Jeff Horing

I was already at my 11th grade math, so I'm like, this is one of the least informative numbers I could think of, and yet that was the only number that Wall Street asked.

I said, the only number that really

Well, two numbers really matter.

GDR, which is gross retention, which is how sticky is your customer base?

How resilient is that?

And more importantly, how much of that bucket do you have to fill every year?

There are very few companies with low-ish software.

Low would be 80s.

080s gross retention that are in the top 20 market cap businesses.

You could probably count on three fingers companies with that statistic.

And the problem is that you get big and let's say you're losing 20% of your business every year on a billion dollars of revenue.

That's $200 million of revenue.

business that you have to go find just to fill the bucket.

And then you of course want to grow 30, 40, 50% on top of that.

So those become daunting numbers that usually reflect itself in your average cost of acquisition.

Take your net new bookings divided by the spend that you had to get to that.

And those numbers tend to move together because you just have to keep filling more of the bucket with sales reps just to stay even.

So I think that was an example of one.

Another time years ago, I thought a lot about calling ourselves the second derivative because so much more is learned.

A couple of guys had this right at Facebook, the billion dollar kind of guys that came in there.