027 With Special Guest Arjun Dev Arora

[00:00:01] Speaker A: All right, we're live. [00:00:02] Speaker B: Hello, we're live. [00:00:04] Speaker A: Excellent. Excellent. Hey, welcome back. This is the Gregory and Paul show. Gregory. [00:00:10] Speaker B: Hey, everyone. Paul. [00:00:11] Speaker A: And we break down the latest SaaS, startups, AI, whatever the Internet is debating. We aim for smart takes. I have a lot of dumb ones, and you let me know, and that's fine. That's how the Internet goes. [00:00:27] Speaker B: It is. [00:00:27] Speaker A: And, you know, we stream live on X and LinkedIn every Friday at noon. And then. Paul, do we put this on even. [00:00:34] Speaker B: Yes. [00:00:34] Speaker A: Spotify, or what's the deal? [00:00:36] Speaker B: We put it onto YouTube. Spotify, Apple Podcast, everyone. [00:00:41] Speaker A: Oh, we're on Apple podcast, too. [00:00:42] Speaker B: We're. We're all the. All the podcasting platforms, dude. [00:00:47] Speaker A: There you go. [00:00:47] Speaker B: Professionals. [00:00:49] Speaker A: Semi professional. Okay. And then we had our special guest, Arjun Devereux, who I have known for many years. He was actually our first guest for our first episode where none of us knew what we were doing. The audience didn't know what to expect. And now that we're a giant success, we've asked our. We. We asked him to come back and experience the all new Gregory and Paul show. And so, rj, do you want me to do, like, a little quick intro? [00:01:24] Speaker B: Sure. [00:01:25] Speaker C: Thank you. [00:01:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:25] Speaker C: Great to be here and excited to be back. So thanks, y'. [00:01:28] Speaker B: All. [00:01:28] Speaker C: Congrats on your success. This is gonna be fun. [00:01:30] Speaker A: So, yeah, the way. The way. The story I love to tell is that I met Arjun at this startup that I worked at very briefly, and I always. And I. And I'm very, very proud to claim it was an abysmal failure, but that. But that one of the huge successes that came out of that was our relationship, and it's been great knowing you ever since. And we'll go into your background a little bit, but I knew you when you had your own startup, which I want to hear about, and then you kind of pivoted and now work in the startup fundraising space, both on the, like, founder startup side and helping emerging managers and other investors raise money for their funds. So, yeah, let's. Let's start with, like, I want to hear about the beginning. Like, I didn't know you before your first startup, Retarder, so I'd love to hear, like, how you got started with that, how you got into entrepreneurship. And obviously, like, we love founders. Entrepreneurs listen to this. And so these origin stories think are always really helpful for them to get inspired and understand how to overcome some of the challenges that they have at the early stage. [00:02:41] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. Well, I'll start. Since you asked. I'll start from the beginning. So I went to school at UC Berkeley, so studied electrical engineering and computer science, so technical by background. But while I was there started to take some, you know, business classes. So I was at the Haas School of Business, was doing something called the center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, just getting plugged into the entrepreneurial world. At that time that program had literally just started at Berkeley. So it was, it was I think the inaugural class of, of cet. Fun fact. In that class at the center for Entrepreneurship and Technology was Tony, the now CEO of DoorDash, Ryan, who was the deputy CTO of the United States of America, the co founder of Superhuman and a couple other interesting folks. So I was very, very fortunate and lucky to kind of just be hanging around some incredible people at Cal, but none of us really knew what entrepreneurship was about. Berkeley at the time wasn't necessarily the biggest entrepreneurial school though certainly it had many successes. So it was just a fun place to be at the right time. But anyway with from there a couple years investment banking and then a couple years at Yahoo. And so at Yahoo I ended up leading business development for Yahoo Real estate. Started, you know, as relatively junior inbound business development guy. But it was an opportunity where I got to cut my teeth at a bigger company and understand just how the Internet worked and got to really get in the weeds on, you know, this is, these are the first principles of the Internet. What is it? What is advertising? What are links? How do you send traffic to certain places? How do you do data partnerships, how do you get data from one party to another? How do you do co marketing, co branding? So it was a really great place to just learn the literal basics of the Internet. And by the way, many of those first principles still apply today. Even in the crazy world of the Internet and AI and GPTs, it's still the same principles. It's text, it's links, it's images. So the foundational until we all disappear into VR world, it's still the same first principles. And that was super helpful to learn. But anyways, from there is where I started my first company called Retargeter in the online advertising space. And obviously it had some exposure to display advertising at Yahoo at the time we were doing a boatload of it. That was the way we monetized and we had some early kind of retargeting technology but it was limited in scope just to what was happening inside the kind of Yahoo walled garden, so to speak. And so the idea or the premise was hey, let's actually make retargeting Accessible one to more people. The only folks who could usually buy any display at that time on Yahoo were spending tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. And so it wasn't very democratized. And then two, it was kind of within the walled garden of Yahoo. So that was the genesis of it. And just jumped off the proverbial cliff and got going. Yeah. [00:05:29] Speaker A: Awesome. Did you like, raise any money or how did you get started? [00:05:32] Speaker C: Not initially. Initially it was a small. Yeah, just kind of getting it out and getting going and very bootstrappy. So bootstrapped for the first, I think four and a half, maybe of the six years of the company was all bootstrapped. And so that just meant initially started to stitch together a open source, you know, ad platform called OpenX that allowed us to start connecting different sources of display advertising. And then, you know, had had the ability to use a pixel to be able to do some very basic retargeting and that was literally hacked together. These days you would call that vibe coding. But those days it was just hacking stuff together and then just started selling because we said, hey, this actually works. It works enough to be able to go to a small business and sell this. Yes, it was very manual at the time. We had to, you know, do some work on the back end to get any live and work with a partner and do all kinds of things. But we were able to kind of get campaigns going. And the benefit of the ad world is that once you start, you know, you could charge real money and you could make real margin and so you, you're off into the races. And then we started to build what I would consider to be real technology a little bit later. But for the first year, maybe even year and a half, we were, it was very, very hacked together. And then that allowed us to, to at least get going and make, you know, at that time quite a bit of money. In the early days, I think we got to something like, you know, 50k in MRR, just tacking it together and then. And then started to use that cash to hire and then get going. [00:07:06] Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah. [00:07:08] Speaker A: Okay, so that's the kind of entrepreneurial journey. And then what was the eventual outcome? When did you leave Retargeter? [00:07:15] Speaker C: Yeah, so we ended up selling company in 2015. The company got to tens of millions of revenue. We like built a, an early, not so good version of the product and then using an outsourced kind of service provider. Then we kind of built it internally with our own talent and then built it again internally. But anyway, we Were great place. We had customers all over the world. We worked some of the largest ad agencies. We were selling to folks like Uber and Twilio in the Bay Area. And then we sold the company in 2015. We're just about 50 people at the time and it was an outcome that was 2015. And then from there made my way over. I had been an LP and fund one of 500 startups and I had been exposed to just a lot of early stage startups and obviously became friends with a lot of other founders and just generally trying to be helpful to other founders as they were going through their journeys. Particularly once we had hit several million in ARR, a lot of folks started to reach out and just hey, how'd you do it? What, How'd that happen? What worked? And so you started to be in the mix with other founders and supporting them. And that's where I just kind of really enjoyed that and really enjoyed working with other founders and helping them out. And that then kind of organically led to me jumping into 500 startups. So I was an LP and fund one that kind of got exposure early and then just kind of was around the hoop with other founders and investors from that fund. And so they said, hey, why don't you just come in and hang out as an eir? Initially I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't know if I was going to go start another company or do whatever, but I just really, just really enjoyed it. I loved working with young ambitious founders going through the program and pretty quickly found myself as a partner at the fund and then pretty quickly thereafter found myself leading fundraising and investor relations for the fund. So it was a quick run and then ended up being very materially involved in all things from capital formation to actively investing to supporting the portfolio to teaching venture courses at Stanford that we were putting together. There's all kinds of fun stuff. So it got fun fast. Awesome. [00:09:27] Speaker B: What kind of founder traits do you look for? What are some kind of the signs that you look for or habits maybe? [00:09:37] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that one interesting piece of news that came out recently and maybe it's a bit timely. So Hummingbird VC I have a lot of respect for. I think they said they put out something that said we look for founders with childhood trauma. Right. And I think that was. You saw that, right. So it was an attention grabbing headline. But I think the implication of that is what's more important. I think it's looking for folks who have an insatiable drive and it doesn't necessarily have to come from childhood trauma. It can come from other places. But just to make the point, I think folks who have an absolute relentless need to solve a problem and to dig in and do something for whatever that reason might be, that is, I think, a really important critical base case for just investing in that founder and then everything on top of that is obviously a very sharp understanding of the market, a deep customer obsession, an ability to be nimble and be highly creative and find solutions with constrained resources and then be tactical enough to build a great product. And not to say that AI is now making it easy, but it's making it much easier. I think we're now dependent even more so than before is just making sure that you have that customer empathy. You can do that customer development and really understand the problem and the market and then be just relentless in executing against it. So those are things that I really look for. And then a design ethos. I'm highly partial to design. I know. Gregory, behind you. You got that great design magazine. I think it, like, it does matter. And so I think, you know, finding folks who can think about the experience for their customers, their partners, their employees, and that's what design means to me is just being a thoughtfulness around, you know, around the experience for. For the end user, whoever that quote, unquote, user might be, whether it's an investor or somebody else. [00:11:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I could. I could drown this podcast in discussion about design, but we'll do that another. Another time. Another time. Okay, so, so great. That's the retargeter experience. And then I'd love to hear more about 500 startups. And, like, I remember, like, us chatting a bunch of times while you were there. I even went to a few of the demo days, of course, ran into Dave. So maybe, maybe just let people know a little bit about Dave too. I don't know if, like, people who listen to this, like, are so. Because we use these people's names like they are people that we just know. Right. I think for other people. Yeah. A little more context be helpful. [00:12:17] Speaker C: So, yeah, Dave and Christine started 500 Startups in the early days. And I think this was in the early 2010s. And at that time, this kind of concept of seed investing wasn't just one second. [00:12:29] Speaker A: Dave was like PayPal mafia. [00:12:30] Speaker C: Right, PayPal mafia. So Dave had been around. Yeah. Through kind of the PayPal ecosystem, and had worked there for a short period of time and then had started a small sub fund that was working on Facebook, apps and other things. So he was kind of floating around that broader PayPal Facebook ecosystem in the early days. And then it's at one point had a small sub fund I think was initially maybe connected to founders fund in some capacity. But anyways, which would make sense given the PayPal connectivity. But then decided to start, you know, 500 Startups with Christine and the principle at the time was, you know, there's this burgeoning kind of asset class or you know, of seed investing. And around the same time Jeff Clavier at Now Uncork is called soft tech. At the time there was Mike Maples, now you know, has always been at Floodgate and other folks. So they were kind of the early vanguard of this principle of seed investing. And at the time the print, the idea was hey, the cost of starting a company is coming down materially. It's not going to cost 5 million bucks and a whole bunch of servers and things. You can do it now the web based stuff was just coming into fruition. Not, not too dissimilar for what's happening right now in the AI world though I don't think we've seen the venture capital ecosystem adapt to it in the same way that it did in the past in the creation of these seed funds. But anyway, 500 was one of those funds and the idea was just to be a very active early stage investor and write small checks into lots of deals. And so the portfolio math, you know, supports that. And so if you look and many folks have run Monte Carlo simulations and done all kinds of things around this but the idea is basically if you write a lot of little checks and veteran being a power law game, you're going to catch a couple big winners. And that was the, that was the idea of 500 Startups. [00:14:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, so Dave McClure was his name and just in case people are wondering and I looked pretty closely at 500 Startups and I was always a fan and I was a fan of you too of course, but like a fan, a fan of what they were doing at 500 Startups. And like so what I do know, like so now we have the data to go back and so this idea like oh, make all these small investments and all these little early stage seed companies, like does this work? And so I know if there's. [00:14:50] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I can tell you. Yeah, as an. I can confirm. Yeah. [00:14:54] Speaker A: Were there three unicorns? So Canva was one. I know Canva was one of them, but there's two or three or two or three other like well known SaaS companies today that were part of the original Twilio. [00:15:07] Speaker C: Twilio is another big one there. So, yeah, I mean there were, there were many, many big winners. And by the way, Even through Fund 4, there were many now companies that we invested in. So that was Fund one where it was an lp, but in Fund four is where I joined as a partner. We had a ton of companies that we invested in at the earliest stages through the accelerator program that are now unicorns. And yeah, that strategy and structure definitely worked. There's LPs at Virtus Capital who've done a lot of math on this. And then of course, we ran a whole bunch of interesting multicolor simulations and otherwise at. On our side of 500 when I was there. And Absolutely. I mean the, the math has worked. Fund one is an, is a stellar fund. I don't know if I can share the numbers publicly, but, but there it's, it's very good. Yeah. [00:15:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw or heard Dave recently on 500 Startups and he was talking about that too. That like, the approach that he used and the data, like if you. Essentially it came down to like, if you make enough investments and you have a certain quality bar and a certain approach. Yes, like his data at least. His data at least shows like it could be enormous. Right, like just, just massive. Yeah. Okay, so that was the 500 startup days. He did that until about when. [00:16:29] Speaker C: Until I think it was around 2018, roughly 18. [00:16:34] Speaker A: And then. And so what have you been doing since? [00:16:37] Speaker C: Yeah, since then I, you know, I ended up hanging my hat at EXPA for a short while. So a dear friend of mine was a partner there and it was a good place for me to kind of hang in between things. So I was in residence there. And Expo is the, I would call it the Venture Studio meets venture fund and also do some philanthropic work of Garrett Camp, the founder of Uber. So Garrett was the original founder of Uber and he brought on initially Ryan and then. And then Travis, who most folks know as the CEO of, of Uber, but Garrett was the founder and so that was a great place to hang. And obviously Uber had done incredibly well by that point in time and actually continues to do well since they even left Expo a few years ago. But yeah, it was a great place to work on a handful of special projects and again, a place with a deep design centricity and a ton of great portfolio companies. So I've got to be involved with companies like Aero, which is a really cool company in the private aviation space. So if you ever want to Take a semi private plane out of Los Angeles to Mexico or Aspen that they're your folks. That's a beautiful experience, well designed. But also of course a whole bunch of other projects like Metabase and Houzz and things in more traditional kind of consumer Internet obviously given the uber history, but also things in kind of enterprise and infra that we were working on at Expo as well. So it was a lot of fun. [00:18:01] Speaker A: And then today you're just. Independent consultant. Yeah. [00:18:06] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah. So today that was a place where I hanging out for a bit and got involved with some nonprofit work as well. Became the chairman of the board of the St. Francis Foundation. But I started doing what I'm doing today, which is mostly advising founders and fund managers and then doing some work with LPs as well and from time to time investing both personally and through spv. So it's a good combination of activities. But I'd say I spent my time with about a dozen founders that I'm very fortunate to get to dig in with on a very material basis, about half a dozen funds and then you know, get to do some investing from time to time and then you know, depending on the situation we'll, we'll, you know, pull together some SPVs or bring a few family offices I work very closely with into some late stage deals. So that's kind of the, the mix of things that's keeping me busy these days. [00:18:57] Speaker B: What, what are you excited about? Yeah, maybe in 2026, what kind of startups are you looking to fund or. [00:19:08] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. I would say there's. Obviously we're all excited about AI I think just as a general starting point, but I would say I'd say space deep tech. I think those kind of spaces are particularly interesting outside of the traditional kind of vertical AI solutions that we're seeing everywhere. And then on the fund side I think there's a lot of great fund platforms that have gone through a very, very difficult last five years, but I think they're going to come out stronger and as the liquidity returns we're going to see some early stage funds that are just going to be great supporters to founders. There's this new tranche of pre seed and seed stage funds that are very hands on. They are there to support founders, they're comfortable investing in unique and different and sometimes weird things, which I think is great and we need more of that. I think that next wave of fund managers I'm super jazzed about as well. But on the vertical AI side I love people who are going to Tackle very difficult industries that have typically been run on paper and pen and using teams of huge, huge teams of people that are doing difficult or manual work. Those spaces particularly excited about. So think shipping, logistics, trucking, aviation, chemical manufacturing, mining. All of these spaces are just seeing a ton of innovation coming in around AI hospitality. Those spaces are really, really exciting to me because I think you can actually use technology in a way to, particularly with AI, solve real problems and remove a lot of the. For lack of a better term, just BS work that a lot of folks have to do. So that can kind of allow you to be just elevated in doing more human work. And so that's what I'm excited about. [00:20:54] Speaker A: Hey, I am fantastic at BS work. [00:20:56] Speaker C: Okay? Just because you're good at it doesn't mean you should keep doing it. [00:21:02] Speaker A: Touche. Touche. So I want to share this thing quickly that was in our doc because, like, you know, when you mentioned, like, space tech, and for a while, I kept thinking that, like, space tech was just this kind of, like, vanity play by billionaires or whatever. And then, you know, Bernie made his statement about wanting a moratorium on data centers. And of course, I laughed at it and made fun of this on X, just like a lot of other people. And I do not agree that we should have a more tour of my data centers. Let's be super clear. Very comfortable that being out there is my statement. [00:21:42] Speaker C: Yes. [00:21:44] Speaker A: But, like, Elon's response was, I saw, like, later, like, blew me away where he said, well, I'm just gonna build my data center in space. [00:21:52] Speaker C: Yeah, right. [00:21:53] Speaker A: And, like, you don't have any jurisdiction over it. I was like, wow. It was like a first moment where I looked at, you know, the space tech stuff, and I was like, okay, that has legs. Like, that's a real reason to go do it is like, the restrictions are very, very different. And let's even say, like, I don't want this to come off as so, like, rogue. Let's agree that, like, the US Government agrees to the launch. You don't need municipal support to build. You're right, because the pushback was the burning thing aside. The pushback has been like, municipalities are like, we're mad. You're gonna take all our water. We're mad. Our energy prices are gonna go up. We don't trust you. Our energy prices are gonna go up. And, like, I'm a huge advocate of tech, but I think that those are reasonable fears of local people. You're small. You're in a Wisconsin rural town. You're a farmer. Like that's your livelihood. What you know, and like this big giant corporation that's literally bigger than many nation states is going to come to your town and start doing things. Like I can see why it's really concerning and they maybe don't trust it. Right. So this very interesting alternative is like, well, I'll just boost this thing up in outer space where I get 24,7 access to solar power. I don't need to worry about cooling. And then I believe I have the technology with like microwaves ever to like beam the stuff down. I was like really blown away that like this will be I think a reality in my lifetime. [00:23:25] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it's already begun. And I think a lot of the rocket infrastructure for that is certainly in place. SpaceX, Firefly and others and then the other kind of manufacturing in space. I was just on the phone before this with a company that's doing space debris removal. So you set stuff up, you got to build stuff and then when stuff breaks you got to bring it back down. So I think all those parts and pieces are all. And then you got to communicate. Right. So all the comms related stuff, but all those parts and pieces are. There are great people working on it right now and it's functional and it's in space removing debris today for example. So I think that's where it's happening very, very quickly. Not only, I would say not only in your lifetime but probably in the next three years. So these sort of things are moving with tremendous speed and it's going to be fun to watch. [00:24:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:18] Speaker B: Cool. [00:24:18] Speaker A: Three years. Launch that data center. [00:24:22] Speaker C: That's not, that's a predict. And I have no, you know, no data. But it feels like things are moving quickly. So it's on video. [00:24:29] Speaker A: We're going to hold you to. [00:24:30] Speaker C: It's good. So I check in. Yeah, in 20 minutes. Yeah. [00:24:36] Speaker A: I always get back to Paul's question too, like, and I know I took that a tangent. So it was fun but like fundraising, so, so yeah, I think this is really important because like, and I want to make sure that we got your perspective specifically on startup fundraising, early stage fundraising. I mean you and I partner on the events, the Viper's House events in San Francisco. We have like seed stage, early stage. It may be series A people and they're all looking for money right now. So like yes. Help us just understand like perhaps like where you see the landscape in terms of like fundraising for early stage companies today. [00:25:09] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:25:10] Speaker A: And how you like think your best guess about how it'll play out Next year. [00:25:15] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's a bit of a tale of two cities, I think. If you're a super high signal founder working on an AI problem that has the potential to break out, it can appear like people are throwing money at you. And that is true in Semino. Many founders who have gotten 4 million bucks, 5 million bucks, just day one, nothing but a deck. And they may be second, third time founders, they may have some meaningful pedigree, but they're working on a big AI solution and they're off into the races. And then for other folks, there is this kind of, I don't want to call it a zombie universe, but there are a lot of companies that had raised either seed rounds or series A rounds pre kind of the major AI boom, and are either now pivoting into AI or trying to add AI in a way that makes them credible. And for those folks, fundraising has been incredibly difficult and they've had a very, very hard time raising capital because they've had to both pivot and show that they can be AI native and do so in an environment which all the money is being thrown at things that have the potential to break out like cursor or break out like anthropic or whatever it might be from a revenue growth perspective. So that's where I think we're at. From a market. If you are a net new company that's AI native with a very strong pedigree, and you're listening to the TechCrunch bubble, it just feels like, yeah, of course I'm raising millions of dollars right out the gate and that's normal and it's totally easy to do and everyone should be doing that. And that's true for a very small subsegment of the world. I think for everyone else, you have to run a very tight process. You have to think thoughtfully about the market, how it's changing, how you are integrating AI, what will give you the potential to grow with speed, and how you're thinking about marketing and selling in a noisy environment. And you need to come with very sharp answers to all of those things. And then, yeah, it'll be protracted. It'll take longer than it certainly did a few years ago, and you may raise a little less than you wanted to, but you could still get a round done. So, yeah, and then for some folks who are, you know, just not able to get the growth going and they kind of raise their A or B back in 21, 22, it's. It's going to be tough. I think we're going to see a lot of companies that are yet to go through an acqui hire process or frankly just have to shut down somehow. We still didn't see as much of that in 25 as I thought we might have, but it's definitely coming even more so. 26. [00:27:56] Speaker B: I have a question, follow up question. Do you think the fundamental way that founders raise capital has changed recently or will it change in 2026? [00:28:06] Speaker C: No, I think just AI is now giving you the opportunity to build your lists better, refine your messaging better, figure out do your pre meeting research better. So there's no excuse for not building out a very robust list. If you're raising a seed round or pre seed round, you've got to reach out to at least 100 people, probably closer to 200 if I'm being frank. So how do you build that list? Make sure you do your research, you're thoughtful. If you're a, a fintech company, you're not reaching out to you know, consumer AI, you know, investor or something like that or you know, vice versa. So just making sure that you show up much, much more educated than in the past. In the past, people might forgive it. Oh, you know, missed it. Yeah, we actually don't invest in that. But if it's like on your website and it's obvious and AI can go scrape it and fill in the thing that says this is what they invest in, this is their check size. Like there's kind of no excuse for missing an obvious thing where there's not a match for a fund. So I think you know, being much more prepared, building out your list more robustly, finding more funds so that when you do run your process, you are being very comprehensive. That, that is definitely now AI has enabled a lot of that. [00:29:19] Speaker A: Okay, this is kind of fun. Let's, let's maybe let me throw at you a few questions. Like I don't know if it's debunking rumors but like maybe these are like popular things you read on X about fundraising. Let's, let's go down this. Yeah, this will be fun, right? [00:29:31] Speaker C: Yeah, let's do it. [00:29:32] Speaker A: So, so, so there's always a debate about the deck. Yes, Fundraising deck. Like yeah, some people are like, it's super valuable. Spend tons of money on it, make it look cool. You need all these projections. I met a guy yesterday who's like, does the financial productions for like early stage startups. Like it puts them in the deck. So like there's a whole almost ecosystem of people around who like think that There's a whole nother cohort that's like the deck is just like a leave behind. It's more about the founder, it's more about your confidence, it's more about, particularly in the early stage where you don't have a lot of traction and I would go as far to say like, I guess to some degree I'm on this camp. Like the projections you're going to show me with like an early stage seed stage company are just meaningless. Yeah, like I don't care that you've got some a PhD in math, you created a financial production for you it's just, it's just not useful. So, so where do you fit on that spectrum or how do you think about that? [00:30:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm partial to a deck and I think it is helpful. I think the projections don't necessarily, they're only important as a way to unpack your thinking and unpack your level of aspiration and aggression. That's where I think the, the projections matter more. It's more about, okay, are you thinking about how the revenue stacks up, how it grows over time where you might introduce net new products or net new geographies or things like that? That's just helpful to unpack. Someone's thinking, I don't know that, you know, nobody believes those numbers ever. And it's funny is that even in the place of folks that have been aggressive, when it's really worked, it's grown even faster than they could have ever imagined. And when it doesn't work, it's been, you know, just zero. So it doesn't matter. Right. So I think that's the, that's the reality there and then on the deck. You know, I think unless you're a very seasoned second, third time founder and you know the folks that you're going to be raising money from and you've dealt with them before, you may have even raised for them before, then maybe you can get away with not having a deck, but for everyone else, bring a deck. And I know a very extremely tier 1 GP founder of a multi billion dollar, multi stage fund who just will not take a meeting if they don't send him a deck. He's like, look, I don't care, something else will show up. Doesn't bother me. Like if you don't send me a deck, I'm not taking a meeting. Right. And I wouldn't say I was that harsh when I was at 500 Startups. So I was pretty close. So I want to see, I definitely want to see the deck. Because it just lets everyone be more prepared. It lets you show up and actually have a dialogue and a conversation and not necessarily sit there and be pitched the deck. So it's not that you're building the deck so that you can come into a 30 minute meeting and pitch it for nine minutes, it's actually so that there's enough context ahead of that meeting so that you can get into a discussion. Yeah, you might pull up a slide here and there, you know, as you're having your initial conversation, which can be helpful, but it's much more about providing a material amount of context ahead of the first conversation so that you can dive right into a fulsome discussion that lets the investor know, hey, is this real? Is this going to, is this something I'm actually excited about? Do I want to spend the energy in cycles to take this to the next step? That's then, that's then becomes a question, [00:32:39] Speaker A: you know, okay, this is fun. I'm going to turn this into everything I want to ask about fundraising process. [00:32:45] Speaker C: Let's do it. [00:32:45] Speaker A: But we're afraid. But we're afraid to. [00:32:48] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:32:48] Speaker A: Afraid to ask you, but post it on Twitter anonymously. [00:32:51] Speaker C: Yeah, there you go. [00:32:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So, okay, so like the other thing. Yeah, this is fun, right? I'm too busy to read Twitter right now to get some more good feedback. But what about the like three slide teaser and then the 10 or 20 slide deck? What is your perspective on that? So just to just context. Yeah, there's a whole cohort of people who are like, you send the investor a three slide teaser and then say if you want more, I have my full deck. That's 10 to 20 slides. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where do you fall on that? On that camp? [00:33:23] Speaker C: I've fallen the just do 110 to 15, you know, slide deck that is tight and well structured so that we can just get to the meat of the matter. If, if I'm going to pass, I'm going to pass anyways. Like I'm going to pass on a 3 slide deck or 15 slide deck. Like give, give yourself the opportunity to, you know, tell, tell the full story and have someone, you know, at least have the opportunity to try and understand it and then, you know, and then go from there. And, and that again is in the spirit of having a, a full conversation. And again, if it's compelling enough in terms of the market, the product and there's questions open, that's fine. That's what the discussion's for. That's the thing to unpack. But if there's not enough substance there, then it's just very tough. [00:34:09] Speaker A: This is great. I got so many of these. Yeah, this is really fun. So what about cold outreach versus warm intro? Right. So the other thing you'll read on X all the time is like, there's a whole core. People are like, do the crazy DM strategy, just cold outreach, go nuts. And you hear these stories too, which I know are true. I just sent an email to Patrick Carlson at Stripe and lo and behold, the invested. Right, Right. And then there's the. I guess, let me, Let me. I think, to be super clear, I would say Mark Andreessen, I think is the king of the war intro perspective. He's always very clear in every interview. He's very consistent, which I like about that guy. [00:34:50] Speaker C: Yep. [00:34:50] Speaker A: He's like. He's like, if you can't figure out how to get. Get to me, then you don't matter. [00:34:53] Speaker C: It's basically what he says. [00:34:54] Speaker A: Right? That's part of a. Part of the skill set. [00:34:57] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah. [00:34:58] Speaker B: Right. [00:34:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And I like the way he's so upfront about. He's like, that's one of the skills. Like, so. So what do you think about this? [00:35:03] Speaker C: I am, I am very, very strongly in the Marc Andreessen camp. Yeah. So I think the warm intro matters and I think it is. It's a part of being able to, you know, unlock the network. And in any entrepreneurial activity, you're going to have to build and maintain relationships and you're going to have to figure out how to get a whole bunch of people to be mildly interested in supporting you just a little bit. And if you can do that, then things move and the world moves in your in favor and that creates that real reality distortion field. Right. So I am very partial now if for some reason you just can't get that warm intro and you take the time to write an incredibly thoughtful cold email, great. That's fine too. So I think that if you've tried every angle and you just don't feel like you have the warmest angle in the time that you need to get things moving, I understand that sometimes you just got to send that note. But if you do send that note, it needs to be so well researched, so well thought out, that it would make a professional spy blush. Like the level of excellence of understanding that other person's life, it needs to be at that level of a commitment to understanding the other person. That's the only time you should send that cold email. It's gotta be so good, so well researched, so Clear on what that other person's motivations, interests, you know, drivers are. Okay, cool. Now, you know, if you need to. Sure. Send the cold email, I get it. Sometimes you gotta do the thing now. And you know, okay, if I could go build a relationship with that person, that person, they can introduce me. But I don't have three months to do that. I gotta do it now. Okay, fine, send the cold email, but make sure you do the research. [00:36:42] Speaker B: So can you elaborate on that a little bit now? That with AI, it's so easy to watch the video. Get AI to watch this video, extract a call from you, send it in your email. Can you tell right away is that useful? [00:36:58] Speaker C: Right. I think it has to be something that is a bit more personal and it feels like it isn't easily aiable. Right. So it's like, hey, I understand that you have watched or XYZ or I've read about this, this and that, or I noticed you're these, these are your last five investments. You clearly have a passion for, you know, X type of founder who comes from this background or, you know, and I match that background. Or I noticed that you've invested three times into this industry. You know, here's what I think you've learned, or what, what I could teach you or whatever. I mean, I think, you know, using any and all of those ways to. To do it. Yeah. And I think AI can definitely help. And, and even if you do it with AI, Great. At least you've put in the effort. Most people won't even do that. So to receive the cold email with someone who's clearly spent time with AI to try and figure out how to send you a great note. [00:37:51] Speaker B: Cool. [00:37:51] Speaker C: That's great. It doesn't necessarily need to be literal manual research. So, yeah, I think it's about showing effort and I think it's about showing an understanding of the other person. Just a willingness to step out of your own mental space and onto someone else's map. That alone is usually a big enough signal for a lot of folks. By the way, this works well for warm too. Not to say this should only be done for cold. Right. Even if you're sending a warm intro, if you can add a little bit more personalization, it goes a long way. [00:38:23] Speaker A: Awesome. This is so much fun. Let me go with the questions. How much traction does someone need to get funded? Let's say in 2026? [00:38:36] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:38:36] Speaker A: And like, because I meet people all the time who, like, well, I meet two groups of people. They don't have any traction. They kind of have an idea, maybe the prototype. And like I think those are always been hard to get funded even in a good environment. So. [00:38:47] Speaker C: But especially now. [00:38:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I have an opinion on that one. [00:38:50] Speaker C: Right, right, that one. [00:38:51] Speaker A: So the question is like, yeah, how much? How much? Because many people, they have traction, but like how much traction? Like how would you explain that? Like, okay, right, yeah. [00:39:00] Speaker C: So I think on the pre seed side. Well, one, I think, yeah, in this day and age of AI and vibe coding tools and you know, lovable and all the good things that we have replit and else, you know, you should be able to at least put something together, right. Even if it's some feature of one part of your product that solves a material problem, like just being able to put that in place just to show your product thinking, your customer centricity, your design ethos, like all of that stuff, you could, could, you could do something. So if you don't show up with even that, then you've got a problem. But let's say you at least solve that and now you go out and talk to a whole bunch of customers. So maybe you've just done a ton of great customer development and you're raising a true precede round. If you're raising a true precede round, then it's fine then I think as long as you've built something, you have a nice website, you have some early version of the product, you've talked to probably at least 100 customers, maybe, you know, 50 to 100. And if you're in consumer, you probably, you know, had it in front of thousands. That's what's necessary to at least get the pre seed conversation started. And that means that that's an institutional pre seed, that's our, you know, friends that, you know, Precursor Ventures, A4Pear. These are your classic kind of pre seed investors. They invest very, very early and they're going to need to see something like this to be able to make a bet. And then if you're looking for a seed round, well, then you better have revenue and you better have kind of a meaningful amount of paying customers. You need to have tested pricing, maybe with a handful of them, seen how it works. And now you've got to be headed in a direction in which it's clear that there are people paying for your product. You're solving their problem. The NPS score is at least high and trending up even higher. Those sort of things then matter a lot. But for the pre seed, if you could just at least get that functional part together, then you could run a kind of institutional grade pre seed process knowing that, yeah, you might raise somewhere between half a million to a million and a quarter or maybe even up to 2 million bucks for an early stage company. But again, the bar has gone up. The onus has gone higher on the founder to go figure this out more so than ever before. [00:41:16] Speaker A: Okay, that was good. Paul, do you have any other questions? [00:41:20] Speaker B: Nope. [00:41:20] Speaker A: I think I got. I think I got one more to close out this segment. [00:41:23] Speaker C: Yeah, okay. [00:41:23] Speaker B: This is great. [00:41:24] Speaker A: Okay. This is another perennial Twitter debate. LLC or. Or C Corp or S Corp. Oh, yes. [00:41:32] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I know where you're going with it. If you're building a series of the punch. Sorry, I just, I know where this was going. If you're building a, a long term, you know, serious startup and your intent is to raise institutional capital, it's got to be a Delaware C Corp. Just make your life easier, make everyone's life easier and just do it. If you're building a services business, a anything else, you know, in and around the startup ecosystem that serves startups or you know, you're doing something that is a more small business. Yeah, by all means, LLC is the. Is a better structure from a taxation perspective and you know, a whole bunch of other things, not financial or tax advice. Talk to your people. But you know, the, the point is you. I think the. If you're doing a. One thing I will say is if you're doing a venture backed startup, that one is a Delaware C corp for sure. [00:42:19] Speaker A: All right, you heard it here. [00:42:21] Speaker B: Confirmed. [00:42:22] Speaker A: All those LLC people out there. Oh my God. Paul, should we jump into some news items? Ton of stuff, A ton of stuff on our doc. [00:42:32] Speaker B: We dove into a little bit of it with Bernie news I had a [00:42:37] Speaker C: shit [00:42:41] Speaker B: our first one. What's. What's on the docket for lovable there? [00:42:48] Speaker A: You want to get it? [00:42:49] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:42:50] Speaker A: So yeah. So I'll kick this off like. [00:42:52] Speaker B: Oh sure. [00:42:53] Speaker A: It came. It came out like, like last night or so I get maybe was the news in Europe or something so lovable. Another vibe coding tool out there. And I would say that they're positioned perhaps as the one that's non professional like cursor in my opinion is the professional tool engineers, people with like an engineering background using this one. They're going after the market. They even mention in the like communications about this like healthcare workers and just all kinds of other people vibe coding stuff. But they raised what, $330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation. Arjun, what is your perspective on this? And this kind of vibe quoting market in general? [00:43:41] Speaker C: No, it makes sense. I have a full disclosure. I'm a small investor in Replit and a big fan there and I think Lovable has really figured out they have such a amazing community of kind of raving fans. There's a founder that I was an advisor to. She unfortunately had to shut down her company, but she just became obsessed with Lovable and really figured out how to build so many incredible things so quickly with the platform and the extensibility of it and what's possible and you know, everything from her holiday card to, you know, mini CRM for their family and all these little things were able to kind of spin up with such speed is really, really impressive to watch. And so there's a universe of raving fans who are using it for all kinds of use cases. Both personal, semi personal business, you know, SMB oriented. And anytime you can build that level of kind of raving fans, it's clearly you're onto something. And so Menlo Ventures has now really leaned in. They're big investors in Anthropic, they're coming in heavy here. Kriandom, the company's out of the Nordics and so it was good to see the Creatum folks in there as well. So it's become a big win for the Nordic region as well. And there's a lot of European users of the platform and they're, you know, they're very thoughtful about design, they're thoughtful about security and privacy. So they've really checked the box on a lot of those things as well, particularly, you know, given GDPR and some of the other things. So I think, yeah, I, I'm excited. I think anytime you can unleash people's creativity and allow them to build and create, that's awesome. I think the long term, you know, sustainability of, of that is always up for question because, you know, who's going to pay and for how long and are they going to find solutions that they either then build and host with Lovable and then they just keep live. Great. If that happens and they continue to use them even a little bit, then I think the stickiness remains and it's no problem. I think if, if it becomes a place where people jump in to other platforms very easily or, you know, it's just a novelty thing and once they're done they don't really keep or use those apps and cancel their accounts. That can be problematic. But so far all the data looks really impressive and it looks like people are doing the opposite of that. Which is building things, keeping them on the platform, having folks use those, using Lovable to power everything end to end for the execution of those projects. So all of that looks positive. [00:46:09] Speaker B: Do you think there's any downstream effects? So I know that they connect to Supabase. I can almost say that every single lovable user has some exposure to Supabase, so they're getting that Lyft. Do you think that there's opportunity for other companies to join? [00:46:27] Speaker C: Oh, I'm sure I'd love to look at their stack. I haven't had a chance to do that and kind of who their key partners are. But yeah, if they truly make this an ecosystem and a platform, then anybody powering them at the infra level and then anybody they end up partnering with, I mean one could imagine a really powerful partnership with Stripe. I don't know if they already have it in place or not, but you know, just getting things going there could be really, really interesting. So I think if they do build that platform out in a material way, they're going to help power a lot of other folks, which will be, which will be cool to watch. And that's, you know, like I think of Salesforce or I think of, you know, pick your favorite true platform company and the entire ecosystem that develops around it. I mean, I know they already have a big conference, but I can imagine their version of Dreamforce would get even crazier in due course. [00:47:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Paul, what do you think about Level? You're our resident vibe coding expert guru ninja. I was told not to use Rockstar anymore, but you know, I'll throw it out there. [00:47:31] Speaker B: All the developers are. The developer community's healthily skeptical. But I think, you know, I think, I think we're, we're just, we're, we're a little bit scared for launches. That's, that's what, that's what we actually think. But like to your point, Replit is amazing. I've used it. I use cursor. I haven't written a line of Cody in the past six months. This is this full honest truth. [00:47:55] Speaker C: Wow. [00:47:56] Speaker B: And yeah, it's built my entire platform. I think Vivecoding is here to stay. Especially with the new anthropic models just keep getting insanely better. It's just crazy the progress. [00:48:10] Speaker A: Paul, do you think people will graduate from Lovable to a different platform? Like because their positioning is the like amateur plat. Amateur tool, perhaps? [00:48:23] Speaker B: That's a good question. I think small amounts of creators on Lovable will, but majority of people won't because you're just, you're just, you're marketing to a complete new segment of people. [00:48:34] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:48:34] Speaker B: For example, like my wife. Right. I. I'm encouraging her to learn coding or learn vibe coding. I would never expect her to pick up cursor. That's just not possible. Or she's not interested. Let's say that. [00:48:49] Speaker A: Did she make family CRM for you? [00:48:51] Speaker B: She did. [00:48:53] Speaker A: Seriously? [00:48:55] Speaker B: Seriously. [00:48:56] Speaker A: Oh my God. [00:48:57] Speaker C: What's the use case? I'm curious, if you don't mind me asking. [00:49:00] Speaker B: Yeah, to keep Paul reminded of all the things. [00:49:03] Speaker C: For all the things that ball needs to do. Yeah, understood. Exactly. Yeah, all the things. [00:49:07] Speaker B: So instead of asking her, she remind me. Now I have a link that I just keep open on my desktop. [00:49:14] Speaker A: Don't have her invite my wife to that thing. We'll both be drowning in tasks. [00:49:19] Speaker B: Right. [00:49:20] Speaker C: Oh. [00:49:23] Speaker A: Oh my God. Okay, let's move on. Look at our doc here. We talked about data centers outer space, which is like maybe the best headline in the world. [00:49:33] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. [00:49:33] Speaker A: Should we talk about the self driving truck stuff? [00:49:36] Speaker B: Take it away. [00:49:38] Speaker C: Yeah. What's happening there? [00:49:40] Speaker A: So like this was super interesting. Let me get this up here. [00:49:48] Speaker B: I'll share it. [00:49:49] Speaker C: Paul. [00:49:49] Speaker A: So. Here it is. So it doesn't actually say what company, but there was this headline, CEO of self driving truck company rejects Teamsters demand for human operators. And I love it. And then you know, Fetterman here, the guy who, who doesn't love this guy, like he's the one wearing the Carhartt sweatshirt into the like, you know, White House and stuff. He's like, I fully agree with Teamsters. Self driving trucks should always be supervised by a qualified professional to keep our roads safe. It's a necessary partnership for America's highway and economy. And there's some really good comments here. So SHIELD who's like big account on X. I don't know if you know him. Arjun. [00:50:43] Speaker C: He's invested nice to sit next to him. Yeah. At 500 Startups he's okay. [00:50:47] Speaker B: Amazing. [00:50:48] Speaker A: Oh really? 500. [00:50:49] Speaker C: Okay, cool. [00:50:49] Speaker A: So he's like, sure. Until the self driving trucks companies can provide the DOT data that self driving trucks are safer than human drivers. That makes sense. But as soon as we know that for sure that self driving is better, wouldn't it make any sense to have people sitting there doing nothing? Right. So I think a lot of people picked up on this kind of sentiment that like, you know, maybe the term like always is a bit dramatic here. And like, I understand his constituency and where he's coming from, you know, as a, as A senator. But I was just curious to hear like actually both of you, what you guys think about this. [00:51:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean there's another use case here that we didn't really talk about. But you supervised how and by whom. And you know, a lot of times you can be supervised by a human that's sitting in front of a screen but is supervising six trucks. Right. So there's a great company out of the recent EF badge called crew line, which is allowing people to remotely operate heavy machinery. So I think of them for this. So I think there's a lot of different ways to do that. Basically. [00:51:56] Speaker B: Yeah. I think Arjun, what do you think? I think Arjun nailed it. The future is obviously not going to be 100% replacement. It's just going to be one person monitoring 15 trucks. [00:52:08] Speaker A: Yeah. I always thought the human intervention piece, I think it'll exist in all these things, like in our lifetime. I don't want to say forever. [00:52:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:17] Speaker A: But because like I, I just see a lot of scenarios where, okay, self driving truck, it all works and then there's like a big snowstorm or something and they can't totally solve it and so they just need to like flip the switch and there's some guy in Arizona or whatever who like is able to drive the truck and manipulate it as needed to get out of the, the snow. I find that to be more plausible with personal cars and stuff. I mean this exists today with drones. [00:52:45] Speaker C: Right. [00:52:46] Speaker A: Like drone operators are sitting somewhere so we know the model works and then they have some form of automation. The drone, my understanding of a military drone from the United States, it flies from the US to the target, wherever that is, that's all automated. It just heads out there. Once it gets there, it notifies the guy. It's like, hey, I'm within range. And then they flip it, you know. Yeah. So like, so yeah, I think there's a, I see that like, let's call it model being adopted across a lot of these types of like automated things. And then Paul, you hit the nail on the head, right? Like, does it mean like one driver is driving six trucks or they're just not necessary to be in the truck doing it? Although the one thing I'll add here that isn't brought up on this discussion. So when the whole self driving truck narrative really was popular, it was about seven or eight years ago in the first election with Trump and Yang and Andrew Yang was big on this. And one of the things that came out was that the driver is required to unload the truck. That was One of the reasons they came up with why it would be very difficult to automate the trucking part because you still need the driver to, like, unload the truck. We're like a private car and taxis and buses. There's a lot of other, like, use cases out there where some form of automation seems to, like, fit better with the current use cases. [00:54:17] Speaker C: Is that a regulation or is that something around, you know, is that one of these things that's been in, you know, written in law in perpetuity? Because back in the day, you need to make sure the person responsible for the stuff is the one who's actually taking it out. So there's no, you know, whatever in the back. Right. [00:54:33] Speaker B: There must be some union thing about, [00:54:35] Speaker C: like, there must be some legislation. [00:54:36] Speaker B: One person supervising a lot of engineering work is like this, right? [00:54:39] Speaker C: Similar to this, right? Yeah. [00:54:41] Speaker B: Personal site. [00:54:42] Speaker C: Yeah. We'll have to do something on that. [00:54:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:54:45] Speaker C: I don't know. It's curious why that rule exists. [00:54:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, the guys at the store can't unload it. [00:54:51] Speaker C: Right? [00:54:51] Speaker B: Right. [00:54:51] Speaker C: Yeah. It's got to be the driver who unloads it or something like that. This would be a. I'd be curious to dig on to the history of that regulation. [00:54:58] Speaker B: Right? [00:54:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:54:59] Speaker B: The real problems is always, like, in the integration points. Right. It's the onloading to the truckloading, to the truck exchanges. That's where usually everything breaks down and automatic get fixed. [00:55:11] Speaker A: All right, and then we got. We got a couple more minutes here, so let's do this one. So Arjun actually picked something from your LinkedIn here. [00:55:19] Speaker C: Okay. [00:55:21] Speaker A: And this was the anthropic OpenAI race to IPO. So I think this is a really interesting topic. I think it's very clear that at least let's call it. Rumors are that. [00:55:36] Speaker C: Well, it's not a rumor. [00:55:36] Speaker A: Anthropic has said they plan to go public at some point early next year, and they have actually put in place, like hired a legal team or investment bankers. Like, that was my interpretation of it. OpenAI is more hand. Wavy. [00:55:51] Speaker C: Right. [00:55:51] Speaker A: Like, they've kind of. They've kind of. They seem to have kind of made this public or alluded to it, but it's not as clear. So just give us your perspective on the anthropic OpenAI race to IPO in 2026. [00:56:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I am happy if any of them get there in 2026. That would be awesome for the industry writ large. So I think while. While they both had very different trajectories on their path I mean the growth from a revenue perspective, from all perspectives has been absolutely astronomical and awesome to watch. I think if I put my ecosystem hat on, as long as one of them can get to an IPO moment in the calendar year 2026, that's going to be great for the broader ecosystem because there is so much liquidity locked up in both of these companies and ideally they're kind of clearing their past round prices. Right. So rumors are OpenAI saw something today, 750 billion. I think there's been some rumors floating around about anthropic at 300 plus. So as long as I think they can get out anthropic, ideally closer to half a trillion and maybe OpenAI close to a trillion or even 700, 800. The amount of liquidity that that releases into the ecosystem is going to be tremendous and it's going to help a thousand flowers bloom. Right. So as people start to get that liquidity, both funds, early stage investors, late stage investors, family offices, all the people that have kind of chucked on into these rocket ships along the path are going to see some liquidity and that liquidity will then kind of return into the broader ecosystem. And so that means more funds getting funded, more startups getting funded, more just general energy and excitement out in the ecosystem. Employees who now have liquidity who, and we've seen this with every other cycle, they're going to put their money in things they know best and those things are startups. And so that's going to be good for the broader ecosystem. So I'm just hopeful one of them gets there and also put in that bucket SpaceX or Stripe or anybody else who might swing it, they're big enough that they'll unleash such a tidal wave of liquidity that it'll have great downstream effects for the rest of the industry. So that's what I'm doing. I'm excited about. So a little bit of a different take on, on that question, but I think I'm happy for either to go public. Let's go. [00:58:11] Speaker B: I like excited to see the, the cursor mafia or the open AI mafia. [00:58:16] Speaker C: Yeah, indeed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What are those guys going to do? It's going to be awesome. We were talking about the PayPal mafia earlier, so yeah, let's see what happens with this cruise. [00:58:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I think, I think there's a lot of people I meet who maybe don't understand that component to the startup ecosystem that when these companies, like when the big ones go ipo, Figma is a good Example, a lot of the money that goes back into startups comes from those IPOs. So the investors, obviously a lot of venture funds, you would even know more than I do. I believe there's a lot of funds that have bylines and rules about this where when the company goes public, they have to sell and they take that money to put into private companies and private startups. And not everyone does this. And there's actually lots of. If you dive into this, some funds like Sequoia are creating these public funds. It's a whole discussion in the VC world. But I do know that there's a group of investors where we focus on early stage companies or mid stage in the startup world. And when they go public is when we cash out and we take that money and put it back into other startups. [00:59:27] Speaker C: Indeed. [00:59:28] Speaker B: Yep. [00:59:28] Speaker C: That's the way it goes. Keeps us all. Keeps it moving. [00:59:32] Speaker A: Paul, any other news you want to talk about? [00:59:34] Speaker B: No, I think we covered all the big and exciting news this week. [00:59:38] Speaker A: All the exciting stuff. Okay. I got one meme. One meme to close us out with. We always do a meme of the week. And this is my new. My new favorite that's coming up. My new favorite meme template. I've been doing these for a couple months now. They're starting to catch on. So this is the. I said pitch decks don't create demand. And the group I was with at Dolores park asked me to leave their blanket. I had to go get ice cream at Buy Right all alone. It's total inside baseball. I've been doing all of these, like, kick me out of sf, kicked me out of SF memes. And it's some of the. Some of the DMS I get are like super funny. [01:00:28] Speaker C: I love this, how niche this is. [01:00:32] Speaker A: I know sometimes the more inside the better. Like, like there's like five people that like fully get this joke. It's my. It's my favorite anyway. [01:00:42] Speaker B: Amazing. [01:00:43] Speaker A: Did you have fun today, Arjun? [01:00:44] Speaker C: Yeah. This was a blast as always. Thank you both. This was fun. [01:00:49] Speaker B: Thanks for being on the show. [01:00:51] Speaker C: Of course. Thanks. Y' all land it here. [01:00:54] Speaker B: Awesome.