a lot uh easier um because like the tools that we had 15 years ago felt very kludgy and i was always interested like it felt like the okay doing these investigations or doing a lot of stuff at the time because these were like host investigations and i always found myself drawn to like the actual tooling side how can i make this better for my co-workers how can i make this better for myself um So it was kind of a different perspective, uh, going in because like I've already lived part of that life and kind of veered off to the engineering track very quickly.

I think there's two things that I guess I would follow up with that.

One is the impact that good tools can have, which is why I'm so grateful for our dev team and the relationship that we have with them.

Even in the history just of Synapse, not prior history at other companies, a big part of what we were trying to build and we're trying to demonstrate to our government customer is, look, analysts spend a lot of time just doing data wrangling.

I have to go find the data in another system.

I have to bring it somewhere where I can look at it and then overlay it with other data.

And we're just constantly hand-creating stuff and moving things around.

And so I think it was just cool, that collaboration, but also using that to kind of launch this new functionality and then have it be immediately useful.

And how would you, before you all came to Vertex and were using Synapse, how would you rate how confident you were in relating pieces of infrastructure versus once you came here and started using the tool and teaching others how to do it? Can you talk a little bit about the before and after of the confidence level of that? Yes.

It's a little bit of a trick question because all of this came from Mandiant.

So we had prior experience with Synapse's predecessor.

But before either of those tools, for me at least, it was what a lot of people I think still use, which is spreadsheets.

and prose reports and different data sources that you're trying to look at separately and bring together.

And in hindsight, right, coming from using all of those different data sources that don't necessarily show you the connections to a system where you can work directly with the data and it's designed to show you those connections, It's really easy to mistake your logic.

If you're trying in your head to fuse information from multiple sources, it's easy to misinterpret.

I don't know if Ryan or John have a better answer for that.