The value of attending conferences
Ted Neward: In some sense, it's the same as asking, "How does marketing get their budget?" People understand intuitively that brand recognition is an important thing.
As a non-developer-product company, we have an API, but we don't have that direct connection. Coca-Cola is considered to be the number one most recognized brand in the world and yet it spends billions of dollars every year to stay that way. Part of it is this notion of locality of reference inside your brain. If you've just seen a Coca-Cola commercial, you say, "Oh, yeah! Coca-Cola! I want one of those!" It's that idea of keeping it fresh.
For Smartsheet in particular (and I think this is true of Netflix, Ford, and, again, all of these other companies that are being told repeatedly that they need to go and build APIs), we have to justify internally why we need to create these APIs. The CEO, the chief financial officer (CFO), and the vice president...