The Sane Asylum

The people of Silicon Valley are unwell. Too many of my friends are spiraling. I don’t know how we’re supposed to live and work like this.

If you work at a frontier lab or decacorn that’s still 10x’ing every six months, you’ve actually got it bad. You may be the chosen ones—the permanent upper class—but that doesn’t mean you aren’t worse for wear. You haven’t seen your kids, your girlfriend’s annoyed, and invites from friends to hang out are waning. I’ve heard reports of weddings and starting families being put on hold. 

You’d do the same if you saw what they saw. Knowledge workers probably won’t have jobs in two years. We may be dead in 10. This is the time to make your mark and make your money. I overheard someone at an SF coffee shop begging for a referral to Anthropic from his friend, who repeatedly replied, “There’s nothing I can do, man.” I was so uncomfortable I had to put my headphones on so I couldn’t hear them anymore. A “perk” of being the chosen one is being surrounded by the most talented people in tech. But you’re finding elbows are sharp in a roomful of people used to being the most important in the room. You’ve been advised not to wear company swag in public: security risk. People treat you differently now. Or maybe it’s you that sees them differently.

If you’re building a startup that’s trying to compete with or be one of these companies, you’ve also got it bad. Maybe you passed up a job offer at one a couple years back, which means you left $100mn on the table, you fucking idiot. Can’t miss your chance to get rich or get your fingerprints on the next great product this time. For the ones that manage to break out, it sure feels like product-market fit. Those basis points are starting to look pretty good for your paper net worth, too. Your company just received an enormous infusion of venture capital, the fourth in 12 months, and there’s a headline in The New York Times to prove it. But below that story in your feed is another one questioning whether companies like yours can survive. You keep telling yourself how fun it is to be the underdog, but it’s harder than you thought it’d be to hire or get your hands on compute. If you’re not on track to a billion dollars of Annual Recurring Revenue this year, or to tweet about your next $100 million soon, you’re cooked. 

If you’re working on a pre-AI startup, you’ve likewise got it bad. Not too long ago you were the belle of the ball, but now your 30% year-on-year growth doesn’t feel like growth at all. It feels like death. Your once-proud investors have taken your company’s logo off their firm’s homepage, and you’re no longer invited on podcasts. The AI-natives don’t want your tricks, old dog. You’re in the group chat +1’ing texts saying, “I guess we should just get acquired and get it over with.” But you’re also seeing the reports of Bending Spoons acquiring Airtable and Miro for peanuts. “But these companies had such healthy ARR,” you think to yourself. You don’t even want to consider what it means for your personal finances. In the meantime, attrition on your team is getting out of control. Everyone’s leaving for the same places. They post their goodbye messages in Slack with “tremendous gratitude for how much I learned working with you.” But alas, it’s time to join the actually ambitious people in the AI arena now. You’re not sure whether to begrudge them or join them. 

It’s not just the uncertainty about the future that has us all spinning. I think it’s just too much, too fast. Too much money, too much growth, too much power, too much change. A new frontier model is released every month. A new unicorn is minted every day. This isn’t histrionics; 300 days into the year 2026, and 311 unicorns have been minted so far. We were shocked when Cursor went from $0 to $100mn in a year. That was less than two years ago. Now it’s everyone’s goal, teetering on the norm. Companies double headcount every month. Raise another mega round every six months. The expectation for what’s possible and what’s expected, and on what timelines, keeps getting higher and higher, faster and faster. There are no signs of it settling down any time soon. 

You’re doing your best to keep up. You’re 9-9-6’ing, sometimes 0-0-7’ing. You didn’t actually rest during rest week, did you? What are your agents up to? Hopefully getting a lot done while you’re reading this. Have you tried the latest personal assistant? Optimized your workflows to accommodate the strengths of the latest model? Have you gone viral on X lately? Have you been angel investing? Have you locked in your Bay Area mortgage? If not, you know you’re fucked, right? You’re enslaved to your keyboard, timeline, and Slack. You’re tired, but your ambition is also Icarus-ing. Your FOMO is spiking. Your capacity is redlining. Is your moral compass spinning?

It’s hard to watch this unfolding in my community. I know it is a tremendous privilege to be alive and working in a time when we can see and shape a technology that’s so transformative. And I know some people are finding the scene right now electrifying. But I know a lot more people who aren’t. And I see that the experience of trying to hang in the ring for yet another round is breaking something inside so many of us. 

The Silicon Valley spirit has always been about thinking big, moving fast, delivering impact, and doing things our own way. But I fear this game is getting the best of us.

In my hunt for safe havens, my attention and work have turned to a small group of elite companies playing a different game. 

These are companies like Midjourney, Pierre Computer, Increase, turbopuffer, and I’m sure many more. They are AI-native, ambitious, profitable, and have a very healthy relationship—if any—to venture capital. They are not the lifestyle businesses for the unambitous, one-person unicorns for the antisocial, buyouts for the MBAs, or invisible companies for the people that don’t care to have a LinkedIn. They have stacked teams, raving customers, financial freedom, legibility to other techies, and swag their employees are free and proud to wear in public. 

After spending time with these companies, I appreciate their imperviousness to the weird incentives and hype games of the “decacorn exit ASAP or nothing” venture-backed playbook. Most strikingly, they seem totally free to be themselves. The fuel source for the thing they’re doing appears to be equal parts outcomes and the experience itself. I suspect it’s this mindset that staves off the psychoses other companies are experiencing. 

I know we say this every time a breakthrough technology emerges, but there has never been a better time in history to build a highly profitable business with significant scale without raising or hiring a ton. As I study these companies, I am learning that you can operate at the exciting forefront without going insane.

Silicon Valley has watched and admired a small handful of companies who explored this path over the years—Linear, Basecamp, Valve, Obsidian, and early GitHub, to name a few. Have you noticed these companies bubbling up in the zeitgeist more lately? Me too. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence. In the coming years, I think and hope that we will see a lot more very successful companies built in this model. They will take advantage of our new AI toolkit to generate financial freedom and build organizations perfectly fit to the things they want to work on, with the people that they want to work with, at the scale, ambition, and pace that works for them. 

For what it’s worth, I also get the sense that the confidence to build a company like this comes more naturally to people that have already made some money. (And just sayin’, we’ll have a bunch more builders that meet this definition hitting the scene soon.) I hope—and expect!—this all comes together to create a much wider spectrum of company types, so that we can all find the size and shape of the company that works best for us. 

Starting this summer, I set out to explore the culture of one company that’s doing all this already: turbopuffer, the Ottawa-based startup powering the search infrastructure for many of the AI darlings. I’ve been working with them for the last six months to help with marketing and communications. I’ve joined their Slack, attended their offsites, and teamed up to ship some work together, all to get a feel for the place.

What follows is a love letter to the way they are building their company. I hope a look inside this one startup will open the aperture for what life and work in the time of AI can look like, and that more ambitious builders and aspiring founders feel inspired to try it for themselves.

The name turbopuffer makes people smile the first time they hear it (even an octogenarian behind me in line at the airport did when he saw it on my hat). The logo is an 8-bit pufferfish with pursed lips, ready for a smooch, and there are 20 remixed versions of it for every imaginable scenario. CEO and co-founder Simon Hørup Eskildsen has a knit pufferfish on his desk, which I ask about during a Zoom call. He puts it up close to the camera, squeezes, and a sparkly blob oozes out from the mouth. It’s the work of head of brand, Devin Lewtan, he explains, who has befriended a prolific crocheter on Etsy. I’m soon sent my own knit pufferfish, which I squeeze into the camera during Zoom calls unrelated to turbopuffer, which is when I realize what a clever brand campaign Devin’s running.

All the best VCs want to invest in the company because it has more than $100mn in annualized run rate and the top performing companies in their portfolio rely on turbopuffer’s infrastructure to, very quickly and very cheaply, wrangle the mountains of data underlying their products. But turbopuffer’s not interested. “What do I need venture capital for?” Simon says, wearing an I ♥️ B2B t-shirt. “We’ve got customers!”

Simon likes to say that turbopuffer started as a blog post, became a project, and then a startup. He and co-founder Justine Li—“the best engineer I knew at Shopify”—started tinkering together in her living room in 2023. We get to talking about the role of ambition in company-building, and he tells me that “ambition should be something right at the edge of your reach. Anything beyond that is delusion.” If you’ve grown up professionally in Silicon Valley, you know that’s not what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed to want it all and more from day zero.

But Simon and Justine grew up professionally at Shopify in Canada (Simon in Denmark before that), and to them, it simply makes sense to let the path unfold as you go. It’s all very The Timeless Way of Building, of which Simon is a fan. Many people forget that Shopify didn’t raise much venture capital for its first four years and had time for a personality of its own to settle in.

In October 2023, after getting their novel storage architecture for 10x cheaper search working, Simon and Justine didn’t head to Sand Hill Road to pitch VCs. They went to a small office in Hayes Valley where an eight-person team was building a new AI coding tool called Cursor. Simon had already piqued their interest with his tweets and blog posts, mostly on infrastructure engineering, and their first live meeting was more like an extended coworking session (a practice that’s stuck with the turbopuffer team). Simon and Justine promised they could reduce their costs by 95% and, after building a couple features and showing promising early results, Cursor was happy to migrate their workload. Voilà. First customer.

By Simon and Justine’s account, the revenue was nice, but the real boon was the conviction that they had the search infrastructure other frontier AI companies needed. Time to start selling. They went door to door pitching better performance at a fraction of the cost. And it worked. More customers, more interesting technical problems, and more features to build made them want to hire a couple extra hands. They found engineers Morgan Gallant on X and Bojan Serafimov at an IOI competition.

Revenue wasn’t enough to cover salaries yet, so Simon and Justine dipped into their personal savings. (They weren’t even paying themselves yet.) Eventually, with more customer demand, they decided they wanted to hire more but had put up enough of their own money. Time to raise.

turbopuffer had otherwise decided to stop taking angel investments because they found it too distracting. “Everyone at Shopify who knew Simon and Justine were building something tried to give them money,” a former Shopify colleague tells me. “Simon just tells his favorites: if you want equity, join!”

Simon recalls plenty of awkward conversations with VCs who didn’t like how he talked about his company’s prospects at this early stage. Investors kept asking how he planned to build a unicorn and Simon wasn’t sure he would.

“How was I supposed to know we were going to build a billion dollar company?!” he asks rhetorically, still indignant years later. “I knew I wanted this,” he says, wiggling his fingers over his keyboard like he’s coding or playing the piano. Then he lifts his hand and draws a Nike swoosh in the air. “But I couldn’t be sure we were going to do this.”

Simon now has a name for it: “ambition bullying.” And Lachy Groom did none of it. 

With Lachy—the investor turned co-founder of Physical Intelligence—Simon said he “could play with fully open cards.” He nervously told Lachy that he was open to taking his money, but wanted to be clear that if turbopuffer hadn’t found product-market fit after a year of trying their hardest, they’d wind the company down. Lachy was on board.

“It was obvious to me they were going to build something great,” he told me, “even if not yet to themselves. I just wanted to help however they needed it at that moment.” And with that, turbopuffer raised $700,000 from Lachy at a conservative valuation of $14mn.

What strikes me about this way of building a company is its honesty: letting ambition grow alongside contact with the market, prioritizing customers, hiring to fill a pressing need, and being very selective about ownership. And yet how rare it feels in Silicon Valley, especially in the AI era. With all the money flying around, it’s easy to forget that you can take this path. 

The approach reminds me of a blog post my friend and OG startup entrepreneur, Derek Sivers, recently published: “I’m building my dream house without predicting—by living in a bare cabin in the woods, then adding only what I find I actually need.” That means that only when he experiences the need for a bed or a shower does he build one. “I hate hanging laundry, so I got a washer and dryer. But I’m happy to do dishes, so no dishwasher.”

A few years into building, this DNA is still visible. Customer orientation comes especially naturally, which is what happens when customers pay your salaries instead of venture dollars.

“I get there’s a compute crunch, but why do I have to fill out a pile of paperwork, beg to get off waitlists, or text 20 people for an invite in order to use a product?” I was asked by a turbopuffer customer—an up-and-coming hedge fund manager in New York—who contrasted the company with others in Silicon Valley which often make him feel he’s doing them a favor by using their products. “With turbopuffer, I feel like an actual customer. I use the product, I pay for it, it’s useful, and they help me when I need them.”

Whenever a customer or prospective user asks a question or offers feedback in Slack, they get swarmed. I seldom see salespeople begging engineers to chime in, as I do at most startups. For one, the sales team is quite technical. (In fact, when turbopuffer was interviewing Jeff Holoman for an early sales role, Justine gave him a yes thinking he was interviewing for solutions engineering.) But more, everyone seems to genuinely enjoy untangling customers’ technical problems and building real relationships. It’s not uncommon for someone to volunteer themselves to put in a heap of extra hours on short notice to deliver a solution as quickly as possible.

In one of my favorite stories, Justine was very determined to shave seven milliseconds of latency off a customer’s requests. Although both companies had infrastructure in Oregon, she discovered that traffic between AWS and Google Cloud was inexplicably being routed through Seattle (15ms round trip!). Rather than accept this, Justine tracked down a private internet exchange and bought a fiber-optic connection that could link the two more directly (8ms round trip!). The ensuing Slack thread erupted with appreciation not only for the clever solution and time savings, but for all the future headaches it would spare the team.

Customer orientation comes especially naturally, which is what happens when customers pay your salaries instead of venture dollars.

In the day-to-day work, to turbopuffer, a chatty customer is a happy customer. They even built a notification system for shared Slack channels that alerts the team when message volume starts to wane. I notice that the automated customer call notes often include sweet personal asides, too. One particularly memorable note reads, “$name always drinks orange juice when traveling to ward off disease even though his background in epidemiology suggests it has absolutely no observable effect.”

I recently saw a tweet that read, “Everyone at [our company] sells, but turbopuffer takes it to the next level. The employees will look you in the eyes at a dinner party after just meeting you five seconds ago and ask ‘does your company puff? should you be puffin’?’ with a completely straight face.”

Other companies pile on in the replies saying “same.” I can tell they haven’t even seen the cigar gimmick yet: Under the right circumstances, some of which are a perfectly casual hang, Simon will produce a cigar from his pocket and ask, “Wanna puff?” “I have never smoked so much in my life,” he admits, but he’s committed to the bit. As bar-goers know, sharing a smoke is an excellent way to strike up a proper conversation with a stranger.

There is, however, one place turbopuffer doesn’t obsess over growth: headcount. turbopuffer is just over 50 people now, and adds a couple people per month max. This flies in the face of the AI hiring playbook, which states that anyone who’s good at anything even a little related to the company should be chased down, hired, and given the space to do their thing. turbopuffer is much more deliberate in this regard. They wait until they feel the pain and then find the right person to solve it. There are tradeoffs to this approach, of course, but the upside is a lean, profitable, tightly coordinated team where everyone gets to stay close to the metal. As Justine puts it, “We are okay with pain, but we are not okay with lowering the bar.”

Search engineer Adrien Grand is the perfect example of what that high bar enables. He lives in a small town in Normandy, France, but caught the team’s attention as the top committer to open-source search engine library, Lucene. In his first three months at turbopuffer, he set to work improving how the product handles long-text queries. In less than 90 days, he took turbopuffer from decent to state-of-the-art. And he did it all while working very normal hours and continuing to spend evenings and weekends doing his favorite hobby, horseback riding. “I do think about search while I ride, though,” he admits.

Recently, a prospective customer came knocking with a massive workload, several orders of magnitude bigger than turbopuffer’s next-largest customer. The team wasn’t sure how they could support it, but engineer Nathan VanBenschoten raised his hand to figure it out. “The napkin math checked out, so I knew it was possible,” Nathan recounts. That was enough for the team to tell the prospect, “Sounds good, we’ll have it ready later this week.” In order to crack the implementation, he had to re-think some of turbopuffer’s core infrastructure decisions from the ground up. And it worked! 

As a former account manager, I’ve developed a healthy distaste for this tactic of “selling ahead.” In my experience, it’s usually a recipe for overpromising and underdelivering. But turbopuffer has such a strong track record of making good on these promises, that saying something like “oh we have it, it just hasn’t been exposed in the API yet” feels less like a bluff and more like a reasonable bet on their ability to build.

The former account manager in me is also pleased (and genuinely surprised) to see turbopuffer being honest with prospects when the product isn’t the right fit. I even watched them help a company tune its setup on a competitor’s product rather than push for a full migration to solve something that could be fixed in a day. I once witnessed Simon cancel an entire afternoon of meetings when a customer called about a serious incident with their Postgres database. Without missing a beat, Simon hopped in an Uber to the office to get hands-on-keyboard to help.

Everyone works hard and ships a lot, especially when it comes to customer needs, but the place lacks the frenetic, sprint-on-everything-all-the-time quality I see at other AI startups. People have room to focus on their work and the time to step out for their quarterly haircut or to pick up their kids from school. Some of this composure I sense can surely be attributed to the high talent bar and culture of end-to-end ownership. But another big piece of it is that the intensity is counterbalanced by a lot of silliness and genuine affection for one another.

They call it hardcore / whimsical. It’s the company mantra. I think of it as Silicon Valley technical chops mixed with Canadian kindness and a Danish sense of humor.

There’s far more talk about life outside of work in turbopuffer’s Slack than I’m used to seeing. People set their Slack statuses to 🧗 or 👶 to indicate what might be occupying their attention outside work. I have noticed a high amount of per capita kids at turbopuffer. People encourage each other to take vacations and to go properly offline when they do. Once, Simon informed the team he’d be taking morning meetings from home “to avoid everyone being privy to my therapy call from my not-even-close-to-soundproof office.” (Take that, Marc Andreessen!) They turn everything into tier lists: kiwis are S-tier, plums are A-tier, honeydew is D-tier. Surely, you understand. Nearly every office table is covered in pufferfish paraphernalia.

By far the most-used emoji in Slack is . Serious technical discussions routinely devolve into jokes. One meeting roundup includes the bullet point: “Simon rips his pants on a door handle, hiding from everyone. (P0 declared).”

Employees are encouraged to be themselves before they even join, with one of turbopuffer’s secret hiring weapons, the Life Story interview. It’s a tactic borrowed from Shopify and adapted to turbopuffer’s style by Jenn Vanden Elzen, the company’s head of talent.

Most startups have some version of a “fit” interview, but I did one at turbopuffer, and it’s unlike anything I’ve encountered. Without giving away too much of its inner workings, the conversation feels more like a long-overdue catch-up with an old friend than an interview at a hot stuff AI startup. We talked about childhood interests, formative experiences, career decisions, and whatever sidequests came up along the way.

They call it hardcore / whimsical. It’s the company mantra. I think of it as Silicon Valley technical chops mixed with Canadian kindness and a Danish sense of humor.

I got obsessed with the tactic and dug into its role in the hiring process with Jenn after I joined. I learned that she isn’t trying to interrogate your accomplishments. Other interviews cover that. She’s trying to understand who you are, how you think, and what makes you the kind of person who achieved those things in the first place. I think back to the moments in our conversation when I caught a little sparkle in her eye in response to something I said, like when I recounted my days as a college soccer player. I realize they were all the moments when I had a sparkle in mine first.

The result of this company-building approach is an exceptionally gelled team. Some of that comes naturally with being a still-small-ish company, but I suspect much of it will endure as the business scales. There’s been almost no regretted employee churn so far, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these people become lifers. I detect very little daydreaming about what life would be like at another company. People seem very satisfied and settled in.

I talk about this with Jacob Thornton, founder of Pierre Computer, who explicitly looks for people who have had really long stints at previous companies. “Even when things are working, [startups] are so fire and ice. Anyone who has been anywhere for a while has seen the goods, the bads, and the super uglies. You need people who can stabilize the culture—and be chillers and fun regardless.”

turbopuffer has these people, too. It makes me wonder whether all the job-hopping and roving eyes in Silicon Valley are really a reflection of ambition, or whether some of it comes from a more persistent dissatisfaction, anxiety, FOMO, or even bad relationships with colleagues that no shiny new job will fix.

Remote work has become another no-no in the AI company-building playbook, but it works for turbopuffer, where employees span SF, NY, Nashville, Boulder, France, Germany, Canada, Norway, India, and elsewhere. In typical turbopuffer nerdery, every time someone is hired, there is a ceremonious re-calculation of the team’s geographic center, currently (to the joy of the many Canadians on the team) Kirkland Lake, Ontario.

Though the company is remote-first, people get together frequently at what they call “campfires.” There’s an unlimited budget to get on a plane and visit a coworker for any reason at all. Once word gets out that a few people are meeting up, others tend to pile on. When I see plans for these gatherings bubbling up in Slack, even I get a surge of pre-FOMO and start looking up flights.

I attend a few, and they feel part hackathon, part family reunion. There are stretches of intense work where people untangle things together, but also a lot of coffee walks, group activities, updates about the kids, and merciless teasing (e.g., I once watched data scientist Simon Riddell neg at least five people into taking a three mile walk to team dinner instead of pathetically taking Ubers). Meals are served family-style at the longest table Taylor Griffin or Emilia Goetsch, turbopuffer’s EA stars, can find. It’s how they do things in Denmark, and it’s how they do things at turbopuffer. When employees with kids travel to campfires, turbopuffer sends Uber Eats gift cards to their spouses to thank and recognize them for the effort they put in at home so their partners can attend.

There’s an unlimited budget to get on a plane and visit a coworker for any reason at all. Once word gets out that a few people are meeting up, others tend to pile on.

As the team has grown, a few offices have emerged in Ottawa, New York, and San Francisco. But these “offices” lack the usual trappings of venture-backed startup life. No catered lunches, bougie snacks, Dyson hair straighteners, or Aesop hand soap in the bathrooms. They’re meant to be offices, not homes away from home. If people want to work together in an office, great! But nobody’s trying to force it.

Unless, of course, you count Simon’s relentless promotion of turbopuffer’s very official Ottawa relocation package, featuring a housing stipend and a slate of pre-paid activities to help you get to know the place (including ice skate fitting, maple syrup tasting, and an Airbnb getaway to the lakes). So far, nobody has taken him up on it, but the Ottawa pride is endearing. I cannot deny that I was very charmed by the place during my stay. (I texted my husband, “Should we move to Ottawa?!,” which I have an embarrassing habit of doing when I visit a new city. In my defense, it was the perfect late summer day and my endorphins were flowing after a long jog along the Ottawa river.)

Perhaps the most important reason turbopuffer’s culture works is that the business of turbopuffer works. Big time. Simon and Justine understand that to build a talent-dense company, you need not only interesting problems, but also the financial upside to match the ambitions of the people you hire. Every month at all-hands, CFO Mike Gagnon, affectionately known as Money Mike, walks the team through the full P&L and projections. Up, up, up it goes. 

After attending a few, I see how this presentation cleverly serves two purposes at once: treating employees like owners who deserve full transparency on the business, and reminding everyone how stellar traction is. The team usually seems pleased but not necessarily satisfied.

When I ask Money Mike what excites him most about turbopuffer’s growth, I expect to hear about margins and big new product lines. Instead, he talks about the cap table, and how turbopuffer has designed its ownership structure to benefit employees first. As he walks me through their approach to equity grants, I can tell he is visibly annoyed about the layers of investor preferences at a typical venture-backed company that can eat into employees’ share of the proceeds. He is a genuinely proud steward of turbopuffer’s approach.

The second and only other time turbopuffer raised money was from Thrive and Lachy (again) in December of 2025, two and a half years into the company’s life, to fund its first tender offer. Simon and Justine felt it was time to reward the earliest employees, who’d been at it for a while now. For some, the money was life-changing. 

“I hope turbopuffer makes everyone on this team rich,” Simon told me. But I know from my time with Simon that the ambition goes beyond money. He wants people to succeed in every part of their lives. Once, after I shared a bummer of a personal update with Simon over Slack, my phone immediately started buzzing. He was about to take off for a flight and didn’t have much time but wanted to spend the next three minutes “making sure you know how awesome you are.” And I’m barely on the org chart!

Recently, Simon sent this message to the team:

Since this message, there have been at least half a dozen announcements of role changes.

My overwhelming feeling after spending time at turbopuffer is that this company is built on real stuff. Revenue from paying customers. Technical problems that require focus and expertise to solve. A cap table that reflects the people doing the work. Customers that the team is excited to serve and learn from. Team chemistry. A talent philosophy that wants people to find their strengths. Care for your colleagues inside and outside of work. A pace you can spend your life working at.

The company is not guided by fundraising milestones, venture capital, mega valuations, marketing hype, corporate politics, fancy figurehead-y hires, growth-at-all-costs, or FOMO. It’s built on the enduring qualities that make companies worth building and work worth doing. I will genuinely miss being in Slack with the team when my time embedded with them soon ends.

Brie Wolfson is a longtime startup operator, including at Stripe, Figma, Cursor. She is a contributing writer at Colossus and member of the Positive Sum team.