AI Founders Podcast

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to the SAS Universe podcast. In this episode, Joseph Abraham, founder and CEO of SAS Industry and Uber saga dives in deep with India. Scatha CEO and founder of Quorum. Simply put, Colum is a tool for enterprises to manage their SaaS spends. This tool enables organizations to buy SaaS better with the help of a corporate expense card, which allows for purchase of SaaS, it or cloud softwares only. And then more importantly. It also measures the consumption of these tools. More about Colum and industries. Journey from being a SaaS employee to a SAS founder. In today's episode of the SAS Universe Podcast, enjoy.

Hi and this thank you so much for taking the time and joining us today on the SaaS Founders Podcast. It's so nice to. Have you I can recollect vividly? Our conversation that we had in a sometime back. Probably like last year towards the end and what I what was very interesting was you were very intently listening to all that I had to say because that was more like a user interview session and I enjoyed it thoroughly quite a bit of learning right there in terms of how you actually. Product and of course it's a disclaimer for everybody. Here we are, you know the users of Colum and we love columns product and finally we get to meet the man behind the product. So happy to have you on the show in this.

Yeah, likewise great talking to you again, Joseph.

Awesome, so very straightforward question. I'm just gonna go straight to asking you about the origin of column so I do understand that you've been in the SAS world for quite some time and have seen the side of growth and other aspects. So how did column? Happen and and what's the origin story in Genesis of Colum?

I think the idea for Colum came when I was. At charge B. 3 plus years ago and charge B as we all know is a, you know, rapidly growing. Company and now Unicorn. And you know of course back then. We were small and. I had a Silicon Valley credit card or a corporate card given to me by finance department and my card used to be on file on various SaaS applications and end of the month or the quarter. Or, you know Kartik or someone from Kartik 's team in the finance office would come to me. Hey in this soil an expense on the statement. What did we buy? And I'd say. Oh, is it 0I? Don't remember. And that would. Be the end of the conversation because I say, hey, I'm in. The middle of a meeting, you know? That data And that would accumulate over a period of time. It would compound with many other charges where the charges are in the statement. The company has already paid. For it, but finance has no idea there's no invoice. There's no traceability of that. And of course we put some method to the madness, but I think that's when the idea started forming in my head. That hey. Why aren't there any? Tools for buyers to manage this. Because if you look up. Let's say you look up software category in sales stack or mark tech tools. There are 10,000 tools that would help you sell a SaaS better or in a much better way than you are normally doing it on your own. So tools to target to analyze the opportunity. To get the email addresses to automate LinkedIn flows. But are there any tools for buyers and I think that's when the idea. Came into my head.

Awesome, that's that's really nice to know so very quickly. What happened after that. So you realize there's a big problem and you realize that this is the problem that you were going through, which is like how? What's the best way to actually start something? Because you you feel it. You sense it. And so how did that turn into a solution? So take us. To the whole journey of how did you? You know, move it into from an idea stage. To a solution.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a product in mind. I had a thesis in mind that hey, this has to be solved that there has to be something for the buyer that should help them manage this better and.

Got it.

You know this is like 2017, 2018-2019, like 2 to 3 years and. Had the problem first hand and back then they were. There are few vendors who were. Selling what is now called SaaS management, which is like a subset of IT operations management and they would give you a dashboard of all the SaaS tools that you have bought and a very. Post facto analytics solution. And maybe I thought, hey, maybe that's the solution, you know, but. I had much. In a. What what's the right word? There was not much of a concrete product in mind, but. There were there. Was a thesis. Saying ohh, if you have an analytic solution, it is post facto. How would you know if employees are reimbursing using their personal card or they have created email tools using their personal email accounts? Because the SAS management category heavily relies on 2 things, a access to identity systems so that they can hey discern who has signed in using SSO, and I think that's the primary. Source, but it kind of keeps the a 60, you know feet gaping hole saying, oh, what about this? What about the other solution? I think that was one thesis saying you cannot literally solve this using it centric view and then the idea started forming what if? Take a fine and centric view. What if what if you? Are in the flow of money? Can you control the flow of money? Can you see the flow of money? Can you put the put rules in the flow of money to allow people to buy or not buy and then without a product in mind I? Quick charge be in the summer of 2019 and kind of started ideating on what the product could be. And you know the early beta versions look like a SAS management. And then we finally kind of iterated into what the product is. Today we have a corporate card which is get into SAS payments and then whole suite of management end to end.

Awesome, awesome. So in short, what does Skolem do? Who is this product for? And you know how can somebody make best use of colon?

In short, column is a SaaS spend management product. Cell into phenoxy or into the finances office or to the CFO. Our target buyer is a CFO or a director, VP of Finance, or a chief accounting. Or an fpna analyst in the organization, and the reason being, is the finance department unfortunately has no idea what these tools do. Invoices are thrown at the department saying hey, go pay for this Mr or Miss. You know charges in the card that are used to that are used to pay for these SAS tools which appear next to the charge for a Starbucks. Coffee or an Uber receipt and the the poor accounting person is struggling to figure out what does that weird statement descriptor mean does not look like a Starbucks. Coffee does not look like an Uber ride. Does not look like an expensive bottle of wine. You gifted to the customer, but it says.

OK.

A a a. Is it like a carpet? That's when we thought, hey, there has to be something built for the finance department. That would help them make the decision of buying. Buying the SAS better. The product is a SAS spend management tool we sell into finance. What it does is basically 3 things. Of course at the top level we enable organizations to buy SaaS better. We issue a corporate expense card. Think of that card as like a brecks or a ramp on steroids, so the card is designed to only enable purchases of pass it and cloud software South. We have an internal catalog of more than 100,000 products, so you can only buy says you can't buy. An airline ticket from that so card in the middle and then because of the card you can put rules etc. In place and then we measure consumption of these. Tools and I'll give. You a reason why later, but basically people are buying hundreds and hundreds of seats of a product. Licenses and and seats getting acquired, but nobody 's going back and monitoring. Hey, do we really need 100? Do we really need 440 or something between? So we go and analyze the utilization or consumption of these SAS seats on a daily basis. So that's number 2 and connecting these 2. Is the number one which. We helped bring their long term contracts on board, so the card helps you purchase ad hoc month to month. But what about your $100,000 sales force contracts? How would you pay for that? You know where is the reminder? Where is the cancellation window? When when do I need to take action on it so we can build an application? Which does pretty much end to end SAS procurement for enterprises. So to answer your question.

Awesome, so quick question a follow-up question. What I've talked 2 mistakes that companies make when they purchase softwares and. How do you avoid that?

Great question. I think easy answer is most of the purchases are. Ad hoc. They are not thought through. They are spur of the moment, desire to buy something which is good because it helps you solve the problem, but they have. No idea what they would do with that. After a short period of usage, so that's one which is the purchases are ad hoc, the second is after the purchases are made or after a purchase is made. People do not go back to that. You know I may have bought a zoom license for my department and then. The customer Success Department bought. Go to meeting or blue jeans. There is no clear understanding of organizational objectives. You know what should we be buying and do we need to be? Intentional about it. So I think that's what's driving. You know 2 big. Issues, if I could quickly add. A 30 seconds onto that. Organizations do not have. The same leeway when you want to. Go by, let's say, Starbucks coffee. You know there are very. Stringent F&B which is food and beverage, and tne travel and entertainment rules. What kind of an airline you can travel? What kind of hotels you could stay in, how much money per day? You can expense on a daily. This is guess there's none for SaaS. You know people are on their own, and unfortunately you know finance and it and your boss does not understand in high paid. Why do you need that to your boss is? Going to say.

OK.

$500 for the sales enablement tool. OK, go ahead, and. Buy it, I'll talk to. You later done.

Totally get it totally makes sense. So what's the antidote to that? How do you solve that?

I think antidote to that is you know what has been happening in organizations for the last 50 or 100 years that you know there has to be some method to the madness. That has. To be organizational policies. Just like. I, as an employee, cannot just randomly decide, oh I'm. Going to travel first. Class today or. I'm going to use my company money to buy me a Starbucks coffee every day. It doesn't happen. There are rules around it, so I think companies have to be intentional about their purchases. You know, have a policy about the purchase and of course have a system of record saying. Guess what you purchased this software this month. Let me go back and see whether you need it next month because SAS makes it so easy you put your card on file. You use it for a month and then you're you know interest wanes in that product, but your card on file, the company continues to pay for months if not years. So I think there has to be some organizational policy. There has to be set of. Tools that kind of measures monitors, you know, just like and the analogy is if. Look at. Traditional, there are hundreds of applications to monitor fraud to, to monitor spend that is not allowed. For example, I know anecdotally, and this is controversial because people would stay in a hotel. On the company money and then they would consume food from the bar, which is very expensive. They'll watch an on demand movie using the company 's card, which is again very expensive. And then in cahoots with the hotel, the charge would be for a dinner or the charge would basically hide what you actually did for that 795 on demand movie. And then you know. Products came out or manually analyzed to remove or reduce the fraud. And you know. And call out the people who are misusing the company money. I think I'm not saying there's fraud in sense. What I'm saying is there's software to control misuse of the company money. I think same. Thing has to happen. In SaaS, you know there is misuse. There is waste anecdotally, and using data we know 30 to 40% of the purchases are either underused, never used. Sit on the shelf brought in the refrigerator. That is burning cash. You know you could save money and give like you know, an iPhone or a Tesla to every employee for a large expense like that.

Awesome great. So I'm going to go back to the story thread that we started with. So you identified a problem, you went ahead thought about the solution and it was more on the lines of SaaS management. Then it became SaaS spend. So how did you go get your early customers like so let's talk about a little bit about that. So you build the product so. What happened next?

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So how did you go get your early customers like? So let's talk about a little bit about that. So you build the product. So what happened next?

So when we build and you laugh at this so when. We build this SaaS management. I just went ahead on my LinkedIn and the idea was to get feedback from. CFOs because remember we we are not targeting it. We build a SaaS management tool and we are targeting CFOs. What a colossal waste of time and mistake because traditional SAS management goes and sells to it saying hey Mr it, here is a singular view of all the apps you have and it makes sense because it was enabling off boarding on boarding. So we built a SaaS management tool, added some finance centric features to visualize spend and all. That and. I showed it to 3 or 4 CFO friends, and of course when you have friends who are in finance, they'll give you very nice positive. Vibes, oh this is good you. Know this makes sense, nothing against them. And then it dawned on me that no, we gotta go and find people who do not know me and then see if they have something to say. So went on to my LinkedIn, looked at. A lot of CFOs who were on my second degree of connection. And started sending out, you know, blind Connect request saying hey I am Joe Schmo. Of course they don't know me and I am building this. Would you have 10 minutes you know wanted to get your feedback? I probably sent. 200 Plus requests something like that and. I got 60 to 70. People who accepted my connections and I ended up talking to around 35.

Oh nice. Oh nice.

And most of them said. Are you out of your mind? I am a finance person who, if this doesn't make sense to me. Give me more features. The introspection was what? And say. Hey, I'm not going to log into the SAS management tool more than once in 90 days. Unless you are in the flow of money. And it basically started a thread saying, oh, you have to be in the flow of money. You have to remove the drudgery of finance. Which is the. They deal with SAS on a daily basis. That's the problem. Our tack and we found 2 very unique. Threads or ideas. They deal with a lot of invoices of SAS. So let's say you have 150 applications or 200 paid. Applications in a mid size. I, I guess what 200 invoices roughly or 15060 invoices are coming to you every month for reconciliation against the spend.

Right?

Since most of the SAS is purchased ad hoc, guess who's buying it? The CTO is buying it. The VP engineering is buying it, the CMO is buying. It so. Of 10 to 15 spend on. They are buying this. Their cards are on file. They are receiving these invoices. Who's paying for it and who's supposed to make sure the compliance is in place. The finance department. And they don't have the data they are chasing. The VP of Engineering saying, hey Mr VP, can you please send the invoice and they'll call every day? The VP Engineering of the CTO is busy because he has a product to build. You know Dev OPS team to run and you know bugs to fix and they don't have time forwarding invoices. Going back to the inbox. So we we kind of thought, hey, that's a problem to solve and the second one, which is the biggest one which we which we discovered is can you give me an instrument that I can control? It enables to pay for SaaS, but I have full control. I have full visibility and that's when the SAS card was was born, that hey. Can you build a card? Which is exclusively designed to pay for SaaS. You can't buy an airline ticket. You can't take a client out to dinner, but. If I swipe on mix panel, if I swipe on zoom, if I swipe on AWS it just magically works. But if you siphon apple.com to buy a laptop, it gets declined or denied. And then with that thesis, and if I give you a timeline. Uh 2020 summer is when we had built the first version of SAS management and essentially we went back to the drawing board after that. Because you know the product was there, but the usage was not there. The feedback was Luke warm and he thought, hey. Let's go back. Let's kind of think through this and then we started working on the card product and then I ultimately launch in summer last year.

Awesome awesome. So moving on to this very interesting question which I am intrigued to us. So how did you come up with this name? Colum so. So take us to the whole story of kolum.

Very interesting one. So when I was at chargebee I used to visit Chennai very. Frequently, you know stay there, and in one of the trips I decided to stay at an Airbnb.

Right?

And the host of that Airbnb happens to be this this woman, who was of course natively native of Chennai, born and brought up there, and she would draw the you know, the column that. Or this floral pattern outside her home. Day and. With their yeah with. The rice powder using some tools that she has or she had and then by the time evening would come the the hand drawn patterns would just you know wash away or just the rice powder would fly away and then she would do it next day.

Right?

And what I learned that she was just not randomly. You know, doing those patterns, you know she had a thesis in mind she was designing. Planetary systems in that you know she was designing some parts of her own folklore and mythology in that. And it just. Hung on me. You know that idea hung on me and when we started column just like every entrepreneur, the first thing is. Hey, what should be the name of the company? And then we were ideating on possible names and some of the early names were absolutely stupid. When I kind of reflect on on the names that I chose. And we could not find anything either. The domain was not available or it was sounded too. Like, you know, boring. And then we thought, hey, why not? Take the word column and try to inflect it so it has the origin of the word intact, but it is spelled and maybe pronounced differently. And that's how. You know the name column was born.

Oh, that's nice. That's really nice. So awesome in terms of your early. Growth right? So how did that happen? So you have a product and you you build that you spoke to customers and it's shaped up really well. So what happened then? Like how do you get your early customers?

Yeah, only customers. And keep in mind we're still. Trying to figure. This out so there was no category that does this. There's no product that solves this exact problem in the way we are. Trying to solve so essentially instead of searching for comparables for us to hinge our ideas on, we were.

Got it.

Easily climbing up a hill. Climbing up a hill. Figuring out hey, is there. Snow on the other side? Is there water on the other side is there you know humanity on the other side? During the early days we thought maybe this is a problem. Which would gel with early stage founders, you know. C 2 Series A because they buy a lot of SaaS but they use, you know, classical brex ramp or Silicon Valley Bank or any other corporate card which. Has their Uber rides and their slack reimbursed slack receipts and slack expenses are tacked together. And we start targeting. Many early stage founders and you know same strategy just like I was trying to find the feedback from early from the CFOs about the first version of the product. So Full disclosure, I'll use LinkedIn very heavily, I think probably. The the best sales tool. In the current circumstances, I'm sure hope LinkedIn does not start clamping down in terms of the features and aggressive use that some of the founders do. So reached out to bunch of founders who I knew from the past life or just random blind connections and our first customer. Well is this company called Ever bought Eva Bot ever bought DOT AI they are. Conversational, you know engine for sending gifts and experiences to, you know prospects and customers and heavily used in sales and fintech industry. You know beautiful. Product so you know reached out to many founders, including the founder of everybody. And then Ravi, who is the CEO and founder. They became our first customer. I'm extremely, extremely grateful for him. I'm grateful to him and then they're still our customer. They use a. Product on a daily basis.

Nice, really nice. So a follow up to that is since you have LED growth prior to this. What are couple of things that early stage founders should be mindful about when they are launching their products? Just couple of lessons are guide posts that you can share that we should early stage fund should be mindful about.

I mean, this would sound controversial, but. Don't take feedback from the people you know. If we would have done that, we would have built a SaaS management tool that would have. Had the same features of the other SaaS management tools we would have walked that path where people said Yep, this looks good, you know, build some of more of these. Build more IT centric, build more IT centric features and they would call it a day. But or call the CFOs who were in my first degree who were known to me. So I think the first order. Of my recommendation is. Talk to people you do not know and that was basically a reveal for us in terms of the product that. We have right now. If I have not done that. We would have built. Yet another clone in the SAS management industry. I do not know how successful would have been. Probably more successful than you would have been now because you'd have walked into an existing category. And you know, would have been easier, but I think we basically found our own path and built something that did not exist before.

Got it totally makes sense. Now just taking 2 steps back in terms of. You're building this product, so take us to the whole journey of you raising your early stage funds, right? So how did that happen and was this a large cap table? Or was this like from friends? How did that happen? I mean, take us to that.

That itself was an interesting journey, so when quick charge we wanted to do this, the initial thought was hey I want to do this on my own for 6 to 9 months. Build the first version of the product, then do the fundraise. But you know, series of happenstances, you know with Sequoia, so I've known how the Sequoia Asia team or the India team well and have known investors at Nexus, Venture Partners. Well series of coincidences and we end up raising our seat. Down from. These 2 institutions, and when that started rolling in, you know, got some friends in the mix. Some people in the entrepreneurial circle here in the Bay Area in the mix. One of my very early, uh friends is a guy by the name Piyush Ranjan, who now runs Google Pay is that is a VP at Google and when he found out. I was I was. Quitting to start a company, and I told him that hey, I'm not planning to raise money and he wires. The money without even me telling him what the. Hell, this is going to. And that basically snowballs into. And of course, then we do the institutional round from, you know Sequoia surge and then Nexus into partners and others, but. In hindsight. I think taking that money was probably the best decision. Because we. Took a lot of time compared to the lot of other SaaS companies that come out. The expectation in SaaS is Yep, have an idea. Do a product in 3 months execute on GTM in another 3 months. After that have the line of sight towards the first 250 K half 1,000,000 of revenue. In from start to 12 months to 18 months, and that's the expectation. You know, because we raised some money early. On we took a longer route saying OK, what is something that has not been built before? Can we build something like that instead of building OK, let me try a tool. A better version of something. So you know, and we took a route because of the fundraise. We took a route. OK, not a better version of X, but can we be the X where people come and build a better version of ours? So I think that's the route we took.

Got it awesome in so couple of tips for anybody. Is raising funds early stage So what would what your what would your advice? We do them.

I think Razor what is now classically called pre seed ASAP. I would not. I would not wait. In fact, in hindsight, if I have to go back I would add another 2030 angels in my round. I think I'm I made that mistake. Sometimes the conflict that you have because you think. How would I manage another 25 people on my cap table? Of course there are tools to manage it now, but back then it did not dawn on me that you have 25 additional champions of you as an individual and individual and you as a product company. I would say, and I know some founders are doing it, but I think that should be the default thesis of a. Founder go raise a precede from 25. You know small check maybe 10 K 20 Ki, think that should be the you know the. I think the get go for any fundraise activity. Then of course your classical seed, round from institutions and. Then your series and.

Got it totally makes sense. Let's talk a little bit about your team, right? So how did you build your team and take us to a little bit about how do you meet them?

Oh man, that's that's a story in itself. We first started in Chennai.

Oh wow, OK.

And miserably failed at that. The reason being is a I was remote. We the team in Chennai. Somehow it did not work out. I tried my best I used. To travel, it didn't work out. We could not grow the team beat. And the 2 to 3 people that we had. Of course you know to keep my loyalties absolutely aligned. I didn't want to bring anybody from chargebee charges. Of course, based out of Chennai. And then. Found a few folks who were in danger. And this is the classical conflict and this. Is just a few months before. COVID, so the story becomes even more interesting from you.

And there's a.

Few more few months before COVID and the guys in in a couple of folks in Bangalore. Said Yep, you know. You can keep your office there in Chennai. There are couple of folks in Chennai. You know we'll work together. We'll look, we'll collaborate, collaborate and then they will work remotely for our Chennai office. So people in Bangalore. Working remotely for the Chennai office. And then. COVID hits, you know, I was actually in India back then and luckily got out on time before international flights were shut down. And during COVID basically whatever team I had in Chennai, they quit. They were done and I had to rebuild the team again from scratch. We had like 3 guys from Bangalore. Now we are a team of 25. People, people in India, people in Canada, United States South America. And the Middle East.

Awesome, awesome and so I'm just going to go. Go ahead and ask you some rapid fire questions and if all goes well and if you answer well then when I'm coming down I'll give you a. Gift hamper right?

OK, let's see how.

How do you do this right so?

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So I'm going. To go ahead and ask you some rapid fire questions. What's what's your? Favorite SaaS app I've put you on the spot.

HubSpot, I'm and the reason is the context because I'm spending a lot of time there.

Some spot.

And although I now

Got it.

I'm kind of. I want to correct myself, but you know. HubSpot does not have the nicest of the UIS, but gets the job done, yet has all the contacts in your sales tracking and activity in there. But there are many apps that are much better, but let's just stick. With HubSpot for the moment.

Awesome, awesome. My next question to you is what's your favorite gadget at this point of time?

This is my Apple Watch and this is my first ever Apple Watch.

OK.

OK.

I never had an Apple Watch I I did not wear a watch for the last 25 years. I had it when I was a kid, you know, loved watch as a kid. You'll be surprised after I started wearing the watch. I am never late for meetings. I don't have many apps. I have like 3 or 4 active apps. The whole the running and the biking and the hiking thing. You know some of the body measurements that the app does. The watch does, and the calendar reminder it's. Absolutely brilliantly done the calendar reminder it. Just sends you a soft nudge. On on your wrist and you look up oh time for the meeting. I don't carry. I still do not have my phone around me. I'll leave the phone wherever it it should be, probably outside charging. Of course. I have my laptop. With me but. Probably the best gadget is. The Apple Watch.

Got it awesome and 3rd one the 3rd question to you is like what's your favorite movie?

Solely childhood super hit movie I I still remember every scene I tried to create memes out of those scenes many times.

Right?

I watched it probably 100 times. I have forced my kids to sit with me and watch. Of course, they cringe on many of those scenes because they have not grown up with that. But absolutely breathtaking of a movie. Very classically built. And not just the movie and the screenplay, but if you go back to the history of the movie and this is what the entrepreneurial mindset is, you know the movie was dead on arrival, people said, hey, are you freaking out of your? Mind, Are you sure you're gonna be an action movie? You have to go back to? Rajesh Khanna and build. You know another romantic, you know dancing Bob movie, you know that Rajesh Khanna was.

OK.

It was against conventional wisdom and the movie. Is the history. You know, again, I do. Not like it because of the history. That's a post facto but. I think just amazing in terms of my memories.

Awesome, so how many hours of sleep? Do you track every night in this?

I very religiously do at least 7 hours if I don't sleep that much. I my next day is absolutely shocked to death.

For this.

So I sleep 7 hours. Love that leave my gadgets out. Leave my laptop out. Nothing in the bedroom, just me and of course. Enjoy those 7 hours.

Got it. And my last. Question to you is what's your favorite vacation spot?

Don't know. Japan maybe that that was one last. Vacation before COVID we. Took I think Japan is an amazing, probably underrated. And people who go there who love it. There are lot more, better instagrammable places. People talk about Mexico or Rome, Venice this and that parts of. But I think Japan is just amazing. Wow from all aspects, not just the destination but logistics and going there enjoying all sorts of climate and food, so that's that's probably the one.

Nice really nice. Great. So I'm done with my rapid fire and I'm back to our main thread which is. Are your top. 2 favorite metrics you measure right now at colon.

Interesting, so since we. Are in in the flow of money products, so we'll look at how much spend is going through on a daily basis, how many transactions are going through? So the number one metric that we track internally for our growth is that PPV on our monthly basis, the. Gross transaction processing volume that happens through us. And the second one is revenue. You know, we we we price a product like a SaaS so you know our customers pay us a SaaS fee and then that is the top line that we track on a on. A daily basis.

Awesome, awesome. And what do you think is the future of SAS pen like how? Where do you see that movie? And you can tie in the future of Colin as well there into that answer as well.

I think SAS spend. Is going to keep on ballooning. I think we will see a soft spot in the next 2 years because you know they'll be there is tightening of the belt due to recession looming? You know valuations going down, and we'll see some tightening of that.

Right?

But if you just look at the. Numbers right so. The 3 pillars of it are. Are and the reason I remember? It fresh we are actually writing a couple of. Posts on this topic. 33 pillars of it spend is, you know one is it communications. Which is your you know telecom and bandwidth. Second is your IT software and hardware and 3rd.

Right?

Is IT services? Each of these. 3 combined to a 4.3 trillion IT spend every year that's I think 2021 number by Gartner and. If you now look at what is happening, the 2 big ones, the services and IT software and hardware. That's moving to SaaS and Cloud, so cloud is of course very obvious. You know hardware is moving to AWS, GCP Azure. The services 1.3 trillion and IT software, which is roughly 600 billion that's close to 2 billion dollars is moving rapidly to SAS. So I think the spend is going to increase. Probably SaaS today is number 3 spend after payroll. It will become number 2I think we will. You know banks to high tech. We will stop using people and we'll start using automation and automation comes from, you know AI and software and workflows I think. I think SAS will be. In my mind. Probably trillion dollar. Business in next. 4 years or 5 years they will see a soft patch now, so probably 5 years.

Got it totally makes sense.

And we want to capture every dollar as column, and you know that's a desire.

That's awesome. I'm glad that you. Added that, so I'm done with my whole podcast. I have one last question which is what's something that. You wish you knew when you were 20. This is something I. Ask every guest on the show.

I think probably all sorts of softer aspects. As as a young. Grad I was a very arrogant engineer. You know so much so that the desire was to not have any bugs in the code. And if somebody pointed out, I will absolutely be. Rebellious, if that's the right word. How can you find? It so I think I should have been more thoughtful, more diplomatic, more reachable. More friendly

From the.

Learn to read people better. I think this is the scale. I think this is not taught anywhere. We are. As as workers in this knowledge economy, we are not trained to understand people. I think it is assumed from everybody. This is what you learn on your own. And that is why many of us who are great at many things in life, skills, hard or not. We do not succeed is because we have a very poor judgment of people. And it's a very easy skill. Learn and to teach. I wish somebody taught me when I was 20.

Got it, it's reading people.

Not that I am great at it now, but at least. Foundations would have been let yeah.

Yeah, the orientation. Got it, got it. Great index is really nice chatting with you and getting to know the story of Colum and lovely insights about what you've built and your journey. Really enjoyed this chat and looking forward to staying in touch.

Absolutely, pleasure is mine. Thanks for extracting those ideas and letting me resurface some of the older memories so. Great being here.

Awesome, awesome and thank you. Have a great great junior ahead.

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