Dharmesh Shah: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. All right. So, we had that transparency and then as we go public, we have this meeting with our investment bankers and our lawyers. This is in the IPO prep process, and they sit down and as part of this all day meeting, one of the questions is like, "Okay, so who are your designated insiders?" So who are your designated insiders? Brian nor I had ever taken the company public before, we're like, "We don't know what that is." It's like, "Oh, it's this group of people that will have access to all the financials and will know." And we're like, "Oh, okay, so how long is that list?" And they're like, "Five or six." And so then Brian says, "Seven? Seven?" And they're like, "Yeah, you can do seven." And I say, "Eight? Could you do eight?" And so we discovered through that mathematical induction process, is like, "If it's true for N, is it true for N plus one?" Is that there's no actual legal limit to how many insiders a company can have. And so we ended up doing, literally the day we went public, is we designated every single employee to be a designated insider. So that allowed us to maintain the transparency thing because there was no rule that said you could only have 5, 6, 10, and there was hundreds of people. And we did not make it optional. We didn't say, "Oh," because there are downsides to being an insider. There's windows within which you can't trade, there's stuff. But we're like, "Okay, well, we believe in transparency. Everyone's going to have access to it, and it's not an opt in kind of thing. You're like, "This is it. We're all in it together."" And we still do this to this day, even at 7,000 people, everybody's an insider, so we can still share all the financials with everyone all the time. You have many contrarian opinions is what I'm getting from this conversation already. And the way you're pushing the envelope on, "Can we have 10, can we have 1,000?" I'm curious if there's anything else there of just contrarian ways of running a company. I know there's probably many, but what comes to mind?…

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