Monthly Archive

So I’ve been watching this meme travel around the blogosphere, thanks to Jeff Pulver who started the whole thing.  Incidentally, Jeff has now become the recipient of some severe tongue lashing by several folks regarding his spurious marketing tactics in promoting this meme.  In any case, you’re supposed to list 5 things people don’t know about you and then tag 5 more people to see how far the meme travels. 

If not for this game, I would have never otherwise known that Dave McClure used to be a donut eating champion, Robert Scoble is a closet nose picker, Stephen O’Grady has a rubber band fetish, Jim Jagielski has never lived more than 25 miles away from where he grew up (!), and Sam Ruby has only ever dated one person in his life (!).   I also had a good laugh watching Loren Feldman’s response, which I found by following a thread to Jason Calacanis’ list. 

I love this game - I’m really fascinated by and enjoy learning about people.  I got tagged by Kevin Burton, so here’s my 5 things:

1. I am addicted to Pirate’s Booty.  I eat 5 bags of Pirate’s Booty a week.  I love all kinds of cheese puffs, but Pirate’s Booty is definitely the best.  I am also addicted to celebrity gossip sites like PerezHilton, PopSugar, and Dlisted, even though I know that by visiting these sites and consuming this information, I am contributing to the downfall of humanity. 
2. I once made a living as a jewelry designer.  I like manual labor a lot.  It’s like meditating, in a way.  Here are some photos of stuff I created:



3. My first official, paycheck paying job was as a waitress when I was 14.  The job paid $4 an hour.  It never paid any tips either, because it was in the dining room of a retirement home in Irvine, CA.  This job sucked.  I had to buy pink oxford shirts and khaki pants that I would have never worn otherwise.  However, I learned one important lesson: waiting on tables is hard, thankless work.  I don’t have a natural talent for it because I have a crappy memory.
4. When I was in my early 20s, I cofounded and wrote the business plan for a company that we took public a couple of years later at a $600 million+ valuation.  The company never reached its potential and innumerable mistakes were made along the way.  The most important thing I learned can be recited directly out of “The 10 Commandments of Entrepreneurship”: the first handful of hires will set the tone, culture, and values for the entire company, so make these choices carefully.  Are the people you’re surrounding yourself with people you would trust your life to in the trenches? If not, it’s better to err on the side of being conservative and grow more slowly.   The culture you build compounds exponentially in often unpredictable ways, so plant those seeds very carefully.  I hope to never make this mistake again.
5. I felt most alive when swimming off the shore of Kailua (in Oahu, Hawaii) this summer. 

The 5 people I tag are George Zachary, Bill Tai, Matt Asay, Jonas Luster - who has a gargantuan vault of fascinating stories, and Raph Koster - because I want to see this meme jump the tracks to the gaming universe.

This year’s holiday card from Blueprint Ventures totally made me crack up.  Like all things that are comic genius, there’s so much in it that resonates as true. 

Gary Snowman is a successful entrepreneur who fantasizes about the decadent and jetset lifestyle he imagines venture capitalists lead.  Ah, yes, Venture Capital is a ‘lifestyle’ job, but as he says towards the end of the video, “Life as a VC isn’t exactly as I expected.”

Disappointingly for Gary Snowman, it turns out that being a VC involves long hours, lots of hard work, and a lot of hustling.  His assistant interrupts his reverie with, ”I have your itinerary for your trip.  You have a 6:30am to Boston, an 8pm to Minneapolis, a 10am to Chicago, and a 2pm to New York. And business class was too pricey so you’re going all coach.”

This is funny because it’s so true.  It made me think of my typical week here, which basically involves running from meeting to meeting to meeting.  Here’s what my average week has looked like:

And lest you think it’s because I’m the newest person of our team, I would have to say that the partners here work even harder.  It reminds me of my days as a cofounder of a startup - you’re fighting for market share in a ruthlessly competitive environment and ultimately, the company is no more and no less than what YOU put into it. 

There is also this interesting dynamic - all of these meetings on my calendar are with other people - with entrepreneurs, potential portfolio company hires, potential partners of some kind - so I spend the bulk of my day socializing with other people, yet as Seth Levine has noted, it can still be somewhat of a lonely business.  Fortunately for me, it suits my personality type and interests well, but it is an interesting dynamic.   More on this later. 

Raph Koster announces his new company, Areae - and we at Charles River Ventures are very excited to be part of this journey.   I’ve known Raph since 1994 or so - back when we were MUD developers, and I’m excited to support him in finally realizing the dream he’s had since starting Legend MUD. 

Though Areae is still very stealthy, Areae sits at the intersection between Web 2.0 and MMOGs.  If you think about it, the Web 2.0 and the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming communities have largely been pretty siloed - gamer developers go to game industry conferences and Web 2.0 folks go to Web 2.0 conferences, and there has not been enough intermingling between the two communities. 

But both industries have been inching closer and closer together.  I predict that the successful online communities in the future will continue to more strongly resemble MMOGs.  And MMOGs will continue to extend their reach and exposing their data to other Web applications - either formally, by the developers/publishers themselves, or informally by folks like Rupture. 

Here’s what the 2 communities can learn from each other: Game designers have been creating rich, fully immersive environments for years.   All of the design principles that I thought about when I was designing MUDs are identical to the issues facing Web designers today - how do I create more immersive environments? How do I give participants -equity- in this virtual world? How do I make users feel like real citizens in my social ecosystem? How do I create better scale around world and object creation? How can I expose building tools that were previously available only to Admins and Devs to the end users - and make them dead simple to use?   How much content should I pre-seed and what content containers do I think users are going to be more likely to want to customize and make their own? 

For Web 2.0 designers, there is a brilliant, must-read presentation that Amy Jo Kim put together about how to intelligently apply game design principles to Web 2.0 services to make them richer, more compelling, and more immersive (read: “sticky.”)

Yet, the Web 2.0 crowd knows a lot that the game devs don’t: how to create massively scalable, low barrier to entry, micro-chunked experiences.  How to create appealing, mass market products that are appealing to a diverse demographic.  How to iterate quickly and create production processes that give you tremendous economies of scale around innovation. 

I’m excited by the possibilities - Raph has brought on an excellent team and advisory board.  It’s time the Web 2.0 and Gaming communities begin collaborating for the betterment of all users, everywhere. 

Here’s some of the coverage on Areae thus far:

GameBiz Daily:

“I would describe what we’re trying to do as marrying together a lot of the philosophy of the web and web 2.0 with virtual worlds,” Koster told GameDaily BIZ. “We’ve been paying a lot of attention to how the Internet is going. If you remember my speech at the Austin Game Conference last year about whether or not the games business is full of giant dinosaurs… a lot of that ties into this.”

CNet:

Koster is not divulging much about Areae, but the company’s site alludes to its pure, massively-multiplayer online game DNA: “We’re working on some new tech that will literally change how virtual worlds are made. We’ve got a cool world or two incubating on the back burner.”

Gamasutra:

With what sounds like a firm emphasis on user participation, as well as user customization and content, all central tenants of the Web 2.0 ethos, we make an obvious leap toward the current open virtual world leader, Second Life, which Koster laughingly dismisses. “See, you’re already jumping to conclusions about what we’re making! Honestly, there are as many differences from Second Life as there are from Everquest.” He pauses, but concludes, “I’ll just have to leave you tantalized.”

One of my favorite features of other peoples’ blogs is seeing what they are paying attention to, so voila…

• All but Ageless, Turtles Face Their Biggest Threat: Humans, NY Times
  [made me think about the giant turtles I saw when visiting the Galapagos Islands a few years back. Here's a photo of one that the turtle expert said was probably 120-140 years old.]



• China’s virtual currency threatens the yuan, Asia Times Online
  “The so-called “QQ” coin - issued by Tencent, China’s largest instant-messaging service provider - has become so popular that the country’s central bank is worried that it could affect the value of the yuan. Li Chao, spokesman and director of the General Office of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), has expressed his concern in the Chinese media and announced that the central bank will draft regulations next year governing virtual transactions.”
• Physiologist and Music expert releases research naming the top 5 happiest, saddest, and most exhilirating songs, Ireland Online
  “The Drugs Don’t Work by The Verve tops a list of songs which make us sad, according to a scientist.”

The press and Wall Street have been abuzz with debate over whether the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 will walk away as this generation’s dominant console. I think they are missing out on the fact that the Nintendo Wii has a good chance of becoming the market leader by sidestepping the battle for the table scraps of the hardcore gaming market and focusing instead on expanding the console market — similar to how Runescape and World of Warcraft have expanded the MMORPG market rather than just fighting for the hardcore fans of Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot.  

Let’s put it another way: while the PS3 and XBox360 have been busy duking out to see who can be the most tricked out consumer hardware box in the living room, the Wii might just sneak up behind them and take their lunch money.    Nintendo’s 3 ^rd place showing last generation helped pigeonhole them as an also-ran this time around, despite the fact that although the XBox outperformed the Gamecube in absolute volume of units sold, the Gamecube was a profitable venture for Nintendo, whereas Microsoft lost somewhere in the vicinity of $4 billion dollars over the XBox’s lifetime.

Why the Wii can win:

• Control system that non-gamers can instantly ‘get’
• Simple games like Wii Sports that make use of that controller
• Vast library of pre-existing games to play, from older game systems like the NES, SNES, Genesis and Turbo-Grafix 16
• Nintendo’s first-party titles (Zelda, Mario, Super Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, Pokemon, etc), which will keep bringing in the millions of Nintendo fanboy and fangirls
• Simple and portable system, can easily be brought over to grandma’s house for holiday dinners and hooked up to her crappy old SD TV.  Grassroots viral marketing!

Nintendo’s brilliant strategy is making some Wii games extremely easy to play, simple even for people who have never before played a videogame. Consider Wii Sports, which ships with the console - bucking the trend of the console industry, which hasn’t seen a manufacturer do a factory game pack-in for a new console in a long time.  Wii Sports is a collection of sports games including Tennis, Bowling, Baseball, Golf, and Boxing. Playing a game of tennis on the Wii is as simple as grabbing the Wii remote and swinging it around as you would a tennis racket.   Playing golf is as simple as swinging a golf club.  Social and simple with low user commitment - exactly the right strategy.

Photo: Wii Sports Tennis

This may seem overly simplistic to hardcore gamers, but the mapping of your real world movements into the game (albeit it in a highly simplified fashion) is just plain fun! More importantly for Nintendo’s bottom-line, it is just incredibly easy to understand.  Your mom can play the Wii.  Your grandparents can play the Wii.  Your 4 year old niece can play the Wii.  Heck, even my fat cat can play the Wii - though he hasn’t proved to be very adept at running after the ball. 

If you put such simplistic, easy to play games on the PS3 or the 360, you would still run into a LOT of people who wouldn’t even take your word for it that it was simple to play.  They would take one look at the controller, with its approximately 500 buttons and go into that “I can’t do that, that’s too hard” mode that non-geeks go in when confronted with anything technical that can’t be easily parsed at first glance.  The Wii Remote bridges over that, because the average person can see you swing the device and see your little Mii swing at the same time.  They then feel they can do it too, because they can understand how it works.  

A lot of the battle here for non-gamers is psychological - it’s a matter of convincing people who were never into games or ex-gamers who abandoned games due to the rising complexity levels to pick up the remote and give it a few swats to convince themselves that, yeah, they can do it.  And boy, it’s fun too!

Nintendo has already successfully executed a similar market expansion strategy in the handheld device space with the Nintendo DS.  The DS’s trick was a touch-screen with pen based input.  From a technical perspective, this is nothing new -the PalmPilot and WindowsCE devices have been doing that for ages.  But Nintendo is the first major company to build a focused gaming device around this idea and it paid off, launching the Nintendo DS into the hands of young and old, gamers and non-gamers.   Kotaku writes about how the DS and the game Brain Age ‘exploded the notion of what a game really is’.   (yes, others like Tapwave tried but failed because they didn’t understand the unique advantage that the pen-based input gave them, not to mention the fact that they were way overpriced and lacked developer support.)

People know how to use a pen, they can see someone playing Brain Age or the Sudoku minigame within it and just instantly understand how it works.  There’s almost no learning curve, and the Nintendo DS has been an immensely huge seller because of that, thrashing the Sony PSP which followed the Xbox360 and PS3 route of focusing their competitive advantage around advanced graphics for hardcore gamers.   Nintendo succeeds because they are focused on solving the core user need - helping average people have a lot of fun - rather than becoming hopelessly mired in a feature / functionality battle with historic competitors.  (MMO developers, consumer web product designers - are you paying attention?)

Nintendo hasn’t forgotten the hardcore Nintendo fans either.  The #1 selling Wii game at launch is the latest installment of the epic Legend of Zelda game series and IMO, this is the best Zelda yet.  I’m 20 hours into the game and still having a blast.   And, other than Knights of the Old Republic and a few other anomalies, I pretty much hate most single player games.  All of the usual suspect Nintendo franchises such as Metroid, Mario, Super Smash Brothers, will be coming to the Wii as it is also backwards compatible with the Gamecube.
 
Of course, nothing is perfect, but Nintendo is really on track to accomplish what it set out to do with the Wii - grow the overall console gaming market.  When I show my Xbox360 running Gears of War to my non-gamer friends, they’re all very impressed by the realistic graphics but few become compelled to actually try to play the game themselves.  When I show my Wii running Wii Sports and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz to the same crowd, everyone wants to play (those extra 3 wii-remotes and nunchuks come in hand for doubles tennis) and after a few minutes of playing they all ask the same questions: “How much does this thing cost?”  And after I say $250, they then ask, “Where can I get one?” 

Photo: Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz - Anyone can hurdle! Even monkeys in transparent plastic balls! Whee!

[Random: I love Super Monkey Ball!  When I went ornament shopping for my Christmas tree earlier this week, I really wanted AiAi and MeeMee ornaments. Does anyone know of anyone that sells such a thing?]

Though I may write about ways entrepreneurs can improve in their efforts to woo and pitch VCs, make no mistake about it: Entrepreneurs are the Customer in this relationship and VCs are merely the service providers. 

I say this because even though a regular part of our job involves saying no to highly qualified entrepreneurs, the process of deciding what VC firm to work with is a mutual one.  It’s not enough that we might want to work with you. You, as the entrepreneur, have the decisive voice in this matter.  It’s a significant decision, much the same way a marriage is.  And you should only enter into this relationship if you think the VC you’re committing to is one you want to be partners with for the long haul. 

(Fred Wilson and Rick Segal have also written great posts about the topic of “Entrepreneur as Customer” on their respective blogs.)

I attend about 30+ pitch meetings a week.   The reason why I bring up this topic of entrepreneur-as-customer is that a pitch meeting is a good chance for you to ask YOUR questions of the VC as well - something many people don’t do. 

Here’s a list of the most common mistakes I’ve observed entrepreneurs make when presenting:

• Talk about the team and your backgrounds as early as you can in the presentation.  This helps us understand why you are particularly well suited to solve the problem you’re tackling.  Who you are can be more important than what you are building.  This is even more true for very early stage companies.   Also, it’s very helpful if you tell us where you think you need to add to your team to round it out.  Being able to realistically inventory your personal strengths and weaknesses as well as understanding how to fill in these gaps is attractive. 
• If you have a working product or prototype, please demo it!  Don’t just mention the fact that you have a working product on a slide.  If you do demo your product, try to do it earlier in the presentation rather than later, because this gives us valuable context for the rest of the meeting. 
• Don’t forget to mention what the financing opportunity is.  How much are you raising? What milestone will it get you to?  Why is this the right amount? Why is this milestone the right milestone?  The amount you’re raising shouldn’t be arbitrary - it should be driven by some well formed assumptions you have about why X milestone is the logical first step to winning in this market.  And by the way, the actual milestone is less important than the thought process you used to reach that conclusion. 
• Do research on the people you’re meeting with.  You should know the backgrounds of the people you’re meeting with so you can better tailor your presentation to their worldview.  Be familiar with the firm’s portfolio companies.  Read up on any interviews the person you’re meeting with might have given recently about their investing style.  If you’re coming in for our QuickStart program, read up on the terms that are published on our web site. 
• Don’t be afraid to ask for guidance.  If you’re uncertain in which direction to take your presentation midway through - don’t be afraid to ask your audience what they would like to hear more about.  (e.g. “I could take you through a few slides about the technology infrastructure or we could spend more time on the partnership strategy - which would you find more valuable?”)   
• Don’t be afraid to rein in your audience.  If your presentation gets sidetracked by too many questions that you don’t think are critically important to understanding your business, don’t be afraid to say, “I would be happy to answer those questions offline, but since we only have 15 more minutes, I want to make sure I get to the really important stuff about X and Y.”)
• Don’t spend too much time on generic market trend data.  This is especially true if you have done research on your audience.  For example, if you know that the person you’re meeting with has already invested in an advertising arbitrage play, you probably don’t need to spend a lot of time telling him/her that the online advertising market is growing at X% a year.
• Be careful of using too much extraneous material in your presentation.  Making heavy use of props such as press clippings or professionally produced videos deters from the primary goal of getting to know who you are.  Unless of course, these props convey something about you or your business that you can’t convey yourself.  We want to hear from you - dynamically and in real time - why your business is so exciting.  

First, thanks to:

Valerie Cunningham and Net Jacobsson for these photos.  John Furrier and Podtech for podcasting the event.  Stanford MBA2 John Anderson and CRV’s Kim Morioka for helping us coordinate the event. 

The premise:

60 pitches in 60 minutes. 4 judges - 3 from Charles River Ventures - me, Bill Tai and George Zachary and 1 celebrity guest judge - Matt Marshall from Venturebeat.   The first half of the contest took place in the Stanford MBA cafeteria - noisy, chaotic, and fun. 

Contestants wait their turn to pitch: 

The judges: me, Matt Marshall, George Zachary, and Bill Tai

The judging criteria: 

The judges scored each contestant from 1-100, with 400 being the highest possible score a contestant could earn.  The criteria? Because contestants only had 60 seconds, this wasn’t intended to be a business plan contest.  We were hoping this could be a fun, educational experience for the Stanford MBAs to learn how to communicate their ideas succinctly and persuasively in 60 seconds or less. 

There are some salient, real world reasons why being able to mount a convincing argument in 60 seconds or less can help you as an entrepreneur.  For example, we’ve received numerous business plan submissions in the first month since launching our CRV QuickStart seed financing program - it’s an imperative for the entrepreneur to make as strong of an impression as quickly as possible.  Or, you may find yourself on an elevator with Rupert Murdoch and want to convince him why he absolutely needs to acquire your startup if he has any hopes of properly monetizing all of the MySpace traffic.  Except, he’s getting off on the 6th floor, so you only have 40 seconds.  

In both cases, what the pitch represents is a means by which you can capture our imagination and make us want to learn more about your idea.  With the Entrepreneur Idol contest, we weren’t looking for fully baked or fundable ideas.  That’s incredibly difficult to convey in 60 seconds.  But the purpose of the 60 seconds is to get us salivating to hear more of what you have to say.  Were you authentic in your delivery? Did you come across as being credible?  Was your general target market attractive? Did you make a logical, persuasive argument?  Did you make us believe that you could be a great entrepreneur to back?

(Tip: Research your VCs before you pitch them.  People tend to fund things they are personally excited about.  It makes your job easier if you seek out people already immersed in your space.) 

 The results:

The judges chose 5 finalists based on the scores.  The top 3 got to present in front of an auditorium full of their peers.  In true American Idol style, each of the top 3 pitched, received feedback from each of the judges, and the audience chose the winner by clapping and making noise.  

The winners, Jeff, Rohin and Ned (left to right) - sorry the photo is blurry:

1st: Ned Tozun, MBA2 - Solid state LED for the developing world
2nd: Rohin Dhar, MBA2 - Online job recruitment services
3rd: Jeff Piper, MBA2 - Hedging instruments for residential real estate market
4th (tied): Vanessa Stanley-Miller, MBA2 - Kid-centric online video service
4th (tied): Ben Savage, MBA2 - Location based mobile game platform

Closing thoughts:

Based on student feedback, people had a lot of fun and it was very educational.  For them, it was illuminating to see the top 3 deliver their pitches in front of a big audience - they could learn from their peers and from the feedback we gave after each pitch.  Moving forward, I’d like to have all 5 finalists (and perhaps more) give their pitches in front of the larger audience.  The margin of difference between the top 9 scores was very small and most of the learning happens by watching other people pitch in real-time. 

We at CRV were very impressed by the quality of the pitches - by the delivery, the ideas themselves, and the enthusiasm of the contestants.

Statistics:

Shawn Fanning’s new social networking service, Rupture, was announced with great fanfare yesterday.  Since he’s kept it remarkably stealthy, it’s impossible to discern what he’s really building.  However, there was some concern in the blogosphere yesterday that Rupture may violate World of Warcraft’s terms of service agreement.  Given that Shawn has demonstrated an acute ability to learn from his Napster experience by delivering the successful Snocap service, I would be really surprised if Rupture did not play well within the ecosystem that has already created around WoW. 

 Yes, there’s already a thriving ecosystem of developers building atop the WoW platform.  Think of as a Salesforce.com-style AppExchange for the World of Warcraft environment.  There are already hundreds of individuals and small dev groups out there building very cool UI, management, and communications modification for your World of Warcraft experience.  WoW has done a good job of creating the hooks to allow people to extend the WoW gaming experience.  Many games have done this in the past and I’d be surprised if all future online multiplayer games didn’t support something similar.   APIs, like open source, facilitate economies of scale around the development process and create network effects for the core product. 

 I spoke with Matt Marshall over at Venturebeat earlier today about why I think there’s a need for Shawn’s new service - Matt’s article is here.  I haven’t seen Rupture so I’m only speaking from the perspective of being an average player who sees an opportunity in the market.  Matt’s article links to a number of different services that I pointed him to, that provide some subset of the functionality that Rupture seems to be aiming towards.  But there’s still market opportunity for someone to provide a cohesive and comprehensive toolset that sits atop the core WoW experience - wrapped up in a UI targeted towards the average user.  Right now, I suspect that most WoW mods are downloaded primarily by the hardcore raiders and PvPers. 

Also, most services right now are geared towards making your core gaming experience more efficient or helping you locate game-related information - there’s definitely opportunity in providing tools that help people discover, communicate, and build relationships with other folks.  After all, your average MMO player spends 20+ hours a week in game.  That’s a lot of people with some strong similar interests. 

Remember the old Betamax vs VHS standards war?

Sadly, my family made the wrong choice and I have a box of Beta tapes of my old figure skating competitions languishing about somewhere.

There’s a similar war being waged right now between competing high definition DVD standards — Toshiba/Microsoft/etc’s HD-DVD and Sony’s Blu-ray.  Blu-ray and HD-DVDs look and generally act like normal DVDs but they support video resolutions that are about 4x the existing DVD format. The most prominent (and cheapest, if you can find one) players are the Playstation 3 for Blu-ray and Microsoft’s HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360.

The impact of the DVD format wars is currently spilling directly into the gaming industry’s latest console generation as Sony designed the Playstation 3 to be a fully fledged Blu-ray DVD player as well as a gaming device. Sony’s strategy in this area was pretty sound – use the PS3 to trojan horse a large installed base of Blu-ray players, giving them a potentially large and early advantage in the high def DVD battle. 

The execution of this strategy has not gone so well, however, as the Blu-ray part of the PS3 has been one of the primary reasons the device was delayed several times (the PS3 ended up launching a year after the Xbox 360) and also a reason why Sony has been unable to produce the PS3 in bulk.  This has resulted in a huge supply shortage and a very small installed base for the foreseeable future. Given how dependent Sony has become on its gaming division to make up for losses in other divisions, these production problems (and the resulting botched PS3 launch) are likely to be cited as a serious misstep for the company, particularly since - for reasons I’ll go into below - it seems increasingly likely that the high definition format war is unwinnable by either the Blu-ray or the HD-DVD contingent.  In essence, Sony has bet their future on a technology that is currently very shaky at best, and which has the potential to pull their gaming division down from the dominant position it currently enjoys. It remains to be seen how well they manage to fix the PS3’s current production problems in the second act of the console’s life, but if the device remains as costly to produce and as difficult to buy as it is now well into 2007, it is easy to see Sony’s PS3 related costs running blood red, turning the go-to profit division of the company into yet another money loser for the company.  Paul Kedrosky has a good blog post here about how Sony is losing several hundreds of $ on every unit sold. Microsoft employed a very similar upfront loss strategy during the Xbox 1’s launch (as an attempt to gain market share in a market that most people considered pretty locked up,)losing about $4 billion over the life of the console. The problem for Sony is that they only have about $3b in cash and short term investments to lose (from their 3Q2006 quarterly report,) whereas Microsoft still has about $28b and the profitable Windows and Office divisions to keep growing that pile.