Agility and Innovation in a New Economy

Michael Mendenhall: Thank you to Vox for holding this and giving us the opportunity to share a very interesting customer of ours who is certainly redefining B2B payment structures. And we're going to talk a little bit about what has happened during COVID because the company was founded in 2018. They started scaling and all of a sudden everything goes remote. Darren, who is a co-founder of the company, Chief Product Officer and Strategy Officer, has been with the company but wasn't always in the financial space. He actually worked at NASA. So after he graduated, he went into NASA for over a decade. He worked on all the space shuttle missions and learned quite a bit, certainly about looking at 17,000 employees who are working on a space shuttle and well over 300,000 different parts that have to go into that. He did most of the testing that you see, the experimental testing that goes into the space shuttles, trained astronauts and was involved in every mission except the Challenger one.

What he learned there, you're going to understand, really applied to what he's doing in financial services, in fitech and how he's redeveloping your payment structure in B2B. So, what is it that you should be looking at? And instead of looking at this spider network that you have relative to all the applications financially someone can transact with, he's made that much easier and much simpler. And we're going to hear about that. The other thing we're going to hear about is he's a science fiction writer. He writes both fiction and non-fiction. All of these applications and careers he has have applied to what he's doing now in financial services and it's very interesting. So we're going to take a journey with him. Darren, come on up.

Welcome!

Darren Beyer: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Michael: So, I want to go back a little bit, you get a little bit of history. Then we're going to go into what he's doing and how he's revolutionizing payment structures. You've had a great career in this space prior. You've had other companies that you've sold, et cetera, and now you're in a new one. It took you out of science fiction writing back into the engineering world. So talk to us about the NASA experience and how complicated that was on these shuttle missions and what you learned from that, that now is going to apply because you basically told us, it's much more difficult doing what you're doing now in financial services and this payment structure than it was at NASA.

Darren: Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting one. So, I wanted to be a NASA engineer from, I was six years old. We had lived overseas, had just come back to the United States, early 70s. My mother woke me up in the middle of the night to watch a moon landing and with little, dating myself, little 19 inch TV, rounded corners on the thing, piece of furniture, right? And we're up in the middle of the night watching this and I decided right then that this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be part of the space program and make that happen. And so, everything I did, studies in high school, in college, everything, led right to that. And frankly I got lucky. I think you can't get everywhere you want to go on skill alone. I got lucky. I got in with the right group at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and started launching experiments on space shuttles and it was a great experience.

And, by the way, people always ask me, so why did you leave? And the short answer is, I got bored. And I know it may be difficult to understand why that is, but it was the same thing over and over again. And where I found I had this little bit of spark that was left at the end of it was when we would have to solution things, right? We would have to come up with creative solutions to get things done. But there wasn't enough of that there. And I always tell people I made this very natural transition from launching space shuttles into doing payments. And they are surely related somehow, right? And actually, they aren't. But it was, I think, again, the key thing was the solutioning piece of this. Now, I've been in payments for 20 years. I was at NASA for right about 10 and I'm still in payments because I haven't gotten bored yet.

The payments piece of the landscape is so difficult and ever-changing and there's always new people coming out with new things. So you had banking get revolutionized with Chime, right? Chime really was the catalyst for changing that. You're now seeing a bunch of revolution going on in the credit space. That's going to be the next big thing that's going to change. We're calling it neo credit. And all of these require taking all these pieces and parts and doing what with them? Solutioning it, right? And that's what has kept me in the payment space and interested as long as I have.

Michael: So Qolo, how do they differentiate themselves in that space?

Darren: There used to be this saying that everybody hates their payments company. There's never fun. It was always a mess. And when we were on the inside looking out, we were part of these companies, everything was wonderful, right? Everything was rosy. Our clients love us. And then you leave there and you start to look in and you realize, "Eh, it's not so nice anymore. I thought it would be a lot easier to get all the things done I need to get done." And you had mentioned a little bit of it is, and this applies to really any company that you're going to be out there that has any complex solution. You've got to go to a number of different providers to get done what you want to get done.

We call it the spider web. And in the technical world, whether it's payments or anything else, you're connecting, connecting, connecting. You've got to get reporting. You've got to munge all this stuff together to build up a customer service application, to do all these different things, right? To make all this stuff happen. It's not easy and it causes a lot of problems. And we were all doing our own gigs. We had worked together for a number of years previously in payments. We had all gotten together and said, "Is there anything out there? Is there anybody out there that's doing this?" Because we had these needs. And the short answer was, no.

Michael: So you're taking this spider web and what?

Darren: Taking it down to one strand.

Michael: One strand.

Darren: Right? Instead of having all these crisscrossing things, you get to us through one API set. And we also like to say we've got, for the Lord of the Rings fans out there, it's the one API to rule them all. We can literally make every kind of payment through one API, single API. And so now what that means is, for all these people who have been looking at this daunting exercise, and again it's not just a payments thing, this applies to any sort of company that's building anything off of somebody else's technology. It's fundamentally easier to say, "Go and integrate with one company and one API set," than it is to go out to six or seven or eight of them.

Michael: So do these new products or solution sets that come into the marketplace, like a firm, these institutions that now allow you to purchase something and pay over time, you talk about that as really just a layaway program. Do you think that puts people deeper in debt? They don't realize that they've actually committed to this and where does that go as a part of what you're doing?

Darren: So we would power under the coverage because by the way, if you're going to be making a purchase with someone like a firm or Afterpay or anybody, you got to pay the merchant, you got to get money to them. So that would be a function that we do. If it' s collecting funds from the consumer, you got to be able to bring that money in. So that's something else that we do. And by the way, they're probably going to two or three different providers to get this done. Now what you mentioned about the credit piece of this, and this just generally talks about consumers, the divide in financial services generally has gotten wider over the past six, eight, 10 years. Not narrower. You're seeing more people paycheck to paycheck. You're seeing, again, more folks that are on the opposite side of that and the middle area doesn't really exist anymore.

So, what happens with, what I worry about happening, because a significant chunk of my background has been in the underserved space in financial services, is you worry about people that go to Merchant X and they use a firm and they go to Merchant Y, they use Afterpay and they go to three or four or five other ones and all of a sudden they're deep in debt and none of the individual buy-now, pay-later providers would even know that there's a problem. But in aggregate there is, but there's no one really looking at all that, right? That's a problem. And it's just going to cause these individuals to get further in trouble. So this is a key scenario. We're starting to see now innovative companies is why we're calling it a neo credit that can look at it from the opposite side of the equation. Let us have the financial relationship with you. Let us get your direct deposit and your pay similar to what Chime does. Then let's work in some innovative and new and different kinds of credit that does allow you to stay financially healthy and not get underwater.

Michael: So that won't go away. But with your platform, each and every one of these new innovations that come into this space, you're going to have to adapt, correct?

Darren: That’s right.

Michael: And so you're constantly innovating.

Darren: We have to be because our products are the components that allow our clients' products to be put together. And if you're not constantly looking at those and changing those, because by the way there's all sorts of new faster payments and immediate payments and different things.

Michael: Does some of this go away? Does a firm and the rest of these just go away, this moves on? And where do credit cards sit?

Darren: I mean, listen, I'm sure everybody in this room, you've got a few credit cards, you use them as an expense mechanism, not as a way to hold credit, right? For the people that are using them as a way to hold credit. I'd love to see them die a horrible death. It's just a mechanism that's been out there forever, for 50 plus years, it hasn't changed. Again, it's one of these things that gets people in trouble. I mean think about it. You get a credit card with $1,000 line and you fill it up because you spend on it. Because you can. And now you're stuck paying 19% and then you miss a payment and it goes up to 29% and you miss another one that goes up to 35% and before long you're eating hundreds of dollars a month in payments.

And I think that's a horrible mechanism. As an expense mechanism for most of us in this room, it's wonderful. It works great. You get your reward points. Everybody's happy. For the underserved market, not a fan, right? Again, I'd love to see it just go away as it relates to that market. And that's what's happening now with some of these other entities coming in. Fintechs, they saw this revolution in what we call neo banking or digital banking with Chime and other ones like that. And now they're starting to come in and say, "Can we do this with credit and be a healthier challenge?"

Michael: Talk to us about employers because there's some changes happening there relative to advanced pay.

Darren: It's a really interesting one. And you could look at this as a form of credit, it's technically not. Although legislation may come in and who knows, and it may go there. But it's called earned wage access or on-demand pay. So you start working in a pay period on Monday, you're not getting paid for that Monday until 19 days later. So it's two weeks plus the whole further week on a pay cycle. For us, it doesn't matter. We've got stuff set up in the background, we've got savings, so that doesn't matter. But for a lot of folks, again, living paycheck to paycheck, what happens when the car breaks down? Well now I've got an expense. How do I get the money for it? How do I get to work to earn the money? And this can be a real problem. So they go to payday lenders. By the way, I want a show of hands, anybody have an idea of what a payday lender, what the effective APR is for a payday lender?

Speaker 3: 36% is what's legally allowed.

Darren: That's what's legally allowed.

Speaker 4: One hundred.

Darren: Try 350 to 750% effective APR depending on where you are in the country. And it's a combination of fees and other things that they get instituted. 36% is the legal limit. And these guys, by the way, it's Whack-A-Mole with the state attorney generals trying to knock these guys down. When you get into that cycle, it's just a horrible place to be because once you take that, they've got you and you're continuing and continuing and continuing. And so what your earned wage access does is, and this was the last gig I had before I came to Qolo, allows you to take a part of the pay that you've earned in a pay period but haven't been paid for yet. It's not technically a loan. You've earned it. The company just hasn't gotten around to paying you yet. And this is something that can be this lifeline for people and you do so at a very low cost.

Michael: Are you finding employers are embracing that?

Darren: Yes, especially in the hourly and lower income demographic employers. So, although some not as much as well, but you see it a lot in call centers, but you also see it in nursing facilities and you see it in nursing care and in elderly care facilities as well.

Michael: Does Qolo have to participate in this in some way?

Darren: We end up, and we've got clients that play there. We are the mechanism by which we move the money either in or out, right? To either get the money out to the consumers or to get it back from them at the end of the day.

Michael: When you think about global, right? And cross border. That has become very problematic, moving money around. Where do you see that going? Is this going to become easier?

Darren: Well it has to. It's also one of these things that it's a major greenfield. So by the way, another show of hands, engage the audience, love doing this. So, what do you think you pay if you send a wire transfer, let's say you're going to rent a house down in Costa Rica. I'm going to use this because my mom did this for us right before the pandemic. And you're going to send a wire down there for the week for the house. How much are you paying your bank to do that for you?

Speaker 5: $30.

Darren: 30 bucks. So, say it was a $10,000 transaction. You're now paying $30.

Darren: You're paying 30 bucks and 300 basis points to send it, which is 3%. So you're paying $330 to get that wire transfer. Why? Because Bank of America, who by the way, or Wells or whomever you're sending it through, they're charging you retail for an exchange markup. The actual cost of doing a transfer and sending money bank to bank, you can get it down to next to zero. But they're charging you that. Why? Because they can and because people don't understand it. So, there's a massive greenfield out there to be able to make that kind of stuff easier. And we're getting there in what we do. We've got an offering now that can do bank to bank. It's not 100% there. But those are the kind of things. You're starting to see it in business and other...

Michael: Is that due to sort of regulations in each country or each ...?

Darren: No.

Has nothing to do with that at all. It's one of these things that's been there forever. The cost for the bank, because they have big banks by the way, have access to the FX markets is essentially zero. I mean it's so small that it's essentially zero.

Michael: So I want to get to COVID. You're in California, you came from California. You have employees here in Florida, you were all together. Now you're dispersed in a very complex environment with the products and services you have to create and manage. How did that work?

Darren: So when we were 20 people, which is what we were at when COVID started, for me, it was the greatest thing since slice bread. I didn't have to get on a plane and travel down to Florida once a month, right? This was great. And then the other side of it is, by the way, payments is a massively growing industry—fintech and payments generally. In 2020, 7.1% of all startups were fintech. So what happens when you've got that kind of growth and you've got a very limited, what I like to call, not a talent pool, but an expertise pool? It gets diluted. So it's really hard to get talent. There's a significant, well there's war on talent everywhere, but there's a significant war on talent in the payments world.

And so for us, being able to go from, "Well we're going to have this office in Fort Lauderdale," and you've got to be located somewhere in close proximity, to being able to open it up and say, "We're going to go talent first and geography second," has allowed us to assemble really an amazing group of people. I mean these are folks with a lot of expertise, a lot of these folks who have worked with before. By the way, of have those first 20, probably 19 of them came out of our networks. So we've worked with them. So when you're 20 and you've worked with these folks before and you're on Zoom and you have a relationship, it's a lot easier than when you're 80, which is where we are now. And most of those remaining 60 didn't come out of our network and they don't have relationships with anybody else and trying to build up that camaraderie, et cetera. It's now turned from what was great to a significant challenge for us. And this is very difficult for us to overcome and we're trying to figure out ways around it, frankly.

Michael: Well within that environment, what we've seen, at least in small businesses is agility and velocity are competitive advantage. And people have restructured, reorganized to move much faster. Certain things that would take nine months to come to market are taking six weeks. So you see this huge improvement in the innovation cycle. Yet now you're remote. Talk to us about that.

Darren: So, the agility is nice. And you've heard this, by the way, I'm sure from a number of different news stories et cetera, around remote work, which is that, where's the separation? Now I'm a founder, so don't count me as an example on this, but I'm up and on the computer at 6:00 a.m. We're an east coast company, so I've got to be up and going then. I'm working all throughout the day and then I'm working, I'm sitting on the couch and we're watching some TV show at night, but I'm working on my laptop. But I'm not the only one doing that, right? We've got people throughout the company doing that and we'll even tell them not to, but people want to succeed. They want to do as good a job as they can.

And that's a problem because then they get burnt out and we've lost a couple people that have just had to step back and go, "This is not for me. I've got a family. I've got to spend time with them." And even though we certainly do not by any stretch pressure people to work, there's always, no matter what, there's that implicit pressure there. That you feel like you have to and because it's there for you to do, you do it.

Michael: So there's that discipline. So you're a believer in hybrid because we're finding there's a lot of hybrid. You can come in if you want. There'll be a place.

Darren: Well it's that. But the other piece of it is, it's the discipline around making sure that people take time off. I can actually present you without the specific numbers, but I can present you a scientific use case why happier people are more productive. There's a scientific background to that. If you're working all the time and your brain is fried, are you happy? I think fundamentally you aren't. You can't be. So there's got to be this balance and you've got to somehow force people and you don't have that end of the day…

Michael: So how do you do innovation then at Qolo? You're remote, you got to move quickly, you got to stay on top of, clearly in the financial services sector, all of these new solutions and products that are coming to market. I mean, you look at Block Phi, right? And you start to see how they're pulling digital currency in and I want to get to that. And you're like, okay, well now, how do we deal with that? So how do you innovate, stay on top of that working remote?

Darren: I mean, the fortunate thing is that our platform was built in such a way that it just spawns innovation, it's highly flexible, et cetera. So we've got a little bit of a built-in advantage on that. But beyond that, it's a combination of getting some in-person meetings. So we let our original space lapse when the lease ran out during the pandemic and we're getting a new space built just up the road here in Fort Lauderdale. It's going to be very cool. It's not built around coming into the office. It's that hybrid model you're talking about. But we have so many people remote that our plan, when we get that going, which it's going to be month or two out, we're in that realm, is that we'll be having team meetings, we're bringing in people from around the country to come in for the team meeting and we'll have other teams in at the same time. And it's a meeting facility, it's really not an office facility. And then people get together, we'll be able to collaborate, et cetera.

The innovation stuff, again, we're lucky because we've got that underlying platform that allows us to do that. But I can see this being stymied and very difficult for people that don't have that have to come up with new and different ways to do things. Because to innovate you got to have to collaboration. To have collaboration, you've got to have the relationships with the people that you're collaborating with.

Michael: So how are you going to deal with, I want to get to this before, we'll open it up for questions. Crypto, NFTs, how are you going to, as you certainly are a platform for transactions, how are you working with that set of new variables?

Darren: It's a tough one. So, crypto is an interesting one and NFTs and there was just the story that came out about the platform that's basically they're shuttering for now because they've had all this, call it fraud or whatever that's going on where people are recreating things that aren't theirs. There's a lot of issues around that. Crypto's an interesting one, though. It's obviously been around for a while. Our platform is fundamentally able to store crypto and do those kind of things, but we're not really going there. We look at crypto as something that is a gap technology. And I think it was Elon Musk was saying, show me the compelling consumer use case for crypto. And I have yet, I love by the way, anybody wants to come and tell me one afterwards. I'd love to have that conversation. I have yet to find that compelling consumer use case for a digital currency.

Not saying there aren't uses for it, there are. But what it comes down to, I look at it as a gap technology. The stated use cases before were, well we could be walking on a mountaintop somewhere and there's no data anywhere around and we could tap phones and I could pay you. The cross border components. "Well it's so much easier and cheaper to send it cross border, et cetera." I would argue that I just told everybody here, you can send money cross border for almost nothing. It's the networks. It's the banks. It's these other things that are artificially raising the price around that.

By the way, there's Viasat and other companies that are putting up, we're going to have full global coverage for internet. So now is that remote nature of being able to trade currency all that important? So some of those initial use cases around it are really starting to fall apart as the technology comes around. And again, the moving of money. If you think Visa and MasterCard are going to get disaggregated because they want to be charging their network fees, they're going to get disaggregated by Crypto. No, because they can send money for essentially zero right now and they'll do it if they have to get them out.

Michael: Awesome. Well listen, there's one, because I want to open up for questions. Science fiction. You were writing a trilogy. Talk to us about that and the application of writing and what it means in business.

Darren: Was writing a trilogy. I got through two of them and then this thing called COVID and startup came along and everything stopped. So, it's unfortunate I have people writing ...

Michael: You have published otherwise.

Darren: I have two published and I have people, I have fans that are now angry at me. But by the way, for the whole GRR Martin thing? I got a few years to go before I get to that level. But what's interesting about it is I've learned more from writing for general product development use, et cetera. I've learned more from writing than I have for anything else in my career. And what it comes down to is when you build a universe, whether it's science fiction or it's a story that you're building in current day or whatever it may be—you’ve got to build out your universe and then you find a hole and then you got to say, "Okay, now I have to attack that. How do I fill that in with other things?" And then that's going to generate another little thing that you have to build and that has holes and you have to fill all these things in until you've got this castle wall around your story and your background.

How is that any different than building a product? You have to do exactly the same thing. You lay out your ideas for a product. You figure out what's going to be there. There are going to be holes. There are going to be things that don't work. You've got to attack those. And then when you attack them, that generates another little wall and another little wall and you've got to just figure that out as you go along. And so it's a very interesting exercise that when you look at these, it comes down and to what we talked about in the beginning—solutioning. You have to come up with the solutions for this and it doesn't matter whether you're writing a book or launching a space shuttle or if you're building a product. It's all about solutioning and building it in a way that you get rid of the holes, you build a product that people can use.

Michael: Well you certainly did that at NASA. That's another conversation. We're going to open it up to questions because we have about seven minutes. There are mics on the side. So if any of you want to ask a question of Darren, he's happy to take the ...

Karen: Hey Darren. I'm Karen. I just actually want to say thank you.

Michael: If you could say where you're from, too?

Karen: Oh sure. I run a company called IFundWomen. We're a funding marketplace for women entrepreneurs. So, I just actually just have two comments. One, thank you for being honest about how hard it is to innovate quickly when everyone's remote. And we're doing this, we've been doing the same thing at IFundWomen where we've been creating meeting spaces for product and engineering to come in from all around the country. Because we've been able to hire great people from everywhere, which is one of the only benefits of the pandemic. And have them come in for a week and just build shit and then build relationships and product and go off and it gets done so much faster.

**Darren:**Is it working for you?

Karen: That is definitely working. The kids in Brooklyn who all wanted the office back in the city pressured me and into getting the office back, which was the biggest waste of money because none of them go there. So we got rid of the office, sorry, to the WeWork CEO, but it was a WeWork. So we got rid of that and we started doing this and that really worked. So, cosign and thank you.

Darren: Thank you. Appreciate the comment.

Nicholas: Hi there. Nicholas Sweet with Goldman Sachs. This question is for both of you. How are you both preparing your employees to deal with the ever-increasing pace of change?

Darren: You never can. I mean, it is just one of those things that everything is changing so rapidly today and it doesn't matter what area it’s in, whether it's financial services or it's employment, it's how you go to work, how you get your work done. All of it is changing. In a lot of cases, we're doing it poorly, I'll be honest with you. Things like communication, by the way, we've probably got five or six different ways to communicate inside our company. We're trying to get that down. But everybody has their own favorite. So, engineers want to use Slack and other folks want to use Google Chat and other folks want to use Google Meet and other folks want to use Zoom. And part of that is just making sure that everybody is on the same page as it relates to things outside of it and the change outside.

That's a tough one. Again, when you don't have the in-person piece of it, it's very difficult to get a point across. And by the way, you get into an all hands meeting and there's 80 people in a Zoom meeting and it's hard enough to communicate what's happening in the company, much less what's happening outside and how to deal with it.

So this is a real problem and it's again, at the beginning of it, I thought it was great. It was just so wonderful to be able to get up and just work and walk into my office and work. And then you come to a realization, you pass a certain point when you say, this is not great anymore and this is problematic and this is where we are today and we're challenged and we're trying to figure it out. And I think everybody is. I think, Karen getting together and meeting is such a critical component of this. Gets back again, everything gets done with relationships. You've got to build the relationships. And this is one tool that, as soon as we get our new space, which is going to be really cool, by the way, it's in this old, the FAT village, fine arts and technology village in Fort Lauderdale. It's going to be so cool and we're going to be able to get people in and have fun food and everything else. But again, it's a meeting place and not an office space.

Michael: I would say we don't read enough and we don't listen enough. I think everything is short form. Things get misinterpreted. You lose a lot of efficiency. And so if you think about the pace of change, the idea of being current means being well-read, listening and not as much short form. And I think we've lost narrative. We've talked about story and narrative is very important. We don't have very good writing skills and therefore you lose efficiency again. So I think there's some skills that you want to instill to say if you want to stay in front of what is happening, read, listen and learn how to write. Everything is short form and I think you lose clarity and therefore then you can lose judgment really quickly.

Evgeniya: Hi, my name is Evgeniya. I'm a founder of a company called Generation KM. So we run corporate innovation solutions. So my question for you, Darren, is innovation comes in different shapes and forms. So what is your personal definition of innovation?

Darren: Well, you just laid out a pretty good one, right? It comes in a number of different forms. Innovation happens at all levels of a company. So there's product innovation, platform innovation, those are the things you go out and advertise to the market, right? The other side of innovation, as we are struggling with this remote nature, we're also struggling with process. How do we get clients implemented? How do we get them implemented quickly and efficiently? So difficult to do in this remote environment. So innovation can come there, innovation can come in any form, in any department, in any function within a company. And I think that gets lost on a lot of people. So being able to innovate again, it could be a risk fraud person who figures out a new and better way to do something.

By the way, that one little thing that they could do might end up saving a company millions of dollars. So, there's these little pieces of it and you have to be able, it is very difficult, right, to be able to do is to foster that and to empower and enable people to innovate in their day-to-day jobs and not think that innovation has to be the next Uber. Doesn't have to be that. Innovation can come in these little steps that can have dramatic impacts.

Michael: I think you have to provide a forum and you have to create an atmosphere that allows people to feel comfortable because you'll see ideas come from anywhere. And are they useful? Right? I spent 17 years at Disney and it was all about that environment and that culture that you build that allows people to comment, it allows people to bring forward ideas no matter how silly it may be, some of them. You find little nuggets and bring the ideas forward. Think big. A lot of people have big ideas and they water them down because they feel like, oh no, people will laugh or people think this is silly. But no, you have to provide the opportunity for people to think big. And the bigger the better, actually.

Darren: Just to add, I'll talk about one. We were talking about this just prior. One of the teams that I was involved at NASA, our job was to launch space shuttles and launch the stuff on them and get it back and get them back safely. And we had this one mission that was exceeding exceedingly high damage rates while we were processing it, right? We were putting it together. And we ended up putting a team together that figured out different ways to get on and off the payload as we were processing it. That went from, we had 692 hours of rework the first time that particular payload launched and ran. And the second time it got down to two. And for 692 hours, for every hour on, it's probably 20 hours off of the payload to do it. So you're talking tens of thousands of hours of work that were gone by taking a bunch of engineers and technicians and quality people, putting them together, putting them in a room, having a good process to foster those ideas.

**Michael:**But you went outside in, too. So you get too close to a product or what you're working on and you haven't stepped out and come back in.

Darren: No, that's exactly what it was and when we first got together we're like, "We know the problems, we can solve them." And then you go, when you look at it you go, oh, the problems that we're bringing up are really symptoms and the real underlying root causes are something different. And when we attacked those, we had just massive results. And by the way, we put things in place that were there for the next decade until the shuttle program stopped.

Michael: We probably have time for one question. Another question.

Victoria: Hi, I'm Victoria from GET Cities and I would like to know more about your concept of diversity and innovation. You mentioned that your team was 20 members and now 80. So, tell us a little about how it's conformed and the percentages there in the leadership and in the base of the team.

Darren: So, I mean, I'm pretty proud of the diversity we've got in our company. So our CEO's a woman. So, by the way, you look at the numbers of women founders, teeny tiny. What was it? 2% of the VC funding went to women founded companies. So it's pretty poor. So we've got a woman CEO and founder, co-founder. We've got significantly high diversity across the board from racial, gender, et cetera. On our engineering side, we've embraced Women Who Code and have a funnel coming in from that. So we feel that that is a critical component of what we're doing. And it's kind of simple mathematics, right?

There's lots of good people that aren't white males and you don't need to fill your company up with white males. As a matter of fact, when you do the opposite, I think you get the better out of everything. So we've taken that tact and I think it's been, again, pretty successful. Our engineering team, we're not quite at parity. And part of that has to do with the supply chain of women coders, et cetera, women engineers. But we're not far off. We're just a few percentage points under a 50/50 split. Our leadership team is very, again, very diverse. Again, different racial makeup, gender makeup, et cetera.

Michael: Well, that's all the time we have. Darren, I want to thank you for being here. I want to thank you for being a TriNet customer as well.

Darren: Love your products. So, I'll throw in the plug. I've been a TriNet customer, whether it's been this company or another one for more than a decade. Love you guys. What you guys do.

Michael: It's been awesome. We want to see the trilogy completed. We wish you well, maybe on what a Series B, was probably your next goal.

Darren: That’s right.

Michael: But thank you again and we wish you the best of success.

Darren: Thank you.