Filevine CEO Ryan Anderson has a lot to say about the state of American social dynamics, the responsibility of business leaders in the age of climate change, the future of technology and its intersection with the legal system, and much much more. As a former personal injury lawyer turned CEO, Ryan offers valuable insights from a rare perspective in this "ask anything" edition of the Filevine Fireside.
Ryan Anderson is the co-founder and CEO of Filevine. Before starting Filevine, Ryan was a founding partner at a western-states firm focused on personal injury, mass tort, and employment class action. With lived experience litigating hundreds of cases, including successful trials with 7-figure settlements, Ryan faced stress and process issues at his firm. He decided to build a solution to solve his problems. Today, rated as one of the top automation tools for law firms, legal departments, and businesses, Filevine is on a continual path of growth. Ryan is a proud husband and father of 5 children and resides in Salt Lake City, Utah. His goal is to change the face of legal work and help lawyers be happier, less stressed, and better equipped to achieve their goals.
Full Transcript
Katie Wolf: Welcome to the Filevine Fireside. I'm Katie Wolf. And today we have a very special episode of the Fireside. I have the tremendous privilege to sit down with Filevine CEO, Ryan Anderson. He's told me I can ask him anything. Ryan, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and talk with us. Ryan Anderson: Happy to be here. I'm not sure it's a tremendous privilege, but I am very excited to talk to you, Katie. We don't get to spend enough time together. Katie Wolf: You are always doing something or other, and so I know what it takes to get into onto your schedule like this. So, thank you. Ryan Anderson: Oh, I appreciate it. Well, I'm excited to chat. Katie Wolf: I want to first just set the table. You had a successful law practice. You were becoming known in your field. You were good at what you did. And then you started a completely different business, a legal tech organization. Was that terrifying? Was that exciting? Ryan Anderson: Gosh, it was not terrifying, to be perfectly honest. It felt risky and it felt bold and not without peril. But for better or for worse, I have never felt like a life well lived is one where risks aren't taken. I think that's encoded into my DNA. I don't even really know how to live any other way. And that sounds really puffed up and ridiculous. But at the end of the day, I think I am a bit of a thrill seeker, and I felt compelled to do it. Ryan Anderson: You and I have spoken before about my co-founder, and really just one of my best friends in the world, Jim Blake, who I'm so fond of and just a wonderful individual. A long time ago, there was somebody at Filevine who said, "Hey, I think I want to learn to code." And I asked Jim. I said, "Hey, So-and-so said that they want to learn to code. What do you think?" Ryan Anderson: And he said, "How old is the individual?" And I said, "I think they're 35." And he said, "It's too late." And I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "It's not that they couldn't learn. Coding isn't so hard that you could learn it at 35. But the kind of person who can be a great coder is compelled to code. They would have already found it, they would have already started, they would have already gotten good at it." And I think like being a great coder might be something encoded inside of you. I believe that being very bold and driven is encoded inside of me. So, there really wasn't a point at which I was like, oh, hey, maybe I won't do this, or this feels too risky. Ryan Anderson: I remember people counseling me early on, especially when we were struggling five, six years ago, "Hey, this is nuts. You've got a great practice. Just focus on that." It was never really an option. To be perfectly honest, I don't know that it was ever really an option. The harder part that I really did like being a lawyer. I still to this day miss it. Just like I like the rush of starting a new business, or landing a deal, or landing a great hire, or seeing a great product get shipped into production. And those things are very satisfying to me, and they're the real reasons why I'm doing this, probably. Ryan Anderson: I felt that same rush in a jury trial. I've told people I'm not quite sure you can recreate the feeling anywhere in any career between the end of a closing argument and a jury verdict. It is a really special time for a lawyer because they have done all that they can do. There's nothing left to be done. There's really nothing you can even prep to do, because if you lose, there's a bunch of different paths to take around appeal and things like that. And if you win, there's a bunch of different paths to take. And so, it would be wrong to start on either of those paths. So, for one peaceful eye of the hurricane moment, the jury is out, and there's nothing you can do. And it's intense, it's terrifying, it's exciting, and there's just nothing like it. So, I miss that to this day, and I don't know that that'll ever change. Ryan Anderson: That said, it wasn't as compelling to me as building something where I alone wasn't the unit of production, so to speak. I have such great respect for lawyers because what they do is they take their lives and they dedicate their lives to the cause of justice, at least the lawyers I worked with. No matter what side they're on, at the end of the day, I think a lawyer has to believe in what they're doing. Ryan Anderson: They may not have chosen that exact client. Certainly that's almost always the case. They may not have chosen that exact cause. But they have found reasons why they're in the game and doing what they're doing. And so, I have so much respect for that because it is draining and exhausting, exhilarating and wonderful, but it is a tough, tough thing to do. And to do it for 30 years is asking a lot of somebody. It's really asking a lot of somebody. Ryan Anderson: So, to me, the notion of building a product that could be reused over and over again and wasn't going to drain human capital was very interesting to me. And that was particularly true because I thought I could build something that would help me be more efficient, spend more time with my family, and maybe that could actually redound to the benefit of lots of lawyers and lots of law firms and lots of paralegals. Katie Wolf: So, you're still finding ways to do what you believe in, even though you've left the practice of law.v Ryan Anderson: I am. When I graduated from my undergraduate program at BYU, I had a capstone paper to write. So, you're familiar with this, and probably a lot of listeners are familiar with something like this. But it's basically a doctoral thesis, 1/10th, maybe a hundredth of a doctoral thesis, but still a significant document and the most important document I ever wrote as an undergrad, and this is for political science. And I wrote about independence of the judiciary and its role in stability in other governments. Specifically, I measured judicial independence and corruption levels and other governments. Ryan Anderson: And what I intuitively thought would be the case, there are indeed measures of judicial independence. There are people who've gone out and said, "Hey, here's countries where there's more judicial independence. Here's countries where there's less." You can imagine where judges are elected, whether they're selected but they can be removed by a politician, certainly where there's underhanded play in how judges get their jobs and how they get paid. That can really affect the autonomy of the judiciary. So, I wanted to look if that did indeed have an impact on the corruption levels of a country. And what I found, of course, is that it did. Ryan Anderson: And so, I'm a big believer in the American judicial system. I'm a big believer in the common law system. I actually find a lot of similarities between the common law system that English jurisprudence has built up and American jurisprudence has brought up. We essentially have a system that says, hey, most of the time, probably 95% of the time, the answer to a legal question is known most of the time. But if that were the case, why were there lawyers? And what turns out to be the case is that most clients, if you are litigating their case, actually have some sort of unique issue. And so, case law, which, of course, there's hundreds of thousands, there might be even millions of cases, have been built up around edge cases. And through literally hundreds of years of jurisprudence, edge cases have been dealt with because there are just so many of them. And I find the exact same thing in software. What you do is you build a platform that works 90% of the time, 95% of the time. But in any given day, and certainly in any given week, a lawyer or a paralegal or an office administrator or an IT director is going to come up with an edge case. And the more of those edge cases you can handle, the better. And so, I like that analogy. I think about it a lot, how long it has taken us to get to a point where most legal questions can be answered and a competent lawyer can tell you where he thinks the law is going to go on a particular point, that is not dissimilar from a software company building a platform that says, "Hey, when you encounter this corner case, handle it this way," and we built software that can account for it. So, that's what I think. And then I'm going to wax a little bit grand here, but what we've noticed as we built Filevine is the aperture for our capabilities increase. Sort of the opposite of what you think will happen, happens. Instead of our users saying, "Oh, thank goodness. You finally do everything we want." Instead they say, "Oh, gosh, you do a bunch of things we want, but now we see that the aperture has grown. And the things just outside the aperture, now we want those, too." And so, we find that the aperture tends to actually proliferate the number of development requests. I think the law's the same. As we cover more ground in jurisprudence, what I think we'll find is that people are going to want the law to do more. And I think you see that with social justice movements, I think you see that with climate change, and I think you see that with sort of the overall arc of justice. People say, "Hey, you know what, I actually don't want the law to just take care of when somebody invades my home or steals from me. The law can do better than that." And so, I think we're seeing that. And so, I think the aperture will grow and the expectations of society will grow along with it. Katie Wolf: So, we have this, yeah, you can't break into my house and steal from me, but what does the law have to say about polluting companies stealing our entire waterways or the future of the climate, things like that? Ryan Anderson: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Katie Wolf: That's fascinating. Ryan Anderson: Yeah, we've come to expect more out of our laws and out of our judiciary to step in and say, "Hey, wait a second. If you're polluting a waterway, we actually have something to say about it as a judiciary. And that actually means something to us." I read yesterday, I think it was yesterday, that Julian Assange, his extradition was being held up because the UK would not allow him to be held in a supermax prison in the United States. And my first thought was overreach, frankly. This isn't really the UK's problem. And why is a UK judge stepping in about the propriety of our prison system? But whether you think the decision is right or wrong, that's not for me to say. I don't know nearly enough about the case, and I'm not pretending to give an opinion on it. But I do think that judges are going to look at the world and apply law and principles of justice to situations that are far less cut and dried than they were before, and handle corner cases and say, "You know what, actually, in the UK, we believe in certain humanitarian rights, and we believe that those apply to everybody, not just our own citizens, and not just people who commit crimes on our borders, but even in others. And so, we're just not going to stand by while you do something, America, that we don't think is proper." Again, I am not making a decision about whether that it was a good decision or bad. I do not know enough about the Assange case. But I do think you'll see that with judges, I do think you'll see that with the judiciary, and you'll certainly see it with Congress. Katie Wolf: Are you hopeful about what the judiciary is going to be doing moving forward? Ryan Anderson: I am. So, again, I'm very proud, and I think most Americans should be proud, of the judiciary. The courts have long been a place where anybody rich or poor can go to seek redress. Now, is it the case that better lawyers, frankly, certainly more prepared lawyers, are often available and better resourced to be able to help those who come in with millions of dollars to spend on legal fees? Of course that's the case. However, a brave lawyer can go up against the largest corporation in America and win. And that is not fantasy. That's not something you only read about in books or movies. That happens. It happens everyday in America. There are lawyers who bring lawsuits against the biggest companies in the world and often succeed. And that is because our judicial system is indeed independent, and it should be, and is very highly regarded. And judges, I think, do a very good job. The vast majority of them, from what I've seen, do a very good job looking at a case and trying to do what's right. Not every judge and not every case, of course, but the vast majority of the time I think judges are motivated to do what is correct. Katie Wolf: So, not a totally perfectly level playing field, but more level than... Ryan Anderson: Probably the most level we have. Right? You can't lobby a judge. Yeah. If you've got a case before a judge, you can't take the judge out to lunch. You can't bring them to your conference out in The Bahamas and walk them through why you should win. You can't do any of that. But you can do that with Congress. Katie Wolf: Yeah. Ryan Anderson: You can do that with presidential candidates. Katie Wolf: Such a good point. Ryan Anderson: Yeah, you can do that with mayors. But you cannot do that with judges. Katie Wolf: Wow. The judiciary is also increasingly politicized right now where people seeing the judiciary as a place where you've got to get your judges in there. Ryan Anderson: Totally. Katie Wolf: So, what do you think about this, which feels like a new development or trend to me, where we're now seeing the judiciary as a place where party politics needs to get in there and make some big changes? Ryan Anderson: I think here I'm going to push back a little bit on that. Look, I hate to get political. And as the CEO of a company that serves all stripes of politics, and frankly, has wonderful people working for it that favor all sorts of political positions and have, I think, good faith reasons for doing so. I want to stay above the fray a little bit on this. But I will tell you that over the past six years, we'll say, there have definitely been Supreme Court justices put up for appointment. And I have thought, my word, I really hope this doesn't go through. And I'll tell you I've been surprised, Katie. If you look at the court's most recent term, it trends conservative. But I think most fair observers of the court would tell you that it has been a surprise, the level of independence that they've seen with the judiciary. And so, I think it's interesting. The Voting Rights Act came out on the side of the conservatives, but there have been issues that have gone ways that I think many court watchers would not have expected. And again, I think that is a tribute to the system. Judges, when they sit in these Senate confirmation hearings, often say, and you hear it over and over again, it's gotten to the point where it's a bit trite, that they're not going to answer a question as to how they might rule on something. And our institutions have said, "You know what, okay, we can respect that. You don't have to answer that question." And so, politicians are reduced to looking through their history to guess how a Supreme Court justice might rule. But I think the reality is that a Supreme Court justice cares quite a bit about their own jurisprudence, and the tradition that is behind them, and their reputation that is in front of them. And when it's a lifelong appointment, which I do think the founders were very wise to do that, the pressure on them to decide something in the moment based on what a crowd may think in any given moment goes away quite a bit, and they can make very long form decisions that span the arc of time. So, again, is it perfect? Absolutely not. Of course not. Decisions abound that I disagree with in the Supreme Court, and I think they get some things wrong frequently. But we should be proud in this country for the level of independence that the court has. I mean, Obamacare I think has been challenged three times in the court, and every single time it has been upheld. Katie Wolf: Yeah. Ryan Anderson: Even though now there is a majority, a significant six three majority in the Supreme court, and yet Obamacare has survived. That says something about the independence of our judiciary. Katie Wolf: I appreciate your thoughts on this, Ryan. Because I feel like most places, whatever forum I'm listening to, it's going to be critical of our institutions, which I think is valuable. But to take a moment and say, "Well, guys, some institutions are working a lot of the time," that's an important pause to take and consider. Ryan Anderson: Yeah. I'm a realist about it. It's not perfect. But yeah, I think that's right. Katie Wolf: So, now you're a business leader. You're in the legal tech sphere. Different set of ethics, different way of doing things. What do you think is the role of an industry leader around some of these big questions we were talking about, climate change, racial justice, all of the big questions that surround us? Ryan Anderson: Yeah. So, the first thing I'll say is, I take a lot of inspiration from Marc Benioff at Salesforce, and we can talk about some of the things he's done and the sort of view he has on this. But before I say that, I will say something that I think is required of every business leader. I'm a fiduciary for my shareholders. They have entrusted me with making decisions about their investment dollars. And it's not just our investors, of whom we have many at this point. Filevine has seen about $60 million worth of invested capital, and every single one of those dollars means that that's a dollar entrusted in my judgment, so I take that very seriously. But also at this point, there are probably hundreds of employees, either present at Filevine today or who perhaps have left, who are shareholders in Filevine. And some of those employees, if Filevine does well, that is the most significant wealth they may ever see. It may help them buy a home. It may help them put a child through college. So, I have significant respect for the gravity of that responsibility, and I take it very seriously. So, first and foremost, I'm a fiduciary, and I care about that quite a bit, and it is my number one job. That said, Marc Benioff takes a stakeholder approach to business. And what he would argue is that it is not only the right thing to do, but it's good for business. And sometimes I think, well, is that true, is it not true, I'm not sure. But it's definitely an interesting way to look at things, and it's something I think about a lot. Because, of course, Filevine exists because it's part of an ecosystem that it had nothing to do with. Our country, the laws that we have, have allowed Filevine to have a stable place to build up its infrastructure. We don't pay for the streets that I got to work here on today. We don't pay for the power lines. We don't pay for the emergency services. We don't pay for a whole host of things that the taxpayer dollars have funded through the decades. And so, we are quite literally sitting on top of infrastructure that we didn't build. And then, of course, we're sitting up on technical infrastructure that has been built by other companies, but also, I mean, of course, the internet itself was a government project. So, I feel a huge duty and sense of loyalty to the community that has put Filevine in a position to succeed. Given that, I think a stakeholder viewpoint on decision-making makes a lot of sense, and I think it is the duty of a CEO to think about those things, to think about the community at large, to think about disadvantaged groups and groups that have traditionally been victims of systemic racism and bias. And whatever you think of notions of where we are in race in America, no one will argue that at some point there was systemic racism in America. And I think the best argument, sort of the most favorable argument for America right now on the issue of race, is that, well, it was only really bad 50 years ago. Well, yeah, but I mean, that wasn't very long ago. I mean, my parents were alive 50 years ago, and my grandparents were alive 50 years ago. And I mean, Jim Crow was the law. Katie Wolf: Yeah. Ryan Anderson: I mean, my word. We talk about these things like they're ancient history. Katie Wolf: Yeah. Ryan Anderson: They are not. They are not ancient history. And the notion that the world would have changed so much for those things to not be impacting our society today seems a little naive. So, look, I think businesses have a duty to do all that they can to source a diverse workforce. And that is a question that comes back to the structure of the business itself. Are we only going to hire here in Salt Lake City, Utah, or are we going to be open to remote hires across the country? It has to do with where we look and how we look. It has to do with the kinds of questions that we ask and the kind of pedigree we expect from the people we employ here. But I will tell you, at the end of the day, merit counts. And so, we really care about making sure we are doing everything we can to source the greatest, most qualified, but most diverse set of candidates we can reasonably do as a business, and then picking the best candidate for the position. Katie Wolf: Yeah. Ryan Anderson: So, that's how I feel about it. And that may not be the perfect answer, but I think that's the answer I've landed on. Katie Wolf: Yeah. No, I find that really... It seems to be expanding the Benjamin Franklin quip, that honesty's the best policy to say diversity inclusion and equity is good for your business as well. It's not just something you do out of the kindness of your heart or something. It's something that you need to succeed. Katie Wolf: Okay, nobody actually voices this as a business, but sometimes I think, well, plenty of businesses succeed through having a culture where there is a perpetual underclass of unemployed or unemployable people, or by having desperate people in the world who will work for peanuts. I mean, are you being realistic that actually having real equity in the world is good for business when there seems to be this other driving force that has maintained systems of inequality for a long time? Ryan Anderson: Well, look, I probably can't solve all the world's ills on this podcast, but I'll give you a couple thoughts. Katie Wolf: Give it a shot, Ryan. Ryan Anderson: What I have found, at least for us. And I can speak to us. I can't speak for every business. One may have thought that it were the case that, and I've actually said these words, believe it or not, that a bad economy might be good for our business. In a bad economy, people tend to be more litigious. And if people are more litigious, lawyers get hired more, and those lawyers may need more software. However, Filevine was founded in, I would say, an economy that was rebounding at the time in 2014-ish timeframe. And so, we were on the upswing from a low from the financial meltdown. And then since then, I don't think the economy has stopped growing, really, in any measurable way all the way through to today. So, we haven't actually seen that play out. But what I do know is what we have seen as the economy's grown and the sophistication of our users has grown is that there's more demand for services than ever. And because there's more demand, not only for our services, but all kinds of services, for travel, for home purchases, for business purchases, that lawyers find themselves incredibly busy. And if anything, I think we may be facing a once in a generation, maybe a hundred-year kind of event, where there is a going to be a massive long-term shortage of labor. And that shortage of labor is the result, I think, of a very strong economy, and probably a lot of dollars in the economy, to be honest. But that is, in fact, driving up wages. I can tell you as a business owner, I'm paying more wages than I ever have before. It is a highly competitive environment. And there are people who work for Filevine today who make considerably more than I did when I came out of law school, and they're starting here. So, no, I tend to think that a good economy does, in fact, lift up most of society. And as it does, those individuals become educated, become consumers, and demand more services, which is ultimately good for business. So, no, I don't think business favors an underclass. I think that's incorrect. Now might there be business people who unduly profit from certain segments of society? Yeah, I think that does happen. And look, I mean, I'll say it right now. I think the tobacco industry does, in fact, profit off of a certain segment of society, and I don't think it's okay what they do. Katie Wolf: Yeah. Ryan Anderson: And plaintiff's lawyers were at the forefront of suing tobacco companies in the '80s and the '90s. Those [inaudible 00:28:38] are still going on today, a lot of people don't know that. And so, there are definitely segments of society and businesses that thrive off what I would call simply taking advantage of human weakness instead of building people up. Now you could argue the tech companies have that problem. Right? I don't think it's clear that social media companies are a net benefit to society. I don't know yet. There's certainly some good that they do. I'm a consumer of social media. I'm a fan of Twitter. But when you're the product, and Facebook gets paid more money the more time you spend on their platform, that's interesting, and it's something we ought to take a look at. Katie Wolf: I just saw an ad for an app that you can join to get gig jobs evicting other people. It's like Uber for evictions. And my heart just died a little bit. But what I hear you saying is that this is a battle. It's about what sort of economy we want. There's the old Ford factory idea that you pay your workers enough that they can buy your cars, the cars that they're making. Ryan Anderson: Yeah, that's right. Katie Wolf: And there's that idea of the rising tide lifting all boats. And then there is this other real strategy, and we're living inside that battle right now of what is our world going to be. You see the front lines of it. Ryan Anderson: You are totally right. I mean, look, technology is a tool that can be used for good, and a tool that can be used for evil. And I think anybody looking at the world of tech would say, "Look, there are companies that do more good, and there are companies that do more evil." That is a very disappointing thing to hear. And I don't really totally understand the thought process of somebody who wakes up in the morning and says, "This is the kind of company I want to create." But I tend to think that over time, if there is some good that comes from the social media world that we live in, it's that there is a sense of like, hey, if you're doing ill in the world, you're going to hear about it from a lot of people. Katie Wolf: Yeah. Ryan Anderson: And it turns out CEOs and tech leaders, they actually really don't like having their name on Twitter disparaged. And so, that actually is quite a force for good. So, look, I don't have all the answers, but boy, I hope that app doesn't succeed. Katie Wolf: Yeah. Katie Wolf: Okay, cool, yeah. So, I know, Ryan, that you have a very busy day ahead of you, as always, but I do want to ask you about one more area. Today. It's going to get 105 degrees here again in Salt Lake City. We've seen just scorching temperatures in the Arctic, wildfires starting. What are your thoughts about existing in this space that's seeing climate change happen on the daily, and what do you think your role is in this whole thing? Ryan Anderson: It's heartbreaking. I live in Utah in large part because of its beauty. I mountain biked a few days ago. I am a huge fan of being up in the mountains generally, hiking and camping. But also, I love to snowboard. I love the snow. I love our lakes. They just absolutely are a huge part of my life. And to walk through Emigration Creek and see a dry creek bed, I mean, I've never seen that in my entire life. I grew up here. I mean, you could float down Emigration Creek when I was a kid. That would be impossible now. So, anybody can see this happening with the naked eye, and you can walk outside and feel it. So, it really is just heart-wrenching to me, and something I think a lot about. I mean, I've gotten to the point where I've dreamt that it's raining, I want it to rain so bad. So, it is, just on a personal level, it's awful. I hate it. I think that our generation, Katie, I think you and I are roughly the same age. You may be a little younger than me, probably a little younger. This is something we absolutely have to tackle, and we needed to tackle it soon. We actually needed to tackle it years ago. Katie Wolf: Right. Ryan Anderson: We're behind. And if business leaders don't understand that this is a clear and present danger to the economic world as we know it, I don't know what they're reading. I don't know what data they're looking at. It is not okay to have Salt Lake City at 105 degrees. I mean, that should be once a summer, if that, and we should all be complaining about it. It should not be every day. To hear that Portland got to 115, I can't even wrap my mind around that. So yeah, I think it's a huge problem, and I think we need to handle it right away. One of the things that I think we can do is encourage our folks to live in ways that... and encourage not just by words, but by doing things as a business that makes sense. So, in Utah, you're familiar with the inversion and that happens with pollution over the winter. I would encourage our employees to work from home, especially if it's going to be a day when the inversion is a problem. There's no real reason to drive in. I mean, we're fortunate to be working in a kind of business where the vast majority of what we do can be done over the phone or over a Zoom meeting. The location of Filevine's physical business, its physical headquarters, is in Sugarhouse next to a massive apartment complex. And probably there are, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 apartment complexes within a mile of here. And I live just several blocks away. So, we moved here so people could live close to work, so people could walk to work. Because we think, number one, people shouldn't be spending time in traffic, and number two, it's bad for the environment. So, I think it's absolutely critical. There are probably more things we can do than simply pick a good environment and encourage people to work from home when it makes sense. And I would love to hear about those because I think it is a huge problem. What I'd love to see is more government investment in technology. I'll say one thing real quickly on that note. Solar is indeed cost effective. And I remember as a debater in high school. So, for anyone listening to this, yes, you get to make fun of me. I was a high school debater, and I'm quite proud of it. I was pretty good, actually. And one of the debates that we had was whether or not the government should move towards more renewable energy, and this was over 20 years ago. And at the time, I remember looking at the data. And I mean, solar wasn't more expensive by a little. It was more expensive by a lot, by probably a factor of 10. And I mean, you had to be kind of a weirdo to really be into solar. But today, it is cost-effective, and really actually tracking with traditional fossil fuel sources of energy. And that happened because our government said, "Hey, we're going to subsidize this." It is absolutely the case that Tesla is the company that it is today because the government came in and subsidized electric vehicles. And now they're finally going to get some competition. And again, that industry would just not be around but for government subsidies. So, I believe that government has a big role to play in society. I believe it has a role to play in making business fair and making business work. And as a business leader, I call upon our government to address this problem now. I can't imagine anything more important than literally the changing of our ways of life. So, as a business leader who cares about what happens to a state, but also cares about the world at large, the last thing I want to see is island nations flooding. Katie Wolf: Yeah. Ryan Anderson: We've got a lot of work to do, and we have got a huge hill to climb right away. Katie Wolf: Ryan, I tried to put you on the spot, but you've thought so much about all of the big questions that it's impossible to do. So, thank you so much for coming. I'm always just really impressed by the depth of your thinking and the work that you're doing. I really appreciate it. Ryan Anderson: Oh, thank you so much, Katie. I love talking to you. Katie Wolf: It's so great talking. See you. Ryan Anderson: Bye-bye. Katie Wolf: This has been the Filevine Fireside. I'm Katie Wolf. Please join us next time.