Plump Acquisitions

Gobble! Gobble, fellow Americans! Queue the tryptophan, it's turkey time and you're hopefully enjoying The Chad & Cheese Podcast with a glass of your favorite beer, wine or mead.

On this thankful episode, JZ lands a new gig, ClickIQ is hiding something (probably in their comfy pants) and Cielo enjoys a Visage. Whether your prefer pumpkin or pecan, you're gonna love this week's show.

  • Clinch Acquisition

  • Symphony Tech Group sells off First Advantage

  • Cielo Invests in Sourcing Platform Visage

  • ClickIQ is Hiding Something

  • J.Z. and Birch Are On-The-Move

This and lots more. Show our sponsors some love - Sovren, Canvas, and JobAdx.


Disability Solutions helps forward thinking employers create world class hiring and retention programs for people with disabilities.

James Ellis: Hey, this is James Ellis from the talent cast, podcasting. You're listening to Chad and Cheese. Really, people listen to this. I thought it was like a joke. I thought it was just a t-shirt and a sweater. Really? They're a podcast? Huh, who knew?

Intro: Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.

Joel: Oh yeah. Gobble, gobble fellow Americans. Que the trip to fan. It's Turkey time and your hopefully enjoying the Chad and Cheese Podcast with a glass of your favorite beer, wine or in Chad's case mead, on this thankful episode Jay-Z lands a new gig, ClickIQ is hiding something, probably in their comfy pants, and we call out this year's biggest Turkey. Whether you prefer pumpkin or pecan, you're going to love this week show. We'll be right back after we pay a few bills. Don't push fast forward Adam Gordon.

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Chad: Oh Yeah.

Joel: Oh yeah. How do we have this much news on a holiday week?

Chad: I don't know, but I am fucking stoked. I am stoked.

Joel: Let's get through the shout outs and, and get to the meat or the Turkey, if you will [crosstalk 00:02:30] of the podcast.

Chad: You got it.

Chad: So the first shout out goes to Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit for reminding us.

Joel: What?

Chad: with their song, "My generation", that Xers had to wade through the same bullshit Millennials and Zs had to face. It was funny cause I was listening to XM radio this week and that song popped up and I'm like, oh fuck yeah, it was like 20 years ago or something like that. Like, oh yeah, I forgot, they called us fucking slackers. They called us, you know, those guys who have no drive and shit like that. It's like this fucking cycle, right? So I don't like Fred Durst, never have, but shout out to Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit for reminding us all, that this is just a cycle of bullshit that everybody has to go through.

Joel: Because we all do it for the nooky, everybody. Shout out to Mason


Chad: Happy Birthday!

Joel: A big time fan of the show. He's celebrating a birthday this week, so lots to be thankful for there. Mason, happy birthday buddy, shout out.

Chad: Next time we see a lap dance on Joel. Okay.

Joel: Oh God, does Mason do that? I don't see him as that type of guy but maybe?

Chad: Well, if he's hanging out with us, it's going to have to happen.

Joel: Is the Wong going to hang out with us? Sorry, I couldn't resist that one. Sorry.

Chad: You've been Wonged. Shout out to Adam Gordon for dropping Clippy into the shareholder meeting webinar this week. I thought that was the funniest fucking thing ever. Remember Clippy? Microsoft's little animated kind of like help bot?

Joel: Yeah, we're both old enough to remember Clippy. Although, I'm not sure all of his investors do.

Chad: No. So we dropped that and Adam Godson, he actually shared on LinkedIn what Clippy actually is. For all of those who didn't have the pleasure of meeting Clippy before Microsoft killed that little bastard.

Joel: Nice. So give us some context here. There was a shareholder meeting, I guess from this crowd sourced investment. So I wasn't there but you were. So what happened?

Chad: Yeah, I was. I'm one of the guys, like I said, when it started happening I was like, fuck this, I'm in right.

Joel: Yep.

Chad: So I'm a shareholder. I was also one of the speakers, and Adam was talking about really being able to have a system that would nurture but to be able to do it in more of like an automated fashion. We were talking about how that would happen? Would there be recipes that would already be set up for these marketing campaigns and whatnot? He said, "well yes to an extent, but there were also going to have like this little Clippy Bot that's going to help people through." So that's where Clippy came in.

Joel: You spoke at this meeting?

SFX: That is one big pile of shit.

Joel: I'm going to give a shout out to Chris Russell.

Chad: Oh yeah.

Joel: His daughter was apparently in a big accident, but no one was hurt. [crosstalk 00:05:21].

Chad: Wow!

Joel: He shared a picture of the carnage, quite a miracle that no one was hurt. But, I'm sure he has something extra to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. So Chris a shout out to you buddy. Glad everyone's okay.

Chad: Yeah, love you man. Shout out to Tarquin Clark, our friend over at Google for flaming ERE on Twitter this week and their unsubscribe process. Dude.

SFX: That is one big pile of shit.

Chad: That's exactly right. So here's Tarquin's Tweet. "Dear ERE, you're missing the point on what unsubscribe means." He actually showed a screenshot of an email that he received after he unsubscribed, to take a survey.

Joel: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Chad: ERE the early 2000 called. They want their unsubscribed policy back.

Joel: Yeah. If you get called out by someone at a big company, who has like PR people, that hope you don't do stuff like that. Like that's kind of bad. So yeah. Tarquin man, big pair of balls on you buddy.

Chad: Nice.

Joel: I'm going to give an unashamed shout out to our sponsors. Since it is Thanksgiving. Uh, we don't exist without you. So I won't get into all the names, you can check them all out at Chad Cheese. But certainly here on the weekly podcast, Sovren, Canvas, JobAdX, We appreciate you and shout out to you. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone at those companies.

Chad: That's right check them out at chadcheese.com.

Joel: Dot com.

Chad: Dot com.

Joel: Got to work on that. .io, .ai.

Chad: No. Shout out. Quick list here. Shout out to Jasmine Mijuskovic. Misjuskovic.

Joel: Easy for you to say.

Chad: Misjuskovic. There it is.

Joel: Mi-Juice. Juicy.

Chad: Yeah.

Joel: The juice.

Chad: She's in employment brand over at Public Supermarkets. Tom Kenyon at Allegis. Alastair Shirmer at Live Hire. Aaron Dragushaun at Happy Monday. If that's not his name, Dragon-Shaun. He should definitely change it to that. Yeah, I would change my name to that. Aaron. I would do that. Ben Gledhill at Yodel who gave us a shout out on the Pods that he listens to, we were obviously listed, and Ben, I'm sure you know, we're a sucker for lists. So thanks for the shout out man.

Joel: That's right. You call me Dragon, I'll call you Nighthawk. Stepbrothers reference. My last shout out and I'm sure you agree, is to the Ohio State, Buckeyes. In addition to this being Thanks Giving, it's also a heavy American Football week and the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry kicking off Saturday at noon.

Chad: Beat that team up North.

Joel: Yeah, it's on bitches.

Chad: Beat that team up North and beat them bad. My last shout out goes to one of our sponsors, we don't talk about that much and we should, Disability Solutions for supporting the transcription of the lion's share of our podcasts. It just blows my mind how many people say they are actually use the transcriptions in either reading through why they're listening, or just scanning through just the text itself, or because of SEO, go figure. They want to be able to find podcasts quickly so they just go to Google, put in Chad Cheese and then whatever the topic is or whatever product is or the actual vendor name and it zips them right to one of our podcasts. Thanks again to Disability Solutions for that.

Joel: Yeah. Essentially they are our search marketing solution. Although they're our sponsor and, you're right, people will search Chad Cheese and then a company name to see what we've said about them. So it's a great resource to the community that those guys helped sponsor. So yeah, I echo that shout out.

Joel: Topics.

Chad: Topics.

Joel: This one fresh off the boat, if you will. Hot off the presses. I don't even know what's going on. You talked to Shane. So you, you lay down the news and maybe I'll comment.

Chad: clinchtalent.com, or as they were first known as clinch.io, acquired by ATS PageUp, So pageuppeople.com, people.us here in union in the United States. They are an applicant tracking system that is worldwide but emanating out of Australia. Yeah. But I believe this buy was definitely driven by Battery Ventures who owns a large portion of PageUp. So it's one of those things where your venture company says, "Hey look, we're buying some shit and this is how integrations are going to happen. Yeah, you just, make that happen."

Joel: Yeah, no doubt. I don't know much about PageUp. I assume they have a major presence there Down Under.

Chad: I wouldn't say just your basic ATS, but ATS that is trying to gain market share. Here's a quick quote from our friend Paddy Doyle, who was a CEO of Clinch. "Inclusion of the Clinch functionality within PageUps ATS will enable customers to source and attract the best talent at speed. Both solutions have been designed to deliver a great experience for candidates and recruiters, yada, yada, yada." A lot of this is happening around the acquisitions that we're seeing. Jobvite buys Telemetry. iCims buys Jibe. Symphony buys SmashFly. There are only so many. This feels very reminiscent to Programmatic. There are so many vendors in the space. So if you want to buy an RMP or more of like a Jibe or one of these types of vendors. You had better move fast because they're going quick.

Joel: Congrats to Shane Gray. Obviously.

Chad: Shane and Paddy. Yeah.

Joel: Anyone who's in the industry, probably know Shane,

Chad: Oh Gees.

Joel: One of the nicest people, human beings, you'll ever meet.

Chad: Yep.

Joel: You've definitely seen him somewhere on social media if you're in the community. You talked to him sort of at length in terms of what his role will be now? Will he continued to skip around the globe? Will he be more landlocked? Any news on that?

Chad: I would say you can't keep the hardest working man in Ireland, the UN hell across the entire globe. Shane Gray, you can't keep that man down. That's the thing is that Paddy Doyle, I don't know if there is a name out there that is more Irish than Paddy Doyle, but CEO, Paddy Doyle and Shane Gray, this is a bootstrap team who I guarantee you this was not a clearance rack item.

Joel: Yep.

Chad: Because of the moves that we talked about earlier. This is a validated market. Jobvite buys Telemetry. ICims buys Jibes. Symphony buys SmashFly.

Joel: Yep.

Chad: I mean from my standpoint, I don't see any changes in what Shane does, cause Shane does what Shane does, and that's why you have a guy like Shane Gray in your organization. I can't say that we love that guy to death just because he is such an awesome dude. Not to mention every time we see him, for God's sakes, he's handing us fresh Guinness that he just brought over from Ireland.

Joel: Yeah, that's who this guy is.

Chad: Yes.

Joel: Let me bringing those idiots some beer from Dublin because they love it so much. That's who Shane is.

Chad: Yeah.

Joel: If you haven't partied with Shane and Paddy, my God, you have not lived.

Chad: I have a picture, and this is funny now. I have a picture of us in a bar in Ireland with Shane and also Thom Kenney, the former CEO of SmashFly. So that might be one that we have to actually get framed.

Joel: Could I get more Irish than Shane, Paddy and Thom with an H? My God.

Chad: I don't think so.

Joel: Jesus.

Chad: But this makes you think once again we have to ask what is Phenom and Beam Ray's next move.

Joel: Yeah, and how does our buddy at Candidate ID think about all this acquisition stuff?

Chad: This has got to make him excited as hell because he hasn't taken as much money and he's not beholden to work day, like Beam Ray is, or female who's taken a bunch of money as well. So I mean overall the big question is when you're in this space, do you do what Shane, Paddy and Clinch did and really bootstrap the shit out of this and come up with a great product and look for an awesome exit, because you don't have all of this money that you have to pay back to investors, or do you take this shit tons of investment and try to see if you can build a bigger platform out of that? I mean there are many different types of ways to exit. I love what they did.

Joel: Yeah, and by the way, January, 2014 was Clinch's launch date, so that's almost six years in the making, that this has happened. So that's a whole lot of bootstrapping that's been going on. So extra happy for those guys.

Chad: Then we have another acquisition, which I think, on the surface level it doesn't seem that exciting, but I think it is, a PE firm Silver Lake buys First Advantage from Symphony Talent Group.

Joel: For a projected that the numbers weren't released but the whisper number out there is for $1.5 Billion. Which is not chump change. I can tell you from my short period in the background check company, that First Advantages, one of the top three in terms of size, you've got them, you've got Hire Right, and you have Sterling. So you know from a background check company perspective or industry perspective, I think that's sort of certainly interesting. I think in terms of talent or I mean simply focusing resources on other things is interesting as well. Particularly in light of SmashFly coming into the fold.

Chad: Yeah. Well, I think this is a really smart deal for Symphony Talent cause, you know, background screening, drug testing and the lot.

Joel: Total commodity.

Chad: Dude, it's a shit ton of cash. It's very profitable.

Joel: It's a shit tone. It's profitable.

Chad: But that's not their focus. And if you think back in the Findly days when they were trying to become the one platform to rule them all. First Advantage had, or maybe currently has, an ATS, the background checks and they were trying to meld all of that with the user experience in marketing. Findly then having Hodes sell it, seemed to be genius, the problem was execution obviously. Where the rubber hits the road and it just didn't work, and this is another marvelous, I think, decision from Symphony to be able to, and even though it does make a lot of money. Yeah, go get your $1.5 billion out of it. The question is what does Symphony get to do with that cash? What kind of shit do they get to buy now?

Joel: Yeah, get your chat bot ready folks. Get your, you know, whatever else. Get your recruiting robot ready, their tin guy who knows there could be a box for that out there for you. That's probably a long shot. But yeah, I think the chat bot things probably a greater, a greater, a greater chance of happening.

Chad: There are rumblings out there, this is total rumor. HireRight is looking to buy CareerBuilder's background check business so that might, this might actually spur that deal to happen faster. Who knows?

Joel: Yeah. And if you start putting the puzzle pieces together there, we'll, we'll talk about this later, but you've got Paradox who was white labeling, Smashfly's chat bot and Symphony buying, you know SmashFly and if we're looking at predictions for next year, you know, Paradox and Symphony could, could be something to happen,

Chad: could be a wonderful relationship.

Joel: Speaking of level relationships, our relationship with job ad X is as lovely as it can be. Let's get a word from them and we'll talk about Cielo and click IQ.

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Joel: RPO. This is your RP Cielo,

Chad: But, I mean it's tech in. I thought it was interesting because Cielo invests, quote unquote invests in a platform called visage, which is a vis V I S a G E or for Sage and fuck, I don't know. Anyway, bison, this is a crowdsourced sourcing platform, which means it's like a Mike a marketplace, right? So you put in, you put your requisition in and you have all of these source sourcers from around the globe converge and they source for you. So it's on demand. And I thought, you know, is this really a thing? I mean seriously is, is this really a thing when we have bots that are out there, we have algorithms that are out there and what's like the hiring solved and whatnot that we'll do this in seconds,

Joel: which, which by the way, it's probably what the humans that are in this service are actually using to find the people that they're providing for the service.

Chad: Since HiringSolved isn't free anymore, I don't think so. Adam Godson who is like the chief stud tech dude over there. He, he's one of the guys that I always go to talk about tech in the industry, especially from a strategic standpoint because again, RPO recruiting is their business. It's not their job. It's how they make money, right?

Chad: That's different than talent acquisition talent acquisition there. They're professionals, but they don't have to worry about bottom line when it actually comes to placing candidates, et cetera, et cetera. So you're going to go into an RPO and talking to them about tech because it's all about efficiency. It's all about margin, it's all about EBITDA. My question to him was, dude, this doesn't make sense to me. Why aren't you using tech to do this?

Chad: And he that when you're looking at a people aggregator where there's more nuanced matching and better understanding of the actual job, they get better results. And that's what they've seen. They actually did a six month pilots before they started the, you know, the, the, the conversations around investments and they were blowing their numbers out of the water. So AI and the AI matching in some cases does, it is like magic. It's just, it's not there yet.

Joel: So let me get this straight. These guys put visage vice age or whatever. We're calling it through the due diligence and found that people were able to provide greater results than what the automation tools were. Is that what I'm hearing?

Chad: Yeah. Cause they could understand the actual jobs better. Cause if you think about it, one job description from one company is so much different than the other for the exact same type of position. But yet that's a nuance that in many cases an algorithm just can't understand yet. I think it'll get there just can't yet recruiters can, and they have a stable in many cases of candidates and that they can go ahead and start pushing toward these wrecks. And they have around 3,500 sourcers now that are in this community that now has Cielo sourcers in it as well. So I mean they're just really turbocharging what they've already been doing for years.

Joel: One of the things that human beings are able to do is allow these recruiters know the people that they're actually trying to place. They're that good and they know the companies that they're trying to fit in with these people. So there's a culture combination that you don't get with just Hey, match these description words with these resume words and hope that we get it right. I think the nuance, like you said, of the human sort of middleman means a whole lot. And I think it's, I think it speaks quite, quite loudly that Cielo thought enough of a, a human, you know, manual old school technology to, to acquire the company. I think that says a lot about the company as well as maybe Hey humans aren't, aren't done after all.

Chad: Well they haven't acquired it. They just invested money in it to help it grow. Right. To be, to be able to shore it up and support it.

Joel: Soon to acquire.

Chad: Yeah. Possibly. Possibly to have 20 plus clients that, that was a part of this, this pilot. And, and it was funny cause I was chatting back and forth with Adam and he, he likened this to Uber versus taxi and it comes to costs effectively sourcing to meet in the need of an on demand model. So instead of having recruiters that are there that don't have wrecks or sourcers who don't have wrecks to actually work on, it's kind of like turning on and off that spigot. Right? And this is more of a new model for them to be looking at. And again, perspectively for talent acquisition to start at least looking at maybe not in the adoption phase yet, but when an RPO starts to adopt, piloted the shit out of it, they've tested it on multiple clients in this case, 20 not just one. And, and that's an indication, I think a signal to talent acquisition to, to be able to look at these things.

Joel: A mosquito, my libido, way to go. Cielo.

Chad: Boom.

Joel: Click IQ, our Turkey. If you want. What did click IQ do this week?

Chad: What, what didn't they do? So hearing from many sources that click IQ, and this is one of the things that we feared in indeed buying any programmatic player click IQ has turned into an indeed buying house. We actually saw [crosstalk 00:00:24:33].

SFX: That is one big pile of shit.

Chad: that is one way we had screenshots that showed some of their new kind of like user experience, their UI where you go into the main screen and all it shows is indeed in glass door and you have to click out to another tab to get to the rest of your life. Quote unquote job board partners. And most of those quote unquote partners weren't fucking job boards. They're actually aggregators but they were Indeed competitors. Right.

Joel: So you're, are you saying indeed bought someone to create a competitive advantage over everyone else?

Chad: I am saying that.

Joel: That's weird.

Chad: The thing that I'm hearing though. And again, we're, we're, we're still to an extent, this is several sources, but again, just kind of like we haven't validated through Indeed or Click IQ cause they won't return our calls. Yep. Companies like NUGU ZipRecruiter have dropped out of being included in the click IQ platform because of this kind of shenanigan.

Joel: Nice. Nice. So I do love the screenshot of like Glassdoor, Indeed, and then what does it more in or something that it likes to have in the dashboard and then you have to go deeper in into those air minds. Me of about six years ago, Google analytics used to hide some of your keywords and then SEO is freaked out and like there was a whole sort of thing about it. So indeed is historically apt to copy everything Google does. So the fact that they've sort of hidden data from their users does not surprise me because Google did that about six years ago or so. Wow.

Chad: Here's the thing for all of the competing organizations that are out there, and I'm not just talking about the aggregators, I'm talking about the programmatic players that are out there who competed with perspectively, competed with click IQ. Man, this should be your Thanksgiving day. You should be feasting on all of these client and all of these partners that click IQ and indeed are putting into that second fuck you tab.

Joel: I can hear the phone ringing at new BU's, Montreal headquarters right now. Is it a different rig in Canada? I'm not sure.

Joel: I would say, yeah, I still think they have the rotary dials up there.

Joel: Well, they all still have blackberries, I think. I think that's still I kid because I love the Canadians.

Joel: You have to because you're married to one.

Joel: All right, well way to go click IQ. This turkeys for you who's not a Turkey is Sovren. Let's hear from them and we'll, we'll talk about some folks on the move.

Joel: Yeah.

Sovren: Sovren parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting Sovren.com that's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren software, so human. You'll want to take it to dinner.

Joel: On the move.

Joel: On the move. We don't do this very much. So this is, this is a big deal. Listeners.

Chad: Yeah. These are, these are, these are a couple of big moves. SmashFly CMO, Josh Zywien, a friend of the show. He's going to the bots, man, he's a Jay Z. It's match Y and we'll be coming to a chat bot company very, very soon.

Joel: And if my prediction is right, going back to symphony talent very, very soon.

Chad: Possibly. Yeah.

Joel: Yes. Yeah. Like I said symphony SmashFly a paradox chat bot. Yeah. And connect the dots. Yeah. But JZ, a great guy, I'm obviously very close with the paradox folks, so can't speak more highly of either one of those. So that'll be a fun relationship to watch heading into next year.

Chad: Well, and JZ, I mean the self, admittedly he is a builder. He loved the startup kind of like atmosphere of, of SmashFly. Not that that's going away with symphony, but you know, he was, he was lured away by another really compelling story. If you think about it, I mean, chatbots are hot right now, shit. And to be able to not really jump ship because they're still white labeled into SmashFly, but to be able to get into an organization you know a lot about because you did have such, you know, close partnership with developing Emerson, you know, it's, I think a good move. So good for him and definitely good for Aaron who needs a smart guy like a JZ to keep him straight.

Joel: Yeah. And I think that it, I think it speaks highly of paradox who, let's face it, JZ probably could've gone just about anywhere. Yeah. And to pick paradox, I think, you know, speaks highly of them.

Chad: Well and I think JZ, if he was there before the whole Madonna McDonald shit wouldn't have went down like it did. Just saying.

Joel: You just had to bring that up then.

Chad: Yeah. It's not my fault, dude. It's stupid. Anyway, now, now SmashFly is left in the very capable hands of Elise merrier, whom we've been working with and the Colt brand podcast and also got a pimp out to that. We're, we're going to be doing some stuff with SmashFly at The Cult Gathering in bang-up in February. Yeah, I mean we're, we're really stoked about that. And again, if you're in branding, employment, branding and marketing in our space and talent acquisition, HR, whatever, right? This is the time that you, I believe, need to start bridging over into the big branding conversation and big marketing conversation and go to Banff in February, the number one rated branding and marketing conference in the world by Forbes. If you hadn't got your tickets, go to CultGathering.com and get your damn tickets because we're excited to go.

Joel: All due respect to SmashFly and symphony aren't going to miss a beat cause Elisa's bad ass.

Chad: She has pretty bad ass. Yeah, there's no question. There's no question. And then our, our second movement here is you probably all know Birch Faber with your CMO texture crew. A little company that it was one of the, I think very first that really set the alarm bells off around texting chatbots and got everybody excited. I mean Dan got everybody excited, don't get me wrong, but that was 26 fucking billion dollars. We're talking about an organization like text recruit to get acquired by an organization like ice hymns. That was a big change in the market and Birch was one of the guys that actually made that happen. He is now the CMO over at our friends at XOR, Aida, Aida at XOR. Another chat bot,

Joel: Another chat bot. Yeah. So a no surprise chatbots are priming themselves for a big 2020 and bringing in some heavy hitters on the marketing side isn't going to hurt any.

Chad: No, I w and didn't they just receive like $9 million in investment?

Joel: Yeah, they got money, I'm not sure. And they moved to San Francisco and yeah. Yeah. So

Chad: yeah, I think, I think they, they've already received like two investment rounds, but anyway, good on JZ. Good Birch, great stuff to be able to see me like it. Organization like XOR, very small, starting to rev their engines. This again is an indicator a Birch has already been there, done that with an acquisition, with a witch, with a core platform. What do you think? What do you think XOR is trying to target with this type of acquisition? A guy who knows pretty much was on on the train while this was happening.

Joel: Yeah, I mean if he can replicate what happened to TextRecruit, I'd say that'd be really good for zaur, but just specifically the kind of client base that TextRecruit had fits really, really nicely with chatbots. And so to the degree that Birch can replicate what he did at TextRecruit was XOR. I think that's a very good thing for XOR

Chad: That it is congrats.

Joel: well dude, I guess that's our show for today.

Chad: I say, we out.