Great. Thanks, Natalie and Matt. Welcome everybody, the Zscaler fireside chat that we're gonna do here at the Needham Conference. It's great to have Jay and Remo here to provide the great content. Let me start off by saying, we have made Zscaler our single best idea in the security space for 2023. We strongly believe that they have the right mix of relatively seamless and easy to deploy upfront technology that in a tough environment, they can deliver that customer growth still, which is the Occam's razor, I think, in terms of where the pressure is on a lot of the security companies. I also strongly believe that this is a time when investors are going to be looking for that quality company that can both deliver growth and strong profitability and cash flow, and that certainly fits the description. The valuation compression, we think has finally started to bottom out, even with the downgrade over at brand X this morning. Leaving that point aside, welcome, guys. Thank you. Thank you. One last thing, if you have questions, I'm more than happy to pass them along. There's a box that you can type them into. I'll keep my eye on that all through the fireside. At any time, please feel free to throw questions in. With that, guys, the obvious question here is, you know, how macro-sensitive is Zscaler against this environment? I actually think there's some interesting data that I was looking at. Let me just roll this by and see if this is something that's predictive. It seems pretty clear that the contagion and the economy started off in Europe and is gradually finding its way to the US. Most companies in the security space that have had issues saw it in Europe first and then saw it show up in the U.S. When I look back over the last 3 years and last 3, 4 quarters, there's zero evidence that that happens in your business. In fact, you guys accelerated from 40% to 45% growth to 46% growth sequentially accelerating in Europe as this pressure has developed. Is that an indication, a proof point that in fact you guys grow well across increasingly pressured macro environments? Alex, first of all, thank you for the opportunity. Yes, Europe has felt some pressure and Ukraine war has also played a role in it. Overall, here is what our European story. First of all, we are very well penetrated in Europe. I mean, take some of the largest companies in France. About 30 of the 40 largest companies are Zscaler customers. Central Europe, UK, it's the same story. These large companies, they need to make sure that cyber is in good shape. It is true there is more pressure in Europe. There's more scrutiny in Europe than in the U.S. There are two things that are helping us. One, like U.S. companies, Europe also has to worry about cyber. Europe actually is more worried about cyber than U.S. is because they are sitting right next door to Russia. Number two, they have lots of pressure to reduce cost, and our solution as a platform can actually reduce cost significantly. Everyone likes to say we reduce cost platform, this and that, but think of Zscaler and contrast it to some of the other solutions. A endpoint or identity, these guys, they are focused good products, but they don't replace a bunch of point products out there. When we go in, the entire outbound DMZ goes away with ZIA. This is a bunch of products. When ZPA gets deployed, a bunch of products get removed. Combination of great savings, and good ROI combined with still interest in cyber is helping us in a better shape than many of our peers out there. In fact, it does suggest that you've already demonstrated what people are fearing is gonna happen in the U.S. economy as the economy has decelerated month to month to month. You've actually seen that deceleration in Europe and powered right through it. Based off of those facts, right? I mean, that's. Yep, yep. Empirical evidence. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the reason that happened. One of the things we're hearing very clearly from the VAR community is there are some categories that have a significant nut up front that you've got to digest in order to get to the savings. Yeah. I have to decommission something. I have to put some engineering skill into it. I've got to actually spend some money on some other hardware or whatever. Yeah. I mean, that's part of the problem, I think, with the vulnerability management space in particular, as an example. They're having trouble getting new customers. Yes. Talk about what happens, the mechanics of winning a new customer for Zscaler in this environment. deploying it, because you talked about deployment, right? Yeah. If you go back to pre-COVID. The customer wanted to go through network changes and deploy Zscaler from branch offices, and then the customer moved on to protect remote users who work from home. If there's one thing COVID did that was good, it showed CIOs and CTOs that the network security you got in place in the data center and network connecting various branches is not needed. It's not relevant. During COVID, we flipped our deployment model. Don't even touch the network. Go and deploy this endpoint agent on a laptop. It simply comes through our ZIASEP, it happens seamlessly. We were able to see the deployment that took five or six months could be done in actually two, three, four weeks. Our deployment model has fundamentally changed. It's helping us do much faster deployment. Once they see it, you know, eliminating some of the network and all that stuff becomes a lot easier. Once traffic starts flowing through us, look at the outbound DMZ, what ZIA does. All those products can be decommissioned, and a lot of them can be decommissioned in a 2, 3, 4 months. Okay. ZPA, it starts with VPN replacement, then it starts looking at doing the rest of that displacement. Customers that are asking us say, "I don't just trust you. Show me Business Value Assessment. Show me quarter- by- quarter what can be rolled out, what can be removed, and what not." That's what we're doing. The extra scrutiny is actually asking us to do that kind of stuff. We have been doing Business Value Assessment for now several years. Now IT environment is asking us to do it more granular, do it more precise. Two year ago, we would do Business Value Assessment, ROI year one, year two, year three. Today, we actually go quarter one, quarter two, quarter three, and quarter four, so on. Our business value is strong, ROI is strong, and that's really what's helping us get our deals done. In that context, can you talk about the some of the other platforms, for instance, the ZDX product? You know, how is the uptake of adjacent products to the existing customer base? Yeah. ZDX has taken off faster than we expected. It has taken off even faster than ZPA. Why is that? If you think about what companies need to do in today's cloud and mobile world, ZIA gets them secure and fast access to internet and SaaS. ZPA provide access to any internal applications in the data center, in factories or public cloud like Azure, AWS, without doing anything special or networking. The two together is what we have been now selling for quite a while. The only thing missing in this equation was if there's performance issue along the way, the user is sitting somewhere reaching some applications, how do you figure out? There's no meaningful product out there to do so. We are sitting in between. ZDX was a natural thing for us to do. We're using the same endpoint agent. We turn on telemetry, we start collecting this telemetry, and we can tell them what's going on. Now we have packaged three services, ZIA, ZPA, and ZDX into one bundle called Zscaler for Users. The three together is all you need for your users, and that's what we're selling more and more, and ZDX is naturally benefiting from it. When did, exactly did you hit that transition in selling process? Yeah. You know, all of these things we test, we learn. About 15 months ago, we start to sell more and more ZIA, ZPA, and ZDX, but they were separate SKUs. Once we see an attraction, we create a bundle. Bill, the bundle got introduced to the larger market, what, a few quarters ago? I do have a couple of questions that came in from the audience, and we thank, I thank you guys for that. I love when it's not me asking the questions, even they pay me that to just repeat them. It's great. Any case, the first one was, can you talk about the competition with each of the two prime competitors that they note here, Palo Alto and Cloudflare? Let me just start off with the, you know, Palo Alto. What's going on relative to, you know, have they improved what they're doing? Do you see them more? Do you see them less? How's pricing playing out, some of those metrics on Palo? If you think about the high-end market, these folks understand security. They understand what really Zero Trust, what's a firewall. We actually, I would say the firewall companies have become less there. They used to show up, tell a story. You know, everyone knows what the story is. I would say the less competition from them on the high-end space. In fact, I talked about a large bank that probably has spent well over $100 million with this firewall company. When they looked at securing the users, there was no back off, okay? They told us that, "Yes, the firewall vendor came to us and said we got a great Zero Trust solution. We can do better than Zscaler, and we'll give you at half the price." Okay? The customer said, "Sorry, you build great firewalls. We love your firewalls. We'll have you in the data center. When it comes to user protection, it's a different architecture. Proxy was a requirement, scalable, proven proxy, and then the real cloud-native stuff. I think there's some noise more with investors than it is with customers. When you come to the lower end of the spectrum in probably the enterprise, low-end enterprise, 2,000, 3,000 kind of numbers, we do see a number of vendors there. Firewall companies show up. Even Cisco Umbrella shows up there as well. That's where we have limited presence. In the past 2 years, we increased our presence significantly. Do I think these firewall guys could be real threatening competition for us? Not really, unless they change the architecture. It's like trying to say that, do you think a traditional car company by bolting on an electric engine becomes real competition? Not really, no. Eventually, if they wake up and say, "I need to invest and build a real electric engine," and go with that could be. That's something for us to worry about and see how do we keep on innovating and get ahead. Good to our benefit. Traditional companies keep on bolting things more and more because they think it's an easier and faster way to get there. Building something from scratch takes a long time. No worry about on the firewall front. You talked about this cloud what's the other cloud something? What is the cloud thing? Cloudflare has put out a lot of press suggesting that they are much faster than Zscaler. Yeah. you know, to be fair, Cloudflare's focus, as a cross-WAN, internet, accelerator- Yep. does give them some advantages in rapid communication across the WAN. When I hear that, my response to it is that, okay, but the comparison isn't between Cloudflare and Zscaler. It's a comparison between Cloudflare and Zscaler and hairpinning of the traffic. Exactly. to the data center. A difference of a couple of milliseconds one way or the other when you're doing three hops instead of 30 hops isn't meaningful. Exactly. It's really a functionality problem. Yeah. Can you talk to that? Yeah. I think these guys make a lot of nonsense noise. Even last year, you know, once they told investors, we replaced Zscaler at a very large oil company. Really? They named the company, you kind of said. 'Cause I know them well, so I called the CIO and said, "Well, yeah, what are they talking about? Do you have them?" He said, "In one of my business units, I am using CDN and DDoS, period. That's it." That funky little thing became, we replaced Zscaler, okay? Some love company like to stretch. Some companies go too far beyond stretching. That's just one. I had one other conversation with someone and they said, "Wow, these guys have lots of experience in selling large enterprise." I said, "Do the following. Rather than all this debate, ask them. Show me 10 large enterprise customers that are actually using Equinix,ZIA,ZPA, okay? I bet you'll struggle to find even one. Okay. It's easy to make a lot of noise. See, putting out all that stuff, they're trying to bait us to respond and get into the... They want credibility. They want some coverage. We're not gonna get pulled into that stuff. Leave it alone. It's sometimes I think they have the Barracuda with lots and lots of little things in it, but everything is two inches deep. Right. From a feature parity perspective, it's nowhere near there. Even if there's some speed advantage, that's measuring the wrong thing, right? Okay, not even quite there. Okay. When can they have the speed advantage? If the traffic, say, coming from Singapore to New York needs to come on a wide area network, yes, they can do acceleration. Our goal is not to backhaul traffic. The goal is that applications are getting set up everywhere. Why is Microsoft putting its data centers in every part of the world? No backhauling is needed. The advantage of doing some funky test to show that I can bring on my backbone to do something is not a real thing. My traffic, my customer's traffic in Singapore goes to Singapore data center. It gets on Microsoft network to get to wherever Microsoft is. If Microsoft is Singapore, it's one hop away from me. All these papers are trying to get attention. We rather focus on our customers. Do you think I even worry about Cloudflare thing? Not really. My worry is to make sure we keep on executing with our focus, our sales team fully enabled, and we don't get complacent, we don't let success go to our head. With that, we are focused on customer obsession. That's why our NPS is sitting way up. That's why our, our score, promoter score is sitting at very good, over 125% net retention rate. We are proud of those numbers, and we keep on driving. Another question came in on the competitive front. The question is specifically, have you seen any changes in the win rates against Netskope and Cloudflare? I think you already answered the Cloudflare. Right. focus on the Netskope piece. Look, Netskope is still by and large a CASB vendor. If you ask them how many Fortune 500 companies do you have as a customer? You know, they'll give you a big number, and actually that number will be technically right. Probably there are a couple of dozen CASB customers who fall in that bucket. You just said, how many of these companies are actually taking all the traffic like ZIA or ZPA? I bet you'll struggle to find companies out there. Becoming a CASB is one thing. Sitting in line to inspect all the traffic without increasing latency and having a cloud that works, how to make sure it has availability is much, much harder task. What's making things worse for private companies is now CIOs are looking for more and more consolidation and simplification. Do you think they'll consolidate with a private company they don't even know what the financials are? If they check an audited financial statement, they'll find that these folks are losing tens of millions of dollars every quarter. Okay. I do believe that most private companies will be struggling in today's market. Our position as a public company with focus on cloud security, with the best architecture, is putting us in a much better position. The question, though, was, is there any change in win rates? It sounds like the answer is no. We aren't even competing on our main segment of enterprise and major. On the low end, we do see them like we see firewall companies and Ciscos of the world. Once we engage, we almost always win. Great. Another question coming from the audience is, does your contribution margin construct of 60% still hold in a slower macro environment, and with more products on the menu? The answer is yeah. Yeah. The answer is yes. I mean, it's, we typically do you know 3-year contracts. Yeah, the, no change in contribution margin. Yeah, no change at all. Still 60%+ for years 2 and 3. While we're on this subject of the business model, clearly there's been a shift in sentiment on the streets, relative to what investors wanna see. They wanna see maybe a little less growth and a little more profitability. I think with almost any very high-growth company, they can print substantial profitability improvement. All they have to do is slow down the growth of their OpEx. I mean, you can, you can mint money for quite a while if you choose to do that. Harder to balance it. Can you talk a little bit about the balancing act you're doing, between continuing to drive that long-term opportunity and the growth, and the value of being the scale player, with producing maybe some more margin and cash flow in this environment, given the uncertainty around the economy? Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. You know, every company's different. You know, every, you know, the market that we're addressing, it's a early stage. We're the leader in that market. We have the product, you know, that addresses the market. I feel that we're, you know, from a company perspective versus other companies, we're more resilient, you know, related to the downturn. Not immune, but more resilient. The question comes down to, you know, and again, we've been growth-oriented and we still are growth-oriented. You know, the thing about it is that because of the large market opportunity that we have, do you wanna really start pushing operating profitability and free cash flow? Free cash flow, we've been over 20% for the last 2 years. That's outstanding. From my perspective, the biggest value we can give to our shareholders and to our, and to ourselves is to continue to focus on our growth. Having said that, we hear, you know, our investors, some investors talking about increased profitability. As you mentioned, Alex, you know, in a SaaS model with 80% gross margins, with the growth rate that we have, it doesn't take much to get to your operating profitability targets, and our targets are 20%-22%. That would be a disservice for everybody, you know, in this market. We're the market leader. We feel that we can exploit this market with our technology. Again, we'll be more mindful of operating profitability. We'll balance it, but again, grow. What we also talked about is that, you know, in the second half we're gonna moderate hiring. The moderation in hiring basically is that we're still prioritizing, quota-carrying reps, you know, revenue generating, you know, salespeople as well as R&D. From a company perspective, I can tell you for, you know, for our revenue, generating reps, we have not changed it from our initial plans. Again, why are we doing that? The reason is that it's a huge market opportunity, and the model that we have gives us the ability to make these decisions. In times like this, you know, major, you know, significant downturns, the risk is you don't wanna overreact. You know? The model that we have, the business that we have, the engagements we have with our customers, you know, gives us the ability to really, I feel, you know, get through this and become a much stronger company on the way out, as we come out of this. Just in passing on that comment, do you think the street is overreacting, in terms of the amount of pressure that they're anticipating? In fact, your business is actually smoother than the street's thinking it is. Yeah. I'll respond. I think yes. Look at 2 years ago, in the past year or 2, all these investors were so bullish. I mean, it's like, come on, you're so bullish, you're investing everything, raising valuations to the sky. Suddenly, you know, they're saying everything is boom and boom. Okay. Remo and I have always been prudent. In those crazy times too, we were investing very carefully. We were still delivering 20% net cash flow, okay? We do the right business. In this environment, we are not going to over-pivot, okay? We know that our model is good. In fact, what gives us more flexibility is our 80-plus% gross margin. If you think about the kind of business we are in, taking so much traffic, inspecting and enforcing policy, and still being able to do that kind of margin is a good starting point, that's a barrier to entry for us. People can't just change gross margin. Our gross margin gives us more flexibility to invest in the rest of the money and whatever we need to do. Some of those things are there because we decided to really build our own TCP stack that gives us great throughput. We invested in building our own cloud rather than running on somebody else's cloud because it is fundamentally meaningful. It actually gives you far better margins. Sometimes I hear these five-O companies say, "Well, our margins are very good running on a hyperscaler." Well, wait till you really have traffic on it. You're just talking about it without much traffic. If a hyperscaler wants to have 70%-80% gross margins, do you think can you get 70%-80% gross margins for your services on top of their 70%-80% gross margin? No, the math doesn't work out. We've done it right. The other strategic thing we did years ago was we said we're gonna put all these functions in India and some of the other lower cost countries. India, Poland became pretty important for us. Engineering. Half of the engineering team is in India. If we had all the engineering team sitting in the Bay Area, our cost of R&D won't be 15%, it'll be probably 10.5. They give us flexibility to invest more and still return some good cash flow, have good cash flow investments. That's why we really don't kinda jump and say, "Let's freeze everything." We think we are doing the right thing. We are moderating stuff, but we are putting growth ahead of profitability, but we are making sure we have pretty good profitability. Remo, when I look back in the rearview mirror, you exited the July timeframe, your fiscal year-end, with a very significant increase in your sales organization. I think it was in excess of 50%. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was. You continued to hire in the Q1. When you say you're moderating hiring, even as you're continuing to prioritize reps, it sounds like there is significantly more than enough capacity to deliver the more modest growth targets, which slow down into the 30s pretty quickly, you know, in the headlights. Is there any change, you know, in the productivity of those salespeople? How do we think about the impact of larger deal sizes and longer closure rates against sales productivity? Are we just being very conservative in the forecasting guide? Yeah, I mean, a lot of questions there. We didn't comment, what our, you know, quota-carrying rep growth was in fiscal 2022. The 50%, I'm not gonna comment on. Regarding, you know, building up the, you know, the sales organization, you know, I not only look at, you know, this year, but I'm also thinking about next year. You know, I'm thinking about, wanna make sure that we've got the capacity, you know, for our internal plans for fiscal 2024. I've got that in mind. Regarding deal sizes, they are getting bigger. Deal, you know, closing deals taking longer. We talked about, you know, things that you look at, your close rates are increasing, which is a sign of the macroeconomy, and also linearity, gets more back-end loaded, sign of the macroeconomy. The expectation related to productivity is that we'll be, you know, flattish to down in sales productivity in fiscal 23. you know, that's primarily a function of the growth in the sales organization, also, you know, the broader macro, you know, environment. Having said all that, you know, we are, you know, the entire world, basically, you know, economy is going through a really, you know, tough patch. You know, I've gone through, you know, two or three back in 2001 and then 2008. This feels different. You know, this feels that it's gonna be tougher. The advantage that, you know, Zscaler has is that the world's changed, that basically how companies conduct business has changed, where applications are in the cloud and users are mobile. Zscaler revolutionized basically how you do security and networking. You do it through the cloud. If you think about it, is that the way companies are doing their business has fundamentally changed, but the architecture is still primarily, predominantly, the architecture which was developed back in the 1990s, which doesn't work because basically. You're bringing things onto your network, you're exposing your network. We're Zero Trust, we fundamentally changed it. From my perspective, you know, because of that, because of the need, like I said, we're not immune, but we're more resilient. We just got to get through this period. I feel, as I mentioned, in times like this, with companies like Zscaler, who are continuing to develop and really grow their business, you know, including, you know, increasing headcount, we have an opportunity. This is a time when companies really can take a big leap forward. Jay's mentioned it before. It comes down to one thing as far as I'm concerned at this point, it's execution. It's the people we have in the company. It is the culture that we create, you know, in the company, that we're all going after the same thing. That's the key thing. It's execution, getting the right people, and that's what we're doing. In the crucible of macroeconomic pressure, the companies are forced to address the inefficiencies and vulnerabilities in a more efficient way, and Zscaler wins in that environment. That's from my perspective, 'cause a lot of companies, what are they doing? They're laying people off, right? They're freezing hiring. What does that do, you know, to the morale in your company? What does that do related to investments that you can make? I can tell you that from a Zscaler perspective, the two areas that, you know, we continue to invest in and not moderate is R&D and basically revenue generating hits. That's puts us in a very unique position to really come out of this pretty strong. You've done a lot more bundling, and in this environment, you're seeing bigger deal sizes. How does that translate into price sensitivity? I mean, certainly we're hearing price sensitivity across most companies. To what extent do you feel like you can hold the line against that? I'll answer. There is definitely price sensitivity, but is far more focused on cost savings than all. If I can show here is the next four-quarter, six-quarter plan that shows that I can save you money and I can improve my security and simplify my infrastructure, it goes through. We are able to do bigger deals at pretty good per-user pricing when we show that things can be taken out. The good thing is that our CIOs are actually focused on simplifying and cost reduction. In fact, they actually open up and share with us some of the old legacy technology they have that can be taken out. We end up doing some pretty good business case studies of Business Value Assessments that help us do well. We have actually benefited from some of this stuff because we have the way to address this. Is that a answer that you're able to hold the line on providing price abatements to customers to get the deals? How do we think about? We. Your ability just to hold the line. While there is negotiations, there is no undue pressure on pricing. There's far more pressure on show me the savings. Right. Right. I had a question from the audience. you know, do you have a 6-month quota cycle to steer large deals into 2Q and 4Q? Is it an annual quota pushing more large deals towards the Q4 fiscal? Our quotas are annual. We don't do 6-month quotas. Okay. There are incentives. No one wants to wait till the Q4 to do the deal. There are things in place. These are measurements in place. Yeah, I've seen some companies try to divvy it up, but I think when it comes to large enterprise business, it's hard to try to really chunk it into 2 quarters at a time. Another question from the field, how are you thinking about M&A opportunities over the next few years? Obviously a lot of private companies under duress, as you noted earlier, might make some interesting acquisition opportunities. I also think you have a tendency to wanna stick to your architecture. Right. How do those sit together? We are getting so many inbound calls on the M&A fronts. Okay. I mean, there's a day and night difference between six months ago versus today. As you've seen over the past three, four years, we have selectively done five to six small tuck-in acquisitions that can fit into our platform, that can be integrated. I think most of the time you'll keep on seeing us doing some of those because having an integrated platform is important. Otherwise, we'll become like some of these other big companies that go on a buying spree. They bought seven companies or seven consoles, everything is separate. Our customers don't like that. Now having said that, we are open to look at some of the sizable acquisition, if that makes sense, but it has to be compelling. We don't really buy for revenues. Unless there's a technology that's meant for the new world, we stay away from old technology. Are we going to-- you're gonna see some tuck-in acquisitions? Yes. If I don't do it, I'll be missing out on something because, tell you, I look at it the following way. If I need to add this functionality, for example, we added browser isolation. I probably cut probably 12 to 15 months time to introduce that off feature set in the market. It's good for us. Big smokescreen, the honeypot technology. We saved over 10, 12 months. You're gonna see some of those really increase our platform, but by getting them early stage, they're not that expensive, and they can be easily integrated. Quickly, is there any high priority categories, and kind of a very quick answer here, that you're watching or focused on? I do wanna ask, Remo about SBC. I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about specific categories on this call. Yeah, makes sense. Didn't think you would answer the question, to be honest with you. Remo, stock-based compensations obviously come to the forefront. People are sharpening their pencils and knives. You know, what's your thoughts there? It'll come down as a%, you know, of revenue to go forward. you know, typically, when you're starting out as a company, you know, public company, your stock-based comp as a% of revenue is gonna be high. As you mature, you know, that stock-based comp goes down. Cash comp becomes more important. Also basically, you know, the lower level ranks of the company don't get stock. As we mature as a company, you know, you'll see that with Zscaler. Yeah. There hasn't been a lot of churn at Zscaler historically, but I would assume churn is even improving and wage rates becoming less of a pressure point as the competition for talent seems to be lessening. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a lot of reasons that, you know, someone would wanna come to Zscaler. You know, certainly, you know, compensation, you know, and again, people getting stock. Right now, you know, the stock is down. If you believe in the company, you know, if you've got the right type of attitude and thought, you know, you could do well. That's one reason. Another reason is culture. The culture we have at Zscaler is unique. I've never seen anything like it in my career, which is great. You know, the other thing is that, if you are an employee, you wanna be associated with a winner. That winner basically carries with you in your career. If you're with a company and you're able to basically, you know, move up the ranks in that company, then, and you're with a company that's really, you know, a real marquee company, it's really gonna help you down the road from a basically, you know, professional basis. There's You know, the, you know, a year ago, you couldn't get people in. Now, there's just a lot, there's a very high demand with people who wanna come to Zscaler. Well, we've kind of run out of time. Let me stop with that great comment. Just to remind people, we strongly believe in the outlook here and really strongly believe that this is a company that's gonna power through it. It's been our position from day one when this was a $25 stock, that this is a company that you wanna own for the long term. We reiterate that point, making it our single best idea for 2023, punctuates that. Remo, thank you so much. Jay, it's awesome to see you. I have been one of my favorite people to spend time with. So I really appreciate you coming on with us. I know you're lurking out there, Bill. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you. Alex, thank you. Goodbye. Bye.