Ep # 191: How A Non-Coder Replaced An Entire Product Team With One Agent ft. Mathias Biilmann (CEO, Netlify)

Mathias Biilmann 0:05 I think three years from now, the majority of valuable software in companies will be built primarily by domain experts that knows the problem they're solving versus software experts. Intro 0:20 Welcome to Across The Funnel, where we dig into concrete Go-To-Market moves across sales, customer success, and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Adil Saleh 0:37 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is Adil, the host at Across the Funnel, and yeah, we've pretty much grown with this podcast. You know, when I started, I was not even married. Now I have a one-year-old daughter, so much has gone past, and we have grown past a lot with a lot of these amazing founders that we met. And these days, for the last I would say two quarters, we're more focused on how we are enabling the new age technologies like AI builders and all these you know generative AI platforms integrated into these developer platforms to build and ship scalable platforms. I know we are talking in the times when building has been easiest than ever, but building the right product has been the toughest because the distribution and and sales and all of that has has been the biggest challenge. So today we're going to be talking about Netlify. I have the chief executive with me, Matt. Thank you very much, Matt, for taking the time. Mathias Biilmann 1:32 Thanks for having me. Adil Saleh 1:34 Love it. So now been there for about more than 10 years now. I remember, you know, when I started first got my job in 2014-15. That's when I first heard about Netify, being a known developer because I was engaged with with with product teams and full stack front end developers. They were deploying and shipping products inside Netify, and that's where I first got to know. So, being a market leader, what is the biggest shift that you have seen in the past, I would say two and a half, three years, in terms of commercial side of things? Like being a CEO, like you are looking at the market, you're saying, "Hey, this is a bigger opportunity. We need to just slow down here, and we need to not just focus only on like building more, but also expanding more, positioning differently." So, how's been the journey in this big wave of AI? Mathias Biilmann 2:21 Yeah, I mean it's been a pretty wild journey, right? In the in the sense that from where we're sitting, we're now sitting in the middle of of two incredibly big changes in our space, right? Like the first is that two and a half years ago, our total addressable market in terms of like the users that were relevant for us was essentially 17 million professional front end developers, right? Like those were the ones that could really get value from our platform, and now it's that has kind of gone from from 17 million to to potentially billions of people, right? Like that's like a really unusual shift in the time in such a short time, right? Like the other thing that has really dramatically changed is the whole build versus buy equation, where in like two and a half years ago, even if you take our company, right? Like, we would be doing our like sentiment surveys for our employee base with Culture Amp that our HR team bought, right? Like, we would be doing our NPS score with Qualtrics as a tool we bought for for running to let the product team run surveys, right? Like we would be doing our support through Sendisk, and we would never consider like building those in house in the past. Now all of those have been replaced with internal apps that our team built and that was directly built mainly by the domain experts, right? Like across HR and product and support. So we sit in this like intersection of suddenly the audience we're working with has fundamentally changed, and then the whole landscape of SaaS businesses versus infrastructure dev tool businesses has sort of suddenly changed towards like everybody now have to be a dev tool founder to some degree because if you're trying to deliver like the whole end-to-end experience, you're probably gonna like miss the mark and and be at risk of of replacement. Adil Saleh 4:47 And this becomes even more interesting. Like thinking of developers who leading these categories, and I see like we do all the research, and you know we are not only using being leaders, we are also looking at like how these categories. Are moving how swiftly when it comes to developer tooling. It's huge, and you talk about like biggest CRMs. They are like you know they're dropping out. So now as a leader in this category, how do you see this is going to shape in terms of adoption of these platforms? Because now it's maybe who knows, like six months, year, two years from now, it's gonna be 50-50. 50% of gonna be the developers, like always been, and 50% of the people like me that are trying to build. They have an idea. They're not, you know, of course, they're not developers. They're not coders, but they have domain expertise and they know the problem and they want to build and ship. So how do you see this trajectory and in terms of turning this motion into a revenue motion, how do you? What kind of initiatives are you guys taking, keeping that inside? Mathias Biilmann 5:49 So I'm probably much more radical in my way of thinking of that. In the sense that I think the traditional for us, I think to some degree the traditional developer audience will be a small niche, not 50-50, but a small niche. I think this probably mimics a bit, like when I started Netlify a decade ago, right? Like our audience that we were building for was front end developers, and at that time, front end developers were not actually seen as real developers, right? Like back in that day, they were seen as someone that would take a Photoshop file, and then they would like typically slice it into like HTML, CSS, maybe a little JavaScript, and then hand it over to like a real developer that would integrate it into an actual working app, and then that process often like kill half of the design and so on, right? Like, but that was like the typical motion, right? Like, and we were sort of somewhat the very first to say, like, I think we can take this emerging audience of front end developers really serious and build platform and tooling and infrastructure for them to ship production quality software directly without like a bunch of backend developers and turn the backend into different APIs and services they're kind of calling from right like and that largely played out and and today like frontend developers like the mainstream web developers it creates most of like the value in terms of building on the web and my prediction is that it'll be similar with what we're seeing now. I think three years from now, maybe even sooner, the majority of valuable software in companies will be built primarily by domain experts that knows the problem they're solving versus software experts that that are primarily experts in building software, and you'll still have both classes, right? Like I don't actually think there's going to be less like developers or software experts, right? Like probably more, but again, the the difference in the total potential size is just so big, right? Like it is really again these like 17 million versus like 3 billion, right? So for us, our bet is that this new team of people building valuable software, not like hobbyists or like people that are really creating values in their companies are primarily gonna be domain experts working with agents and supported by a smaller set of of software specialists that helps them make sure that their software is robust, that maintainable, and so on. Right, like so that's kind of where we're taking the bet where I see a lot of the other players in the market seem to take a more sort of like binary bet, either on like a vibe coding platform that seems like entirely for people that are not software experts, or sort of going in this direction, but maybe expecting more of a 50-50 split, where where the where the developer persona is still the most important and and in the center and when when you look at us you'll see us lean heavier in on like what is it this new audience need because we we expect that they will be there will be much much more of them and not in some like personal or hobbyist software and so on, but in terms of like who is building the business software of the future. Adil Saleh 9:28 Absolutely, and because of course they have more insights into industry and and the real problems, andthey're most of them are living their problems. And in the past. Mathias Biilmann 9:37 Totally, totally, and it's such an unlock, right? Like when when take take a couple of those examples, right? Like take the HR business partner that internally at Netlify replaced Culture Amp with her own app for running all of our sentiment surveys, right? Like in the past before this change, right? Like if we want to do this in house, I would have had to pair her with a product manager that would sit and try to get the domain knowledge out of her head and into some requirements that she could pass to some engineers that would then probably work in like biweekly sprints, show the result at every sprint, and get together with the customer as the like HR business partner, right? Like, and then have like this slow like two week iteration cycle where I get some things wrong because of the translation between like HR product owner, like engineers, and so on, right? Like, and it would probably like even just like the team size and the speed of that would like take so much effort that we would never like never even attempt to build that software, right? Like, and then in this new world, we actually have like a one developer part time attached to the people team now, right? Like, but because the people team is building a lot of software, right? Like in this case, the HR business partners has all the domain knowledge. Like sentiment surveys might sound like just a survey, but it's like really complex, right? Like you got to really know, like how are you gonna structure different teams? So like the minimum team size is always big enough that like responses are not essentially non-anonymous because like you have a team of two people and it's like okay like I kind of know who sent this right like what demographic information do you need to to pull in what can't you pull in what can you pull in some countries but not in others and so on right like and she has all of that domain knowledge right like now she could just sit down with like Netlify and Cloud Code and agent runners and just like prompt that into being. And then there's a couple of pieces where it's like, okay, let's we we need this to connect to our central like system for for managing all the employees and so on, right? Like, let's get a developer in and make sure that the way we do that is secure. That the way we do that is like safe. That we don't accidentally like pull in like compensation information and like all of these pieces, right? Like, but that's just like her collaborating with a developer. It's not this like process, right? Like, but I think that little mini example is so indicative of like how this ability for for people with domain knowledge to drive the development themself instead of like working through a PM and all of that how it just completely changes the kind of software that even becomes like viable to build for them. Adil Saleh 12:41 Yeah, and also this point team brought in pretty interesting. Like more than 30 million every quarter, more than 30 million solo preneurs. They're trying to build something maybe as small as their website, their landing page, their blog, their book page, ebook, whatever. All of this. So only thing that they have is domain expertise. They know what they're selling. They know who they're selling it to, so huge stream. Before that, they were like paying 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, $10,000 to get an agency to do it, like in a month or two months. So this this is big, huge stream up. I spoke to this leadership at Vercel, but that was long ago. So much has seen now. So that's why I'm throwing a lot of these questions. You're so now thinking about the product-led across these smaller segments like solopreneurs, like solo users. You talk about like a lot about this developer experience that you guys started being a first leader. How you're coping up with the signal side on the health side adoption first value paths. How they like you know at the moment, they like they they actually install the repo and do the development. What does the test look like in the in the initial stages? Mathias Biilmann 13:47 Yeah, first of all, I wrote this article in January 25 called AX or Agent Experience and why it matters, talking about like back in the 90s, Don Norman coined the term UX as user experience, right? Like, and became a really big shift in how we think about building software in the sense that, like, before that, you would think more of a software as like a feature checklist, right? Like, does it have this feature or not, right? Like, and they kind of really changed the mentality into like there's some user that's gonna onboard into this software with manuals and installation and like user interface and then actual experience and that experience is going to matter probably even more than the feature list, right? Like, and it really changed how we thought a lot about digital products. And then in the 2010 or so, Jeremiah Kochin coined the term developer experience, sort of saying like when developers augment all of these platforms or build new products, there's also an experience that like again similar before that people would think like is there an API or is there an SDK, and now it became like oh there's a real experience of learning it and so on, and I think. I think I was very quick to see that the same would happen with agents being consumer of our platform, right? Like for the first time, we would have this non human entity that essentially have some experience, right? Like that that's trying to reason and figure stuff out and needs to onboard and so on. So I coined that term AX like both to coin the term but more importantly to sort of reorient my whole team internally around this is a shift from our north star being developer experience to our north star of our project being the agent experience right like how well does Netlify work for work with these agents and the humans that are using them, and that's why I think we're we're seeing sort of two approaches diverged. I think there's like one view that is like our audience is now we're building for agents and that's it. That's sort of like imagining like almost like an autonomous economy 2.0 that's entirely agent driven that's just like buying using building platforms building products and so on and that might very well happen but there is another view which is the one I I would say I even try to fight for right which is that these agents are only doing stuff in so far as it serves some human in in their purpose or their imagination or in their quest to reach other humans or connect with other humans or do business with other humans, and there is no real purpose in just having a bunch of agents do things on their own, right? Like. Adil Saleh 16:42 Like an agent built community, like sort of a community of agents that have different capabilities, knowledge base, different goals, different industry verticals, and they're all collaborating. Like any community, Mathias Biilmann 16:54 Totally. But I think my point is that you can either think about it as pure agents working with each other and our product just being for them, or you can think about there's always a human somewhere on the other side. Hopefully, and we're building our product for them, so our agent experience is still fundamentally a human experience, right? Like someone that comes to our product and is using Cloud Code, a cursor, or a combination of like Lovable and Cloud Code, and like Grok Builder and Google Design Studio, what is their experience having all of these agents do stuff that involves Netlify, but still tracing it back to that human experience, right? Like, and that's sort of our bit in the market that those humans are going to matter, and that those humans are the real people, like yes, the real agency in this. And I could be wrong on that, but like, if I took the other bet and I won, I would still feel like I like I lost. Adil Saleh 17:53 No, no, I 100% agree. I mean, I was just listening to the I think the CTO of Tesla, and he talks about second brain, and you know the primary brain is always going to be human, and you can build secondary brains, you can build all agents ecosystem around it, but the moment your primary brain learns more, that can be obsolete, all everything. So the power remains with with the human, and you know all these successful platforms, they're already struggling with making over-engineering agent actually going multi-product. A lot of successful platforms that come here and be made in the valley during different networking sessions around friends. People are throwing different things, experimenting, but you know it's always good to you know know and learn from people's mistake because you don't get to live long enough to make them yourself. I love the way that you. I was also reading up your background. You had a degree in in music and literature back in the years, and you been a music generalist as well. Love that. Totally. Real background or is there a virtual background that you have? Mathias Biilmann 18:55 That's a real background. That's my own little digital piano down here, and then I do have like a real Steinway piano upstairs in the living room. Adil Saleh 19:08 What kind of music you like? Mathias Biilmann 19:11 I'm sorry. My sense of music is very broad. Everything from like contemporary classical to like indie rock or like it spans very broad. Like when when I play music myself, it's mostly classical music or. Adil Saleh 19:27 Look like as much as I've understood, like classical person, like always going with low beat, classical, more lyrical. Yeah, to play and to listen out with a book and perfect, love it. So some of the questions came from the team. Now thinking, how do you see this developers building platforms across Vercel? All these community projects that they have, like Next, or all these. How do you think that you're going to expand for developer experience to have such projects where they can, you know, do end to end and od course, from a lens of competition, how you're like setting everything you know apart. I know as a product, everybody knows you're better. But when it comes to expansion, when it comes to you know going multi product and having these kind of hooks, especially this low low tier like small mid sizers solopreneurs, how do you think you're going to expand more in multiple segments? Mathias Biilmann 20:20 So the first thing is that we've always had like this core like value of trying to like lower the ceiling but raising the floor, right? Like, so it's kind of always been our mission to build everything in our platform around like a set of characteristics where getting started of building something simple feels magical and easy, but where the way we architect things also scales up to like the pre like the really high end of things, right? Like so today you will see people come in with like zero programming experience, use our new agent and database product and so on to just like, you can literally just go into Netlify and say new project and prompt like build me a personal app for managing all my recipes that allows me to paste in a URL and slurp it into an LLM and store the actual recipe without any of the fluff and the story and so on, and put it behind your login. And we'll just like kick off Claude Code in the cloud. It'll go build the whole thing, understand all of our primitives. We've like moved from like front end cloud to building all like the full stack abilities, database identity, everything you need for that, right? Like, and it'll just work. But you'll also see teams building like League of Legends.com is a Netlify, right? Like our Ciric Insurance is building like mission critical product on us, and like we we we have like North Face.com runs a Netlify right like billion dollar e-commerce businesses right like so we have really maintained always this promise of like we lower the floor but we raise the ceiling, right? Like, and that's like very ingrained in in in our philosophy. And then that comes a lot down to like how do we do that? It comes to a lot of hard work on thinking like, what is the right abstraction level for our core set of primitives, like the core Lego blocks that you can build with, that should both be powerful enough that they serve the advanced users, but that should be like well defined and simple enough that Cloud Code can work with them and build you a whole product that's solid and that doesn't need a ton of like maintenance or operations, none of that, right? Like and can operate. So you'll keep seeing us push really hard on building more of these primitives, making them more coherent and integrated, and making them really feel like a whole, and then moving from a world where we tended to see like this split between like we would give you the front end and the back end for the front end, but let other teams take the back end and so on to a world where in this new world where domain experts are not just like where for an indie hacker, it's extremely useful to be able to build like full stack. Everything is on Netlify, but also for this HR person, they also need the tooling to build full stack apps inside their company where everything is on Netlify. So if you follow our launches over the last year, right, like you will have seen like a big shift in our sort of full stack capabilities and the set of batteries included features where we're taking less of a like leave it up to you to compose everything together and more of like we have a set of like identity and database and blob storage and everything that's just like built into the platform and that you can rely on. Adil Saleh 24:26 Interesting, and you know, I know since you guys are bootstraps ever since 2021 you know, you haven't raised the fund now. In terms of raising funds and your next round, I would not go into that, but thinking of you know the revenue retention funnel. So, what kind of technology processes you have in place for mid market to enterprise? All of all of these customers in that segment might have like more than 50% of them. How you find success? What kind of processes or AI implementation that you have done internally to make sure you measure success from the point of onboarding to the retention. Then, of course, you know expansion models and all of that. Mathias Biilmann 25:07 Yeah, it's another area where the whole build versus buy equation is like fundamentally shifted, right? Like, where again, if you looked at us two and a half years ago, you would see so many different go-to-market tools across all of this, from like Qualified to Pocus to like I mean, just a strew of different tools managing lifecycle and everything, and and now you'll see that there's like a set of core tools left, mainly like Salesforce and HubSpot have still survived, right? Like, and then the rest have really moved into homegrown go-to-market software, and we now have like go-to-market engineers working on that. And a lot of that is agents that like that we've built on top of of Netlify pattern. We use a lot is to build them with like agent SDK running in our background functions, and then triggering from different events, and each agent has a set of tools and sort of like a purpose, right? Like so, you can imagine an agent where if someone adds a bunch of seeds to their pro account, that would be a signal for our go-to-market agent to go look at that account, look at understanding what are they building, what are they doing, who are these people? Are they a company? What kind of company? What problem are they trying to solve? And is this a good time where someone should reach out to them and help them use more of Netlify, help them transition onto maybe getting like SSO in place and getting like more governance in place, or is it a place where they might need SLA and performance guarantees where they're working to go live with big project? Like, what is the use case here and so on, right? Like, and all of that, we've sort of like invested a lot in both from like how do we understand what's happening to customers in that whole self-serve funnel, how do we understand what's happening from a customer success perspective to large enterprise customers, and how do we how do we get much better? Like as I mentioned, we even rebuilt Sendesk in house called Netli desk, and it's like essentially a support team that has built it to support now more than 16 million users, right? Like, but again, for the same reason, we really wanted to own a lot of that, like tightly integrated software across like the support messages coming in, like the sales and success part of the business, and even the product arm of the business, understanding and being able to act on those support issues, and even building agents that can react to those support issues and do real things. Adil Saleh 27:54 The support product sales GTM, all of this is pretty much unified, and you build agents to collaborate, and of course, human in the loop is always important to make sure. Mathias Biilmann 28:06 Always important, but yeah, but we like we use Netlify religiously to build software now across all of those axes, right? Like, and that's a shift for us as well, where we used to build like obviously Netlify has always been built with Netlify, but before Netlify was our front end platform, right? Like, and now it is really like our full stack platform for both like all of our internal apps as well as our internal agents. Adil Saleh 28:30 Perfect. So, Matt, you know, since everybody knows about Netlify, so I didn't waste a lot of time doing introduction. But now, for people to know what's coming next, what makes you excited? What is that one thing that you're building in terms of product? In terms of maybe any any other initiatives, any roles that you have open for the for the next quarter? We're jumping July very shortly. So, what is that you want to share in terms of these new initiatives that makes you super excited? Mathias Biilmann 28:57 Yeah, we're building a lot, and we especially have roles open in in in in product and and and R and D for for strong builders with high sense of of agency that feel excited about using using AI and and AI based tooling to to to build tooling for other builders right like and the exciting part for me is that, like, I think we have so much work to do still. Like, I think if you look at the the general place where you're domain expert, you just build something with cloud code, a cursor, or whatever, and and and you want to put it somewhere where you can operate it and run it and actually build it, right? Like, I think we're already kind of in a good spot for being the most approachable of of all of those platforms and the friendliest, and at the same time, we're so far from being built for this audience. Right, like at the same time, like our experience is strewn with like words that. Are familiar to developers and concepts that are familiar to developers, so they're like barely explained in the in the UI. There's few workflows getting you into them, right? Like, and we have so much opportunity and work to do there to really reflect how software development is changing from people sort of sitting and working manually to code to a world where people are collaborating with coding agents and where it it it's more around like introducing the full software development lifecycle to these people than expecting that they work in in in the old way and and part of that, like, is more and more of these batteries included, right? Like, it's clear that for a lot of these people, it doesn't make sense that you sort of like should need to also go to GitHub and sign up there and like have have like this whole workflow centered around your code when the code is now just like some output from agents, right? Like it's a lot of lot of stuff to build there. We have a ton of work on the product line we call agent runners. That is really our like cloud agents based on running not our own agent, but like the the the the most important coding agents in the world. So right now, that's like thought code and and codecs, and we'll probably extend that with like potentially things like open code or like agents that that that can use a broader set of of models as well, right? Like, but there's so much we can do there when we really think about like these cloud coding agents as another primitive in our platform that does that you can be very interactively working with, but that can also be doing work for you in the background. That can listen to webhooks, respond to things happening in your Slack or in different places where you have context and so on. Right, like internally, we are building tooling like again closing all these loops, right? Like, can we have like agents internally that just like constantly looks at everything happening in Netly Disk, like acts on those support tickets, do planning runs and build runs, and start like having agent runners automatically propose changes that our team can verify. There's so much to to to to build there, and so much and and so many more like batteries included primitives to to to build out. So much of that whole workflow layer that that that used to be extremely centered around Git operations platforms. It is now really shifting towards like cloud-based agent runners. Adil Saleh 32:44 Yeah, and I love the fact that the way you're approaching this as as you know the the workflow completes when when when when a ticket has been resolved, and a lot of these developers are putting in ClickUp and Asana and all of those. And now that you have inside Netlify, so they can run their own streams within here, and and of course we have like all plot cores and every other source like language models to interact with the knowledge base and context and all and and and how do you think like you know looking at anthropic lot of these big companies are built on the way they are engineering and making it really really fast all the next model comes with better context longer context better memory, all of this. How do you how do you see this ending? And what is an ideal scenario for Netlify to see anthropic or you know cloud code and clot to end? Mathias Biilmann 33:33 I mean, I think as as an independent player, all of us kind of depends on there being a certain level of competition, and I'm raised between a lot of model providers, right? Like it's it's bad for everyone. I think if there's like only only one, and it's good, like competition is good, right? Like they push each other further, and it makes a lot of room for for people. Like I think no one smart will will will want sort of like their whole infrastructure platform to be tied to a model, right? Like you kind of want to jump around, right? Like, or even to an agent, right? Like you kind of want to want. So, so for us, the important piece is that there is real competition between the different coding agent companies and and and model companies. And then the way I think about it, right? Like I, I, I think a lot about our our product philosophy in in three simple points. Where the first point is like expect like build for the future of of AI, and that's a future where where where I expect these agents to be more intelligent than me, right? Like in almost any way that matters, right? Like realistically, I I expect them to be better dealing with like massive amount of knowledge and like bring it in, like reason through really hard problems, writing code, understanding large code bases. Like I expect that they will, and in some cases they already are. Right, like I expect they'll be super intelligent and and and better than me. So we need to build. Our product in a way that the more that becomes true, the better our product becomes. Right? Like there's always a risk around building your product around what the agents can't do right now, and then over time your product loses more and more value, and we have to build in a place where okay, if we assume that these more like these agents are really gonna just get stronger, do more longer autonomous work with deeper intelligence and so on. That needs to benefit our product, right? Like we need to be a product that gives them facilities and feedback loops and way to interact with the humans behind it. That that that that's better. Then the second point is that while we're building for agents and building for a great agent experience, we believe that we're building for a world where humans are the ones with agency, right? Like, and that was the point I touched upon earlier, right? Like, where I feel like if if if I build for a different kind of world and one, then then I would still lose as a human being, right? Like, so we gotta build for for a world where we believe that people have agency and purpose and imagination, and our product is eventually for these people and should feel human and should make them like the the the drivers in in in any way that matters and should enable people with imagination to turn that imagination into reality, right? Like, and then the third pillar is that we take this new audience of domain experts extremely seriously. We don't think they are hobbyists or a secondary audience, and so on. We think that that they are going to be building the majority of impactful and important software in the world over time. So we need to take them serious. Like we we we don't think about them as like less developers than the real developers, right? Like we think of these people as the people that will be building most of the software in the futures, and that are sort of like the three guiding principles of how we go into this next stage of building Netlify. Adil Saleh 37:09 Love that building for the future, humans, you know, taking you know taking over the you know human managing the AI, Mathias Biilmann 37:17 People front and center. Adil Saleh 37:18 Yes, and that this this is exceptional. So now, looking at your culture, could you also briefly go through what kind of culture, the DNA that you have internally as a team? Mathias Biilmann 37:27 Yeah. Adil Saleh 37:27 I know a lot of people. You know, I've met in in the Valley. They speak highly of of Netluff's team and people that are so energetic, deep-minded. Always, you know, some of those events that you know we've been a part two, so go ahead, people that want to join Netify team. What kind of soft skills that we talk more about? There are no more soft skills, but they are new. Soft skills are super important. So please also go through that. Mathias Biilmann 37:54 Yeah, I mean, like we've sort of formulated them in in in our company values that that I that I always think like the values have like changed how we formulate them over time, but they've always kind of flown from like what kind of company we build, right? Like, and the the first value at Netlify is be inclusive, right? Like we we have a team of very different kinds of people, and we want to tap into very different kinds of people, and then even more so in this space we're going into, right? Like we are aiming to build for like billions of people that are gonna be culturally and mentally and like in interest and capability, like just like an incredibly varied customer base, right? Like so, both internally and externally, we really aim to to to be inclusive and and and think about like a broad range of experiences of genders, of cultures, of backgrounds, and and make sure that inside Netlify those can thrive together, and that we can build a product that that's relevant for for for all of them, the second the second value at Netlify is own it, ship it. We we we we lean team now, where everybody has broad responsibility and and scope, and where we want people that are that are not passengers, but but but pilots, right? Like people that that are not coming to Netlify because they think we'll go somewhere exciting and they want to join the ride, but because they think what we're building is exciting and they want to be part of making it happen, right? Like, so we want people with strong sense of ownership, and if you own something, you better ship it. Like, don't don't don't own it just to build your empire and so on, right? Like if you own something, the expectation is that you ship something. The third value is to care deeply and and have fun. As you said, like the people we hire are generally people with a lot of passion that that that really care about what they're doing, about what they're building, and so on. That's really like that's always been really important to me, right? Like I thrive around people that are passionate about anything, right? Like if someone can be passionate about like stamp collection, and I'll get excited with them, right? Like, but but if you're not really passionate, I like like some people are not, right? Like some people come and do their work and they're good at it. Like if if you lack that passion, I've I kind of become like this as a personal difference. I get annoyed, right? Adil Saleh 40:26 It shows on their face right away. You know? Mathias Biilmann 40:29 Yeah. They're not and then it's just like it's like that care deeply and have fun because sometimes when we all really care and it's hard and we're building and owning and so on. You can also forget that, like the journey, gotta be worth it as well, right? Like, it it gotta be be fun doing the work, and we do better work when when we have fun. And the last, just to wrap it up. Like the last of these values is simplify, and that is just really that, like Adil Saleh 40:58 Simple to communicate. Mathias Biilmann 41:00 Simple to like Netlify as it best as a product is is is taking like in the beginning we took this problem of like deploying a front end to a globally distributed CDN with like built in like CI/CD and so on that at the time would often take like a DevOps team's three months to set up or something right like and we boiled it down to three clicks, and you were set right. Like that's always been when we are our best. We we simplify and make something that is inherently complex seem very simple. And that also goes internally in the company, right? Like the more you have people that simplify processes instead of making them more complex, that find simple solutions instead of hard solutions. The the better you thrive. So I look a lot for that in in in people. Are they simplifiers or are they not? Those are like the the the the four the four values we we sort of explicitly try to operate the company around. Adil Saleh 41:57 Listening, these are the traits that you know that you you gotta have or you gotta aspire to have being a part of Netlify's team. Thank you very much, Matt, for all this time and this insightful conversation. I got to learn a lot for a lot of these folks. I can have like a few folks on my finger that includes you as well. So thank you very much for being that and being super insightful and giving me so much to learn. Mathias Biilmann 42:21 Thank you so much. Adil Saleh 42:23 Appreciate it. Outro 42:25 Thank you very much for listening to Across The Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore Hyperengage at hyperengage.io and Dextego at dextego.com.