Diving deep into B2B SaaS metrics with Isabelle Winkles, CFO at Braze

Episode Description

In this episode of Diving Deep, Subscript's CEO, Sidharth, has an engaging conversation with Isabelle Winkles, CFO at Braze.

Sidharth and Isabelle go deep into B2B SaaS metrics as they discuss:

Advice for navigating a challenging economy
The compelling benefits of having Finance and Rev Ops report to the same leader
Specific ways the role of CFO changes when your company goes public
A thoughtful approach to adding to your finance tech stack
How a finance leader should prepare for an IPO
And more!

Show Notes

Follow Sidharth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidharthkakkar/

Follow Isabelle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelle-winkles-100665/

Follow Subscript: https://www.linkedin.com/company/subscript/

About Diving Deep with Subscript

Diving Deep with Subscript is a video series where we dive deep and explore SaaS metrics with leading investors, CEOs, and finance leaders.

Watch the entire series of Diving Deep with Subscript

Get caught up on the entire series right here: https://www.subscript.com/diving-deep

Episode Transcript

Sidharth Kakkar
Thanks so much for taking the time. The first question I wanted to ask you about is just at a very high level, why are metrics important, why are subscription metrics and financial metrics important? And why do they matter when you're building a great company?

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah, thanks Sidharth, thanks for having me. I think having a handle on your own internal metrics at an organization is just so critical and so paramount. It's important to understand what are leading indicators of future performance and what are lagging indicators of your actual performance in order to get a sense for where should your next dollar of investment be, what's working, what's not working, what trends are you seeing? I find so much that a lot of times we just talk about numbers in isolation and a number in isolation doesn't really mean much if it's not contextualized with trends or other metrics that are related to a particular piece of performance. And so having a handle on a broad set of relevant metrics that help to identify what is working well and where some changes need to happen in an organization is pretty critical.

Sidharth Kakkar
I feel like there's some metrics that are sort of obviously relevant to everyone, right? Like revenue or cost or profit. And then from there it kind of seems to vary quite a bit in terms of what actually matters. And then especially when you go all the way back to leading indicators, those are like extremely varied. How do you think about what you want to spend your time paying attention to?

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah, so I think it starts with some of those very key metrics that everybody looks at things like revenue. And I think you have to backtrack then from revenue to figure out, well, what's actually driving the revenue, what are the leading indicators that are happening in the background that are indications of future success or failure of the organization? So for different types of organizations, it's going to be different. For subscription based companies, things like a remaining performance obligation is very important to be tracking and understanding number of customers that you have, the amount of churn that's happening, where it's happening, the speed at which it's happening. Your dollar based net retention is incredibly important. How are you able to beyond the churn how are you able to upsell your existing base of customers? There's a lot of cohort analysis that companies will do to see how different classes of customers have grown over time. And so there's just a host of different metrics that are leading and lagging indicators. And again, I generally think it starts with top line and a CFO has to then pick apart what is actually driving the evolution of that top line over time.

Sidharth Kakkar
It's funny when you say that. It makes me think of I had this investor in my last company who talked about the Fermi paradox and how folks broke that down. The probability that there's life in the universe, down to a series of what are the kind of variables like how many planets are there and what is the odds that certain things, certain events happen and sort of produces a number that there's life outside Earth on the universe. But the idea is that you have this like thing, you multiply all the way across and that gives you the probability of it. And he always used to say you should run your company that way. You should basically have at the end is like sort of your revenue number or whatever. And then there's all the things that multiply out into your revenue that are relevant for your business. And it feels like you're from a very similar school of thought.

Isabelle Winkles
It's a little bit of a similar school of thought, although I do think it's important not to get bogged down by indications or metrics that are somewhat peripheral. And I think when you think about something as large scale as trying to figure out the probability of life in the universe and also the relative sort of relevance of the answer to that question, it's a little bit different. You want to be careful. You're not trying to boil the ocean in the context of trying to really fundamentally understanding a number that is as specific as a company's top line evolution.

Sidharth Kakkar
Fair enough. Point especially taken on the relative relevance. How do you draw that connection between looking at the metrics you're looking at and seeing changes and maybe seeing things that are going really well or things that are going to relate to actually doing something? It feels like a big part of your job is how do you do the thing and go from figuring out the number to doing? How do you think about that?

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah. So I think it's also important to have a structure within an organization that can take this relevant data and actually transparently report it in a way that's understandable to within the financial organization and then outside of the finance organization so that other individuals can consume that information and try to figure out what's working and what's not working. So I look at my role as CFO in running the finance function as a conduit of the relevant pieces of information to help support us as a leadership team to make some of those right decisions and better decisions for the organization. There are certain areas where I, as CFO, have to take the reins and make a very specific call. But when it comes to some of these strategic decisions around growing the business, I really find that a good CFO's role is to have a good handle on what are these relevant metrics that become the leading indicators of solid performance and making those transparently available and creating the right forums for discussion to figure out. What should we do as an organization?

Sidharth Kakkar
Are you able to go into that a little bit more? The right forums for discussion?

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah. So if I think about the way companies can think about organizing around these, it's finding A sort of the right responsible parties. So I always think about aligning accountability with responsibility and then figuring out ways to share relevant information with those groups. And so if it's groups that are responsible for hiring the right headcount into certain locations, let's make sure that they are enabled and empowered and educated on the right metrics that help them figure out how to be successful in that area. If you're trying to figure out where the next rep should be hired in a particular region or across a particular customer micro classification, let's make sure that the right data is available to heads of sales and regional heads. Of sales and within the finance organization and other areas of marketing support to figure out where's that next investment where that next investment dollars should go. Where that next headcount should go. And so it's really organizing around the locations where data needs to flow to in order for the best decisions to be made.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah, that part seems hard. Is it hard?

Isabelle Winkles
I think when you have a good rhythm within the organization where you figured out how to align responsibility with accountability, figuring out who the right person or the right group is to share that information becomes easier. I do think it is challenging, and I think particularly organizations that are growing quickly, it can be challenging to figure out people's job descriptions can change more rapidly at rapidly scaling organizations. The organization six months from now can look pretty different than the organization looked six months ago. And so that can be challenging, where suddenly roles and responsibilities are evolving fairly quickly. But the goal is always to figure out, well, where is the crux of the decision making process happening for a particular area and how do I make sure we organize and share the right pieces of data and information with that group to enable them to make the best decisions possible?

Sidharth Kakkar
One last question about this and how do you make sure that data is being considered in those decisions? And how do you make sure that it's not like entirely a gut based or convenience based decision? Because finance isn't always in that room where the question is being asked and answered.

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah, so I think a that it very much comes from tone from the top. And so if you have a leadership organization that chooses and has decided to be data driven, that should permeate through the organization. And so finance does not need to sit on top of every single decision. Finance should enable the right data and analytics around many decisions. Some decisions will be gut based in nature, but I think you have to weigh the risk of the particular decision and the extent to which you then need data to back up your actual decision. We make small decisions every single day that may not be perfectly data driven. The bigger the decision, the bigger the risk, probably the larger the data set that it should be required to back up the actual decision. I think there's also a question about the permanence of the decision that you've made. Is the decision, if it turns out to have been a bad decision, how easily reversible is it? And again, I think the less reversible it is, the more confident you want to be with data backing up your decision.

Sidharth Kakkar
I really love the point about culture being so important here. It totally resonates and makes absolute sense. One question around preparing or companies approaching IPO should be to be SaaS metric that companies look at start changing as they're approaching IPO.

Isabelle Winkles
So I think if you have an IPO in your sights and we can talk about what approaching IPO actually means, I don't think you want to sort of wake up one day and say, oh, now we're 18 months away, so now we should start looking at these different metrics that are more relevant for public companies. I think you actually want to start training yourself on those. And if they are the right metrics for public companies in your particular sector, they're the right metrics for very specific reasons. And they probably are leading indicators of future performance. And so you probably want to be looking at those even earlier to make sure that you are building an organization that will be sustainably successful. As these organizations grow, it can become challenging to sort of make decisions to pivot a particular metric if you've been built to sort of accomplish a slightly different outcome. And so I certainly think organizations should be cognizant of the relevant metrics in their sector, but I think it's a dangerous proposition to say, well, we'll figure it out when we're much closer to IPO and at that point we will change the metrics that we look at.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah, I totally get that. Like pivoting an organization, especially if you're creating close to IPO, it's probably not a small organization. To pivot in that way does not sound like an easy feat.

Isabelle Winkles
Yes, and there's so much going on in the context of preparing for an IPO that trying to sort of structurally change the relevant metrics that you're looking at and therefore the way you analyze data potentially to make decisions, that's a lot to consume all at once, while you're also preparing for an IPO.

Sidharth Kakkar
How do you balance that with this? Just generally as companies grow, what got you here won't get you there type of thing that happens sort of different phases just require different muscles. How do you balance that with the fact that you do kind of need to do some pivots as you reach those different stages?

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah, so I think it's important to be able to identify where some of those inflection points are starting to happen. And I'd say a few things. One is there are some of those inflection points that happen naturally by virtue of the evolution of the organization. And then there are some of these evolutions that happen by virtue of the market dynamics around you and needing to pivot because the selling environment is evolving, because the macroeconomic environment is evolving, because geopolitical forces, inflation, whatever, pick your favorite flavor of what we're seeing now, but what we've seen over cycles, over decades. Right? And companies need to figure out how to adapt. And so it's an adaptation that is not only linked to the evolution of the company's own intrinsic stage of growth and life, but also the world context that it is evolving in. And I think again, I come back to this concept of tone from the top. I think if you have a leadership for the organization that is collaborative, that can solve problems together, that can figure out how to navigate some of these complexities, the change can be disruptive but productive. And that's true whether again, it's part of the natural evolution of the organization.

Isabelle Winkles
You're starting to enter new countries that you've never entered into, you're finding product market fit in places that you didn't anticipate or you're evolving your product to become more widely accepted. All of that requires change within the organization. And I think if the tone from the top is clear as to what the definition of True North is, what the definition of victory is, and everybody can rally around whether it's things like OKRs or other performance metrics that can be shared to rally the company around the definition of victory, that can be highly productive for everyone.

Sidharth Kakkar
When the environment changes like it has now, it's sort of like there's a lot of received conventional wisdom, or maybe not so conventional wisdom, that's sort of coming from the outside, whether it's like investors or advisors or anything of that sort. And then there's sort of like first principles thinking that you use to arrive at what should be done in the company. And I find that there's like a delicate and difficult balance between the two because the two may not point the exact same way. And I'm curious like how you personally think through that.

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah, so actually I think because of those two forces and you're exactly right. So a couple of things. One is the events of past types of cycles. While they can be informative, the current cycle you're in is never exactly like any experience that you, your company, your organization has ever experienced before. It's always sort of the here and now and it's always unique to what's happening today. And you are going to get advice from third parties and that advice is also going to be colored by the events of the past and different people's experience. And so I think what all of that sort of noise and confusion can mean is that you have to be able to be flexible and you have to make decisions that enable you to still make choices. And so making sure not to walk through doors that don't really cut off other paths, you have to be very nimble across scenario planning. And again, that goes back to having all the right data to understand. If this then that I think your ability to work across multiple potential outcomes becomes that much more important.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yes, makes total sense. How has your role as CFO changed since Braze went public in November 2021?

Isabelle Winkles
Yes, I think the biggest change for me personally, as an employee and as a CFO is the importance of spending time with investors. And so we now have about a month of what we call the open window when we can speak to investors post earnings. And that is not something that existed certainly with the same cadence or regularity or criticality pre IPO. I joined Braze after their last round of private funding, so I didn't have to participate in a round of private funding. And so my first true experience with investors was in fact in the context of the IPO. And it takes a lot of your time and effort and energy in a way that doesn't exist so much in the ordinary course when you're not in a funding round in private company land, that's probably the biggest change going from pre IPO to post IPO for me.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense for finance leaders who are hoping that their company will have this in its sights in the next few years. What are things that they can do to both prepare their companies and themselves better?

Isabelle Winkles
Yes. So I think there's a number of functions and internal tasks that typically get back burnered as companies are heading towards IPO. And then once the IPO is sort of imminent or actually has already happened, then companies sort of start to invest in these areas. And it's things like internal audit and marching towards your path to SOCS compliance. I have actually tried to use all of this sort of internal audit and internal reflection work that we've been doing to not only meet the needs of our external constituents and handling auditor requests, et cetera, which is obviously of critical importance, but to help us just create better data, faster data, cleaner data, and use it really to our advantage. And so not doing any of this for any kind of tick the box exercise, but rather really finding the importance and criticality for us as an organization. And I think that companies too often look at that as a bit of a check the box exercise. And so I would recommend it becomes much harder to get people to rally around it if it's just that. And I think what finance in all likelihood recognizes this, but other groups around the organization may not, that all of this compliance work actually can't be handled 100% within the finance organization.

Isabelle Winkles
It requires full cooperation and participation by the likes of the People Organization and the likes of whether it's growth teams or data teams or operational teams in the background that are responsible for certain client related activity. It actually is akin to a full contact sport and it can't be handled in isolation by the finance organization. And so I would advise companies to start to figure out what those requirements are sooner rather than later because they're easier to get right the first time than having to go back and make modifications on existing processes, existing systems, existing access, existing whatever the specific case may be. It's always easier to do it right the first time and it is an investment. But as soon as an organization thinks that the IPO is sort of firmly within their sites, that is an investment that is absolutely worth making.

Sidharth Kakkar
Any sort of team organization implications of any of this work.

Isabelle Winkles
I think that this is something that certainly happened to me when I joined. I had three direct reports and broadly speaking, we had leadership across the accounting organization, across the FP&A function, and across the revenue operations function. I think that what really tends to happen is you start to have to have much more specialization and focus in particular areas. And so my number of direct reports has more than doubled within those organizations. The number of specializations that have been hired for has increased materially. In a pre IPO world, for example, you don't need somebody who is a specialist at SEC reporting. But once you are cleanly on that path, and then certainly as a public company, you need a team that is responsible for dealing with your SEC filings. And so I think what ends up happening to the organization is you stop being able to have folks who are a bit of jack of all trades who are doing a lot of they're wearing a lot of hats. And the individually specialized hats have to go to much more subject matter experts to sort of own narrower but deeper pieces of functions.

Sidharth Kakkar
I guess it's sort of like the maturing of any organization, whether it's like a division or a whole company. But the specialization just increases over time, so that makes a lot of sense.

Isabelle Winkles
There's an interesting corollary, actually going back to a professor that I had in college about urban city dynamics, and it was about how the bigger the city, the greater the specialization you were able to find within the city. So in sort of a very rural town, you might have a medical professional who's an expert at one type of medicine, actually practice multiple types of medicine because that's just what's available in the town. Or the seamstress is also practicing this other line of business in New York City, which was deemed at the time to sort of be, if not the most, one of the most cosmopolitan and metropolitan cities. One of the markers of that is you could find somebody who was as specialized as a necktie replacement, a necktie repair man, and that's just so, so specialized that it was just such a marker of the sort of size and scope and scale of what was available in New York City. This was over 20 years ago, but I think the same is true, as you said, of organizations where the larger you get and the more the closer you are to public company status.

Isabelle Winkles
And then certainly as a public company, you really have to have these subject matter experts that are well aligned to their roles and responsibilities.

Sidharth Kakkar
That's so cool. I feel like there's this awesome story to be told here about coordination amongst people and being able to accomplish awesome things. I love it. Very cool. What are some of the benefits you've observed from having finance and revops report to the same leader?

Isabelle Winkles
So the coordination between the revenue operations team and finance more generally, there's some real synergies there. If I think about, for example, the deal desk that fits cleanly within the Revenue Operations organization. Revenue Operations deal desk rather works directly with salespeople in order to put together their order forms. And there are nuances and complexities in how that has to be done in ways that align from a compliance perspective with accounting principles and rules of ASC 606 revenue recognition. And we certainly want to do right by the customer and be able to sell to them in a way that they need to be able to purchase product. But you also have to be able to protect the organization from any negative financial or accounting related concerns. And so having these teams that report up into the same individual can be really helpful. To be able to work through any issues or confusion, to be able to actually set goals so that there aren't competing goals among leaders where one part of the organization might say, no, we have to be more client friendly. Order forms have to be able to be produced in XYZ fashion.

Isabelle Winkles
And then there's a potential disagreement or friction with Finance that says, well, this is going to create all kinds of concerns. And so aligning those two things, even from something as simple as a compliance perspective, is incredibly helpful. I think the other part is the Revenue Operations team has an incredible amount of access to data and analytics about performance of the sales organization. And as Finance thinks about what is in the realm of the possible, again, going back to this concept of scenario planning and financial modeling, having those teams well aligned and working together is incredibly helpful from the planning process as well.

Sidharth Kakkar
There's a point you made in there about how a lot of times when companies are experimenting with business models or new products or whatever, ultimately a lot of the customer facing teams define what that will look like and then sometimes that can be a nightmarishly difficult job for finance to deal with afterwards. And it feels like maybe there's like a counterweight that you get with revops sort of not necessarily living under the customer facing order, but is that how you think about it?

Isabelle Winkles
So when we think about bringing new products and new SKUs to market, there's actually, and we've been going through this evolution, a much more robust process to figure out what will work for a whole host of stakeholders. And actually that process is not directly owned by either Revenue Operations or Finance, it is owned outside and it's owned within the marketing organization actually. And that actually provides for a third party to come in with knowledge of various pieces. But actually responsible then for making sure that all of the stakeholders, from the salespeople to the product, individuals who are developing the new product to the support organizations that are responsible for turning features on and off to the finance organization, to the revenue operations organization. There are just so many pieces that need to come together. And so I think that roadmap or that new product introduction process, actually having that owned outside of the finance organization and letting finance be a critical and key stakeholder is actually a very productive way to approach the problem.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. Ultimately, I guess, as you get these, as companies grow, rules get more specialized, one of the things that you have to also balance that with is mechanisms for coordination that will still allow you to do things as quickly or as effectively as you could before. And yeah, there's lots of ways to make that happen, I suppose.

Isabelle Winkles
Yes. And certainly I think a lot of folks that are involved in that whole process are not necessarily even based in the same office. And I think what COVID and all of this remote work has taught us is really how to better coordinate across time zones, across geographies, across remote locations and really trying to kind of get the most out of the time that we can have together to try to solve some of these problems.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. At Subscript, one of the challenges that we see finance teams face is taking data from a wide variety of sources and then finding ways to turn that into strategic insights that the business can use. How do you make sure that your team has both the right tools and access to the right things to be able to do that effectively?

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah, so the tooling has evolved over time, so we do allow ourselves to be introduced to new tools and new toolkits as we are presented with new problems that we're trying to solve and as we recognize that maybe the existing tools that we have are insufficient. And so it's a balance because on the one hand, we don't want to have this sort of messy mosaic of all of these different tools that are each solving for one very small piece of the puzzle. But at the same time, we do want to be able to run analytics in ways that provide us with the most clear, transparent and actionable sets of results. And so I am generally reviewing the various tools that we are thinking about purchasing with recommendations from my team and those who will actually be using it. And among my leaders, we'll usually discuss the tools so that we can make sure that we're not either doubling up and buying two things that do vaguely the same thing or that we're trying to maximize the problems that we're trying to solve for. But it's a journey that I think many companies are on. What's interesting is a lot of new tools pop up all the time and so you want to experiment, you want to try new things.

Isabelle Winkles
But as a public company, it's tough sometimes to try tools that are very, very nascent in their own journey because you don't want to sort of depend on a tool and then not be able to. Use it for the long haul because the tool somehow or the organization has gone under that would obviously be not productive for us as an organization.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. Totally broadening the question about tools to not just finance tools, but tools across the organization. One of the things that I think a lot of folks are experiencing is that businesses are a little more reluctant to spend money than they were, say, a year ago. We're recording this in December 2022 and December 2021. It was a bit easier. And so a lot of the question comes down to ROI on any given investment. And I'm curious, how do you apply rigor to that question of, like, what is the ROI we're going to get from a tool generally?

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah, so first I think about if we're buying a particular tool, is it actually overlapping with a tool that we might be sunsetting? And the extent to which that overlap is necessary. Maybe you can't give up the functionality, so you have to double pay for some period of time. Or can I punt the signature of the contract so that there's less overlap? So that's a consideration. And then when I think about the ROI and I do this for more than just tools, what are we getting for the investment? And so is it that the tool is meeting a need that actually we are incapable of doing without the tool? And is this a critical function? So this is money that we have to spend because it is a requirement, and we are not going to meet the requirement without the tool. Is this an investment that is going to allow me to avoid a headcount? Because actually the tool enables a more streamlined or efficient process. And therefore, if I look at my hiring plan, actually cannot be rejiggered to fund this tool. And so there's a couple of different ways I think about ROI.

Isabelle Winkles
Are we doing things faster? Are we doing things with fewer heads? Are we doing things in a more cost effective way? So is this tool actually maybe less expensive than a previous tool that I was working on? I think those are kind of the broad dimensions that we think about. And then how much maintenance is going to be required? What sort of internal It support am I going to need to keep this tool up and running and up to date and up to speed? Do I need engineers internally to be able to make updates? Or actually do updates come rather simply from the organization? Is it just sort of a web based UI that keeps pace with the needs of the business? So there's a host of different kind of questions that I'll ask when we're thinking about investment. And I also have to think about the investment dollars in the context of the macroeconomic environment that we're in. And so I have to much more rigorously prioritize in a world where those investment dollars can become more scarce.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. It feels like when determining ROI, there's, like, cases that are super clear cut, like this might increase revenue. You can look at the revenue versus the cost, or this might automate something that reduces the need to hire a person instead. And this is what that would cost. And this would cost, but for everything else in between, it feels a lot harder. And I'm curious how you go about even approaching that question when it's sort of in between.

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah. So the things that are in between are sort of things that would point to perhaps just a better process, but maybe it's not faster. Maybe it doesn't require fewer people, but we believe that the outcomes of the data will be more reliable or will be more insightful. And so in those cases, I have to work with the individuals who are going to be the users of that data, and I need to work with them to understand why do they think this is going to be better? And maybe it's a second derivative. Maybe the benefit is a bit of a second derivative. And I think that's where you're highlighting that it's harder to see the direct benefit because the benefit actually only comes because I was able to make a better decision. But okay, was the decision better because the data was better, or was the decision better because I had smarter people making the decision? So there's a lot of nebulousness in what's actually driving the outcome, which I think is to your point of that makes the ROI harder to specifically pin on the tool. So there I have to just work with the leaders who are going to be working on the tool and depending on the tool, and I have to trust that they think that the outcome of the tool's capability is actually going to be better for the organization.

Isabelle Winkles
And I may not be able to pin a number on it within a quarter. I may not be able to pin a number on it within two quarters. But I do want them to be able to argue, articulate, why do they think this is better? And maybe it is a second order derivative that is the economic benefit to the organization. But I need to get them there. And it's incumbent on me to sort of ask the right questions to figure out, is this the right place to put our next dollar of investment?

Sidharth Kakkar
We're recording this in December 2022, and it's a tough time for many SaaS companies. How is the current macro environment shaping the decisions that you are making?

Isabelle Winkles
So I think I go back to something that I said earlier, which is really just an ability to conduct multiple scenarios and to understand what we think we would do if the world starts to look like this or if the world starts to look like this over here. We are working towards being more I don't want to say we're working towards, we are exploiting our ability to be more nimble in making decisions that enable us to not close certain doors but leave room for decisions that may need to be made if the environment changes, continues to change around us. So I think scenario planning continues to be incredibly important, even more so now than it had been in the past. And we rely on the tools and the data that we have at our disposal in order to run those scenarios, to understand the impact of different choices, to figure out where would we start to make changes to the extent we needed to make changes. And that's very powerful. To have your hands on the right data, to be informed of what sorts of decisions would be the best next action to take, is very powerful.

Isabelle Winkles
And there's no control group, right? There's no way we can say, oh well, if we had done this thing over here, this is how the world would have played out or this is how our performance would have played out. There's no control group. But I think that's why you do need to live in a data rich environment. You do need to be highly analytical and you do need to leave yourself the opportunity to be able through scenario planning to figure out what choices you're going to make.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. What is the hardest part of doing the scenario planning or the hardest part of making the decisions that come from the scenario planning? I love the framework of we have a bunch of scenarios and we're using them to guide our decisions, but it's not as simple as that sounds, I am sure. And I'm curious, like, what is the hard part?

Isabelle Winkles
I think the hard part is the trade offs. And so when you are looking at different scenarios, usually across the different scenarios, you're making different choices, you're going to prioritize one action over another. And scenarios tend to be from great economic environments to lesser economic environments. And as you are looking at the alternative economic environments, again, you're going to be forced to prioritize. Where does that next dollar of investment go? How do you think about your capital deployment strategy? And that I think, becomes the hardest thing, is to choose where that next dollar goes.

Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah, I guess there's ultimately, no matter how certain a model seems, there's always uncertainty in there. So the decisions are not so clear cut.

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah, they're not so clear cut. But again, I think it's an effort of being data driven, of feeling like you are being informed and being advised. I think notwithstanding, we talked about some of the noise that gets created when you get advice from a lot of different places. I think that it is still important to listen to those and to pay attention to what is happening around you. What are other companies doing, what are other companies saying, and to be aware of how others are reacting to the environment. And it ends up creating that. Between that and the data that you have and the experience that your own leadership team has, it creates a mosaic that you have to sort of learn to read and figure out and then make the decisions that you think will be best for your business over the long term.

Sidharth Kakkar
That's where the experience comes in, right? The sort of reps that's, reading that mosaic and trying to figure out the answer.

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah.

Sidharth Kakkar
When it comes to using data to answer some of these questions or surfacing the right pieces of information, the right pieces of data to be able to then start to take an informed sort of prediction or make an informed prediction of what might happen. What are the things that you wish more finance and or executive teams could do with their metrics? As an example, one thing that we've seen a few times is like being able to use product usage metrics and being able to correlate those with things like Net Revenue Retention. Are there things like that that you're like we could all or like teams in general that I've seen could make better decisions if they had X?

Isabelle Winkles
Yeah, I guess it sort of depends. I guess it depends what kind of organization you are working with. But I think having a really strong alignment or understanding of what are you selling versus what's getting utilized and where are you selling more of where the utilization is actually happening and where are you seeing that maybe you're not selling enough in the first go around and that's where you're getting maybe some upsell motions or some overages? So having that data really readily available to be able to anticipate what might be the next financial action that happens between a customer and the organization and that is something that even getting that in real time or more closer to real time is also helpful. Here at Braze, we swim in quite a bit of data and so it's more about marshaling that data than figuring out how to get more of it. And we've done what we feel is a very good job of marshaling a lot of that data through visualization tools and other tools to be able to again get the data out to all the right individuals for them to consume it and start to make decisions that are most beneficial to the organization.

Sidharth Kakkar
Very, very cool. Those are the questions I had. Thanks so much.