Alex Zukin : A lot of them have been asked, but I guess one of the constant questions we get from investors, and I’m sure you get too is you look at the headlines, you look at commentary, particularly about white collar recession or employment levels at some point, starting to kind of tick in the other direction from the record strength we’ve had here. Samad kind of asked this question about your Q4 numbers, around conservatism. It sounds like you’re not seeing any change in employment levels in your customers, you’re not even really seeing any change in sales cycle times in your customer base for new logos. I guess, how — is there a reason that you guys have been able to decipher as to why that is or when you would be anticipating seeing that impact from the macro economy?
Or is there just a level of resiliency either from a share market perspective or type of client perspective that you serve that gives you that resiliency on the recurring revenue line. And maybe it’s also just the mix of SMB versus larger customers that you’re serving in your business. But would love to get some — just further clarity on that.
Steve Beauchamp: Sure. So obviously, been in this industry, really my whole career, and I’ve seen the different cycles. But the interesting part, I think, to me about this cycle is you still have relatively low unemployment levels. And certainly, the headline news, there are people reducing their workforces, but there are still a number of jobs out there, and we’re still in a growth environment. There’s been a lot of lumpiness post COVID. The other thing I would say is hybrid work, people moving from 1 industry to the next, there’s a lot of resilience in terms of being able to move from 1 job to the next, being able to work from home anywhere in the country. And so I think the labor force can react relatively quickly as we’ve seen these maybe shifts in demand, as you said, from white-collar jobs.
And overall, when I look at the longer-term history is GDP is growing a little bit, employment usually trails at a little bit from a percentage basis. If it’s declining a little bit, it’s also going to decline trailing GDP. And sometimes unemployment numbers can take a couple of months before you see it all the way through. But if you think of all those headlines, we’ve been flat for several months in terms of employment levels. And that, frankly, makes sense to me based on what I’ve seen historically. Now that doesn’t mean that, that’s certainly going to continue. We have forecasted kind of a flat environment on our guidance for the rest of the year. But I think there’s a fair amount of resilience in this type of employment environment where people can move from one job to the next relatively quickly because of the rise remote work.
Alex Zukin : That’s actually a really unique and great explanation. It’s super simple and super interesting that the labor mobility, effectively if one of your clients loses somebody they’ll pop right up at 1 of your other clients. I guess 1 other question I have is, as I look at the OpEx umbrella, it does look like for the first kind of — this quarter specifically, your growth in sales and marketing is meaningfully ahead of the recurring revenue growth on a year-over-year basis, which I guess, to some extent, makes sense because it’s aligned with your total revenue growth, what do we — when you think about your ability to kind of almost not overinvest, but invest ahead at a level that maybe you haven’t been able to invest in the last couple of years, what are you — if we think about the reaping the rewards of that kind of front-loaded sales and marketing investment that you’re able to make in the first half of this year, is it — do you anticipate it kind of driving greater growth durability, greater growth rate when — particularly when we start anniversary-ing some of those tougher comps.
