The we had some L3 agreements on community open source. So when we started out with when we started out with SAF, we had a pure open source product that was just the community bits. And then over time, we actually had the community version and then a downstream version, which was the ink tank distribution of SAF, which is called Ink Tank SAF Enterprise. And and that Ink Tank SAF Enterprise had pieces of it that were proprietary. So they had something called Calamari, which does the management and monitoring and some of the other features that that make it more of an enterprise product as part of it. When we got acquired by Red Hat, we open sourced everything. And then there was it made less sense for us to have old L3 support agreements on community bits rather than our downstream. So because of a business model change that we had to make, we had to go back to some of these older agreements and say, you know, we're not going in that direction because it's not long term sustainable for us. And we knew it wasn't sustainable, but we did it to get the deal done in order to get the name on the board in order to continue the traction, right? Yeah. So what we try to do in order to hedge our risk over there is not sign long term agreements. So we try to keep things to a year or two years at the most, which is actually kind of short term in the scheme of things so you can switch out of it if you need to. If you don't feel like you've got this thing nailed. So take that as one piece of advice you'd give us with your red hat hat on. What else? What other advice in terms of like partnering with a company like Red Hat and maybe just we can extrapolate to HP or Cisco or EMC or any of the larger companies? Yeah, I would say, you know, if you are a partner of Red Hat and you're the OpenStack conference, so I assume you're going to be interested in partnering with the RELLOSP team because they have a great product around that. And they've got a 200 and something partners that plug into that. I think it's a really good idea not to just be a number and not to do the bare minimal work, but to work very closely with the marketing teams, work very closely with the product, try to figure out what joint customers you have, see if you can get white papers done, case studies, things that prove joint value. If they see and they have collateral around that, that means you can actually leverage the greater field sales team. There's a lot of people selling Red Hat as well internally and we have partners selling it. But if we have material to back that up, it means that your solution would get out there more broadly. But it's very easy to take advantage of that. All you have to do is ask and for the most part and just be there often. You know, Solid Fire has done a really good job of being engaged with the RELLOSP folks and they've seen good traction come out of it. And I can say that there's a handful of partners that have really just spent energy on it. And some of it is time and some of it is money and some of it's sponsorship and some of it's having that marketing team available and things like that. But if you make yourselves available and just that team can see you as a resource when they have problems to solve, then that works well in your case. And the best thing ever is when you have joint customers. So if you bring customers to them, they appreciate that and they will bring customers back to you as well. So if it's a win-win, it works. But that win-win takes a lot of work. You can't just sign up and do the bare minimum. If you do that, you're not going to get too much traction because you're just a number in the pile. Just go ahead. I second what exactly we've been saying. I mean, the lifeline for us at the beginning and still somewhat today, but the beginning of the journey was we needed partners not only to gain a distribution channel. We also needed partners to help us with the delivery side. And so the key there was that we had to find the right partner that shared common objectives with us. Common objectives from how the types of customers that we wanted to win and common objectives in terms of revenue and making money. And so really for us, it was around finding a partner with complementary capabilities around the sales and distribution side as well as the delivery aspect. And so actually the example that I'll use is the one with Red Hat in Asia because we found that in Korea and the Southeast Asia, there was starting to be a lot more demand for our kinds of services. We just didn't have the scale. Not only that, but also we didn't have the reach in certain regions. And so we spent quite a bit of time, like Ben mentioned, in terms of developing joint go-to-market strategies, joint case studies, joint sales briefs so that we could then have Red Hat be a proxy to us in the market. And it was very clear and we defined this upfront what the responsibilities were from a delivery perspective for Red Hat and what they were for Selenia and that actually worked out really well. But again, it's communication. You have to invest in the partnership. You can't assume it's gonna happen once you sign a contract. And again, the common goals and objectives are absolutely critical. Any quickly any quick questions audience? So what makes a bab? I mean, we're talking about maybe not so great customers. What about partners? You can invest a lot of time and waste a lot of time partnering with large companies. They've got a lot more people. They can have lots of meetings, lots of emails and they can overwhelm you. So you're laughing because you, Ben, right? You know exactly what I'm talking about. It's not evil, but it's kind of this bear hug for small companies that can be smothering. Are there things that you can identify that make a sort of a maybe not the ideal partner relationship? Like what makes you feel like you're forcing it that people can take away from conversation? Is it my question? Your question? And I think anybody, any, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I can start. I mean, again, the investment in the relationship and the continuing, continuous nurturing of that relationship, sometimes you don't have the resources to do that. And sometimes you let that partnership go away. And the worst is when you lose contact with your individual folks that you have a relationship with or somebody else takes over the partnership and decides that, hey, you know what? We can do this on our own. And that actually happened to us, not with Red Hat, but with other organizations where they said, look, we can do this on our own. We don't need a Selenia for whatever reasons. But again, if you don't nurture the relationship and there's a change in the guard in terms of who you interact with, then you just have to be careful. And in some cases they'll take business away. Not because they're malicious, but because it's the best thing for them to do. And the partnership wasn't important for them to begin with because they never had that trust, so. And I just wanna say, like I wish I had this advice several years ago, because we made all of these mistakes. You know, we've signed on partners and then said, oh, that's great. We have a partner now. We're gonna have business together and not resourced it and nothing happens, right? And it goes stale. And we certainly learned our lesson there. And definitely it has to be, you have to know what you wanna get out of it and you have to communicate that well with the partner and try to come to an agreement or understanding of what is it gonna take to achieve these goals. And definitely working with a big partner is a huge investment in resources, right? We are partnered with Dell, for example. Dell's a reseller of ours. First of all, getting in agreement with Dell to do that is not easy, right? It took eight months to get to just an agreement. And then now you have the agreement and nothing happens, right? So now you have to spend another six or seven months enabling them, training their field staff, trying to figure out where you fit if they're offering competitors. How does the sales team know when to bring you in versus a competitor? Very, these are things that you have to answer and explain and proliferate across a giant organization. So hopefully the organization has good tools to help amplify your voice. Dell, for example, does. They have some internal webinar things for their field staff, which 400 people will come on. 400 sales people will come on and listen to you talk. And that's been very successful, but it's slow, right? It's taken us a good half year before we started seeing actual joint deals come together. And it's a mix of strategies that has worked for us. So it is of course bringing in a customer to them. That's of course been the most successful thing we've done to strengthen a partnership with not only Dell but other distros, right? The best way to get their attention is to say, I've got a customer, I'm gonna bring them to you. Let's do this together and show them that this is a solution that the customer will like and they'll choose. And then you can use that as the case study to show to the other parts of the regions and give confidence. But if you don't do that, we always ran into a lot of issues where I think the field teams didn't wanna bring us in because they thought it would be a risky move, right? They'd wanna sell what they know. And if you bring something new into that and it's not clear that it's gonna be a success, then they don't wanna take that risk. So it's just something you have to do. So you gotta prime the pump, basically. Ben, are there any, I mean, just parting shy, are there any, I mean, now you see probably a ton of people coming to Red Hat. Wanna partner with you? Is there anything that you just can see me that this is not gonna be a good partnership with the company? Not because it's an evil partner. So I mean, just say, yeah, it's not gonna be a good fit that maybe is not obvious. Well, yeah, if you're gonna compete directly against me. I wouldn't really like that as much. And you wouldn't believe how many people come to me and try to partner. No, no, we're really complimentary. We're really complimentary. Just saying it doesn't make it so. Look, exactly. And you know, here's the thing, it's, I mean, we're talking about partners, but think about it, it's a marriage, right? You're gonna have up days, you're gonna have bad days. You gotta go in there with the right expectations. You gotta make sure the expectations are clear between both parties. Call that the prenup. Right? You know, once the expectations are kind of all set and everybody understands that, everyone who's in a marriage thinks they put the most work in. So you have to assume that you're gonna put more work than your spouses into that marriage. Right, right. So that's kind of an important thing, just understanding that maybe sometimes the workloads are not ideal between the two. You might take a lot of work. Sometimes they might take a lot of work. If you have any sort of issues, you communicate it. You bring things of value to the partner. Customers are things of value that you can bring to a partner, but there are other things that partners need. Sometimes they need marketing help. Sometimes they just need to be told they did a good job in a press release. Right? Like, easy things. So, and if you accept the idea that you're gonna have sometimes in that relationship that's gonna be really high, and then you're gonna have other things that are gonna go down, as long as you both have a mechanism to get through that, you'll have a good partnership. If you don't, then it starts to go sour really quick and it doesn't work out. And so, what makes a bad partner, what makes a bad partner is, at some point, if the expectations are different, and that's what I said, if you're gonna compete against me, that's one thing, but there's a lot of other things. There's different expectations that people have, and sometimes it's just not communicated well, and it just takes some time to level set. What we do when we go through partnerships on my team is we have a whole checklist of these are all the things that we plan on delivering, let's put dates behind it, let's assign owners, let's have a scheduled sync where we keep on going, so we try to keep track of all of this stuff. But, you know, we're a big company and sometimes we lose track of some of these things, and that's where we need to be reminded of it sometimes. So, like, it takes work. It all takes work. It all takes work. Well, both really important times, partners and early customers, I know it's tough, but I appreciate you all sharing all your stories and taking the time, and I appreciate all of you taking the time here to join us at the end of the day. Do you have a quick question? Okay, sorry. Well, as a venture investor, I'll give various a sync dancer. I mean, I think most early stage companies ought to be able to get a half dozen customers very quickly, because you can call your brother, your sister, your cousin, your uncle, your aunt, your old boss, pull all these strings and get, you know, six customers. And that's, I think, the start. And then if there's no resonance there, I would pivot very quickly. Because people that know you and trust you, you know, you ought to be able to sell something. That's not even that compelling to them, because they want to buy from you, right? Because they know you, they trust you. So that's where I would start, yeah. Okay, go ahead, yeah. What about lettering? Now with investors. No, I'd say, pretty much universal, I mean, I think people value in the sense that you've got a relationship with a customer, but we really want to see people that have bought stuff. The way I sort of think about it is, something that's really hard, because customers will tell you they want to buy, because it's easy to say, right? It's just they, it's human nature to be nice, right? So, oh, I'm gonna buy something from you. And they tell you that, they'll even write a letter of intent, but it's non-binding or something, right? But until they actually got it, go get that check approved. You don't really know. And so, I mean, that's, you know, what's the, yeah, even, I mean, talking to a reference on the phone, saying, hey, yeah, we think this is interesting, that's valuable for sure. But that's not, if your question is, is that as valuable as the customer? No, but I think- Is it worth chasing them at all? I wouldn't, no, I wouldn't spend a lot of time chasing them. I mean, you should have some referenceable, you can talk about it in terms of beta. I mean, what's better is to have someone actually using it for free, than to get a letter of intent or something. You better have someone using a product and say, yeah, this is great. Especially when they release it, we'll pay something for it. That would be a better, better thing to do. I want to be sensitive to time, because it's late. If you have some questions, I'll stick around for a little bit, and hopefully the panelists will too. Thanks again for everybody coming. Give everybody a round of applause. Thanks.