Josh Roth - CTO at Ring

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Josh, the CTO at Ring, and we discuss how being successful requires creating your own luck, the exciting innovation going into Ring's new product releases, and why being a CTO is a twenty-four seven job. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) Hello. Hello.

(Josh Roth at 00:00:35) Hello, Joel. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Fantastic. How are you doing, Josh?

(Josh Roth at 00:00:39) I'm doing great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Dude, I'm so excited. I love the Ring doorbell, man.

(Josh Roth at 00:00:44) I love to hear that. Thank you so much. And I've recently become a fan of your podcast. I got to go listen to a bunch of them over the weekend. So I'm super excited to be doing this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) Oh, thank you. Did you hear an episode where I talked about how I use the Ring doorbell to look at all the different animals in my neighborhood?

(Josh Roth at 00:01:03) No, I didn't hear that one, but I can tell you that's definitely a favorite of my family's, to send me all their videos of things. And my wife, sadly, showing me the rats out by the trash, so that's always fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:15) We found bunny rabbits that go into the gutters. We've got coyote that run around the neighborhood just randomly. And we've seen a bobcat or two. So it turned my—I go on runs early in the morning, so I started carrying pepper spray with me just in case I run into one of those guys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) Yeah.

(Josh Roth at 00:01:34) Yeah. My dad's got a house in Montana overlooking sort of a river, and he sends me bears, mountain lions, deer. Yeah, it's pretty wild. You know, huge bears come up to his property, and he's got them on the camera. So it's pretty awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:50) So how did you even get involved with this? How are you at Ring?

(Josh Roth at 00:01:54) So sort of the short version of the story, and obviously we can dig in. You know, Jamie, our CEO, and I actually had a business prior to Ring years ago in 2008. And that business we ended up selling. It was a business called Unsubscribe.com. We had it for a handful of years. It was focused on the email space. And so Jamie and I had known each other for, gosh, it's been almost twenty years now, I think. And so ultimately, after we sold that company, we kind of both went different directions. Jamie went into the garage, literally, and started sort of working on ideas. And I went off and started running as a CTO of a pretty large e-commerce company that was doing about 45 different retail brands. Over time, Jamie and I obviously kept talking. And he showed me the first sort of concept version, which was the original DoorBot, and asked me, you know, at one point if I wanted to come run operations for him. So after a lot of no's, I finally said yes and came on board. It's been just about seven years now. And, you know, it was a phenomenal sort of beginning experience. It was one of those things that you looked at the sort of who were setting the trends of buying the early doorbells from us when we first rebranded as Ring. And the real interesting thing to me was it was actually not just sort of the Silicon Valley elite or the early adopters. It was actually the late adopters and the laggards that were actually the most interesting ones buying the product. And so it was single moms in the middle of the country, someone who was elderly who couldn't quite get to the door as easily. And they were buying it sort of early days when we were selling in Staples and Brookstone and in catalogs as well as direct. And it was just, you know, super exciting to come on. So I came on to literally run ops. I helped oversee the call center. I did the hardware. I did the software. And sort of Jamie and I kind of just split things up. And obviously he focused more on growing the brand and the marketing. And then we sort of co-shared a lot of the innovation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:53) So you were employee number 11. Is that right?

(Josh Roth at 00:03:56) I was. That's correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:57) Nice. And so now there's over 1,500 employees. I want to know about—that's insane growth. What was the hard part?

(Josh Roth at 00:04:05) Yeah. I don't even know. I mean, 1,500 is probably the published number. You know, what's it like? I mean, so the growth, it has been insane. I'll tell you this. I sort of wake up every day still a little bit in awe of all of it. You know, Jamie and I will get on the phone together and sort of laugh a little bit together. Like, you know, this obviously was never the—we never envisioned it, if you will. You know, you started off, you built a product, and you hope to build something great that people loved. And obviously it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. And I know you've heard this a million times from whether it's CTOs or other founders. But it truly does. I mean, the amount of work and time you've got to put into it is just sort of exceptional. You know, and then we wake up every day and it's sort of, it's a little bit mind-boggling to think that, you know, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that sort of work for us on a daily basis, you know, building this phenomenal stuff. You know, for me, I've always, you know, I guess luckily, you know, this isn't my first startup. I have been around a few times. You know, as you can see, I have a few gray hairs on the beard. And so I think that's helped to sort of level set things. You know, I think that overall though, you know, I've always felt that if you have sort of, you know, surround yourself with great people—I know it's totally cliche—but if you surround yourself with great people and they truly sort of raise the bar for you, then you're able to scale in perpetuity. Not to say we haven't had issues along the way. Obviously, like any company, you know, you go through lots of growing pains. And so for us, you know, I think along the way we've kind of seen it all. We've had, you know, whether it's revising hardware, whether it's working with chip manufacturers, whether chip shortages, getting things from China on the shore here, whether it's by plane or boat. Obviously system stuff with scalability and sort of leveraging and working your way through that. And I'd say over the years, you know, look, I got also really lucky in finding just really talented people. You know, in finding people that out there dealt with scalability other places or dealt with phenomenal hardware other places. And so I think with that growth, it's been just been great. You know, I think the other thing that we've been fortunate to do is leverage sort of a worldwide center of resourcing. So it's not all just sort of centered in one place. We're not just Los Angeles. We're not just San Jose. We also have locations sort of all over the world. So we have a Taiwan office, and we have people that work for us in South America, and a couple different locations over in Europe. And I think with that, it's allowed us to sort of get this almost twenty-four seven development support. And, you know, that's been, I think, really helpful to our growth as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:33) Are you just being humble when you say you never imagined it would get this big? I find it hard to believe you and Jamie—right, correct? That's the CEO?

(Josh Roth at 00:06:41) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:42) I find it hard to believe you and Jamie didn't sit down with some scotch or whiskey or just hang out and imagine, like, maybe one day this will be on every doorbell. You guys never saw a vision that big?

(Josh Roth at 00:06:52) That's the dream. Right? I mean, any startup that you build, you one day you're like, oh, if we could just get 1% of that. Right? I mean, that's the reason, because then you know you have a big company. But I can tell you now, we never set out to build a big company. I think we always set out to just build something that we thought was great. And we knew if we did that, that people would want it. And just the feedback, I mean, similar to your stories, I mean, you know, obviously we hear similar stories every day. And we always have. I mean, that's been sort of the fun part of it. I think the other part of it is, you know, both Jamie and I are sort of, you know, get ourselves dirty, you know, crawl into the house and pull wires kind of guys if you have to. And so, you know, I think that's also worked well for us. We've always been really close to the customer. And so I think, of course, we had a sense that it was growing and it was hard not to see that. But to the extent that it's, you know, you kind of drive around neighborhoods and literally I would go around neighborhoods and counting how many people had Ring doorbells on their thing. I'd be like, ah, how come there's only five in this neighborhood? Or, you know, amazing. There's 25 on this block. And so, you know, you really do pay attention to those things. And so, you know, I wish I could tell you it's planned. I mean, I know—look, I like I said, I've listened to your podcast now enough. And I think you'll hear a common theme from most founders or CTOs, which is, you know, you can't plan for this stuff. I mean, and if you try to, usually you fail, by the way. Right? You just try to build something good. And one day, if you're good and then sort of create your own luck, which is what I kind of think about, then you put yourself in a position to have good success. And so I think Ring is just is that, really, to be honest. You know, look, we built something that no one really knew that they wanted. And then once it was kind of out there, they realized that this is something they couldn't live without. And so I think that that's been sort of the critical nature of it. I can tell you the other litmus test I think that's worked really well for us and was actually a big part of me coming on board with Jamie, was I'm a big fan of products that are not out of sight, out of mind. Right? And so with Ring, the fact that we're sending you sort of push notifications on every event, whether it's a motion, a doorbell press, you know, whatever it may be. If you have an alarm product, the alarm door's opening, those type of things, that makes it a relevant product. And so, you know, I think that there's sort of a couple different product categories, and I think this one fit into sort of the safety and security bucket, which people always tend to gravitate towards, as well as not being out of sight, out of mind. And I think those are critical components for one of the reasons Ring succeeded.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:18) Yeah. Yeah. You're talking about cliches a couple times. I think they're funny. I think they're funny because we tend—we talk about them almost negatively, right, because we just do as people. Like, oh, that's such a cliche. At the same time, it's like a condensed form of human truth that we all understand. And it's weird how we'll dismiss things that we know to be true just because we don't like the way that they sound. I think for me, that's one of the most interesting paradoxes that I've come across. And I like doing these shows selfishly for me because I need to be in an environment where I hear people talk about these principles of how they they grew their business. And one thing that is emerging to me recently is I heard this quote. It says a few people can stay excited for a few days, a few more people can stay excited for a few months or years, but only a winner can stay excited for however long it takes. And I have found as I, as I grow both myself and my business, that you've got to work at staying excited as these things grow, right? Because now, you know, I said 1,500 because I think that's what LinkedIn had mentioned or it's what's in the show notes.

(Josh Roth at 00:10:30) Yeah. Yeah. I got you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:31) Real with you. Right? And, you know, you've got to continuously find ways to stay excited. Is that something you're experiencing?

(Josh Roth at 00:10:40) No doubt about it. I'll tell you, I'm not a big sort of blogger. I never have been. You'll laugh at this. I started a—you'll probably can still Google it. I don't even know. I started a blog a long time ago called Serial Entrepreneur. And it was serial spelled C-E-R-E-A-L because I eat cereal every morning. And the one post I was ever going to write was actually about right along the lines of what you're talking about. It was sort of remaining relevant and how to keep yourself excited. And, you know, you've always obviously read these books about sort of retraining yourself or recreating your career every seven years. You know, the thing I found for myself, at least, from a success perspective was actually the opposite, which is it's important to think through. But once you sort of have established some things about yourself and obviously enjoy what you're doing, then it just—it goes back to exactly what you're saying, which is how do you sort of rekindle that energy every single day? You know, and I think for me, it's obviously a mixture. And, you know, you talk about cliches, you know, it's working with great people, it's loving what you do. You know, I think those two are extremely important. Obviously, you should never do something that you don't enjoy. You've got to wake up every day and have some level of love for what you do. It doesn't mean every day you're going through—there are days where you wake up and you're, gosh, I hate this product. It's terrible. You know, but then the other thing I think about it is you have to find whatever it is that sort of satiates your appetite for knowledge. And I've always been a big fan, sort of exactly what you're saying, of surrounding yourself. From my—one thing I gathered by watching your podcast is a lot of it to you is really it's your school. Right? Because you're out there talking to people every single day and that just keeps you excited. I think for myself, it's the same thing. I find myself sort of a voracious reader of lots of things. And it's not always tech stuff. Actually, it's rarely tech stuff, to be honest. It used to be when I was younger, probably I spent a lot more time reading tech stuff. I think that was partly trying to sort of make up for my age difference of people I was managing. I had to feel that I was sort of the smartest guy in the room. And I don't feel that I have to be anymore. I think, though, you know, I'm a constant reader, so I'm always just sort of gaining that just insight of knowledge. And then just talking to a lot of people. And then I do sort of get fascinated by doing whether it's something like your podcast, whether it's doing panels where I'm talking to people, whether it's being an advisor or a mentor to companies. You know, I think those things keep you excited about what you're doing because you get to talk about them. And you get to talk about—you sort of renormalize what it is you're doing. And obviously, like, I forget every single day, like, you know, I'm the CTO of a multi-billion dollar business that was bought by Amazon. And like you said, I have 1,500-plus people that work here. And, you know, you sort of forget that. I'll tell you a funny story. I had a developer a couple years ago actually came into my office. And he was a great dude and, you know, really was not shy. And one thing I loved about him that he said to me, he goes, Josh, even though, you know, you're you're just Josh and you've got the open door policy and all these things and everyone can kind of come and talk to you, he goes, you've got to remember that there's a huge intimidation factor because you're the CTO of a multi-billion dollar business and people sort of, you know, look at that and they're a little bit scared to talk to you about stuff. And for me, I forget that because I'm just the dad at home and I've got three kids and I go to the volleyball tournament on the weekend and I'll play golf with my son. And, you know, so for me, you sort of forget those things. And so I think a lot of that is really grounding also. And I'll make one last point and then we can kind of move on to something else.

(Josh Roth at 00:14:06) But I think the other thing for me is, as I said, I do have kids. I've always found just sort of wanting to demonstrate a constant work ethic to my family. I think it's important for success. And, you know, hopefully they take a piece of that in their lives, you know, do something similar, whatever it is.

(Josh Roth at 00:14:24) I want them to work and be happy, but I also want them to recognize that, you know, you've got to work hard to achieve success too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:29) No, I'm glad you mentioned that because that is the one thing that really impacted me in my childhood is watching my dad's work ethic. Right? Like, he worked, and I don't look at it as like he didn't get to spend a lot of time with us because when you're small, you really don't care. You're not paying attention to things like that. You only realize that in hindsight. And it's not like we didn't spend time together. We spent a lot of time together because he would take me to work with him, but man, that guy had some work ethic. And so when I started to have my family and I've got two kids, I was like, I need to demonstrate that work ethic. So for one, I know I did everything I could do in order to provide for my family because, you know, you're an entrepreneur, right? And that's a scary ship to get on out in the dark sea.

(Josh Roth at 00:15:18) Definitely can be. You know, I will say, though, family first for me has always been a big thing. I mean, as much as I talk about working hard, I think I've been fortunate in this day and age that I'm able to work hard anywhere. Right? I mean, we have these amazing sort of modern tools now that let you be anywhere. Obviously, you know, whether it's your phone, your computer in your pocket, right, or tools like, you know, Zoom or Slack or whatever it may be that allows you to do these things. And so because of that, I've actually—I mean, I hate to say this—I've been really lucky. I haven't actually missed any of those things for my kids. I've been to the school plays, and I coached baseball when my kids were younger, and went to all the volleyball games for my daughter, and, you know, was at the soccer game. So for me, I'm actually really fortunate to be able to do that. But I would tell you that a big part of that was I'm so ultimately responsive on those tools no matter where I am, no matter where in the world I am, to be honest, that it's weirdly scary. That's probably the biggest downside is that I am glued to my phone quite a bit. And, you know, you put it down when you have to.

(Josh Roth at 00:16:22) But again, I think it all sort of comes back together and sort of fills that circle of, you know, how do you build something big and successful? And obviously, you need to get lucky along the way too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) Yeah. And speaking of being on our phones and mobile so much, I was having this interesting conversation with David, who's the CTO at a company called NowSecure. They specialize in mobile apps, mobile app security. It's pretty cool, pretty interesting stuff. I dug into it. It's worth checking out. But I saw that you guys just released some new security stuff at Ring, and I was curious if you could tell me a little bit about that.

(Josh Roth at 00:16:53) Sure. So actually, one of the newest things we just launched is a feature called end-to-end encryption. We launched it in technical preview a few weeks ago. So, you know, high level, everything we already normally do is encrypted, right? We encrypt in transit with TLS and SSL. We encrypt at rest for your videos when they're sitting on our servers. What end-to-end encryption really was is I like to sort of use the adage, it's like a second or third deadbolt on your house. Right? So, you know, some people like that, or when you're in the hotel room, you put sort of the extra locking key on and you turn the bolt, and you put the sign outside. And so a lot of people like that extra layer of comfort, really. And so what end-to-end encryption did is it allowed us to do an encryption at the camera that started there. Literally sort of scrambles the packets, if you will, or encrypts them. And then the only way to actually unlock those is with your phone. And so you actually have to go and register with your phone as the key to unlock these things. And so the slight difference is with the default settings we have, we have the ability to sort of do other features with your videos for you. So things like computer vision in the cloud, having your third party Echo device, your Alexa device, your Brilliant light switch, whatever it is, be able to interact with your videos and do stuff on your behalf as a customer if you want to enable those things. When they're end-to-end encrypted, they don't have the keys anymore to be able to unlock those videos, so they no longer can sort of participate in that user experience. And so it was really a customer choice. You get to go and you can turn this on or off if you want to. But for us, we, you know, we really are all about sort of that customer transparency and choice. And so we're always kind of iterating on our security features to allow for that. And so it just kind of fit in line with a lot of the other stuff we launched over the last year for us. And we'll continue to iterate and improve upon it.

(Josh Roth at 00:18:39) That's kind of why we're in technical preview—we're looking to get a lot of feedback from customers and see what they like and don't like about it and where we can improve. I can tell you, technically, it's been banged against by lots of security experts. We put white papers out there telling people exactly how we're doing it because we have sort of no fear of the technology, if you will. And it's based on stuff that's actually been around for quite some time. So we're leveraging, if you're familiar with sort of envelope encryption, which, you know, you've seen it probably in other names with things like Pretty Good Privacy or PGP on email, which has been around for a long time, uses similar concepts. And so we felt really, really proud of what we've built with regards to leveraging sort of pre-existing stuff in new ways to provide a great experience for our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:24) Yeah. I've noticed—and tell me, have you noticed in your personal life, just going about with like your banking or the different apps you use—the two-factor text and authenticate, it's just like they all got a memo. And in the past six months, everything—Facebook locks me out now. They literally said you can do nothing on your account because we run Facebook ads, right? They said you can do nothing on your account until you two-factor, and you couldn't use text. You had to use like an authentic Google Authenticator.

(Josh Roth at 00:19:53) Authenticator. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:54) Yeah. But then you could use text after you do that. They let you know you can use text as like a backup if you lose it. I was like, okay, so I don't really understand that. But yeah, have you noticed that in your personal life, those have like gone up 100%?

(Josh Roth at 00:20:08) For sure. I mean, I can say—so at Ring, we enabled two-factor about a year ago as a requirement. We've had it for quite some time. We just hadn't sort of mandated it. And so, yeah, we all got that internet memo, like you said, that everyone on the internet got that said, make sure everyone knows two-factor now. And yeah, I mean, look, I've—obviously for two reasons. I mean, yes. I saw the Facebook one. It's funny you mentioned the SMS piece of that because I got the little notice the other day logging into Facebook asking me to do the authenticator thing, and I don't remember which authenticator I used for that one because it actually uses like three or four different ones. Yeah. And then, of course, then it said, or you could use the text message we just sent you. I'm like, all right, perfect. But, yeah. I mean, we're seeing that everywhere. And, you know, look, I would say this: also being sort of a, you know, a visible person that's out there in the world, you know, Ring is a fun place for people to try to attack things. And so because I'm the CTO here, I've definitely gone out and enabled two-factor on every single site that I possibly can, or authenticator apps if that's the case. And so, yes, I've seen a great uptick on that in the world as well as from a personal side.

(Josh Roth at 00:21:12) You know, gone out and made sure that those things were enabled if they weren't already.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16) Nice. Nice.

(Josh Roth at 00:21:16) And it does, by the way, it does make a big difference technically. I mean, you know, the problem with passwords, as you know, is as odd as it is, you know, we all use similar passwords all over the place. Your email password from, you know, 20 years ago is probably compromised a hundred times. And, you know, it turns out—and I don't want Gmail or Yahoo Mail to yell at me—but it turns out that email's not the most secure location because of all the needs for sort of these backup processes and everything else. But don't get me wrong. I think that Gmail has improved tremendously with how they're now authenticating people, trying to beat some of these things. But there are still some places out there that people have had accounts for a really long time that just don't have the right security in place. And so the problem is without sort of the second factor, the bad guys are able to get in your email.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:06) Well, I think it's that they're able to get into it at scale too. Because once you write bots that can just sniff for people that are using poor password hygiene—I mean, people think they're so like, hackers are so mystical. No. I mean, you can guess usernames. Somebody has a username. You can buy the databases. You can have a pretty good idea of, you know, check these 20 popular websites and try the same username/pass. There's a lot of—I've gotten to talk—the amount of stuff, Josh, that I've had to edit out of this podcast.

(Josh Roth at 00:22:34) I believe you. But I would also say, you know, you don't even need to guess passwords anymore. I mean, with the way they crack these databases now, it's more about, you know, what we call credential stuffing, which is they don't need to guess your password. They have your password, right? They just—they're just taking it from somewhere else, as you're saying, where we know it's shared. And so there's no social engineering as much as probably we used to think there was. This is literally just, like you said, it's bots. There's lists. They just try them. And if they get lucky, then they go crazy with those across the 20 biggest websites and go see if they can spend your money or disrupt your lives. And, you know, it's a shame. You know, I wish there were less bad actors out there. They do exist though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) Yeah. And the authenticator, two-step, multi-step authentication will prevent—yeah, it'll make it less profitable. And then that'll crush them out. It's like taking the oxygen away from a fire, right?

(Josh Roth at 00:23:26) That's exactly right. That's a perfect analogy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:29) So, you know, you must be like a kid in a candy shop when it comes to security. You get to hire like some of the best minds in the world to come work with you. Learning that, like, learning how to let go of something as the scale happened and learning that I can go hire the people I admire from these books I've read, and I can go have them come work with me, and I can go learn from them. Tell me about that process for you. Like, did you—what—tell me about some mistakes and some lessons that you learned.

(Josh Roth at 00:23:58) I mean, look, I make mistakes every day. And I mean that wholeheartedly. Like, I really do. You know, I think—look, Amazon, we have, if you haven't ever seen them, we have these leadership principles that are out there. And they really do apply, I'd say, to, you know, 99% of the companies in the world and the people working at places. They're not specific to Amazon, but they are obviously tailored to Amazon. You know, and so to your point, I mean, we have one, for example, that says, "I'm right a lot." And so, you know, as a good manager, you know, it doesn't mean you're right all the time. It means you're right a lot. And so I think I'm right a lot. And I would say for the times that I'm not right, the thing I make up the difference on is I'm not afraid. That's not one of our leadership principles, but maybe it should be. But I'm not afraid to make decisions, and I think that's one of the separators between someone who's sort of a—I don't know, maybe seasoned veteran or been in the space a long time—or a person out. I don't know. I don't want to put anyone in a box. But so I think that's there. I think to your other point though, like, you know, Amazon's been phenomenal as far as, like, you know, you get to—you do get to truly talk to some of these phenomenal minds in the world. And whether they're people you've read books on or white papers or read their blog or seen them on a podcast, like, it's sort of all of the above. And, you know, yeah, it's pretty cool. Like, you know, if I want to go talk to the person that invented the audio system for Alexa—and I'm sure I'll trigger mine now—like, I can, right? And it's literally like an email or a, you know, a message away. And I do. You know, there's people that, like, there's people that have been running the Amazon retail stuff, both technically or business-wise for 20-plus years. And, like, you'll be on a phone call with these folks and you're like, oh, that's pretty amazing. I'm talking to someone who runs the biggest thing in the world. And so, like, the access from that side is not even comparable, right? There's only a handful of companies that you can probably even say that sort of exist in. You know, outside of that, I mean, I think just by the sheer fact that I have obviously, you know, some good brands that I've been successful with, obviously built a career over a period of time, it's definitely given me a lot of nice access to those type of people. And then, as you know, when you, you know, everyone gets on the phone, it turns out everyone's really just nice people, right? I don't care what you do for a living, but, like, everyone at the end of the day is pretty down to earth, nice person. Someone might, uh, maybe they have a little bigger house than somebody else or something else. But at the end of the day, like, we're all kind of salt of the earth, and we all like engineering tasks, and we like to fidget with things. And some of us like to solder stuff and, you know, test everything. If I showed you my desk right now, you'd sort of laugh at the amount of junk I have on it of, like, you know, wires and things I'm plugging in. And so I find the folks, at least, that I work with on a daily basis aren't too dissimilar to that, right? We all love to sort of tinker and improve. And so I think that that's just mentally is an interesting connection point. And then obviously, you know, we're working on stuff at scale, and so we end up sometimes—my team being sort of that smart guy in the room on some stuff, right? The amount of video that goes through our system every single day is astronomical. And I tell my team this: every single day, we're setting a new record. Like, it's not like it goes down. It just keeps going kind of up. Some days more of a hockey stick, but it's pretty much a linear curve. Like, as you add more devices, more videos go through the system. It's, you know, it's pretty easy to measure that way. And so you just have to figure out how to scale that. And, you know, it's not always easy, obviously. But, yeah, we're fortunate. And there's always an expert somewhere inside of our company that I get to talk to if I need to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:31) And people want it too. I mean, we were just exploring listing our house for sale, and that was a big item: are you—you have to let the Ring doorbell stay. Everybody wants the Ring doorbell.

(Josh Roth at 00:27:43) I was—you're considering it's like, you know, you're selling a couple hundred thousand or whatever size house and someone wants the $150, $250 item.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:51) That's what it is. They want the Nest. They want the Ring doorbell. They want all that stuff to stay.

(Josh Roth at 00:27:56) Yeah. No. Believe me, I get it. Look, I mean, you know, the nice thermostats make a difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:01) But they can't have my indoor drone camera. I'm taking that thing with me. Tell me about that.

(Josh Roth at 00:28:06) That's coming soon too. You know, I'm sure you read about that, our Always Home Cam. You know, I tell you, it's one of these things that when we first started talking about it a couple years ago, we're like, alright, this is kind of crazy. We know we want to build something at some point. Will people want it? Will people buy it or would they think we're insane? And I can tell you the fun part about it was we had, sort of, as free search, we started looking at all the little teeny mini drones flying around our office and banging into people's computers and everything else, and trying to figure out which ones had good time of flight sensors, and which ones were going to be safe, and which ones weren't going to, you know, were going to be either easy to control or can control themselves. And so we went through sort of that whole iterative process. And I'll tell you, when we announced that product, I want to say it was September, the amount of sort of publicity and analysts coming at us and just sort of consumer sentiment of it blew me away. I'll be honest. Like, I'm a relatively, I'm a naysayer on quite a few of things that we do, and I'm usually wrong. And that one, I was like, listen. I think it's really cool. I don't know if people are going to want it. And then, of course, we put it out there and everyone's like, I want one of those.

(Josh Roth at 00:29:12) And I think part of that is sort of the interest in something new. But then I also think if you really step back for a minute, forget that it's a flying camera. It's a super purposeful product in that it's sitting in a base. It doesn't do anything most of the time. The camera's not recording most of the time, so it gives you that privacy aspect. And then if an event occurs, your door sensor opens when you have your alarm turned on, smoke detector goes off, whatever you have it sort of programmed to do, it'll fly to that location and give you awareness at that moment. So it's a very purpose driven specialized product. And I think that you're going to see more and more of those things, not just from Ring, but sort of the industry over time. You know, to use sort of the term, it's a little bit of an extension of if this, then that, if you will. Like, if something happens, let's take an action somewhere else.

(Josh Roth at 00:30:03) I think this camera is one of the first that really sort of physically does that for us. Right? You have other products in this space. Like, I'm a big fan of iRobot, for example. And, you know, I have a lot of Roomba products in my house. And so, yeah. Like, I spill something on the ground and I can have my mop, I call it Mop-o, come over and pick, you know, clean up the mess and, or the vacuum cleaner. And I think that the camera is very similar to that, obviously focused on safety and security with the Always Home Cam. And so, you know, I think we're going to start seeing those. I'm not trying to be secretive. I don't have something on our roadmap that's coming out that's this magical thing that's more about that. But I think we definitely strive for that. We have sort of linking devices in our system and integrating with other third parties. You're seeing a lot of the smart home products, specifically the Alexa stuff, start doing that more. They're trying to tie things together. Action items. Right? Turn your lights down or off if you're watching TV. Turn your radio up or down. I think you're going to see a lot more of that over the next couple years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:57) You know, about between three and four years ago, it was right when we started the podcast. I was talking to my producer. We're actually recording. And we said, somehow it came up and I said, I invented, like in real time, I said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to have a drone. It's going to be hooked to your alarm system. And when it goes off, it's going to find the intruder and then it's going to follow them out and it's going to shoot them with a net. Or it's going to find their license plate of their vehicle or follow them as far as it can out of the neighborhood. And I mean, it's like we're all connected. Right? We have these ideas, but other people are having them at the same time. I mean, I think it's been like this way forever as long as humanity's existed. Right? But it's so cool when I get to do prep for the podcast. I did not know about this drone camera until this past two weeks. Right? And when I saw it, I said, there it is. I love when I have these thoughts that run through my head. And then, like, two or three years later, I see them out in the marketplace. It makes me so happy.

(Josh Roth at 00:31:58) Yeah. Well, so on the record, we did not steal the idea from Joel Beasley. But, you know, off the record, I think what you said is the right thing. Like, and this goes exactly, by the way, if you're ever, you know, I'm sure you do. But when you talk to small startups that are always afraid to tell their ideas, you know, the reality is there's very few, this is going to sound stupid. There's very few unique ideas. Right? It all comes down to execution and implementation. And, you know, we just happen to be at scale and crazy enough to go build a sort of a Always Home Cam, the flying drone. But from an idea perspective, it's a hard thing to go build as a startup and be like, Oh, we're going to build this flying camera with no other, you know, with no ring around it. Right? And so I think there are a lot of those where, you know, I mean, obviously we've had a million of these, you know, sort of silly ideas. I'll tell you one. We saw a customer do that I laughed at, which is they had their floodlight camera and they had the motion sensor. And somehow, I don't know what they used, but they used some home automation thing that they put this sprinkler on the back of their truck that if it detected motion in the middle of the night, it started spraying people.

(Josh Roth at 00:33:08) And they have it all on video. And again, it was a deterrent to crime. And so I could tell you that we've also, I've seen that other people. Jamie's wanted to do that. He has a koi pond at his house, and he's wanting to spray the birds that come down and try to eat his fish when he sees the camera and get motion detection on him. So, I think that's sort of the fun stuff. But again, it's sort of these, you know, it's that's your net being spit out of your drone or, you know, obviously, we've had people think a little more evil than that. But, yeah. I mean, it's definitely not. They're actually, we're going to keep it, you know, very purpose driven, you know, and try to build things in a way that longer term that people can add these other things. I mean, I guess if you want to go build a complicated net structure in front of your house and have it drop on somebody, that's up to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:52) I'll settle for a taser inside the drone.

(Josh Roth at 00:33:55) I think we're going to stay away from that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) Third party.

(Josh Roth at 00:33:59) Yeah. That can be a third party aftermarket add-on that you go figure out for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:04) Do you guys have that, by the way? Do you have any sort of third party aftermarket or businesses building around Ring?

(Josh Roth at 00:34:10) They are. I mean, honestly, I'm probably not even the best person to ask on that. I mean, the couple of areas I've seen, actually, I take that back. I have one of the products. I keep forgetting. So I actually bought, before we started making it, there's a company on Amazon that makes a two battery charger for the ring batteries, which is pretty cool. Because, you know, you're swapping batteries out on some of your products. And so, you know, I have that downstairs. On Amazon, you'll also see in a few other places, people have made custom sort of wedge kits. So they do different angles on the products. We sell our own and make our own, and some of them come right in the box. But then there are people that have made some. I've seen some people do sort of custom faceplates and sleeves, if you will. So like if you're in a cold weather situation where you're a battery powered device, you know, batteries don't do all that great beyond minus five degrees. And so I've seen some people actually make some silicone sleeves, sort of to go around the doorbell to try to keep it a little warmer. So, yeah. I mean, there's definitely, there's probably even more, to be honest. I don't even know. But there's definitely a pretty robust sort of sub-economy on it.

(Josh Roth at 00:35:14) I haven't seen anyone, obviously, get massive off of it. But, you know, there's definitely some people out there, I would assume, doing decently well off of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:20) And then you've got something coming out with the car. What's that about?

(Josh Roth at 00:35:24) Yeah. So the car products, we actually have a couple of different products that we also have coming out. You know, for the first time we're entering, we call it the mobility space because they're sort of products that move. And so, you know, for the first time we're coming out with a camera that'll be, you know, mounted on your dash. It's an inside facing and outside facing camera. And that product, you know, has motion sensors built into it, will do recordings. And then it has a cool feature that we announced, which is you can sort of tell it if you're being pulled over. And so the interesting thing about that is it'll actually then kind of alert your family and friends, whoever you've programmed to, to tell it, Hey, Josh is being pulled over right now. And therefore, they can potentially even look at the screen and be notified of stuff. So that's kind of neat. We have another product that is in the car, sort of, you know, alarm system for folks that don't have an alarm system or want to enhance their current product. It's got motion sensors and break glass detection, things like that. And it plugs right in your OBD port. So that product is pretty cool. And then we also have sort of an API or SDK, if you want to call it, that we call the Ring Connected Car system that's also coming out that we're going to be working with other manufacturers to be able to integrate some of this technology right into the Ring system. So if you're a car company that has cameras now on your car, you'll be able to actually use our APIs and inject that video right into the Ring dashboard.

(Josh Roth at 00:36:47) And then do all the linking we're talking about. So like, if you detect video on your car, and you want to turn on the cameras at your house, you'll be able to do that at some point. And so, you know, I think this whole interconnected play is really what we're going with there. We're trying to extend that out. We also, I believe, had announced a product that we're building that integrates inside your Tesla, specifically. And I think we look at them really as the first version of the ring connected car system. In this case, it's a piece of hardware sort of as an example, if you will, that you could put inside of a Tesla. Essentially, it uses the Tesla Sentry Mode and ties it to the USB video that Tesla already records. And so this really is sort of a big plug-in USB, if you will, that then can broadcast those out to the Ring system after they've happened. So pretty cool as well. I happen to be a Tesla driver, so I'm excited by that one. But, yeah, I think that the mobility products are sort of a whole new area for us and that, you know, we've tried to stick around the ring of security around your home. But we've always had this vision that your home isn't just your home. Right? People have travel homes and vacation homes, and then they have their car, which turns out is obviously one of your most prized possessions. Right? It's one of the most expensive things you ever purchased in your life or rent or lease. Excuse me. And so it's just one of those areas we definitely want to help you protect. And then, of course, it's mobile.

(Josh Roth at 00:38:03) So it's going all over the place. And so the feature set has to be slightly different. And so your ring of security becomes really around, you know, your family, your community, your neighborhood, and not just around sort of your home, which is where we begin with the doorbell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:17) Is this how new products happen with this vision of the Ring of Security around you?

(Josh Roth at 00:38:22) Yeah. I think it is. You know, I mean, I can't say that the, you know, there's a direct sort of, you know, flywheel that says, alright. Let's look at the Ring of Security and figure out how to expand it. But I would tell you that how we started and how we used to discuss this and explain it to people was there was this ring of security around your front door. That was the doorbell. And then we expanded to the ring of security around your house, which was the floodlight cams and spotlight cams and indoor cameras. And, obviously, the Always Home Cam fits into that space as well. And then we said, alright. Let's do a ring of security around your community, around your neighborhood. And because security is not just a solo thing, it's not just about your house. It's about protecting your neighbors, about protecting your friends, about protecting your extended family. And so as you look at those things, I think everything that we try to do really fits into that mission. And I guess that's also important, by the way, you know, as we sort of circle back to where we started the conversation. I think that's actually one of the biggest things that's made Ring unique is that we are a mission driven company.

(Josh Roth at 00:39:20) Right? We are here to make neighborhoods safer. And so we believe, obviously, it's sort of an unending goal. Right? I mean, I think we've achieved some phenomenal success there with helping make neighborhoods safer. We've done all sorts of studies about having Ring cameras on your house makes neighborhoods safer and having people have awareness and the notion of always home, which is sort of our motto. And so I think that those things carry much broader and sort of last forever. But because of that, you have sort of a target, if you will, that we're always trying to hit as a company. And so people get really passionate about it here. And so, you know, if you dig into what we've done on our Neighbors application and our partnership with public safety offices, and our partnership with some of the stuff we're doing out there with the communities, and how we give back, it's all about, sort of, the betterment, if you will, of the world. And I think that, you know, that's a big important piece for Ring. And it really does stem towards why I think we've been successful. There's other companies out there, and you alluded to a couple of them, that have cameras. And, you know, look, some of them make really good products. I'm not going to say they don't.

(Josh Roth at 00:40:25) But I think that their sort of litmus test of success is just different than Ring's. Right? We look at it as, have we been successful in our mission? And I think they look at this, you know, obviously, you know, have they sold product? And I think that's just one of our KPIs that we care about. It's important. But I would also tell you if we could afford it, we would give away cameras to everybody. We just can't. Right? Because it would hit our mission faster. But it's obviously, that's not achievable. And so we have to have methods of being able to sustain our business. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:54) Well, I mean, it's business. You need more money coming in than going out so that you can scale and provide customer service and grow and the next generation of products. You know, earlier you were talking about ideas, right? And with the drone and stuff, I have a million ideas a day. I see people around, I'm like, that aren't doing as much work. Are you absent an idea? Do you need one? Because it is all about work, the work you put in and sticking with it and staying excited along the way. I mean, it is so hard to do. It really, really is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:34) And so I was curious, when you go around, you give these talks, everyone's going to ask you, "Oh, how did you get successful?" They're going to want that one thing, right? And you always want to say it's not one thing. It's a billion different things, and then a little bit of luck emerges, right? But for some advice to an entrepreneur starting out, what would you give that person?

(Josh Roth at 00:41:57) I wish I could say there's one thing like you said. There's not. And of course, it's funny. I'm asked that question. I'll also give you the one other question I'm also asked, is how do you become a CTO? So I'll start with that one, because actually that's sort of the funniest answer I give, which is you start a company and you give yourself the CTO title. Because I think that, you know, or CEO or whatever it is, it doesn't, you know, then you get to automatically be there. Now, that being said, obviously, look, I've been working on computers since I was 10 years old. I have a Computer Science and Engineering degree. I did go to school for it. I've been programming my whole life, and then eventually stopped because I couldn't anymore. So I think, back to success, and what's my advice? You know, create your own luck. I think that's, you talked about it, you need a little bit of luck. I think you actually need a lot of luck. That being said, I think you can create that luck. And I would look back and I've been very fortunate. I've actually sold multiple companies along the way and had a company go public as well. And so I've been lucky. But I would say that luck doesn't happen multiple times to the same person. At least not to me. I don't know. I've never won the lottery. So I think that there's obviously some semblance of you've got to be pretty good at what you do and you have to figure out whatever that is. Whatever that magic is for you. I don't care if you're a painter. I don't care if you're a writer or if you're a CTO or whatever it may be. You've got to figure out whatever that magic is to help create passion around you and obviously keep it within yourself. I think you touched on that perfectly earlier, which is how do you get excited every day? So if you can keep the excitement, you can keep gaining knowledge all the time, and then you just work your ass off, I think you can create luck with anything. I don't think there's anything, I don't think the notion of sort of good ideas and bad ideas really exist, to be honest. And you, I have a thousand ideas. I've been writing them down for, you know, 20 years. I look back at them. This is the funny thing about getting older. I look back at all my ideas that I'm not going after. I'm like, "God, those are terrible ideas. You know, who would ever build those things?" And then you'll see some company spin up and it's a billion-dollar company doing the exact same thing. Or you'll talk to a startup founder who tells you what is probably an idea you wrote down as a terrible idea, and you hear it from them, you're like, "That's an amazing idea. I love that." And that all just comes back to them being passionate about it, right? If someone's passionate about their idea and believes the vision, they'll get there. I mean, there's some obvious ones out there, right? You look at Uber, which is a phenomenal company, and had they told you the idea, "Oh, we're going to take these black cars sitting on the side of the road that aren't working all the time and turn them into something," you'd be like, "Why? You have taxis. Why do I need this?" And, you know, Facebook, same thing. There was Myspace and Friendster before that. Why do we need Facebook? And then, of course, I'm wrong. So, you know, I think that Ring is even similar to that. If someone said to you, "Hey, I'm going to put this camera on the front of your door so you can see who comes to your house," you'd be like, "Why do I need that? I know when the pizza guy is coming to my house." It turns out you don't always know, obviously, all the answers because they evolve over time when you have passionate people that obviously love what they're doing. And so that's my biggest advice to people. Just go love what you do and you build something great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:04) Yeah. And if you do fail, you'll learn a lot and have a good time doing it.

(Josh Roth at 00:45:08) I hope you don't fail. I hope you don't fail. You know, we've all failed. There's no shame in that, but it's more fun to be successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:15) When I was raising money, they're asking me the number one reason for failure. And there was a list, 20 items long. And I said, "I think this list is incorrect. The number one reason for failure is they gave up." Because they listed money, people, talent, all these things. And I said, "That's not it, guys." I go, "Because I'll be cleaning toilets at Walmart still trying to make this thing work."

(Josh Roth at 00:45:39) And they wrote you a check right there, I bet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:42) Yeah. Yeah. Because that's just what you have to do. You have to decide to go all in on something. And I mean, it's weird because you hear different people. You will listen to some speakers and they'll say, you know, "Be stubborn on the vision." Other people say, "Be flexible." But how about just turn some of that stuff off and get to work?

(Josh Roth at 00:46:00) Yeah. Exactly. I think I do tell people that all the time. You know, I was looking at an idea the other day someone was raising money on and, you know, one of the things they noted in their thing was, "We're going to sell the company in five years." I'm like, "Okay. You've already lost me." Because if that's your focus, then you're not focused on building something great. You're just trying to focus on building something that someone told you you have to hit the numbers on. And I think to your exact point, if it takes you, you know, cleaning the toilets or pulling wires under the house or digging a hole, you do that. I mean, and that's, you know, look, at Amazon, we refer to that as being customer obsessed. And I think it's the same thing everywhere. But, you know, for us, I can tell you this is pre-Amazon. I used to, and maybe people find this creepy, but, you know, I'm on Nextdoor, and obviously, I see the messages coming in. And if there were people on there that were struggling with Ring that were in my neighborhood or close by, I would direct message them and say, "Hey. I'm the CTO of Ring. I'd love to come help you fix your problem." And so, you know, obviously, I don't want to scare people, but, you know, people would let me come and fix their problems. And I can tell you what, I learned more doing that. And, you know, eating my own dog food. At Amazon, I've heard people refer to it as drinking my own champagne, which I like a little better than eating my dog food. But, you know, I think that that is obviously also critical. Use your product. And go understand what your customers are doing. And, again, if I have to clean the toilet because that makes the Ring camera work better, great. Give me the scrubber. I'm there. Doesn't matter. So, you know, I think that those are great, those are all definitely great pieces of advice I'd give people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:36) Awesome. Thank you so much. As we start to wrap up here, because we're conscious of your time, we have about five or six minutes left. We have a community called Elevate. It's a bunch of technologists, 200 plus CTOs, all different varieties. We get together weekly, do these calls. And part of the calls we list out in this document, some different questions and things like that for me to go hunt down and get answers for. And so I've got a couple questions for you if that's okay from the community.

(Josh Roth at 00:48:04) Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:05) All right. What is your advice for CTOs in high stress stage of growth, and they don't know when to stop working every day?

(Josh Roth at 00:48:17) I, this is going to sound terrible. One, don't stop. No. In all seriousness, I mean, the nature of technology is there's always more work to be done, right? It's never ending. I mean, even today, it's not like I get to go turn off the clock at 3:00 and, you know, hit the golf course and and pretend like nothing exists. So it's never ending. So I think first understand that and accept it, that being a CTO is a 24/7 job. It, you know, my wife actually had the greatest saying ever. This was years ago. Different company. When you see pagers, she used to say, "You're worse than being married to a doctor because at least a doctor knows when he's on call." And for me, it was just I'm always on call. You know, I think as a CTO, you are where the buck stops. And so I'm a get deep CTO. I try to know everything going on down to the Jira tickets, and but that's just my style. I'm not saying that's right for everybody. But for me, I think that's one of the things about remaining relevant. So I think as a CTO, unfortunately, just, I mean, this is sort of counter to what you probably want to tell your folks, but you don't stop. I mean, you never stop. Again, the best way to stop is hire partners that you love and believe in and trust. And know that if you are sleeping, there's great people also watching after the systems for you. And, look, obviously, if things are broken, you definitely don't stop. You know, you keep going and, you know, sometimes you've got to yell at people. Sometimes you've got to throw some tables in a nice way and, you know, get things done. Sometimes you've got to switch partners. Sometimes you've got to hire new people and let people go. I mean, it's hard. It's hard. Look, I'd be lying to you if I said there weren't tears along the way, and there are. There's plenty of times where I've just, you know, I've been so frustrated and tired and, but that's what you've got to do. I mean, you know, I don't know what else to say on that. I mean, if someone thinks they can take the time off, then it's probably not the right job for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:16) How do you manage and prioritize requests coming from everywhere at once?

(Josh Roth at 00:50:22) I wish I could tell you there's a magical system for that. There's just, I mean, I think a lot of it is my gut. And I know that's, people don't like to hear that, you know. Look, I've been in companies and Ring now is no different where there's priorities coming everywhere. People try to put prioritization scoring around things. And, you know, you have your sort of top-level litmus thing. Security is first, system stability, obviously, right there. For us, hardware launches are extremely important. You know, and feature sets kind of come below those things, to be honest. Feature improvements. And so, you know, not every company has that same thing. You know, I think it's, I'll go back to customer obsession. If you know your customer and you really know them, I'm not talking about surveys. That's BS. Go and talk to people. Go out in the world. Watch how they're used. Count the doorbells in a neighborhood. See how they're stuck on the wood. Look at someone's floodlight and see if it's in the right spot. Notice these things in the world. I don't care what your product is. It doesn't have to be Ring to be able to do those things, right? If, you know, if I was the CTO of, I don't know, pick your pick. Zoom, who I think you have talked to actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:33) Yeah. Harry. He's awesome.

(Josh Roth at 00:51:35) Yeah. I'm sure Harry is spending every minute of his time experiencing his own product. Right? And so, you know, he sees when there's problems. He knows when Zoom isn't scaling properly. He knows when the video gets good or bad. And then he goes and he tries to fix it. And so, you know, I think that that is the human nature of being a CTO that is good at what they do, is they are truly customer obsessed, and they're not just about the data and the analytics. They're about the experience in the field. And so for me, at least, I'm a very experiential CTO. I've been fortunate to have hardware in this case, but also been a lot of apps and websites and things like that over time. Again, and also, I think going back to what I said earlier, I'm right a lot. I'm not afraid to be wrong. And so I think those are all important pieces of advice for your folks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:24) Thank you so much. Last one. Do you have any tips when building and dealing with a shoestring budget?

(Josh Roth at 00:52:30) You know, I've always been extremely frugal with regards to my teams. You know, I get asked this question all the time, like, what's the right number of people to hire? Obviously, there's no simple answer to that. You know, I think if you can get people on your team that are equally passionate to you or close, you're going to get a lot out of those people. And every, look, I've never once heard someone say they have enough people. Ever. I've never, "Oh, I got too many people on my team. I don't know what to do." That's never happened in the history of engineering. So if they do, then, you know, get rid of that guy because, you know, he or she has spent all your money wrong. You know, I think you have to have a balanced set, just like, you know, there's times when you want to overspend because it's a critical component to your business. And there's times that, you know, go find a less expensive resource and find that needle in a haystack. I mean, look, some of the best engineers I've had, and I hope none of my engineers listen to this, but in a positive way, some of the best folks I've had, you know, are straight out of college and they don't, they haven't been sort of framed yet for 25 years. And but they're just these amazing sort of entrepreneurs in their own way. And so, you know, he or she'll dive into something and come back on a Monday and be like, "Oh, I solved the problem." And you're like, "Great. I never even asked you to, but I love that you did. And fantastic. Let's go tackle 10 more things." And so I think there's also that passion and excitement you kind of have to, but that's, I think, look, hire higher energy. That to me is a big thing. You can do all the programming testing, phenomenal places and are important to your growth. Also, hire people, though, with a phenomenal energy that you know that at the end of the day, you can, you know, get in the trenches with, and they're not going to hate you when you yell at them. And they're going to be able to tell you honestly back some feedback and say, "Hey, Josh, don't do that," or "Let me solve this problem," or "Why'd you do this?" So I think you have to create that rapport with people. And then what I found is when you do that, expensive or inexpensive resources, they'll do kind of anything with you because now you fought the battle together. But, you know, look, we at Ring do look at, as I've said, we have locations all over the world, so we do use some offshore resourcing. We use some lower-cost resourcing. But that's really dependent on your business, your margins, how you do those things. I wouldn't say that, again, it's not one size fits all. But, you know, be frugal. I think being frugal is important. I think it gets your teams to a better spot, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:10) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.