In the dozen-plus years since Stripe has been around, the payments and financial services platform provider has been expanding online commerce by enabling entrepreneurs around the world.
At the same time, the company has had a unique vantage into the numerous ways changing macroeconomic conditions impact businesses – from the smallest startups to the largest ecommerce corporations that Stripe works with as customers.
Along the way, the company has likewise adapted its product development roadmap, go-to-market strategies, and various other operational tactics during both healthy and uncertain economic climates.
Throughout the many expansions, pullbacks, and vacillations between capital abundance and capital restraint that all startups face, Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison says the company has held steady to its goal to continually push what is possible for new businesses around the world by adhering to a guiding principle.
“We want to be micro pessimists and macro optimists,” says Collison. “Over the years, we’ve always been looking for ways to inculcate that.”
Collison, who founded Stripe with his brother John in 2010, says for tech entrepreneurs, that means having the ability to acknowledge flaws in strategy and be self-critical on product development, while recognizing the cyclical nature of business in Silicon Valley and beyond.
That structural tension, Collison says, is what keeps startups motivated to move forward while still being grounded in reality. As history shows, having this mindset can be the difference between persisting throughout choppy conditions or becoming a casualty of one of tech’s many boom and bust cycles.
“Silicon Valley is famous for being such a productive and prodigious cradle for new technology companies, whereas, in reality it’s the world’s most densely populated graveyard,” says Collison. “But when I look at a five to 10- year time horizon, it seems to me that the really great companies that the Valley built over the last 40 years went through these cycles… I suspect that on average this is very good for the Silicon Valley ecosystem.”
Collison joined me as part of Greylock’s Iconversations speaker series for a wide-ranging discussion on navigating challenging times; the most important lessons learned during Stripe’s early days and its evolution; and his perspective for the future.
You can watch the interview on our YouTube channel here, or listen to the conversation at the link below or wherever you get your podcasts.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Reid Hoffman:
So Patrick and I are beginning to make a habit of this. We were on stage last week at the Master of Scale Summit and we thought we would open this up. For those of you who didn’t see last week’s Master of Scale Summit, Patrick, who is a Master of Scale, identified himself as a “Hamster of Scale.”
Patrick Collison:
Thank you.
Well, okay. For context, you’re like, “Why is there a hamster here?” So I do think there’s this thing – I mean I guess it serves as good instructions as anything. I think there’s this thing that happens where, I don’t know, I guess we conflate the size of the company with having figured things out.
I don’t know Laszlo Bock from Google (who ran HR and People there for a long time), and I’m sure he’s a wonderful guy. Again, I don’t know him. But I was very struck by the book that he wrote about Google culture, which I haven’t read and maybe a wonderful book, but-
RH:
But, you were struck by it, you mean physically.
PC:
Right. Well it’s just, I mean it’s a book. I think the concept of the book is how to have a culture as good as Google, right? And my kind of outside view on that is step one: to have a culture as good as Google is like number one – have the business model that’s the best business model in the world and as good as Google. It’s like, “Hi. It really becomes much easier to have a good culture when you have the world’s best business model.”
And so in a sort of similar vein, I think Stripe has been fortunate to be hauled and thrust along by all these structural forces, but I do not feel… I’m much more comfortable being denoted a Hamster of Scale than anything beyond that.
RH:
It’s one of the key things to always think about being an infinite learner. And so let’s go to the deep part of what it is to be an entrepreneur right now, which is: wars, pandemics, markets, oh my. After a 10-plus year bull market, all of a sudden we’re in turbulent times. And the turbulent times are not just questions around, “What does capital fundraise look like?,” but, “What does your customer flow look like?”
What are you seeing in Stripe and what’s the advice you would give entrepreneurs in these choppy waters? We’re starting with the real stuff.
PC:
Okay. Well I suppose the simple thing today, just from a Stripe vantage point, is I think rates have changed substantially and as a consequence I guess, investor behavior has changed a lot. And based on what we see in consumer spending and even business spending, that has not yet noticeably changed.
Now, maybe there were modeling effects where we thought that the pandemic pull forward was actually some kind of structural new normal. And it turns out that actually no, it is better modeled as they pull forward. But all the headlines you read about Europe, you’re wondering, “Is there still an economy there?” But not only is it still standing (I mean I’m a European, so fortunately so), but not only still standing but still growing. And so it just comes as a very basic foundational matter. The economy seems to be in relatively good shape.
We just turned a phrase at Stripe: We want to be micro pessimists and macro optimists. And over the years, we’re always trying to find ways to inculcate that.
For example, when we were moving offices, I told John that I wanted to get signs from other companies that we could put up around the office, like National Semiconductor or Atari or Osborne Computer or Sun Microsystems or SGI and so on.
“We want to be micro pessimists and macro optimists.”
RH:
This might be an old enough group that they actually recognize those names.
PC:
Well, it’s just like Silicon Valley is famous for being such a productive and prodigious cradle for new technology companies, whereas, in reality it’s the world’s most densely populated graveyard. And I think there’s something so kind of gloriously macabre about the fact that the Facebook Headquarters are not the Facebook headquarters, it’s the Sun Headquarters. And the Googleplex is not the Googleplex, it’s the SGIplex and we’re like crabs, just scuttling along and sneaking into each other’s shells.
But the millennials and the Gen Zs obviously don’t know that. And so we were always trying to find these structural things that we could do. John didn’t let me do the sign thing. He told me that I fundamentally misunderstood how to motivate humans. But we’re trying to do things like this.
And so on the one hand, I think for many of the companies that are trading in public markets, and perhaps that’s some folks here, I think. I mean, I can’t speak to that. Stripe is not public. I think it’s super hard and I don’t want to sound oblivious to that. But when I look at a five to 10- year time horizon, it seems to me that the really great companies that the Valley built over the last 40 years went through these cycles. Andy Grove’s famous literature was written after and about these melding periods.
And so again, I don’t want to sound like some wizard expert here, Stripe is going through this right now. But if I disassociate myself from Stripe and just kind of think as an observer sitting in 2032, I suspect that on average this is very good for the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
RH:
I actually agree because it’s partially refocusing the question about how to navigate both difficult times as well as the bull times. In fact, if you can actually turn it to a strength, you get much more competitive differentiation for doing it. So let’s dig a little bit more on that.
PC:
Well, and you’re forced to prioritize more, right?
RH:
Yes.
PC:
Look, even I’m being forced to prioritize more and it’s terrible. And in capital abundant times – and I guess it’s theater, you know, to want to be kind of a “Yes, and,” culture. Well when capital’s abundant, your product developments can also be a “Yes, and” culture. And maybe to some extent that’s good because you get to have some expansive ambition. But even because our customers are, on average, presumably going to be investing less over the next two years than say they were before, Stripe has some kind of overall averaging of that. We’re thinking harder about, “Well, how do we make sure that we’re appropriately calibrating what we are doing, relative to them?” And we’re making harder product trade-offs than we had to three years ago.
RH:
Well, and I actually think that’s embedded in what you’re saying: you want to keep the same level of ambition, but it has to be through a focused aperture. Rather than, okay, yes we can do that too. And we can do that too, we can do that too. Everything from Microsoft all the way down to the Series A, has to get more focused.
PC:
I think that’s true. So I started Stripe with my brother John. And John reads earnings transcripts in bed, and we used to be roommates. And then we got girlfriends and it would’ve been weird and all that.
RH:
And a wife now.
PC:
And now a wife, yes. But for the first eight years of Stripe, we lived together. And I’d be shuffling along to brush my teeth or whatever and he’d be yelling out, “You’ll never believe what they said in this 10Q.” And I, as a teenager, was really into programming languages and Lisp and all this kind of crazy stuff, but at least sort of aspired to being some kind of technologist. John was always super interested in business.
It was early in Stripe’s history, and I pitched John on, “Well we should just make Stripe free because we’d grow much faster.” And John’s like, “Interesting. Can you explain the business model embodied in that, to me?” And, I didn’t really have one. But from a technologist’s [view], from the standpoint of purity, I thought that was much more compelling.
Anyway, the thing that I think, was that there is some kind of yin and yang, where I suspect most people in this room self-identify more as a technologist than a business person. And I think that’s fine and good, and Silicon Valley is ultimately an ecosystem of technologists. We’re not New York, but I’ve certainly found over the years (and I’ve kind of experienced it myself), that it’s very easy to become, excessively, technologists.
And I think part of, [this question of] “What’s the difference between Steve Jobs One and Steve Jobs Two?” I mean, you can read that many ways. But I think Steve Jobs Two was much more a business person than the first iteration. And so maybe part of it’s the need to focus and all the rest. But I think part of what lots of companies – and again I include Stripe in this, as kind of the shift that we’re having to go through – is to not just acknowledge that, kind of reluctantly, “Okay fine, we’re businesses, I guess.” It’s to embrace the fact that we’re businesses and think about things like hurdle rates and IRRs all the rest as part of the fundamental raison d’être.
“It’s very easy to become, excessively, technologists.”
RH:
Yes. Although, maybe less IRRs and more the question of – similar to how we do compounding loops in growth curves and other things – is also the compounding loop in economics, is how the model comes together.
PC:
For sure. And yes. And actually there’s a book, some of you probably have read it. It’s kind of famous in some small little sort of factions, “The Outsiders.” Okay, I’m seeing some nods and smiles. And you can nerd out about data pipelines and the optimal way to do to, I don’t know, iterative data computation thing. You can nerd out about the optimal way to be thinking about return profiles. I think The Outsiders is the best single distillation of this.
RH:
And speaking of nerding out, we’ll come back to why Lisp was the language that you selected in the things-
PC:
Because it’s the best one.
RH:
Speaking of (we’ll put the nerd out on the side) micro pessimism, macro optimism. How does that cash out some? What are some of the ways that you operate culturally, make decisions, plan for both ambition and downside? What’s some of the way that cashes out?
PC:
The structural thing that the tension was trying to navigate is, I think there was just a fundamental contradiction in the startup mindset and this cognitive dissonance. Where, on the one hand, you have to be incredibly attentive to your problems and to recognize the myriad ways in which your product totally sucks. And if you’re oblivious to that, if you’re kind of just cheerfully whistling along, kind of Lego Movie style, everything is awesome. I haven’t actually seen the Lego movie, but I heard that referenced once. But if you’re-
RH:
It’s just like the book for Lazlo Bock.
PC:
Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So if you’re oblivious to this stuff, obviously reality is going to give you a rude slap in the face pretty quickly. I think the challenge and the tension is, if we’re kind of rubbing our own and each other’s faces in this, it’s easy to have that, I don’t know, drag in your spirits. And you simultaneously need to have this attitude that everything is terrible today, but we really have conviction that we can make it fantastic in two years time, in four years time, in six years time.
And so this idea of micro pessimism, macro optimism, part of what we’re trying to do is to acknowledge this tension and to give people structural permission to be extremely critical of that which exists today. Because I think otherwise people feel a bit tentative. “I don’t know, are they criticizing my baby? Can they say that our dashboard sucks?” Or, “This API sucks,” or whatever the case might be?
“You simultaneously need to have this attitude that everything is terrible today, but we really have conviction that we can make it fantastic in two years time, in four years time, in six years time.”
RH:
So shifting a little bit of our focus out some. One point you said the internet is the world’s most vibrant city and the equilibrium has yet to be reached. Where are we on the evolution of the internet? Are we still very early days? Are there places where we need to be making corrections?
PC:
So at our event last week, Masters of Scale, Hamsters of Scale, Reid asked-
RH:
You’re going to rename it Hamsters of Scale. You heard it here.
PC:
… Reid asked about technologies that I’m excited about. And obviously there’s blockchain and drones and AI and IOT and all the things. And I said one of the things I’m really optimistic about and we see burgeoning around us, is vertical SaaS and-
RH:
This is the right audience for that comment.
PC:
I’m seeing at least one nod there. Great. So every sector of the economy, not every single, but essentially every sector of the economy, is still fundamentally analog, bespoke, handcrafted, and not in the nice attractive handcrafted sense, but just in the horrendously inefficient sense. And all the tools that we benefit from in how we do business, I think 97% of the rest of the economy is yet to benefit from. We did this video with this company back in Ireland last week, they’re called Herdwatch and it’s literally SaaS software for farmers to manage their herds. And certainly today before Herdwatch and the likes, the cows are, they’re not being tracked in Google sheets, and the cows are not on Slack. But there’s just tremendous efficiency gains. And not just in the logistics of the farm, but how you do market making and matching and price discovery and actually quite fundamental things.
Now there’s FarmLogs, another company some of you might be familiar with. They do analysis of crops and optimal distribution and pesticide use to try to lower that and everything else, which is both healthy and cheaper. And it actually turns out, if you get into this, it’s like a whole burgeoning ag tech sector and so many different ways which software can be brought to bear. But again, we’re at a very early point in this distribution – Carlota Perez sigmoid.
So I didn’t quite know how to quantify it, but if I had to just offer sort of a point estimate off the top of my head, and again based on what we see from our customers and all the different platforms are going out trying to serve this, I think we’re still in the single digits, right? Because it’s all the different sectors in the U.S.. But then, of course, it’s not just the U.S. or Western Europe, you have to take stock of the full global extent of that. So on a truly global basis, I think we’re barely off the starting blocks. So, yeah, I’m whatever.
“Essentially every sector of the economy is still fundamentally analog, bespoke, handcrafted – and not in the nice attractive handcrafted sense, but in the horrendously inefficient sense.”
RH:
An optimist.
PC:
The fact that Jerome Powell correctly, presumably, is running the Paul Volker playbook, I think should not in any way diminish our optimism about the five to 50-year prospects of the technologies being worked on.
RH:
Yeah, no, I think that embodies the micro pessimist, macro optimist point from before.
PC:
Well, look. Again, I feel like maybe I was too cavalier earlier. Again, I do not speak with any wisdom, so just consider every answer in fact caveat with that. But especially in this one, Stripe started in 2010 and, exactly, has benefited from the longest bull market in postwar U.S. economic history. And so we, Stripe, have not lived through hard times.
But certainly from all the people I’ve spoken with, all the reading I’ve done, and just trying to get some sense for what might loom in our futures, I think that we once hired someone from Amazon, who was describing how after he started at Amazon, the stock plummeted by 70%. I’m like, “Oh that must have been very painful.” And he was like, “Actually no, I could deal with that. What was very painful is when it then fell another 80%, that’s when I started to feel bad.” And that was Amazon. And obviously these moments and these companies’ histories don’t tend to garner as much attention when the kind of ex-post facto Brad Stone books and so forth are written.
And so, much in all as I’m extremely optimistic, I think that these… You’ve lived through them. I have not. But my sense is, these cycles can be pretty intense.
RH:
They’re super intense and one of the things that I think is important to recognize is that it’s hitting everybody. And so your differential ability to swim through it, whether it’s Amazon, PayPal, other things, is actually, in fact, the thing that gives you strength.
I’m going to ask one more question and then open it up to the audience, just to give some breadth. So Patrick is comfortable exposing the hamster view on a wide variety of subjects, which is good.
So progress studies: why did you do the Atlantic article? What’s the key thing? What’s the lens of, “Why is it important?” Because this is a room of people that will agree with progress studies, but just may not be familiar with it.
PC:
Well, I suspect everyone in this room is united in the belief that progress – and by progress I mean just the overall, broad, society-wide betterment that we’ve all been beneficiaries of over the last, at this point, several centuries – that it’s possible, and that it’s important, and that it’s contingent. I mean, if you thought that we were just on some neat escalator ride to success, probably there’d be no need to start a company, someone else would do it.
So I think the kind of intrinsic, irreducible necessity of human action agency [is important]. And I found, in Ireland where I grew up, I think it is actually a case where people are very culturally aware of this. Because in as recently as 1960, Ireland was a destitute, autarkic, insular Catholic theocracy. And my parents remember getting electricity, and grew up in subsistence farms, and all the things. Like there was the big literature about Ireland being the sick man of Europe and what’s going on and so forth.
And basically, Ireland had bad ideas. We thought that being kind of closed off and walled off from other economies was a good idea. We thought that excluding women from the workforce was a good idea. We thought that having the Catholic church run our country was a good idea. There were lots of things. And then a couple of people made the case successfully that things should be changed. And Ireland had this explosive growth over the course of, essentially, my childhood. It was just kind of starting around maybe 1985, and then it kind of reached the peak, I guess, pre-financial crisis around 2008. So I grew up in the midst of this.
But as a result of that, the kind of sociology in Ireland was that everyone really knew that it sucked to not have the right kind of development ideas and that things can be so much better when you get the circumstances configured the right way. And then I came to the U.S. and I guess the U.S. has been a beneficiary and kind of rich and developed for so long that there seems to be more of some kind of shrug. And maybe even the opposite where you worry about too much development or too much growth or what have you. And so I think we’re not at the end of history yet. We have not developed all the ideas we need. We have not cured most human diseases, we have not solved climate change, we have mental health [issues], there’s lots of problems.
And so I’m trying to find some common hashtag that could generalize beyond just saying we should have more startups. What’s the unifying sentiment there that’s more expensive? And so when we wrote the article, we were trying to propose the label for that.
“We’re not at the end of history yet. We have not developed all the ideas we need.”
RH:
And I recommend it. I myself sometimes say “Yes, I’m a progressive. I believe in progress.”
And with that, questions? Questions in the audience?
RH:
Other questions? All right, I will go with one while you’re thinking. Other than vertical SaaS, which of the technologies do you think is most underrated in the way that it’s going to have an impact that entrepreneurs in the room should be thinking about?
PC:
Definitely AI.
RH:
And say a little bit more.
PC:
I’ve actually been an AI pessimist up to now. [By that] I mean, the difference between AI and ML is a bit of the sort of continuous redefinition, where ML is the stuff that is actually useful and AI is the stuff that’s not useful. And so it’s kind of tautologically true that AI is not useful. So acknowledging that, but in as much as you think there’s something more to this whole thing than good classifiers or whatever, I think that has not really been born out to date. The aggregate ARR of the AI sector – I mean of all the GPT-3 and the DALL-E and other image generation apps and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, and all these things. Summed to all the revenue of the GPT-3 and other LM users, Jasper and Copy.ai and all those companies, I don’t know what the actual aggregate revenue is, but I’m pretty sure it’s sub $1 billion and maybe it’s, I don’t know, but maybe it’s sub $250 million.
And so the market is saying it hasn’t really mattered thus far. I mean there are lots of things that don’t matter and are relatively economically inconsequential, until suddenly they’re not. And it seems to me that we’re reaching that tipping point with all of LLMs and various of the sort image generation, video generation, sound generation, speech generation, speech transcription, all this stuff together.
There was the paper in 2017 “Attention is All You Need” from a bunch of folks at Google, bringing into the world the transformer model. And it kind of seems that they might have been right and that maybe transformers are all you need, and the fruits of scaling up seem to be super high. And so I think 2023 will actually be the year of AI. And I say that as someone who has been on the substantially skeptical side to date.
“There are lots of things that don’t matter and are relatively economically inconsequential, until suddenly they’re not.”
RH:
I totally agree, but before I ask the next question, I want to see if there’s another question here. Okay, great.
Audience Member:
So you have a very unique situation of founding a company with your brother. I’m curious, I think there’s a lot of founders in this room, probably many of us have co-founders. I do. Do you think it was easier or harder? And then also: You’ve gone through so many phases, and your company’s 12 years old. What have you learned (in terms of working with other senior leadership and founders) that make that kind of a different special relationship, and what are things that have helped make you successful as a company, as a co-founder group?
PC:
Okay, I’ll try to give a very attenuated answer, because, I don’t know – you could probably bore someone for hours talking about all the co-founder dynamics.
But, so first, building a company is hard and it’s obviously hard in the case where things don’t go well. And the thing they don’t tell you on TV is, it’s super hard – or they didn’t tell me – it’s super hard, even in the case of where it does go well. And the Greg LeMond, who I think was a Californian, but the Greg LeMond quote, “It doesn’t get easier. You just go faster.”
And one builds companies at a kind of constant – the rate at which you can tolerate problems and everything else is kind of the variable that moves. And so you’re just constantly in this zone of maximum pain. And if you’re below that threshold then you take on more stuff. And you get yourself right to that peak.
And so given that, I’ve certainly found it extremely helpful and stabilizing to have someone else who’s in exactly the same boat as you, who’s been with you through the whole thing, has full context, but a different perspective. Just otherwise it ends up… I’ve tremendous admiration for the people who are doing this solo. And look, there are some phenomenal entrepreneurs who are doing it solo. And maybe Mark at Facebook is a perfect example. And evidently, empirically, that can work well. But it seems to me that it’d be quite a bit harder. And so I guess, my learning from that is, I think where they exist, those relationships are precious and worth really investing in and fostering.
Then, to the second part of your question?
“One builds companies at a kind of constant – the rate at which you can tolerate problems and everything else is kind of the variable that moves.”
Audience Member:
It was more about the journey you guys have been on. You answered some of it, the journey you’ve been on together, it’s been a long time.
PC:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. The big one is, how do I phrase it? Early on, I think both of us were much more insecure. Not to some crazy extent, but I guess we very much conflated Stripe and our leadership and our own personhood and those things were all wrapped up together. And I think that naturally so, because I mean it was a thing we had just made and so they didn’t have particularly separate identities. But I think something that’s been very healthy (and that I think if I could speak to me six years ago, that I would try to emphasize more, is, you are not your leadership style. And I now think of myself as, I don’t know, like when I go into work, I put on a MEC suit, not in terms of offensive capabilities, and smiting people-
“You are not your leadership style.”
RH:
And not literally.
PC:
Right. But just in terms of if someone said that the MEC suit sucks, I would not feel personally attacked. It’s just like, “Oh, I guess that little laser blaster is kind of shitty.”
I had a conversation with one of our leaders last night, and he gave me a long list of things that he thought I should do better. And I agreed with all of them. And I fully intellectually acknowledged that such a long list does exist and I could add more things to it. But I think me from six years ago would find that a much more uncomfortable experience. Whereas, now my mindset is much more, “He’s giving me excellent upgrade ideas for the MEC suit.” And so I think, I don’t know, that I’d be trying to yell all that to me six years ago.
RH:
Well that’s an excellent bridge to a question that we are going to be closing many of our sessions with. And so I’m going to ask you that question, which is, if you were to be yelling to your six-year-ago self, whether it’s five, seven, whatever, what would you most tell yourself about what knowledge would you impart? Not with the knowledge of the future, but what would you tell yourself to do differently? More of this, less of that.
PC:
I mean there are lots of specific things, but actually I think the meta one is, from which most others follow, is you are not your leadership style.
RH:
Yes. But when you say, you were not your leadership style, does that mean the fact is, you’ll always be learning and seeking to make yourself better and not internalize it, but to treat as an external thing, a skill set that you’re improving? O
PC:
Correct.
RH:
Yes. Okay.
PC:
Yeah, and it’s like you’re not… What’s an analogy? MEC suit is probably a bad one. Much too pugnacious.
RH:
Pugnacious.
PC:
Yeah, if I’m trying to think of a good example of something that people do create but is not obviously part of their identity. And maybe you could say their code or something, but people do get very possessive with their code. So anyway, I don’t know what the right analogy is. But yes, fundamentally that idea that it is, well both, it’s a separate set of skills, but actually it’s also a choice. And I think we kind of fall into these patterns. And again, I include myself, where you find a thing that kind of works and now that’s you, right? But actually, I mean, it doesn’t have to be you. And I’ve been very lucky where there’s other leaders at Stripe who have a kind of maturity to this and a sort of hard-won wisdom that I’ve learned a lot from. And I’ve even witnessed their evolution and changes. And there’s an implicit gauntlet there where it’s like, “Man, if they can grow and develop that much, like shit, what am I doing?” But anyway, all of that kind of bundled together.
RH:
Yeah, no, look, I think it’s excellent advice. And I actually think one of the things you embody is, it’s not just your MEC suit. It’s [the question of] how are you making improvements in your team’s MEC suits together? How are you playing sports together? How do you get your role increased, partnering well with them, et cetera?
PC:
Okay. Actually, all this philosophical mumbo jumbo is not that useful. So maybe a more tactical useful prescription is, actually when I meet companies that have product market fit. And I think when a company gets to that stage… like pre-product market fit, you should be scrappy and iterative and just focus on the product exploration in the space. Once you have product market fit, I think all the lean startup intuitions don’t carry over. And you become super focused on building a leadership team. And the question is always, “Who’s your leadership team and how well is it working?” And that’s a complete inversion from before. So maybe actually six-year-ago me, I would say focus more on your leadership team.
RH:
Well, as you can see why I always love talking with Patrick and every single event I do, I call him and ask him, “Hey, will you come on stage with me?” So for those of you who were at last week’s Masters of Scale event, you saw that. There will be more in the future. Please give him a hand.
