Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jay Kreps: Yes. Yes. I mean any change like this is a little bit disruptive. And so I think that’s the — probably the biggest impact for us is just making sure that we get off to a fast start at the beginning of the year. We’re not so disrupted that, that impacts execution. It’s obviously also just a harder thing to go through. We felt like, look, after a couple of years of very fast growth, where we kind of roughly doubled headcount in that time period, there was opportunities for efficiency, right? And despite being very thoughtful in planning and where we were deploying resources we thought there was opportunities to get more efficient. So for us, it was kind of a question of how do you do that. Are you going to do it more slowly, kind of in place?

Are you going to do it more quickly? As we got, I think, a better read on just, what’s the environment for ’23, what’s the environment overall in tech, what makes sense for us, we feel like it made sense to do it more quickly. And that kind of, I think, shows a little bit of what’s possible for the business in terms of efficiency or is at least one good step in that direction. And it seemed like in the environment, it just made sense to do that now.

Steffan Tomlinson: And we’re also doing it, preserving our ability to drive top line growth, and continue to invest in our innovation engine. And we are able to balance the moves that we made to preserve our long-term sustainable competitive advantage.

Jay Kreps: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. I mean as we went into this, the kind of key analysis would you have to give up on something that’s going to make the company great, whether that’s in the development of the product or how we’re growing the business, how we’re kind of capturing the opportunity. And we felt like we could do it without doing that. And I think that was one of the big things that was necessary for us to act on.

Raimo Lenschow: Okay. Thank you.

Shane Xie: All right, thanks Raimo. We’ll take our next question from Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank, followed by Bank of America. Brad?

Brad Zelnick: Great. Thank you so much. It’s nice to see you all. I’ve got one question for, I guess — first for you, Jay. Jay, just as we think about the changes that you’ve made and you’ve got Larry moving on, what is it that gets you comfortable that there’s not risks exiting this year with 55% to 60% sales rep productivity and it might inspire some additional unanticipated turnover? And then I’ve got a follow-up.

Jay Kreps: Yes. I think we continue to have a kind of steady hand running the go-to-market organization. So Erica Shultz has run the larger field organization. Larry reported into her. She previously directly managed the three sales theater VPs and is kind of taking them over directly. And so actually, I feel like in a time where there’s like a fair amount of macroeconomic uncertainty, that org structure is actually good. You want to have kind of a short path between leadership and what’s happening out on the street. So I feel pretty good about that.

Brad Zelnick: Okay. That’s good enough. And maybe just for you, Steffan, I’m just trying to reconcile Confident Cloud Q1 guidance versus the really strong results that you’re coming off of in Q4. Is there any reason to think that consumption was perhaps unusually strong in Q4 in some way that might not repeat? And/or are there any reasons to be more concerned and conservative about consumption rates in Q1?

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