Bill Gurley

You know, some of the stuff you talked about, unit economics, like you want to understand is it'd be great if the marginal customer is more profitable than the one before them.

So that's a test of whether you're starting to get scale in your business.

Right.

Right.

One exercise that I heavily encourage all founders to do, no matter how much the size of the business, is force yourself to do a three to five-year forecast.

And you don't have enough information to really do it, which is why people push back, but it forces you to ask the right questions so that you can prepare.

And if you want to grow a lot for five years, your business is going to be pretty big.

And so...

Having gone to the exercise of filling out an Excel spreadsheet and thinking through what that means in terms of employees and salespeople and marketing spend, all those is a very useful exercise.

And one that the majority of founders do not naturally do.

Like it's not something they want to do even, but they should do it.

I mean, there's so many different business—I think certain businesses, there's a—like in— Like every business has their own metric that matters.

Everyone agrees net dollar retention is the one that matters most.

But that doesn't apply to everything.

Yeah.

So it's kind of dependent on the business.

Exactly.

Am I the first person to play this game?

Oh, yeah.

Nine, nine out of 10, maybe 10.