Reckoning or Reformation with Mary Wisniewski Jason Henrichs and Kara Parkey // Cornerstone Hot Takes

I think it’s a really good time. I think, to your fintech exuberance kind of statement, what’s really cool about the environment that we’re in is it’s forcing younger companies to get a bit more focused than they have been.

You’re starting to even realize that in meetings. People who might have been a fringe customer or somebody you might want to meet with because you might have some overlap, those meetings are not taking place anymore.

People are saying, “Here’s our target market. Here’s who we need to meet with. We need to get back to the basics. We need to make money quickly.”

I think everybody’s getting a bit more focused on what they’re good at and where they can really add value in the ecosystem. It’ll pay off in the long run.

And exactly what she said is what the market needed, too. Too much money chasing too few deals, too many deals in many cases, has been bad for the ecosystem.

Or maybe a reformation.

Oh, that’s good. I like that.

Yeah. Reckoning sounds kind of dire.

There will be good stuff that comes from this.

There will be great stuff that comes from this, and the good companies will come out of that.

Yeah. But I think some of the good stuff is, when it was growth at all costs, a lot of this was just creating products that didn’t add huge amounts of value.

Even if I look at some of the stuff we’ve done with MX, it isn’t just about displaying data. The richness of the MX data should lead you to go do fundamentally new things that others haven’t done before.

Except, with growth at all costs, it’s like, “Eh, that’s hard work. Let’s go chase growth instead.”

Yeah.