Securing the Digital Age: The Power of Cloud-Based Identity Management

Megan - 00:00:42: Today, my guest is Michelle DeBella. Michelle is a CFO and dynamic executive who has been leading change at some of the most well-known names in Silicon Valley, such as HP, Uber, and Lyft, and more recently helping late-stage venture-backed companies grow and scale their businesses while maturing their finance, operational, and governance execution, and increasing employee engagement in remote-first global environments, as CFO of Knock, a high-growth prop tech startup, she helped the company expand from 14 markets to 75, grew revenue four times in 12 months, and helped the company secure over $200 million in debt and equity to fund their innovative business model. She currently serves as an advisor to the Knock co-founders and the board. In her current role as CFO of JumpCloud, a cloud-based identity and access management offering a full range of secure identity and device management solutions for SMB to mid-market companies that is raised over 400 million dolars today. She's helped the company achieve consistent double-digit ARR growth, cut net burn by more than 50% in two years, expand global operations across all functions, and increase her team's engagement scores by 15 percentage points in her two-year tenure. Over her career, Michelle has also been recognized for her leadership, mentorship, and efforts in the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging space. Michelle is an inactive CPA and has held memberships in numerous professional organizations over her career, including the AICPA, Institute of Internal Auditors, Internal Audit Professionals Group, Advancing Women Executives, SEC Regulations Committee of the Center for Audit Quality, and Women Leading Travel and Hospitality Advisory Board. She also served as the Board of Governors for the San Jose chapter of the Institute of Internal Auditors. Michelle, thank you very much for joining me on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Michelle - 00:03:11: Hey, no problem, Megan. Glad to be here.

Megan - 00:03:13: Yeah, today we're going to be talking about the CFO trifecta, which sits at the intersection of finance, strategy, and leadership. And I'm excited to learn more about this topic and from you and your experiences. So let's jump right in.

Michelle - 00:03:27: Sounds great.

Megan - 00:03:28: First, and just so that we have some idea of where you've been, can you just walk us through your career to date?

Michelle - 00:03:36: Yeah, I think I started in, I divide my career into half. I started and spent half of my career in public accounting, which kind of goes back to why I got into finance and business in the first place. And I spent the last half of my career in senior finance roles in industry, primarily in tech and Silicon Valley. That's been where I've spent most of my life. Everything from what I call the titans of tech like HP, through companies like Uber and Lyft, who are in the middle of their IPO journeys, to now I'm working in mid to late stage venture backed companies. So that's where my CFO roles have come. So it's a story I call the barn boots to business suits story. I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and had a great hardworking family. My mom did a little bit of college. My dad had an eighth grade education and again, great work ethic. But we live below the poverty line. And I swore I was, if I was going to work that hard, I wasn't going to be poor. I had a mom who knew I was academically gifted and really encouraged me to use that and nurture those gifts. And I was great at math and I knew math teachers didn't make a lot of money, but CPA has always had work even in my small town. So that was going to be my backup option, which, like I said, led me to kind of. My career in public accounting. And I had a great high school teacher who saw my potential, really pushed me to do business. And it helped me join Future Business Leaders of America and really consider a career in business. And that's kind of what put me on the path to, like I said, a career in finance. What kind of pushed me to the other half of my career was that pivot point, those pivot points that make you make choices. Number one was I got laid off from public accounting during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Megan - 00:05:29: Yep, I'll do it.

Michelle - 00:05:32: Yeah, when I knew my partner path was not a go at Ernst & Young, I took an executive role at HP. And it turned out that was really an outstanding experience in global finance leadership at a Fortune 15 company. And that's when I knew I loved working in finance, love working in tech. And I love that senior global leadership role. So that was a huge pivot point. I also had a couple of people who told me I couldn't be a CFO. I'm one of those people who, if you tell me I can't do it, I'm probably just going to try it just to demonstrate that I can. And that, again, was really something that really pushed me, encouraged me and made me stretch my boundaries and my experience. But I also found that as I moved from working at HP to companies like Uber and Lyft, high growth, disruptive tech companies really didn't need you to have all those old school experiences. Like, it was just more important that you could see patterns and adapt in those kind of VUCA environments that volatile, uncertain, chaotic, ambiguous, that's that term they use. And I discovered that I was really good at transformation, change and resilience and keeping engagement high during those times. So that was kind of the culmination of things that really pushed me to become the person that got me that first CFO opportunity.

Megan - 00:06:55: You think of yourself as a person who thrives in chaos?

Michelle - 00:06:59: I would say thriving is a strong word. I think I'm one of those people who can figure their way out of it and can do so really quickly because I don't love living in that state all the time. I do get a lot of energy by building and creating things. So I find I don't thrive in very stable, routine, non-changing environments. So, again, it's probably a little bit of that. I've got that intellectual. Curiosity, and so I approach the things I see in chaos and disruption as a little bit of solving a puzzle. And I love solving puzzles. So I can solve it, and it feels like a win.

Megan - 00:07:42: And as you look back on your career, is there a particular project or achievement that stands out as a source of personal pride for you?

Michelle - 00:07:49: Yeah, I would say given that I spent those last 10 years of my career working those companies that are either going through significant change and transformation or even just disrupting entire industries, I think I'm most proud of my ability to create teams and leaderships of what I call talent decathletes. There's those people who are trying to have a multitude of really good skills across a bunch of dimensions, and they're really skilled at managing and adapting to change. I love watching LinkedIn and to see these people that we took from really odd roles in different parts of the business, and we put them on this career path and progression. And it's great knowing I had a part of their journey. And it kind of along with that, then I love looking back at true business and finance transformation and seeing that some of the programs that I incubated and built have become these valuable and lasting parts of the organization, even after I leave. Specifically, I can think of one. I thought when I was at HP, we needed a women in finance kind of leadership group, like an ERG type of a thing. I couldn't get the HR team or my boss to bless it. So I used a little bit of my own budget and I just made it happen. And I had a really skilled person on my team who was willing to help make it happen. And it just kind of grew into a thing. By the fifth time we'd had this program presentation, suddenly the CFO and our HR business partner were asking to join the program. And I talked to the person who led the program after I left two years ago and I talked to her, it was still running and that feels good to see, again, that the leaders I built, they're still there. The programmers I built, they're still there.

Megan - 00:09:37: That's awesome. So looking at transformation projects, do you find that, like, is it usually the people? Is it the processes or is it the technology that is the most challenging aspect of a project?

Michelle - 00:09:53: It is all of those. Honestly, it really is. If you buy tools to solve it and you don't approach it from the people and process aspect. You just have a really expensive machine that's probably not going to give you what you need. If you... Get a bunch of people behind you and then you don't enable them with great tools. It's not going to happen either. And even if you have great people and great tools, if you haven't really thought about what the process would look like in your head, and maybe even on a piece of paper, you're not going to be able to maximize either your people or your tools. So I think you can't approach transformation without any of that. I would say if I was going to default to which one you maybe put a little more energy in, then it's people. Humans are naturally resistant to change. Even I have some resistance to change now and then. And that's just our nature. We're comfortable where we are. And so getting people's heads and hearts into change and transformation and getting them to trust that there is a better outcome on the other side is, really key. So I'd probably invest a little extra energy in the people, but you got to have all three.

Megan - 00:11:05: And as a CFO who's experienced rapid growth firsthand, can you share any specific strategies that you've employed to maintain financial integrity while scaling a company? I guess you scaled a company four times in 12 months, which is amazing. And what lessons did you learn from that experience?

Michelle - 00:11:23: I have two big priorities. Now, and by the way, I learned this firsthand by the HP in a couple of instances, and I'm just taking it with me. The first thing you have to do is focus on three things, simplifications, standardization, and automation. And that should be in your products, in your processes, in business models. These three things, simplifications, standardization, automation, are core to how you 10X your capabilities without 10Xing your people, your dollars, or the tools. It's just a really critical part of managing resources and scaling well. Companies who do this well have top-line growth that way outpaces their financial spend on that. And lesson two is don't get over your skis. Right? Post-pandemic through early 22 gave us that false sense of security that money was cheap and easy. And despite the fact that we just come out of a period of massive disruption from the pandemic, that really like, totally shut down some businesses. We suddenly came out of it and went crazy. And that first experience as a CFO taught me that you have to align your resourcing plan to something that balances growth and a disciplined cashflow, and objectives of just spending cash like it's free and easy and it's coming around the corner. And you're not driving to that self-sustaining model as soon as possible, you're headed for trouble. So you've got to be able to really adapt your spending to your revenue trajectory pretty quickly if things change.

Megan - 00:13:00: I love that advice. And I like the focus on simplification because I think a lot of times when companies start growing, they tend to overcomplicate.

Michelle - 00:13:10: Totally. And I think it's also like in startups, I think people value innovation so much that the word standardization feels like the opposite of innovation. And I've actually found that like the more you standardize, even like for your user experience, right, the more you standardize, the more capacity you have for the things that actually need to be differentiated or need to be customized. You customize those things that give you significant value or differentiation in the market. If you're customizing everything in your business, you're missing the opportunity.

Megan - 00:13:50: And how do you balance the immediate financial responsibilities of a CFO with the need for long-term strategic planning?

Michelle - 00:13:58: Yeah, I think you kind of have to be thinking of both all the time. There's a phrase I actually heard at a leadership training year, I don't give credit to Thayer, it was their program. And they said, great leaders are working in the business and on the business, meaning In the business, you're being operational, you're managing day-to-day stuff, metrics, things like that. But you're also working on the business. You're thinking about that next one year, three year, five year thing. One of my early hires here at JumpCloud was a really nice... Really experienced senior leader for our FP&A and business finance team who was going to focus on longer range planning. And I wanted a three-year strategic plan and rolling planning that had scenario analysis for range outcomes. But at the time he came, it was really something I was trying to build for the future. However, our business model is really heavily influenced by hiring and user expansion in our customer base. So when we hit some macro headwinds and our customer base suddenly reduced their net expansion due to a pattern of user contraction, they were doing layoffs and other hiring adjustments to adjust to the new realities of inflation and higher interest rates and tighter capital markets in late 22 and early 23. We were able to use that strategic plan and that scenario analysis to really quickly adapt and make real-time changes to our resourcing plans that can serve the cash we'd raised in 2022. And knowing that capital markets were not going to be our best option for that. And that has held us in great stead against a lot of our competitors and a lot of other tech companies in the same position that we were. And again, if I hadn't been thinking about that long-range stuff, and planning for our future while I was just trying to do my day job, right, and pay bills and things like that, I don't think we would have been as ready to make those pivots.

Megan - 00:15:59: And speaking of leadership, but when you look at leaders and leadership, what are the critical qualities that a CFO has to possess these days to manage diverse teams across different cultures and regions, especially in global organizations?

Michelle - 00:16:16: HP was my first experience in a true global organization, global team. And I think it comes down to three big things. Soft skills is kind of at the top of my list. And I think it's things like communication, transparency, clarity of goals and objectives, and employee engagement are all super critical to creating that virtual community that really enables a high performing team. So as a leader, if you don't have those, you're kind of starting out of the gate on your heel. I think also. Clarity and well-documented processes, ownership, accountability, and those measures of success are the things that will allow your teams, particularly global teams who may be asynchronous in time zones, it gives them the autonomy needed to work as a global team. And especially a company like ours, which is remote. First, we don't even sit in offices together. So I think, again, that clarity of your goals, success measures, and those processes is and accountability for them is really critical. And then my final one is honestly, it's just resilience, grit, and learning how to make the best choices for the company, even if it's not your best interest. And I think the best, one of the, I would say most important, but hardest things I had to do was to make a restructuring plan during my first CFO gig. We had a really short cash runway. Back to my first point, make sure you're thinking about that ahead. But we had the short cash runway. We were trying to do a SPAC IPO, but that was fizzling out. So we went to get our Series D funding, and that was the thing that was going to give the company the ability to continue operations in a really tough macro environment. But our lead funding VC said, we've got to have a better spend plan. So I had to develop a restructuring plan that cut nearly 50% of our headcount. And one of the most important things I had to do was put myself on the top of that list. And so in those moments, you kind of have to stay super calm and focused and objective and focus on the best outcomes of the company and the shareholders and the customers and the remaining team. And in that case, that outcome was I'd be at the top of a list that nobody wanted to be on.

Megan - 00:18:33: And you mentioned working in 100% remote environment. How do you make that work? I see so many companies now pulling people back into the office three days and even now five again. So how are you making that remote environment work?

Michelle - 00:18:49: I think it was interesting. I would say here at JumpCloud and the last, actually the last two environments I've worked at have both been remote first. One of them did it way before the pandemic. So I was actually like really impressed. I think with JumpCloud's case, the pandemic forced us to not work. And that happened almost at the exact same time that like. Our business became global overnight in terms of our customer base and our revenue base. And we suddenly realized we had to have global talent to meet our customers where they were. They didn't all want to wait till the U.S. woke up for us to answer questions or support them. We needed sales and other teams, support teams on the ground, more in region, in time zone. And- So we weren't going to start building real estate platforms all over the place. And so remote first was a way to access. Talent across the globe that could serve a global customer base. But I think what's critical to keeping that thing working, however you get there, whether you choose to do that upfront or on the back end, is one, you have to have a really strong set of company values that you... You hold consistently as leaders, you demonstrate consistently, you reward consistently, and you hire for those consistently. And if you have people who don't demonstrate them, they don't fit in the organization because you kind of have to have that unified approach to just those core values that you have. The other thing is, I think you really have to think about communication, almost over communication, right? Because, that clarity, that transparency, communication is the thing that has to keep an organization together when you don't sit in the office. And that extends to relationship building, right? You have to learn how to make relationships in a virtual environment. And it comes down to, again, you've got to be able to have human connections. So you have to use your time wisely. And the other thing I think is, it kind of goes back to my other point, is clear, well-documented processes, metrics, measures of success, outcomes. Even when I worked at HP, which was a remote person, we had a really global workforce. And one of the things that let us operate asynchronously with teams all over the world was we had a playbook. And that meant for doing, it was for audits, right? For doing an audit, any one of our auditors in any country could pick up the playbook and they knew all the steps they had to do, all the things they had to document where all the tools were, everything. And having those well-documented... Processes really lets teams work asynchronously. If you're still operating in that mode of, we figure it out as we go, that's going to be hard. If you don't have clear metrics of success, you don't know how to measure what people are doing when you're sleeping and they're awake 12 hours away from you. And I think that was the other thing. I think. When we talked about being in the office or not being in the office, because even HP, before people were remote, really got into this, we want to be in the office and create community. One of the questions people say is, how do I know people are working? I'm like, well, if you have clear goals, objectives, metrics of success, like when I was running a closed process, if the Indian team wasn't done by 6 a.m. On such and such a date on closed, it wasn't going to hand off to another team. And that was our measure. You had these things you had to complete, and if it didn't happen, the next team couldn't do their work. And so I think that's where that clarity around, again, whether it's process, goals, measures of success really helps you do that. But again, it comes down to people. You've got to have a special kind of person who knows how to think of other ways to create relationships that exist and persist. Outside of in an office environment. In fact, actually one of the most best examples I would say is the team that I was. Part of restructuring, we created a virtual Slack community just for people who had been laid off. And that. Black community. Was active and living for like two years after the layoff. And I think that goes to show that you actually can create relationships in community when you have that common sense of values, purpose, our purpose. And obviously our why was different at that moment, but like it can persist in a virtual environment. And those are the keys to success, I think.

Megan - 00:23:28: Thank you for sharing that. That's all great advice. And switching gears a bit, but and looking at data governance and analytics, how are you leveraging data to inform financial decisions and drive business strategy?

Michelle - 00:23:42: Yeah, I mean, I love using it. I think the reality for most companies, particularly growing companies, is you're never going to have data to support 100% of your decision-making. That's probably aspirational at best. So I think the thing we focus on is what are the critical data items? What are the definitions of those things across the company? It can't just be inside of your team. What's that source of truth? And this is true at JumpCloud. It was true at my last role too. In fact, we had to undertake a big project to just say, let's define these things very explicitly so that when we talk about them and measure them, we do them the same way. But once you have that critical set, then you can, again, you define them and you can figure out where that source of truth is, whether that's in finance or with your business partners. And then drive governance over those things. And that's way more essential than having really heavyweight governance over everything.

Megan - 00:24:38: And AI, can't really have a conversation these days without mentioning it. What are you doing with it? How are you using it? If at all. Where are you in that journey?

Michelle - 00:24:50: Yeah, well, we're early in our journey. I would say we actually just did a maturity assessment. I have an awesome strategic program management team. And these folks are leading a cross-functional effort that, again, focuses on those three things, people, process, and tools. We have a representative of the people team on the team. We have a representative from the product who's really kind of knows some innovation and has worked on putting AI in the product itself. And then we've got our head of our business systems, who's really helping us think about the tool aspect of it. But what we did is we really started with that maturity assessment. And we're two at best in most places. And we're one in some places. I think what we're trying to approach it, we actually are also working on AI in the product set, which is another whole conversation that's really to help the tool be better for our customers. But internally, we really do want to leverage it. What I'm learning, though. And. And what I'm trying to make sure we stay focused on using the program management team to help all three pieces come together is. We are going to have to build, find, or train people to really think this way and really think about like, what can we use AI in? Where is it best used? How is it going to accelerate us? How is it going to unlock other capacity for us? And identifying those use cases are pretty important. The second thing I think is focusing on what already exists in our environment that has some built-in AI that we can leverage. And, you know, I know that companies like Salesforce and Oracle and big companies that are selling big SaaS platforms, they have resources to devote to this. We're saying, let's leverage anything they're building. I mean, they tested on... Hundreds of thousands of customers, right? We don't need to build everything ourselves. We just need to understand what tools we own and what their AI roadmap is and how do we put our use cases to work with the tools that we have. And then again, thinking about what are those other use cases that sit outside of that, maybe that. So I think we're just trying to, again, approach it from a very cohesive company level approach that thinks about the people, the processes and the tools so that we have a really coherent and cohesive approach to it versus every team going off and trying to figure out their own solutions. We're getting business partners focused on what are the opportunities and the use cases and let's find quick ways to pilot them with stuff we have and let's imagine the art of the possible with the others.

Megan - 00:27:37: And you mentioned your product, but what exactly is it that JumpCloud does? What is the product and who are your customers?

Michelle - 00:27:44: Yeah, we are an identity and access management platform. We are a foundational tool for a lot of SMEs. So customers anywhere from the small 50 to 5,000 kind of range, which I think somewhere in the thousand to 5,000 is probably a little more mid-market. We sell a platform that actually has kind of an all-inclusive bundle of a core directory, identity device management, identity management, SSO. Password management, patch management, a bunch of different tools. We're an excellent platform, again, for that SME space where companies are, again, maybe they don't have a sophisticated environment. They just need some baseline tools or they have a little bit bigger environment with a couple IT people who are really trying to focus on scaling the company efficiently. And it provides them that one new platform, single pane of glass. As we get to bigger companies, we can also leverage the piece of the platform, the self-point solutions. Maybe somebody's got a single sign-on mechanism, but they really need to work in a heterogeneous device management tool. And we've got that. We were just kind of founded from this belief that identity is the core to security and a lot of what we do and having a cloud-based. OS device agnostic platform was the best way to do that rather than sticking to like a single stack like a Microsoft.

Megan - 00:29:10: And as a CFO at the forefront of technology and innovation, how is it that you see the role of finance evolving and the role of CFO evolving in, let's say, the next three to five years? How is it going to change? Can we even envision how it's going to

Michelle - 00:29:26: change? Yeah. Yeah, I think finance is going to have to, I mean, we're still going to have to do a lot of compliance things, but I think it's going to have to be more critical and have a bigger seat at the table at making those forward-looking decisions that are not going to have historical data and trends or models, right? Reporting historical performance isn't necessarily going to help you if your market's changing. So I think we're going to have to learn to be advisors on options, trade-offs between speed, risk, and return on investment. And we're going to have to navigate business support in an environment that changes more quickly than ever before. And I think we are going to have to continually adapt to more automation, AI, data analytics, put those in our models and practices to create internal capacity to solve more complex things and considerations our business models have to know.

Megan - 00:30:17: And the word storytelling, I hear that a lot in relation to a CFO. So how do you tailor your own communication style to effectively convey complex financial concepts when working with different stakeholders?

Michelle - 00:30:31: Yeah, I think one is you kind of have to educate people. Some of that is about educating, right? And it's making sure your stakeholders, like your board and investors, know what your North Star metrics are. How you measure them, being consistent in sharing them and helping them understand the why those are important, right? I also love the military concept my ex-husband taught me, this bluff, bottom line up front. We focus on trying to tell our investors or our board what we want them to take away from reading our board deck and results, right? So I think like learning how to have that like takeaway summary or elevator pitch, right? It's like we're seeing great expansion, which is driving top line growth. And we're managing spend well, like having those statements so that people can then have that in their brain when they're looking at the results and the numbers and things like that. Again, consistency is big for me. And when you're in things like meetings with your boards, I think the other thing is you've got to give people ways to digest your messages. In the way that's best for them. So we're a big fan of pre-reads and we establish that pattern of sharing information in advance. Sometimes we do it in slides, we do videos, sometimes it's narrative. And we do that ahead of meetings so that really like by the time we get to having those conversations, we can focus on having them be thought partners versus just a governance body that like hears things out. So, but yeah, and the storytelling, I mean, somebody else also told me this, right? Like, tell them what you're going to tell them, you tell them, and then you tell them what you told them, right? And I think it's that, again, repeating consistent communication, that repetition, I think, helps people digest messages over and over. We have North Star metrics. We're really clear in the company and all of our employees know our four North Star metrics.

Megan - 00:32:25: Yeah, I love the idea of a pre-read and that way gives people a chance to digest and then actually have thoughts on a topic rather than just be surprised by information.

Michelle - 00:32:36: Yeah.

Megan - 00:32:37: And having developed objectives and key results and KPIs at various organizations along the way, how is it that you determine which metrics are most meaningful for both financial performance and overall business success?

Michelle - 00:32:51: For us, again, we focus on this concept of the North Stars and those we look at as core guides to our future success with both our customers, our employees, and our shareholders and investors. So our four really do have a focus on top line, bottom line, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement. And when we present that to an employee as a company, we want our employees to all see themselves in one piece of that puzzle or another, right? And so I think having a few really core ones to focus on is key. You can have 27 of them, but if you have 27, nobody knows where the focus is. Or if something new pops up, nobody knows how to get into the prioritization. I think having a small set of those core is critical. Now, to operationalize that, you obviously have to have some metrics that help individual teams understand their part in contributing. Like getting those first three to five are really critical. And sometimes it's about crystallizing the why those are important. And I'll use the example, like probably a month into my tenure here at JumpCloud, with the market evolving before us, and we saw the capital markets getting more expensive and harder to raise capital, and investors were getting really conservative and multiples and their risk tolerance. My CEO said to me... We need to exit each year with a three-plus year cash runway, so we're not depending on the near-term market dynamics. We need to build a self-sustaining business. And the clarity of that will end every year with three plus years of cash. Was it really helped us crystallize budget setting. It helped us balance it. Once we got the revenue plan, the spend plan had to follow that and follow this crystal clear guidance of when we finish the year, we got to have another three-year cash ahead of us. But it's also helped us even as things adjusted, it really helped us adapt and really effectively change things if we needed to. The great outcome of that and that clarity and the why, again, let us do those short-term investments, but more importantly, it's helped us continue to preserve that cash we raised in 21 or 22. It's helped us operate more cost-effectively since I got here. We've cut our net very monthly by more than 50% in less than two years. And we've got to path the net for neutral insight inside of the next 12 plus months with the healthy cash balance that's earning interest in one of the best interest rates environments I've ever been in as a business woman. So, it just, like I said, it's just having that clarity of that is our, that's the outcome that we have to have every year. It crystallized what we needed to do every year once we got the revenue trajectory right.

Megan - 00:35:43: And working in technology, obviously innovation is key. So as a CFO, how do you balance risk and reward? How do you put some controls into place while not stifling innovation?

Michelle - 00:35:57: Yeah, I think that's probably been the biggest learning for me, especially when I moved from working at HP, which was Fortune 15 public. I had been in business 75 years and had 300,000 people around the globe at the time I joined. I actually saw what good process, good governance, good controls look like, but it doesn't move fast, right? Which is fine if you're a company that has GDP growth levels in the 3% to 5% a year and has cash, right? When I moved to those really dynamic high growth companies like Uber and Lyft and the pre-public companies I'm at now, they're like, things move and change fast, and you can't put an HP size level of governance on it. So you can't manage all risk, right? And you see, you probably have to take this more adaptive approach to figure out those one or two that are critical, manage those well. And, then build the lightest weight model you can for everything else, that is good enough. And I think that's one thing I had to learn really early on is there are definitely certain things like we have a platform. Security is super important to our customers. We probably need to be in a B plus A in security to really deliver on our promise to our customers. On other types of things, I don't think we have to manage the risks to the A plus level, right? I like to be a B minus C plus in those because the cost of being an A plus doesn't outweigh the benefits of doing that. And then it can actually slow you down, right? So I think it's understanding how to balance that and building the lightest weight thing that gets you good enough. The other thing I'd say too is sometimes we have to tell ourselves this, like to move fast, sometimes you have to move slowly, in one part of the step to let you move fast. And that might be, again, stopping to say, if we're going to experiment with this, what are the no-go places? What's things we won't do? And then giving the go-ahead on everything that doesn't create that biggest risk for the company.

Megan - 00:38:06: And last question, but as a leader who values employee engagement, how are you approaching mentorship within your teams? And what strategies are you employing to foster a culture of continuous learning, so important these days.

Michelle - 00:38:21: Yeah, I think formal or informal mentorship is really about relationships and trust and being able to learn and get honest guidance and feedback that helps you grow, right? And so how do you establish trust? I mean, the trust equation is pretty clear, right? You've got to have credibility, consistency, and kind of a personal affinity. And so first and foremost, I'm an authentic leader. What you see is what you get, meaning I'm real, I'm vulnerable, I'm human. I try to create connections that let folks engage with me and share. And part of the way I do that is by sharing about myself and letting them see my successes and my failures the same way. I think the first time I got laid off, I was kind of embarrassed to tell people. Now I'm proud to tell people I've been laid off three times for economic events and everyone has taken me to a different and better place, right? It wasn't about me. It was the economy. And that's part of my story. That's part of what's made me who I am. And I think that, again, that authenticity creates that relationship and then lets people be willing to share and take that guidance and feedback. I try to encourage all of my team members to have skip level reviews with me monthly, just so I can know them and learn what engages them. Some of them do it more frequently than others. And that's also part of mentorship is knowing like when you need it and when you don't. And then to really kind of encourage kind of that learning environment and continuous learning and growth among folks like, we have at our all hands quarterly, we have a team showcase. And that's deliberately intended to celebrate new ideas and creative solutions and innovative ideas that the teams have been working on. I want teams to not only share their own successes and stories, but I want our other team members to see that and be inspired by that and maybe have a little bit of that competitive spirit and say, well, now I want to create something great. And I try to also be that leader who is good with learning and testing, even if things don't work out right. Like if they don't work out, I don't want. I don't want to penalize people. I don't want to blame people. I want to focus on what's the root cause. What do we do to improve things at the source of the problem? And honestly, don't like never overreact if people take risks, but end up with imperfect outcomes, right? Look at every failure is an opportunity to learn something, right? So I think it just means I've got to be calm and centered and focused on what did we learn here in this moment?

Megan - 00:40:48: Michelle, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Michelle - 00:40:51: Pleasure to do it. Happy to share.

Megan - 00:40:52: Yeah, it's been really great speaking with you. And thanks for finding the time to be here with us today. I wish you and JumpCloud all the best. And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.