Greetings! I wanna welcome everyone who's joined into this session at Oppenheimer's 27th Annual Technology, Internet, and Communications Conference. You know, I'm thrilled to have with us Clearwater Analytics. This is a top pick for us at Oppenheimer here. We have the CFO presenting with us, Jim Cox. Jim, great to see you. As always, I appreciate the time. Jim, maybe if it's okay if we can just go real high level, start at 20,000 feet. We may have listeners here who are unfamiliar with the Clearwater story. Can you maybe just share a brief-
Yeah
company background and maybe talk about the problems the company is solving for your customers?
Great. Sure thing, sure thing. Well, Brian, first of all, let me say thanks for inviting us to this conference. It's incredibly convenient, so thank you, and also thanks for all the support along the way and, and, and the thoughtful commentary. Let me start with Clearwater. First of all, I've been at Clearwater over five years. Before I was at Clearwater, I was a customer multiple times, so I understand the value of, of what we do. What Clearwater does is investment accounting, reporting, compliance, and risk. We serve corporates, we serve insurance companies, and we serve asset managers, and we actually do that globally. That's, that's what we do. Let me talk a little bit about why it's maybe some metrics. Since I'm the CFO, maybe I should say...
You know, we consistently grow 20%+, have really nice EBITDA margins north of 30%, convert cash flow very healthily. And so it's a very durable, reliable growth business, and has been that way from the start. Why are we able to grow durably and reliably? The business, you know, investment accounting, as exciting as it is, we actually do it a little bit differently. So most investment accounting platforms think about first a portfolio, and then the securities or transactions or something within that portfolio. And at Clearwater, right in the beginning, the founders thought about it a different way. Don't know whether it was deliberate, don't know whether it was luck, but we're very happy that they thought about it this way.
And instead of accounting for a portfolio, they account for - we account for the securities underlying a portfolio. And so why is that? It's nuanced, but why is that important? And it's very important because if you have connectivity, then if more than one client owns that same security, you only have to connect to get that information once. You only have to reconcile that information once. You only have to model those securities once, if it's fixed income or those sorts of things. And so you have a clean, reliable, true golden set of data at the security level. And then, and we do all that work overnight. You know, we pull all that data in, we compare it to - we do it something called a tri-party reconciliation, where we're comparing to everybody, and we cleanse that data.
And so our value prop to our clients is clean, reliable data at the beginning of your day to start your day. Go use that. And so, because we do all of the sausage-making behind the accounting, and we just provide the results at the end of it, we have incredibly high NPS, and we have really high gross retention rates, 98%-99% gross retention rates. And so that's, that secret sauce has been kind of, the, the very kind of bedrock of what we do. Interestingly, we started out selling to corporates. That's why I was a client, and, used it on the corporate side, and then moved to other asset owners, particularly insurance companies.
'Cause if you think about it, insurance companies are investing in many of the same securities that corporates are investing in, or at least initially, and now they go beyond that. And then next moved into asset managers because the asset owner clients of those asset managers were saying, "Hey, I'm getting this reporting from Clearwater. Why can't you do the same thing that Clearwater wants to do?" And so they bought Clearwater to help them build with that. Now that's the core product. On top of that, we're now in this next evolution, which is moving from a single-product company, which is this core product, to a multi-product company, and that's a really important element of our next phase of growth.
We have a long runway with that first phase, and we have this next phase as well, which you know, I think we're starting to be well underway with.
Jim, that was a great intro. I love the fact that you really get exciting that accounting investment accounting is sexy, is a really
Yes, yes.
I don't hear that very often.
There you go.
So, let's, we'll dive in a little bit deeper. I want to start with the product.
Yeah
... differentiation, and, you know, I kind of think of it as an accounting book of record and-
Yeah
sub-ledger that Clearwater creates for its customers. So, maybe the first question is, you know, why is your solution mission-critical for your customers? And why is it so important to have the full book?... from the customer to create the accounting book of record or, you know, sub-ledger?
That's it. That's it. So there's no fudging around with this. People are taking the data straight out of our Clearwater system, and they're putting it in their SEC filings, and they're putting it in their regulatory reports, and they're doing all of that. So we have to be accurate, and we have to be comprehensive, and we really pride ourselves on being both accurate and comprehensive. Now, why is it that we are so accurate? Well, I talked a little bit about that single security master, but I didn't really talk about what some of the benefits are. There's a network effect benefit to the company and to investors from, well, if we have one security, and we have multiple clients who have that same security, we only have to reconcile that security once. We have to do those calculations once.
All of the clients that hold that same security benefit from it. That's a benefit to us. What's the benefit to the client? It's accuracy. 'Cause let's say that the price on that security was wrong. And by the way, that happens every day, but it's because there's literally hundreds of thousands of securities flowing through every day. So that price, someone mispriced a security. That then comes in. A client, any client that holds that security may look at that security and say, "Oh, that price doesn't look right." They might then come to us and say, "Can you look that up?" We'll go to the pricing vendor and say, "Ah, that price doesn't look right." The pricing vendor says, "You're correct. We'll change the price." The price is changed.
Immediately it ripples through, not only to that client that identified that price, but any client who held that security will reap the benefits of that. So you get much better quality in that. So I think the way we say it is, it's at least as good as the most accurate client we have, and it's definitely accurate across all, all those clients when you start adding up all those clients. So you get much better accuracy. That's the secret sauce. There's also this, network effect to us that is the benefit of that. We really believe we do it better because, we do have all the connections. And then lastly, So that's the accuracy piece. The other piece is comprehensiveness.
The truth is, as people select new investments, and their current accounting system may or may not be able to account for those investments, what do the accountants do? The portfolio manager still buys it. It's the accountant's job to figure out what to do with it. And I had an old buddy when I was an accountant, he said, "If you can't account for something, perhaps you shouldn't have bought it." But that is not how it works. That is not how it works. People buy stuff, and it's up to the accountant to figure out how to account for it. And, so what ends up happening is they'll put it in a spreadsheet. They'll do it on the side. They'll do something else.
And then when you ask, "Oh, what is my exposure to X, Y, or Z?" You actually can't look at the system of record. You have to look at the system of record and over here, and the spreadsheet over here. "Oh, and I've gotta go call someone, and I've gotta do that." And so they say, "Okay, well, I don't wanna do all that. I'll put a database on top of that. Oh, I'll put that database on top of it. Oh, no, the database is out of sync, and how do we do that? Okay, let's hire some 10 people to put the database together and do all that." That's what you choose to do if you don't have Clearwater. If you have Clearwater, when you buy a new security, the first question is, is: Does anyone else already have that security?
Are we already doing all of this? Or let's say that it is a new region or a new security or something's new about that. We bring it in. We do the connect. It's our problem to solve that. We do it, and then for the next person that comes along, it's done. We've connected it. It's flowing, it's reconciling, and that information is there. So that's the comprehensiveness is what's really important to the CIOs, to the chief risk officers, to the audit committees, to those folks, and understanding, really, do I understand all the places? Because if you don't have a consolidated view, you really can't answer any of the question.
And then, Jim, maybe just sticking on this topic, on the product differentiation or just the product in general, wanted to ask you about the defensibility in the AI area.
Yeah.
How durable is Clearwater's moat in AI? Maybe I'd ask it this way, you know, why can't AI just find the different pricing, the mispricing that's out there on the market and then do the investment accounting automation? You know, why is Clearwater's moat deep-
Yeah
... in this upcoming AI era?
So I think that, in fact, not only is it deep, but I think it is an asset, right? So we have this single set of assets, this reconciling. So first of all, generative AI. This is, this is math, and so you've got to figure out the math. Secondly, we have already embraced a lot of machine learning along the way, not AI, not generative AI, but machine learning, because as we've learned about these, we've built these rules, and there's just a compendium of rules that we have to go through. And so this is an incredible opportunity for us. Now, why can't they do that? Because we have a single set of information across a broad spectrum of all of these different locations, all of these different areas, and all of those elements. The truth is, once clients come to Clearwater, they're generally not...
You know, we have them turn off all their other systems, so they're moving to us to build on that. And so I think we feel very comfortable in the verticals that we are, with the expertise that we have in these areas, and driving towards that. We view AI as not necessarily a threat, but really an opportunity, and we're already utilizing it ourselves because most folks are asking the question, "Oh, why is this number this or this number that?" We're using AI with our own agent-in-the-loop perspective to facilitate that, but this is accounting. This is regulatory reporting. It has to be right, and so we believe that the approach is enabled by gen AI but will require a human in the loop for these elements.
Perfect. Jim, I wanna shift gear and get into the growth drivers.
Yeah.
You know, I'll start with this as an intro.
Yeah.
You know, you know, you clearly report a really strong 2Q results, which are an outlier in the software industry. You know, in my universe, the 2Q earnings season was pretty rough, for software, so clearly the macro didn't get better-
Right
... for software companies, but you know, your business remains strong. So clearly the business is more secular than it is cyclical. So you know, let's go through those secular growth drivers, and maybe you can shed a little light on what these buying drivers are, why these buying drivers are leading to new sales. So-
Yeah.
Let's talk about the regulatory opportunity with Clearwater. So, you know, how do your products solve the regulatory requirements for your customers?
Yeah, that's, that's a very big driver. When you think about why does someone decide to wake up and switch to Clearwater, I think most people will look at how we do it and the way we do it, and they will say, "That's the right way to do it." But they're on whatever platform they're on today, and they say, "Oh, is there enough incentive for me to move?" And so one of the best incentives that drives is regulatory change, and there's a mountain of regulatory change that happens every year. In fact, in North America, there are very significant changes. The NAIC has put through something called the Bond Project, and that has really changed to how folks are gonna report to the insurance regulators. And guess what? If you're on Clearwater, we solve that for you.
If you're not, you're probably working on a big project on that. Now multiply that. That's just one example from this year in North America. Now multiply that for every other region of the world, and how there are new regulations in every market. And the benefit of being on Clearwater is because we have the single-instance, multi-tenant solution that has this data and all, all of these different gaps available, we are keeping all of that up to date for folks. So the regulatory environment is good. I would say, Brian, I will tell you, we're a very durable business, and it's because we have a lot of irons in the fire. And I'll be honest, not every iron fires 100% of the time. So one thing that's generally a nice tailwind for Clearwater is IPOs.
When a company goes public, that's how I became a client of Clearwater. When companies have excess cash, they want to invest it, they usually buy Clearwater when they do that. Well, I was hopeful that the second half of this year we'd have an opening in the IPO market. Not so sure that's gonna happen. Certainly didn't happen last year, and it hasn't happened so far this year. Now, that's kind of that IPO piece, and so that isn't working. But guess what? This regulatory piece is in insurance companies. The other piece that's, I think, helpful is, 'cause you think of the vertical that we're supporting, we're also supporting insurance. Insurance companies are reasonably profitable, and they're doing very well these days. And asset managers, my sense is that asset manager budgets for 2024 are better than they were for 2023.
Because those budgets are set at the beginning of each year, and coming out of 2022 into 2023 versus coming out of 2023 into 2024, there's probably some benefit there. And I think that those are some things that help, but ultimately, it does come down to exactly what you were saying, Brian, the secular trends. So the secular trend for insurance companies is: This is the solution. It's a multi-tenant cloud solution. It's probably the right way to go. When's the right time for me as a business to do that? And usually, that right time for a company to make that switch is, "I want to invest in something new. I want to go to a new geography. I want to do something strategic with my book." Imagine if you're a reinsurer.
A reinsurer's business is all about taking risk and assets from other insurers. If you were a reinsurer not on Clearwater, you would have to, before you even if you thought it was the right strategic decision, you would have to think about every nuance of making it operationally successful. Versus, when you're with Clearwater, you just do your strategy, and Clearwater's responsible for the operations. If you're an asset manager, asset management is all about gathering and growing assets, and Clearwater allows you to do that by doing kind of best-in-class reporting for those clients. That's a really important element of your communication as an asset manager with your asset owner clients. Those are the secular trends that push with us.
I'd say the final secular trend, which may not be secular, but I think it's specific to Clearwater, so it's, but I think it's persistent, is generally our clients are very happy with us, and they have problems, and they have money. When you have problems and money, and you have a trusted vendor, it's natural for you to ask them to do more for you, and I think that has been helpful as well for us this year.
Jim, share with us also why Clearwater is a play on new wealth in instruments, new investment classes. We've got a lot of money managers who are on the call-
Yeah
so I think they'll understand that. Explain why your solution is also a play on supporting new wealth instruments.
That's it. So, you know, I think I saw something that said every MBA or economics major coming out of college wants to go into private credit. You know, I didn't even, I couldn't even spell private credit when I got out of college. That's how it's evolved, right? And so there's always new instruments, there's always new innovation, there's always something to do. And so you, it's generally accepted accounting principles. How do people account for it? What do people do? Well, when you come to a platform where there are all these alternatives already on the platform, and we're able to say to you, "When you acquire an instrument, would you like to account for it this way or this way?
Because 80% of it, people account for it this way, 20% of people account for it this way. No one accounts for it any other way. Which one would you like to do?" And that, just that, helps our clients to feel confident about entering new asset classes. 'Cause if you didn't have Clearwater, you'd have to build a spreadsheet, or you'd have to do something else, or you'd have to think of some other way to do it, and it, it discombobulates the entirety of the whole risk management and performance calculation structures that they have.
Other growth drivers I want to touch upon is, first, why don't we talk about how you're targeting to gain more wallet share-
Yeah
... from your customers? You know, Commercial Paper Solution is the newest.
Yeah.
You know, JUMP with order management. Wilshire, you bought risk management models. You got mortgages-
Yeah
now, maybe a benchmarking product. There's a lot of chatter on that.
Yeah.
So, maybe I'd ask you, you know, are you seeing more products being adopted in your new logos? And then how do you go and distribute? You know, how do you go to market and be able-
Yeah
to gain a greater share of the wallet? What's the strategy there over the next several years?
So I think if you just... Brian, if you look back and you remember when we went public, we were very much about, "Hey, we have this single product, and we have this growth path, and we're gonna go global, and these are these sorts of things." But we were very much a single product company at that point in time. And I think the evolution from then to now is really about us moving to this multi-product strategy. When you think about it, we have clients that have problems, they- and we have really high NPS scores, client satisfactions.
And so they actually have been coming to us to say, "What problems can you solve for us?" So we commissioned a study, and this was really interesting: what we found was for a typical insurance company, if they pay one basis point of their assets for their accounting solution, they pay a total of four basis points for kind of their all, their middle back office solutions. And so that led us to say, "Okay, we have clients that like us. They have other problems. What more can we do for them?" And that's the core basis of our, of our real back to base strategy there. And honestly, we're doing all of this in conjunction with our clients. Like, how did we get into LPx? Our clients came to us and said, "We need more help with our LPs," and that led into it.
Mortgages, that's coming down the pipe. There's... We're really satisfied with the performance in the first half of the year with Prism, which is our kind of integrated reporting solution, along with Clearwater, and we've had a lot of success as clients have done funds to build into that. So those are all areas where we've had a lot of success. And then we have a number of investment areas that you mentioned, that we continue to evolve. And I think that one of our core principles is we do things together and in conjunction with our clients. So when we think we have a good idea for a solution, we start building it, then we go out very quickly and find a number of design partners to help us design the solution, and we've done this time and again.
One thing we learn is if we can't find a willing design partner, we probably are barking up the wrong tree, so we stop. But when we find a number of design partners that say: "Yes, I'm willing to put some effort in to help you design this because I think it's good for the world, it's good for the market, and it's good for me, your client," then we kind of co-innovate with them and build these products and bring them to beta and into market. And so I think we see a number of those, that we started a number of those programs at the beginning of the year. Some have worked out better than we expected. Others, not surprisingly, you know, did not meet the bar that we have for.
We'll reallocate resources to those areas that are most compelling. So that's kind of the multi-product strategy that we're on. We've had to reorganize our sales teams because we wanna be really focused on moving to back to base, and so those folks are only focusing on selling, you know, back to base, as well as then we have a separate team that's focused on new logo. And that's something that's happened in 2024, and we see, you know, further evolution of that as you look to the future.
Real good. Last growth driver I just wanna touch about on is international. You know, how penetrated is the business today, internationally? And then, you know, which geographies, you know, do you see the most opportunity, are you most optimistic about, over the near- nearer term?
So look, we have a great... You know, 50% of our ARR, about 50% is insurance. And so we really, I think we're the market-leading solution for North American insurers. When you look at the TAM, there's more TAM in Europe than there is in North America, and our total revenue is about 82% in U.S., North America, and only 18% international. So our TAM is kind of 50/50 international U.S., so we've got an incredible runway internationally. I think we've had a lot of success in the U.K. That's where we started. We've also had success in France, particularly since the JUMP acquisition.
It created an instantiated, committed presence in Paris, which has helped JUMP add more clients with the JUMP product, as well as the Clearwater team adding more Clearwater because in that region. So I think we've seen good. And I'm really excited to say in the first half of the year, we've seen really promising wins in DACH, which is the German-speaking region. So Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Northern Europe has had a strong first half of this year, and that's relatively new for us. So we see a lot of opportunity, particularly in continental Europe, and we're in the early days there. And then you move to Asia. We were lucky. I think the word will be lucky. You know, we, we've been pulled into Asia.
We were not deliberate at all, but, you know, some clients who are now clients, some prospects, you know, they raised their hand, and they said, "We could really use something like this. Can you please set that up?" And so now we're gonna be much more deliberate in, in, in looking at Asia. I think even if you go back, you would've said, at the beginning of this year, you would've said, "Our core TAM is North America and Europe, insurance, asset managers, and corporates." And I would expect when we look to next year, we'll be talking about Asia as part of that core as well.
That's exciting. Jim, I thought you were gonna say next year we're gonna be talking about IPOs-
Yeah.
as part of that.
Well, that would be great, too.
Part two.
That would be-
We're on the same...
Yeah. Yes, let's do that.
We're on the same side there.
That a 100%.
rooting for those two to come back to the market, so-
100%
Yeah. Jim, let me ask you about Project 115 or your one-
Yeah
115% NRR aspiration.
Yes.
First half of the year, you know, the business has been generating 110%-
Yeah
NRR, which is up from 107, you know, last year.
Yeah.
So that's great. But the goal is 115% by Q1 2026. So-
Yeah
two questions. The first question is just, how do you get there?
Yeah.
How do you get another five points of growth? And then the second question is, maybe it's more cyclical here, but, you know, does a rate cut, you know, does that help the NRR of the business?
Yeah. So for folks who are new to Clearwater, so, yes, thank you. I'm a huge fan of NRR 115. It's when we look out at great SaaS businesses, they have really high net revenue retention rates, and so we aspire to be a truly great SaaS business. And so that's an appropriate goal for us to look for. We sit on the shoulders of a world-class gross revenue retention rate. Typically, it's 98%. The last two quarters, it's been 99%, but it's just a remarkably great gross retention rate. And 106, 107 is a really pretty average net revenue retention rate. Not for all businesses, but if you're starting at 99, that would be, you know, not that much.
But it really reflected the fact that we were kind of historically a single-product company, and so we thought about that. So when we started on this endeavor, we said, "Okay, given that we have this great gross revenue retention, how do we get to a world-class net revenue retention?" And so maybe before I get to how we get from 110 to 115, I'll kind of talk about how we get to 110 and then what's different. I think that's the easiest way to think about it. So you start at 100, then we lose 1%-2% with churn, then we get about 3% kind of realized on price increases from client. We get a couple, 3% from kind of the natural... It wouldn't be, you, you mentioned AUM-...
but it is an AUM increase, but it isn't market volatility. It's not a tilt in market. It's the fact that companies are profitable, insurance companies are more profitable, and more assets are added just in the normal course of business. Of course, individual companies, their investable assets go up and down, but overall, as companies are profitable, those grow, and that's a few percent. Then there's the another piece, which is about 3% as well, 3%-4%, actually, it was 4% last quarter, is what we'll call share of wallet. So this is assets. A lot of our large asset management clients will grow as they add more clients to their portfolio, and we're out there helping them. Or we're adding Clearwater to other places in their business.
And basically, it's the same core Clearwater product, but there's more of it. So that gets us roughly to 108. And then there was about 2%, which was additional products sold back into our base. So that gets us to 110, roughly. And so how do you get from 110 to 115? Well, you can use any of those drivers, and just so folks understand, you know, there is someone whose job it is to manage share. There's someone whose job it is to execute price increases. There are many people's jobs who it is to increase wallet share, and then there's whole teams that are each focused on individual products that we need to sell back into the base.
If you think about what's the largest driver, we'd like to improve on all of those, but what's the largest driver from the 110 to 115? It's simply moving that 2% of new products to 7%. It isn't that one product will do 7% increase across all clients. It's about having a whole toolbox of products that we can sell, maybe 1% or 2% each, but have 5 or 6 of those that we're continually selling back into our clients as we're doing more for them, growing that to the 115. I think we feel great about where we are, like, that's why we initiated the whole growth opportunity program, growth objective program, what we call GOs internally, and we've seen good traction with that.
However, there's one thing that I miscalculated a little bit on these new products. We're selling them in the upfront bundle, and so we're getting a bigger upfront bundle when I, perhaps naively, thought we would be only selling it back into the base. So I'm certainly never backing away from 115 or anything like that, but I think that if just mathematically, if the upfront bundle is 105 instead of 100, and you turn it to 115, we're all better off because of it, but the way the metrics work out is a little bit different. But we're. You know, this NRR 115 is what's really the impetus to drive the investment in all of these additional products. And I would say that these products are organic, but they're also acquired.
JUMP has an OMS/PMS system that we're delivering that product. And so we may do this organically as well as inorganically, and frankly, it's a combination of both for some of these. Taking Wilshire, for example, we're using elements of that Wilshire solution that we're gonna bundle in with our overall solution and to create value for clients.
Jim, sorry about your high-class problem, that your new logo deal size is increasing, so your growth is faster from new logo stuff.
Yeah.
Sounds like a real. And you're stickier, and you're gaining more wallet share-
Yeah
from the budget.
And you're right. It's just-
High-class problem
that bigger wallet, kind of that bigger kind of new logo, it's because it's a bigger problem. It just increases also our right to win all these solutions. And so, yeah, I wanna remind everyone, the end target is total growth, and we're really committed to kind of total growth. Yeah.
Yep. Last question on the NRR. So, you know, could this 110%, you know, be a new trough here for NRR? 'Cause when I'm thinking about it, it's a trailing 12-month number.
Yeah.
Last year, you know, you have less products to sell.
Yes
than you have now, so you got lower expansion numbers. Those are gonna start to fall out of the calculation.
Yeah.
you know, could this be a new trough level, you know?
I think, so it's hard to call it, but if you said at the beginning of the year we were down a few points relative to where we are now, right? And I don't think we go back there. So, you know, could we do a. You know, we're at 99, so could we do 198 and 109 instead of 110? Sure, but but I do agree, this is what we're doing, is, is we're setting a base level here, that I think we're now focused on how do we drive more of those products to drive more of this, to really push that forward. Yeah.
Fair enough. I know Sandeep would say yes, but he's not on the-
He-
He's not on the podcast.
He would, he would absolutely say yes. And that's-
He'd say it's too low.
That's as big a yes as you can get from me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He'd say it's too low. It's too low.
Oh, that's so true. So true.
Yeah.
So true.
Jim, last question on the margin, the profitability-
Yeah
you know, side of the story. So, you know, you're operating with... Already you're north of 30% EBITDA margins.
Yeah.
You have a guidance out there to, you know, take that up to 35% in a couple of years on your way to 4%. So why is the business able to do it? You know, why is the business able to produce these best-in-software profitability margins? And then maybe the other question is, where do you see the greatest opportunity for operating leverage?
Yeah
over the next several years in the business?
Perfect. So I think if you just look, it comes down to the unit economics. So you come back to the architecture of the platform and this concept of the network effect, that every client makes you more efficient. And so if you look, I think in the last quarter, our incremental gross margin was, it's like 89% or something like that. So it's really about marching gross margin to 80%, and we're really focused on that. Then it comes down to, what do we want to invest in? And, and we have lots of, lots of optionality around that. But I do think we also have leverage.
We're spending north of $100 million on R&D, and we will continue to grow R&D, but there's lots—just like we're getting efficiencies through AI in that gross margin line with client services, I think we're gonna see efficiencies with our development team. So we think we can grow R&D spend, but not as quickly as revenue, and get leverage out of that. But ultimately, the reason why we have these great unit economics is because our clients. Number one, they're very sticky, and so that really helps. The longer you have a client, the more profitable they are. Just collectively, the happier they are. And then we're able to spend. You know, we're about 25% on R&D and only, like, 12% or 13% sales and marketing. That's upside down for most SaaS businesses.
The reason why we don't have to spend so much on sales and marketing is the word of mouth and referenceability. Those high NPS scores actually translate into more efficient sales and marketing activities. So I think although we will invest very deliberately to globalize our sales team and to offer the opportunity to open up channels and partnerships, as well as make sure that we're nicely covered on our back-to-base sales, I still think we can do that very nicely within the envelope of what we have. And I think we see a clear path, because of these unit economics, to 40% margins. We just wanna make sure that we're investing today so that we can fortify our growth years into the future.
Damn it, Jim, we ran out of time.
Yes.
I wanted to ask you about the partner strategy, 'cause that's a whole new part of the story. It's mostly a direct model, and-
Yes
So now you're developing the partner channel. We'll have to leave that for Joon Park, and investors are gonna have to call Joon Park to hear about that part of the story, which is an important part of the story.
They will love Joon, as both of us do.
At Clearwater. That's right. Jim Cox, thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, Brian.
and sharing, you know, what is a great story over at-
It's always great to see you.
Clearwater these days.
Appreciate, uh-
Great to see you.
Oppenheimer's support, and appreciate you. Take care. Thanks.