 Before lunch, Ingrid and I are going to do like a chat and it probably makes Ingrid a little bit nervous that we have not talked about what any of our questions are going to be. As you can see, I didn't bring any questions. And if you've met before, I don't make things ahead of time. So let's do this. We're going to, I want to kind of like introduce you by way of true-false game. Okay. So which of these things have you done, true or false, national cycling champion? Do they answer or do I answer? You. Oh, that is true. If they know the answers, we're done already. So that was true. Software developer. True. Started a company. True. Sold a company. True. Tech stars mentor. True. Merge lane mentor. True. Chair of a non-profit. True. Mom of twins. True. Are there any balls this year? Is Marty our friend? True. Soft answer, soft answer. Like general overall, like badass. True. Okay, true. So like a lot of different topics that I think are interesting. But you know, one that always stands out to me is coming from a software development background into business running, business creating. Can you tell a little bit of the story of when you all were programming and then decided like, we could, this business thing, it can't be so hard. Like we could do this. We did say that. Actually, unfortunately. What did that look like? You know, it's funny. So when I go to speak at code schools or at CU, you know, computer science department, one thing I make sure to say every single time to the women in the group is that you have to be really careful about making sure that you stay in engineering. If you really want to be an engineer, you have to make sure that you stay in because women tend to get pulled out into other things like project management or organizing groups or all these things. And so in my career, I've definitely had to resist that and have had to, you know, I've tried it out. I was a, you know, director of engineering in my past. And so when we started Quick Left, you know, it was three of us. We were all developers. We were all writing code. And it came to a point in my career where I felt like I was interested in trying something a little different. So I kind of went over to the business side. And it was good because it was something that I chose and I was excited about it. But it was really hard as well because when you don't write code, you don't really have a sense of accomplishment or when you're making that transition. So, you know, I, you can really feel good about yourself when you get through a bug or you make something work. It's harder to feel good about yourself until you practice about solving a people problem or something like that. So I would go through the day and all I did was meetings and email and I wouldn't feel that sense of accomplishment. So that was, I think, the hardest thing for me to transition into being a developer and then having a business was just feeling like I actually did something. And eventually I just sort of made light of it. And when people ask me what I do, I say email and meetings and show up to stuff. Thank you. When you were first starting out and it was just the three of you on day one, was it hardest to manage the clients, which maybe day one they didn't exist, the team or the business? It was definitely the clients. And I actually have a funny story that I hadn't thought about except for that I ran into Ryan Cook earlier. He's at Curly. So we actually started out as a PHP shop. And we hired... That's not funny. It's scary. We hired Ryan and two weeks later when he started we said, guess what? We're not going to write PHP anymore. We're going to switch over to Ruby. So there was a lot more in the beginning. There was a lot less need to really manage the team because the people that we hired early on were very self-motivated. They didn't really... Ryan didn't walk out because we told him that he was going to learn a completely new language. In fact, the first three hires that we took from your school were... Not any of them did Ruby when they started. We did JavaScript and iOS. So they all had to do languages that they had no idea how to do. And so in the beginning it was really more that the clients were the hardest to manage. And it was us figuring out what our ankle was. We had to make those decisions like were we going to be on call if they emailed us at two in the morning? Were we going to do midnight deploys? The answer to all of those things, of course, is no. And I think it's expected more that you don't do those things now. You want to do a deploy when people are fresh and can respond to issues. But in the beginning it was really... We were still really educating clients about our process and figuring out what it was and how we defined ourself. Managing the team, we went from being a flat organization when we started and that worked really well for us until we got to about 20 people. And then people started to wonder how do I advance my career? How do I get from being a junior to a mid to a senior? And so then that's when we started to have to pay more attention to more people problems, career growth, implementing a hierarchy, not to create bureaucracy but to create more structure. A flat organization works really well if you have a certain kind of person but that doesn't give you necessarily the opportunity to have a diverse team. And so those were some of the ways that we transitioned from not having to worry about things to having to worry about quite a few different things. A ton of pieces I want to dig into there. As you got started, when was the first time you got paid? Because we are a services company, so Quick Left was a dev shop agency style. We actually... Well, when I first met my two co-founders, they were not getting paid. So that is one thing I was able to offer was tightening up our contracts and really like... I think I learned this from being... I got my graduate degree in women's studies and so you have this whole notion of understanding your value and kind of asking for what you're worth. And I think as developers of all genders, we can sometimes not value our worth and we can have a hard time. We only think we're valuable when we're typing on the keyboard and we shouldn't bill if we're going to the bathroom or taking a break. But you're thinking about the project the whole time and so that's sort of the angle I brought to the group when we founded the company. And so what we ended up doing and enabled us to not have to take funding when we started was we would get payment up front from our clients and that was what also allowed us to get some cash surplus to have people quit their perfectly reasonable, well-paid jobs to come work with us, which was really scary. The upfront payment thing I think is super interesting and having worked on my own had made those mistakes. I was just telling Dave a story last night where one of my clients who was enormous, the bigger the company, the longer they take to pay and my net 30 invoice they paid in 280 days. And when you're sitting around like, hey, it's just me and I'd love to pay this rent and then they're like, oh, it's about to get paid. And then 200 days later it gets paid. That's very not fun. The getting paid up front I think can sometimes feel like advice like, oh yeah, I would get paid up front, but they'll never go for that. And one of the, did you all have any tricks in getting, or I shouldn't say tricks, strategies? I mean, you're right. A lot of companies don't go for it. And our strategy was that we weren't even big enough to contract with those kind of companies yet. And so it is true that as you kind of go for those larger contracts you don't have a lot of say in the payment terms or you might not even have a lot of say in the contract terms and it's kind of up to you in terms of how much risk you want to take on. Is it worth having their logo on your site or is it too risky for your business if something happens and it takes 200 plus days to get paid? So our first clients were more kind of angel funded types who are actually great at paying because they have their cash. Yeah, small people, they tend to either have no money and then they don't pay it to you. Or you give them the invoice and they pay you right away. It's kind of like waiters and waitresses are the best tippers. They kind of understand what you're going through. Eventually figured out a strategy for my business which was to raise prices 10% and then offer a 10% discount for prepayment. Those were great tricks actually to artificially raise the prices and then offer a psychological discount. Yeah, people love discounts. Anything discount, they're like, okay, I'll do it. Speaking of pricing and so forth, there's three of you and your new kids on the block and then you're like, we will charge $800 an hour. That was not the answer. How did you figure out how to price those initial things when you had no particular reputation as a company at least? We actually got our inspiration from a talk that Obi did at Hatch Rocket where he was talking, and this is a very old talk and probably many of you have seen it, but he was talking about how as developers we should all charge $150 an hour. It doesn't matter if you're freelancing or whatever, we all deserve this amount. We started in 2010 and this talk was probably... So it's like $400 an hour in today's dollars. Unfortunately, as maybe we'll later talk about in this geography, the prices kind of have come down a little bit. But anyway, so we did a lot of research. We modeled our company a lot off of other places that we admired like Hatch Rocket and Thoughtbot and Pivotal. So we had a lot of good examples that have sort of paved the way for us. So if I'm in the audience and I'm a developer and I've been doing this for five years and I've been looking at these managers like, I could do that, what's the thing I'm most likely to mess up in that initial, in the first like 45 days? I don't think you'll mess up in the first 40 to five days if you have that attitude, because I was certainly in that same boat. I mean, I've only worked... I've always been a very early employee at every place I've worked. So I've been able to kind of see how these people started companies and I learned a lot about just initial starting things. Where you'll mess up is going to be later when things get more complicated. And you have all of these judgments about, you know, why your boss did something and how stupid they were and then when you're the one on the other side. I mean, there were times where I was like, oh my gosh, the whole dev team is going out and gossiping right now. I can see it. And I remember when I was that person. So, yeah, Carva. So you started out the three of you. You hired the fourth pretty early on. And was there a vision of like, we want to be 12. We want to be 16. Or was it like, we just want to not be poor. Like we just want to get the ball rolling and like see what happens. Well, it's so funny. So for me, it was really important that we had health insurance from day one because, you know, being a competitive cyclist, you know, there's things that could happen and you could be in really big financial trouble. In fact, one of my friends is an Olympic level sprinter and she in a training ride got crashed out and almost ended her career and she didn't have great health insurance. So you just don't want to play with that. So our first number had more to do with the fact that with TriNet we had to have five people on the insurance plan. We're going to get to five like anybody. So we made it so we can be insured. We tended to pretend to be two people. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, we got. Well, you know, we had some good projects. So we were able to do that pretty easily. And I was very proud to say that we had insurance early on, but it was kind of funny when I went back to my graduate school. They had their 40th anniversary. San Diego State was the first graduate program in women's studies in the country, believe it or not. And they had students come back to talk about how they applied their feminism. And everyone was like, yeah, I work in a nonprofit for nonviolent self-defense and I'm writing a book and getting my PhD and I was like, I have health insurance at an eight-person company. You know, it was like crickets, tumbleweeds. It was the crickets of envy, though, because they were like, that's awesome. You know, why wouldn't you? And so I think it's hard for people to realize that that is a big deal. And I think, you know, even when in the news they're talking about raising the minimum wage and all these reasons why small businesses can't do it, I wonder, you know, they should. Because if you have somebody on your team who crashes or gets hit by a car or something happens and then imagine as a small business what happens, the ripple effect of that for your business, for the morale of the team, it's like the few extra dollars that you're spending to get people insured, it's worth it. It's funny with some of those pieces that are almost taken for granted, or I think particularly when you're like 20s are taken for granted. I was talking to a friend who works at one of the largest consultancies kind of in our space, and they were griping that the amount they individually pay for their health insurance had gone up. I was like, you have to pay for your health insurance? That's crazy. Like this is a billion dollar company. Why do you pay for health insurance? They're like, well, that's what we have to do. Those choices don't have to be that way. And it's kind of interesting, I think about these kind of hygiene factors of employment, and it's weird how dollars aren't always dollars, right? Like $50 here and $50 there, and the feeling of I have to pay for my health insurance is kind of just one of those like, ugh. I would rather get health insurance and get paid $500 a month less or $300 a month less or whatever and just not have it on my mind, right? It's just a part of taking care of people when you were trying to get to five and get to eight and get to 10 and to 12, like what were you doing to try and shape the culture? And by that point, I think you were kind of running the ship, right, among the three partners and the other two were kind of like, hey, this is cool. We want to write the code and do the stuff. And you were like, okay, I'll tell everyone what to do. Is that fair? I'll keep the lights on. I'm more of a coach and less of a tell people what to do kind of leader. When do you get to yell, though, if you're a coach? Yeah, see. Back to the computers, no. No. But, you know, in a lot of ways, we grew pretty organically. I think when it came to strategy on growth, the main way that we focused on was more about the kinds of projects that we were taking and less about the numbers of people. So, you know, we could have added a design team and been really a full service agency or, you know, there could have been a number of things that we did. And we did spend a lot of time making sure that we were happy about the direction we were going from, you know, more of an engineering perspective. So, we really put engineering first. And I don't know if looking back on that, that was the best idea because I think in the end, it may have contributed to, you know, sort of what happened and led to us selling. Being an engineering first company doesn't always mean you're making the right business decisions. It is mainly. And one unfortunate thing I learned, and I... It really bothers me. But the only people that care about good code are us in this room. Investors don't care about it. The people you're writing code really care about it until somebody they think is important tells them that the code they have is terrible and then they kind of care. I think they care if they have like a security breach and they are responsible for a bunch of things. But it was really, you know, one thing I saw over and over again was just that lack of care that clients really did have about our craft. And so, from a business perspective, there is a little bit of that conflict with us being craftspeople versus can we get this done cheaply and hire a lot of juniors to make a better profit. Yes, hire a lot of juniors. Which I do, but not to make a profit. Did you feel like you had to be the bad lady, you know, of like, hey, everybody, I know you want to refactor for four sprints in a row. We got to ship this thing. Not so much because I think we had people that were pretty pragmatic. I think there were times where we had people who did go down rabbit holes and, you know, if that happened, you know, sometimes we just give a discount on the invoice or something like that. You know, sometimes it's really hard to tell people why what they're doing is wrong until they've experienced the pain themselves. So, for instance, I am also old and so I've also done Waterfall and I remember when I was in San Diego and we were working on the San Diego Chargers website and opening day of football, I had to do something to their homepage and so Sunday I was by myself in the office because, you know, there were no laptops so I had to drive to the office to do this and, you know, like a good developer, I tested my changes on the staging server before I put FTP in my files to the live server. PHP days! And, you know, back in those days, people were really trying to figure out how to monetize the web so some of the ways they did it were with, you know, paying for these tools. So there was a little JavaScript whizzy wig so normal people could type stuff in like Microsoft Word style and it would show up in markup. But the license for this tool was only licensed for the live server but the database connection was to the live server as well and so instead of testing my changes like a good coder, I actually deleted the homepage. Chip it. Oh! The homepage deleted. Football games you have to start. People that like football care a lot about football. Thankfully there were no smartphones so the people at the football game had no idea. Exactly. So, you know, those are little things that, you know, you almost have to experience that pain to realize like why Agile is good for you, not a nuisance. Why TDD is good for you, not a nuisance. Why FTP is just not a good way to transfer files over. It's a good way to transfer files, just not to have files. I had a friend who ran a small agency in D.C. called me one day and he said, hey man, I really need some help. How do you undelete on FTP? And I was like... No, then you have this whole folder, subfolder which you've copied everything in case you need to put it back. It's a total disaster. They had actually deleted, so they had all their clients on a shared server and had accidentally deleted the root and of course they didn't have version control or anything of that nature so that was not good for them, not good choices. So sometimes I think, instead of telling people to back to your original question like get back to work, I think what I would do instead were I really did let people kind of walk off the cliff and as long as it wasn't going to put us out of business or something like that I did stand back and let people just kind of learn on their own and it always I think just sticks with them better and it's a lesson they can take with them. So a theme this morning is really about mentoring and I think as a mentor you can't be so quick to jump in like no, no, this is wrong. Just sit back and shut your mouth sometimes and just let people kind of go through their journey to get to that answer. Did you feel, especially in that small team, did you like share the business and the business burdens and the business concerns when you were 10 or 12 or was it like all deal with all this stuff you all deal with this coding? I think that things were pretty shared and maybe to a detriment because as we grew one thing I started to notice is that developers maybe didn't have all of the right information that the management team had about a contract and so sometimes they would get distracted on some of the details of the contract terms in a way that kept them out of just delivering the best business solution to the client. So I definitely went back and forth between like at one point we had open books, we didn't have open salaries but we had open books and I thought that it would help people really understand kind of how the business works but if they don't really understand how a P&L works and some of the bigger picture business to your point yes the profit and loss sheet it is hard for them to make really educated decisions about why we're doing things and then again it takes their minds off of delivering that solution so yeah I mean we've definitely tried all of the above sharing a lot sharing less, trying it out. I think when you talk about transparency in business as a software developer or kind of a person in a role where you're doing the work the feeling is like yeah transparency I want to know what's going on and the problem is like it's not always pretty and you're trying to write software and this whole thing about writing software is about abstractions on top of abstractions because we can't hold all these details we can't be thinking about all these details and if you're trying to implement some application and you're also like I'm pretty sure we don't have enough money for payroll this week that's not like that's not a good place to be doing good work right and at the same time you don't want to be like building software and then everybody's like oh by the way we have to keep the lights off because our bills like overdue and it doesn't work charge your laptops at home so there can be like pluses and minuses right or like finding the right level finding the right people who are valuable like you don't really want information that you can't do anything about yes and you're right and as engineers we are always trying to solve the problems it doesn't matter necessarily what area of life it is in and so it's hard you know I really struggled with that natural curiosity like I don't want to keep things from people because it's our nature but it's really a distraction sometimes so yeah it's a hard one I want to flip a little bit from the business part to some things you brought up about like women's studies and feminism and being in tech and especially as it relates to kind of this like Denver Boulder area I imagine it's the case that as you said like going to things like what has have there been phases where it's like I'm invited to this thing and I'm invited to this thing and I'm invited to this thing and it's just like yeah I'm the lady software developer business owner at like every single thing over and over and does that feel like pressure you know like oh I have to represent my old gender and like prove that women can do all these things or whatever or is it does it balance out with like excitement and getting to kind of share what you all have done it's not it doesn't feel like pressure now because there's so many more voices but when I first I give a women in tech talk about kind of the data behind how many people are in tech why they might not be high school college things like that data wise and my first started giving it like no one would really come and it was just women in the audience and by the end or by the end I still have given the talk so you know as the time went on more people would come and the room would get bigger so you know from my time in graduate school till now it feels like people actually care and I actually remember having this conversation with somebody at South by Southwest one time another woman in tech and this was early on in tech too so it felt like the younger generation was coming in more excited so I felt like men on my engineering teams that were younger were more excited to have me on their teams and so I have anecdotally seen this shift where people want to have the conversations and it's been really great so I haven't felt the pressure because other people have shared the burden of having the conversations whereas you know I think in the 90's in the early 2000's you definitely felt like the loner if you brought up any of these issues about race and gender and you know it still happens but you would get like the email lists would all do and now it's Twitter and it's really kind of dangerous almost to speak about some of these issues and you had to think about it more like do I want to take this on because people might send me nasty emails or you know say they're going to come to my house and things like that Was that a part of your personal experience? Not so much because when I was in tech I was just trying to be a good developer and some of the things sometimes it takes me a while to marinate on kind of what happened and so I never really experienced anything that I felt like had to go and talk through and so I never had to take that risk I suppose. Do you feel like that kind of thinking and those understandings did they influence the early days of the company like in concrete ways? Yeah definitely I think just specifically more in organizational structure I had worked in collectives and kind of experimented with different styles of kind of group structure so collectives are non-hierarchical and there's no structure and that also makes it hard to get things done so having some of that experience helped I think to strike a balance with a flat organization that can work well. I think we did a good job for a while but at some point it does become difficult with a diversity of people in their experience levels and with getting things done focus wise You were on the board, did a lot work with NCWIT advocacy and those things One of the things that's really interesting to me about some of those issues now is for most people I think most people are convinced that this is an important thing to talk about I'm not convinced that the action keeps up with the talk Do you see a gap there? How does that play out? What does that mean? Absolutely I think it has more to do with that people are well-intentioned and don't always even realize what they're doing so one of the examples that I have from Quick Left is I got a master's degree in women's studies I run this company we got this, we're good Then I started to notice we also had an apprenticeship program early on but I started to notice that women weren't making it through the screening interview and then I started to notice later on when we were hiring that women weren't making it through our interviews so I started to look at the ways we were asking questions how we were existing in the room so I noticed we do the standard whiteboard interview and the interviewer would go into the room sit down fold arms blank face and then the person being interviewed would be basically standing up there not getting any feedback from the interaction at all and be completely intimidating and so I think that what the person doing the interview was really trying to do was figure out if the person they were interviewing was smart and didn't realize that they might be kind of tainting the interview and causing the person to be more nervous and not bringing out their actual problem solving skills or personality so if you think about it, if you're working with a client you're talking to them you're interacting, there's body language there's hand motions, there's smiles and so it's really easy to kind of see if what you have suggested as a solution is resonating well or not and that's what you should be testing for right not why our manhole covers around like those kinds of interview questions are that are meant just to stump people don't feel authentic, they don't feel like they test for anything and furthermore they do leave people feeling like they're imposters and they shouldn't be there and they're intimidated and women carry that burden quite a bit more although I do find engineering men also feel that way a lot sure what do you think like as I'm a software developer and I've been at this a year or two years or three years and I want to grow into maybe being a team lead, maybe being a company founder like what are the skills or what are the things I can do with the position I'm in to start practicing and building that stuff how can I kind of apprentice under my leadership that's a really great question because I think as a developer it can seem like you want to go into management because maybe that's the only next step to grow in your career and I would encourage you to look at places or encourage your employers to have two technical tracks which is what we had, a management track and an architect track so that you can still advance in your career if you don't want to be a manager but some of the things that you can start with are like can you run the project inceptions or can you be responsible for stand-ups or can you do a lunch and learn, we had Monday lunch and learn where you organize topics even just small things like that can give you a taste of what it feels like to just be doing emails and meetings for a little bit and see if you actually want it try it, that's great one of the top tips that I feel like I give over and over and I'm sure hopefully you've seen this from our people is make it very easy to say yes I think when you're in the employee tier it's easy to imagine say like I should get paid more, Ingrid should know I should get paid more or I'm working too many hours I should get some time off and from the management side I'm dealing with all these other problems I'm not brainstorming what your problems might be and so worst case you get no feedback second worst case is what I call info turds where they're like I'm burned out and then it's now up to you like fix me boss lady have you worked on kind of like coaching people through that kind of thing like how they provide feedback to you that's actually one of my weaknesses because when people give me their info turds I just completely go into fix it right away mode I think a lot of women can be in that role it's taken me a while to practice don't respond immediately and ask what can you do what do you think we should do some of those things it can be easy to like we think as engineers there's a problem with variables and life is like that too so which variables do we have to change and a lot of times one of the things that I felt as a leader is that people would come to me expecting me to be the solver of the variables or me being the reason that everything was broken just make them do it and so that was certainly a frustrating part of running a company or being a leader is that you come from feeling like a teammate with everyone and everyone's really self-sufficient to then you get to see this other side where suddenly people don't take ownership of things and don't have accountability and you're just like and they expect you to have all these answers and you're just like what just happened good stuff and people are nice to you and you're like why are they so nice oh I'm the boss my wife is a social worker and whenever I come home with problems and I'm like oh he's such an asshole and over and over we've had that conversation a lot of times specifically we'll have the same conversation over and over where she'll say to me what was your role in creating the situation and I was like can't it just be that he's a jerk and she'll say the same thing of well you can't control his choices you can only control your choices so if you don't know what you're doing to create the situation no change is possible okay right and I think one of the to me one of the transitional pieces of going from an employee who's producing to an employee who's like incredibly valuable is figuring out like how you control the situation how do you create the situation for you to be successful as we kind of like wrap up you've chosen to kind of change the situation what made you choose so after how many years I started in 2010 so 6 and a half years of quick left decided to be acquired by cognizant now cognizant quick left with a job title with a comma in it as we established last night why well a lot of reasons there's never just one reason but one reason is that running a consulting company is really hard client you're dealing with people it's clients it's going to be so fun it's going to be the three of us and then we had health insurance and then and then things get real um yeah it's a lot of it's customer service so it's hard but then there was also things changing in the market you know as I kind of alluded to earlier the delta between developer salaries and our billable rate we're starting to shift we're almost a victim of our own success right you know we're getting paid really well with developers but especially in this geography clients were wanting to pay less so our hourly rate actually kind of went down and they want their cake and they want to eat it too they don't want juniors they want you to be on site so there was a lot of these things that just weren't working in the market and it's something you know as an entrepreneur you know I've run into these things the whole time where market shifts language shifts whatever pivots we had done but I was also pregnant with twins and it didn't it was really difficult for me to get pregnant so I didn't really want to like mess it up for some business um and so I kind of looked at our choices could I fight for it shift with the market and I made that decision that I didn't want to do that and the only variable was that we had merged with a product company called Sprintly which is an agile project management tool in 2014 and that brought with it a whole other set of like corporate mess including a cap table and investors I had never met and so really I had this kind of you know internally broken structure corporate structure that also was adding to the you know do I want to fix what we're going through in the market and I want to deal with this you know kind of crappy corporate structure I was now and so it was effectively like all on your back and that too and my co-founders had left you know one had left pretty early on and then the other one had left more recently and so yeah it was the last founder left and I didn't join I didn't start the company to be a solo founder I'm not a solo founder kind of person I am a collaborator and so yeah there was just a lot of different things and when I left I was having conversations with companies and taking my girls out to lunch because they would sleep all the time and talking deals so as that woman walking downtown Boulder on Pearl Street with a stroller doing a deal but I couldn't tweet it at the time I was like this is so awesome but if it was if I was in your shoes I feel like I would be on Pearl Street on my thing just being like by the way I'm fucking selling a company you know boss level was quick left a success you know I think to your earlier question about do I feel pressure being a woman in tech that the sale was like the only thing where I was like dang it I think I might be failing women in tech but I think it was you know I got a lot out of it a lot of you know I've grown a ton I got to meet a lot of people you know when we had to put together our due diligence I had to go through and make sure every single person we had ever hired had assigned employment agreement and it was really I felt really good about that and we had a lot of people that have worked at quick left and my first reaction was like oh my god we had a lot of people leave quick left but my second reaction was like you know we had a lot of people that we really mentored and we have amazing jobs I mean we have people at Twitter we have people at Netflix we have people at Instacart Slack so you know I think and people have made life long friendships so I think I'm just going to throw it in there yes you took my people back so I do think it's a success but at the same time you know so my friend Mara Abbott got fourth place in the women's Olympic road race at the very last minute at the finish line she got passed by three people she was by herself for most of the race and then at the last minute I feel a little bit like I got fourth place in the Olympics of businesses you know it wasn't the exit that I had hoped and dreamed of but you know I didn't like have to declare bankruptcy or you know have all these mortgage in my house or anything but you know I have you just you know the standards for yourself at the same time though I think I feel very lucky that I can make this choice where I have this phase of my life that I want to focus on with my family and I had I was able to make the choice of selling and getting myself into a place with Cognizant where it's very comfortable for what I need furthermore it's hardly different in my office we're still working on really great projects in fact Cognizant has a billion dollars to invest in did you say a billion dollars it's a very big company a billion dollars the second half of the sense is really good too I should show up they have a billion dollars to do to invest in innovation over the next four years internally and so we are starting the startups program and so we I am going to be running their mentor program so they kind of like tech stars in a big company but then my team gets to we're going to be the startup studio we get to work on all of these startups so we still get to work on Greenfield awesome new projects but we don't have to worry about sales and all of the stressful things our culture is the same you know there's a lot of things outwardly that look very successful but I do feel like I got fourth place at the Olympics back to true and false did you learn a lot yeah true over like 50 people had their careers accelerated through your leadership over 100 did good work for clients not always I mean you know true it's true so we'll let them tell you like success true or false true thank you Ingrid we're going to transition to lunch first we'll give Ingrid a clap ready three two one