Transcript
This is Mark McClain, CEO and founder here at SailPoint, and welcome to Identity Matters, a podcast where I get the opportunity to sit down with people that are, as we like to say at SailPoint, humble, hungry, and smart, and also leaders and innovators in the industry. And I'm very privileged today to be joined by my friend Andre Duran. Andre and I have known each other for about 25 years in this game of Identity, been in our respective companies for a long time. He's the co-founder and CEO, excuse me, founder, I think, not co, right, Andre? The founder and CEO at Ping Identity, a very significant player in the marketplace. It is great to have you on today, Andre. Thanks for joining. I'm excited to be here, Mark. Thank you. You've had a remarkable journey building Ping from the ground up for over a couple of decades, as we know, and leading it through multiple transitions. You and I have some interesting things in common on our journeys, and I'd like you to just share a little bit about security in the first place, way back when. I think my first introduction to the importance of identity was actually prior to Ping. I was, I had founded with a very brilliant engineer, a commercialization of the Jabber messaging platform, and Microsoft had introduced Passport. This is right at the beginning of the internet, and it was kind of, you know, at the height of the Windows, Microsoft, you know, kind of domination, if you will, of the desktop, and here we had an opportunity to redo what, you know, networking and compute looked like online. And there was a lot of reaction to people that said, we like the idea that you could have an identity, a singular identity that follows you around the internet. They didn't love the idea that it had to be a gateway or a tollbooth through Microsoft, and so there was a reaction, really, by the industry to create standards for identity that would allow you to understand who you're interacting with online, but allow any number of parties to be the identity provider in that scenario. So that was my, that was my first introduction to thinking about it. And then some years later, two years later, I, in essence, kind of came to the conclusion that we can't be anonymous by default online, and that anything of value or of meaning, we had to have some level of assurance of who we were interacting with on the other line. And so kind of the classic cartoon now that's 40, 50 years old of the dog, no one knows you're a dog on the internet. I was like, okay, that actually doesn't work. So that was the- Literally where my brain went. Ironically, you said that, literally was thinking that cartoon as you were talking. It's funny. No, I get it. So that was the realization that said, okay, we've got to do something about that. Awesome. Yeah. And it's been a very long and interesting journey since then, similar journeys as CEOs and founders in this space. So more recently, you went through a take private, and after having been in the public markets before, and that was a major milestone. When you've seen your company go through various milestones, venture-backed, private, equity-backed, public, you've been on some of this journey. What are some of the reactions you've had as a founder through some of those milestones? Like, wow, what does this mean for me, for our leaders, for the company? Just kind of some reactions to that, maybe. Well, I think, look, when you're playing the long game, right, 23 years, 25 years, right, in their respective cases here, you recognize that there are different capital structures that align to where the company is at and or to where the market is at. And so venture capital takes a lot of risk early. But at some point, they have LPs, and after a certain amount of time, they expect a return, and so they need to exit. And you take on a different class of investor that is looking for, might be looking for more scale or might be looking for more profitability. And so in essence, I became in tune with aligning the investor to the stage of the company and where the market was at. And so the decision to go private was largely around two things. One was an observation that post-COVID, it was hard to determine what was going to happen in the macroeconomic environment. But I would say it looked stiff, and it didn't look like it would just be a blip. And what I decided was that I would rather play offense privately than defense publicly. And so, you know, and, you know, I've been around and seen a couple of cycles. I've observed that all of these moments, if you will, in markets where they come under stress, in essence, they're concentrators. What happens is kind of the wheat and the chap get separated in those moments. And if you are in a position of strength, you can actually accelerate yourself through those moments. And so the opportunity with Tomo Bravo wasn't simply to go private. It was to do something transformative. In this case, the transformation was to combine with, you know, what was at the time a direct competitor of ping in the upper end of the market, had a great solution in the customer use case, which we were also very focused on. And so the intent was, how do we leverage a moment in time in the market where we can consolidate our collective strengths? No, I think it was well played, to use some phrase from gaming world, right? I think it was a brilliant move and a strong move. And I think it has resulted in you guys being an even stronger player in this market space. You know, and if you think about, like you said, this entrepreneurial journey, it's funny, probably you and I react similarly to that question. A lot of people say, tell me about your entrepreneurial journey, and you think, it's been a long time since I thought of myself as an early stage entrepreneur, right, been at it for a while now. But if you think about that, kind of, what is it that continues to motivate you to continue to build, you know, as the company's obviously gotten to significant scale through this transformative acquisition and integration of another large organization and now kind of an even larger player in the market? Just kind of what continues to be a big motivator for you on this journey? I'd say the motivation has come in chapters. And the way I would think about it is, there's no end summit, there's only the next summit. As a guy in Colorado, that makes a lot of sense. I tend to get very fixated on what the next summit is, like singularly focused on the next summit. And the summits are never like one or two year achievements, they tend to be, call it three or four year achievements, which about aligns with what I consider to be a good tour of duty commitment, meaning we don't have to commit forever, but we need to commit to a goal or to a mission. And what I've noticed is that myself and the company has been aligning to these almost three to four year missions, and I've become singularly focused and the missions are challenging, right? So they're very stimulating. And along the way, I'd say two other things have kind of enabled me to go the distance. One is that the challenge of scale is a privilege, frankly. And so I noticed that I focused, whereas my attention was on one point singularly on innovating and building, now my focus was split on innovation of scale almost. And not a lot of founders find that appealing. I think they look at the rigor of scale and the process and everything becomes a specialty as somehow diminishing their creativity in a sense it juiced mine. So that's on one dimension. And on the other dimension, we're always innovating, introducing new products. So in a sense, a larger company is nothing but a collection of startups. And every product really does go through most of the challenges of new product introduction and product market fit and pricing discovery. And so along the way, I've discovered that in a larger company, you can have layers of innovation all at different levels of maturity. And if you are stimulated as a founder by that early innovation, you'd certainly don't lose it at scale. You actually have it in space. Or if you do lose it at scale, you start to shrink and then you have different problems. Yeah. So the challenge is to continue to innovate and continue to find new opportunities. And you guys have done that obviously very well. I want to come back to some topics on leadership and culture. Let's at least spend a few minutes in this common space you and I are in and broadly enterprise security, particularly identity security. You know, there's been an awful lot of new things. You talked about how you sort of came into the market with this thinking of kind of people need to be known on the internet and kind of that flavor of thinking about identity. How's your thinking about identity continue to evolve over the years? If somebody says, what do you think about identity today? How would you answer that differently than you might have a couple decades ago? I would say that my view of the importance of identity of a few decades ago has, I say, withstood the test of time, fairly durable. So I don't think any of the foundation that we can't secure what we can't identify. And we can't trust what is not authenticated because it is inherently untrustworthy. So identity as the new perimeter of authenticity of what can and cannot be trusted was an insight on day one. And 23 years later, it's turning out to be more true than ever, especially in the age of agentic where proxies that we used of authenticity, for example, a laptop or a device that might have been issued to us and might be known and trusted and managed. Now we can load an agent onto that device and the agent can see and understand everything that we can see on the screen. It could move the mouse and type the keyboard in the same patterns that we used as factors of authentication in a typing biometric or a mouse movement biometric. And we now have essentially not a man in the middle, but an intelligent agent in the middle that can impersonate us. And so maintaining proof of humanity and authenticity in interactions, we're now a device that is primarily used to interface the digital world. We don't interface the digital world in analog. We always do it with the device, laptop, mobile, or other. We now have a new actor kind of changing the game of how do we ensure proof of humanity, proof of authenticity, when all of a sudden there is an intelligent essentially agent in the middle. So the challenges have continued to kind of keep the space stimulating. And because all of our assets are now accessible digitally, obviously the trillions of dollars that is being robbed of our $125 to $130 trillion global market, and some estimate that lost to cyber could be as much as $8 or $9 trillion. It's because ultimately what stands between us and our assets is the security and trust that we have in the digital channels. And the trust has been weaponized and it's under attack. So it just keeps us very interesting. There's no sense of boredom in our space, right? You said far more simply than your very nuanced understanding. I said to people, most of us started in this industry, identity really was who, and now it's sort of who and what, right? There was always a what, meaning we as humans were interfacing, as you said, to the technology ecosystem through some means, a laptop, a device, a something. But it was still the sense that you were... Identity was the thought of, I know who Andre is, I know what Andre is supposed to be doing, therefore I want to make sure it's what I expect. And he is, in fact, Andre when he's doing whatever he's doing, not some impersonator. And like you said, now that impersonator could be a non-human impersonator and that's made the world infinitely more complex and highly scalable and all that. Well, look at us, we did good. I think we're about 10 or 15 minutes into this. We haven't said AI till right now. So let's talk about what's happening in the realm of AI and automation and how... I think you and I probably answered this question similarly. I get the question like, hey, is AI good for your business or bad? And I say, yes. Right? Like, welcome to our world, right? There's a bunch of things we think we can leverage with this new technology and how it's going to... Like you said, the agentic world is going to transform in some ways the world of work, I think. On the other hand, we know it's... You just used the word weaponized, which we talk about as well. These technologies are absolutely being weaponized by criminals, by nation states, all kinds of bad actors. When you think about kind of how this world is evolving, kind of what do you see as kind of the pros and cons of the agentic AI revolution from your perspective? It's massively disruptive. And I kind of put, you know, like most, I put a category of AI for good and then category of AI for bad. In our world, we have... There's the opportunity to automate. And so part of the equation for us is how do we reduce cost, reduce complexity, and automate the identity control plane? We need to react faster to threats. You can't always get eyes on glass in the moment, but AI can be monitoring the signals and the data. It can see anomalies faster, and it can actually recommend changes to policies or other things that over time, once we have trust in the decisioning and the quality of the data under which it's making decisions of do I allow access or not in real time, there's a tremendous automation opportunity through AI in the core identity space. On the other side of the equation, a couple of things are occurring. Deep fakes threaten the recognition of authenticity or humans as basically carbon is bound to silicon. Like the distance between you and your computer right now is a recognition space, so to speak. And deep fakes threaten essentially the mechanisms under which we recognize a human using a computer and creating a session and then gaining access to resources. So there's tremendous pressure to recognize deep fakes, so in essence, we can preserve the authenticity of humans interacting with computers. So that's a threat, but an opportunity. Additionally, companies are looking to automate through frontline workers and digital workers different redundant processes that they can now codify in agents. The agents now are actors in the system that have access to critical resources. They need to be identified, authenticated, authorized, governed. Some of them might take on elements of privileged access because they're so deeply embedded in the infrastructure that they have access to a lot. And swarms of agents now interacting in pursuit of an outcome essentially need to be authorized. So there's tremendous opportunity for the identity infrastructure to, in essence, identify, authenticate, authorize, govern, and enable privileged access where appropriate to the entire lifecycle of all these things that now stand in the middle of the integrity of a digital transaction. We have to look at a human pressing a button and the hundreds of interactions that happen in between, and any one of those could be a compromise of our digital economy and digital transactions. Anything that is critical in the middle will need identity infrastructure essentially to secure it. Yeah. No, it really is in a phenomenal time of disruptive change, as you said, where the scale and the speed at which things can happen is the enablement side of what you and I both do. We always talk about our business has always been a little different than other aspects of security where it's mostly about purely defensive, like stopping, blocking bad things. Our realm has always been kind of this two-sided thing, right? On the one hand, you need identity capability to enable business advantage as quickly and as effectively as possible, and because it's now the primary vector of attack, you need to protect it very carefully. And all of that, the opportunity side, as you said, is escalating rapidly because of what we can do with some of this tech, and therefore, the defensive, protective side has to move as quickly or more quickly to make sure we aren't going to get compromised as we try to move forward. It is, like you say, for guys that have been at it for a few decades, it's not like we're getting bored and this space is solidifying or getting a little bit trite. It's gotten more challenging and more exciting in some ways since we got into it. I guess, yeah, the last area I was going to shift into more was sort of some thoughts on leadership and culture and change, because you and I have, again, these long journeys we've been on, kind of seen a lot of evolution and change, not just in this market, as we've been talking, but kind of how you think about approaching leadership. You've done a pretty transformative M&A, which is always a challenge we hear about, right, of bringing together two fairly large entities and looking for ways to bring the best of both worlds and slough off what isn't great or look for cost efficiencies, all those things. And maybe you and I, I know, care a lot about culture. Talk about some kind of what you thought going into that transformative M&A, and this is more people and culture than, say, technology, and then kind of what came out the other side. What did you learn? What do you think you do to help others who might be facing those kind of challenges? Well, prior to the ForgeRock merger, I hadn't done a scaled, call it merger of near equals in this particular case, so I didn't have a lot of preconceptions, other than I knew it would be hard. And these are two companies who had competed directly for a number of years, so kind of deeply embedded, I'd say, views and philosophies and an embedded set of investments that people cared deeply about and didn't want to lose. In hindsight, I would say, looking back, our customers, and in some cases, our competitors, creating fun in the market about what would happen with one technology or another, forced us to create a common North Star vision of where the merged companies were going to go. And in essence, about in March, so we did the deal in August, we kind of ran independently through the beginning of the new year. Then we consolidated, essentially, the sales teams, we got the kickoff. But very, very quickly, we realized we needed to get on the road, and we needed to calm customers who were stalling purchase decisions because they didn't know if they were on the right side of the aisle of where we were going to invest going forward. And so we ended up doing a 24-city roadshow, and in that, we shared the vision of where we were collectively going and how the combined innovation was now going to be available to both customer sets, things that Ping had invested in, that ForgeRock hadn't, and vice versa. And our plan was to, in some areas, unify and converge, but in other areas, allow these mature platforms to just continue as is, meaning they were profitable, customers were happy with them. And so we built a common vision that kind of took customers from where they were to the future. And that common vision was something that now both companies could rally around because it wasn't about our past, it was about our collective future. So I think, in hindsight, it's not that we came to that realization from day one when the merger happened, it's that out of necessity, really, our customers looking for clarity, and that our response really created, essentially, the answer, which is we have a brighter future together, and the customers have a brighter future together, and we can get both parties focused on that future. And if you talk about that's, I love that, that's very much kind of how you needed to clarify and then communicate a new and unified vision. If you talk about, to the extent you can, what was that like on the inside, so to speak? Like, what did you feel like you had to do to kind of bring leadership teams together, bring culture together? Look, same thing here of, you know, together we're going to become one new culture, arguably, as opposed to this wasn't such a large player swallowing a little player that, hey, clearly our culture wins and you just kind of join us, right? You had to think about some of that coming through. Tell me what a little more that felt on the inside, I'm just curious how people would hear that. Well, I mean, the way it manifests right out of the gate was that one management team didn't take over another management team. The resulting management team was a very balanced blend of the two companies, and that sent a signal that we're very serious about carrying forward the cultures. Now, the great thing is, is that the ForgeRock culture and the Ping culture actually at its core were very similar. There was a core foundation of we care deeply about our people, we care deeply about the tech, and obviously we care deeply about customers because both of us had long lived customers. We have customers for decades. And in order for us to be successful, we're not a one and done. It's not a transaction that we walk away. Our opportunity is a land and expand. If you don't have the customer's long term success in mind, you'll never expand. All of those foundations were already embedded in the culture, so nothing significantly had to change. I think we just had to demonstrate, if you will, through and that took time because everyone kind of stands back and says, you sound good, but I'll see the way it really is in a year from today. Can you walk the talk? Yeah, that's exactly right. After about a year, people could see that. Oh, look. And then the other natural thing that occurs here, and it's healthy, is that the people that didn't like it opt out and that's a choice. And we like that. So to a certain extent, the dilution, if you will, new people come in, they're not wed to any past, they're just wed to the opportunity for their future. And they come in and kind of bring a new edge, a combination of all those things kind of time naturally made it happen. And let's bring together a couple of threads here now. I think you talked about kind of values and culture and how you kind of brought the best of those two together and they had a lot of common ground. And then you talked earlier about what makes this continue to be interesting is scale. And I agree with that 100%. Bring those two thoughts together now. What have you learned about kind of what does it take to continue to hold on to key values and culture as you scale? Because that is another interesting challenge, I think, that I personally wasn't thinking a lot about in the early days of our company. I thought, hey, if we get to a few hundred people, maybe we have an outcome. Some folks know we had a prior identity company that we sold at about 100 people. So I was kind of thinking that would be the playbook again, if I'm really honest, right? And obviously you get to a thousand, a few thousand people, a lot of the time is spent on how do we maintain and hold on to our culture and values. But then what do those look like in the context of a more global company, a higher scale company? So, tell us a little on that when you're bringing together your thoughts of the fun, interesting challenge of scale and kind of holding on to the right cultural values, but figuring out how to make them real in a different kind of context. I'm a big believer that just about every formula is about finding the right balance. There's always a tension of forces. The question is, do you have the right balance? And balance could shift from one era to the next. So there's no... Like balance doesn't mean 50-50. Balance in a conversation could be 90-10 for three years, and it could flip to 10-90 for the next three years because the environment changed or competitive landscape changed. So the good thing is, is that I think my and our core values transcended whether we were big or small. It didn't matter. And it was rooted in a philosophy that I call 10-10. So it's a simple concept. Take an X and Y axis, and on one dimension is performance, and on the other dimension is your attitude or collectively the culture. So if it's an individual, it's your attitude. It's how you show up. If it's everyone, it's the culture. So performance and culture or performance and attitude. And the goal is the upper right-hand quadrant. The goal is to perform with a great attitude. And what I mean by that is, one is the what. It's measured by KPIs and numbers, and it's cold. You get the job done, or you don't get the job done. The job gets done with quality, it gets done by the deadline, or it doesn't. And on the other dimension is how people show up for one another while we are in pursuit of the goal. And what I discovered is that when cultures create competition internally, it's like survival of the fittest. I'm going to throw a bunch of people into the ring and see who's tough enough to emerge. It's a different kind of, it's a Darwinian culture. And look, there are some very successful companies on the performance line that breed an internal competition. It doesn't feel great on the inside unless you're the winner. And so really what I've stressed is that the how matters. The we is bigger than the I. And that really the essence of a great culture is when somebody feels that everyone at the company has their success and best interest in mind. They're not competing with them, they're there to help. It's that simple. It shows up when an individual starts on week one, and they have a million questions. And they asked someone who is next to them who is not their boss. And if that person says, hold on, let me stop what I'm doing, I'll answer that question for you. You have a great culture. If that person says, who are you? And who's your boss? And why are you asking me? Why don't you go ask them? That's not a great culture. And so that transcends size. It didn't matter if we were small or our current size. I love that. Yeah. And it's so interesting. I've never articulated it quite like you just did, but I love applying it at scale to the group as a culture. I've always thought of that on that individual level, the performance and attitude thing. And I always say, look, back to our quadrants, you know, like upper right quadrant, you hold onto those people with everything you can. High performers with great attitude. Opposite quadrant, you get rid of them as quickly as you can. Low performers with bad attitude. So a lot of your management challenge is in the other two quadrants, right? Someone who's a high performer that you have to work on attitude or a great attitude that isn't performing. And I like to say, generally, give me the ones with a great attitude that aren't performing. Maybe they're just in a wrong fit position, but we'll find a place for them to win because they feel culture. And if they're really, and this is the hardest thing I think for leaders to do, if they're performing well but toxic, to use the ugliest of words, you have to make a hard call of is that fixable or not? Because I've learned in my leadership journey, you can't hold onto toxic people almost no matter how good you think they are, because they will suck the life out of the organization and the team. So it's those other quadrants, right, that really take a lot of management time and energy in my experience. It sounds like you think similarly, yeah? Yeah, you have it exactly right. My observation is that high performing people that are toxic are short for the ride. There are moments in time where I feel for loyalty to cause is that you have to suffer a little bit because the company is vulnerable to a toxic personality. And so you have to be measured as to when you make the change. And it depends on if the toxicity is high, you have to be very measured. And so I and we have suffered at moments in time where we clearly have a very talented individual who doesn't match our culture. And I felt that my loyalty to the success of the whole company left me vulnerable to the timing of the change. I had to wait for a change until the company was in a position where we could do it. And yeah, so look, it's an interesting conversation because I'm not one that believes the ends justify the means, right? Yet, however, what I just described is a little bit the ends justifies the means. But whenever I'm in doubt, I always come back to loyalty to cause and mission first. I am a steward of everyone at the company. And no single individual, including myself, trumps what is the loyalty to the success of the group, of the team. Yeah, no. Well said. Yeah, I think you have to always say at the end of the day, we're a business and you have to steward the business and help the business succeed and navigate through challenging times. But in general, like you say, in general, as rapidly as possible, I always say deal with toxicity. But as you said, there's times when you have to kind of navigate through a little bit of a situation where you sometimes feel like you want to reassure some of the people on the team like, hey, are you aware of this person? Like, yes, I am. And we're about to deal with it. Sit tight. You know, sometimes you have to kind of acknowledge that there are some challenging people. And sometimes good people become a little more challenging because of personal things in their backdrop or whatever. I used to say there's good and bad people. Now I say there's bad people. You just don't want them. You know, at the time of the interview, like, nope, this person's not going to work. And then there's good people, but they may not fit, either because at times the job or the needs of the job change and they're no longer the right skill match. But sometimes they themselves go through challenging times and it's just hard to navigate through. And you know, you just have to, in those cases, say, look, we're going to have to part with dignity, but this isn't going to work anymore and we're going to have to take care of you as a human, right? So now these are, I love talking about some of these leadership things, so I think we can talk a lot about the technology landscape and all that, but long, longstanding leaders, like us, I think we've learned some things that are hopefully useful to pass along to others out there kind of navigating the leadership stuff. Well, look, let's talk just a few more kind of what we always call the rapid fire stuff and go anywhere else you might want to go before we wrap up. But I like to kind of, guys that are, let's just say comfortably over 40, how's that for being generous? You know, if you could kind of give the classic give advice to your younger self, kind of what would you tell your younger self or what kind of wish maybe you had done a little differently as you look back? It's not really a regrets question so much as what, you know, kind of what advice would you think to give to your younger self or others at the earlier stages of their career or leadership journey? This is a much longer conversation, but I'm just going to give you the short. I think trusting my intuition. I didn't know if I could trust my intuition early. Nobody knew if they could trust my intuition, but I had a strong intuition and time has shown that the intuition has been more accurate than not. And I wonder if I had placed more weight on my intuition, the sharper the decisions and more decisive they would have been. And I wonder how that might have manifested. It's taken me 35 years of looking back with hindsight being 2020 on what I thought might happen, what actually occurred. And the delta there is a person's or a founder's or individual's intuition, whether it's either confidence in themselves or confidence in an unknown way in which the future might unfold. So I would say that that is now the big one. I think I was onto it intuitively early, but again, I didn't know if I could trust it. That's so good. Yeah. I think another way of saying that, I kind of spent part of my developmental time in the marketing function, and I tell people there's been so much transformation in so many functional arenas, particularly in the world of technology companies. But that discipline, you would have argued 30 odd years ago when I was kind of thick in it, was like 90% art, 10% science. Marketing was notable for like, oh, we feel this, and we like that, and that's prettier logo or better words on a slogan. And today, as we know, that thing has shifted to a lot of data, a lot of information and testing what's working and all that. But I think that it's set a different way of your intuition. There's kind of always in almost every leadership journey kind of this balance of art and science. There's a set of data, and we are increasingly data-driven as in the world. We just have a lot more data, and therefore, it theoretically can inform a lot of our decisions. But some of the most interesting and sometimes transformative things that people have done didn't have a lot of data behind them, right? They intuitively saw things emerging or watching trend lines or whatever. So I think your way of capturing that is really good, which is, and like you said, that there's probably a double-edged danger there for the younger leaders like, yeah, be careful with that intuition when you're in your 20s because you don't have a lot of lived experience yet. Your intuition might be way off. But on the other hand, the old trust your gut asterisk, trust your gut, but maybe check with some other people that have a little more experience if you don't have quite as much maybe is the right way to think about it, I guess. I think the balance between, I would say it like this, 1% improvement every day is data-driven. So I think when you're on an S-curve, you improve your efficiency in the S-curve through data 100%. But you can't see the next S-curve in the review mirror. If it's a truly a disruptive S-curve, there are disparate signals that are not inherent in the way you would look at data to make incremental operational improvement. And so the balance is finding those two. You improve the business through data. You can see disruptive signals through very disparate data points. Intuition can connect those dots. None of the data might have gotten you to the same intuition. Finding the balance between those two, because successful companies, long-term successful companies are never the optimization of a single S-curve or opportunity. They always find a way to jump S-curves. Most companies fall in the chasm and fail as they move between S-curves. The great companies figure out how to do it, and that's the balance between the data-driven culture and intuition and understanding of the market. And to your point, I'm not sure data almost ever helps you jump a curve, right? There's some level of market understanding and intuition that says, I think this is what's going to matter in the next wave. Last thing I'd like to do is, because most interesting leaders like you are readers or absorbers of content and other ideas, you know, I used to only ask people, hey, what book are you reading? And today's questions probably go, what book are you reading? If you're going to share some of what helps you navigate your journey, what are some of the things you'd tell people? I'd highly recommend either reading this, listening to that, you know, some of the things you think are particularly interesting. Maybe two of the most interesting books in the last year or so is The End of the World is Just the Beginning. It's essentially the end of globalization and what, from a demographic point of view, what has been 50 years of essentially globalization led by kind of the peace and stability, you know what I mean? That post-World War II that the world has lived in. The other one is intriguing, a little bit more on a personal note, Buddhism is True. And you know, don't be off taken by that title. It's very philosophical. It's not religious. It's philosophical. And it's deeply, deeply rooted in the evolution of human biology and human nature and what it means to transcend some of those things in very profound ways. And the last thing that maybe is a slight extension of that, which isn't being consumed in a book right now, but clearly the algorithms have figured this out in all my social feeds, so it's snowballing. I am incredibly fascinated now by what is coming out with quantum. Nearly everything that we might have ascribed as crazy pock is no longer crazy in quantum. I mean, it is so unbelievable. Now, a lot of this still hasn't been entirely proven, but the notion of human consciousness is actually being a manifestation of quantum field is fascinating to me. The notion that in quantum you can have two entangled particles, one that is actually living in the past, yet they're entangled. The notion that the future is unwritten until observed. Particles can exist in every possible future state until you look at it, so to speak, metaphorically, and then it chooses the path forward. Everything related to manifesting our destiny through focus and passion of our energy is fascinating to me. That is. Wow. I guess I better catch up with you on some of that reading. I feel kind of dumb at the moment as you say that. But no, I think at the end of the day, there's an awful lot of fascinating scientific learning and knowledge we're seeing, and we're seeing it in a pragmatic business way of some of the AI and that technology. But as you say, underlying some of that is just some fundamental, amazing advancements in underlying science. And I'm more of a liberal arts than science thinker. That's where my wiring is. And so I tend to go to, what does that mean for people and the way we interact and the way we think? But both are, like you say, they're pretty highly integrated at the end of the day. You and I have hit on a number of topics today, kind of in the realm of balance and integration and managing tension. One of my favorite phrases a pastor once said was, there are problems in life which can be solved, but far more often, they're just tensions that need to be managed. You're never going to come to a perfect answer here. You're going to continue to rebalance. It was what you said about the 90-10-10-90. You're constantly rebalancing tension in an ever-evolving landscape of life and work and everything else. And just keep learning. Keep adapting is probably the main thing. Stagnation is probably the worst of all things. So no, this is super fascinating. I think it was a fascinating conversation, which I fully expected. And thanks for the time, Andre. Thanks again for what you've done in the industry. It's been a fun journey. You and I have been kind of running in relatively parallel tracks for a long time, usually in very, very collaborative ways, and continue to do that today. And we're sort of cousins in the Toma Bravo world at the moment, so that's part of our journeys too. So it's all been great. But I appreciate all that you've done and continue to encourage you to lead the way you're leading with a lot of thoughtfulness. I think it's the kind of way we want more leaders to lead. So well done. But thanks for the time. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody, for listening in. We'll see you on another episode of Identity Matters soon. Thanks. Have a great day.
