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May 7, 2020
An Atlanta-based sales software startup that once famously shot money out of guns at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference has been forced to lay off around 55 employees, a vivid illustration of the damage the coronavirus crisis is doing to a tech industry that was flying high.
SalesLoft attributed the layoffs to the pandemic, which has caused sales to fall and scores of salespeople that use the company's software to lose their jobs. (It's worth noting that the money blasted from guns by SalesLoft was only $250 in $2 bills, so it wouldn't have saved any jobs here).
"I give Kyle Porter and the rest of the ELT a lot of credit in the way the situation was handled, as disappointing as the result may be," former SalesLoft user experience researcher Rob Solomon said of the company's CEO and executive leadership team in a post on Linkedin.
A company spokesperson confirmed it did layoffs and said, "Nearly every company would benefit from hiring SalesLoft alumni, as they are all great people."
The company, which had been one of Atlanta's fastest growing tech outfits, was most recently valued at $600 million. It's in a competitive field: San Francisco-based Groove announced Thursday that it raised $12 million from investors. Another competitor, Seattle-based unicorn Outreach, has so far avoided layoffs, while reportedly seeing mixed results — with some customers like DoorDash surging and others forced to pull back.
Sofie Kodner
andSofie Kodner (@KodSof) is a former newsletter producer at Protocol, based in San Francisco. Previously, she was a reporter with Bay Area public radio station KALW. Send her an email at sofie@protocol.com.
Biz Carson
Biz Carson ( @bizcarson) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering Silicon Valley with a focus on startups and venture capital. Previously, she reported for Forbes and was co-editor of Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Before that, she worked for Business Insider, Gigaom, and Wired and started her career as a newspaper designer for Gannett.
People
Beeper built the universal messaging app the world needed
It's an app for all your social apps. And part of an entirely new way to think about chat.
Beeper is an app for all your messaging apps, including the hard-to-access ones.
Image: Beeper
January 22, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 22, 2021
Eric Migicovsky likes to tinker. And the former CEO of Pebble — he's now a partner at Y Combinator — knows a thing or two about messaging. "You remember on the Pebble," he asked me, "how we had this microphone, and on Android you could reply to all kinds of messages?" Migicovsky liked that feature, and he especially liked that it didn't care which app you used. Android-using Pebble wearers could speak their replies to texts, Messenger chats, almost any notification that popped up.
That kind of universal, non-siloed approach to messaging appealed to Migicovsky, and it didn't really exist anywhere else. "Remember Trillian from back in the day?" he asked, somewhat wistfully. "Or Adium?" They were the gold-standard of universal messaging apps; users could log in to their AIM, MSN, GChat and Yahoo accounts, and chat with everyone in one place.
<p>Migicovsky has spent the last two years building a modern equivalent. It's called Beeper, and it pulls 15 different messaging services — including WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram and iMessage — into a single app. The app launched this week, and will cost $10 a month for anyone who wants to use it. Migicovsky said roughly 40 people have been using the app for the last few months, and that he's come to rely on it completely. "Beeper went down for me a couple of weeks ago, and I had to fix it," he said. "And for the hours I was fixing it, I had to open up Slack, Telegram, Signal, everything. It was like going back to the Stone Ages." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>To explain how Beeper works, and why Migicovsky thinks it's valuable, you have to understand the protocols. In the early days of online messaging (otherwise known as The Adium Era), many messaging services were based on a protocol called Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP. When it was designed, XMPP intended to make all kinds of communication on the internet, from text to video to file transfers, into decentralized systems. For a while, it worked: From AIM to Google Talk to the early days of Facebook Chat, some of the biggest messaging services used XMPP. </p><p>A few years later, Google and Facebook — and soon others — decided to stop supporting XMPP. Some argued XMPP was too complicated a protocol and simply didn't work; others said they could develop features more quickly by keeping everything in-house. "Today, group conversations, sharing your day with stickers or emojis and messaging across multiple devices have become second nature to many of us," Google product manager Mayur Kamat <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150704141805if_/https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/ETBvtp9VYav" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote in 2015</a> announcing the switch from Google Talk (which supported XMPP) to Hangouts (which didn't). Whatever the reason, messaging apps soon became walled gardens, with everything run — and stored — in one place.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>In the last few years, though, a group of developers has been building a new protocol, one they hope can offer all the openness and decentralization of XMPP but with all the modern features people need now: encryption, voice and video, integrations with other apps and the like. It's called Matrix. "Matrix is our effort to right the balance" after decades of great tech being turned into walled gardens, said Matthew Hodgson, Matrix's technical co-founder. "If you were going to build the holy grail of messaging," the team asked themselves several years ago — a service where anyone can participate, where everything is encrypted, where nothing is locked off from the ecosystem — "what would it look like?" Some of this tech has been built in the past, but always inside a single company or service. They wanted to build it and give it to the internet.</p><p>Ultimately, Hodgson said, Matrix is more than a messaging protocol. "It's a real-time database for any kind of information," he said, from financial tickers to drone flights to VR streams. "Matrix just gives you the building blocks to synchronize it between different deployments." Messaging just happens to be something with which Hodgson and his team have plenty of experience. Not to mention, it's kind of a killer app. Matrix-based messaging can support a whole ecosystem of apps, the way email protocols do. It's all end-to-end encrypted, and it's resilient by virtue of not being housed in a single data center. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>"When Slack goes down for six hours," Hodgson said, "or Signal goes down for 24 hours, people realize, 'hang on, all my eggs are in one basket.'" There are already decentralized, harder-to-kill apps like Slack or Signal running on Matrix, where there's less security risk or possibility of downtime. He added: "The narrative is swinging in our direction." Millions of users use Matrix messaging tools already, he said, including the entire French government, which uses a Slack-like tool called Element that is built by the Matrix team.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTUxMjQ3Mi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY3MDIzNzU0NX0.NPrsWaIEy9RUG90_cIsyZMFW7foaGyiuP_vHdD2T-Ok/img.png?width=980" id="ce4ab" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="37ea800dd363bb5c0c588b2727990131" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Beeper chats">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Beeper tries to wrangle lots of messaging apps into one. Eventually, that might not be necessary.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: Beeper</small></p><p>Matrix is key to Beeper, but in a slightly different way. Migicovsky isn't trying to build a brand-new chat service to compete with WhatsApp; he's trying to wrangle all the services people use into a system that feels more open. So he's taking advantage of a Matrix feature called Bridges, which pulls other apps into the Matrix ecosystem. Sometimes this is easy: Migicovsky said IRC and Telegram have great APIs, making it easy to send and read messages from other apps. Most others are a bit hackier, though Migicovsky said it's rarely impossible: "If you can open something in a browser, we can get to it."<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>One of Beeper's most enticing integrations is with iMessage, which would mean users could access their iMessages on Android or Windows through the Beeper app. This one is stupendously hacky. If a Beeper user has a Mac that's always on and connected to the internet, it's easy; Beeper just connects to the same relay that delivers messages to all your Apple devices, and sends them to Beeper. But if you don't have a Mac that fits the description, there's only one way in. "We wrote an app for jailbroken iPhones that acts as a relay," Migicovsky said. "There's a database on the iPhone called sms.db. And so we just read and write to that." </p><p>But wait, it gets hackier! There's no way to get everyone to jailbreak their iPhones, so Migicovsky found a workaround. "I buy used old cracked-screen iPhones for cheap," he said. "I jailbreak them, and send them to people with the app installed. And they just set it up and leave it somewhere connected to Wi-Fi." There's a box full of semi-busted iPhones, all the way back to the iPhone 4, on his desk right now. The plan works, though it doesn't exactly scale. "We tried a lot of different things," Migicovsky said. "It might not be like this forever." </p><p>There's one part of this setup that Migicovsky actually quite likes. "You control the phone," he said. All the code is open source, and Beeper encrypts all messages; only users have their passwords to access them. But if you really don't want Beeper getting your texts anymore, just unplug that jailbroken iPhone, and you're done.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Migicovsky has lots of ideas for how to improve Beeper as a product, and messaging in general. "No one has really innovated in chat in the last 10 years," he said, before allowing that maybe Slack and Discord get a little credit. But that's it. He's not sure what better looks like, though. He's intrigued by new ways to sort and organize messages, even how threads could look. "I'm really just excited about having this ... not a blank canvas, a malleable canvas," he said.</p><p>The list of places people message seems to get longer every day, and Migicovsky wants Beeper to support them all. "I want to build LinkedIn and Snapchat, and I'm not dating but a lot of people want Tinder messages on this," he said. He's not trying to replace those apps entirely, though. "Discord's amazing," he said, by way of example. "It has cool animations, you have the audio chat that's really good, it's got this social element." For Discord things, people should use Discord. But texting with friends or sharing photos shouldn't be a Discord thing. Or an Instagram thing, or a WhatsApp thing, or a Signal thing, or a Slack thing. It definitely shouldn't be all of those, separately.</p>"It would be wonderful if we didn't have to build what we built," Migicovsky said. "And you could just look me up, like in a phone book or something, and say, 'I want to talk to Eric.'" In the long run, Matrix might help make that possible — already, it appears some of Twitter's decentralization work through Project Bluesky is <a href="https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1352302821140549632" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">being done on Matrix</a>, and Hodgson said he's had conversations with a number of big players in the tech world about build a more open and interoperable messaging ecosystem. For now, the best anyone can do is put everything in one place. It's hacky, but it's progress.
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Protocol | Enterprise
Inside Christian Klein’s determined bid to remake SAP
The 40-year-old, first-time CEO has a tough road ahead of him in turning around the nearly 50-year-old vendor.
Christian Klein became SAP's sole CEO in April.
Photo: Picture Alliance/Getty Images
January 22, 2021
Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
January 21, 2021
On April 19, the day before SAP announced that Christian Klein would take over as sole CEO of the German software giant, his wife joked that she was going into labor with their second child.
That joke became a reality at 2 a.m. the next day.
<p>After rushing to the hospital, Klein left his wife at 7 a.m. to go to the press conference for the announcement, then answered press questions at SAP's headquarters. He returned to the hospital and missed the birth of his daughter by just 10 minutes. </p><p>It's a story that will surely be recounted for years to come, not least because it showed Klein's dedication to the company — perhaps unsurprising, given his 20-year tenure at SAP — but because it displayed just how consequential the announcement was. Klein is in the midst of one of SAP's biggest transformations in its nearly 50-year history, one that could someday draw comparisons to Satya Nadella's turnaround of Microsoft or Shantanu Narayen's pivot at Adobe. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Whether it will be as successful as those two efforts remains to be seen. But Klein is banking his legacy on turning SAP into a power player in the cloud industry, with the ultimate goal of its tech underpinning all operations within an enterprise, with the data from each flowing seamlessly between applications and AI-backed tools layered over the top. </p><p>It's a major about-face for one of the hallmark providers of on-premise enterprise software. And he faces no shortage of critics who doubt whether a 40-year-old, first-time CEO can turn around such a large organization at the necessary speed. </p><p>"When you are doing something for many, many years … people, of course, ask: Why do we now need to change," Klein told Protocol. "The technology and the products, we will get that done. The mindset, to have a sense of urgency and need for change, that's key … but there are still parts of the company that need to get better." </p><p>That may be an understatement: Achieving his goal likely requires a revamp of the entire organization, from the way its employees are incentivized to the way its divisions work with one another.</p><p>Take, for instance, its sales team, perhaps the most visible part of the transformation underway at SAP. In the past, it tended to work alone, and relied on sometimes weeks-long HQ visits to pressure clients to sign multi-year, multi-million contracts. But that strategy was rocked by both the pandemic and the broader desire within corporate America to deploy cloud-based offerings.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Now, Klein is overhauling the sales team's incentives: It used to receive 20% of its commission based upon how many other add-on services a client purchased, but he says that 20% is set to rise substantially as the company prioritizes selling existing clients on the broader SAP suite of products, a model often referred to as "land and expand." And the CEO says that the shift will involve the sales team working far more closely with the deployment teams.</p><p>In a sign of just how critical a revised sales strategy will be to Klein's vision, he recently remade the board to appoint Scott Russell as the new chief customer success officer. The organizational shift also extends to the product team, which is slated to work more closely with the sales team under newly-appointed Chief Marketing Officer Julia White, who led efforts to promote Azure at Microsoft. </p><p>"It's the final piece of the puzzle," Klein told reporters recently. </p><p>While still early, there are glimmers that show Klein's strategy — including changes like these, as well as others happening quietly behind closed doors — is beginning to work. In SAP's most recent earnings statement, for the three months through December, cloud revenue grew to $2 billion, while its cloud backlog increased to $7 billion. As to be expected in the pivot to cloud-based offerings — which are typically based on a three-year subscription model versus the large, up-front payments that SAP used to rely on — software licenses dropped 11%. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Outside of earnings, Klein is working quickly to shore up support from other industry giants. The company, for example, is slated to announce later this month a closer partnership with Microsoft to help SAP's on-premise customers move to the cloud. "The leading business capabilities of Microsoft are coming together with SAP," Klein teased. </p><p>And behind the scenes, customers appear to be noticing: Last year was the first time since 2017 that the firm's customer satisfaction score was positive, per Klein.</p><h2>The full 360?
</h2><p>In the meantime, SAP isn't without its doubters. </p><p>When Klein announced in October that SAP would rescind its prior financial guidance, a decision that came about after internal financial projections estimated as much as a 4% decline in profit margins if external factors stayed constant, <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/sap-stock-price-2020-outlook-downgrade-2020-10-1029720099" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the company's stock plummeted</a>. It was a major move for the newly-appointed CEO, one that signaled a desire to focus on the long-term transformation versus short-term margin optimization — basically the opposite of what many shareholders are seeking — and just how seriously he was taking the task ahead. </p><p>"It was clear to me that the market would not applause for that because we just told them, 12 months ago, a different kind of story," said Klein. But, he added, "in that moment, you should not care so much about how much trouble you are in."</p><p>The lambasting extends beyond just investors. In early 2020, for example, Marc Benioff <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-26/salesforce-s-benioff-says-sap-s-troubles-are-unique-to-them" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">opined about the difficulty SAP was having</a> in transitioning from former CEO Bill McDermott to co-CEOs Klein and Jennifer Morgan. (Morgan left in April and eventually joined private equity firm Blackstone.) And at key competitor Oracle, co-founder Larry Ellison keeps claiming without evidence that the company is stealing major customers from SAP, a nod to its struggles in transitioning clients to the cloud. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Klein ignores much of the criticism and instead is banking on the results speaking for themselves. SAP, for example, is now replacing Oracle at biotech giant Gilead, the type of proof of "customer wins" that Ellison has yet to provide — at least publicly. </p><p>Now, as Klein presses on with his vision of making SAP an end-to-end provider for customers, able to provide software across all of a corporation's various business units, one can start to see the influence it could give the company in the modern IT stack. If he gets it right, it's not hard to imagine SAP outperforming Salesforce's penetration within enterprises. </p><p>Salesforce, for example, regularly touts its Customer 360 offering, a platform designed to oversee all client information stored within an enterprise. But the data available to Salesforce is limited by its own offerings, the bread-and-butter of which is customer relationship management software, a front-end tool that was historically catered to a company's sales team (though that is changing as Salesforce <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/introducing-salesforce-industries/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expands to other industry verticals</a>). </p><p>As customers wade deeper into the SAP ecosystem, though, tapping its tools to support operations such as supply chain, procurement and human resources, there's the potential to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/sap-crm/caught-short-by-salesforce-sap-targets-front-office-market-idUKL5N1T71ZZ" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">link back-office tools</a> like an <a href="https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/sap-oracle-fighting-startups" target="_self">enterprise resource planning system</a> with front-office applications such as a CRM platform. In theory, that could mean when a customer purchases Dell laptops from an online marketplace such as, say, Ariba, the order is automatically sent to SAP to fulfill and a tracking notice is immediately provided to the customer so they know where the product is — something SAP refers to as a "procure-to-pay" system. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>"This is really a secret sauce where SAP can come back really strong," said Klein. "With us, you really have the 360 [degree view]." </p><p>That position becomes even more powerful if the data is unified, which would give customers the opportunity to deploy powerful analytics capabilities across entire operations and enable SAP to layer on AI to help automate some processes. Right now, such an application is not feasible in many organizations because information is often stored within the different pockets of an enterprise. And the reality is that companies are going to use many vendors, so while they may tap SAP as an ERP provider, they might still use Workday for HR or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/coupa-sap-oracle-saas" target="_self">Coupa for corporate spending</a>. </p><h2>10% integration, 90% innovation </h2><p>Still, SAP's work with the automotive industry is an early signal of what's to come. </p><p>In September, it launched <a href="https://news.sap.com/2020/09/bosch-and-sap-automotive-industry-next-generation-capabilities/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">an alliance with Bosch, BMW and other industry players</a> to share more data among the cohort's participants. The venture, which was likely only feasible given SAP's dominance in the sector as an ERP provider — it counts companies like Mercedes, Porsche, Toyota, Ford and others as customers — is <a href="https://www.automotiveworld.com/news-releases/strategic-partnership-bosch-and-sap-aim-to-simplify-corporate-processes-with-a-new-standard/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bringing together what is often disparately stored information</a> between suppliers and manufacturers with an ultimate goal of improving production capabilities, from procurement of raw materials to the building of the actual car. Such a partnership could <a href="https://cloudwars.co/sap/sap-ceo-christian-klein-ready-to-drive-the-digital-revolution/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">theoretically be broadened to other industries</a>, like <a href="https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/sap-moderna-pfizer-covid-vaccine" target="_self">pharmaceutical manufacturers</a>. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>But the work to achieve such a vision will have to extend far beyond just pivoting to new cloud-based offerings. Right now, for example, SAP has many applications running independently, which immensely complicates the task of unifying the data. A key hurdle is integrating the various companies that Klein's predecessor McDermott purchased during his tenure, including Callidus, Concur and Qualtrics, the latter of which is <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/28/qualtrics-files-s-1-aims-for-valuation-of-up-to-14point4-billion-in-ipo.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">being spun out via an IPO</a>. </p><p>Previously, if an HR department wanted to use both Concur and SuccessFactors, it would have to run the applications separately, meaning data from one would need to be manually entered in another. In Klein's vision, the two would operate together, where the information in one would instantly flow to the other. Now extend that to all the other verticals that SAP works in, and you're thinking on the same scale as Klein. </p><p>"Over the last 10 years, we acquired products but we really didn't stitch it together," he said. "Everything needs to be connected." </p><p>That, however, is an incredibly difficult engineering process, which requires reworking the core code of those applications. To get there, Klein says he's devoting 10% of the company's entire development budget on the task, with the other 90% going towards new initiatives. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>In a sign of this closer coordination between the acquired firms, Concur, <a href="https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/sap-concur-president-customer-chief" target="_self">which is undergoing a leadership change</a>, was "functionally" aligned into SAP on Jan. 1. A spokesperson declined to elaborate on what that means, but stated that "customers should not experience any disruption to their business as part of this organizational alignment within SAP." It's unclear whether other business units are undergoing a similar change. </p><p>At the same time, SAP is also focusing on revamping its product offerings and investing in new, industry-specific applications. One example of this is SAP's work with the oil and gas sector to <a href="https://blogs.sap.com/2019/09/24/chevron-and-sap-co-innovate-on-a-cloud-solution-for-oil-and-gas/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">build catered cloud-based products</a> to run on the core ERP system. </p><p>But as the integration effort becomes a priority, Klein says he is putting the brakes on any other major acquisitions — though he didn't rule out smaller purchases that help fill a gap in its offerings. For example, SAP <a href="https://news.sap.com/2020/10/sap-to-acquire-emarsys/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bought customer analytics firm Emarsys</a> in October, an acquisition that will help the company compete against rivals like Salesforce. Conversely, Klein also didn't rule out future divestitures of its vast product portfolio. </p><p>Clearly, Klein doesn't appear to be ruling much out in his quest to turn around the software behemoth. And with major technical challenges, an internal cultural shift and an external marketing overhaul all underway, he'll need to hold his nerve and commit to SAP like never before if he's going to pull it off. But as his wife would probably tell you, that doesn't look to be a problem.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p><em>Update: This article previously stated, based on information from SAP, that 2020 was the first year ever that the company received a positive customer satisfaction score. It last received a positive score in 2017. Updated: 1/22/21</em></p>
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Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
Protocol | Enterprise
Databricks plans to take on Snowflake and Google and score a huge IPO
Even against intensifying competition, Databricks hopes to be a hit when it heads to the public markets this year.
Ali Ghodsi is the CEO of Databricks.
Photo: Databricks
January 11, 2021
Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
January 6, 2021
Enterprise software had a huge 2020 on Wall Street as companies such as Snowflake and C3.ai went public with blockbuster initial offerings. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi is hoping to ride the same wave in 2021.
The public debut of the data analytics startup, valued at $6.2 billion, is among the most-watched IPOs for the year. And for good reason: It competes in a similar space as the much-hyped Snowflake, helping customers find the data to power the algorithms that help with everything from picking which products to order to which candidates to bring in for job interviews. While Databricks has been tight-lipped on its specific plans, including which bankers it is tapping to help navigate the often arduous process, it is taking steps internally to prepare.
<p>"There's a lot of compliance that goes into it," Ghodsi told Protocol. "Much of it is making sure that we have that predictability that you need when you IPO."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Unlike other startups that tend to bring on a new chief financial officer to oversee the IPO, Databricks is already set: CFO Dave Conte previously helped take Splunk public in 2012. But it does plan to make other key hires, according to Ghodsi, including a new head of engineering and new board members. </p><p>Databricks is also shoring up its own internal software, including investing "massively" in Workday, according to Ghodsi. And while an IPO is looming, the company is weighing another funding round in the interim amid what Ghodsi described as a rush of calls from venture capital firms looking to invest. </p><p>While Ghodsi says 2020 brought a "significant acceleration" of its business, he declined to provide any up-to-date revenue figures. Databricks said in October that it passed a $350 million revenue run-rate at the end of Q3, up from $200 million a year earlier — an acknowledgement that, despite COVID-19 gutting some sectors, the appetite for data analytics and artificial intelligence is robust. Still, the competition is fierce and, despite <a href="https://databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/databricks-and-snowflake-announce-strategic-partnership" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">notably partnering with Snowflake in 2018</a> (a partnership that continues today), Databricks faces an increasing rivalry from the current industry darling, as well as Google's BigQuery. </p><p>"For data science and analytics, those are really going to be the three competitors," Sapphire Ventures co-founder Jai Das said. "But the market is still so big, I think all three are going to be successful."</p><h2>First time IPO'er
</h2><p>The investor appetite is, of course, a big vote of confidence in Databricks. But it's also a show of support for Ghodsi, a former researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science who still teaches classes at the University of California, Berkeley. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's not uncommon for companies to bring on CEOs skilled in taking startups public prior to their own offerings. Snowflake, for instance, poached Frank Slootman, who <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/30/snowflake-ceo-frank-slootman-pursues-third-ipo.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">led the IPOs for ServiceNow and Data Domain</a>, for its own offering. </p><p>That's not the approach at Databricks. It'll be Ghodsi's first time leading through the process. But while he doesn't come armed with detailed knowledge of the public markets, he believes a deep understanding of Databricks and its offerings is a much more significant advantage. </p><p>"These professional CEOs very rarely are good at that because they don't really understand the products that your company is selling," Ghodsi said. "Oftentimes what happens is that you have great technical founders, they start the company, you launch the product, but you don't really hit your revenue targets. Then the board looks at making changes to fix that. That's basically the death of the company in the long term." </p><p>For Ghodsi, the long-term mindset meant largely ignoring the frothy equity markets in 2020 that led some firms to <a href="https://www.protocol.com/how-a-spac-works" target="_self">quickly launch a public offering</a>. And despite claiming it will be a "really successful" offering in 2021, he views the IPO as just one step in the vision to make Databricks akin to Salesforce — an enterprise software firm that <a href="https://www.protocol.com/salesforce-blockbuster-2020-benioff" target="_self">continues to grow in revenue and influence</a> roughly 16 years after its own IPO. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>To get to this point, however, took what Ghodsi described as three phases of evolution. </p><p>When he and six other co-founders started the company in 2013, Ghodsi served as vice president of engineering and product management. That gave him a leading voice in figuring out exactly what market needs its offering was solving. But it also meant forgoing lofty revenue targets — it made roughly $1 million that year — to instead focus on "making sure that this is a product that companies really need and love." </p><p>The growth came when Ghodsi took the reins, assuming the role of CEO in 2016. At the time, Databricks poured money into its "go-to-market function," including sales and marketing. That also included developing a "customer success" function, an increasingly common facet to organizations that sell their services via the cloud, designed to keep close contact with customers and ensure they don't pivot to another provider. By the end of 2019, Databricks reported a $200 million revenue run, up from "almost no revenue," according to a statement at the time. </p><p>That also meant hiring beyond 150 total employees, breaching what is commonly referred to as "Dunbar's number" or the maximum number of people that one person can keep in social contact with. In a practical sense, that meant Ghodsi no longer knew the names of all the employees.</p><p>Now, Databricks is in what Ghodsi calls the "operational excellence" phase, or making sure all the company's processes are "aligned and rowing in the same direction." It's produced one of the company's biggest new product releases to date: SQL Analytics, which helps data scientists or analysts more easily run queries on a vast amount of unstructured data through commonly used tools such as Tableau. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>While similar offerings are available from Snowflake and BigQuery, the release is Databricks' way of championing the "data lakehouse," or a combination of curated information alongside unstructured data. Typically, they reside in two different stacks, often referred to as a data lake (a vast pool of information) and a data warehouse (a more structured storage center). </p><p>And more product announcements are in store for 2021 as Databricks looks to capitalize on its fastest growing industry sectors, including health care. </p><p>"Databricks is behind the scenes of pretty much all the vaccines that are being talked about," Ghodsi said. He added: "Health care providers are using it to track inventory and how crowded their hospitals are." </p><p>But despite Ghodsi's best attempt at downplaying the current financial environment's influence on the company's next steps, it's clear that competitors' successes are top of mind — and that the biggest event of Databricks' year will be held on Wall Street. </p><p>"It's a really, really good IPO climate and we will be IPO-ready," he said.</p>
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Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
Protocol | Enterprise
How Salesforce, despite big setbacks, had a banner 2020
Amid the chaos of major layoffs and top executive departures, Salesforce announced a key acquisition and managed to report blockbuster earnings.
Marc Benioff is the CEO of Salesforce.
Photo: Kimberly White/Getty Images
January 11, 2021
Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
December 21, 2020
On Aug. 27, Salesforce announced it would lay off around 1,000 employees.
The news came as a shock to many. At the beginning of the pandemic, CEO Marc Benioff committed to making no "significant" layoffs for 90 days. (The 1,000 job losses occurred 155 days after that pledge was made.) But any blowback to the announcement appears to have been brushed aside by some of the company's top leaders.
<p>"If it is any indicator … I have gotten, easy, 10x more emails and texts than all the employee posts combined, from non executive employees, telling us how smart of a move this was, and well orchestrated," Chief People Officer Brent Hyder wrote in an email obtained by Protocol to other executives, including Chief Communications Officer Brad Burns.</p><p>Ending the correspondence, he added: "The haters will be haters."</p><p>Salesforce called it a "difficult communications day for the company" and said Hyder was "trying to be a good leader and lift the spirits of some people who had to do a really hard job." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Still, Hyder's mantra could be the theme for Salesforce's 2020, a year that may mark an important turning point for the 21-year-old company. The $200 billion enterprise software giant announced its most significant acquisition to date, saw key turnover in its executive ranks that is helping to usher in the next-generation of leaders, reported blockbuster earnings amid a global pandemic and is now poised to compete more aggressively against key rivals.</p><p>"It was a year of change, significant change," RBC Capital Markets analyst Alex Zukin said. "They exit this year with an opportunity for rebirth."</p><h3>Gains and losses</h3><p>Back in August, when announcing the layoffs, the company also said <a href="https://s23.q4cdn.com/574569502/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/CRM-Q2-FY21-Earnings-Press-Release-w-financials.pdf" target="_blank">revenue increased 29% year-over-year to $5.15 billion</a> — one of the best quarters in its history. Then in the days following, Benioff said the company <a href="https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/a-few-weeks-after-layoffs-salesforce-will-add-12-00-jobs-over-next-year" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">would hire as many as 12,000 workers</a> in the coming year. But additional reductions are also possible, with Salesforce now aiming to "rebalance" up to 10% of its workforce every year, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-26/salesforce-cuts-1-000-jobs-after-banner-quarter-stock-surge" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according to Benioff</a>. </p><p>The company declined to make Benioff available for an interview and Hyder did not respond to request for comment. </p><p>"We're reallocating resources to position the company for continued growth," Salesforce said in a statement. "This includes plans to hire up to 12,000 by the end of 2021, redirecting some employees to fuel our strategic areas, and rebalancing some positions that no longer map to our business priorities. We worked to support those affected to find the next step in their careers, whether within our company or a new opportunity."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Jump to December, and Salesforce dominated the news cycle with its <a href="https://www.protocol.com/salesforce-buys-slack" target="_self">$27.7 billion purchase of Slack</a>, the company's biggest deal to date. It puts the company on track to expand beyond its core customer relationship management software offering, a strategy that <a href="https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/salesforce-slack-execs-outline-vision" target="_self">executives laid out for Wall Street analysts</a> during the annual investor day in December. </p><p>Despite signaling a new direction for the firm, the deal made some investors nervous about future organic growth: Salesforce's stock dropped nearly 11% in the days following the news of the acquisition and has shown little recovery since then. And as Salesforce embarks on the next chapter of its corporate history, its rivals are also charging harder.</p><p>Microsoft <a href="https://www.protocol.com/tom-siebel--c3ai-blockbuster-ipo" target="_self">recently partnered with startup C3.ai</a> and Adobe to begin selling artificial intelligence-backed customer relationship management software. While Salesforce remains the dominant leader in the CRM industry, Microsoft is seeing explosive growth in its Dynamics 365 business. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel, who invented the initial CRM product in 1995 at Siebel Systems, said Salesforce has lagged in bolstering its own AI-based offering, called Einstein. For its part, Salesforce says Einstein is running <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2020/11/24/einstein-now-delivers-80bn-predictions/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">over 80 billion predictions each day</a>. UBS analysts have also warned that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-cloud-software-spending-could-change-2021-ubs-analysts-2020-11#salesforce-1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">smaller competitors such as Twilio</a> could take market share from the software giant. </p><p>Still, other industry experts say Salesforce at least has no need to sweat Microsoft in the short term.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>"There's overlap, they will bump into each other, but at the end of the day I don't see them as direct competitors," Edward Jones analyst Logan Purk told Protocol. "Microsoft does a lot of things fairly well, but it's not that they do everything great. And I think Salesforce does CRM great."</p><h3>Executive overhauls</h3><p>Underneath its flashy Slack deal, there were signs that Salesforce was taking steps to reposition its leadership. </p><p>There were <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-most-significant-hirings-departures-2020-keith-block-2020-7#departure-richard-socher-former-chief-scientist-5" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">several executive turnovers</a> at the company this year. The most significant was the departure of co-CEO Keith Block in February, which created a major power vacuum within the company that is now being filled by the rising influence of chief operating officer <a href="https://www.protocol.com/salesforce-coo-bret-taylor-interview" target="_self">Bret Taylor</a> and chief revenue officer Gavin Patterson, according to industry analysts. Their growing authority was evident in the leadership role both played in the Slack acquisition. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield is <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-04/slack-s-butterfield-expects-to-become-a-salesforce-president" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">also poised to play a key leadership role</a> as the company strives to integrate the platform into its own CRM system. </p><p>In December, the company <a href="https://www.protocol.com/salesforces-apac-ceo-ulrik-nehammer" target="_self">overhauled its Asia-Pacific leadership team</a>, with APAC CEO Ulrik Nehammer, chief customer officer Stan Sugarman, chief operating officer Dan Bognar and EVP Lee Hawksley all departing. That's a major shakeup in a key growth market for the company. </p><p>And there were other important departures: Chief data officer Hernan Asorey left for Microsoft, product head John Ball departed for ServiceNow, chief scientist Richard Socher <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/former-salesforce-chief-scientist-announces-new-search-engine-to-take-on-google/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">left to form a new startup</a> and Lisa Edwards, the former EVP of strategic business operations, left in October for software company Diligent Corporation. The latter was the latest in a string of defections from high-profile female leaders, including former HR chief Ana Recio and global marketing head Julie Liegl. It did elevate other women to leadership roles, including a promotion for Amy Weaver to chief financial officer. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>There also appears to be some bubbling tensions with current and former employees. Salesforce's former head of government relations, Niki Christoff, <a href="https://twitter.com/nikichristoff/status/1334912895440785415" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">recently took to Twitter</a> to lambast Benioff for not allowing her to join the board of directors of another company — a policy she argued was discriminatory against women. Christoff declined to elaborate on her tweets.</p><p>Despite its <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/salesforce-is-named-to-great-place-to-works-worlds-best-workplaces-list-for-third-year-in-a-row/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reputation as an outstanding workplace</a>, current and former employees also <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-push-to-improve-equality-yielded-slow-results-tony-prophet-2020-11" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">criticized the slow pace of change when it came to diversity and inclusion efforts</a>. In November 2019, for example, one worker took to an internal chat group to highlight how "incredibly emotionally and mentally exhausting" it had been to "fight for equality and equity related answers and change at Salesforce," according to a screenshot of the message board viewed by Protocol.</p><p>For its part, Salesforce announced several major equality-related initiatives in 2020, including plans to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-double-black-leaders-employees-racial-justice-2020-7" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">double the number of Black leaders by 2023</a>. A diversity scorecard released in December, however, <a href="https://equalitydata.herokuapp.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">still showed little progress</a> in improving the number of minority employees.</p><p>It's unlikely any of those developments will put a dent in Salesforce's growth — the company raised its earnings outlook for the fiscal year in December — or change the general public perception of the company. But they do bring about uncomfortable questions for the company, particularly given Benioff's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-salesforce-ceo-pushing-other-ceos-to-do-the-right-thing-2018-4" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">willingness to speak out on hot-button political issues</a> like U.S. immigration policy an LGTBQ+ rights.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>But by taking control of one of the most popular applications in use today, Slack, Benioff is all but assuring that Salesforce will — whether you like it or not — remain in many of our lives for years to come.</p><p>Or, to put another way, the haters will still be haters.<br></p>
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Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
Protocol | Enterprise
Coupa is cribbing from SAP and Oracle. Then it wants to beat them.
The $21 billion company is trying to out-innovate its rivals to help organizations better track their spending. But there are still plenty of obstacles ahead.
Rob Bernshteyn is the CEO of Coupa.
Photo: Coupa
January 11, 2021
Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
December 10, 2020
Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn was once a project manager at Accenture helping customers implement SAP's software. Now, he's fast becoming a thorn in the side of the German tech giant and its rival Oracle.
"These are products companies, they're not software-as-a-service companies," Bernshteyn told Protocol. He added: "[We're] the holy grail of what SaaS is all about."
<p>Those are bold claims from Coupa, a relatively understated but <a href="https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-is-no-one-talking-about-coupa-software-stock-2020-08-29" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">fast-growing company</a> founded in 2006 to help organizations manage spending. Among other services, Coupa offers expense management, procurement tools and, more recently, a business-to-business payment platform known as Coupa Pay. </p><p>The looming obstacles for those products are clear. Bernshteyn, who assumed the role of CEO in 2009, is going up against giants like Oracle and SAP that have long-standing relationships with customers, command significantly higher market caps and offer some of the same tools that Coupa does as part of a broader suite of services. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>SAP, for example, has Ariba, a procurement marketplace that competes against Coupa's Open Buy. It also has its own expense management platform known as Concur. But for Bernshteyn, products from SAP and others are older, lack innovation and only address a fraction of the overall customer need. </p><p>"We've replaced Ariba 100-something times," he said. "It's a very old code line. It's a 1995 code line that's being hosted. It's very difficult to reconfigure." </p><p>Coupa already touts Amazon and <a href="https://www.coupa.com/newsworthy/press-releases/coupa-announces-agreement-with-walmart-to-enhance-the-companys-business-spend-management/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Walmart as clients</a> — two bedrock U.S. institutions that any software company would love to have on their customer roster — as well as convenience store chain Casey's, DHL and others. Amazon alone manages $24 billion per year on Coupa's platform, per Bernshteyn. (Conversely, the bulk of Coupa's product line runs on Amazon Web Services, the ecommerce giant's cloud service.) Coupa also recently signed a deal with the U.S. House of Representatives, part of a growing focus on the public sector.</p><p>SAP appears to recognize the potential threat. It recently hired former Salesforce exec John Wookey to improve products like Ariba, which the firm says hosts $3.75 trillion in annual transactions across more than 5 million companies. </p><p>Ultimately, Bernshteyn says he is not trying to supplant all of the products from SAP, Oracle and others that still underpin most large organizations. Among the existing customer base, for example, 60% still use SAP or Oracle. Instead, Bernshteyn's hoping that customers choose Coupa as an added upgrade and, eventually, one of the "four-to-five key systems of record." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>"We may have little point-solution competitors around the periphery," he said. "But if a customer understands the vision of what we are playing for, which is managing all business spending on one platform, we really don't have competition."</p><p>Coupa also has a secret weapon in what Bernshteyn calls "community intelligence." </p><p>The concept is quite simple: Customers share anonymized data on their spending that can then be analyzed to help others make more informed decisions. So, say a supplier of paper clips lowers its costs. That insight can be easily and quickly shared among clients, giving companies the opportunity to restock and capitalize on the decreased prices. Bernshteyn likens it to Waze, which allows users to share traffic condition updates with other users for aggregate benefit. </p><p>"That's never been done before in enterprise software," he said. "The data and insights we have are growing with every incremental customer." </p><h3>Learning from the industry luminaries
</h3><p>Listening to Bernshteyn talk, you can hear the influence of well-known enterprise software CEOs. </p><p>The relentless focus on the customer, the need to continually release new products and a desire to serve a greater good beyond offering software are all core tenets of luminaries like Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott (also the former CEO of SAP). </p><p>Even Coupa's sales strategies mirror those employed by the industry giants, such as using big splashy customer events combined with more close-knit community sessions to build awareness and share success strategies. </p><p>But this year, as COVID-19 upended plans for the large-scale enterprise tech conferences that have since come to help define the sector, Coupa has diverged from its rivals and gone small while others continued to go big. It cancelled Coupa Inspire, its annual event, while others like AWS and Salesforce pivoted their marquee conferences to be weeks-long online events. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>The pandemic also dented part of its business that it was hoping to grow. COVID-19 sent sales of Coupa's travel management software to a screeching halt. To bolster that product, Coupa had purchased <a href="https://www.coupa.com/newsworthy/press-releases/coupa-acquires-travel-price-optimization-leader-yapta/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">travel price optimization software provider Yapta</a> in January for an undisclosed sum, just months before demand for air travel evaporated. </p><p>"Maybe I regret the timing" and the price point, Bernshteyn said, adding, "we think we can come out the gates once all of this settles in a much stronger position."</p><p>Still, Coupa's reported consistent growth, with revenue growing 31% year-over-year to $133 million last quarter. And Bernshteyn is bullish on sustaining that momentum. He previously promised investors that the company can grow at a 30% annual rate for the foreseeable future. Shareholders seem to have confidence in that rosy outlook. Since the start of 2020, Coupa's stock has risen roughly 105%, boosting the overall market cap to nearly $21 billion. That far surpasses the Nasdaq's 38% growth so far this year. </p><p>Coupa also just <a href="https://www.coupa.com/newsworthy/press-releases/coupa-acquires-ai-powered-supply-chain-design-and-planning-leader-llamasoft-broadening-its-leadership-in-business-spend-management/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">purchased LLamasoft for $1.5 billion</a>, its most significant acquisition to date. Bernshteyn says LLamasoft, which offers an artificial intelligence-backed tool to help companies manage their supply chains, will allow Coupa to penetrate deeper into an industry seeing notable upheaval as the ongoing pandemic forces continued shutdowns across the globe. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>And while acquisitions such as that and Salesforce's $27.7 billion <a href="https://www.protocol.com/salesforce-buys-slack" target="_blank">purchase of Slack</a> are <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e26b8d71-be32-4e59-830c-3100435a2ecb" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">viewed by some as a precursor</a> to a pending wave of consolidation in the SaaS industry, Bernshteyn says he's fielded no serious acquisition offers. </p><p>"This company has never had something put in front of us that's for formal consideration," he said. "If we ever did, it's our fiduciary responsibility to take it to the board and discuss." </p>
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Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
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