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The Berlin headquarters of software developer Contentful occupies an old brick warehouse with heavy metal doors and broad functional corridors and spaces native to its industrial past.

Standing six stories high, the structure once accommodated its worker population with a miniature kitchen on every floor, a favorite employee perk perhaps first introduced by a coffee-loving tenant.\xa0 \xa0

Still, not everyone at Contentful loves coffee\u2014or at least its CFO, Markus Harder, doesn\u2019t.

\u201cMy secret is that I hate coffee\u2014I just don\u2019t like it,\u201d says Harder, who shortly after his arrival at the firm put in motion a mandate to remove the small kitchens.

\u201cIt was arguably one of my biggest career gambles,\u201d says Harder, as he captures our attention and leads us to wonder why a finance leader would make a point of championing such a seemingly misguided decree.

Of course, Harder\u2019s actions are only Part I of a two-part tale. The second part involves the creation of what he dubs \u201ca central watering hole\u201d complete with a coffee machine worthy of Berlin\u2019s trendiest \u201cthird-wave\u201d coffee shops.

\u201cWith all of these floors and their little coffee machines, we were never seeing each other\u2014we never talked to each other,\u201d explains Harder, who reports that Contentful hired a champion barista for a 2-week period to teach every employee how to properly use the new machine to render an excellent coffee.

Says Harder: \u201cWhatever you want to drink\u2014a coffee, a latte, an espresso\u2014you\u2019ll find that there\u2019s always somebody there who has been to the training or someone in line who is ready to train somebody else.\u201d

According to Harder, skeptics of the original mandate have largely been won over, but outsiders still find the coffee-making arrangement hard to imagine.

\u201cThree hundred people, just one coffee machine\u2014how does that work?\u201d asks Harder, echoing the thoughts of coffee drinkers beyond Contentful\u2019s four walls.

\u201cWell, actually, it works. And it\u2019s about the line. It\u2019s a social experience, and one that I celebrate each morning,\u201d remarks Harder, who says that on any given morning he\u2019ll spend a minimum of an hour at the caf\xe9.

Says Harder: \u201cWe\u2019re all in the open. I\u2019m available. Ask me something.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney

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Harder: We're in the fortunate, but also tricky situation that historically we've doubled or more than doubled revenue over basically every year of our history. And that brings challenges toward pipeline generation. Because if you want to double the revenue again, you need to have a massively bigger pipeline. So we are doing more with existing customers. Our existing customers have certain requirements that today we can't fulfill. So how do we get them to be successful in all those things they want to do? We have just relaunched our partner program.\xa0 So oftentimes Contentful gets implemented through a large partner who is either specialized in building web presences, or building workflows for the customer without touching any internal user interfaces and so forth. So you can think of the Accenture's and Capgemini's of this world, or Razorfish or ... There are certain marketing agencies that use Contentful.

So you were trying to work more with partners, enable them to be more educated with how to best implement Contentful. We're investing a lot in enablement and training and coaching. So the learning materials about Contentful are out there are heavily downloaded. We have a Contentful certification. So if you are a developer, you can actually graduate with a Contentful diploma. And we try to be industry agnostic, such that our solution really works for a broad variety of customers though. Yeah. So I continue to invest in the team. I continue to invest in automation and systems. I'm actually accelerating hiring at this point and I'm getting Contentful ready for being a public company in a couple of years. That is sort of a North star. That doesn't mean that we