eight question, and it's, Ah, a little bit of a winding story, but I'll make it brief, Um, after I graduated from college, studying human resource is I had a job at Microsoft as a product manager. Ah, As part of that role, I got exposure to a lot of different elements of technology in business. After about five years at Microsoft, I joined ah, startup that was focused on some of the technology that I had been working with and Microsoft specifically, I was focused on mobile applications and mobile productivity. This is back 10 years ago before everybody had a cell phone. Even so, if you can imagine that on and I joined a start up company that was focused on some aspects of mobile. From there I was ableto build out a pre and post sales engineering team so leveraging some of the best aspect of the technical side of product management with some of the business acumen that I had built in the charisma that I had. Naturally, I wasn't a kind of behind the desks that they're on work with engineers product manager. I was out in the fields talking with users quite a bit so build out a pre and post sales engineering team that this startup ended up moving to San Francisco to run their West Coast office. Hired probably 30 or 40 people fired 30 or 40 people when we ran out of venture money, as happened, That led me to the next place that I worked, which was a start up in a similar space, but a little bit more on the data side and a little bit less on the Bulls side. Similar story came in to build out their technical pre and post sailed engineering teams, and, as part of that on the team had gone through the organization gone through three or four different sales leaders. So after they had fired their fourth sales leader, they had asked me if I wanted to run sales. So I stepped in and I ran the sales organization for about a year and 1/2 grew the organization stabilized the revenue stream, and then after four years there, it was time for a change, and I moved into a, um, rule Now where I'm general manager and I run to the world's largest education community for leaders in sales, sales, engineering sales operations that related discipline. So I was able to parlay what I had learned as a sales leader and as a business person into this role, where now I've got full kind of responsibility and 20 odd 1000 people in my community that I keep an eye on every day. It's been pretty fun, and I think when I think about incidents, you know that a shape, shape, the career path. One thing that's important and it's novel to talk about now. But when I was at Microsoft, we were working on office for iPad. This is before the iPad had released and, um, at that era of Microsoft that you would always build for Microsoft Windows. And we got word from way up on the top that we weren't shipping office for iPad when the iPad ship that had been a year and 1/2 of my life and I was like, Oh, my goodness, what am I gonna dio? And that actually forced me to look at start ups and consider opportunities and look at my skill set and identify not as, ah, product manager at Microsoft. But if somebody who had a skill set that was some business acumen, some technical ability, some ability to interface with customers and people that were in the business and work with them and then sort of spin a technological Rubik's Cube to line up with what they need so that get that was my entry into start ups, and that forced me to just think more broadly and then going into organization than I the startups I joined typically 20 or fewer people. You get to wear a lot of hats, so you face all different sorts of challenges every day. It was a very formative experience, much like with product management, where no two days are the same. When you're in a start up, there's always different challenges. One start up I was at was supporting an application. That was the first time the Super Bowl had been streamed on a mobile device. We were all in the office watching the Super Bowl, not because we wanted to watch the Super Bowl, but in case anything in the system's broke. It was just amazing, amazing set of experiences, and I think looking back on it and having this conversation. If office for iPad had ships right way back in 2011 or 2012. Whenever it was, I would probably still be at Microsoft, which is crazy to think about. But that one change set off a series of events were. Now I'm doing something totally different and it's been it's been amazing and rewarding, and I've learned so much along the way.

so I'll start with a caveat. Anyone who you talk to, who's the general manager? It's kind of a meaningless title. It means that you do a lot of different things at different points in time. When I think of this role, and I'm asked to describe it, I am the CEO of my business. I run the profit and loss. If there's garbage in the trash can and it didn't get thrown out, it's my responsibility to throw it out. So unless I've hired for somebody to do a job, my responsibility is everything else. So in our business we run. We do a lot of digital events for our community, and I have a team of people who handle that and handle engaging with our community and making sure members feel good. But in terms of everything else, um, I do it. At the end of every month, I balance the finances and I take and make sure I see what the revenue is. I see what the bookings are. I forecast, and project out two or three. I take a look out and I maintain an eye on all of our competitors. I am involved in every sponsorship conversation that we have when we're selling access to our community to our sponsors. I am involved in every conversation we have with the board, with the founders and all of that, but your responsibility day in and day out shift. But your most important role, as at least in my role as a general manager, is it is actually, whatever the biggest problems of the day are to go tackle those and for my team, and my team is much more junior there earlier in their career, it's to make sure that they're prioritizing the highest impacting that they can do in the 24 hours that we have in the day. Um, the week itself is very, is the amount of time that I work. It depends on where we're at in terms. If we have a lot of events, we don't have a lot of event, but it's a solid. It's a solid 50 60 hour work week, Um, and it's varies every day. The challenges you're facing are a little bit different. Traditionally, before we got into the Corona virus pandemic, I would travel 2 to 3 times a month, and that would be either for meetings with high priority members. In our community, high priority customers are our sponsors or just to go out and understand what sales and sales operations culture was like in a new market. We may want to expand, Um, and now it's all work from home. And I think in the future, as we get back to whatever we get back to normal post pandemic, I think travel will be a component of the job. It's certainly not in my previous role. I was a VP of sales. In that role. I was on the road 80% of the time. I'm in this role. The travel is is much less.

the biggest challenge that we have on. When you think of a community and you think of a community, there's two components of it. There's the members of the community. And then there's the what you're doing to get those members excited and keep them engaged in the community. So you've got these two competing things, and the analogy I use is uber if everyone's got the uber app and there's no drivers were not going to use. And if there's ah, if there's a bunch of drivers on the road and nobody's calling uber's you, the uber doesn't have an effective business, or we you need to balance those two things constantly. It's a double sided marketplace. So in our world is balancing the needs of both. We want to do a lot of programming for a community because it engages them. But our community on Lee has so much appetite for it. So we try to balance those two. Those two demands right? The demand of we want the community to be highly engaged with the recognition that the community can't consume content and programming from us. Every waking minute of every day certainly would love them to but they won't. And when we think about that, that challenge manifests itself in a lot of different ways. But what's helped the US is to come back to our first principle. And when I say first principles, I mean, these were the pledge allegiance to the flag when we think about what it means to engage the community and and are what we consider best in class way. And there's two things that we look at for this first, the level of experience we want to provide to our community members. We use a retail analogy, so we want to be Nordstrom. And if you've gone shopping at Nordstrom, you know what it's like to go in the store and have that experience versus if you shop that maybe H and M Zara at Asian Amory Zara. If you need a T shirt, you're looking around. You can't even find somebody to help you get that right size, whereas at Nordstrom you get a very white glove, very curated experience. So that's our first check. Are we providing a Nordstrom level of quality to our community members? The second piece is, are we creating an environment where community members are having a good time learning something in meeting somebody new. Everything that we do has to meet that quality bar of the Nordstrom level of quality and then those other characteristics of like, what success looks like. And we we actually approach to this and we look a this through a lot of feedback that we get from our community afterwards. Any time we do something for them, we survey. That's our way of finding out. Did we meet that were very vocal with our community about a. Our goal is meet somebody new, have a good time and learn something. Did you do those three things? If it's no, then we investigate an example of the deaths with the start of Corona virus we had shifted from in person event online events and a real challenge that we face was, Well, how many do we dio? Do we just take all of the in person events that we had scheduled and make them online? Do we take some of them and make them online? Do we doom or online? Because we're online and we spend the 1st 2 months of the pandemic really trying to figure out what that rate balances between engaging our community in a way that's very, very meaningful, while also making sure that they're not getting to their we're not. We're not overtaxing their there their attention span and so shroud the 1st 2 months of the Corona virus pandemic. We were deliberate. We were honest with ourselves and said, We're going to test this and we tested the two extremes. We did very few events and we did a month where we did a lot of events and we figured out we And when I say extreme, I mean extremes of what the team could support, not with community could support. And from those two extremes, we found out there's actually a happy medium here and by doing a lot of events in the early days that gave us an opportunity to see what worked and what didn't write some things that sound really good in person. You bring it online. It's a very different world. An example of this is an event after work, an event after working a theory of wine. Folks have a couple of drinks. They start to talk, the room gets louder, conversation flows a little bit more naturally after work after drinks. It's a great time to start conversation. It's people have fewer barriers if you try to take that in person event and translated exactly online, exact same time, exact same schedule. It's a very different experience because we're not both grabbing a beer, cracking it back and having a conversation. So with that, we learned that some experiences that where you're doing in person just didn't translate online. So what did we do? We just adjusted the time. And instead of that being evening event, we made it an afternoon event. Some formats we just thought that didn't work online or for whatever reason, the novelty wasn't there for the community. So those are a couple of things. What I would encourage folks to do any time you're encountering any challenges and business is to really take a step back and make sure you understand, Like, what problem are we trying to solve? Order our first principles about how we believe we should solve it correctly and then use those is guiding principles. You know, this was a community again. This could have been anything that could have been a manufacturing challenge. It could have been a product management challenge. Having those first principles really grounded us and gave us a framework to measure our own success or failure in the middle of a pandemic, where really we still don't know where the end is. We don't really know what normal is, but we have our own yardstick that we're measuring success by and that was very