We have a packed, packed day, and George did us a favor and reported great results last night. So we have great topics to talk about. So, with no further ado, I'd like to welcome George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike. All right.
Thank you. I did it just for you.
I know.
You know, it's-
My birthday party
Everybody, yesterday we spoke about my birthday, but it's not just me, it's Angelina Jolie and me were born the same day. All the beauty came to this world one day. It was a joke.
George, first of all, thank you for doing this. This is early morning, and I really thank you last night, and it was hard to find something that I can talk about and criticize you. So-
But you will.
No, but it's—I, I'm not sure I'll find because the results are really clean, clean. And I'll just, you know, for those of you, those of our investors that didn't read the report or the results, what drove such a strong growth in an environment that is something that is going wrong, and your company reported just very solid results across the board?
Well, first, a pleasure being here, and thanks for you did. It's something we've been focused on for the last 5 quarters, which was delivering results in a really challenging environment. It's still... We talked last night. It is still a challenging environment, make no mistake about that. I think a key drive form expansion that we've been embarking on really since I started the company, and this platform term and this sort of whole strategy of selling is not new to CrowdStrike. This was a key thesis when I started the company in 2011, and I think you're seeing the manifestation of that, getting into customers. We've always given the module land count 3, 4, 5, then it was 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9.
You know, it keeps going up because we keep landing and expanding. I think when you go into a customer and you can drive broader adoption and really consolidate and save money or somewhere else, and you combine that with Falcon Flex, as I'm sure we'll talk about, which I think is a really innovative licensing methodology that we have. This is what customers wanted, and we got it.
What's the benefit of having. You reported that customers that buy 8 modules went up 95% in the quarter. You reported great statistics about how by being bought by the same customers. What drives it? Where, where, what's the value in buying all these modules from a single company?
I think what's important to realize is that when you actually get into the product, and when you look at PowerPoints, I've never seen a PowerPoint that was wrong. They all look good, right? So but when you actually use it and you install it and, you go into some of our big banking customers, and we've got banks in the world, might be more at this point, they... Some of them have, when we, when we got the deal done, they, they allocated two years of deployment time. Two years. You know this from a big bank, right? You know, only because that was their schedule. Could have got it done, you know, a lot faster than that. This has not been done before in our space, and it's because of the way we've built the technology, how easy it is to, deploy, no reboots.
So there is this sort of revelation for companies when they get it. They go, "Okay, that just worked, and it was really easy." Now, you would think every technology does that. I can assure you it's not that way. There's 5 or 10 thousand endpoints. You need brokers, and you need reboots and all kinds of complexity in the environment. So once they get it, then they look around and go, "Okay, well, can I use that? I have vulnerability management. Can I IT, I've got other players in IT. Can I use Falcon for IT?" And it just goes on and on because the, the valuable real estate is, is the agent that we have.
And yes, there is a big element of endpoint protection, but really what we've built is a really effective data ingest engine, which we get data from the agent and now with our LogScale, fully integrated. So once we get the data into the platform, which is well beyond security, it opens up many more use cases and many more TAM expansion opportunities, which you've seen, you know, over the years of covering.
The big modules that are being sold today, meaning outside of endpoint protection, other areas you're going after.
Well, it's a good question, and we do have a lot of... And they, they might have a specific use case, right? 'Cause we always get asked, "Well, how does it all start?" I mean, certainly, if they need endpoint protection, they know where to come, but we do have a lot of customers that come to us need, and we have to secure it, right? "Can you help us there?" Well, we've got a cloud offering, and you've seen the last public numbers that we put out, not this quarter, past quarter, was a $400 million business in cloud. Data is a quarter old. They might come to us with a next-gen SIEM. There's so much movement in the SIEM market. They've got legacy SIEM. They're not happy with it. They're not happy with the cost, the expense, the performance.
They'll come to us in that area and come to us and say, "Hey, we've had a breach. We failed a pen test because we don't have identity protection. Can you talk to us about your solution?" And we can. So we can land what you would call endpoint protection, and I think that has allowed us to, to get into various vectors and then continue to cross-sell the platform. But those are the three that we continue to talk about. There's a lot of excitement around, but cloud, next-gen SIEM, and identity are key drivers of growth, that we've seen just tremendous success with.
Yep. Talk about competition. You highlighted yesterday, Falcon for Defender solution against Microsoft.
We have seen the results of SentinelOne that were not that great. Talk about the evolution of the... So what's the pricing environment and how competition is like these days?
Sure. I think it's one of those areas where we've always been in a competitive market. When I started the company, it was Mac. Most of the players that we started and competed against, that laughed at us, by the way, when I started the company, are either sold or out of business... you know? So you got to look at it, it's always been competitive. Now, you've got four. And, what do we see? Well, I think if you, if you look at some of the other players that you mentioned, you know, we've had a lot of success in the, in the SMB. Falcon Go yesterday, but, you know, we're doing amazingly well with going down market, and I think that's really the exciting part of the model.
There's not many companies or industries where you can dominate all the way down into the SMB. It's, you know, you're in rarefied air to be able to do that with, with a similar set of products. So we've been able to do that, and, we've been able to do that through some effective partnerships, which I know we'll talk about. I think that has really served us well in these markets. And when we think about Falcon for Defender, that's another area in the SMB, you know, we think we're gonna see a lot of success with. We just launched it at RSA. But in general, customers, many enterprise, come to us that are E5 Microsoft customers. And when you have an E5 license, the only thing that you would technically get with the E5 is NetOps, not the servers and other places.
So we've had customers say, "Well, you know, procurement made a decision in this area, but we know we have the responsibility for stopping breaches. We know you have, you know, a 6x improvement in Microsoft. We know we need things like OverWatch." So we came up with, I think, a really effective packaging that allows us to help backstop what's there and help customers prevent the breach in other areas, servers, and things of that nature. But really, it's the entryway into those organizations that will allow us then to expand our module footprint.
Got it. Been a lot of excitement around that from-
You spoke about partnerships, and I wanna, I wanna expand on it. I wanna talk about go-to-market-
... and your target. You started as an enterprise company, starting in the very high end on the enterprise, and also penetration within the enterprise.
Sure. So for me, my background, I spent a lot of time in enterprise sales, just within my—so that's really where we gravitated the company. And we did that for two reasons: one, I had a lot of experience there, and two, if you can own the enterprise, it's much easier to go down market. If you're a mid-market players in security that are mid-market companies, you know, BofA is not buying the mid-market security. They're just not doing that, right? It's just not gonna check the box for them. So we wanted to start in the enterprise, and then it's really this pure B, and we've been able to go effectively down market in those areas.
I think once you have these big lighthouse customers, you know, 15 of the top 20 banks, you know, probably 40 in the United States that are customers, manufacturing, utility, it goes on and on. We've got a marquee blue chip customer base. Once you have that, then you have built credibility to go down market, and then you create the partnership sales team. And really, what I wanted to do was to take a sort of a page out of the SolarWinds sales team playbook, right? And combine that with the Atlassian e-commerce engine. And, you know, people have done things like how do you put it all together, and how do you create velocity in in down market? We've done some amazing partnerships with Pax8 and NinjaOne now, and the MSP competitors there.
But now, they actually came to us, and they said, "We want something our customers are demanding for CrowdStrike, and we wanna be able to offer it." So we've got a lot of robust business in those areas, and we're seeing tremendous growth up in smaller SMBs through these managed service provider channels.
And how is the success, by the way, so far? How, how big is it? You're still in majority - the majority of revenues come from enterprise. How big is the success so far?
Yeah, well, if you look at any company that sort of has our characteristics, you know, by revenue, you're gonna see a lot of it land in the enterprise just because they have bigger buys. But when you see the customer market in SMB, it's really... And one of the things that this was at the end of the year, we gave out our total reportable customer accounts, right? But what we don't report on is all the—so there's many, many of those.
They're counted as a single customer?
They're counted as a single customer, but they've got tens of thousands of customers that are, you know, underneath them. So that's when you look at it, and those are all bundled together. So when you look at our ability to touch these markets and in different geographies, I think it's been incredible. There are many geographies that even as big as we are, we can't touch. We just don't have the people there, right? So we need the partner network. We need things like distribution. Traditionally, in the U.S., we've been outside the U.S., now we have distributors. So we've got distributors in Europe and Asia, and then they've got resellers, and they've got end customers.
So we're really onto before, and that's—I mean, that's probably the normal evolution of a company that is, you know, originated in North America. But there's a lot of places that we're still not, and I think, you know, if you were to ask me some areas and we think we can do better in, it's, it's outside, you know, rest of the world. We think there's a huge opportunity in, in areas that we're just not in.
Got it. You spoke about the expanded discussion. Let's talk about your pricing. Because for those that don't know you even, how is your pricing mechanism to customers? How is it different from big enterprises versus smaller customers and channels?
Vectors to the pricing. One is just kind of the number of agents or endpoints that we would actually deploy, whether that's on a desktop or in the cloud. And that's counted, just add them up. You could have 10, or you could have, you know, 4 million. It's everything in between. That's one piece. Then the number of modules. So you've got, you know, call it 100,000 endpoints, maybe 50,000 servers. Those are each a cost, and I think we have effective bundling around that. And then you have, in some areas, like next-gen SIEM, you've got data ingest costs, and then support and other things. But in general, if you were to...
Sort of number of agents, when you get into other areas like agentless and cloud, it's a different way to count it. When you look at SIEM, you've got data ingest, things of that nature, and node count sort of drive our models.
What is the Flex? You mentioned the Flex pricing or Flex program that you have.
Yeah. So in September at Falcon, we really just operationalized at the beginning of the year, and it's been incredible. So we sat down with a bunch of customers who came to us and said, "Hey, we wanna buy more from-- We wanna do more with you. You got a lot of modules." We're a bit of a product of our own success. I mean, you start with one or two, and it's easy to keep track of. You got 28, how do you sell it? Does the entire sales force know each one- complex in these areas? So they said, "We wanna go all in on CrowdStrike, and, and here's what would make us happy." So essentially, what Flex does is it opens up the entire product catalog to a customer.
We worked with, actually, a pretty big bank on this one, and they said: "We wanna go in with you." So essentially, the entire product catalog, almost 28 modules, are available to them. They start with a bill of materials, okay? And then they can add... It basically is similar to what they're doing with an Amazon or a Microsoft Azure or what have you. You have a commitment to CrowdStrike. The more you buy, the better deal you get. You open up the product, and you can ramp out of products from competitors, you can ramp into our products. You know, if you sold a division, you can take the licenses and put it back into the pool. And, you know, even if we buy a new product, they can add a new product without going through another procurement cycle.
Most organizations, you know, end customers, don't wanna go through procurement cycles, and giving them what they want, which is gonna drive even higher adoption rates on a module-by-module basis.
What are your challenges? I mean, the numbers were pretty strong. You said it was consistent, NRR, Net Retention Rate, was consistent.
We do see struggles, not with you, with other companies. So what are your challenges? Where do you wanna see the company, and what are the challenges in getting there?
Well, I think I have to go back to our Falcon Investor Day when Burt talked about the path to $10 billion and five—focused on that, and there's a lot of steps in between that and where we are today. For us, when you think about the challenges, still a challenging macro environment. Make no mistake about it, I mean, you know, this quarter, and we've done it in a challenging environment, as I said, for a while now. For us, it's always making sure that we've got the right people, the right talent, that we're ahead of the curve. We're really an innovation company. We've done that since I started it. We've really disrupted a lot of the markets and came out with things that people hadn't even contemplated. So when we look at- ...
that we're skating to the puck, as they say, right? So I always look at technology and the technology curve as a slope, and when I got into security 30+ years ago, it was pretty simple, like, actually, you know, I was involved before there were really commercial firewalls. It was Cisco routers and things of that nature. And then you look at the complexity, it went like this, right? Sort of exponential. Well, as you look at the slope of that technology curve going up to the right, and there's many areas, and, you know, it used to be simple, like endpoints and servers, and now you've got, you know, pods and, you've got, you know, clusters, and you've got all kinds... On and on, and I won't go through the whole technology stack.
So as we think about a generative AI, and we think about where the industry is going, you're gonna need security to solve a lot of those new technologies that are coming out. So for us, we're really good in areas that we focus on.
There's a bunch of things that we don't do. We're not a firewall company, we're not an appliance company, we're not a whole bunch of doing email and other things. There's a data gravity element to it, and we can solve a security use case that fits the bill, and those are areas that we'll look to get into.
Got it. There's one question I forgot to ask you, and I'd like to ask is, when we recently at RSA, et cetera. So they talk about your competitors, they say it's bundled in for free, basically.
That's on the endpoint. How do you compete with free bundling? How do you compete with some from Palo or... How do you compete with that, and does it mean that on the endpoint side, price erosion is a factor?
Selling value, and I think the value we're selling is stopping breaches and actually having technology that works at scale.
Yeah.
We don't have multiple agents. You know, we... As I said, some of our competitors that bundle things in for free, they're looking at six months deployment times. I mean, we, we can get it done in a day. Like, literally, it's, it's up to the company. Like, their own processes kinda get in the way of it, and it's just gonna work. Things like, Falcon Complete, which is our MDR service, and Overwatch, I mean, we are orders of magnitude faster and better than our competitors there. So, you know, lifeboat, you know, if you wanna buy that, that's fine, but when you, when you go to, you know, sort out the breach and you, you look at, you know, you look at one of the latest healthcare breaches, that was what? $800+ million?
Yeah.
I mean, ask who they were using. You know, so at the end of the day, from my perspective, you get what you pay for. If we need to be aggressive in how we package things, we can. Ultimately, you know, the total cost is different than the price of something, and the operational overhead and just the pain inflicted on customers and multiple consoles, and, you know, ultimately bears out into, you know, wins for CrowdStrike, and I think you saw that this last quarter.
Last question before I get into some of the products or some of the modules. We ask all the companies about federal opportunity for cybersecurity. How are you positioned, and how do you think this market evolves?
I think we're positioned well. We just got late last year the next level, and it is when we just talk about U.S. federal, 'cause we got federal all over the globe, if you will, the equivalent. You know, it takes time. So we have a license to hunt in over 100 different agencies that we're knocking down agency by agency. But when you look at some of these big contracts, and I was involved with them when I was at McAfee, I mean, they're still there, right? It takes time, move slowly, and you have to look at the budgetary pressures. So we are making, I think, really good progress in areas.
You know, I think the breakout ultimately will come when some of these new programs or adoption that gives you sort of one shot to deploy in lots of places. So, I think good progress there. If you look at where we are, obviously, the build is into Q3, where the federal buying. Well, if you look at state and local government, as I said, we got 40+ different states that have settled on, or consolidated with CrowdStrike. Outside the U.S., IRAP in Australia and other places. So we're knocking down all these local certifications so that we can continue to sell into their equivalent federal government.
An amazing business for us, and we've got, I think, the right products and the right offerings for these organizations to allow them to consume it with not always the resources they have. But I think we're a perfect fit for them. Yeah.
Maybe before I go into the products, I wanna ask you just some financial numbers. Just, what, I think yes, there's great cash flow generation. What are the plans of doing with all this cash?
Well, there's a couple of things that Burt, our CFO, and I always talk about. We love the free cash flow, and we've been very diligent with what we've done with that cash. And I think if you look at some of the acquisitions that we've done, they've turned out amazing. It was doing $7 million of ARR when we got it, and the last number we reported was $350 million+, right? That was a quarter ago. So that Flow acquisition, which is in the DSPM space, we did Bionic in ASPM space. So for us, we think we can make the best use for our shareholders of that cash, leveraging it through M&A and having dry powder. And that's really what we wanna have.
We wanna have the dry powder to be able to take advantage of opportunities that come our way. As you know, many of these, they've got some big valuations. I think expectations are being reset a bit as the market has moved. So we wanna be there, we wanna be opportunistic, but ultimately, we want the best people and the best technology that can be folded to value to our customers. And that's really... That's what we plan on doing with it.
Got it. Okay. So I wanna take just me starting from an endpoint company into going all these areas, and you spoke about the fact that you're leading today, in many times, not in endpoint.
Yeah.
You're blending with the other modules. So just the end markets, let's take, for example, identity. You're playing in identity, but we also have Ping and Okta and other players that traditionally were in identity. What's the difference between what is it? So if we can talk about, same question, identity, SIEM-
How are you positioned versus the incumbents or the existing players?
Sure. So let me, let me just give you one minute as we think about how we evolved and what we did. So when I started the company, it was really thinking that data can solve a security problem. And what we built, and we didn't quite realize the superpower we built, but the ability to get Threat Graph and cloud at scale has been, like... It's just amazing what we can do, and it's very difficult to replicate that. So the even the original slides of the company where you had now and nothing in security, and my little slide had CrowdStrike as that missing platform player. So now we fast forward to today, we have all this data. What are we doing? Identity is one of those areas.
And just to make it easy because we do to our Ping or these guys, how does it all work? And actually, they're partners of ours. But you can think about identity in three areas. One is the creation of the identity. This is generally like an, you know, the... they've renamed it. You've got Active Directory, which that's basically the creation of identities, and then there are other systems that have identities. Then you've got the aggregators, which are, you know, as a user here, you think about all the SaaS applications you have and all the things you log into, you probably have 10 different identities. So they're able to then pull all those identities together. Then the last piece of identities, and that's where CrowdStrike plays.
So we don't create the identities, we don't aggregate the identities, we protect the identities, and that's how we play in the ecosystems. There's plenty of great players that, you know, are creating and end of that. And what does that do? Well, it allows us to understand how all these identities and these stores are configured. There's a lot of challenges in, in Active Directory, and it's hard to get information out of it, so we protect those. And then the second piece of that is, we can provide fine-grained access controls in areas, in applications, and protocols that you don't. So that has been a real boon to our customers, and again, one of the fastest-growing modules we have.
Got it. Same question for SIEM. How do you differentiate and innovate in SIEM?
So what we found with SIEM is if you looked at the market over the last, say, 10 years, last decade, it hasn't been a tremendous amount of innovation. I mean, people have been additive to their solutions for sure. Level of frustration, both on the technology side and particularly the business model side of buying SIEM, right? Really expensive. And to me, when data should be like your cell phone minutes, you shouldn't—I remember the old days where I'd have to like, do I call my mom on, you know, the weekend where I get the free minutes, right?
Friends and family.
The friends and family, or do I call her tonight, right? You have-
By the way, I think you can afford it now.
I'm okay. I can. I think I can cover it. But, I think it's one of those areas where people are making decisions around data, where they're saying, "I can't, I can't ingest..." Is the power of what we're doing to find these bad actors, and to drive the AI models, you need the data. So why not disrupt that market and make it very cost-effective? We went out a number of years, a company called Humio, which is now LogScale, which has, you know, we're seeing a 150x increase in search speed over our competitors. 150x. We have banks that were using competitors that were... They do that in less than a minute with ours.
We've taken the cost from our competitors, and we've got a third of the cost now of what they were paying, and we've become their data lake. So, market, it was ripe for disruption. Now, the really exciting part is that technology has been natively integrated into Falcon platform with the Raptor release. Over into that new release, in the fall, and we've finished now. So we went small, medium, and large customers. We got through everybody, so everybody has it. And what that means is that when we think about next-gen SIEM, go buy legacy SIEM technology for customers. We already have a big customer base. Everyone has it. Now we have to just go through the selling motion of activating it for our customers. And at RSA, we actually announced that we're giving away...
So now it's natively within their workflows, it's natively working within the Falcon SOAR product, and they get 10 GB to ingest third-party data. By the way, we generate probably 80%. Way. So why send it out somewhere else and incur the cost? So we're saving on the data exfil cost, we're saving on the technology that they actually had to procure, and we're giving a better... So excited about this.
Before I go to the other products, I just wanna ask about, did you have to change go-to-market because you started as an endpoint company and focus on other areas? Is the sales motion different? Are there different buyers for that, or is it the same kind of sales strategy for the past few years?
Different personas when you're selling, and if you're selling Falcon for IT, that is a different persona, right? You know, certainly, since we've become public, we've been more focused on the platform sale, right? 'Cause we've got many more modules. That muscle memory is there, but there are new buyers, right? And there are other players in the market who, you know, have always operated at the CIO level. We, we've been there over the last number of years because of all the customers. But if you look at cloud, if you look at Falcon for IT, if you look at Next-Gen SIEM, these are different personas.
So we do have that focus in these areas, but if our, if our main sellers are able to sell the platform and the benefits of it and package it up with something like Falcon Flex, then we can support that with that we've created. So that's really what we're thinking about. But there are some nuances, for sure, and some differences in those, in those personas that we have to sell to.
I wanna shift to cloud. Companies like Prisma Cloud, and you have companies like Wiz. Same question I asked you about identity. Where are these companies that started in cloud security, or at least evolved there, in the same exact location, or is it a different location than the others?
Well, we actually think it's more, 'cause if you look at some of the private companies that are out there, they really started with CSPM, right? And there's very little beyond that for customers want. They want the ability, certainly, and let's just go through it. CSPM is like vulnerability reporting for the cloud. That's what it is, right? So what customers want is the preventive piece, which is a cloud workload protection, which is really where we started. Now, we've added over time, CSPM, which we believe has parity with the other players in the industry. DSPM, we have that, the other players don't. Other players you named don't have ASPM. We have DSPM. We've got CIEM. These are all acronyms, but essentially, we're covering the full suite of what you need.
You know, certainly, the private companies are specialized in a few areas or one, but it's... What customers want is the integrated solution. They want your CSPM to, you know, understands... ASPM is Application Security Posture Management. These are all elements. You gotta tell the story and put it together. So if you're just one-off, it makes it really difficult for a customer to kinda figure out what's going on. You know, one plus one equals three, but on a standalone basis, we've got world-class technology in each one of those categories that I mentioned. And market, it's really cost-effective and disruptive to some of the other players that are out there.
Yeah. When you look at cloud solutions, they start on the left side with dev op environment, then you have to make sure the network-
Yeah.
I'm trying to not use acronyms.
Yes.
Then you have the protection part and runtime protection, making sure that there is no risk right now in the network running. Areas of cloud security, or is this still a work in progress, kind of evolving into it?
No, it's really code to cloud. And there's always other things that you would wanna fill in, and there's... It really is not up to just one thing, right?
Yeah.
And as new technologies come out or a new open source project comes out that needs to be protected, or now with GenAI, you need guardrails around that piece. GenAI is gonna be a huge boon to us in protecting all these pods and these super pods. You, you heard some of the announcements we did with NVIDIA. So from that standpoint, we, we've got the full suite, but there's always more to stand still. There's gonna be stuff that, you know, new, new things that come out that you're gonna need to either build or buy.
Right. So last night, you mentioned on the call, you said, and I want a single AI engine basically across, across the board. Let's talk, let's take a maybe a step back and just speak first about the implications of AI and GenAI on your business, and opportunity and the threat, and where are you differentiated?
Yeah. So that's, it's a good question, and it's one of those areas where we've been doing AI before it was fashionable, and not generating that for a while, but when I first started the company, it was all about leveraging machine learning to be able to identify and predict whether something was good or bad without ever seeing it before, and moving beyond just for these bad pieces of malware. So we started the company doing that. We've evolved. We've got a very large and robust data science team, and a lot of the original thinking for the company. Once you have that data, you can use it in various ways, and a lot of it was to feed the algorithm. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
We were, I think, now, say, the 10 years of collecting data from everything we do. We were able to annotate that data in a way that made our generative AI training very effective. And as many of you know, like, you know, you've heard the story, you know, is it good or is it bad, right? Well, we had, we had sort of annotated. That's what I mean. We've had data that was collected, that we had we sort of described along the 10-year journey, so that when we fed it into the clean. So that made and our life a lot easier when we created something like Charlotte. Now, Charlotte is our generative AI technology. What does it do? It goes beyond just a chat.
It's a lot of like, "Hey, we've got a new chatbot." Okay, that's interesting and fun, but, you know, what, what do you do beyond that? So what we've done with Charlotte is we've taken the collective wisdom of CrowdStrike over the last, you know, well, we put it in the Charlotte. So you ask a question, you get an effective answer, as if you're talking to the smartest, SOC analyst, Security Operations Center analyst that, that we have. That's one. But the second, and I think more impactful piece, the automation framework of CrowdStrike. You wired it into our SOAR, we wired it into our real-time response technology. So from a customer standpoint, if you want to take 8 hours of grunt work, we can reduce... Can we answer and pull data out of the system and, and write reports on it?
Like threat reports, that would take days, it writes automatically. But then we can actually provide actions into what you want to do. That's really the power of what we see. We want to create a virtual SOC analyst, not a chatbot, and I think we've been very effective in doing that, which is why we call out the 90%+ win rates when people actually. I didn't leave enough time for questions or much time for questions. Is there any question from the audience? Yes.
So, George, you guys talked last quarter about upping the investment spend again-
this year and next year versus
Yeah.
a little bit of a pause last year, if you will. Strength of Flex-
traction, international, the excitement in the marketplace. To the degree to which your sales are exceeding, reinvest that upside, or will you just maintain a very methodical approach to your budgeted spend, such that we'll see the leverage and the flow through sooner, reinvest that?
Well, what Burt-
Quickly.
Yeah, it's a good question. And what Burt and I talked about, and Burt gave some, I think, constructive words on this, is that here, and certainly in terms of headcount and go-to-market and even engineering, right? We have new products, we continue to add there. And we front-loaded this because we wanted to make sure we got the ramp. You know, it does take... You hire a new salesperson, they're not productive at the ramp for the back half of the year, and I think we've been doing a good job in that area. But one of the things that Burt and I have always said, and it, it's part of our DNA, is that it's not growth at all costs.
And I mean, we're a rarefied air, as, as many know, but we want to do it in a profitable way, and we want to certainly do it and deliver the free cash flow that we've talked about and the operating leverage and the operating margin. From that, but where we can invest and be smart and strategic about it and front-load things, knowing we're going to get the benefit, that's what we're going to do. And that's really what we've done in the beginning part of this year.
Any, any other question? Okay, I'm giving you back 25 seconds.
Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much, Saul. Thank you.
Yes, pleasure. Thanks.