Why Real-Time Cash Visibility Matters

INTRO  0:00   

Welcome to The Treasury Update Podcast presented by Strategic Treasurer, your source for interesting treasury, news, analysis, and insights in your car at the gym, or wherever you decide to tune in. On this episode of The Treasury Update Podcast host Craig Jeffery sits down with Brett Turner, CEO and founder of Trovata to discuss why real time cash visibility matters. They explore Brett’s career journey in the startup world, the concept of real time, steps to achieving true cash visibility, and ways to overcome key impediments. Listen in to find out how to access valuable cash insights to position your company for success. 

 

Craig Jeffery  0:49   

Welcome to the podcast, Brett. 

 

Brett Turner  0:52   

Yeah, thanks, Craig. Thanks for having me. 

 

Craig Jeffery  0:54   

I love this topic, why real time cash visibility matters. But you know, I know that’s a huge area of focus in your current role and as part of your career now, but I wondered if it would be okay if you just gave us a bit of a background on your some of your career highlights. And then I just want a quick overview of Trovata for those who may not be familiar with it, so maybe you just tell your career.  

 

Brett Turner  1:18   

Yeah, absolutely. And we’re talking real-time, so it feels like, you know, my career is, it’s been being in startups seems like there’s nothing, not real-time or not high impact. Things move pretty quickly in the startup world, but yeah, little over 20 years’ experience going back to my day starting out as a CPA at Deloitte, moved into high growth startups, though, a couple years into my career in the Seattle area, and was a controller for a few high tech, high growth companies, a lot of time spent in ERP systems and financial reporting, really the gap specialist in a lot of ways, and that carried me through for a few years, three different companies and then, these are in startup environment, so in a lot of ways I’m sort of, Trovata my seventh startup. So, in the early days, my first three startups I was learning, I suppose, more what not to do that than to do. Great learnings, but all three companies actually ended up failing. Feel like I was getting an MBA in every one of these companies and even my, my family would say, like, how are you becoming successful and getting better at being in failed companies. And so, but there was in those days was just, you know, learning so much, and I would kind of have my own postmortem after each company, and companies were high profile startups, one of them was a billion-dollar startup called Tella Desk, it was broadband via satellite, Bill Gates and Craig McCaw came together.  

 

So, I think a lot of it was helping shape, be discerning, where I was always heading in my career is wanting to, to be entrepreneurial and start something at some point down the road when I was ready, but really taking this accounting finance track to get there. I took some time off from those three startups and went to work at Amazon, managing their SEC reporting. And then, and then moved into a CFO role where that sort of intersected a lot from on the cash side, was the CFO for three different venture backed startups. And now after that post Amazon, that’s when things really started to click, this company worldwide packets, was in telecom space, we had just an amazing team, and built that company up, and then later sold, its successfully sold, had an incredible run, and that’s sort of for me in the startup world where, put all the pieces together, you know, as an operator. Learned so much, and that’s also what I had to pivot around understanding cash and cash flow, where it started to experiment with getting cash or data from the bank marrying data with data from the ERP system, and sort of building my own modeling around cash models and for Cash Forecasting that really became my CFO dashboard. And I’d have my whole team manage a part of that, which really became a big part of this, almost a near real time FP&A tool all centered around cash, and that became just from there on out it’s really the only way that helped me, which I felt was so needed, to really manage the business and manage the business effectively because I just got so much you know insights as to what was going on. That and then also the third of those three startups, you know, over that 10–12-year period, one in cloud computing, had a front row seat to the whole digital transformation in IT was a company called Second Watch, we became the first premier consulting partner with AWS. Back in, you know, the early days of the cloud, migrating companies like Coca Cola and other bigger companies to AWS. Really those two segues this digital transformational wave, and in tech, and then also really steeped in in cash management and sort of reinventing myself that was, you know, around accrual based accounting and financial reporting to more cash forecasting and real time cash visibility or as close to it as I can, given that even those days a little more archaic and that toolset, really kind of set up the run to seeing a huge opportunity, that that you know we’ve been, you know, really enacting and really driving toward it Trovata. 

 

Craig Jeffery  5:37   

To summarize your career as you spend your time in three companies, learning what not to do by failing and then you journey through three companies learning what to do. And now you’re pulling it all together. Now I know that’s a bit tongue in cheek at the end there, you know, one of the things you said was interesting because you talked about, you had an FP&A tool that gave you a view towards cash, a real time view towards cash. And this may be interesting or may not be interesting, but when I think of FP&A, I always think of a focus on income not on cash not on balance sheet items. So, can you just explain that piece or was that just an addition so that you could have the liquidity view? 

 

Brett Turner  6:25   

This company, World Wide Packets, it was a it was a high profile startup when it started, it started right the court before the telecom bubble burst in 2000-2001. I had joined in 2005 when Madrona, the big VC out of Seattle led a new round of capital to really reboot the company, and so I came in on that wave with the new executive team and was part of that. Really pivoting the business around business services. Come in to basically run, and in a lot of ways sort of fix a lot of what was broken at the time, and then really set up for this next run that we all saw coming was the opportunity. So part of it was kind of doing my own conventional playbook, you know I’m in a lot of ways I you know it’s pulling, first thing I would do is set the data lake get all the data I could out of my ERP system, and then would use that to get a good basis for financial reporting and, and really disseminate or, you know democratize that data essentially to the business the key business stakeholders. We had a really good, you know, a cadence at that time. The problem is…it was obviously it wasn’t fresh enough or relevant enough, it’s old news and when you need something that when you’re moving so fast and you need to get really great visibility, I started to turn to more bank transactions and started to look at, as things are transacting, I can just get better, more real time visibility. The problem is, the bank data wasn’t that intelligent, so it’s like if I could marry more of the intelligence from the ERP system, but I, but yet the access aspect of getting, you know bank transactions that are more Middle East even prior day which is way faster than after a month-end and close and rolling into your reporting cycle, which by that time it’s 45 days late, you know, who cares in the startup world. If I could marry that up, though, in more of this real-time cash data, and I could categorize it if I could shape that in more functional areas, almost like I’m doing cash accounting in some ways that would give me really good insights of what was going on, almost like this real time cash base P&L.  

 

And if I could do that, I could start to get really predictive and back into my balance sheet assumptions for planning, and then also, even, most importantly, driving really predictive insights into my cash balance. And that’s how we got really good with all of that, it practically killed me because it took about a year and a half to build, and it was all kind of on the side. I was acting as basically my own Product Manager building these models on the side. But once we sort of, you know, cracked that code, and had that, it just became an incredible dashboard, and it just great insights of really marrying up the best of both worlds. And then I could see what was going on, what was a lot of the trend analysis, a lot of the things that was happening, were just became these indicators of where our cash was going. And at that time, even though we were raising $65-$70 million at World Wide Packets, we’re competing also with Cisco and Juniper, the big telecom vendors and we were innovating building out a whole new class of product, a world class product at the time, and we’re selling to companies like AT&T and Comcast. So, if you think about that, I mean $70 million is still not a lot of money we spent 25 million just building our flagship product in the space, every dollar, we’re burning to two and a half million a month every dollar though is crucial, and so we had to be really efficient. And then from there we just became our, the way we reported our numbers the way we just gave insights to the board. We rallied our entire financial reporting around cash metrics, and it was really cool. And I think the biggest part of this gave me a tremendous amount of confidence to then making really good decisions and quick decisions because we had this data that was really fresh, highly relevant, and it just helped us, not just be opportunistic and sort of get ahead of the curve, but also it can help us predict if there was a problem, it would it would be sort of that canary in a coal mine really quickly before we just went down that that path and then had to unwind. So, it just became an incredibly valuable to operate the business, and it was something our senior team, our board, everybody appreciates because it just gave us that great visibility on what was going on. 

 

Craig Jeffery  10:48   

So, there was definitely faster visibility and better visibility which helped with decisions, but as we think about the topic of real-time cash visibility. I think you’ve covered most of what that looked like but maybe you could just describe it more fully when you think of real-time visibility, do you refer to just cash, or does it include other assets right your, your overall balances, your forecast. 

 

Brett Turner  11:21   

Yeah, so, maybe the quick segue is, World Wide Packets went on to sell, had a good exit, went on to then start a couple of companies. And I took these tools with me, that became sort of the CFO dashboard and I think over time just got a little bit better, you know would infuse in some additional information to that and those tools just got a little bit better, a little bit better, until part of it was then seeing the opportunity with starting Trovata. And it was really predicated on that it was predicated on, you know, let’s take this to the next level. Let’s do this to. Could we do it at scale? And we obviously at the time, these were these collections of models or spreadsheets that I would have on my team would have to help, update it and I would use it periodically, at least at least once a week and refer to it. It just obviously wasn’t scale but wasn’t a product wasn’t even though we’d have VCs, would get the model and say hey I want to send this to all my, you know portfolio companies because you know they could have, you know this great way to manage it because I love you know getting the up insights that you send, just a better way to kind of see what what’s going on, and it just wasn’t that way you know. I get a call from a CFO from one of the portfolio companies and, like, okay, “I supposed to ask for this special model you got what do you got, you know, cooking up” like this is gonna be passing around this spreadsheet that explain it like, there’s no instruction manual that I could… It would take me months to write, so it just it didn’t work and so in that way and so I think that was the thing though. What really surprised me I think going back after a number of years, and after that a couple other startups, then those sold off and did well, then it was like, then seeing the opportunity for just the next wave of digital transformation is going to happen in banking and finance.  

 

You know Fintech is often running, none of that though is really intersecting on the wholesale side of the bank or more, you know, mid-market enterprise that side of things, and so I started look back at my days at World Wide Packets and just started seeing what was in the market was just amazed. I couldn’t believe that nobody had ever really built anything like this and had there was such still such a dearth of tools. I think that was were being able to, you know build Trovata in a way to bring this to everybody. Everybody’s had this base core need and then it just depended on, you know what level of needs you have. Is it really complex, but if there is a base level for sure, you know, cash is king and every business everybody needs something, it’s just how much they have. So, I think part of it though, kind of getting back to your questions, the thing that the big thesis was, if we could add scale, be able to start with that base record that, you know, that line item in the bank, which is a bank transaction. The nice thing is that you know that it’s, if you see it in the bank, you know you can count on it you can bank on it–there’s a reason why you say that every 99.99% of all business transactions settle in cash, so you know that they occurred. So, if we could start with that base record of truth, a bank transaction, it doesn’t have a lot of intelligence, but you know for sure that it happened. Then we could sort of walk up, so if you think of the, the ocean, if it’s water running from the mountain, all the way into the ocean, you know that you know the banking sort of the ocean of transaction settlement if we kind of walk up the hills and valleys and up to the mountains, you know, we could start to integrate, with ERP being a big one of those, but you know other systems too through the whole close to cash process and we can start to augment, tie in that record, and really go after the origin of that record. What is the origin story of that record? What happened, what was going on? There’s insights and intelligence with the other ERP and other business systems, and we can start to pull that together as we go. And that’s when you start to get and automate some of the aspects of FP&A where yeah, it’s all cash based, it’s not accrual based, but it you get this super-fast real-time intelligence. And that for me sort of reinventing myself, you know from the, the gap world and financial reporting into kind of looking at getting this data that much faster, feeling like you know the future is unlimited in terms of we could crossover and do something at scale, where you’re getting that kind of real time intelligence, and that kind of predictive analytics off of that, then it could change the face of financial reporting, let alone just getting better visibility into your cash from a treasury standpoint. 

 

Craig Jeffery  16:08   

There’s a number of things that you said that are interesting, you know one thing that you, you know your history from a gap perspective, I was thinking about the timing there since we’re talking about speed, you know, monthly statements coming out in the 10th or the 15th, or maybe the fifth or fourth. It’s so delayed and treasury’s priorities not good enough. We need current day. But this idea of this real-time. How real time is real time? Are we just getting faster, do we need to be almost instantaneous? And, you know your idea of moving up the hills to the mountains where the source comes from–how do you define real time, and is it different for these different at the bank, or at the source system? 

 

Brett Turner  16:56   

A lot of times they think of building a startup, and kind of learning those aspects is, is I’ve done for you know many, many years. It’s the end of the day it’s about assessing risk in a lot of ways, just like in treasury or in finance here. You become a professional risk manager because in building a company, there’s just so many moving parts and you’ve just got to look ahead and you’re constantly mitigating all of the things. You need to know what the uncontrollables are so you can start to respond to those. You want to be able to obviously know and have a really solid deep dashboard of all the things that are, that are in your control, and you now know what those things are so you can impact it. In so many of those is just about mitigating risk and working through that whole process. But I think when you kind of look at, there’s two things I think on the, you know, defining real time one is, is from that risk standpoint, it’s just a lot can happen now, you know, even in day. The world is speeding up massively, you think of, you know how real time is impacted other areas, like trading stocks, high frequency trading is, is now table stakes for how it’s done in the market and responding to and trading in the market today. You know, if you look at, other aspects of just how we gather our news, you know stuff hits Twitter in seconds and you know we’re not waiting till the evening news, six o’clock with Dan Rather, in the days you know, many years ago. So, it’s like when you kind of just look at the speed of information that’s moving so fast. It’s like in a lot of ways you didn’t have to have that because that’s what the world is now run by.  

 

If you don’t have that it’s gonna be hard to really be proactive or compete in some ways, because you’re always going to be, you’re always going to be behind. And if, if the rest of the business is starting to rely on things that are really really fast, the treasury world if the finance department and accounting. It’s just, how do you respond to that when everybody’s expecting, you’d have that same speed of information, and you’ve don’t so you just you just look and feel like a dinosaur. And if you want a strategic seat at the table, you have to think in that realm and you have to have information that’s more relevant. So, if you’re going to provide you know more strategic advice or counsel to the senior team, or even to advise on a matter to the board. It’s like, if you’re everybody’s expecting again for you to have really, you know, hypersensitive information that’s more real time, if you don’t, then it’s not going to be as relevant and whoever’s making key decisions is going to, you know, they’re going to second guess that a little bit and they’re going to look at other need other input. So, I think part of it is just, you know, levelizing to the rest of the world, because what’s behind all the transactions, ultimately, and the cash of what is delivering or driving. What you see as cash is all happening so much faster, and you just need to level up to get on the same page as everybody else. And I think the other aspect to it is just the ability to automate, so much as, you know, when you look at so many of the workflows in finance, particularly in treasury, there’s so much that can be automated. And when you’re able to put that on a certain predictable cadence or more real-time now you can start to, because that’s where it’s all happening or headed, being able to start to build around that and an automated processes around that is really key. So, I think those are, those are two things that it really supports and yeah, I think it’s, whether it’s coming in in seconds, it doesn’t have to be that fast, as long as it’s coming in, you know, I think every hour or every two hours, that’s kind of where we need to be at this point, 

 

Craig Jeffery  20:43   

Two things that you, that I heard you saying was one is speed matters and quality matters and those two things, create a virtuous circle and a sense of getting faster, getting better information that’s the demand, doesn’t have to be instantaneous, but whether it’s every 10 minutes or every hour. That might be, that might be fast enough for today, but I wanted to expand the conversation on that. I was going to ask about what are the impediments to real-time visibility, and then how do you get past it, but I kind of want to combine that what are the items that act as blockers to achieving real-time or just much faster visibility. And how do we move past that because if you have, I don’t know if I want to use your example the water cascading from the mountains, the hills to the ocean, but if there’s dams that are holding stuff that release water every whatever every day, that’s going to be a gate, that’s gonna be a gating item. And you know, you might not have, if your bank is only updating some of their systems at night, the fastest you can get it as the next day because there’s a, there’s a delay there and same thing as if information comes in but your internal process can only update stuff every four hours, you’re building in these delays. So maybe you could talk to some of the key impediments and how you get past them or how we, how we think we’ll be able to move past these overtime. 

 

Brett Turner  22:20   

Normally, there’d be three impediments, but I’ll tell you, I think things are changing a little bit, so the first impediment has always been technology. Do you have the tech to be able to do these kinds of things? That’s no longer an impediment. In fact, tech has been ready for a few years now, and it’s not a technology problem. A lot of what we all see and experience in many other areas, you just pick up your mobile phone and download an app, just use something that’s more of a modern user experience a lot of other, you know other applications, we look at that and say well, why isn’t that in this space, and a lot of that it just hasn’t made its way. And so that’s a big part of, you know what we’re doing with Trovata we’re just, we’re taking what’s available, and, and we’re applying it to this space and that looks radically transforming. It is because it hasn’t been applied yet, but it’s not unprecedented because it’s been done, you know in other years the tech in fact it’s sort of table stakes in other areas of tech. We expected there, we just it just hasn’t happened in this space. So, that is no longer an impediment and perfect example is what we’re doing with Trovata. We’re over, the last couple of years, just our traction in the market is proven and now with so many different companies and our growth is kind of validating that. The second one is more of the banks, and that’s been, because again, if you’re going to get bank transactions more in real-time then just do the banks have the right tech, and traditionally, that is, has been no they’ve been behind that, but the changes that have happened in the last few years in wholesale banking have been just incredible improvements.  

 

And the progress, even though it’s never going to be lightning fast, it’s definitely quickening, and it’s really exciting to see what happens. So, you get a lot of the big banks are, are being able to I mean, all of them are rallying around API’s. API’s being the way in which they can now deliver next day banking services, they can deliver data, and they can deliver what other folks, like Trovata, who can bring and update these user experiences and connect to that. So, it’s a way to just communicate in ways that are very productive to solve a lot of the end user and customer problems that they have. And their customers have been raising their hand for quite some time, but they’re responding, they’re delivering the API’s and that’s huge, because that’s really that step of transformation now that can carry on and take place. So, I would say we’re right in the middle of that so it’s not like it’s still somewhat of an impediment because it’s not, depending on who you bank with, and on where they are with what API’s and some ways we’re just warming up, we’ve got some base API’s but there are more API’s that are coming, and that’s it so we’re right in the middle of that. 

 

So, tech is out there. Some of the banks are delivering on that. You have this layer that can interact via API’s, it’s at the front end or customer facing, but a lot of banks have a lot of really old tech, fairly old tech, behind the scenes that they’ve got a…if it’s going to be real time they still have to get it so that it can get pushed out to the layer that can interact and API level, and they may be working with a lot of tech debt that is there is that is that the big impediment, 

 

They’re finding ways to work through that, of course I mean at the end of the day, banks are going to need to upgrade their core systems, and that’s not something that happens overnight. I mean, they’re still kind of run by mainframe computing, right? So, if you think of the volume at scale that they operate with you’re having to rebuild from scratch, and these are years and years and years and then even the migration itself is so daunting, can it even be done right so there’s just incredible risk. So that’s what has happened, you know why it’s taken so long is that is those barriers have been so high, that they’re high hasn’t been, you know, that maybe that compelling event that’s really caused the banks to have to do it. You all of a sudden you look at what’s happened the last couple years with COVID, I would say that’s compelling event. And so now it’s like all the banks, because if you think a real time, and all of a sudden from a risk standpoint, all the customers and clients are panicking and not having great visibility, they need that. They’re you know, they’re hollering at their banks that they need that and needing that tech advancement. That’s really what’s driving a lot of this, but they’re not, they’re getting around it in the, you know, I would say the work around. I mean they’re building data lakes, they’re feeding those doing internal integrations to feed data into those data lakes, they’re putting on, building API’s to access those data lakes to be able to deliver that data through the API’s and so, I mean, think about, I mean, that one needs to get faster, better, you know, all of that and be more efficient, internally with how they’re doing that but that’s sort of the basics of what needs to take place, they’re doing that, and it’s working. It’s now opening up, you know that handoff, pass the baton to a company like Trovata to then be able to, you know, take that data, and do all these things with it downstream for the clients and the clients are responding.  

 

They’re just, “Thank you, this is, this is what we need”. And that’s evolving, we’ve got constant conversations about, okay all of these new things that we, a lot of stuff that we’ve done today but all these new things that now it opens up the possibilities. And that does this feedback that have those conversations are really lively and really exciting so those possibilities, all of a sudden just become, just open up, the ceiling, really starts to go way, way up. And so, I would, that’s why I say it’s not–I wouldn’t say it’s an impediment, I think it’s where it’s a work in progress, but it’s not an impediment, it’s happening today. I mean, we’re delivering real time data for several banks to, to, to our clients today, we’ve got you know in a couple years we’ve grown from zero to, over 130 mid-mark and enterprise clients. These are big companies, some, we’ve got some that are 13-14 billion in revenue clients. We’ve got others that are, you know, down to 10 to 15 million, and everything in between, but a lot of… most of our customers are kind of in that, you know, a billion in revenue, or three or 400 million in revenue or 3 billion in revenue. So, companies like Square and Etsy and a lot of tech companies and so when you kind of look at that they might have, with Square we have 18 banks, all normalized, all as part of Trovata,15 million transactions, and we’re able to deliver that with 300 millisecond response rates and with natural language search across that entire data set. So those are the things we can deliver, but it doesn’t mean that all APIs are all you know that with the banks depending on where they’re at in their API journey, just like it was 10 years ago sort of this journey to the cloud, you know there’s still we’re still kind of in the early innings. Banks are starting to get better or just getting their APIs online. So that experience might be a little different depending on who you bank with or the mix of banks that you have. But I think that’s just part of that progress. It’s changing and changing fast and it’s super exciting, I would say though the only real impediment today is just ourselves. People making decisions now to kind of move forward I think that, you know, given that in this space, everybody is a professional risk manager, essentially, your professional risk manager probably going to be careful or maybe conservative of when you move into making these kinds of you know, buy decisions. So, I would say that’s honestly that’s becoming the biggest impediment. I think the more people see their peers, the more they see that environment start to change and they’re seeing it, then they’ll become more comfortable, they’ll see more, you know, reference ability of what’s happening in the market, and we’ll see start to see a tipping point and a massive wave and we’re just not there yet. I know it’s coming, but I think everybody’s gonna feel more comfortable here both from their bank, and both on what they see in terms of the tech environment, and it’s only a matter of time before that wave is going to hit. 

 

Craig Jeffery  30:48   

So, the tech issue, the impediment of not having the tech, has mostly been solved. I mean there’s obviously growth from what you’re saying is, the banks have it, they’re growing and they’re maturing. It’s early innings if you use the baseball metaphor that you did, and then on the, on the receiving side, there’s using the tech but there’s also the mindset of how do we scale? How do we use tools that support real time, full blown API use, you know, this this faster environment. As you talk through these impediments and the mindset, you mentioned COVID. Talk a little bit about how that how that helped in this visibility I know it helped in many other areas with payments, with expectations, with work from home, and processes. Maybe you could share some of your thoughts in this area? 

 

Brett Turner  31:42   

In the world of tech and adoption speed of adoption, as an entrepreneur you always look at the compelling events. What’s the compelling event that’s really driving adoption of new tech? You look at what we’ve gone through over the last couple of years with COVID I think two things are going on. Prior to that, it wasn’t that the, the world or the speed of information wasn’t exactly slow. A lot of other areas of course we’re already akin to getting that information really really fast, right, you know, again, whether it’s Twitter, whether you’re going to get, you know, trade on a stock tip, and everything is just moving so so fast. And I think, but there wasn’t really that…you could really get by without having to have your forecasting model updated or some of these processes not, you know, maybe not as giving you as good visibility that you needed to. Once COVID hit though, it really exposed a lot of that, that became a compelling event. It became everybody went into disaster recovery mode, all the way from the board to senior teams, everybody’s looking at the treasurer, the CFO and needing answers, because everybody wants the crystal ball. Wat’s, you know, what’s it gonna be like next week? Or what’s it gonna be like tomorrow? Do we have to lay off 30% of our staff? You know, these are really big things and big decisions that we have to work through at the time. Obviously, you know, some companies thrive, some companies are still struggling through this, it’s had a huge profound effect. And then you’ve got this aspect of the banks now that have accelerated a lot of their FinTech initiatives, that’s trying to avoid these things, and that that’s become the thing that they’re responding to from their customers. So, I think this aspect of real-time I mean, it’s now, it’s really forced that mindset that is now part of best practice. It’s not about just covering the things that need to be covered, it’s about being proactive and always looking at project in various aspects of what that means and having, having answers. You’ve got to be able to understand what it, what it means when you have different impacts or aspects that may happen in the market controllable or uncontrollable. You got to be able to respond and have solid answers of what should be our course of action. How should we respond to that event?  

 

And I think that’s not going away anytime soon. I think if anything, everybody’s realizing they’re still not quite there yet, they still don’t feel comfortable, but I can just say that when I got to a point where all of this information was able to be maintained, and I could get it weekly, the information was a lot faster, which helped us be really predictive and really accurate and precise in terms of our assumptions around cash. The correlation of my confidence relative that was through the roof. I could actually speak about the business; I could actually speak confidently about whether we do this or that. I could hang scenario planning off of those kinds of things. The level that I could maneuver as an operator was radically different. If you don’t have the confidence, you’re sort of, you’re just tentative, you don’t constantly speak about something or talking about something because you’re not sure so you’re always speaking in a range of outcomes ahead. You’re always moving in this world of reactive within this throw hedges on top because you can’t ever want to give a straight answer because you don’t want to be wrong, right? Or you have all the information, yeah, you’re always gonna, you’re going to be doing some hedging and providing, you know, obviously, the possibilities, but the band, in which you’re going to hedge is gonna go way, way down. So, hedge the max, hedge maybe like 10% of what that and now you can do it because now you have so many answers that you didn’t have before that you can just narrow down. And there’s things you don’t need to hedge because you’ve already crossed those off the list because you have the information that’s eliminated those, you know those things that that could occur. From my standpoint in the startup world everything moves so fast. So, for me it wasn’t a central to I had to get there earlier on my career, I had to really reinvent myself to sort of get there, but once I got there, it just made the world of difference. And, you know, I couldn’t operate without it, you know, I still feel the same way, I can’t operate without that, you know that aspect, everybody wants to operate with confidence, when you don’t have it, it’s not a fun way to live. 

 

OUTRO  36:25   

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