Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Abby and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the DigitalOcean Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded and all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you and I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Rob Bradley, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Abby. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today to review DigitalOcean's fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial results. With me on the call today are Paddy Srinivasan, our newly joined Chief Executive Officer; and Matt Steinfort, our Chief Financial Officer. After prepared remarks, we will open the call up to a question-and-answer session. Before we begin, let me remind you that certain statements made on this call today may be considered forward-looking statements, which reflect management's best judgment based on currently available information. I refer specifically to discussion of our expectations and beliefs regarding our financial outlook for the first quarter and full year 2024. Our actual results may differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. I direct your attention to the risk factors contained in the company's annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC and those referenced in today's press release that is posted to our website. DigitalOcean expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements made today. Additionally, non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are also available in today's press release, as well as in an updated investor presentation that outlines the financial discussion in today's call. A webcast of today's call is also available on our website in the IR section. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Paddy.

Thank you, Rob. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. I'm very excited to be here with you on my first call as the CEO of DigitalOcean. As today is my first opportunity to talk to you, I would like to start by sharing a bit about my background, why I was drawn to the DigitalOcean opportunity before providing an overview of our priorities for 2024 and highlighting the focus I will bring to the company. To start, I'm thrilled to be here at DigitalOcean. Having worked my entire career in technology companies and having a professional art that spans engineering, product management, and C-level positions, I have a deep appreciation for the opportunity that DigitalOcean has in front of us and strongly believe that I'm well positioned along with the DigitalOcean leadership team to help the company reach its full potential. I started my career as a developer and spent my formative years of my career at Microsoft, where I worked on various products, including Windows Server, a variety of developer-centric distributed technology, and finally the Microsoft Office Server team. As I progressed in the leadership ranks at Microsoft, I had hands-on experience building platforms aimed at developers working with independent software vendors and managing businesses with tens of millions of users. From Microsoft, I moved to Oracle to help launch its Asia R&D center focused on innovating products for the unique needs of that market. As an entrepreneur at Oracle, I picked up experience identifying market opportunities and developing platforms like mobile embedded databases with extremely small footprint and near real-time performance in a very low bandwidth network environment to meet those unique emerging market requirements. After Oracle, I co-founded Opstera, an application monitoring and managed cloud services platform. This experience, again, reinforced the importance of…

Thanks, Paddy. It's great to have you on board. I can tell you the entire DigitalOcean team and I are excited that you've joined as CEO, and we're very much looking forward to working with you to achieve DigitalOcean's enormous potential. In my comments, I will review our Q4 results and cover the full year 2023 financial highlights before sharing our first quarter and full year 2024 financial outlook and our go-forward capital allocation strategy. Q4 2023 was a good finish to the year with revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and net income per share, all exceeding the outlook that we have provided. Revenue was $181 million, which was up 11% year-over-year and was 3 million above the high end of our revenue outlook. This performance was driven by the stabilization of net dollar retention within our core business and strong execution on the Cloudways front, and we got some contribution from our recently acquired AI and machine learning solutions. We also delivered strong profitability as we continued to appropriately manage our investments, balancing investment for growth with efforts to improve operating efficiency in our core business, which resulted in adjusted EBITDA of $73 million, a 41% margin. Adjusted free cash flow was $29 million, representing 16% of revenue due to working capital timing and increased investments in our AI/ML capabilities in the fourth quarter. Non-GAAP fully diluted net income per share was $0.44, which was up 57% year-over-year as we continued to successfully implement our strategy of increasing operating leverage while executing our ongoing share repurchase program. As Paddy mentioned, and as it was for many players in the industry, 2023 was a challenging year with slowing revenue growth in the face of persistent macroeconomic headwinds. While top line pressure lasted longer into 2023 than we had originally expected, we saw…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And we will take our first question from Jason Ader with William Blair. Your line is open.

Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome aboard, Paddy. Wanted to ask you just as you’ve – I know only been in the seat for a few weeks, but from your perspective and observing, the business so far and talking to folks, where do you see the lowest hanging fruit for the company?

Yes. Hello Jason, nice to talk to you and thank you for the welcome. Yes, this is my day seven on the job. Last week, I spent the whole week in Boulder, Colorado with my management team and just taking stock of where we are and the plan ahead for 2024. Yes, I don’t want to comment on low-hanging fruit. For me, everything looks like great targets to accelerate our product roadmap. And as I was saying in my prepared remarks, I think it all starts with really understanding who our customers are and solving their challenges. So I’m super excited given the breadth of offerings we have, the – how much our product is loved by our customers, the community engagement, all of these things are great foundation for us to build on. And in terms of my priorities, as I outlined, it’s really straightforward. There are two buckets of priorities. One is accelerating innovation and delivering on the product roadmap. And there are several aspects of that, whether it is fortifying our core network capabilities and innovating on our infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service to the exciting world of AI/ML and everything in between, I think we have so much innovation to do. It’s going to be super, super exciting. The second thing is the experience that I bring in from GoTo and other places, which is how can we not only augment our product-led growth engine that has gotten DigitalOcean to where it is, but drive positive NDR by really establishing a great relationship with our top thousands of customers, exposing them to the breadth of offerings that we have in our platform already, and building a great drumbeat in terms of engaging with them and exposing them of all the great product capabilities that our teams are going to be rolling out. So all in all, I feel very energized by all of these opportunities. And of course, I’m going to be building a series of operational mechanisms to ensure that we are looking at all these initiatives one by one and driving execution across the Board. So I’m super excited to be here. Thanks for the question, Jason.

Yes. One quick follow-up on that. Just how long do you think it will take to see the return on some of these initiatives? Do you think it's like 2025? Do you think we could see some actual kind of material impact later this year? Just to give us a sense of the timeline that you're thinking about right now.

Yes. I think many of these initiatives are going to be long running, right. We will never be done with innovation or fortifying and enhancing our performance, stability, security kind of a thing. So I think a lot of these things are evergreen initiatives in terms of when you're going to start seeing results. I hope it is sooner rather than later in terms of the outlook that Matt laid out. I think it is a very appropriate outlook for the year given the year that we are coming off of and we will absolutely be laser focused on execution. So there's a great opportunity ahead of us and you can count on us to be very disciplined and be laser focused on execution.

Thank you and good luck.

Thank you.

And we will take our next question from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Gabriella, we can't hear you.

Can you hear me now?

Yes. Yes.

Okay, great. To Paddy, I want to pick up on the comment that Matt made about generating a higher growth trajectory exiting 2024. So, Paddy, either for you or for Matt, how do you think about what the sustainable growth rate is for this business and the sustainable margin profile that's alongside of that?

Yes. Gabriella, thank you for your question and nice to meet you. So you're absolutely right. My overall philosophy is to find the right balance between long-term growth and profitability. I'm a firm believer in the concept of growth at a reasonable price with growth being the ultimate value driver for all of us. And you heard Matt talk about this. I don't want to put an exact exit trajectory growth rate. I think it is too early for me to do that. But given where our core market is and where our developer customers are going, I think there's a tremendous opportunity in front of us in terms of participating in the AI/ML market and make the right responsible investments to help us accelerate our growth going into next year and beyond. I think you will find us be very active and busy in our product roadmap, not just on the AI/ML front, but also you saw just in the last few days, we announced the auto scaling capability of cloud-based called autonomous. You will start seeing a string of announcements and string of releases on our core infrastructure and platform as a service offering. So I think our job is to focus on delivering for our developer customers. And then once we do that, and we become very disciplined at doing that, I think the rest is going to take care of itself. There's no shortage of growth opportunities here, right. There's just so many different problems that developers face today that I'm super excited to start solving. And I think it's really setting ourselves up for the future. And I think we have the luxury of having such a strong foundational financial profile to be able to make quick, thoughtful, calibrated investments to help us lay the right foundation for next year and beyond.

Okay, that makes sense. And then the follow-up I have is a strategy question on how you think about AI/ML. If I were to oversimplify and think about DigitalOcean's value proposition, so much of it is tied to the bread and butter offerings, the ease of use, the getting SMBs and developers off the ground with straightforward configurations and usability. Help me understand where AI and ML fits into that. How do I reconcile the classic value proposition of simplicity with something that could arguably be much more sophisticated and target perhaps a different customer set from where you've traditionally participated?

Yes. It’s a great question, Gabriela. And that's one of the main reasons why I was so excited to come here and work at DigitalOcean, because I feel like the rest of the market is just making it a lot more complicated than it needs to be. And I'm a fundamental believer that the future of any kind of application development on the cloud is going to be AI and ML centric for the years to come, right? I've had a lot of background in the last few years, both at GoTo as well as at Amazon. And I'm a firm believer that we are in the very early innings in this space. And to your point about, hey, this is a market for very sophisticated developers, that's because everyone is talking about large language models and the GPU forms that you need to power them. But I believe that there's a lot more to this than just building and training LLMs. So there's obviously a hardware part to it, but I think the power of this is again going to default back to software. That's where the magic is going to happen. And we at DigitalOcean firmly believe that the durable competitive differentiator for us long-term is going to be in the software layer. And you rightly mentioned that developers are finding it extraordinarily hard to say, okay, where do I believe or where do I start my AI/ML application development from? Should I build a model? Should I train a model? What is fine tuning? What is RAG? Just so many buzzwords in the market today, we have a phenomenal opportunity to do what DigitalOcean's founding principle was, which is deliver the best cloud computing experience for developers, so that they can forget about the infrastructure and worry about the software that is going to change the world. We have that exact opportunity to do it in AI/ML. And we are going to unleash the same playbook in a different domain of AI/ML. So having said that, I feel the Paperspace acquisition is very strategic to us. The gradient experience, and I personally played on with gradient over the last few weeks, it is phenomenal. This is exactly what the market is missing today. And we have a lot of work to do to integrate. And we are very busy doing that integration between the gradient experience and the core DigitalOcean offerings. But as I said, this is super early innings in the world of AI/ML, despite all the hype cycle. So I think this is an opportunity that we are in the very early innings of, and I feel super energized that this is exactly in the wheelhouse of DigitalOcean. And every developer in the world that is going to build a cloud application will have to consume and make sense of the complex AI machine learning landscape today. And that's a great opportunity for us to add value to them.

Thank you for the thoughts.

And we will take our next question from Brad Reback with Stifel. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks very much. Paddy, given everything you just laid out there around the opportunity, why not invest more and faster, especially given some of the people you’re competing against or investing on for some that we’ve never seen before?

Yeah. Thank you, Brad for the question. That is a really important question. So I’ll start, and then I would love for Matt to give us a little bit of color as well. As I said, Matt – Brad, it is very early innings, right? And I’ve only been here for a week. So I think the strategy that we have is a very responsible strategy that balances the right mix of investing for our future while not being getting carried away by the hype cycle of today. And as I said, our long-term competitive differentiator is going to be in the software experience we provide to the developers. And we absolutely have to invest responsibly in the hardware that powers this experience. But we have to be careful not to, to try and become a hardware provider, which is not our long-term strategy. But we have to find the right balance and I am a firm believer that we are going to be very focused on looking at our value proposition, how developers are consuming our services, and we have the ability to calibrate the investment as we go along the year. So that’s – those are my early thoughts. But Matt, why don’t you chime in?

Yes. I completely agree that it’s a very similar model to the model that we have versus the hyperscalers today. I mean, we have a very small footprint of locations and a very small capital budget relative to any of the three hyperscalers. And it’s because we target a different market that doesn’t require that level of sophistication or that level of scale. And what you’re seeing when you see a lot of these companies raising massive dollars, they’re basically just providing bare metal solutions of renting the GPUs, and in some case renting them to the hyperscalers. That’s not a model that we’ll ever compete in at scale. It’s just we don’t have the cost structure for that. What we do have is what Paddy described is we have differentiation in the target market, and we have differentiation in the software layer, and that’s where we’re going to devote our investment. So we’re investing more in R&D and in the software layer, we clearly need GPU capacity. And as I said, we’ll spend $50 million this year in GPU alone in 2024, which is a big third of our capital budget. And that’s an appropriate amount I think given that we think that we’re taking a slightly different angle that we think is perhaps, I don’t want to say more durable, but it’s certainly got a lot of legs from our perspective, and we see a lot of long-term growth potential in that strategy.

That’s great. And then just one quick follow-up, Matt, it may be sort of splitting hairs, but the Cloudways contribution, I think you said 2% to 3% for next year. I believe last quarter you put it at 3%. So any specific changes there or is it just rounding? Thanks.

No, Brad, it’s just rounding. As you would expect coming out of the year, we wanted to establish a baseline growth rate that we and everyone can count on, and we’re going to build from there. And we’ve tried to be real clear on that and we’re not expecting any kind of major recoveries in the market. So when you look at the exit growth rates of the various businesses and products we have, that’s kind of what you get. And again, the NDR that’s assumed in the guide is we’re not assuming any macro improvement that all the NDR improvement that we have, which is still not much, we won’t get in the baseline plan to above 100 NDR to the latter part of the year. It’s all tied to discrete products and initiatives that we’re driving. So I just say it’s there’s no message in that number. It’s a little bit of rounding and it’s based on the December’s exit run rates that we’re seeing.

Perfect. Thank you very much.

And we’ll take our next question from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays. Your line is open.

Hey, thank you and all the best from me as well, Paddy. I just wanted to ask more about expansion into new areas and how you think about that. I mean, if you look at the last few quarters, it was more over M&A to get you into AI with Paperspace and Cloudways et cetera. Like, how do you think about that balance of kind of having internal product development and you talked that you’ve been at AWS and Microsoft versus kind of buying expertise from the outside. Can you speak to that please? Thank you.

Yes. Hello, Raimo, nice to be here. And I think my philosophy is, we have to do both in a market that is evolving quickly. And I don’t want to make this sound like it is all about AI/ML. I think we have a lot of core innovation left, both in our infrastructure platform as a service as well as in our Cloudways hosting offering. I think we have a lot of innovation left within the core DigitalOcean. And also, as I mentioned, we are still building the bridge between the gradient experience at Paperspace and the core DO offering. So we have enough to keep us very busy organically. But as you would expect, we are very diligent in scanning the landscape, whether it is to buy talent, as you’re talking about or buy new capabilities, which our customers will appreciate, expand from a geographical footprint perspective, there’s so many dimensions that we could add inorganic capabilities into our offering. So I’m super excited. And having the financial structure that we have gives us the opportunity to make the right responsible bets to accelerate our growth.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. And Matt, one for you. If you think about the environment out there, you mentioned in your plans, there’s no assumption of things getting better. But if you think about the linearity in the quarter and the different geographies as well, what has been your observation this quarter? Thank you.

Yes. Again, one of the things I love about this business is how the lack of concentration we have in any vertical or in any industry or use case or country. And so we’re pretty diversified on that front. And we haven’t seen any kind of one sector or region performing materially different than the rest. But what I would say is while the NDR was still 96% in the fourth quarter. We are seeing increased usage on the core DO platform. We saw that continue into January, it's continued into February, and we are seeing signs of, like we said, we expect NDR to improve over the course of the year, and we're seeing good leading indicators at this point as customers are starting to pick up their activity on the core DO platform itself, which has been kind of the real headwind of growth over the last several quarters.

Okay, perfect. Thank you.

We will take our next question from Patrick Walravens with Citizens JMP. Your line is open.

Oh, great. Thank you. And let me add my congratulations, Paddy. So my question is really basic. What is your philosophy of leadership?

Patrick, thank you for your question. So my philosophy in leadership all starts with the customers we serve. I think our purpose of existence as a company is to serve our customers, and if we do that well, and if we understand their needs and we deliver at a risk pace and solve their problems, I think the rest is going to take care of itself. And I think, as I mentioned, those are the couple of things that really excite me here. It's a large market, and we already have a very, very strong foundation. And it is a market in which our core customers, which are the developers, have an emerging set of very complex problems that are worth solving for. So my leadership philosophy starts with that. Number two is, we need to have, we are a tech business, so our technology has to be world class. So that's something that I'm going to be super focused on. And number three is, technology has to come from world class technology should come from world class people. I've been very impressed with the caliber of talent we have here at DigitalOcean, and we are really excited to get to work. And my job as the CEO is to, A, help us understand our customers very deeply, and B, put the right people in the right jobs to deliver innovation, to help take care of our customers. So hopefully that gives you an answer, which is not super fluffy or high level, but hopefully I will back up these things over the next several quarters with product innovation and delivery that backs up my leadership principles.

Awesome. Thank you.

We'll take our next question from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for the question and welcome Paddy. I was hoping you could give an update on the revenue composition between products, like how much mix is droplets or infrastructure-as-a-service versus platform-as-a-service, what products are contributing most in platform? And I guess I'm wondering if with the net retention rate below 100, like looking at the average revenue per customer, if some of the adoption of multiple products is sort of masked by lower consumption overall, bringing that average revenue per customer, keeping that more modest growth.

Hey Josh, it's Matt. We don't disclose the mix of the IaaS and PaaS solutions, but what I tell you is the PaaS solutions are growing faster than the core kind of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. So database and some of the other products and kubernetes are all growing at a more rapid clip than is the core kind of droplet and compute business. And that’s so the take rate of those services is very healthy. I think when you see that again, the big driver in the NDR challenges that we've had has been, as I've said, multiple times over the last several calls, its expansion is slowed. Right. The churn has not changed. It's right around where it was even a year ago. The contraction is a little bit elevated, but it's been fairly stable over the last, now seven, eight months. Where we saw the most pressure year-over-year, last year was in expansion. And that expansion was customers owned businesses just weren't growing as fast, and so they didn't need more compute. And so we didn't see as much growth in the core kind of droplet part of the business. And so I think that I'm very excited by the product roadmap that we have. And with Paddy coming on, the ability to even more focus on driving adoption and increased kind of take rate of our existing products into the installed base. Most of the headwind that we've seen, though, has been in kind of just the core droplet core compute.

Great. And just wondering, Paddy, if you're thinking about all the opportunity in front of you, all the growth levers available to you, how are you thinking about potential for future pricing increases over the medium term? And Matt, just wondering, in your breakdown of growth drivers for the year, is there any contribution from pricing embedded in those different categories? Thanks.

Yes. Hey, Josh. There's no factored in price increase as part of our outlook. And just my philosophy is, we will continue to have packaging changes and lineup changes, and we will introduce new products and premium capabilities and things like that, but nothing which is already baked into our outlook for this year. And my philosophy is, we’ll continue – we have to innovate and try new packages and different thresholds and things like that. So it's an ongoing thing. And as with any other technology vendor, we will pay close attention to what our customers are asking for. So that's my overarching philosophy.

Perfect. Thanks.

And we will take our next question from Pinjalim Bora with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Oh, great. Thanks for taking the questions and welcome, Paddy. Just two part, one question on Paperspace. Anyway to understand kind of the adoption of the MLOps platform versus the IAS [ph] side of Paperspace? Is the MLOps platform landing with customers? Are they using that more versus the IAS side of things? And Matt, maybe help us understand. You are, I think, assuming about 6 million from Paperspace this year, was that – did that land at that point, about 6 million, or was it more?

I can start. Thanks, Pinjalim. I'll start. It's Matt with the latter question. Yes, we came in right, exactly what we had expected. We had signaled, I think around 5 million, and we came in around 6 million for the year. And clearly on an ARR basis it's higher than that. That was just the last six months of the year, and we think that, again, that business should give us three points of growth on the entire business. So it's more than doubling on an ARR basis over the course of this year.

Yes. And to answer your first part of your question, I think it's a mix of both, right? So the MLOps platform needs a steady dose of infrastructure. And as we go into this year, as we start bringing the two platforms closer together, we expect a lot of our Paperspace or AI/ML customers to start consuming more of the DigitalOcean compute capabilities as well. So it's still early days. It's a little – so there are customers that are very heavy users of the AI/ML stack, and they might use a little bit of compute on an as needed basis. But then there are other customers who are in a steady state inferencing type of workload. So it is still a little training heavy, as you would expect, given the nature of what customers are trying to do with AI/ML. And many of our customers are in core use cases like text to image generation or text to video generation and those kinds of things. So it's a very heavy training oriented mode where it is a lot more of the AI machine learning ops, marshalling data, getting their data set organized, and just training the data set is what we are seeing a lot more of now. But once you get to the steady state is where the spillover to the compute side is about to happen in the inference stage. So that's why we're getting ready with our integration of the core DO infrastructure.

Thank you.

And we will take our next question from Tim Horan with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Thanks. Just a few clarifications, Matt. I think you said 50 million on GPUs this year. It's one third. So are you guiding to CapEx closer to 150 million for the year? And if so, how does that square with 20% free cash flow margins? Maybe I'm just missing some adjustments. And can you just give us some color on the outlook, [ph] the demand for GPUs? How confident are you that you can utilize that 50 million in GPUs? Thanks.

Yes. So the guide for the year for free cash flow is 19 to 21. So kind of 20 in the middle. It's consistent with we're not guiding to CapEx. I gave you general parameters of it so you can kind of sort it out. But we're pretty confident in our ability to hit that 19% to 21% free cash flow margin. As we demonstrated this year, we have the opportunity to drive material kind of leverage in the core DO platform, and we can use that to offset the incremental investments that we're making in both OpEx and CapEx in the Paperspace business. From a demand standpoint and this gets back to, I think, Pinjalim’s question before, which is, did we exceed what we thought we would do in revenue for AI/ML in 2023? Part of this is there's supply constraints, so you have to order the gear six, nine months in advance to be able to get GPU capacity. And even when you do that, the vendors, and these are major kind of tier-1 distributors, not kind of small shops, even then, they can't guarantee that you get it all and you get it all at the right time, and you get it all with all the right parts. And so there's a more of a –it's more of a supply challenge right now, to be honest with you, than a demand challenge. It's like, can we get it? Can we get it installed? Can we get it up and running? And we're also, again, very focused on the software side of things, which is an integration that we're doing between our platforms. And so it’s a – we're not worried at all about the demand. We're worried about how quickly we can get it turned up and available. And when you're starting, again, a business from this small size that when we acquired Paperspace, if you turn something up two months later in the month than you had anticipated, that's a big hit on the – in year revenue, which we're not that fussed about. But that's why we're, I think, being conservative in terms of the amount of revenue that we're going to drive off that capital in 2024.

And then, Paddy, can you – and all the due diligence you did, can you talk about who you think your primary competitors are? And Akamai acquired Linode, and they seem to be more focused on R&D and enterprise than SMB. Do you think competitive intensity is decreasing or do you expect it to? Or do you expect it to increase? Thanks.

Yes. That's a good observation. So yes, I think the competitors are who all of you can guess, right? And I feel when we are looking at our competitive posture, I'm always – I have a very healthy dose of founders paranoia. So I feel like every dollar has to be earned, every customer has to be earned. So we will go with the assumption that all of our competitors are fiercely coming after our customers. So I think that's the way I like to operate and push our teams to make sure that our innovation outpaces our competition and also out delivers in terms of ease of use and the ability of our platform to stand on its own and impress our customers. So, yes, Akamai/Linode, I have also heard what you just said, but that's not to say that they might not change their strategy in the next few quarters. So we like to operate, or I like to operate with that philosophy. So – and same thing for AI/ML. It's – everyone is throwing the kitchen sink at this problem. But as Matt and I have been repeating ourselves over the last hour, we'll focus on, yes, hardware is an essential means to an end, but our long-term durable differentiator is going to be on the software stack.

Thank you.

And we will take our next question from Jim Fish with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Hey, this is Quinton on for Jim Fish. Thanks for taking our question, and Paddy, look forward to working with you. Paddy, maybe for you, you talked about a focus on augmenting the self-service motion, investing more in a direct customer relationship. Is that something that's going to require a further increase in the sales rep headcount as we look to 2024? Or is this more of a rebalance of the existing resources within the sales team?

Yes. So it is – it is a factored into the outlook that Matt gave. So, yes, it is a rebalance, and we are not talking about building an army of salespeople, right? So, our customers are developers, and we have to – this is, again, going back to my core philosophy of we really need to be world-class in understanding our customers and their preferences and how they want to be reached, and so we are not going to start dialing for dollars and call our customers day in and day out. That's not what I'm talking about at all. But there are customers that are reaching a certain point in time of sophistication and requirement from our platform, which A, requires the platform to be rich, and number two is tasteful customer success and ongoing relationship to make sure that they're getting the best value from our platform, and many of our customers don't even know the breadth of or how much we have evolved since they started their journey with us. So, I think it's a great opportunity for us to wave the flag and make sure that we are engaging with them in a very scaled manner, so – and also using technology to make sure that we are establishing that relationship at the right time with the right set of tools to raise the visibility and offer them help on an as-needed basis. Matt, I don't know if you wanted to add any color on the actual expense outlay.

No, you nailed it, Paddy. The plan we have already factors in the refactoring and kind of investment in the sales and marketing part of the guide.

Very helpful. Then maybe a quick follow-up. Matt, I think it's for you. We've talked about in the past crypto being a headwind to top line. We've seen a little bit of improvement in the underlying pricing. Has that correlated to any sort of return in usage on the platform, or maybe what are you seeing from that specific vertical? Thank you.

Yes. We've looked exactly at that for the reasons that you described, and we haven't seen nearly the kind of surge that we had seen in the past. We are seeing, as I said, more usage on the platform, and we saw increasing kind of usage patterns in January. We're seeing that increase in February, but it's not coming disproportionately from crypto. As we had said previously last year, crypto was down to like 2% of revenue, so it's not by itself a needle mover at this point.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

And we will take our next question from Mike Ciko with Needham & Company. Your line is open.

Hey, thanks for getting me on and taking the questions here, guys. I wanted to start first. I know that you guys are talking to some of these investments in direct sales and customer success. Wanted to get a sense here, can you remind us what is the time to maturity for these reps, and also what's the profile of the customer that you're looking to invest in as far as taking them through the solutions to increase attach rates or better serve those customers?

So, yes, so first of all, it's not that we are starting from a clean slate. So we do have people in roles that are already engaging with customers, both on the customer success side and sales perspective. So I'm too new to answer your question in terms of what the ramp up time is going to be for new reps, but I just want to make sure that I'm not inadvertently signaling that, oh, we have to start from scratch, and nobody has thought about this so far in the company. So in terms of just the types of customers we'll go after, it's both a looking at the top consumers of our platform with an implicit nod to the fact that the more you consume the more you would want to have a trusted relationship with your biggest platform providers. So that's one. Number two is we are also investing in, we already have technologies that we have invested in that gives us great visibility into customers that are about to hit a certain threshold of usage and consumption that we can get ahead of and be proactive in building a relationship with. So that's more of a technology enabled engagement, if you will to augment building this relationship to drive expansion and reduce churn with some of our top consuming customers.

And I would add that the third kind of leg of that is as customers, we get millions of visitors to our site every month, and tens of thousands of those sign up as customers. And three, four months later, you get kind of shake out which ones are viable customers and which ones are grow. And part of that sales motion is taking those customers as they come on and trying to figure out which ones have growth potential. And they may only be spending a little bit as they're dabbling with our platform, but they might be part of a bigger company and there's a bigger workload that they could bring. And so part of that go to market motion is triaging those customers and figuring out which ones are the higher value prospects, and then making sure that you're disproportionately helping them through the onboarding and trying to understand what their potential is.

Understood. Thank you for that, guys. And then for the follow up, I know last quarter, Matt, you had given us some great parameters around that retention. I remember churn had been relatively stable at 12%, contraction had improved entering the quarter – September quarter at 16%, and you exited at 15%. Based on your comments today, is it fair to assume that churn and contraction were stable and the big overhang on that 96% IOR [ph] we're seeing today really ties to the expansion rates? Or is there anything else to consider?

No, no, I think you’ve got it. I mean, this is frustrating because it’s a rounding, but we actually saw improvements in all three over the course of. If you look at like June – July to January, it’s actually a, it’s a much better than it appears. Improvement part of the problem is the way we define NDR. It’s averaged over the months. So it’s the July, the third quarter number was the average of July, August and September, and the fourth quarter number is the average of the three months. But if you look at the actual months, which you can’t, because we don’t disclose that, but there’s actually more kind of steady progress. It’s still modest. So it’s clearly, if it’s rounding as an issue, it’s not massive improvements, but we have modest progress on each of the three dimensions over that period. And as I said, January was a strong month in terms of usage and NDR for the month, and February is looking good as well. So I’m confident that it will continue to steadily go up, and I would expect it to go up at a faster clip than clearly what it did in the third to fourth quarter.

Makes sense. Thank you for the color there Matt and looking forward to working with you as well, Paddy.

Thank you, Mike.

And we will take our final question from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Yes. Thank you so much, Paddy. Congrats on the role. Look forward to working with you as well. Paddy, you mentioned focus on product innovation, enhancing developer experience, but as Matt mentioned, you have very diversified customer base. So how are you thinking about prioritizing across these use cases? I know you mentioned several, including SaaS or back end of web, game development, e-commerce, a bunch of those. And is there a specific, maybe intersection of that with the product roadmap that you mentioned between security, resiliency, storage, networking, et cetera, that really stands out or jumps out as that the area that you would tackle first? Or how are you thinking about prioritizing these?

Hi, Wamsi, very nice to meet you and look forward to working with you again. I think in terms of the workloads themselves, the workloads might be very diverse. Yes, you’re right. But the core capabilities that most of these workloads need are fairly finite. So you have the core network, core compute, different types of storage, and even in AI and machine learning, again, it’s a very finite number of work capabilities that they need to power, whether it is a classification type of workload, or a large language model, or any other type of AI machine learning workload. It is about making sure you have the data curation right and figure out the data pipeline and you have the right training and right inference infrastructure. So, I feel fairly confident having dug into some of the platform capabilities that we have and also spent a bulk of my time last week going into the customer feedback and looking at what our customers have been asking us for. I think the priorities are very overlapping between these workloads. So I think if – and I think we have enough to keep us super busy over the next several quarters in terms of product innovation and the prioritization of the roadmap. And I think most of what we are going to be doing and most of what we have actually released, like for example, I mentioned the cloud-based autonomous functionality. Regardless of whether you’re an e-commerce store or any other kind of web hosting customer, auto scaling and sophisticated rules based configuration are universal, more or less. So, I feel fairly confident that our innovation is going to impact multiple customers across different workloads. So as we go along, I’m pretty sure that we will find ways by which we can accelerate specific workloads as we get into the later part of this year. But I feel fairly confident that we have a robust roadmap that addresses a broad set of functionality.

Okay, thanks Paddy. That’s helpful. As a follow-up, Matt, the incremental quarter-on-quarter growth of learners and builders seems to have decelerated a bit in Q4. How are you thinking about the trajectory of growth in customers over the next few quarters, just directionally over the course of the year, maybe?

Yes, that’s a good question. Wamsi, I’d say one of the things that I’ve been paying attention to is the incremental ARR. Clearly I’m looking at the customer count. I’m less worried about the customer count because it’s such a broad set of customers that we have. And again, churn is not a factor. So, I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity for us to accelerate the growth of the customer base. And as we drive these new capabilities into the market or into our platform, that’s where we’re assuming the growth comes from. Not that we suddenly drive tons and tons of new customers on the platform, it’s more growing the existing customers. But when you look at the ARR growth and you take out paper space from the third quarter, clearly the first and the second quarter were really light in terms of incremental ARR growth. But then in third and fourth quarter, we got back to closer to kind of historical levels at around $18 million in incremental ARR, excluding what we picked up from paper space in the third quarter, $17 million in the fourth quarter. And with the increase in usage that we’re seeing it’s not again, it’s not being driven by we have tons of more new customers, it’s because the customers we have are starting to spend more. That’s what is giving us optimism as we go into the beginning of this year.

Great. Thank you so much.

And there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Mr. Paddy Srinivasan for closing remarks.

Thank you all for your time and really excellent questions and great engagement. As you can tell, I’m super excited to roll-up my sleeves and get to work. Lot of great opportunities to innovate, enhance our product offerings and really augment our great product led growth motion. I am looking forward to working with all of you and meeting many of you over the next few months. Thanks and have a good rest of the day.

And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s call and we thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.