 I am Matt Jacobsen, a partner at Iconic, an investment and venture firm representing some of the most exceptional entrepreneurs globally. I'm thrilled to be here. Over the last several years, we've been a lead partner to many of the most impactful companies in Europe, including, you know, Wolt, here in Helsinki, Aden, Kalibera, Dadaiku, Miro, and many others. You know, very excited that earlier this year we launched our office in London as our first foray into Europe, led by Seth Pierpont, Ritika Pai, and Calvin Yeoh, who are here today, and excited to make many more investments into Europe. You know, we've partnered with a number of global leaders as well, including companies like Datadog, Snowflake, GitLab, and of course, Braze, and thrilled to be here with Bill at Braze. You know, the topic is, you know, choosing the wave, pacing the wave, and owning the wave, and I can think of no better entrepreneur that we've worked with than Bill to walk through this important topic of markets. So, you know, we'd love to put up the first slide, and Bill would love to walk through the process of, you know, I think very few companies emerging market leaders like address a massive market head-on. It's important to find the right entry point and segue, and take control and ownership. So we'd love to put up the first slide and talk about how you chose the wave. Yeah, absolutely. So, our story goes, you probably need to advance back one there. So our, my story with mobile starts actually all the way back in 2007, and the company, Braze, we founded in mid-2011, which was really at the beginning of the smartphone revolution, but my conviction in it was born earlier than that. Actually, 2007, I was living in London. I bought a Nokia N810 Internet tablet, which actually didn't have built-in data connectivity nor GPS. I actually had to buy a separate, about the size of an Altoid 10 Bluetooth GPS transceiver for it. I wrote a web crawler to download all of WikiTravel and also OpenStreetMap. But in the process actually created a, you know, a travel guide that was able to chart my way through Europe as I was traveling that summer, was able to follow the maps with the GPS in real time. And what I experienced was that mobile and that connectivity was going to really provide freedom to people. And so, you know, fast forward to 2010, I was working at Google out in Mountain View on Android, was there kind of for the early days of Android. I remember the big fiberglass cupcake being rolled on the lawn as we launched Android 1.5. And, you know, just had this tremendous conviction that mobile was going to, you know, fundamentally change our relationships with technology, with each other, with institutions. And importantly that huge businesses would be born and built to be mobile first. And so when we started Braze it was that early conviction, you know, first that we would see those huge businesses arise in mobile. And second that the wide scale adoption of mobile by consumers would transform the enterprise. And, you know, what you're looking at here is a chart from the Economist which maps out the number of years that it took before one quarter of the population in the states had adopted new technology. And you see this tremendous acceleration over time, you know, looking back at, you know, telephone taking 35 years, radio 30, television 26. And then we start to see things really speed up and having, you know, PCs took 16 years, mobile phones took more than a decade. Then the web shows up seven years, smartphones it only took three years. And so that pace of acceleration in technology, you know, I think really comes about because our markets are more interconnected now, consumers are more savvy and more open to adopting new technology. And that has pretty profound implications for startups. You know, when you get that personal conviction that a new technology is coming in and on the edge of being able to really change markets and create disruption, that's where opportunity comes from. And so, you know, mid-2011 we saw a tremendous amount of energy and excitement in the mobile sphere. You know, I had the personal conviction that was born out of both my own experience as well as being in the industry on the ground floor. And so we decided to, you know, take a risk. Me and my other co-founders all quit our jobs. We moved to New York in July of 2011 and decided to start up, you know, the company trying to build something that would help those early mobile apps build more sustainable businesses through, you know, developing their customer relationships, having great conversations with them over time and being able to really build enduring value. But, you know, the market really wasn't ready for it yet. And so many investors, many founders asked the question like, why now? And, you know, what were the different considerations that you balanced, you know, when thinking about that in 2011? Yeah, so, you know, we were obviously the amount of investment and energy that was going into mobile was important. But there were actually some inhibitors in the way in the mobile market for us to really build that into a business. You know, people by and large were not taking their mobile apps seriously as businesses. I actually think that the early App Store model that allowed for, or that where people were buying apps for 99 cents or what have you, actually was detrimental to this. I remember having conversations with mobile app owners in 2011-2012 and they would tell me, I don't actually want to engage my users in the long term because, you know, they've already paid me and the sooner they stop using my app, the sooner I can stop paying the server bills for them. And that, like, was rational but was obviously a sign that, you know, the market was still very immature. You know, that's just not how you build enduring businesses. But much like my, you know, my Nokia N810 Internet tablet with its little hockey puck Bluetooth transceiver that no one was going to carry around, you know, the mobile sphere still had some maturation to go through. We needed consumers to get comfortable buying digital purchases. We needed them to, even just basic things like people didn't trust to put a credit card into their phone in the early days. We needed cell data services to get faster, cheaper, more reliable before media streaming would become a thing. A lot of the early mobile businesses also required network effects when you look at things like local marketplaces or other sorts of, like, you know, dating applications which were some of the first premium mobile services. So it took, you know, a good three or four years of development before we started to see all of those external pieces click into place to really create the market opportunity for us to grow. So if we evolve the conversation to, you know, the concept of pacing the wave itself, once you got on that wave and saw all these developments, even that early, you know, phase of the 99 cent, you know, flashlight app, you know, what were some of the signals that you held to in terms of, you know, staying patient as the market continued to evolve? Yeah, well, you know, before I get into that, you know, this slide here, I want to kind of tell a quick story. So before we started the company, my current CTO, John Hyman and I, we actually, we were both software engineers at a hedge fund called Bridgewater Associates, which is Ray Dalio's hedge fund you may know from the principles book that was published after we left. But during our onboarding, one of the chief investment officers drew, you know, three lines that looked similar to this on the whiteboard. And he asked the room, you know, if you were given a choice between these three investments, you know, which one would you choose? You know, Matt, what would be your choice? You know, I would have to go with A in terms of the slow and steady wins the race, particularly in market times like these days. All right. Okay. So some wisdom there, you know, and on its face, this is a question that appears to be, you know, asking you about your appetite for risk, right? How much volatility are you willing to deal with or how patient are you? And it shows, you know, you've got letter C here, which is kind of erratic, but at the end of this time window ultimately has the highest return. But of course, it's going back to the hedge fund world. It's a bit of a trick question because letter C, when you hit that, you know, down point halfway through, all of your investors are racing to redeem. And you're so far behind your high watermark that, you know, in a lot of cases, the fund is going to fold up. And letter B, you never actually got any of the early, you know, fundraising or momentum to even be able to live long enough to get to that point where you hit the inflection. And so really the only viable option here is letter A. And I think that when you look at, you know, the startup growth scenario, you see very similar things in action. There's a lot of examples of companies that raise a ton of money right out of the gate on a bunch of hype, you know, they look like letter C, and then they run headlong into a market that's just not ready for them yet. I think that if we had done that in 2011, 2012, that we would have run into a mobile market that was not mature enough yet, you know, there was a lot of energy and hype around it, but by being patient and being measured in how much money we raised, where we set our growth expectations in those early years, we allowed for us to be, you know, that letter A. And when you look at, you know, a lot of companies that fall prey to that hype cycle early, they also, you know, they bring in a lot of great new employees, but a lot of their equity compensation gets marked to, you know, very high valuations, and then they go through kind of that trough of sorrow. You lose that momentum, you know, you lose that employer brand in many of those cases, and it keeps you from being able to live to fight another day. You know, similarly at B, you never really get the momentum going, and especially when we're talking about markets with rapid adoption, like we did in mobile, where, you know, it was important that we started early on the ground floor, but the market wasn't really ready for us from a product market fit standpoint. However, you know, once we got to four years in, we had the technology advantage, because we'd already been working on the problem. And so, you know, I think right now, especially when we've got the uncertainty that lies ahead of us over the next couple of years, it's just really important for entrepreneurs to be really mindful about the pace that you're setting, and really looking at, you know, how much capability you have to sell into markets as people are afraid to disrupt things, as people are afraid to spend money. You know, you can still obviously grow, but it is really important to measure those growth expectations and make sure that you're setting yourself up for success. I think it's a question, especially in this market and landscape on the minds of many founders and entrepreneurs and leaders at different technology companies today, in terms of, like, what is that right, you know, speed in terms of applying capital, in terms of the, you know, people and progress against these growth curves? Yeah, so this is a model that I used to think about it, and we actually, I presented a version of this at a company all hands, all the way back in 2016, as we were continuing to grow and think about this amongst our own competitive landscape. And so just to kind of orient everyone, you know, what this is, is effectively a supply and demand model, but the supply curve is the cost that it takes for you to sell to an incremental part of your market. So in the early days of a new category, or in the early days of technical disruption, you know, the supply curves are very inelastic, which means that, you know, you can spend up to a certain point and you can sell to those customers that are right there with you on the early side, you know, on the early edge of that wave, but for you to really sell much higher than that, you have to burn a lot of money and burn a lot of calories and you need to kind of create that market on your own. But of course, over time, if you're at the beginning of a wave, what should happen is that these supply curves should swing out over time. And so, you know, that is a combination of external factors. I mentioned some of those in the mobile market earlier, you know, the cell phones getting faster, the hardware getting better, GPS being miniaturized, people being more comfortable with digital payments, some of those network effect companies, you know, starting to get critical mass. Those were all reasons why our supply curve was naturally swinging out over the years. And then there were internal factors that were in our control. You know, we were out in the market talking about customer engagement with a much more sophisticated approach, one where, you know, marketing should be much more than just batch and blast messaging that was tied to single channels. You know, we at Bray's try to approach this problem of developing customer relationships as one where we tie together the business goals and the customer needs, and we deliver that with a cross-channel experience in a way that's data-driven and experimental. But if you look at, you know, the state of broadly marketing automation in 2012, 2013, you know, most of it was just batch and blast, spamming out the same email to everyone in your user base, not really paying attention to where they are in their product journey and certainly not being data-driven enough behind it to really, you know, go through an experiment cadence where you would be able to go through rapid iteration loops. You know, those were all things that we were out in the market, you know, working to help teams structure themselves, encouraging that interdisciplinary collaboration, really training the community. I'm really proud of the fact that Bray's today actually sells to job titles that didn't exist when we started the company. And one of the things that we saw that really swung the supply curve out for us was the formation of, you know, growth marketing teams, of consumer-scale CRM teams, of marketing teams that were starting to collaborate more with their engineering counterparts, and they were starting to assign data scientists to those teams. And so, you know, those were all things that were causing our market to develop. They're also in many markets, you know, you'll see simple things like a CFO needs to assign a budget to your category. You might have a brand-new category that hasn't been, you know, thought about before. Maybe you're selling software into a new buyer that's not used to buying enterprise software in a certain way. You know, those are all things that take time because they involve org charts and they involve budgets. And those are all kind of things where you can certainly influence that. You can be on the conference circuit. You can be out in the media. You can have PR and press. But you also need to be patient about how that evolves over time. And so we try to think about this and say, you know, venture capital certainly lets you be higher up on this curve than you otherwise would be. You know, you can spend into it a little bit, but you've got to be really careful to make sure that you're not trying to, you know, push a rope, if you will, and you're just really kind of crashing into the very vertical part of the curve. And so what we tried to think about was, you know, how do we climb that efficiently and hit that point where we're accessing as much market as we can, but we're not hitting the inelastic part of the curve. We're really just wastefully spending money. And I think it's fascinating this concept of patience, especially in markets that are so obvious to us today in terms of mobile that we're not necessarily obvious and I think some great lessons now, particularly as the market, you know, definitely sinews for the first time in a couple years. You know, I think one of the questions, you know, in terms of your own journey is looking through the lens of the customer and, you know, really trying to think through, you know, how you both stayed focused and met the needs of some of the early visionary customers at the start of the journey for Brays but kept your eye on the prize in terms of where the larger market opportunity was going to be. Yeah, so, you know, I think that this, you know, this kind of CASA model and looking at your early adopters on the left, which is where you find your early customers and then, you know, eventually as your market matures and your product matures, you're able to sell into the mainstream market, has an important corollary to the supply curve concept as well, right? In the early days when your supply curve is inelastic, it's exactly because you're in a part of this where the area under the curve is pretty small, right? When you're selling into innovators and early adopters, it's fantastic. There's a lot of energy around it. They give you a lot of great product feedback and, indeed, they're the only ones who are really willing to risk working with you as a new company but it's important to note that that market is only so big. And so, you know, you can find yourself in a trap where if you are building too much for that group and not really getting over that CASA into the early and late majority, then you can find yourself stuck on that steep supply curve for quite a while. And so I think, you know, for us, it was really important to be able to simultaneously make sure that we were making very happy customers out of our early adopters but also taking a look at, you know, what was it going to take to supplant the enterprise in the space that we were, you know, moving into? Bray's had an interesting combination of green field opportunity through mobile but there was also a massive market that was already there from email marketing and from a lot of the web properties that obviously were already at scale. And so we had this simultaneous opportunity to really build for the brand new mobile app startups but the, you know, the kind of the middle of the curve in the early and late majority was all about selling into the enterprise. And we had a lot of early competitors that actually they chose to partner with the legacy marketing clouds, people like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Oracle, et cetera. And they opted to be the mobile channel bolt-on to those clouds. And, you know, what I think the mistake is there is that you are over indexing on the early majority of the market and actually then robbing yourself of your future, which is where you're going to be able to move into those pre-existing budgets, you know, move into a place where we knew that evolution needed to happen, durability of the enterprise customer base as well. And so, you know, the kind of takeaway here is that as you're developing those markets and as you're watching how they evolve to make sure that you've also simultaneously got an eye on where they're going to be a year or two from now as those supply curves swing out and you're able to access more of the mainstream market because, you know, by and large the area under the curve matters a tremendous amount. And so making sure that, you know, you're able to access these very large markets and that you don't get distracted along the way is super important. And, you know, looking through the lens, you know, not just of the market and the product, you know, in an era of minimal viable product and blitz scaling and other things, you know, I think have experienced, you know, many companies kind of rushing to get, you know, product out without thinking through the holistic architecture in terms of mapping it to the arc of that market would be interested to kind of, you know, get your thoughts in terms of raise this journey and how you thought about that in terms of building the correct infrastructure and underpinning before expanding into so many channels. Yeah, it's an interesting point because we didn't really follow the lean start-up handbook very well when we started. The very first version of the product that we launched actually had four different channels in it. We had email push notifications. We had an ephemeral in-product messaging slide-up and we also had a news feed before the Facebook news feed. We were trying to describe that to people as a mini blog inside your app for them to kind of get the concept. But, you know, the reason for that is because we actually were trying to, we were trying to tackle this customer-centric problem of like, how do you build great customer relationships with people? And that wasn't a channel-centric problem. It wasn't, hey, we're trying to build, you know, marketing automation for mobile. We were trying to broadly manage customer relationships and that meant that you needed to have a strong understanding of who the customer was. You needed to be able to take that understanding and kind of merge it with your business goals and that's where the orchestration layer comes in, what you're seeing there in the middle in orange. And then the communication channel that you chose should have been more of an implementation detail about, you know, how you optimize for that particular strategy. By contrast, most of the market before us actually built for a single channel and what that did is it constrained the thinking in the market because you were like, oh, I have an email tool. What email am I going to send people? You weren't, hey, I have a business goal. How am I going to best communicate, you know, with my customers in order to achieve that goal? And then the other side of it was that, you know, we needed to really, you know, that's the modularity across the channels. We needed to also think about where is our differentiation going to come from and what did the new disruption that was coming out of technological change imply about our architecture? So when we look at mobile versus, you know, let's just take email marketing as an example of the legacy market that we've been supplanting. You know, most email from 2000 to 2015 was being read by people on their desks at work when they were ready to do it. You know, it was in a time period when they were focused on their inbox, et cetera. As we've now moved the vast majority of messaging consumption of all kinds onto our mobile devices, it's happening in real time. And the evolving context that's around you needs to be taken into consideration. Otherwise, you're being disrespectful to the right that you've been given to be able to, you know, basically beam yourself into someone's pocket or onto the dinner table or onto their nightstand or what have you, right? We brought these devices into all of the moments of our lives, and that means that if people are going to exercise the right to communicate with us on them, they need to do so in a much more sophisticated way. And so, you know, we took on that challenge and said, let's meet that with modern technology and let's meet that through vertical integration. And so what you see here is actually a conceptualization of braze as a vertically integrated stack where we start at the top where we're integrated directly into our customers' products. And what that enables us to do is to ensure that we have minimal latency as data is generated through customer interactions. It immediately goes from that edge into our infrastructure, and then we're architected as a stream processor. And that means that we have one at a time continuous processing of data as it flows in. It's not a batch process where, you know, the data is generated and it gets written into a relational database, and then every once in a while, you know, we're going to run some sort of process to figure out if we should send a campaign to someone. It really is this real-time event-driven engine that allows for us to respond in the moment to customers as they're interacting with brands. And, you know, that we felt was just super important from a differentiation standpoint in pairing with mobile technology and what was going to make mobile different. And so as we, you know, looked at the early market, we knew that we needed to, as our MVP, at least have the full vertical integrated data flow stack. You know, our orchestration was not very advanced in the early days. The classification was more limited. Personalization was more limited, et cetera. But we knew that we had to have that end-to-end journey and the stream processor that was backing it in order to deliver on that promise of being interactive. You know, not a bastardized term for real-time, which, you know, for a lot of the legacy players means anything faster than an overnight ETL job, right? But truly responding in milliseconds so that you can be a part of someone's flow and part of the product experience. So we needed that vertical integration. But then we also thought, you know, where do we build the modularity? Where is that abstraction layer that allows for us to invest, you know, in the middle of the stack and really build up that sophistication over time, but still enable people to tackle strategy in the middle so that we could deliver across all those different channels? Bill, thank you for sharing all of this. I think Bray's is just an unbelievable example in terms of, you know, owning this wave and, you know, in such a massive market opportunity. I think, you know, as we close out, you know, any parting advice or takeaways for many founders that are thinking about their own journey in terms of, you know, choosing and pacing their own waves? Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing is, you know, be patient, make sure that you're growing efficiently and don't worry about that. You know, even if you see other competitors around you that seem to be, you know, building that momentum on a bunch of fundraising or what have you, you know, this is a tough environment and it's one where you're going to be rewarded for having that patience and really building at a pace that matches your market and so that you can co-develop within that market. You know, for us, the journey, we IPOed actually 366 days ago and so yesterday was the one-year anniversary which was pretty exciting and, you know, but that was ten and a half years into our journey and, you know, that kind of building and growing also in many ways our product market fit didn't really start to show up till three or four years in but it wasn't because we had to pivot our product, it's actually because the market wasn't there yet and we saw a lot of competitors along the wayside, you know, that kind of rose and fell and they, you know, they burn too brightly and what have you and a big part of it was that they just didn't match the pace of their growth and their fundraising to the realities that were in the market and so, you know, especially in this time when there's a lot of uncertainty and when things are tough out there, make sure that you're being really realistic about that, you're being considered careful and patient and, you know, in many ways, when we get to the other side the patience is going to be rewarded because you're going to have maintained your focus throughout that and you're, you know, merely surviving through periods like this in many ways is what it takes to win the market. Thank you. That was incredible and really appreciate all of the thoughts and sharing the journey in terms of the wave. Yeah, thanks for having me. Cheers.