Yeah. I mean, I've been doing this for what I'm doing today for 25 years or so. So it's been a along and in somewhat convoluted path. Very couriers follow a perfectly straight line, but I'd say, you know, I began. I was an English major English in political science, major in college, I graduated into a, um, pretty weak economy and without clear direction around what I wanted to do exactly. I had a passion for sailing, which I quickly realized was not a way to make a career. Although I tried for a brief moment, and then we went back to grad school, and during my MBA program, I started to get a real sense for what it is that might want to do with my life and really have a vocabulary for describing what that waas. So marketing was clearly where I was going. I was always a good writer, a good communicator, pretty good thinker, were recognized patterns and think and make connections sort of synthesize connections, and it seemed to lend itself to marketing, initially started out in in public relations and took to that really liked it, working the agency side, and we went to work for clients, and that client happened to be, you know, eventual back software company. And then I got the bug. So I got swept up into Bubble Wand Auto bubble to Dato. And then over the course of seven or eight start ups with, you know, Cem pretty good exits and then some dramatic flame outs. I took on more and more responsibility, moved into product marketing and product management, and then took on broader VP of marketing and CMO roles and that for 17 years or so, enjoying it, learning it on and having some really notable experiences and kind of burned out, to be honest. And then I took a left turn in my career and I became a Gartner analyst. So I decided, Do you have to take all this experience that I've had and these learnings, and it's sort of apply it a little differently? Azaz someone who's advising other companies on how to build businesses and how to think about marketing hunching marking products. I did that for about five years, and then I was called back to my roots and um, immediately before where I am today, I was seem over company, Pulp Endo, which was is a very, very fast growing B two B SAS company located in Raleigh, North Carolina. And I was red, marking there for almost three years, and we grew at a ridiculously fast face on. It was maybe the most notable professional experience I've had to date that led to wear today and president of a company called Menace E X, earlier stage venture backed software company, Um, and I've taken on broader responsibility beyond the marketing roles that had previously

so responsibilities as CMO of, ah, rapidly growing software company like kendo. Um, it's, you know, I was responsible for the brand. How did the brand show up in the world? How did we create awareness around that brand and really have a strong point of view and make it stand for something important that created differentiation for us as a company? And we did that through building community and content marketing. Thought leadership on everything from digital advertising toe out of home media, where we ran billboard campaigns and San Francisco Bay etcetera demand. So that was that's what kept the lights on them. That's what kept me game Gainfully employed was ensuring that my team was generating demands to fuel the growth of the business. Those were the primary Teoh elements of what we do in them, you know, sort of positioning, messaging, pricing, competitive intelligence, enabling the sales organization, launching new products. It's pretty broad set of responsibilities. Join it enormously on. Of course, after after all of that was building a team and managing that team mentoring progression, helping people find their way in their own careers. Uh, work hours? I don't know. I probably worked on average. Something like 70 hours a week, maybe more. But I typically get up early and I start working around 6 a.m. and that's what I feel productive and inspired. And I probably stopped working sometime around six and then get back to it. Maybe a night for a couple few hours. Um, yeah, so that's just in the weekends. I try to take off, but I'm not always successful at that.

Yeah. I mean, there, there a ton of challenges in scaling a business like that. But I'd say that the greatest challenge was was the fact that we're growing so fast that you would You have to sort of invest well ahead of where you were a za company from a people and a process perspective. Eso being able to keep an eye on the as is but also being very mindful that to be, um, and making the right set of investments from a hiring perspective and from a process and operational perspective to accommodate that, I'd say the other things are the business as it grows, becomes more complex, multiple products, multiple segments, more complex sales organization and go to market motion. And managing that and importantly, optimizing it based on a clear understanding. What is it isn't working give you quite a challenge. So, yeah, there's the challenges, are numerous and and you at any given point in time, you feel like you're both winning and losing the battle that that's very, very natural in that circumstance.