Lucas Swisher

The way that I phrase data, and I phrase this to our team a lot, and this is what I really believe is data is a prerequisite.

It is not the answer.

The data must be very good.

It's not the whole picture.

And I remember I was sitting in a very old...

I see, and when we were looking at Databricks at Kotu way back when, and Thomas was like, Lucas, you're missing the forest through the trees here.

Just because net new ARR didn't accelerate dramatically in any given quarter does not mean this trend is not happening.

And so net new ARR or whatever metric you want to use, they're incredible guideposts, but you can't miss the forest through the trees in this.

Like the bigger picture, it really matters, but it is helpful, right?

I'd say like the thing that I'm looking at the most with a lot of these kind of AI native businesses is

If you're low margin, I need you to have high retention.

You have to have it.

Because you leave no margin for error if that's not true.

If you're gonna be a low margin business to start, the customer behavior must be so sticky.

It's gotta be so sticky.

Because otherwise, you're really, really fragile.

One move the wrong way and you have no margin for error.

So those are the types of places where data can help you.

It can hurt you if you live in Excel all day and you are just missing the forest through the trees.

The gift that Mamoon has, and I think from the SaaS era, Mamoon, my view is he was the best Series A investor in the SaaS era, period, right?