Hey there, and welcome back to lead the team.

Thomas Hansen scaled Dropbox to 1 billion, spent 13 years at Microsoft, and now leads Amplitude.

And today he is sharing the new leadership superpower.

Why the career ladders broken in the age of AI, and why windsurfing and what windsurfing taught him that the boardroom never could.

Thomas, welcome to leave a team, my friend.

Thank you.

Awesome to be here.

Great to see you.

Yeah.

So what is the next leader superpower?

You know, in.

In any leadership role, there's always a little bit of a mix of art and science.

But in this world of AI, science is becoming far more of a thing.

And the thing in science that really stands out is analytics.

I mean, think about it.

We have all this data, and we have it overlaid with AI.

So you take all those data, data points, you take all those facts you have about your prospects, your customers, your team, your product, and you leverage analytics to give you insights.

And by the way, in my day job at Amplitude, that's exactly what we do for our customers.

We provide a digital analytics platform that enable our customers to understand customer behavior.

So they can build better products.

Yeah, it's so interesting because back in the day, it's like all the leaders sort of had their spreadsheet jockeys.

Yeah.

And that would play in Excel, and they would like, you know, demand, make this data simple, tell me what it is.

And it sounds like the new leader superpower is not just demanding that your people know the numbers and give you the numbers, but it's like taking that next level to how does your organization work with the numbers?

How does it inform the business?

Like, almost like, really?

How does, how does data, how's it going to be presented at multiple levels?

It's almost like doing the job of the CIO and kind of sprinkle it across all leadership positions.

That's right.

I mean, look, reality is this is no longer as a leader, asking a large team of data scientists or analysts in finance or other parts of your organization to present you with the three bullets for the day.

You actually got to go in and open up your own tools, look at your own dashboard, navigate it.

Hey, I'm an early riser.

I get up at 5 o', clock, I go to the gym, and then my working day gets started.

7:00am West Coast.

The first thing I do after I've looked at my slacks and emails, I go to my dashboard and I go to my analytics platform and I get a quick snapshot of what's happened overnight.

Any outlier issues I should be aware of and then I can have intelligent discussions with my team.

All right, so you might have a few leaders out there right now listening and they're like, nope, I don't do that.

I've cultivated my own team of number crunchers.

What, how do you take a leader or what's your recommend recommendation for a leader who hasn't been of the, been of that approach with the data and now all of a sudden they need to start taking like they're listening to center being like yeah, I need to start down that route.

What's the first step they should do?

You know, as leaders sometimes you just consciously gotta embrace that you're incompetent in certain areas and then do something about it.

Right?

Conscious, conscious incompetence.

So I mean just embrace it and there'll be amazing colleagues around you that may be some of your dark reports and maybe an internal or someone in between that you can sit down with and say hey, explain XYZ to me like I'm a 5 year old and just embrace that.

You got to learn and go and play with it.

There are wonderful self serve analytics and AI tools out there that really are not very difficult to get to a reasonable level of understanding so you can get value out of it every day.

Do you have any like war stories of like you've, you know, maybe you approached a leader, you work with, a leader who wasn't used to the dashboard, wasn't getting down in the nitty gritty, they wanted to like stay strategic and then you persuaded them to sort of start deep diving in the tools and they, and it revealed something special for them or the company.

I, I, I got many stories around it, but I think there's sort of a, perhaps a theme I can use for, for those folks out there that are chief marketing officers.

When you think about the CMO head of marketing historically, if you go back to say 20 years, it used to be a little bit more about the art, the art of marketing, the brand and what are the unique selling points and how do you engage your customers.

Fast forward to today and I would say when you look at balance between art and science and marketing, it's probably a 2080, it's probably 80% that it's science that drives marketing today.

There is an incredible stack of marketing tools out there that allows you to get actual data points, real facts around customer behavior and your category and you just got to go and embrace it.

So I've seen marketing leaders over the years that were very much on the art side and Progressively over the years have moved more into the science side.

And frankly, I still see some marketing leaders or business leaders that are very heavy on the art side.

And that can be okay as long as you complement, some say, your own lack of strength in a certain area by having amazing colleagues around you that can compliment you.

I mean, that can also be part of the answer.

You don't have to be as a leader, perfect in every single aspect of the job.

You can't have a superpower in every single aspect of your job.

You got to focus on your energy, your time, on what you're good at, and then complement it by having amazing teams that are diverse around you that can compliment you.

I like that.

It's like, use your leadership intuition that you've spent a lifetime honing, right?

But don't do it blindly.

And the tools are out there now for you to ground that intuition in the data and make wiser decisions.

I'm thinking about like job experience and in years.

Why do you believe that the career ladder is broken in this age of AI that we find ourselves on?

Ben is not broken.

There is no ladder.

The ladder is gone.

There's not broken.

There is no ladder.

It's gone.

Listen, you know, conventionally, back in the day, most careers had very sort of linear paths.

You know, you go into a certain area and the next steps were very, very clear.

Now that's not, by the way, something I personally have, have embraced my, my own career.

I've, I've done very illogical, non obvious moves.

I have taken on the jobs that no one wanted to take on that were the hardship roles, the turnaround roles.

I've done the roles that I really never thought I was going to do.

And I've done it because embracing diversity and breadth of learning, it actually accelerates you later on to take on even more.

But Ben, I'll tell you a quick story.

I have three amazing children.

Two girls, one boy, 21, 22 and 26.

My youngest daughter, Sophia, she's a sophomore doing advertising at USF in San Francisco.

She was very fortunate to get a summer internship for A y Combinator24 company that's doing some B2C social media, some pretty amazing apps.

And she's the intern.

She's come in and in two weeks has helped them to 10x 10x their revenue by leveraging social media and doing things that you may think after the fact is obvious.

But she's done it with such hard work and energy and talent and to the extent that after two weeks they actually promoted her to head of marketing.

And as her sophomore year is about.

As a sophomore year is about to start, they've asked her to drop out of college and come on board full time as a marketing leader.

Now, not influenced by my wife or me, she gave them feedback that she would not be able to drop out of college for herself.

She wanted to accomplish that in her life.

But she also made a case.

She would love to stay on and work for them as she goes through the next two years of college and continue to help them grow the company.

But it just shows Ben is not linear anymore.

There is a new world and there's an ability for very early career folks to do far more than was ever possible before.

And a lot of that comes back to AI and just technology.

Wow.

So she jumped in, did a great job, and wow.

She.

You know, because it's interesting because so many internships are really sort of fluffy.

They're like delivering coffee.

Yeah.

You know, the.

These sorts of things.

And there's nothing wrong with getting behind the scenes and developing those relationships.

Yeah.

The fact that in this world we live in today, especially with AI.

Yeah.

If you've got the will and the creativity, you can make an impact.

You know, Ben, part of it, though, also there's something in it that's very old school and that's just tenacity and grit.

I gave her some advice before she started.

She.

I think she was meant to work 20 or 30 hours a week in this internship.

I said to her, embrace it as it is a full time plus plus.

And she has worked six to seven days a week plus, minus 12 hours a day for the last two months.

Over the summer, not skipping a beat, not missing a day, being in the office or meeting up in coffee shops across San Francisco and really leaning in.

And keep in mind, this is by and large almost an unpaid internship.

But it doesn't matter.

It's about getting the experience, showing you can make a difference and also building your own confidence in yourself that you can take on more.

Right.

Would love to get your perspective on this.

So a lot of times people in high school or even college, they like, man, I'm not.

You know, it's like this idea of unpaid internship for experience versus working at Chick Fil A or working as a lifeguard.

I worked as a lifeguard.

I learned stuff as a light, as a lifeguard.

I'm not saying lifeguards are bad and I got paid.

But it's.

With the world that we're in now with technology, it just seems like there are Other opportunities.

So what's your take on doing unpaid internships versus getting paid to do a different job that may not be necessarily associated with your career?

Well, I think context matters.

So you know, not everybody are fortunate enough to be able to afford to take an intern, unpaid internship over somewhere, but might actually have to go and earn some money to save up for college or whatever it may be.

So context matter.

So I don't want to give a black and white answer.

I think it depends on your personal circumstances ever.

If you are in the very fortunate situation of not short term needing cash to pay for college or whatever it may be, and you can afford to take an unpaid or fairly lowly paid internship role, I would encourage you to do it.

Get some real work experience that hopefully has some level of connected, connected tissue into what your passion is and hopefully what you're studying, studying for it just means you get a different perspective.

As a matter of fact, my youngest daughter said to me after a month or so in the internship, I know disrespect to her college, but she basically said, hey, in the last month I learned more than I learned in the last two years of college.

So, you know, there is incredible learnings to get in a hands on environment.

I'm a very big believer in it.

That's, you know, years ago it probably would have been a hands down decision, okay, gotta go back to college and finish my degree.

Yeah, probably a lot more difficult now for the parents, you know, and your daughter because you're like, hey, wait, this is, she's learning so much.

Yeah.

Can you really learn in the classroom as much as you're going to get in this world?

Because things are accelerating in such a pace.

She's got two or three more years to go of school.

Who knows?

I mean what, what the work world's going to be like at that point.

Yeah.

How do you think about that going through college now?

Traditional education versus getting the ultimate education of work experience.

I would say context again matters.

I think specifically if you are in computer science or in deep math.

There may be a lot of temptations in this today's world of AI to skip college, not even start, but go straight into workplace or skip halfway through.

And I mean I work on the US west coast in the Bay Area, in San Francisco and I see so many examples of exactly that amazing, amazing young woman and men that have started in college and skipped after a couple of years because the opportunity to soar in front of them was just unrivaled.

Look, I am perhaps a little bit Old school, relative to my advice I provide to my children.

And I think there's nothing like an education.

It gives you a grounding, it teaches you to work in teams, in projects.

It gives you some foundational learnings that you'll benefit from later on and also probably will give you a little bit of a self worth of having accomplished that in life.

So that's the advice I've given to my, to my children.

The other advice I've given to them is as for college education.

Unless you know really early on you want to go down a very specific path, say you know, structural engineering or become a doctor or vegetarian, I would say rather go broad.

And that is what my children have done.

They've gone fairly broad, which means as they have exited college or are about to exit college, it's a little bit broader, but they can go out and embrace work wise as opposed to going down that very narrow path that may define you early on into a corner that actually you end up regretting.

Yeah.

Great insights there for all us to think about as, as a top executive, kind of flipping the coin on your own people that you're hiring for your organization.

Yeah.

How are you thinking?

Like, I'm, I'm thinking about your daughter as like an example.

Would you hire a, like, are you thinking about like people that don't go to college?

People don't go part way to college, but they have a skill set you need.

How do you see that playing out today and in the future?

Because I'm, I want to know like what, how you're thinking about it.

So our listeners are going to find themselves in the same boat like they do.

They, they're not looking.

They need AI help, data help, and they don't necessarily need a doctor, a doctorate, PhD or this, but they might need someone out of high school that's just gone down the rabbit hole.

And so how do you rethink about qualifying them and building the, sort of building the workforce in the future for yourself?

Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a challenging one.

Right.

Because I think the linear path of looking at education and the first one or two jobs post, for example, college, it doesn't really rationally make sense anymore.

Specifically when you're looking at early career hires, for early career hires, it's far more function of attitude.

Do they have the core traits that you're looking for in employees and do they have an ability to go and figure things out and learning?

So are they curious?

Are they life learners and do they really embrace digging in and figuring it out, making a plan.

Obviously it will depend for the listener out there.

It will depend vastly whether you are hiring into very specialized roles, whether you're a small company or large company in terms of what you look for.

So there's always those dimensions to think about in this context.

So superpowers for leaders in the future, using data and analytics at a very high level and also thinking creatively about how you hire for those roles that you're going to need and, and how you check the boxes are going to be a lot different.

Spot on.

Yeah.

Well, I want to dig into this.

So your windsurfing story.

Yeah.

Made the Wall Street Journal.

In fact, you are, you're the only executive I've ever had on that's featured in the Wall Street Journal with your picture actually on a wind surfing board.

You, you're there in the Wall Street Journal, and that must have been a cool moment.

Like, okay, there's a guy I'm about to interview, he's, he's wind surfing in the Wall Street Journal.

But what did wind surfing teach you that the boardroom never could?

Well, so first of all, it should, just for the record be said, I'm fairly clumsy, which is one of the reasons I should never get close to a motorbike, which, which I'm not.

I'm, I'm a tall guy.

I'm 65 and so controlling.

A 65 body on a windsurfer in the early days when I started, when I was 14, was challenging and I figured it out and I just applied time tenacity and surrounded myself by a small group of folks that were super supportive and were good at coaching me.

So one of the things that I take away from windsurfing, one of the two things I take away from windsurfing is things may feel difficult, but you can probably overcome it and figure it out.

But you gotta lean in and actually ask other people for coaching, for advice and support and help.

And there's nothing to it to be ashamed of, however junior senior you may be.

So that's, that's the one thing windsurfing has taught me.

The other big thing it's, it's taught me is to go big, like dream big.

Go for the, for the moonshot, so to speak, which in the case of a wind server may be a forward loop or riding the ultimate big wave in on Maui, which I've done, whatever it may be and that I take back into business.

I love the notion in business of really thinking big.

You know, I have a Saying, which is losers count in millions, winners count in billions.

It's a little Pepsi.

A little bit derogative.

I don't mean to be derogative.

But my point though is think big.

Yeah.

You know, there is, there's nothing stopping you from taking a business that today may be $300 million and say, hey, in two years time, we're going to take it to a billion dollars, which, by the way, I've been part of.

So this notion of things are impossible.

Well, our job as leaders really is just to make the impossible possible.

It's that simple.

You got to dream big.

So you could have picked any hobby, but you're picking the one where you're going at like, what, how, like how many miles per hour do you get going?

30, 40 miles an hour?

Typically.

Yeah.

And if you hit the water going 40 miles an hour, that's a little uncomfortable.

It's not bad.

It's not bad.

Do you, are you training for this?

Like, when do you find time?

Because I run the Wall Street Journal.

Like they, they're talking about how your hobbies make you a better leader.

Yeah.

So this could be time that you could be doing executive work.

In fact, you might be thinking, oh, I, I shouldn't be on this.

I shouldn't be going 30 or 40 miles an hour.

I should be back in the office.

Yeah.

Dealing with the data that's coming at me, 30 to 40 miles an hour.

So what are you doing to like, give yourself permission to like, pursue this thing to such a high degree?

Because you're not just dabbling in it.

I mean, you're like, you say, you're really going for it out there.

You know, I'm not a big believer in work life balance, but I am a big believer in work life harmony.

So what I mean with that is I'm at peace that when I'm in the water and I'm taking three hours out of my day on a Saturday or Sunday or if I'm on vacation during the week on a vacation day, I'm at peace with doing it because that's what I decided to apply myself to and for you as a leader, however junior senior you may be as a leader, to find balance and performance in your role, you got to have some harmony between what you do work wise and what you do for yourself and your family.

So I'm very, very big in believing.

When you choose on a Tuesday evening to switch off at 5:30pm and to go out with your family for dinner, apply yourself for that.

Keep the phone in your car, keep the phone in your pocket, don't sit and check work, work emails when you're sitting and having dinner with your family as another example.

So I'm just very big in applying, in applying boundaries.

Having said that, I've also myself found a good rhythm as a leader that works, works for me.

As I mentioned early on I get up pretty early in the day.

I exercise every day, early in the morning, 5 o' clock to get the endorphins going.

I do that seven days a week.

I find it gives me energy and drive.

But I have a fairly early start to the day so I typically get on a normal non traveling workday.

I typically get a 10, 11 hour workday in before it's dinner time and then as much as I can afford it unless there's calls to Asia or something else unique.

I, I switch off come six o' clock when I'm not traveling.

Now when I'm traveling I'm on 24 hours a day.

I mean I sleep obviously I don't sleep a lot but I do sleep.

That's different because then I've actually dedicated, I've carved out that day to me out traveling whether I'm in Europe, Asia, somewhere domestically in the US So there I'm not shy of leaning heavily in and making sure I really apply myself in all those hours.

You just got, you just got to create boundaries, right?

Such a thoughtful approach.

And what I hear in that is hey Ben, you got to be proactive or you're not going to be able to do any of this stuff.

Find the way it works together.

What I mean, what, how many hours of sleep do you sort of try to optimize for?

6.

6?

Yeah, yeah, you get 6.

You're good?

Yeah, I'm good.

Yeah.

Wow, that's my, my, my.

I'm very fortunate.

I, I have been in fairly extensive global traveling jobs for gosh plus, minus 20, 20 odd years.

I can fall asleep straight away and I can sleep literally almost anywhere.

So you know, being in a global role obviously spend a lot of time on a roll row 37 eating, eating boring chicken.

But I can sleep on planes as well and hotels so that, that helps a great deal.

Well, no surprise.

It seems like you treat your, your global executive role as an endurance sport and you're training yourself to that.

And I think a lot and a leaders got to think that when you get an executive role of a global company it's not just leading, it's thinking about how you train yourself, how you perform in that way.

You know, there's an, there's an interesting debate on this point here.

So are you doing a sprint that never ends or are you doing a marathon?

You know, I, I have for a number of years been saying it's not a sprint, it's a marathon at a, at a reasonable pace.

But you got to pace yourself to be in it for the long term.

I want to say it probably was on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning last week I changed my mind.

And literally as I reflect on the last year and what's happening in business with the arrival of AI, I unfortunately think at least for a period of the next one to three years as, as AI really makes its broader inroad into worldwide business, I think we're back to, you know, a good four to 12 quarters of a sprint where we literally got to be going full speed.

Because the pace of change from AI, if you sit back and if you're not heavily leaned in, you may just miss the mark of what's changing your category.

I, I meet amazing customers in all different types of categories and industries around the world.

Without naming the company or the industry, I think of one company I worked with that literally have had their entire business model completely destroyed by AI and really have had to reset their company.

And I'm talking about a listed company.

So I see these things changing real time right now.

And I think we all need to just embrace the fact that change is here with AI and it's moving at a different pace and we all got to lean in in a big make way.

So when you're talking to your, to our listeners and to your own company about hey, we're in a, we're in a long sprint.

Yeah.

Not a marathon, but a long sprint.

Yeah.

What do leaders need to do to prepare themselves or how are you thinking about preparing yourself differently for a long sprint and getting off the marathon mindset?

Well, I think first mental and physical health.

So again I come back to exercising daily for me has been one of the habits that's one of probably has made the biggest difference in my life in just giving me positive energy and also just making sure I stay healthy mentally and physically.

So that's one thing I would give to all colleagues, however junior senior they may be, to all leaders as well.

Look, I think one of the single biggest things is self learning and self service.

So you can no longer sit back and wait for others to teach you what AI can do for you and for your company.

You gotta go out and spend some time, if not every day, at least a few times a week and educate yourself on the latest.

Understand it, use the tools, think through the implications, talk through what it means for your company and make some decisive changes.

That's what we've done.

In my day job at Amplitude, we have embraced AI in a very, very comprehensive way a year ago and made some substantial changes to how we think about how we build our team, how we build our product and how we take our strategy for the company going forward in a different way.

Love that.

It's the learning piece that can bite us and we're in an all out sprint on the learning side because it's going to be hard to catch up if we're not at that Breaknet pace or at least the learning piece of it.

Now starting to sort of ground it in leadership principles.

What's one leadership principle that you used back in your days over at Microsoft?

14 years, man, you really were there during a. I guess we're, I guess Microsoft is still in their heyday, but definitely very much so.

Their heyday, right then.

Yeah.

And so a leadership principle, Microsoft or Dropbox, that perhaps broke down when you got into the startup components.

You know, I will do like any successful politician will do and I'll take your question and talk about something else.

How's that?

But now that you said Microsoft and Dropbox, it actually reminds me of something, I would call it somewhat of a failure in my career.

So I spent 14 wonderful years at Microsoft, very, very grateful for that time and the learnings and the amazing colleagues and people I met.

Then I made a transition at that time into a successful company, Dropbox, that was still private but quite a bit smaller.

So you go from an environment of having 100,000 colleagues to having 1,000 colleagues.

And I entered into Dropbox as Microsoft, Thomas.

I had not reframed that.

It would take a different Thomas, a different version of myself, not necessarily a better version, but a different version of myself to be successful in the context of the size of the company, the category and the context.

And I took some hard learnings in that regard.

But you know, as one says, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

So you learn in that process and then you take that along with you and I had some tough learnings there.

Yeah, no doubt about it.

Which, what part of like, was there one thing from Microsoft, Thomas, that you were trying and you're like, man, Bill Gates sure did do that well, but that's not going to work here at Dropbox.

Yeah, I think, I think there was a culture coming built from Bill and Steve which was one of know your detail.

You got to be master of your discipline and build near perfect plans.

And you saw that in Microsoft in some of its processes.

It's, it's, it's then no longer existent, but it's then mid year review cycle which was, you know, pretty intimidating from a, from an insights and data perspective in terms of how you have to prepare for that.

I mean what I very quickly learned coming into Dropbox and what has been part of my life in the last plus 10 years in working for, for venture capital backed tech companies is 40%, 60% may just be good enough in terms of the data and the insight you have at any given point in time as a leader to make a decision.

Now of course, the more data we now have and the more analytics overlaid with AI we now have today of course means that we are actually as leaders getting into stronger and stronger positions in terms of actually having data and insights at a higher level.

But still this notion of having perfect data to inform you as a leader, it's nonsense and it just doesn't exist specifically in, in, in startup environments you have to go with intuition and you have to go with a 40% or 60% confidence in a decision sometimes and make a leap.

And then of course you have to make sure you don't fall in love with the decision or what you put in place because you could very well be wrong or it may only work for a short time.

So you've got to be prepared for tearing down what you built very quickly or quickly acknowledging that the decision you made wasn't right and you got to change course.

And I think in terms of just mindset, you know, you have to let go of this notion of the F word, failure, rather think of it as a set of rapid experiments where you do an experiment, you make a decision, the experiment partially work, you tweak as you go along and over time you get fine tuned product or strategy into a place where it's really a.

So good.

And to your point earlier, context matters.

And I worked for Honeywell for over a decade and every number mattered and had to be 100, right?

Yeah, and if not, we had the Honeywell operating system, Six Sigma.

It was just very.

And now in the world of technology, podcasting, media production, it's a different animal.

If you wait for the perfect number, it's not going to happen.

Now it's interesting because I also think this is, you know, thinking about superpowers for leaders right now.

This is another thing to think about because you're A you're providing, helping companies develop their dashboards.

Right.

They're, they're their numbers.

Yeah.

And you're doing it across a lot of different kinds of companies and some don't always have to have it to the T and then some may.

So how are you helping leaders think through, through that?

Because hey, here's our dashboard.

Oh, our dashboard.

If it's not 100% right, we can't make any decisions on it versus, you know, we're, we're close enough, we're directionally accurate and that's what we need to know.

We're going to keep getting better.

So how, how are you talking to leaders about that?

Well, part of what I talk about here is the notion of experimentation.

So actually when I talk to leaders in my day job with prospects, with customers, we talk a lot about the experimentation angle of the Amplitude analytics platform, which allows you both on real data, but also based on synthetic data, to go and run experiments.

And with the arrival of AI, you can literally have agents running either fully autonomously or fully or with human checkpoints, experiments all the time.

That enables you to fine tune getting into deeper levels of insight what might actually work before you fully implement it.

So this, this muscle, this discipline of experimentation, I think is critical to your business.

Yeah, a really great.

I'm making a note of that.

So the idea is there's so much data coming in for organizations right now with AI and leadership trying to process this and think about it, they have to get comfortable with the idea.

There's so much.

It's not always going to be clean.

The LLMs are not always going to be clean and they're not going to be perfect.

And it's like a constant journey to run these experiments on the data set you're using to fine tune it and make it better.

Y and is that where you come in or is this something that the ownership of the companies have to have to make sure they're doing?

I mean, this is where we at Amplitude can help.

It's one of the many things we can help with at Amplitude in terms of our platform.

Look, coming back to this notion of experimentation and making perfect decisions, the beautiful thing about experimentation is it allows you, typically through AB testing, to go and do experiments on a smaller subset of subset of your customer or prospect base, which means you're minimizing risk and quite frankly, you can completely reduce risk by running synthetic testing.

So it really allows you to run so many different what if scenarios, understand all the different variants, and then land on a decision that is optimized with the data you have in hand.

And even then, of course, I mean, look, reality is that going from synthetic data into testing into implementing a full solution, or going from actual AB testing in a live environment in a smaller subset of your customers, once you bring it into full production, globally 100% of your customer base, things may pan out slightly different.

So again, one has to be on the ball, monitor the data and make sure that you are able and willing to drive corrections as and when you learn more.

That's just the reality of it.

Thomas, starting to land the plan here.

This has been a good one today.

One year from now, I'm hoping you and I have another interview.

Yeah.

What are you going to be telling us about that AI and data is going to be doing for companies 12 months from now?

Well, we have a long range vision for amplitude and it's this notion of self improving products.

So we believe that over time you can have a world whereby leveraging the amplitude digital analytics platform, you can actually have the machine, have the LLMs, have the AI running experiments for you, provide feedback to customers that allows you to build better products and optimize your revenue.

Now I think between now and a year from now, I think number one, we would have made more progress than we think today.

We will make number one because things are changing rapidly and I think as part of that we would at amplitude have made more progress towards this notion of self improving products than where we are today.

So I anticipate a lot of progress.

Agenti, I think is going to be transformative in so many industries and so many categories in terms of how you leverage technology and how that impacts your business.

So yeah, I think we in the year of AI and we specifically are in the year of agentic and a year from now a lot of progress would have been made.

Are you still in a sprint a year from now?

Probably, probably.

Run Forest Run, right?

Run Forest Run.

I went to Alabama so I really appreciate the Run Forest Run comment, Thomas.

It's been a fun one today, my friend.

Y' all keep an eye on Thomas up to big things.

And if you are wind surfing, stay out of his way.

He's going 30, 40 miles an hour.

Having fun.

He'll probably be giving you a yeehaw as he passes you right on.

Ben, pleasure to see you.

Thank you for your time.