My name is Alex Henderson. I'm the Needham Security and Networking Analyst. great to have Okta here today. Brett, it's good to see you. let's see, it was what, 20 minutes ago we would do a one-on-one?
Yeah, no. Long time no see.
It's good to see you again.
Yeah.
We have a lot of people dialed in. If you have a question, we're gonna do a fireside chat. If you have a question, we have The Wall Street Transcript link up, so you can type it in, and I would be more than happy to pass that along to Brett. The more questions coming from the audience, the better it is, frankly, in my opinion. So please don't hesitate to use that. With that, welcome. I'm glad to see you again. Maybe you could just start off with a little bit of background on what's happened over the last couple of quarters of volatility that we've seen out there.
I think significant improvement in the operational structure, particularly over the Auth0 side, that's now setting up.
Well, thanks for having me, Alex. I really appreciate you taking the time to host me today. I think, you know, maybe a little update on how the business has been doing. You know, if you listen to the Q3 earnings call, we talked about progress on a few things that we've been working on. First couple of quarters of the year, we had some challenges around a few things, right? There was really elevated attrition in the field, and then execution issues around Customer Identity Cloud. We saw in Q3 a trend going in the right direction. The attrition really improved to a level that we hadn't seen for almost a couple of years at this point.
From a Customer Identity Cloud perspective, we had the highest participation in the field in Customer Identity Cloud deals. You know, not where we want it to be. It's trending in the right direction, but it's still better than what it was. We look at both of those, both of those challenges as, you know, it takes time to fix, right? We had a good quarter, we're pleased with the quarter, but we're not gonna rest on, oh, in one quarter and all of a sudden things are done. We gotta continue to focus, continue to go in the right direction. I think the third thing that we talked about was really macro and how that has changed.
You know, Q2, we talked about how it was, we saw at the very end of the quarter and not much, but in Q3, we saw it definitely get worse. You know, we are expecting it to continue to trend that direction as we move forward.
Just to remind people, you're on Okta Q3.
Yeah.
January Q4.
Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah. Yeah. January 31 fiscal year. That's definitely. We saw, you know, trending in Q3, a worse from a macro perspective, like I said, we do expect it to get worse.
Let's dig into the Auth0 acquisition and kind of the trajectory of that. You know, my initial response to the acquisition was, this is a great acquisition. You guys are bringing in a whole slew of skills that you really didn't have before.
Yeah.
Tying directly into the coding community, in a way that you weren't there before. The consumer markets, the higher growth arena, with a lot more, you know, untapped space in front of it, than what is probably a little bit more mature enterprise side. Seemed like a really good acquisition. The other side of the coin, you already had a consumer franchise that was more enterprise-oriented.
Mm-hmm.
Less, coder-centric. It seemed like for the first couple, two, three quarters, that they were kind of at odds with each other. Is that a, you know, the fair description? Because now it sounds like you've gotten all of those on the same page, working off the same script, and instead of competing with each other in the field, they're actually, amplifying each other in the field.
I wouldn't say they were competing with each other, at odds with each other. We kept the businesses separate that first fiscal, well, really three quarters, that the last quarter of fiscal year 2022, because, you know, both businesses were doing really well, and we didn't wanna mess them up, you know, 'cause they were trending in the right direction. We saw the results in FY 2022. They were really strong. I think today, bringing them together, yeah, we've hit some speed bumps, if you will. Ultimately, we still view this as a great long-term acquisition. I mean, you say it yourself, Alex, one of the things that Okta lacked was that developer-friendly kind of like up, you know, kind of, build it from the ground up kind of, you know, approach.
That's something that we need to continue to kind of bring together as our organizations continue to meld and continue to go toward this potential that we have as an organization. We need to continue to invest in Customer Identity Cloud. We need to continue to invest in Workforce Identity Cloud as well. We need to just bring everything together 'cause both companies were great and are great together. We just need to amplify what made each of them great.
As we look at, that coming together, the other issue was that during that period of volatility and change sales leadership and some other things going on back then, you'd seen a very high level of attrition.
Mm-hmm.
Particularly, it sounded like the attrition was higher at Auth0 and higher in the sales organization there. That seems like it's reversed quite substantially. Frankly, this environment is one where sales attrition is highly unlikely to be as big a factor given the economy. Can you talk a bit about the attrition rates? Where, what, where it peaked, and how much has it improved, and what are you seeing now?
Yeah, I mean, it peaked in the first half of the year, so first half of the fiscal year of last-
Through the July timeframe.
Yeah, exactly. Q1, Q2 of fiscal year 2023, which are, like I said, are, you know, January 31, is our fiscal year. The Q3 numbers really kind of got tremendously better, and specifically to the sales organization. The non-sales organization or the go-to-market organization is probably a better term. Even the non-go-to-market organization also helped, but I think there's some things that we implemented specifically for the go-to-market organization around, you know, enabling the field and making sure, you know, messaging was clear. We did some things around compensation. I think some of it is related to the activities that we've done and the strategic, kind of like programs we're running. I also think that the macro has also helped us on both areas.
I don't wanna sit here and say, "Oh, it's all Okta management and the brilliance," or anything like that. I'm sure we've gotten some benefit from the macro environment just given, you know, there just isn't as many jobs out there today than there were six, 12 months ago, so.
To get a first question in from the field, we have over 100 people in the audience, so I'm expecting a fair amount of them. When was the comp plan for FY 2024 introduced? How did it change versus incentive structure for FY 2023?
FY 2024 has not been released yet. You know, we've gotta finish our fiscal year 2023 first. Early February is where we'll release all of our comp plans. We're going through our comp planning today. You know, we're obviously gonna make sure we don't make any of the mistakes that we did last year. I would say the comp plan was part of the challenge. I would say there are other things that we could have done better. You know, we probably hired too many reps. You saw that was one of the activities that we did. We've slowed down rep hiring, which then makes territories bigger, which then makes opportunities bigger, which means people make money, right? I wouldn't only focus on the compensation side of the house.
I would say also the activities about how we do pipeline, how we actually carve territories, how we do quotas, all that sort of stuff, we're gonna be very thoughtful about all those things when we go into 2024, FY 2024. I don't wanna be sitting here talking with all of you guys in six months, nine months about the same issue. We definitely, when we made the changes in 2023, it wasn't just about 2023. It was about thinking through how those changes would affect 2024, and so we wouldn't have a repeat of what of the issue in the first half of 2023.
Integration is now smoothed out. The attrition rates have come down. Those were two of the largest things, but I don't think you've decided to fully bank on the attrition improvement. When you talk about your outlook to people lately, I think you're still assuming a relatively high attrition rate.
Correct.
The rate of improvement in the last quarter was not necessarily a trend line that I think.
If you look at a few things like... I mean, that's exactly right, Alex. If you think about attrition, you think about Customer Identity Cloud execution, those are two things that we definitely got better at in Q3, but in my opinion, one quarter doesn't make a trend. We wanna string a few quarters together on both of those before we can start saying that the job is done. Like, I just don't think that it's prudent to say that we're through all of it, just being thoughtful of how we're thinking about the future.
If I shift gears from the Auth0 side to the employment side, while the positive comments about consumer coming out of most of our field checks, we've actually heard a little less positive on the enterprise side, mainly because it seems like there's some saturation going on over there. I think the street is quite worried about Microsoft, but we haven't heard that Microsoft is having an impact, but to some extent, the VARs are telling us their business is slowing somewhat.
Hmm.
Can you talk about the macro impact on that side of the business and to what extent you think there might be a little bit of saturation there?
We don't think there's any saturation, frankly, there. I mean, even if you look at. If you heard, if you remember what I talked about at Investor Day back in early November was around, you know, hey, we've got a huge portion of the Fortune 100. We've got a big portion of the Fortune 500. If you remember what I said is even in our largest customers, in those customers, we still think there's a tremendous amount of room to run. That's because we feel like there's a lot of starter deals in there, whether it be in number of licenses or if it's in products. We feel like we're under-penetrated in a lot of our customers. So, you know, even in places where people are using. Let's use a very simple example of MFA, right?
There's MFA, and then there's advanced MFA. A lot of our customers still just use MFA, which is a text, right? Which we know is phishable. We've seen those challenges. You could go to a more phishing-resistant factor like Okta Verify, which is a, you know, obviously, you know, we have it all on our phones at Okta. It's great. It's an amazing tool. That's just a simple example of, like, even in that situation where, yeah, they have one of the products that we have, they could really upgrade into a bigger product there. I think from an overall workforce perspective, we still feel there's a lot of room to run there.
I mean, if you include the IGA TAM in there, we think it's around $50 billion. Clearly, we don't have $50 billion, not even close to that. you know.
Let's take this a step further then. I mean, to the extent that the VARs are telling me one thing, and you're suggesting that there's a different reality than what they're expressing. I know that you've focused very heavily on sales capacity expansion and have done somewhat less on the channel development. Is that disconnect between those two comments a function of needing to do more to invest in this, the SIs, the GSIs of the world and to build out a more robust VAR channel? I think that's something that you're actually stepping up to, is it not?
I would say, you know, a stat we've talked about in the past is we've said about a third of our business runs through the channel, right? That continues to be the case. I think Alex, you know, I think you might have heard me talk about it earlier today, which is around, you know, we need to continue to invest in our partner ecosystem. We need to, you know, obviously. The vast majority of that third, by the way, is VARs. Vast majority. We need to invest more in the ecosystem to continue to do what we've done with the VARs. We also need to expand more into the RSIs and the GSIs.
We've got a couple of RSIs, but the GSIs haven't paid attention to us enough because, I mean, look at our professional services revenue as a percentage of total. It's 4%, right?
Right.
GSIs really wanna have to build a practice. We think Customer Identity could be one of those vectors for them building practices around and can ultimately, you know, make it so it's worth their time to come in and be a part of the ecosystem with us. There's the third vector, which is marketplaces. You heard from AWS at Investor Day around the opportunity there in marketplace. I mean, how many thousands of reps does AWS have? They get quota retirement for anything that's runs through the marketplace for Okta. AWS sees how valuable it is to have a partner like Okta in terms of identity. We look at it as a kind of a three-pronged approach between marketplaces, the SI, GSI community, and also the VARs.
Yes, we do need to do more there. It's, actually, you know, when we're thinking about our strategic goals, it's one, you know, it's an area to focus on, as we, as we move forward.
Clearly, the question of Microsoft comes up in, probably every one of your meetings, I'm guessing.
Wouldn't be a meeting without one.
Wouldn't be a meeting. I wanna make sure this is a meeting then.
Yeah, yeah, we get it. Let's just get it out of the way.
Let's hit it. There is clearly anxiety among the buy side and sell side analysts that Microsoft E3, E5 bundles have security and particularly identity security in them that in a tougher environment, they would then use that thing they're already paying for rather than use the Okta product that they're, that they may also be paying for when that redundancy of payment is something they can streamline. How hard is it for somebody to do that? Generally speaking, have you seen any evidence of that trajectory changing?
Yeah, we haven't really seen a material change there. What I would say is, I mean, Microsoft has always been there, and Microsoft will always be there. There is no world where Active Directory doesn't exist or Azure AD doesn't exist, right? I mean, the vast majority of our companies or our customers have Microsoft, right? They're a great competitor. They're a great company. If you wanna be a single stack company, Microsoft's gonna win. We're not gonna be able to compete with an E3 or E5 agreement if it's 100% of your stack is on Microsoft, right? I think there's less and less-
Who does that?
of those customers out there, right? You have to believe in a world where ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, Zoom, I could keep going for the next 20 minutes on number of customers that wouldn't exist or companies out there wouldn't exist. That's where I think Okta really shines. Once you step out of that single stack mentality, that's where, that's where we do well. I think, I mean, we do well even actually for years, we've done a great job even doing access into Microsoft products better than they have. You can look at the ratings on their website. I mean, they're gonna make that better, right? Like, it's their stack. They're gonna make it better. You can't expect that to continue.
Ultimately, you know, we believe that, you know, if you're interested in a multi-cloud world or you're interested in a heterogeneous world, you know, whether you're using Salesforce for CRM or, you know, Slack or Zoom and so Teams, like it's just that's where I think Okta really shines.
If that's the, you know, the logic behind it, what about the empirical support for the theory? Any evidence of any change in your trail of business, your pipeline that reflects Microsoft, you know, competition?
Nothing that we can see at this point. I mean, we had another strong renewals quarter. You'd think if anywhere you would see it, you'd think the most direct way we could see it is in the renewals piece. We haven't seen it yet. In fact, we had a really good quarter against Microsoft in Q3, so.
Great. Well, let's shift gears, back to the question that came in here. This one is, how has sales productivity trended through FY 2023? What is implied, in FY 2024 guide from the sales productivity perspective?
Yeah. Given the challenges that we've had, sales productivity has not trended where we want it to be through Q3. Q3 was better than it was before, but it's still not at historical normals. When we think about the FY 2024 productivity, if you think about the things I talked about around it, we don't expect attrition to, you know, get better from here. We don't expect Customer Identity to get better from here. We expect macro to get worse. There is gonna be some disruption from some sales leadership changes. We expect productivity not to really do that much better in FY 2024. We're being conservative because there are. Yes, we've had some good just some good news in Q3, but we're also not expecting that to replicate itself.
We're being thoughtful about how we think about productivity in 2024.
Given, there's two very distinctively different pieces of that question, can you maybe break it out a little bit between the enterprise-oriented business and the consumer-oriented business within that context? I think you saw most of the volatility was early on the consumer side, not so much on the enterprise.
No, no, not necessarily. Think about it, there's the two main factors in terms of productivity that we saw for the first half, and it does still have that impact in Q3, which is attrition and Customer Identity. Customer Identity, yes, clearly that is Customer Identity, but attrition is both, right? It's gonna affect both Workforce Identity and Customer Identity because you have newer reps who don't have all the effects on both sides of the business. I don't wanna sit here and say it's only Customer Identity. You have to have headwinds in both because of the attrition is affecting the entire field. Yeah, that's how we're seeing things. I mean, obviously, we're working on improving our attrition. Like we had a good quarter in Q3.
Let's see how Q4 does, how Q1 through Q4 of next year goes. We wanna be able to improve the productivity on both workforce and customer identity, and that's really our goal for next year. Obviously, we're being thoughtful about how we think about it when we talk with all of you guys.
Looking at the, you know, the macro condition, the slowdown that you say you have seen as evidence of in your trailing results and to some extent your pipeline, can you distinguish a little bit between geographies? Is it more international? Has it come to the U.S. in a meaningful way? Second, can you talk about, you know, size of customer, split it that way a little bit? Then again, between enterprise, and consumer. Three splits.
Yeah. I would say the most obvious is in, Let's just go with geo first. Geo, it was really U.S. commercial that we saw the most. It's gonna tie back to segment. That's the most clear-cut thing that we can see right now, which went through the end of Q3, which was, if you look at EMEA enterprise, we had actually closed a handful or a fair amount of really nice sized deals, like big deals. I think that helped EMEA from an overall perspective, right? If you look at where we are seeing it more is U.S. commercial, and I think it's more SMB in general across the world, as opposed to is it EMEA versus Americas.
I think we're seeing it more on that SMB side of the house. I think that just makes a lot of sense when you think about it. They don't have quite the balance sheets that your enterprise and strategic customers do. You know, their budgets aren't as flexible. They don't have access to capital like the enterprise does. That's one of the kind of like, okay, this makes a lot of sense to be macro because it's just starting to show up in places that it just makes sense, right? I mean, the other way.
EMEA enterprise versus consumer.
I wouldn't say I have a cut that is very definitive on that at this point. What I will say, going back to what I was just gonna say, is specifically in SMB, talking to some of our leaders, you're hearing the qualitative side of the house, which is around budgets being delayed or budgets being cut, right? I don't have quantitative for that. I mean, the other stuff I have all the quant for, but that's also just speaking with our sales leaders through the end of Q3. They're like, "Man, we're hearing a lot more around just budgets being slowed down, budgets being cut." That also gives us an indication that it's really more SMB-focused.
Okay, guys, we got another 15 minutes. You wanna get some questions in here, you know, I'm more than happy to pass them along. In the meantime.
I'm sure you got a bunch of them now.
I've got plenty of, I can ask either way. Can you talk a little bit about the IGA, you know, that product ramp and where you are on it, when it goes GA and, you know, what the initial focus will be, and how you expect that to do in this environment?
Yeah. U.S. GA for IGA, man, a lot of acronyms in there. Went live, you know, earlier. Well, in FY 2022, you know, July, August timeframe. Worldwide went December 1st. Right around December 1st or 2nd or something like that. Through Q3, we had about 100 customers. Early success, better than we expected, frankly. We're pleased with where we are. Right now, if you think about IGA product, it's really SMB focused. It's really focused on upsells. It cannot stand on its own. It's not a, you know, we're not gonna land new customers right now. Our focus is around getting upsells with our SMB customers because, you know, really it's about going and accessing the market that traditionally hasn't had that product in that market, right?
There's a lot of customers that want it but maybe couldn't afford it or didn't have the time to do it. That's really our approach right now for IGA. Like I said, we've had good momentum. In fact, we've had some momentum in the enterprise as well. You heard about a couple of customers that are bigger customers in the last earnings call. Just it's nice to see not just SMB, but we're having some success early in enterprise, even though we're not expecting it in these early days.
We look at it as, you know, an upsell right now and really, frankly, one of the reasons we're in the market, I'm not just because we think it's a good idea to go in the market, but also our customers are asking us to be in the market as well, so.
What about on the PAM side? Can you do similar?
Yeah. PAM, we are still our expectations that we set back at Investor Day is EA in the first half of calendar year 2023 here. Still on pace there. You know, we've been building out ASA, which is Advanced Server Access, which will be one of the PAM product. Yeah, we're on track and things are trending in the right direction there.
Okay. I managed to stir the pot a little bit and got a whole bunch of questions just zoomed in on me, so I'm gonna roll a few through here. Can you provide any update on how the sales leadership hiring process is coming along? Similarly, can you speak to the news of Steve Rowland stepping down as CRO, how should we expect this to impact the go-to-market strategy and org going forward?
Yeah. We are very focused on replacing Susan at this point. It's one of Todd's top priorities right now in terms of getting things done. In terms of Steve, yeah, you know, I mean, we talked about this at the last earnings call, which was, you know, we, and specifically we've talked about it earlier today around potential further attrition. We didn't know about, you know, further, you know, where the further attrition would come from, but it's just naturally part of a leadership change, right? I mean, you've gotta have expectations that when a leader leaves that there's gonna be potentially other leaders that are going to leave or potentially other people in that organization that will leave.
We do believe we've got a very strong bench of leaders in the organization. We're excited about the direction where the organization is headed. A lot of the plans we've set up, we're gonna continue to execute against. I mean, we believe those are the right direction, the right strategy. yeah, that's kinda where we're headed from a overall perspective on that, on that front. What else can I answer on that one? I'll make sure we're very clear on that one 'cause it is important for us to.
I guess the question is how long do you think it'll take to solve that gap in your leadership?
That's a good question. You know, I wouldn't expect it overnight. I mean, we're gonna have Todd the interim, assuming we don't have anyone hired by February first in terms of the whole head of go-to-market. In terms of the chief revenue officer position, we are going to have an interim named from an internal candidate probably in the next week or so. That will shore up that area. Obviously, yeah, like I said, we gotta focus on hiring the go-to-market leaders as well.
A slightly different set of questions here. What do you see as the potential impact from the Thoma Bravo acquisitions of Ping and ForgeRock?
That's a great question. I can't give you a great answer on that. I mean, those are a few very different companies. It'll be interesting to see how it goes. I think it, in, probably in the short term, probably helps us a little bit, just 'cause you don't know what. No, it's unclear as to what's gonna happen there. That could help our sales efforts, I'm sure, in some ways.
Yeah. It's always good when private equity takes out your competitors and disrupts them and then cuts back on their sales organization. I saw that Citrix acquisition. They just took out, what, 3,000 employees out of it? I mean, holy moly.
How many? 30,000?
No, $3,000.
Oh, I was like, 30,000.
No, I don't think they have 30,000 employees.
Yeah, I was gonna say, that's like, what?
$3,000.
Yeah.
Another question that came in, what was the feedback from customers after the GitHub hack?
Fairly muted because there really was no impact on customers at all. We've had some customer conversations, but it, you know, I would say it's been fairly non-event. You know, it's not a great news story, but you could see us, we came out very front-footed. We had already informed our customers before we told the rest of you guys, told them exactly what happened. Frankly, there's nothing, no impact to customers.
I think you guys learned your lesson on that one, huh?
I think we approached this one better than the last time, yes.
Yeah.
Alex.
it's a learning experience, and we appreciate that.
Yes, it is.
Which expense line items would you expect the most leverage on over the next few years? Relatedly, how should share dilution trend relative to history?
Okay, those are two wildly different questions. Okay, first one is on terms of, like, you're talking about, you know, where would we see leverage in terms of each line item on the income statement, I would say you're probably gonna see most of it from the operating expense line item, but you could also see it from a gross margin perspective or a COGS perspective, depending on how we perform. I mean, I don't have, you know, obviously, we don't have a long-term plan out there, but we do expect to increase margin, you know, obviously next year. You know, either you're looking at non-GAAP operating profit, low, low single digits, and then, you know, improving free cash flow margin. One of the things that we're working on in 2024...
Let's before I say that, in 2023 we did a lot of activities to be able to set ourselves up to improve margins in 2024. Things like slowing down hiring across the board, including sales. Things like software rationalization, rationalizing the real estate. You probably saw the write-off we did in the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation in the most recent earnings process. If you look at going into, you know, that all sets you up into 2024, okay, well, how are you gonna help yourselves in 2025 and beyond, right? It's about, in 2024 one of our main key strategic goals is around helping scale and automate the organization.
We've got a variety of projects that we're working on in 2024 that will help us continue to drive margins and margin expansion out into 2025, 2026, and 2027. We wanna make the entire company more productive. Okay, the next question was around share dilution. I talked about this at Investor Day. You know, historically, we've talked about 2%-3% net dilution. You know, since we've been a public company, that's about what we've run at. You know, given the share price compression, we do expect that to rise a little bit, but that's not to say we're not managing the issue. In fact, we've managed the issue for years now. Like take, for example, early days, we were a private company.
The equity cash balance for an employee was much more heavy equity. Over time, as our company has matured, we take the opportunity to right-size those and change as the company matures. Now, obviously, as we're going over the next several years, we're gonna continue to make those tweaks to the environment, make sure that we can not only attract and retain the best, but also do the right thing from the fiscally response perspective. We're gonna drive down that dilution as a percentage of that dilution percent that I just talked about being a little bit elevated in this near term out into the medium and long term, which then if you're thinking about SBC as a percentage of revenue, you should also expect to see that drop off over time.
If you wanna see a little bit more on that, you know, there's a little bit in the Investor Day presentation that I gave back in November.
That kinda dovetails into the next question that came in. You're guiding to 10% operating growth in CY 2023, less than revenue growth of 16%-17%. What are you doing on the labor and OpEx side to achieve this lower expense growth?
I'm assuming that's like non-GAAP operating margin dollars growth. Just to be clear, we're all on the same page, we've guided to non-GAAP operating margin of low single digits. How are we doing that? It's just exactly what I just was talking about around slowing down hiring we did in 2023, rationalizing software costs. Basically, cost efficiencies, let's call it that way, from my FP&A team looking into that real estate and then some of these activities I just talked about around how to make the team more efficient, more productive. Also looking at different regions, so not just hiring in all expensive regions, but how can we expand into different regions and lower our average cost perhaps. Those are the areas that we're really focused on.
Yeah. Some shifts of spend towards, more channel, to help drive the top line as well, I assume.
Yeah, I mean, obviously diversifying how we're doing that to try to get a better ROI out of them as well. Yeah.
Another question just came in. What specific software spend have you rationalized?
It's funny, I got a similar question from someone earlier today on that. It's really across the board, right? Like, there's no specific area where like, "Oh, G&A, you need to rationalize." It's the entire company. The way we're doing it is, you know, what's the... You know, look at product functionality. What are we getting the best ROI for? If there's two pieces of products, two products that kind of overlap, let's make sure that we're using the one and shifting to the one that's the best ROI for us as a company.
Gotta tell you that we've had a lot of questions in here. We had a lot of people, you know, dial into this thing. There's, I think we peaked out at about 150 people listening. If you were to offer up three key points that you absolutely want people to take away from this call or any meeting with you at this point in time, what would those three primary points be?
Good question. I would say that our opportunity still remains massive. I think that we've got a huge opportunity out in front of us. I mean, you know, the guidance is next year, a little bit north of $2 billion. We think the TAM is 80. You know, we've just still in those early innings of IT. I think as you see us add to the product portfolio and be able to add more functionality and really build out this amazing set of products that we've already got an amazing set. I think we can make it even better. I think we've just got a huge opportunity out there.
I, you know, I think the other one would probably be along the lines of, you know, yes, we've had some challenges in the early half of the fiscal year 2023. Great. In my opinion, I think we've made the right strategic direction and decisions to be able to solve for some of those, but only time will tell. I think we've gotta, you know, we gotta keep going in this direction, and I think it's ultimately the right plan, and I think we've got the right people and the right team to do it. I think we're headed in the right direction is probably the second key point. Those are probably my two key points. Big opportunity, we're headed in the right direction.
Yeah. We got one minute left. I'm going to ask you to change your hat a little bit.
Sure.
You talk to a lot of CIOs, a lot of CFOs, a lot of CEOs in your role. If you were to look at the macro economy, based on what you're seeing, based on what you've... Your ability to be an economist. What do you think is gonna happen to the economy over the next two, three, four quarters?
I would love to tell you that I could tell you that. Otherwise, if I could, I probably wouldn't have to work, Alex. You and I wouldn't have to have this conversation.
I understand. Seriously, seriously, it is a serious question. What do you think? What is your best cut? I mean, everybody needs.
Well.
A handle on it.
Yeah.
You have a different perspective than the typical analyst.
No, I think it's. I do think I mean, and this is why we guided the world the way we did. We do think it's gonna get worse.
Do you think we'll actually hit a recession in, say, two Q, three Q timeframe or no?
That I think is remains to be debated, but I think at this point, you know, what we saw at the end of Q3, it just felt like it was getting worse. I just.
All right, you're gonna dodge the question. All right. I get it. We're at 125, which is the ending point. I really appreciate everybody, Zooming in to this. Brett, it was great talking to you and thanks so much for everybody for joining us.
Yeah.
Thanks to the two operators, who are running this in the background.
Yeah. Thanks, Alex, for the time. Appreciate you having me and speak soon.