Ohad Gilberg 0:00:42.2:

Hello, everybody. I hope you all had a fantastic lunch. Please file in, come closer. This is a giant room. Super excited to be here. My name is Ohad Gilberg. I am a vice president in our technology, media and telecom business. I've been at Anaplan ten years, and I've had the pleasure of working with Shelby and Netflix for nine-ish of those. So, it's great to be able to talk through their story, and have Erin here as well to represent a full picture of how Netflix is leveraging Anaplan to drive real business transformation. So, why don't we start off with a couple of intros before we get into the heart of it. 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:01:28.2:

Hi, my name's Shelby Galvin, I lead the planning technology team that's a part of the broader finance engineering organization at Netflix. My team partners very closely with FP&A teams, like Erin's, to implement Anaplan and anything we really need from a planning perspective across the org to help with forecasting and planning and process improvements. I've been in Netflix about eight years, so, yes, it's been a while. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:02:00.7:

Amazing. Erin. 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:02:01.7:

Awesome. Hi, everyone. My name is Erin Riemersma. Shelby and I are both in LA, but I'm a Chicago native, so it feels so good to be home. I'm from Orland Park, southwest suburbs. Woo, I heard a woo. It's been a cool journey for Anaplan. I've been at Netflix for five years, but before that I was in CPG. So, hearing the earlier conversation about Mars and some of the things they're going through was very relatable, and definitely some of the things we face here at Netflix. I represent the business in this conversation, so my team is a hybrid between corporate FP&A, which you heard about this morning, and the content and marketing businesses. So, we support co-CEO Ted Sarandos and help him manage our spend, nearly about $20 billion across the world. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:02:50.9:

Awesome. So, before we get into a bit about Netflix company objectives, goals, raise your hand if you have heard of Netflix. Okay, raise your hand if you were pissed about the password sharing crackdown? Didn't tell you guys about that one before the presentation.  

 

Erin Riemersma 0:03:10.6:

There's a lot of other exciting things that offset that. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:03:14.3:

No, we're just messing around. Obviously, Netflix, iconic company, and everybody knows what it is, so we don't have to go into details about that, but definitely wanted to give you guys a chance also to just kind of open up about where Netflix is going as a company, some of the strategic investments Netflix is making that maybe we're not aware of. 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:03:33.7:

Yes, that's a great question. It's been, for both of us, a really exciting journey, five and eight years respectively, to see the growth of Netflix, starting out as DVDs and how it's evolved even in the last decade. As it hits more maturity, growing top line and bottom line is still of the utmost importance, but we're getting more mature and we're starting to look at our processes a little bit differently. There's two big pillars that we think about is content and delivering what all of you want to see, and that content continues to evolve. If you've been keeping up with some news, we have been dipping our toe into some live initiatives. So, any Bears fans out there, you may have enjoyed the Tom Brady Roast that just happened. That was a huge success for us. We announced WWE starting in 2025. Then we just announced the two Christmas Day games are going to be exclusively on Netflix. So, things like that are the fun consumer-facing strategic initiatives of how our content continues to evolve.  

 

Erin Riemersma 0:04:40.2:

I think, behind the scenes, we're becoming more global. Our user base is no longer US dominant. We're having consumers all over the world. With that, from a finance perspective, local currency planning, understanding how our headcount is growing, where our investments should be made, it's such a global picture now. So, managing those strategic initiatives, staying nimble, I think where Netflix thrives is how fast things move and how we react to what's going on in the market. So, having that ability to stay nimble is really important. Then, as a finance organization and technology, how do we support that? So, that's what we're really excited about. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:05:18.7:

Yes, and that's 100 per cent thanks to Anaplan, presumably, that nimble… 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:05:22.2:

One hundred per cent.  

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:05:23.1:

Yes. Okay, so let's go into just a little bit of overview about what you guys are actually doing with Anaplan. Hopefully, this works. There's nine screens I can look at. So, yes, just maybe give us some of the highlights of that eight-plus year journey with Anaplan in terms of the use cases and the outcomes that you guys have been driving? 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:05:44.6:

Yes, absolutely. So, maybe while all of the success of Netflix can't be attributed to Anaplan, we are able to allow our FP&A teams to spend a little bit less time in the detailed minutia of budgeting, and really spend more time on these strategic initiatives and making sure that we have budgets and funding in the right places. So, when we look at our nice little honeycomb here, you can see some of the areas that we support the business inside of Anaplan. We started out about eight years ago with our marketing expense forecasting, and this is a really connected model. So, we have our marcomms leads in the system, doing their title prioritization, inputting their marketing budgets. They're also doing some procurement cycles there, requesting POs, looking at how their budget is trending against how much they've spent. Then we're also able to aggregate all of that together for FP&A.  

 

Shelby Galvin 0:06:49.7:

The next area that we implemented after marcomms was our consolidated workforce. Historically, this has been employees plus requisitions, but more recently we're redeveloping this model to cover positions. So, we're doing a change within our HRAS to shift from job management to position management. So, that shift is requiring quite a bit of redevelopment, and we're in the process of doing that now. Then the more recent implementation that we've done is with customer service planning. What we're able to do there is our partners are able to see what our contact volume forecast is. They're able to go into Anaplan, see those contact volume forecasts, and then update the forecasts for our agents. So, it's very connected and allows us to aggregate all of that up together for FP&A to then submit to corporate. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:07:50.7:

Yes, and I'd probably venture a lot of folks in the audience, customers, are going through that same switch to position management. It's something we're seeing a lot of companies doing, and it's an industry trend for sure, at least in the technology world. So, it's great to see that you guys are going through that. Maybe, Erin, you can talk a little bit about - so you've been working with Anaplan from the marketing and the workforce? 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:08:17.7:

Yes, on both models. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:08:19.0:

Both of those, yes. So, maybe touch on, a little bit from the business perspective, some of the results you got from implementing those processes, how you guys - and we're going to do our best to tie everything to enterprise connectedness and decision excellence today for you guys, so if you can just pull out some anecdotes… 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:08:37.2:

Yes, for sure. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:08:37.8:

…for how you drove that. 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:08:38.6:

I'm going to start with the marketing one because that's more fun. I think, from a marketing perspective, we always had the ability to track our spend, and I try to connect different industries. You can think of our different titles as different SKUs, and we want to understand around the world how are we spending on our SKUs, aka our titles? We had the ability five years ago to do that, but it took my FP&A friends in here, it took us a lot of time to make sure to aggregate the reporting, understand where everything was coming from, and get a final report out the door. I think, as the business continued to grow, as our marketing budgets continue to grow, we, as a finance, said, how do we go from spending so much time on just making sure we have the information to figuring out what we get to do with this? Many of us know marketing is that lever on your P&L that you can deploy the fastest, you can cut the fastest to, but that ability to understand where do we spend the next best dollar, and if we have a better understanding of how teams are tracking, how title budgets are tracking, it allows us more flexibility to make faster decisions.  

 

Erin Riemersma 0:09:45.2:

That truly was the North Star of taking on this Anaplan project, where we said it is worth the time and investment to make our Anaplan marketing model better, and now it is so much more efficient, I can tell you a single title, how much we spent in every country around the world, what we spent on different forms of media, different forms of PR, and we have our users, which is our marketing and PR stakeholders. We keep it pretty simple for them. We work with them on having a title budget, how are they spending to it, and then it's finances job, through Anaplan from start to finish, to say here's a title's budget, here we use algorithms and the such to predict, here's how that expense is going to happen over time based off of a launch date of a show. So, we have a launch date of the show, we understand where we're spending, and we can back into phasing assumptions to get us an 80/20 kind of forecast. Then we're able to report on that. So, when we get constant questions from internally or externally of how we're doing on certain titles, it's a lot faster.  

 

Erin Riemersma 0:10:47.2:

The last point I would just make quickly on the marketing one is really some fun real-life examples is that by making the process better, we've been able to deploy the dollar faster, and the most fun when we get to do that is when there's titles that are hits that we didn't expect to be hits. So, everyone gets their marketing budget, it's based off all of our internal predictions, and then something like Squid Game happens, something like Queen's Gambit happens, something even like Baby Reindeer, for those that have watched it recently, happens and it allows us to react quick to say, okay, where do we know we have some money? Okay, boom, we can do it, go deploy. Through Anaplan, we've taken so much time away from the data mutiny and put it towards actually creating some value. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:11:31.8:

That's really cool and I would… 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:11:33.7:

Workforce, sorry, I forgot about workforce slightly, the not as sexy one, I guess, but equally as important. We have grown as a company and we're now global and there's so many more employees than there was ten years ago, and it's a constantly changing environment. We reorg, we adapt to whatever is happening. So, the ability to have more sophistication on our workforce planning, again, takes the time away from our teams of figuring out where all these heads moved, to be having much more streamlined reporting. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:12:02.3:

Yes, and that's used across all functions, right, so anybody with headcount, exactly. 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:12:06.4:

Yes.  

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:12:07.1:

So, just to tie that back, marketing, great example of vertical connectedness, you've got that whole function all the way from the bottom level forecast to your top level leader probably understands where the dollars are going. Sounds like you've increased the accuracy of your forecast and you are making better decisions. You're deploying dollars in a nimble fashion, if you will, to where they're going to maximize the return. 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:12:32.9:

That was actually a theme that came up in the Mars presentation earlier of just like that, the balance between the human bias and constantly kind of refining what your assumptions are versus using AI and just technology and historical trends to help you simplify your forecast. What Oscar was speaking about earlier resonated so much with me, as a Netflix employee, of how do we constantly balance and use things like Anaplan to allow us to lean into the history and the trends that we know and then eliminate some of the human bias where we can and that fine line that we walk. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:13:06.0:

Yes. Awesome. Let's shift gears a little bit towards - unless there's anything else you want to add on the call center, the customer support side of things in terms of those outcomes that you were able to drive? 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:13:18.0:

Yes, I can speak to that for a couple minutes maybe. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:13:21.6:

Seventeen seconds.  

 

Shelby Galvin 0:13:22.7:

Seventeen seconds, great. I think for call center planning, one of the biggest wins we have there is there's just a lot of detail in the contact volume forecasts. We also partner with our data science teams to ingest into Anaplan a forecast baseline for call volume. From there, we're able to use some drivers in Anaplan and some adjustments from FP&A when we know there's going to be a shift in plans or a price increase or password sharing crackdowns, like whatever is going to… 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:13:56.0:

Or ads.  

 

Shelby Galvin 0:13:56.9:

Yes, or ads. Whatever we know is going to increase the contact volume for those areas, we're able to make those adjustments, and because we have our call center partners directly in the Anaplan models, they're able to log in and see the contact volume forecasts, make adjustments to how many agents they're forecasting. That then feeds the expense forecast that FP&A needs to aggregate for corporate. So, it's a very connected model. All of our ecosystems at Netflix are connected in this way, and it's something that from the beginning we identified as such a huge win to bring more than just the FP&A teams into these models. If we're going to make the investment, we might as well look at the entire planning process and pull in any one that makes sense for efficiency. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:14:48.8:

That's really great. I did not plan this ahead of time, but the marketing one is sort of vertical, the workforce planning is a horizontal connectedness, and then you have external. You have partners that are not Netflix employees going into your models too. So, very cool examples. Let's talk a bit about the execution side. So, this is all the outcomes you guys got and delivered for your business, but talk about how you partnered together as a team between technology, business, various stakeholders. What's your overall strategy and I guess way of working to get that adoption and change management in your organization? 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:15:30.3:

First of all, I'll just say it's so fun working with Shelby, and to have your FP&A and your technology partner truly in sync and getting along and having conversations and being able to have even sometimes the hard debates is welcomed. So, I'd say the first thing is really establishing that partnership on projects from the very beginning. I think we've all been in situations where sometimes someone got brought into the loop a little too late and it got a little chaotic. So, we talk about, as things are happening, how do we, from the very beginning, get on the same page? I think there is also trust and that doesn't just happen naturally, that's something you work towards, but trusting each other, holding each other accountable and also over communication, that's something we constantly talk about is if you think you should tell someone, tell someone, and how do we then make sure as problems come up that we aren't dealing with the fire, but we just see it as it's happening. That has proven really successful for us, as a couple things I would name. 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:16:35.9:

Yes, and something else I think I would add is that it's really important to have partners within the business who are able to kind of deeply understand the technology, because when you're looking at a process initially, it's always through the lens of a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets have certain limitations, or we've created processes or steps in the process a certain way because of those limitations, or because of the way that spreadsheets themselves come together. I think that when you take a little bit of a step back and you partner with the business very closely to help them understand what's possible within the tools, then you're able to work with that team, and both partners are able to guide the process to become more efficient and to utilize the technology to its full capabilities. Then I always plug this and I'll probably talk about it a little bit later as well, but I think making sure that you're also partnering with the other teams outside of the two groups that are leading the charge here.  

 

Shelby Galvin 0:17:35.3:

So, we always bring in accounting, we always bring in procurement, we always bring in the business to understand what their reporting needs are, and that's part of the deep understanding of whatever use case you're working in, and then having some integration, support and investment in making sure that Anaplan connects very deeply with your other finance tools and with your downstream reporting tools is also very important. I think it helps create, maybe not the illusion, but an actual true connectedness where the business doesn't really need to see the, sorry, you can't have this because we need to update the spreadsheets and it takes X amount of time to update. It all just feels very seamless to the end user. 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:18:21.7:

I think just one other comment I would make to piggyback off of you, I think it was a comment in the earlier session, understanding your lane too. Someone made a joke of like, hey, FP&A, you're all about trying to go be like data engineers after this. I think there is, again, a fine line of we want our teams to understand systems. As an FP&A leader, I want my teams to be able to understand and speak the language, but I don't expect them to know everything. I love when we're in a meeting, and there's a couple of Netflix people here, they show us something and I'm just in the back of the room going, this is so effing cool. That is my job is not to know all the things, but when they bring them, to embrace them and ask questions and figure out how they can fit in with the business. So, I think what our success has worked is we have a good understanding of what the other person is doing and what their problems are, but that ability to stay in our lanes and maximize how much value we're driving in our lanes. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:19:21.7:

A lot of great insights, first of all, but the inverse of that, what would your recommendation be to folks who are maybe a little bit earlier, they're not in year eight or nine of the journey, they may be in year zero or one, maybe some of the gotchas or tough lessons that you learned as you navigated this, that you would share with the audience here? 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:19:46.7:

We've talked about this of you can do your best. I think back to the first model that we did and we thought we were so all over it, it's like we are thinking through everything that could possibly happen, we have pages of Google Docs with all the requirements laid out, we've talked to every stakeholder, and you're never close. I mean, you're close, but never at 100 per cent. I think in the early days it was being surprised by something unexpected, things that happened. While getting requirements is so important at the very beginning, it does evolve over time. I think creating that flexibility and being nimble to understanding here is the North Star and the primary requirements of what we're trying to do, but leaving some space in project timelines and the such to pivot where you need to, that is something now that we build into our project timelines and communications, that we didn't quite build in as much in the first few models. So, I think that's definitely one of the lessons learned that I would share is stay flexible in how the project's going to evolve over time. 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:20:53.6:

This is maybe a little bit of a more technical answer, but I think, especially in the early days of a project, something that can help contribute to success is let's look at the data from day one. Don't put the data integrations and validating data toward the end of the project, that needs to be a parallel process to every other thing that's happening in the model. I think that that's always a best practice that's listed and you start out making sure that that's one of the early project deliverables, let's get the data. I think that there's just a lot of opportunity within that data for things to be missing, for you to not really understand how it's coming from the source system. I think especially with missing data, that caused a lot of gotchas early on in projects, especially as I was really understanding the lay of the land of Netflix data and like where it all came from. I think that if you can really make sure that you are working through all of the data inputs and the outputs with all of those partner teams that I mentioned earlier, then I think there's a lot less opportunity for those gotchas that tend to really delay project go-lives, like when data is missing or it's incorrect, or there's a spreadsheet that someone's manually editing and you didn't know they were manually editing it and there's changes that are happening between the accounting system and the reporting tool that you're pulling it from. I think that those types of things can cause pretty big project delays. 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:22:29.4:

That's all new news to me. I've never heard - I'm just kidding. I would also add in, also hierarchies. I laugh of like how many hours we have spent talking about hierarchies, the core part of that data, and you sometimes I think want to jump to the fun, sexy, like let's build dashboards and see how cool this is going to look, and I think it's really being grounded in what is the foundation of your house. It's like you can add on whatever you want to your house, but if the foundation is not right, you're screwed. I think that is where we really put the time in to say what are the real, true foundation of what we need and we build on top of that. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:23:06.3:

That was such a great example right there of one of your things that you recommend is having your business teams and your users understand what the technology can do, that's a success driver, and you just showed that, you're talking about hierarchies and you're the business users. That's very cool. So, just thinking about moving forward, what are you guys looking to do, both as a team and how you operate, how you want to evolve that and maybe just looking forward for Netflix plus Anaplan plus other things you're doing? 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:23:43.5:

So, one of the areas that we're making a ton of changes right now is actually something I mentioned earlier, and it's with a shift in our HRAS system moving from job management to position management, and what this means from a long-term data implication perspective is that it's going to be a lot easier for us to track the history of a specific position over time. We're not going to have to do these reverse lookups over and over and over again to understand this employee filled this rec, which was a backfill for this employee which filled this rec, throughout time. It makes it a lot easier for us to understand how orgs changed over a set period of time and that really allows us to understand where we maybe made mistakes in org design in the past, how we can be better at that in the future. Then I think it also really unlocks a lot of potential for us on understanding what budgets should look like at a level that's lower than our standard accounting coding.  

 

Shelby Galvin 0:24:40.7 

So, budgets at an individual manager level for certain areas, instead of being at a cost center level, and really be being able to manage that holistically across Netflix instead of it being in a bunch of Google sheets that are manually maintained by the FP&A partners for a specific org. So, it creates a lot of consistency, and I think that's something that we're really looking to do across the board from a workforce perspective, and will help really unlock a lot of capabilities we don't have today because the data is so messy associated with job management. Of course, there's a lot of policy and process and structure you have to put in place to actually get good data from position management, but it does feel like we're doing all the right things there. So, we'll be able to utilize our tools to utilize the good data instead of having to do a ton of manual work to get to where we need to be. 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:25:36.8:

I'd say the more 10,000 foot level, I think Anaplan is great, Anaplan is not the only tool that we use at Netflix, but I think it's just we put so much effort into whether they're internal Netflix tools or Anaplan of how do we figure out the connectedness of all of our tooling? So, that has been a big initiative at Netflix in our finance org is how do we improve upon the individual tools themselves, whether third party or internal, but then how do we bring that all together? So, that's to me where this continues to evolve is that individual focus tool by tool, but then how do we create better reporting, better visualization across all the reporting from our tools? I think, for my FP&A folks here, I think our jobs in this too, as far as what the future looks like, we are that seat at the table that has the early prediction of where things are going to evolve. We're at the LRP table, we're at the strat plan and annual planning tables, and I think part of our partnership is when you get wind that Netflix is going to do ads, your job as the FP&A person is to make sure that you're sharing that with your technical partners. Shelby's team owns that roadmap of what does the next three years look like, but FP&A is a big partner of that to say what - there's so many things your company wants to do, how do you prioritize them and what do those timelines look like? So, I think it's having set plans of how do we want to continue to grow our technology, but leaving space for the fun surprises that come along the way. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:27:20.3:

Okay, so I think we've got about eight minutes left for some Q&A. Not going to make the Grammy joke about the timer, but we have eight minutes and eight seconds, six seconds. So, let's get some questions out there. I have a few extra ones, but whoever out here wants to ask something, please ask something about AI, I dare you. 

 

Audience 0:27:49.3:

So, we're very early, we're at year zero in our Anaplan implementation, and our FP&A team, they're wonderful people but they're just straight-up Excel people right now. So, how do you do that skill-building with them? How do you encourage them, not drag them, how do you develop that culture where they're excited about and really getting invested in these new tools? 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:28:10.3:

I love the caveat, by the way, I love that you're like, they're good people, however. I think of 15 years ago when I was starting in my FP&A journey and it was all Excel. I think of it almost like change in life. It's like when you don't really know something, you're resistant to it, and I think in that spirit it's like, hey, I'm doing what I'm comfortable with, what I'm used to, and you're telling me that this is going to make my life better, but I haven't experienced it myself, so I'm just hesitant. That applies to so much in life. I think part of what helps is showing the use cases, and I'm sure you guys have done that, but continuing to be patient with them, and showing examples like Netflix and Mars and other people that it's, here's data and here's examples of how this can be better. I think making sure you have space from a time budget, etc., that you have the space to train. I think we have seen in our organization those that fully embrace finance technology, it's like this is a cool part of my FP&A job is that I work on technology, and sometimes we have folks that are more resistant to it, and the ones that are more open are the ones that are kicking ass and doing better. I think that's the messaging of showing them the possibilities and trying to help them with the change management of it all. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:29:38.4:

That's a great question. The other thing I'd just add, and I obviously work at Anaplan, so I'll evangelize it, but one of the things I've seen with all the projects over ten years here is that because you can develop things pretty rapidly and at least develop MVPs or prototypes, finance folks are used to long implementations where something arrives a year later and they're told they have to use it. That's the backdrop that a lot of folks are coming from. So, the more that you can show them, they can have access and visibility into what's coming and that you can change it rapidly, to your point, when it doesn't exactly meet their needs, that will win a lot of hearts and minds. 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:30:20.1:

Very tactically in an implementation cycle, while you're doing the build work, once a week you should have a stand up with the FP&A team, get their feedback, and then the following week show them exactly what you changed, how you made it better, how you improved upon it. Those very real-time examples of those things always really help with my team, really getting people a good understanding of the system.  

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:30:46.5:

Got one right here.  

 

Audience 0:30:49.0:

As you talk about expanding your model, I hear lots of implementation model building. I'm a small shop and so I have to think about make versus buy. So, I'm curious as to how you all expanded. Do you rely a lot on your outside partner? Is your team big enough that you all can do all these? So, kind of just talk through make versus buy? Where did you make your own decision? Where did you have success? What were the lessons learned on make versus buy? 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:31:14.8:

So, I think at Netflix, with our initial implementation, we worked with a partner, and then at the end of that implementation, I joined Netflix full-time, so I stayed on and I led a small one person COE for a while. Now that we've expanded quite a bit, we kind of have a little bit of an implementation shop inside of Netflix directly. So, my team is filled with folks who primarily come from implementation consulting, and so we're able to operate as this small implementation partner just directly with the business. I think that that has a lot of benefits, because it really allows the folks on my team to get this very deep understanding of the business, and then they're able to really iterate quickly as big changes come up very last minute from FP&A, whether that's a strategic shift we're making in FP&A, a new initiative we're trying to invest in, whatever that looks like, my team is able to help address it very quickly. Then for larger rebuilds or larger implementations that we do, I will engage with a partner. Right now we're working with Spaulding Ridge, and they're helping us with this workforce implementation and supplementing the model builders that I have on my team, and I think that that model works really well. 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:32:43.7:

Then I also do have a couple of integration engineers that work on my team, and they're able to ensure that we are very deeply connected with the other finance tools, which, at Netflix, that means workday and our downstream data warehouse. I think it's a combination, you're always going to need help from partners because it's never really going to make sense for you to have a giant enough team to handle any implementation you could possibly do, but I think having the in-house experience, at least one person who really understands Anaplan very well, is going to really pay off in the long run. 

 

 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:33:21.5:

I think too, even just Netflix is the hybrid of big tech and entertainment, and I think sometimes we act more as entertainment and sometimes we get to be big tech. I think, with that, comes the constant question sometimes of make versus buy and some things we choose at a higher level to say, hey, we have the data science engineers to build something ourselves, versus, hey, there are really great third-party tools like Anaplan that are better to use, and we have an implementation team in-house. I recognize that comes with some bigger budgets. I think it is still a tradeoff that we always look at. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:34:07.8:

Anybody else out there have a question? I have an extra one, if nobody does. It's directly interrelated with what you were just talking about. So, a big part of what we presented on earlier is our strategy as a company to develop applications for repeatable business problems that we help our customers solve. So, financial planning is obviously one that applies to literally everyone on Earth. So, wondering just what your take is as a person who runs a COE and is developing models, maybe how you see Anaplan becoming a platform that also delivers out-of-the-box applications that you can add on to? 

 

Shelby Galvin 0:34:54.0:

Yes, I look at solutions like this as a way to kick start the implementation process. I think that I would love my team to spend less time naming modules and adding line items to modules, that's not a super value add amount of work for them. I think that they're able to and excited by other types of work, and instead of spending a ton of time creating this baseline setup for a model, then being able to spend more time building the cool things, building the things that we really need to be customized, that's just a better use of everyone's time. I think it also will allow my team to cover a lot more area in a much smaller amount of time. So, I think that this hybrid approach of let me get this 60 per cent baseline from something out of the box and then be able to customize it from there, that's going to just save my team a lot of time. When we were talking about this earlier, Erin mentioned job satisfaction as a part of that. Nobody loves creating lists, that's not an activity that anyone enjoys, but it is a necessary part of the models. If we're able to get that really solid base, then the cool stuff comes, the marketing phasing and the comp modeling and things like that, that we're doing inside of the models, that's actually challenging and value add. 

 

Erin Riemersma 0:36:18.4:

That's our last comment is that it's more fun. It's more fun when it's better and the processes are better and the reporting is better, and your teams probably feel that. How do we, as leaders at Netflix, continue to invest in what's best for Netflix, of course, but the day-to-day culture of it, and it's that satisfaction that people get of working on these projects, seeing how much better it is, seeing them feel like their work and the many hours we put in are leading to more value added. I think we've seen the transformation even in our own staffs. So, we'll leave it on that note. 

 

Ohad Gilberg 0:36:49.7:

We'll leave it on that note, the red light is flashing. So, thank you all for your great questions and your attendance. Thank you guys for being fantastic partners.  

 

Erin Riemersma 0:36:58.2:

Come say hi, we're around.