Dylan Field: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's also great to see you too, Dylan. The last time we chatted, this was right after the Adobe deal didn't work out. Now, you're a public company, a public CO, congrats on that. Specifically, post-Adobe deal falling through, the journey you guys have taken, it was quite unusual. You almost sold the company to Adobe for a lot of money and then the deal fell through. My understanding is it fell through because the UK government regulatory boards just didn't want it to happen. Is that why it fell through? What's the story there, by the way? Yeah, various regulators did not like the deal and had arguments against it. No need to go into those and whatnot. But, yeah, it was a long process, 16 months. Adobe is an incredible company, a lot of respect for that team, and very interesting to, even in this constrained context where you can't plan out a road map or they can't give you instructions and stuff like that of, here's what you should do or not do. Just seeing them operate through the regulatory process even was fascinating. But yeah, it was intense and I'm really glad we kept our foot on the pedal, gas pedal, and just kept accelerating forward rather than grinding to a halt. Because we're able to exit this deal that didn't work out and go into launching Dev Mode and really pushing on how do we expand our platform in a big way. It's been I think just further acceleration of pace from there. I'm really proud of the team for how they handled that and also how they're in focus now, and it's a real honor to be on this team. Let me actually ask you about that exact thing. Most leaders, most teams would get super discouraged, and demoralized, and distracted by something like this. Basically, there was a bunch of money ready to be wired to their bank accounts. This deal was going to sell. It's like, "Oh, amazing." Then, it doesn't happen. Easy for people just to get, "Oh, no, what the hell's going on here? Why am I working here? All these news about us." How did you very specifically keep people focused and keep momentum up, as you said, almost accelerate it to this very successful IPO?…

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