“I even encourage my CEOs to talk to their direct competitors. Go to coffee. Yeah, if you're clueless, you might leak some information towards them. Hopefully you're not clueless. And they might tell you something that's interesting, or they might shape your view on an industry. … It's an inverse intelligence-gathering mechanism.”

No, well, obviously, you do as good a job as you can building a network and knowing what's going on. It's basically cataloging the inventory, is the way we used to think about it. But every company in the market is a potential acquisition. So you catalog them and where are they in their growth rate? What kind of founders they have? Who are the backers? What are their aspirations? Who are their customers? Just like be informed. And, you know, the business, the corporate development group had to do that, but I kind of considered it everybody's job at the company to be constantly informed about what's happening around them. So, and then essentially, we at the company, we would try to weave it at Cisco. We would try to weave in the inventory against a strategy statement that was there. For example, we're a router company, but there are going to be more switches than routers. Therefore, we need to have a switch. What are the switching companies that are available, right? Or optical networking is becoming important because of bandwidth, blah, blah, blah. What are the companies that are available? You often have the…