Ric Elias

It's funny because we're getting a lot of momentum back and a lot of things are happening that are on the positive side.

But still, there's this sense of, man, these are not the same days that it used to be.

And of course they're not.

Everything Danny Meyer, a good friend of both of ours, says that cultures are like sharks.

They have to keep swimming to survive.

And to compare it to something first, I don't think the past is always as good as we remember it being, but the reality is that there was a moment in our journey where I remember leaving a big company event here on campus and it was like a magical night and we had this like incredible energy and I got in the car and I'm like,

It just cannot get any better than this.

To see a couple thousand people just completely pulling in the same direction, trying to do something.

And it just felt like unity.

It was like lightning in a bottle at a moment in time.

And it was a moment in time.

You felt it today.

This is a magical place.

There's a magical culture here.

But comparatively, so probably when we're compounding at 30% for like five years in a row and we're just success after success, it was like, wow, we're really good.

Reality is we were really lucky that we were really good.

And it was a matter of when that we needed to do it.

I'm kind of very excited for the next five years.

I spent a lot of time listening to your digestion of AI, but I think AI is really going to change a lot of our businesses, some of the traditional ones, but even our partner business, our client business is going to really change and some of our assets.

So I think the next five years may be the most exciting ones.