 of companies, established official companies, usually with the CEO and maybe a developer or five that we've never heard of, or you've heard of some of them, maybe your friends run some of them. And then there's everything in between. So there are companies in the Drupal ecosystem right now from the single proprietor up to the, I don't know if any of them have 200 people yet, pro people 200? Not yet. Awkward not yet. And there are only a few companies that have actually broken the 100 barrier. So we're not big, none of us are big. So we're going to use the term big. And one of my questions is what are the advantages of being big? But I just want to establish at the front of the conversation that none of us are big. Big means more than 5,000 people. Unless you've got more than 5,000 people, then you don't even come onto the radar of somebody like Capgemini with 100,000 people. So we're still talking on a scale that's really Drupal-sized. And if we're going to think big and if we're going to predict the future and prepare for it as business leaders, then we have to think about the time when we're dealing with Drupal shops that have the 5,000 numbers in them instead of the 50 to 100 numbers. But it's not just about size. There are a lot of potential advantages that might make a merger or an acquisition advantageous to a business leader that go beyond just having more people on the payroll, being able to do more or bigger projects. So for one example, I'd just like to point out what happens when two five-person companies join forces? Well, all of a sudden the two CEOs represented by those two five-person companies have peers. All of a sudden you have management instead of the manager. And peers are a good thing. Peers challenge each other and it lets you share a workload. So instead of one person making all the business decisions, you've got two. And this is something that replicates itself in every department, at every level of a company when it gets merged, acquired, or simply grows. Another thing that happens in a business environment when the companies tend to get bigger is you start to draw outside talent. Right now, if a five-person, 10-person, 20-person shop goes shopping around for new talent to hire. They look for well-established Drupal people who absolutely have our standouts in their field. Why do they do that? It's because as a 10-person shop, 20-person shop, you simply don't have the capacity to train anybody new. Do you have interns? Absolutely you don't. Do you have people who have never touched Drupal but are talented PHP programmers? Are you investing weeks and weeks and weeks of your time to train them to bring them up to speed with Drupal? Absolutely not. So one thing that happens, and we're starting to see this in Acquia, is that when you reach a certain size, you have capacity for mentoring within the company. You can bring people in who have not yet established themselves as Drupal experts, and you can train them. Because there's a little bit more flexibility around resource allocation, and you have peers in any of the given departments. Another thing that happens when you get a little bit bigger, and maybe through the process of merging and acquiring, this can also happen, you can focus more on some of the more esoteric and unheard of aspects of Drupal business, namely sales and marketing. So if I have a critique to give to the typical Drupal shop, as I know it in today's environment, it's that they absolutely have no focus on sales and no focus on marketing. How many people here work in a company that has more than three people on their marketing team? Aquians put your hands down. Chris, put your hands down. Right. So that's maybe 4% of the people here, right? So that's actually an interesting problem, given that our leader, the person who's the visionary for our project, got up on stage today and spent half of his keynote talking about marketing. How many people have more than three people on their sales team? Slightly better, slightly better. Good, good. OK, so these are some of the things that might be advantages of getting bigger. And there are other advantages of mergers and acquisitions that we can talk about as well. The typical reasons for emerging and acquiring are things like moving into a specialty, acquiring a product or a technology that's advantageous to the portfolio, regional distribution. Evo's case is going to talk about that where pro people was able to move into new markets based on their acquisition. So there are a lot of reasons. Only a handful of them are actually represented by our panelists. But I do believe strongly that we're entering a time in the Drupal ecosystem. We're going to see more of this. So I think that by talking about it at Drupalcon and having experienced panelists that you can ask questions of will give us the chance to maybe look to the future and prepare a little bit better for the time when merger and acquisition announcements are almost everyday occurrences until we reach that state, if this is the way it goes for us, that we have a larger number of really strong brand name companies and a slightly smaller number of the plethora of very small boutique shops who are operating out of their kitchens or shared offices with five to 10 people in them. So without any further ado, I'd like to introduce our panelists. Karen Borscher. Borscher. OK. Pretty straightforward American pronunciation. French name though, right? German, actually. German? Yeah. OK. What do I know? Karen's a product director at Phase II Technology. The acquisition that she's going to tell you about is Phase II's acquisition of development seeds product portfolio around Drupal distributions, including things like open atrium. And I think the best way is, if Karen, if you would take four or five minutes right now to tell us about your acquisitions and experience from your company's point of view, and then we'll move on. OK. Can you hear me? OK, great. So I am with Phase II Technology, and we are a custom implementation shop for Drupal about 50 people located outside of Washington DC in Alexandria, Virginia in the US. And we are known in part for the work that we've done on distributions, including open publish for the publishing and news industry and open public for the public sector. And because of that competency in product development and product strategy, we were involved with an acquisition, if you will, of development seeds product assets in Drupal. So development seed, many of you probably know a great development shop, also in Washington DC, great partner of ours, colleagues of ours and friends of ours, who decided to take their company in a different direction, but wanted to see the products that they had built in Drupal, namely open atrium and managing news, find a home that would take those products to market in a slightly different way with more support and hosting packages around them, but also find a way for them to focus their efforts on what they were doing in mapping and in the industry that they're sort of moving towards. So we were involved in the acquisition of those assets earlier this year. So we took ownership of them in March of this year. And I was pretty involved on the actual project of determining what that would look like and what products are worth in Drupal and what actually changes hands and what happened in that. And so that's how we were involved. Thank you. So the next panelist that we have is Frédéric Play. He's the CEO of Commerce Guys based in Paris. So Commerce Guys, as you may know, is the leading brand in commerce, content, and community. Or is it community content, commerce? We've got their marketing manager here. And they're also leading the development effort around the Drupal Commerce platform for Drupal 7. So Frédéric, would you like to explain your acquisition history? Sure. So hi, everybody. Thank you for having me, Robert, to this panel. So Commerce Guys is the leading force behind Drupal Commerce. As Rob has said, we are a 30 people company. We are actually operating in Boston, US and in Europe with teams which are remote for most of them or centralized, either in Jackson, Michigan, or in Paris, France. And so we actually are working on a mission, which is basically building Drupal Commerce and making Drupal a flexible, powerful E-commerce solution as a whole, so including the Drupal Commerce but really, more importantly, benefiting from all the great things that Drupal has and that E-commerce players want. So we like those three C's words. And what was your acquisition history? How did the company come to exist? Right. And so the reason why Robert was actually inviting me to this panel is that back in 2008, there were two different companies, one AFH3, working in Paris and San Francisco, and another Commerce Guys LLC based in Michigan. And we started working together on client projects for the start. We worked with Ryan and Mike and had a very good experience working with them, but actually what they were doing was really great. And got together and thought that working on E-commerce with Drupal was making a lot of sense, probably not with IboCart, which was really designed for more US-centric, smaller merchants. And the whole idea of the acquisition was actually to come up with a solution where it was really differently built from IboCart. So we started from scratch again based on IboCart's experience, but it's really from scratch called Drupal Commerce. And that would target higher end merchants. And we've been doing that for two years. It went through a technically an acquisition process with actually really more merger because we founded a new company, Commerce Guys SAS for the French Société Anonyme. And all the key stakeholders were actually becoming shareholders of the company. So that has been a pretty not straightforward deal to make because we were gathering three teams. And it's actually happened in April 2010. We've been running on the same company since then. So it's been a year and a half. And so maybe one thing to finish, there's several ways, reasons to react. Doing an acquisition or a merger, the real main reason is that we had a common project that we wanted to achieve all together as a unique team. And that's more or less the background. We also raise funds with VC. So it's not a merger. It's not acquisition. But I think that's something that you want to mention as well, Robert. So I think the reason why we're here is that we went through those two phases. It's been overly really successful, but not every day easy. So I think that's the idea is to share that what was successful. So if I can kind of recapitulate what I understood, you had a company, AF83. And that was a slightly larger company. And you had a very small company, Commerce Guys, based in Michigan. And AF83 shed its Drupal expertise into a separate company. Right. Thanks for presizing that. Actually, we took part of the team from AF83, the two which was specialized both in e-commerce and in Drupal. And made a new company out of that team. So we take away that part from AF83. AF83 still goes on. They actually don't focus anymore to Drupal. They're still there. They're focusing on Ruby on Rails and some other cool technologies, not Drupal. So both companies actually keep on running. So this is interesting because this is actually a case where a company's divested itself, of a part of itself, spawned off something new, which is also the other side of mergers and acquisitions, is spinning stuff off so that it can not be tethered to the home ship anymore. Maybe interesting to ask Frederik about in the follow-up questions or after the session. Good. Thank you. So Evo Radilovsky is the CEO of ProPeople, Germany, Austria, Belgium. That's not the same as ProPeople. The bigger ProPeople is that they're sister corporations. Evo previously had a company called Segments that was operating basically in Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria. Austria mainly. Bulgaria. So and that was more or less a professional services company. And so go ahead, Evo, and explain the nature of the acquisition and merger and where that leaves you now. Thank you, Robert. So ProPeople Group has now more than 130 employees. And we are in over seven countries. We have offices and operating in much more countries. So for me, it's a very interesting situation because I've been a small company with up to 10 people depending on projects. And I've worked for several years with Drupal. And it was kind of taking the next step. And for me, it was very successful to join ProPeople and being in an international team, being quite active in other fields like organizing conferences, Drupal government days. That is one of my core competences to meet people and network. So for ProPeople, this opens a new market, especially in the German-speaking area where I'm situated, this kind of going forward there. So yeah, ProPeople is among the biggest Drupal shops, I would say so. It has undergone three acquisitions within one year. So we already have some experience there. And that's what we want to share today. So out of those acquisitions, were they all services companies similar to segments? Right, right. Yes? Yes, yes. So how many people did ProPeople grow by through your acquisitions? So actually, I don't know the exact numbers about the other companies. But I'm sure it's at least about 15 to 20 people. And how many regions did you move into through those acquisitions? So more than five regions, where we are now active and we have projects running. OK, thank you. Karen, what motivated your acquisitions of the assets from Development Seed? Well, to be honest, we didn't pursue an acquisition of these. We were approached about it. And so what motivated us to consider it and to consider the idea of that, there are two things. Number one, we know that we are proficient in products and know how to build them, how to maintain them, how to use them for our projects. And every custom implementation that we do, almost every single one starts with one of the distributions that either we've built or that we maintain. So we use them on an absolutely daily basis in our office. So that was one thing. They help us do our job better and faster. So that was one reason. And then the other reason, honestly, is that when we started the conversations with Development Seed about open atrium, we believe open atrium is an incredible asset to this community. And we believe that people are using it, customizing it, building upon it in ways that are just really unique and really exciting. And we really didn't want to see that go away, to be honest. Part of it for us was, part of it is the maintenance of the modules and maintenance of the distribution itself and continuing documentation and support and building that community. And the community is too strong around open atrium for it to just be something that perhaps just kind of goes down over time. We really thought it was a vibrant part of Drupal and we wanted to see it maintained. And honestly, we use it in our office every day. It's our project management tool. So we didn't want to see it go anywhere either. So if I might ask, what exactly did you acquire? We're talking about GPL code. How does one acquire GPL code? Well, one doesn't acquire GPL code. One acquires the trademarks and the assets around that GPL code. So what we acquired was the maintainership. So all of the maintainership for all of the modules of open atrium and for the distribution itself was changed over to us. That obviously is not something that is a financial transaction so much as a maintainership change. In terms of a transaction, that is about the intellectual property around that GPL code that it built the open atrium brand. So if you know the open atrium name and the logo and the sites and the marketing materials and all of the beautiful design that development see put into that product in the community, those are the assets that we actually acquire in that transaction. The maintainership is just a transfer of maintainership by d.do. Thank you. And what would have happened if you hadn't acquired those assets? Well, I don't know. A few things could have happened. The development seed could have kept it and held on to it and continued to support it. They could have looked for someone else in the community to support it. Or they could have left the code there and let people continue to use it. And then perhaps somebody else would have either built upon it and called it something new and started a new community around it, which would probably take a little bit of time or not. Thank you. Frederick, how successful was your acquisition? Or in this case, the merger and acquisition? Well, today we're announcing the Drupal Commerce 1.0 release. So as it was the mission of the company, I think it's overwhelmingly successful. We're very pleased with the fact that we managed to get this project done. And it's really more like a second beginning for us than anything else. But it's definitely being milestoneed. So I would say it was very, very successful. That doesn't mean that everything was absolutely easy and that it went very smoothly. We were very fortunate to actually be among very intelligent, smart, open people. And we went into the entire. I think we did the toughest thing you can do is basically not consider just doing an integration and a build up, but having basically teams that are working on their side and working on their markets and focused on their clients. But we went for the entire integration. So what I mean by that is that we have only operations manager within the company. Only one sales manager within the company will not really organized by geography, but more organized by type of rules. And this means that people collaborate all the time together. This means a lot of communication going forth with the time difference from Europe and the US. So that's, I mean, there's no regret. That's the right organization for us. But it was tough to install. And it took us, I think, at least three to six months to really figure out and be efficient as a company again as we were before the merger happened. So you mentioned it wasn't always easy. Were those the hard parts? What other hard parts were there? Yeah, the main one part was actually to set up an organization that was proving efficient. And especially when you, as I said, you want to make a global organization, not a geographical organization. I think we needed that. But it was definitely, it requested time for people to understand each other's way of working. And we were coming from different cultures. So that was probably the tough part. And if you could look in retrospect, do you think you made any mistakes? Can you identify any concrete mistakes? We made mistakes, but we were right on choosing this organization and pursuing it. What were some of the mistakes you made in the merger and acquisition that you would like to do better if you could do it again? I don't have a straight answer to that. There's nothing in mind that I think I've got to read some great, great songs. So I think that we did the right way. But again, the thing that the warning I would like to send is that don't believe it's going to work overnight. It truly requires to take time. It requires the teams to get involved, to travel if we're talking about remote and teams operating in different countries, to really spend time, face time together, even though we get the feeling when we started this process that everybody was from Drupal.org, everybody's on RSE, everybody's connected, works together, remote, because that's the way Drupal works. So it's going to be easy. Well, it's not easy, even though people contribute like that on Drupal, it's not the same for a company than for a community. And face time is absolutely important. So get ready to travel if you want to get on other markets. Get ready to actually really spend time and energy on making it happen, because that's really where the secret relies, I think. Thank you. How about you, Ivo? What was the most difficult part of the acquisition after it closed for your company? So as far as I see it, it was to align the processes between the different companies, because people often keep working in habits they built over time. So what do you call that culture? Corporate culture? Yes, but mainly processes how things are done. It's not only the corporate culture and the culture of different companies in different countries is kind of different. But yeah, to get in one line with every department, and it was quite new for me, too, because I've been in a small company where I had to take care of everything. So on the one side, now I have help in different areas where I can focus on the things that I really like to do and can do good. But to get straight the processes that was probably, I think that's a general thing. And when change happens, you have to deal with it. Is there any mistake that you made that was made during the acquisition that you would like to avoid the next time around? Yeah, nothing real big. But what I've seen is probably that sometimes I've tried to implement my habits over the rest of all. So this is a warning for the people you're interviewing, right? Yes, so on the one side, it can be pretty helpful. Because when a vehicle starts going, it goes and goes. And if you come from outside, you see some things that are not perfectly optimized. So you can give your input and try to optimize them. But it's hard to change the whole thing. And it's also important to keep your eyes on the big goal and make sure that you're fixing the real problems and not getting distracted by the small problems. Right. That's something that I speak to you from personal experience with a growing startup that I work for. Frederic, how important is being big for a shop that is involved in any way with professional services of any kind, including support? It depends really who you target in terms of customers. The bigger the customers, the bigger the expectations on the size, on the financial situation, on everything that basically is not your expertise. So that's really a question of strategy in terms of what your target customers. I believe that's one of the things that we see right now. So we don't do end-to-end website development. That's not what we're doing. We are running a partner program and receiving leads. So we're sharing leads with partners. Every project we work on, we work with integrators and Drupal shops, all sizes, from small size to really big size. And there's projects for most of them, because on e-commerce with Drupal, it's just like on Drupal. We get very small projects, so very big projects. So all type of companies are actually interesting. But for the really big projects, what we saw that lately, and I recall at least three or four projects where it actually happened, is that the technology was very convincing to the customer. The ecosystem was not convincing to the customer, because they couldn't find the right people, the right number of people. If they had to find some, for instance, 10 or 15 Drupal developers ready to work on a project the next week, that was not possible. And I'm talking of examples that I saw in France and in the US, mostly in France. But I clearly recall that we lost some projects to .NET or to other technologies, because on those worlds, there are some large companies that I actually can provide a client with 10 or 15 people the next day. And I think that right now we need scaling in the Drupal community. We have this level of maturity where I think it would be good for the entire ecosystem to actually move on and start consolidating, start working on larger companies. And I think that would be really helpful to the old market and to the old Drupal community to see this momentum really starting. I think it's starting. It's probably not starting as fast as it should. Thank you. Ivo, do you have something to say? Yes. I think in general, it's not really that important to be really big, because there are companies that are highly skilled and can sell their services as a product. And if no one else has the technology, they can keep on moving by not being big and still have big contracts. But in general, I think Drupal against the rest, it makes more and more in importance to have bigger companies that can actually compete with software from other companies and proprietary companies. OK. Thank you. Can we hold the questions to the end? Thank you. So Karen, I'd like to ask you, how did you establish the value of that which you acquired? This is a great question. This is especially an interesting question in open source. Can you move the microphone closer, please? Yep. Better? Better? OK. So certainly an important question, valuation of open source assets and open source companies. There's obviously a lot of valuation methods for any company undergoing any sort of acquisition or any company considering acquiring assets or another company. If you are acquiring an entire company and you're looking at bringing on the company's income and talent and everything, it's a much different process, obviously, than if you are acquiring assets on a one time basis, and that's that. So very, very different. In terms of how we established the valuation of what we were acquiring, we looked at what we believed the, what it would take in order to build that all again. And that's the simplest way that I could say it. What would it take to build up the entire community, the entire brand, the entire ecosystem that has grown around what development seed had built? How much would it take to build the brand assets, the trademarks, the goodwill that has grown in the community? And that's, there's some really big intangibles there. How do you put a price on goodwill? So for us, we just had to really take our best gut reaction. One of the big rules of mergers and acquisitions that you always hear is a company or its assets are worth two things, what somebody will pay for it and what somebody needs to get paid for it. So it's that there are a lot of, there's part of that that goes into this. There's no perfect number that you build into your Excel spreadsheet and poof at the end of the day. You have a perfect valuation and everybody gives it the thumbs up and everybody walks away. It doesn't work that way. For us, it was a matter of understanding what it would take to rebuild it and understanding the investment that development seed had made and what they'd done. And honestly, what that was worth to this community, to us as a company, and to what we wanted to do with it going forward. So all of those factors came in. There were a lot of weighted score cards that were involved. We literally looked at all of the different pieces of this and said, how important is this to us? What did it cost and what does it do for us? And then worked from there. How did you pay for it? Cash, equity, something else? How much? Not how much. That's too personal. I'm not sure that I'm ever ready to say that. OK. Good. Frederick, can I ask you the same question? How did you pay for it? How was your deal structured? Cash, equity, both? That's a different story. It's not an acquisition of something. It was really basically bringing teams together to actually accomplish something. So we wanted the people that were coming in to be really into what they were doing. So all the key stakeholders of the company have become shareholders at the beginning. So it was definitely shares. OK. So equity best. Eva, how about yours? So I personally think the best way to go is the way that it was in our case. And that's a good mix of having some cash involved and having some shares involved. So the one thing gives a short-term motivation. The other thing, a long-term motivation. So I think a mix of both is the best way to go. Great answer. You win the answer category for this question. Yeah. So at least in two of the cases, we're talking about companies that have equity and the ability to move it around. And I think this is an important distinction. If you don't have an equity structure in your company, you better have a very large bank account, or you can't acquire anything. I wanted just to add on one thing about evaluation. And besides the financial methods, our evaluation method, one of the main factors is to look after the people. Who are the people behind the company and the product? So this gives us some insight and possibility to evaluate the likelihood of success. Thank you. So I'm going to skip number six. Raise your hand if you'd like to answer this one. I'll call on you if you don't. To whom? Anybody want to take it? Karen? We'll see. You couldn't answer the last question, but you think you want this one? Yeah. Well, you asked what kind of company is the most likely to be acquired next? I think you asked earlier, does it matter about what's the value of being big in this space and big as a service company? And if I'd answered that question, I'd answer it somewhat the same way that I would answer this question. I think that what companies are looking for in this space is to be excellent and to handle the demand that they're getting, to be excellent and to be responsive. And so I think that it completely depends. What kind of company is the most likely to be acquired? Well, it depends on what kind of company is the one acquiring it and what they need. So I think a large company that is having a hard time handling the amount of demand coming in for their services is looking for a company to acquire with awesome talent, awesome talent that can come in there and get the job done and get it done fast and be responsive to clients. And I think that some of a company that is super responsive and just awesome in terms of customer service and really wants to do more of that and get more of those clients is looking for the best talent out there. If you're really good at selling and you're really good at being responsive to clients, then you're probably looking for a firm that is just super, super smart, great people with great stuff who can build great things. And if you're already building great things, you're probably looking for the other side of it. So that's a great answer, but your company didn't acquire talent? No, we didn't. OK, so there must be other types of acquisitions out there as well. Right, so yeah, we didn't acquire talent at all in this case. In our case, but we acquired what talent built. Open atrium is something that incredibly talented people built and built up, incredibly talented people built and built it up. Would we want to go and try to rebuild that? Absolutely not. Do we think that that was an essential part of the work that we do? Do we use it in our work every day? Absolutely. So for us, it wasn't talent, but it's what talent built. Thank you. Frederic, anything to add? I would add to that that I believe that a company likely to be acquired is a company that is willing to be acquired. And it doesn't happen by accident. And if you don't think about an exit strategy to use the VC words, or at least understand in the environment industry what kind of company could be interested by your skill sets, it's not going to happen. So I think that it has to be, if your objective is to sell your company someday, you have to market it. You have to market your company to meet somebody's specific needs and stick to it and actually then you're increasing your chances to get acquired. But again, I don't believe it's happening by accident. It's definitely a will, and then it can work. Thank you. Evo, anything to add? Yeah, I think that sometimes out of existing partnerships, this can happen because you worked already together and you complement each other and projects. And then you realize, actually, we should get closer. In general, I think it's going to be highly skilled companies from 10 people, 10, 15 people that are very skilled in a specific area and complement the portfolio of a bigger company. Thank you. Great. So we're going to move on to questions from the audience. Jakob, you're first. So I just have to try to find people who are able to be acquired and to find a company that I should talk to. So the question is, if you are a small service provider company, how do you go about identifying potential partners or people to acquire you and what's the process? Evo? I think that's a very interesting question because I was in this situation. And yeah, I had several options there. There are some options out there. And I think in my case, it was mostly looking after the philosophy of the company. And in my case, I met the managing director of the company and we had several conversations. And actually, we realized, OK, we have the same goals and we are going the same direction. We want to achieve the same thing so it fits perfectly and we complement each other. So yeah, it's probably you have to identify which company is doing what you want to do and what is following the same philosophy and then go to the CEO and talk to him about your ideas, what do you want to achieve. And if he identifies that this is something that fits to his company, I think it's most likely that it will go into the direction. Karen, Frederick, anything to add? No, actually, I don't have this experience myself so I'm not sure I would do it. Probably Evo is right on the fact that you need to identify the people that you want to get acquired by because you think that there's a good match in terms of teams, which is definitely number one, market, strategy, and probably common culture that would make this happen and then it can work. I don't believe that the size we're talking of can be big enough to be something interesting for intermediates or a banker to look after it. So I think it's really about doing it by ourselves and combining with the right relevant company at first. Thank you. Zohar, you had a question. Yeah, so a small, medium company ourselves about 20 people, you see that it's not. He mentioned three. Three. How do you see this easier? So I believe he mentioned that they acquired 15 personnel between the three acquisitions and the company is around 130 people now. Does it get easier afterwards? It's pretty small acquisitions, but the effect is quite high because two of the acquisitions were to establish markets and one to extend our expertise. So it's going smoother now and the effect is big. So I don't think that this growth was negative. And when talking about getting bigger, right, you mentioned from constantly growing, that was one of my things that I thought, OK, if I want to reach this to grow to a certain size, that there where I want to go, it will take me several years. So I just want to take a shortcut. Gentlemen here? So the question is, how does one grow beyond the ceiling of 10 to 20 people in a Drupal shop organically? Yeah, what's the question to me or should I? Actually, Karen, your company is the only one that's done that without. Yeah. Organically. Yeah, done that organically. OK, so it's a great question. I haven't been privy to every part of that growth from where we were to where we are now, but in the last year that I've been at Phase 2, we've grown a great deal, fastest rate yet. I think part of that is due to looking a little bit more holistically at what you're doing and what you're investing in. So we've invested very heavily in distributions and products. Part of the reason for that is because it does actually help to drive our reputation in sales. And that sales has driven organic growth from a people perspective. So we add people when we have so much work that we need to add people. It's really very plain and simple. We've never taken investment. We aren't venture backed. We have grown from day one from sales. And so when we sell more, we hire more. And generally what we found is by investing in the people that we're hiring to not only build their client sites, but also to build lasting assets in the community. Number one, it makes our employees incredibly invested in what we do. Our employees love building on OpenATrium. They love all of the modules that we maintain. They love being a part of DrupalCon and the Drupal community. And so part of it is that when the projects come in that are really hard that require everybody to really double up and put in all the hours, we do it because it means that we know that on the other side of it, we'll invest time in other things. So we'll invest time when somebody wants to try out something and build a new module, that's supported. A lot of research and development work is supported in the organization. And that the sales helps us bring in new people. And the diversity of what we do on staff helps us retain them. Thank you. And if you'd like to hear Karen speak more about phase two and what they're doing, she'll be on stage with me tomorrow when we talk about taking inventory of Drupal products and app stores. We're announcing the Open App Store initiative standard. Open app standard. Open app standard. So if you've been following the app store debate, this is where it comes to a head. There's actually a public standard. Press release went out yesterday. It did. It did. So see more of Karen tomorrow. Fred, you had something to say? No, I just wanted to share my previous experience at AF3 because we experienced that same issue. We went from one employee to 15 in three years. So it was not just Drupal. It was several technologies. From how big to how big? One to 15 employees. 50. Yeah, OK. AF83. Yeah, and really the time where we struggled was the 20 to 30. That was exactly the spot where it's really tricky because you're at that stage where you still you need to have some second management level. And everybody's straight in the line. It's no longer possible. It's not you can't grow anymore like this. So you start to have a second row of manager and maybe sometimes a third row of management. And that's a different organization. At that stage, the company really changes because it has to be split into more specialties. Before 20, we had basically project managers and developers. That was it. After 20, we had some people doing integration, focused on integration. Some people focused on development. Some people focused on maintenance and project managers. So that was four teams instead of two. What else do we have? We had also the fact that the company is re-changing when you double like this. So people had the feeling that the company they came in at the beginning was not any more the same company. So he was starting to bring up some kind of friction and tension within the old guys and the new guys. So basically, you're starting to see new problems and new issues. And I think that's a tough step to actually get to. And I believe that's the reason why we see a lot of Drupal shops that are actually stuck at 15, 20, which is a good side. But getting the next level really requires to bring some unique financial manager, for instance, that you don't need when you're 20, I would say. You need marketing and probably a dedicated person in marketing. You need more salespeople because you have to be sure that you can make the salaries after every month. And you're starting to look at big, big, big figures. It sounds like you're making a case for a merger between two of these shops. Yeah, and actually, the thing is, I think the next spot after, that's my experience. So I'm just sharing that with you. I'm not saying that's the truth. It's 20 stuff, 30 stuff, 40 stuff, 50 is good. There's some kind of nice spot at 50. Some kind of nice spot at 50 because you actually can afford to have a financial manager. You can afford to have a sales guy, a dedicated marketer. Before that, you're struggling because the revenue you're generating with your development and project management team doesn't really cover the fixed cost of the other people that are actually doing good but more long-term good to your company. That's direct revenue every month. So I think it's, yeah, should for 50. That's my advice. I think you had your hand up first, right? OK, so the question is, when you acquire an company, what sort of due diligence is done before you sign the deal? Evo, sorry. How deeply did they inspect what they were getting with you? Yeah, so in our case, it was pretty straight. When it's a small company, you can fast figure out most of the details, and it's easy to handle. And then it's mainly based on trust because if you have trust, a good relationship, then it's going to work out. And you don't need that much details. Of course, you'll need a lawyer, and the first things will cost you probably several thousand euros. But that's not a big deal. I think it's more interesting to hear from Fred. Yeah, you're a sneaky devil, Evo. Because I know it was more complicated. OK, Fred. No, I'm more or less pretty much on the same page as Evo. I think combining two shops, or Drupal shops that have been working for a year together, you don't need the whole army of consultants to check out the accounts, even though you're going to check because that's something you want to do. So you have somebody looking at the accounting for sure. I can tell you a little bit more about the, you haven't talked about VC funding and stuff like that, but this is getting really more serious when you're actually getting this route to actually grow your company further. That's, you're getting due diligence, and it's done by editors, and they come to your place. They actually look at every invoice contract expense you've made for three, four days. And they come up with an audit document with recommendations that you need to follow probably most of the time for the fund. So I think it's really important when you're getting to a process of acquisition to make sure that your accounting is good, that your contract are closed, that they are stored in a specific place, that get disorganized before it happens. Otherwise, it's a tough moment, it's not fun. So it requires to be really organized and have some clear good accounting. And so get the assistance of a lawyer and of an accountant or CPA beforehand to make sure that everything is in order. You can screw up an acquisition or a VC raise pretty easily. When trust goes away, it's very difficult to recover it. So I think that's something you really want to pay attention to before you do anything. Thank you. So there was a question. Yes, Mr. Rikin. Yeah, but other than Russian, I want to have a problem to deal with the Russian. We don't have to go to our organization that has a lot to do with English, either version. They're not all involved. What you need to do is you need to start looking out. You're opening some sort of infrastructure that will organize yourself. I mean, good for processes also, so your employees. So that will lower your managerial costs a lot. And trying to organize yourself, so the agile or simplified process that attaches to your work. Good. Thank you. What's your organization's name? OK. Thank you. Did you have a question as well? In your business, are any of your companies facing difficulties hiring Drupal developers? Karen? Yeah? What are you doing about it? Sorry. Well, there's two things. Number one is we're hiring a lot of non-Drupal developers. So we actually are in a, I guess, somewhat unique position that when we were a 10, 12, and 15-person firm, we've always hired really talented LAMPstack developers that have almost no Drupal experience. We have a lot of guys who started on Drupal with us. And we just hired the most talented developers we could find, and then they developed great Drupal skills with us. That's something we've continued to do, and we will continue to do, is help to grow the community in that. And then I think the other thing is just to make sure that when we are hiring great developers, that they stay on as great developers. We're not hiring developers to come in and stop developing, stop contributing back to the community, stop building Drupal as a community. We're hiring them and helping them continue to do that because. That's a round of applause. That's the right way to do it. The number one thing that you can do to have more developers to hire is have more Drupal to build. And so if Drupal is being built and it's being built by a great community of people, then those are the people that are going to foster the new hobbyists, the new part timers, and eventually your new hires. And so that's how we're doing it. Thank you. There was a question in the back here. OK, I can answer that question. Is anybody here from Dataflow? So there's a Belgian company called Dataflow that was merged, acquired by or merged with the much larger Aussie group in France. So this is a very clear example of, and I don't know the details of how that came about. I was hoping somebody might be here. But I think Aussie France is like more like 30,000 people. And Dataflow is in the hundreds of people. Six? Six, 7,000 there. Dataflow? No, no, no, not Dataflow. Aussie. Six, 700 people. OK. And Aussie is like 7,000? Six, 7,000. Six, 7,000 Aussie. Good presentation, Eric. Great, thank you. I'm glad you were because I obviously am not very good with numbers. So six, 7,000 non-Drupal assets for Aussie acquired or merged with Dataflow, which has 600 now. 60. 60? 60. Oh, 60. That's all there is to this one. Dataflow has over 600, yes. Absolutely, yes. So we can ask them. What about 60 Drupal developers? 60 Drupal developers. Yes. You know something about this? No, actually, a question. So yes, one moment. So yes, and there are other examples of venture capital-backed Drupal companies. Aquia. Aquia is one of them. But there are others. Pantheon, I believe, is venture-backed. Who are the others? I mean, commerce guys are venture-backed. There's a lot. I mean, not necessarily always huge venture-backed. Is that Evan? Subhub is venture-backed, yeah. OK, good. Your question? I would like to ask you, after you did this acquisition to go to other markets, what do you say you get the most of? More organic growth in the different markets? Are you getting more benefits between bigger and pushing products and more economies? So the question was, as you move into other markets, are you benefiting more from the economies of scale? Or just for getting growth in different markets, or growing into different markets organically? Eva? So yeah, I had the problem that we had big opportunities with big clients, but we mostly lost them to bigger companies. So this helped me to make use of the resources that pro people has and to extend the business to the new markets. So I kindly take benefits from having an established development or more established development teams. As you saw, there's a platform for you. Right. There's a platform for you. What about the platforms? How do they see, do they push more products as a company with scale, or they just get more capital growth? They get mainly growth because I have a base that I couldn't use really before as a small company. And now, yeah, I can really get the projects that I always wanted to. Good. So we are, unfortunately, out of time. I'd like to thank the panelists for volunteering their time to talk to us. Thank you, Eva, for organizing.