Everett Randle joins Benchmark as newest GP: why he's betting on early stage and the 'legibility gap' in AI adoption

Thanks so much for coming by.

Thanks for having me. What's happening show? Oh, you Oh, you picked you selected the Matina, the podcast in a can. That is Andrew Huberman's work. Uh, we're big fans of it here.

He's on a tear. Uh, and you're and you've been on a tear. Uh, introduce yourself again. Uh, what's the latest news? How do you describe yourself these days,

gentlemen? Um, great to see you both. Um, first time in the Ultra Dome. Uh, it's as incredible as I imagined it to be.

Thank you.

Um, so yeah, I'm Ev Randall. I'm the newest partner or the newest general partner.

General partner. Don't forget that first part. [laughter]

Don't underell yourself. Congratulations.

G the big G benchmark.

Yes.

How did it come together?

It was um it was really it was it was a pretty unique recruitment process. It was one that was uh initiated actually by Chaan and we actually he just reached out to grab dinner um a few months back

and a lot of it was was just pure vibes and relationship building.

This is a tip for GPS at other firms. Don't let your partners get dinner with anyone at other firms because they're out of there. [laughter]

So, it's, you know, dinner.

Yeah. Had dinner. Um, and you know, like investors will do this often times with each other. It's like, you know, you're all you're all looking at similar things, looking at similar spaces, doing a bunch of research.

Fremies.

Frenemies. Yeah. It's like you're you're all in this competition, but you're also, you know, you can you can be of immense value to each other. We're all marketing each other's.

And he said he said, "It's been quiet on the timeline for benchmark. We'd love to bring someone to the team that could uh that could be a little bit more controversial. Spice things up. No, no, but what what did he actually say about like the problems that he wanted to solve that you could bring

and and more so what was like the pitch the hard

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I I think that the the pitch because it wasn't really like hey we need to we need to solve all these problems but it was just I I think like a pitch around alignment uh about what the partners at Benchmark really like doing. and he was like, "Hey, like we are a group of people that really love to get involved with very very few companies every year. each one of the general partners there invests in one to two investments per year um and gets really really involved and tends to get involved relatively early in the company's

life cycle and and and like break that down a little bit deeper because you could be like I could have a VC that's like oh yeah uh you're the only investment I made this year but I call them and they're like sorry I'm on 45 backtoback like pitch [laughter] calls because I got to find that one really good one versus someone who's like no I'm actually like in the office regularly yeah I take other pitches. So, like is there a material difference in the day-to-day actually spending time with companies or is it really just highly selective and then you're still doing like a ton of outbound and inbound and just hearing pitches constantly and it's more we're more just saying like the cream of the crop is like the picking what's going on.

Yeah. Yeah. I I think the the rate limiter and the bottleneck is definitely the picking. Like you're still meeting tons and tons of people. You can still learn even if you're not investing in a company or you don't partner with the company. There's so much that you can learn from every single founder, every single company that is building something. And so even though we only partner with a few, we're still meeting a ton. We're meeting a ton of co-investors. We're meeting a ton of founders. We're meeting a ton of awesome operators.

Um so so still immense amount of relationship building and networking. Uh we just end up only partnering with with a few of them.

Yeah. How are you feeling about uh entering a new role, new firm for you at this moment in the market? It feels like where that there's a lot of froth. A lot of people have already made their bets on the different foundation labs. Uh where do you see opportunity to kind of like make your mark with the new team?

Yeah. Yeah. It's um really really interesting because it's a like almost like life cycle of a market

like selection like like on the timeline of like like there there was a lot of great investors that just ended up starting their check writing career in 2021.

Yes.

And they did a lot of investments in 2021 because it was a relatively uh frothy period in the market.

Uh and to no fault of their own really a lot of them ended up having like a pretty rough initial track record. So it's always something that you're thinking about is like what part of the market cycle am I joining this firmman and and what am I you know writing checks into because if you started in 2023 that was an amazing time to write checks everything was was you know whether you're at the growth stage or the early stage um there was a lot of like the companies that are now these like stalwart AI leaders starting and picking up steam but then you also had a bunch of growth stage companies that were relatively cheap on on like a multiple basis and so 2023 was an amazing time 2021 was an awful time to start uh I think that The scary thing a little bit is that like I don't think any of us know or have any idea if this is 2021 20 it's definitely not 2023. Uh feels a little bit like 2021. Um but I think you know if you ask somebody if it's is it 97 is it 99? Is it 2001? Um no one really knows. And so I think you have to be you have to keep that we got another decade to go. It's 91. [laughter] No one's afraid to say it. Everyone's like it's 98. It's not the bubble popped the 91 last week.

Yeah it did. And now we're back. Actually, this morning at the open, it popped. And now we're back. It's over. It's over.

Well, I was at dinner with somebody um the other day and they said something that I thought was really smart, which was that they're like the the the main reason I'm scared right now is that the only time that I've seen everything work

was also in 2021. Like the issue about 2021 wasn't that people were doing

big investments into companies that were bad.

The the issue was that everything was absolutely ripping. Like

and was that just because of the pull forward in e-commerce due to the shift in like you know like I remember Paler looked amazing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Or if you think like think about I mean obviously depends on the category but think about like ecom like e-commerce enablement or commerce enablement there's like a whole crop of startups that came up and it just so it turns out that when we're all locked into our houses

everyone's just Yes. Yes. Yes. and just like, oh, you just

not to mention as the capital starts flowing and then it flows into one company and then that company goes and buys a bunch of software and they're probably using like even a recruiting platform looks like, hey, this could be a billion dollar business because every company's like we need to hire as many people as possible. So, it's like

it's very recursive. Yeah,

very kind of like

we're getting big words early. big big words early, you know, it's it's all interwoven and like obviously you're you're starting to see that a little bit with like the AI trade this year and there was like I I did this presentation um a couple months ago for for this group of of of CIOS um chief in uh chief uh information officers at large companies and I was um doing some research on macro and I was like oh my god of the top 20 year-to- date return stocks in the S&P 500 so of the S&P 500 of the 500 companies which 20 have had the best year to date returns. 18 of them were related to the AI trade. Like it wasn't, you know, and not just like, you know, Micron and Nvidia, but like G Vernova and like Bloom Energy and like all of these things about like the supply chain of AI. And that scared me cuz I was like, "Oh my god, like the

US economy, like the pensions of our parents are writing on the AI trade and are basically writing on uh you know each Yeah. one one superhuman man that is uh you know, signing up all these all these all these huge deals." So I think in 2021 you definitely saw that where yeah you had all these massive impacts from from zer from co from people being inside from companies go digitizing and buying a bunch of software. So even things that at first principles were kind of like mediocre companies they looked unbelievable and so it was hard to blame anyone for investing in these companies cuz

until then tech had been so secular like it was not a cyclical market like the march the march to cloud wasn't like this like up and down thingy. It was like each year the incremental share of cloud relative to like onrem was like nice and steady. Yeah.

And so you're when you're trained that you're investing in a secular market that always kind of linearly goes up, you're trained to invest on like on good numbers because they usually continue. Um and 2021 was the first time where you really saw the cyclicality. And I think some people think that the AI trade could also be cyclical given the um actual infrastructure built out that sometimes is, you know, built out via debt and leverage and all these things that could end up blowing up. when you look at what's going on in the public markets, uh is it fair to say that like the first year of the AI trade and and the boom of those 20 stocks that you mentioned was driven by basically earning surprises like Nvidia just being like oh wow every hyperscaler bought so many more like the the cash flow is going up the actual business is growing and now we are shifting into more of like the LOI economy the the forward contracts and so that's been a little bit more of what's moved the market and and maybe that's why Oracle has kind of traded up so much but then roundt tripped because people have said oh that's amazing but actually we're going to discount that a lot more than we did on the day that the deal was announced.

Yeah. Another another framing that that I would use actually is like usually in these cycles um it starts with like the core.

Sure.

And then you start just layering on derivatives. Okay.

From that core. And so it's like okay a AI demand is you know maybe two orders of magnitude higher than we thought. Yeah.

So who is the first order benefactor of that? Y Nvidia like who's you know the GPUs and then as as the the cycle continues to play out it's like okay well like what's the first derivative of that it's like well okay like what goes into these data centers turns out like these turbines that G Vernova creates and like oh now they need to buy all these you know all these like specialized things from Broadcom and then like now Micron and so there ends up being that and then like there's like this cascading of these derivatives until like the nth one is like the shitcoin market and like the memecoin market and so now it's like oh wow how like these like three quantum, you know, computing companies that have zero revenue combined for $75 billion of market cap and you're like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait a minute." And that's that's when I think everyone kind of pauses and they're like, "Wait, wait, hold on."

And then and then I think it goes even further like he he he locked in. Speaking of SC, I think that like there are people that are trading the quantum stocks because of the AI boom because like they have been told that that the next thing after AI or the next big unlock for the AI revolution will be quantum. Meanwhile, like like

Yeah. And it was a bunch of skepticism like no GTC. I remember I was watching the stream and and uh they had Brad reading off the the teleprompter and he was talking about you know the opportunity in with quantum and AI. So this is a narrative that that Nvidia as a company has

certain been a little bit back and forth.

Okay. But as a company as a company that was a part of their narrative for GTC.

Yeah. it's sort of like furthest out on the risk curve and that's why you know if we see you know Nvidia selling off by like a couple percent every week uh the quantum stocks I I see charts where it's like down 20%.

Yeah it's they're like levered trades on the core all these derivatives and so it's like you know people are like oh Nvidia is not going up you know 10% a day now what could and then you go to like the derivative and it's like well this isn't going up so much per day now well what could next and you keep going and now you see I think over the last month like so many of these stocks are down 45%. Yeah, I don't think Nvidia's down, but so many of these other stocks are down 40 to 50% over the last month because they're kind of the canaries in the coal mine are like the leading kind of derivative that is almost like a lever trade on the core.

And we've had we've it it's been an incredibly rough week in the markets and now everyone is sitting saying please deliver Jensen. Now I have I have some confidence. So, it's it's uh Wednesday.

Uh they they have earnings after the close and

uh I feel pretty good about it because of the you know Jensen, you know, smashing beers on video, right? You don't do that a month out from earnings. If you're feeling really good, you belong in a pod shop. That's that's like some that's a deep cut. That's some deep analysis.

Jordy loves this type of analysis. The vibe the vibe

I don't care about the numbers.

Yeah. No, I [laughter] I have no idea what they're promising, but But trading on vibes that's the move.

Yeah. And then the other I mean the other factor here is like just the the challenge of of this market as you have within the same two you know effectively two week period where coreweave gets rated by semi analysis as this sort of like only platinum tier neocloud

the best product in the category.

Uh and and they're down 30% in the last 5 days. Right. Um 30% less.

Uh and now people are saying, "Yeah, may maybe Nvidia ends up uh ends up, you know, having to, you know, buy them. It would certainly would would not go uh well, uh if they were to

What's the least AI company you've done as a deal in the last couple years?"

Gosh. Uh

because everything has some I mean, even Anderal Industries, you know, it was like AI and now there's obviously an AI narrative there in some ways, but it's like definitely just a hard tech company. [snorts] Yeah, it's hard. It's It's funny because like sometimes um as an investor, you're almost trying to like do some portfolio construction

and you're like, man, it'd be really nice if I had something that was uncorrelated with the AI trade [laughter] because if it all goes down, you know, 80% or whatever, then like I'm going to need something. I mean, it's so different in in private markets because especially if you're investing at the early stages, like none of this stuff matters. Like when like by the time the companies exit, you have no idea what the what the stock market's going to look like. You have no idea what the macro is going to look like. And so like thinking about this type of type of stuff is usually like you really should like if you're zooming out and thinking on like a 10ear time horizon should you still be ultra long AI? Of course you should.

And so it's almost you kind of like pump fake yourself into being like maybe I should do like an anti-AII play or something.

Um I think I think there's like some parts of cyber security that actually are still not I mean a lot of a lot of like you know a lot of like data security is like oh well like you know you need to secure your data into to secure your AI. So like a lot of even cyber has moved into AI but there's still some pockets of cyber security that are AI related.

Do do you think there are durable learnings from the Palunteer story of being sort of like the forward deployed engineer almost being consulting building custom software. It feels like with AI there's a lot of folks who are sort of doing that and it seems really exciting because you can go and get a Fortune 500 client, you can go ramp revenue really quickly. you there's there's all this question about like well does this is this going to look like high margin SAS in 10 years um but we already ran that experiment with with uh Palunteer and regardless of what you think of the the the price to earnings multiple like you can tell that the margins are good and the revenues are real and so like it clearly worked out and uh and like if if you were investing in that and you know even if you were at like a I don't know 40 multiple like you'd still be doing very well based on the early investments and so uh I'm wondering if you think that that model if something permanently has changed in the way sa SAS is delivered into the enterprise or you think that people might be overfitting on that?

No, I I think it I think it absolutely has and the way that I talk about this I call it the legibility gap.

Okay.

And what I mean by that is like

you know if you get a Gmail account

it does not take very long for you to like understand how to use Gmail. Like anyone can kind of like pop on even if you're a boomer and like like I've used an email account before like this is just sort of like a slice of an email account. Yeah,

I think the issue about AI is that not only are the capabilities so new for the broad population that could use them, they also evolve so quickly. Like if you think about, you know, not having Chat GPT 3 years ago and now everything that we can do or especially on some of the media models, how we had like Will Smith like

the the grotesque version of that initial video and now we have like absolutely perfect Will Smith eating, you know, spaghetti and meatballs. um just the the rate of evolution. Like I I so I I'm I'm from like a rural town in in Colorado and a lot of my friends um work still in my hometown and they're like, "Hey, like my job

to the Heartland."

That's right. Shout out shout out Windsor Colorado.

Nick over there went to Colorado. [laughter] Well, I guess he's gone, but he's a Colorado guy, too.

Oh, amazing. Yeah. the uh but but like they they'll come to me and they'll say look like my job now is like I put any work task I get you know they're doing some you know random you know they're an accountant or they're doing some administrative role for for the company they're like my job now is 90% of any work I get I feed it through cloud chat GPT or whatever tool that I'm using on the AI side I turn it into my boss and then I go golf because my boss like still doesn't know how to use any of these things so they like so the business owners have no idea how to use these tools they barely even know they exist

to like the associate yet.

Literally, it's [laughter] like I I call

to the golf courses.

Yeah. I I call it like synthetic UBI because it's like, you know, cuz it's like they they like there's just this insane legibility gap where so many businesses still have no idea.

Imagine if these tools were available during the co era, like the remote work. Oh my god.

Was like, yeah,

people could have 20 jobs instead of the five that they were running with co. But

yeah, so I think the whole FD like the thing that the FDE position solves is the legibility gap. when you're like, "Hey, we know that there can be a ton of value produced here. We just don't really know how and we don't even really we can't even put our arms around the evolving capabilities because like maybe you implement, you know, one of these AI tools and in six months it's like a brand new tool because you know, cognition rebuilt

uh rebuilt Devon off of four five sonnet. Um, and it's like, well, if if like the the product is evolving that much every 6 months, you probably need someone in a post sales capacity to continue to educate the customer, especially if they don't live in Silicon Valley. Totally. You know, like tracking every single new model release and they're in some random place and barely even use Chat GBD or something like that.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. How are you thinking about uh your focus in terms of stage? I mean, Bond, Founders Fund, I I I've thought of you as a growth guy for a long time. Are you moving earlier stage? How is Benchmark thinking about growth versus early stage? Are those just like antiquated terms? Because you can do a growth.

Was this part of Was this all part of the plan to end up at benchmark where you get you go you go and learn the methodologies and the approaches of everyone how they work and then you go compete with them on every deal.

Exact. Yeah.

In the final job. The final job. It's like

how they've [laughter] done it. Now I'm doing it my way. No, I mean I it's certainly being able to see up close a lot of the greats and how they how they do the job and and the frameworks they use has undeniably been so important for my career and my development as an investor. I think like what it what it came down to and something that I learned over my entire career slowly like again I started in PE and so like the idea of venture was so foreign when I was shadow capitalism uh like the the idea of venture was so foreign when I was first coming into the industry that I really like growth was like felt safe. it felt like what I was good at. And I've just learned over the the however long I've been in the industry that um like where I felt the most fulfillment, where I felt the most joy is actually the investments and the relationships I've built someone like a Sean Henry or even like a Parker and Matt at Ripling where it's like you get in even at the early series B. I think there's this like line where like if you can get in and build a relationship and be on the board with a founder when they're still figuring everything out when it's still like the primordial soup phase of a company, there's just all this like there's a deep relationship and all this context that you build both with a founder with a team and like the underlying organization that you're working with that just like like if you get in later, you just like can't go back in time and get that same amount of relationship building and context in the series G. You can't use Wii. [laughter] You're involved.

No, I still would. I still would, but you know, it doesn't feel good in the Wii.

Ripling. Uh, bringing up rippling reminded me. So, you were we were talking about this forward deployed model

and every startup

that's doing anything in the enterprise feels like they've adopted this, right? And it's like part of their pitch. Uh, customers obviously like it. If like you'll put somebody in my office and build software that's specific to me, that sounds great. Uh, but I feel like during when when Parker released the I think it was the series A memo for Rippling about this concept for a compound startup.

Yeah.

Uh, what's what's the postmortem on because it felt like every startup started saying we're doing a compound compound startup. We're going to build three basically three products at once at the same time. Yeah. And it and it's worked very well for Ripling. Uh but I I it's hard for me to think of any other startups that like adopted the approach that worked for Rippling which like the context there was they worked

basically for my to my knowledge like they worked in silence for years

and then they came out

and also Parker had built like seven of those products literally before and so he was like okay I kind of know what the way I want that product to look. He's not doing as much zero to one discovery in each of those like someone who starts the point solution might.

Yeah. I mean I I think the rippling story and like where I think where a compound startup can really really work um is is like one yeah there's there's this fat build in the beginning where you need to build all this platform architecture because the whole idea is like you need to build some form of platform architecture that's going to make building each point solution that you end up bundling faster like if it's just going to take the same amount of time that it would any other startup to build each product then there's kind of no synergy for building the compound startup like they all need to interact and be built on the same platform. I think the other key learning from Ripling is that a lot of the products that they were that that they've built and that they sell are not like I don't want to like say commodity in like a negative like they don't matter way, but they're just not these like really it's not Figma, you know, like it's not like a designer that's like I'm not going to use like off-brand Figma. I have to use Figma like it's my lifeblood. It's my everything. when you have like an application, you know, an applicant tracking system or like a time and attendance thing or like employee reviews that there's so much value in in the integration of data with like employee reviews being integrated into your HR suite rather than just having like the nicest UI or having the product that feels the best. And so like the value of having a bundled suite in a compound startup is really powerful when the actual products don't have to be the complete bleeding edge best of breed. They can be like very good, but they don't have to look the absolute nicest. They don't have to have that last 10% of like of like complete um fine-tune effort. And the the buyer and the user actually still gets a ton of value actually from the integration of all those products together. And the like sum of the parts is a lot more valuable than if each product in its individuality felt a little nicer to use or something but wasn't integrated tightly into a single product.

Yeah. I was always wondering if someone was going to run the compound startup playbook in in

fintech. M uh it's called Revolute.

I was going to say it's called Rip. I mean RIP isn't

No. So So sorry I so I meant I meant consumer in the sense that like uh you know uh Robin Hood has crypto and has different uh has different financial products where you can like build a whole company on Coinbase and and uh manage payments with Coinbase. There's a whole bunch of different functionality there. But uh there aren't that many companies that I've seen that have come out to market with wi with one uh on day one. Uh you can trade stocks, invest crypto, get a mortgage, get a car loan. This is a credit card. There's points. It's like it's been a little bit more focused on the consumer fintech side in America. At least from my perspective, there's been payment money transfer services that have gone gone really big. There's, you know, a consumer credit card like there's that Built Reward, isn't that company that does like cash pay? And it's like and and maybe one day that grows into they'll also do mortgages and then they'll also do uh stock trading and investing and IAS and all that different stuff. But it just feels like probably because of the regulatory it's a little bit different. But no one's really

It's also a challenge because like eventually people are going to tie a lot of their like financial life to the in like the firm that gives them a mortgage, right? Yeah. So not being able these companies starting out, they don't have their own balance sheet, right? They're neo banks, so they're kind of like operating on top of other banks. But

it's just like there are startups that have done like new mortgage like where wasn't there better better mortgages, right? um I think that went public at one point um has done quite well and uh and and so like if that business has been has was was buildable as a startup and then also you have a credit card startup like you you would think that you could build both at the same time. Maybe it's just too distracting. I don't know. Well, that honestly you should um highly highly suggest listening to Nick at Revolute Talk, okay? Because he he basically set up his organization somewhat similar to Ripling and like he set up all these like product pods

and they had an initial wedge which was basically this like um uh FX product traveling around Europe like you know young people were were going around Europe and you could do very easy FX and that was kind of like the wedge for their first cohorts but they really really quickly

focused on just how do we go as many products if they're high quality as possible. Um, and now they have uh tons of consumer products and B2B products and like they're all doing a ton of revenue. Like it's kind of an unbelievable story.

Yeah. Uh, what's

earlier this week you kicked the platform VC Hornets Nest comments.

To be clear, you said that Andre Horitz is a zero, [laughter] right? That's what you said. It's it's a zero. It's just I'm not even going to be for another clip. [laughter]

I've learned my question was uh did you did you kick the hornets nest to inspire yourself to grind harder? cuz I feel like [laughter] I feel like there's immense pressure now to deliver a 5x net.

Oh yeah, it's fun because eventually who knows maybe the performance

if he comes back at 4.9 Mark Andre's personally going to be like dunking on you.

He Yeah, he's going to fund the OPSEC that that uncovers our returns.

He's going to pay newcomer to come.

No, no. I I think that the whole thing from this week I I think the the biggest lesson or or like it it shown to light for me just like the the purpose of the algorithm. Yeah. Like the algorithm exists to kind of like the algorithm needs like the algorithm is the beast. Oh yeah. And the beast needs controversy. Oh yeah. And it was so funny because the first day that the interview came out um like all this happened on the second and third day. So like the first first day the interview comes out

um you know all the all my friends at all these firms are like oh it was great. I thought it was like pretty nuanced and like moderate takes and like you know it's good. You were kind of pitching the benchmark strategy is unique. And then the second day comes out and it's of course like these clips with like these very, you know, kind of leading tweets and things and then it's like then it's like, you know, knives out and

you got government officials coming after you. [laughter]

The government

I know. I wanted to like check if my passport still works and like I hope so my passport still works. No. So like I and like again like I I think if you look at any of the individual clips or anything um like sure you you could take things from them that I think were more incendiary or like more uh more controversial than the actual context of the conversation. Um, I don't like, you know, context. Yeah. But you, but but you've also you've you've been commenting on different fund strategies for years, playing different games. Your essay, your bombshell essay about uh the crossover funds, right? Uh, Tiger, CO2. Um, what what is your what is your like what predictions did you actually make in that piece and then how did they play out? because I feel like a lot of the firms that you identified as running these strategies are still around doing those strategies and it seems like they've done very well and so like people might have read your original piece as a as like a critique but in fact it was just the you're just shining a spotlight on a new strategy that exists and runs. Is that right?

Yeah. And and on like if it so the original piece is called playing different games. Check it out on Substacks. Um, but the the the actual point of the original piece and probably what I got wrong about the original piece more specifically was I zeroed in on Tiger as the example. And I and I actually was like, "Oh, I'm bullish on Tiger because I think this is a good strategy." So I I actually said like, "Hey, this is a great strategy and it's going to continue." Um, and the strategy being like, "Hey, there there's like venture returns historically, if you look like since 2000, at least of the great funds have been awesome." Yeah. like every great fund that has raised like and by the way the only way that you raise really large funds is if you earned the right by having amazing returns. So all of these brands have had really really amazing returns and the simple math was that you could

put a lot more money out the door especially as we had the emergence of these companies that show like increasing returns to scale. This is the whole kind of idea behind the mag 7 is that in technology when you have network effects like you do in consumer social or economies of scale like you see with Amazon, you just kind of keep winning at a greater and greater scale assuming that your TAM is big enough. Um, and so the whole point of the the the essay was like, hey, wow, like you can even if you reduce your implied returns a fair amount on on your forward returns, if you just put more money out of the door, there's just so much more like absolute dollars to be had for for all of these firms. So I think like in the four years since that piece came out in 2021. I think that has been the prevailing trend in venture. I mean very clearly I don't think it's you that's a very consensus thing to say that a lot of these firms have realized that like wow there's so and like I think that's actually the beautiful part about our asset class now is the menu of options and the menu of ways that you can practice the craft of venture growth y

and be extremely successful and partner with really good founders and make money for your LPs is extremely broad. Yeah. And it's only gotten broader because a lot of these leading firms have really expanded and increased their capital velocity or like dollars out the door per year.

Yeah. Um, it feels like there's a lot of venture capital that might actually be more like private equity or it it it feels like we're we're sort of is there is there a factor where we're just taking an asset class that has existed for a long time investing in a company that has 10 billion in revenue uh and we're calling that venture now. Is it are we just renaming it or is it somehow structurally different? I'm just looking at like if if you're investing in OpenAI right now uh is that even a venture investment? Yeah, I I mean like I this is always like even if you look at playing different games, I always say like venture growth. I do venture growth because like you know I think most people would call it growth or like not just call it venture capital itself. I think the structural change that we have seen and a lot of people actually have gripes with this. I I like you can you can be on one position of this or another but I think there there is some validity to the the idea that that some people complain about which is if you look at what's happened what like where the structural change has happened is that companies just like don't IPO

maybe ever anymore uh but they certainly IPO way way way later in their life cycle than they used to. And so the complaint that some people have is like this is essentially stealing returns that people were able to get in the public markets because if you're IPOing only when you reach a $200 billion valuation instead of a $10 billion valuation which used to be the norm you know 10 years ago or even you know 15 years ago or whatever it was um that's a 20x that like the public market investors don't get that is now fully in the hands of private market.

Shopify is a great example. I think they went out at like four four billion or something like tiny

for sure. It's like that, you know.

One question I have is like, do you think that the partner at a platform VC that's like a non-founder partner maybe maybe early mid30s? Do you think that's the most dangerous job and venture? Because I feel like there's this pressure to deploy and build a track record yet at the same time like you're on the chopping block

if if you deploy and a bunch of bad bets and we see a correction and there needs to be like somebody needs to get fired for it. Yeah. Like in some ways it feels like a benchmark earlier stage you're somewhat insulated from the kind of downstream chaos where you can make a bet it can get marked up a lot but even if it trades down during a correction you're still up yeah massively on your winners.

Yeah. I mean like to be fair like I don't think it's unique to to platform firms at all. Like if I don't make great investments I'm also screwed. Like you know like at the end of the day you you need to build a really good portfolio and like no one is spared the results of like not investing in great companies. I think I think like where that becomes somewhat true and again everything is so dependent on the firm and every firm's culture is so different um that that's actually one of the things that I think people don't understand really about venture growth is like every firm the way they do things the variance is way higher than I think maybe any other asset class where like the work and the cult like how you do things is is relatively similar but I think where where that can happen in a platform firm is where just like the supply and demand of of like things you're able to be the point person on is is uh is like negatively inclined towards you. What I mean by that is like there's like I don't know maybe a hundred good companies that exists at at like whatever stage um uh like each maybe stage there's like you know maybe 50 great early companies 50 great growth stage companies. if you have uh you know 20 partners uh you know the math is just like okay like if you're 50 if you have like 20 growth or let's say 25 growth partners since I'm bad at math uh and you have 50 good growth companies that means there's like good two good companies per partner and maybe like the senior senior partners get like 10 instead of two and so there there's just this there's this reality where it's like there's some efficiency frontier where you're trying to um be able to be the relationship builder uh and the point person and the board member for really great companies um but when you have a ton of people within an organization, it just becomes mathematically harder to um to to just have like shots on goal enough. You're not gonna win every single deal either. And so it's like, okay, how many am I covering um and how many um can I win? Like that just starts to diminish. It's also it's not a perfect framework because again like

it's also not like a solo, it's not golf. It's not a solo sport. Like it is a team sport. And so I think a lot of these places that have good cultures, um they're more focused on like okay, how do we win as a team? we multiple people can work a company, multiple people can be on the board or one person is a board observer or whatever. So, it's not necessarily mutually exclus ex exclusive, but I do think some people at those firms do feel those impacts for sure.

Are you AGI pilled?

Uh, wow.

What's your what's your [laughter] like how have you processed that question? How have you engaged with the the discourse around uh everything from

uh just how powerful the models will be in 1, five, 20 years?

Yeah.

Uh what that means for your investing thesis um versus even just like the fast takeoff AI doom. Has that stuff ever rattled you? Have you always just been I'll wait until it shows up in a spreadsheet. I don't know. [laughter] like you seem like a pretty even keeled like quantitative person who's not getting lost at some EA rationalist party and going off into sci-fi land.

Yeah, I I mean I am definitely of the belief well one I think AGI has become like a near useless term. I mean it's almost like agents at this point like both of these things are so nebulous that and like the product marketing around them has been so brutal that like they've just lost all their meaning. Um, so I think actually when people

quickly agents didn't exist as a marketing term two years ago

and now it's already played out that just shows you the you know the cycle of these things in 2025. But I think that like so like AGI like when you say like what you just said I think is actually probably referring to like ASI like artificial super intelligence. Um like I think that the bottleneck and the rate limiter for AGI which is like artificial general intelligence which maybe you could define as like when do we have um you know an AI that can do what like a reasonable adult can do in any given situation is fully dependent on how quickly we can distill the technology through the economy.

Yeah.

And I think like and this is like Tyler Cowan talks about this.

It's actually more about the inference and the pre-training.

Well not even about inference and pre-training. It's literally just like about this the FDE actually someone to use it.

Yeah. Like deploying it into the economy like like it just takes a really long time and no matter how fast these growth curves are there.

It's notable that uh that you you gave the example of somebody, you know, at a let's say like some company where they're doing their job with Claude uh but their boss doesn't know that because they just want to be able to do their job quickly and go golf. And then that person gets presented with a better solution. They get a pitch on, hey, we can actually like replace your whole team. and they're thinking like,

well, there's a chance I could maybe golf more. There's also a chance that I could lose my job. And so, I think there's going to be this interesting tension where the people that are associate, he uses so many M dashes. He's amazing. [laughter]

He's also getting really good at golf randomly. Like, every time I go out, every time I go out with him on the week, it seems like he's been practicing a ton. Uh, no, no, no, that makes a ton of sense. Um what what what about the uh the just the stakes uh geopolitically because uh there's been this critique of benchmark of like oh maybe you guys are a little bit more open to investing in companies that are indexed to China somehow. This is not new. Excel has investments in China. There's a whole bunch of different stuff. Uh it can go both ways. Uh do you think that but but it it feels very predicated on if you think AI is a super like nuclear weapons level technology then it's harder to rationalize. If you think it's more like an Excel sheet and autocomplete, maybe there's a little bit more of a deal to be done even with a nearper competitor.

Yeah. Like the fine line I' I'd place on that is that like we we certainly like like I think all of us um certainly within Benark, but I think everyone in in the industry wants Western AI to win.

Sure.

And we do think it's a bit of a race and we want nothing more than western and US AI to win. Um that does not mean that uh Chinese citizens or people that were born in China or people that at some point in their lives have been in China um cannot contribute to and be a huge factor in building western AI. If you look at the there's you know that that tweet um that had like the poach list for the Meta ASI team.

Oh yeah.

It was like 15 of the 20 were Chinese citizens or at some or were born in China or whatever it was but there there was incredible kind of Chinese representation on the Meta team. Um, and so again, like the the investments we've made have been in companies that are in Singapore or in the United States. And just like if there's people that were born in China or Chinese citizens working on AI that they want to build and help the world in a western context with our values and our value system um, and distribute it globally, not within not just within China or whatever and not even building in China, then we of course we want to support those teams. And I think there's an immense amount of AI talent in China and would behoove us um to have them building for Western allies for the United States and making sure that we win the AI race rather than scaring them off and pushing them to only work for China and for the CCP.

Yeah, makes sense. Uh are you thinking has has your has your thinking on opensource AI updated at all? Um I've kind of gone back and forth. John Ludig uh friend of ours has written about this saying that you know the scale of the of the effort and the capital intensivity to really have ser significant progress on the model side uh means that uh open source AI might struggle at the same time uh a few weeks ago we saw Brian Chesy say that Airbnb has been using open source models and seeing a lot of great results there and so there's obviously different use cases for each but uh how are you thinking the market will play out. How are you thinking of how do you how do you make money as a for-profit company in open source? Are we looking to Red Hat as an example, GitLab? Like what do you like in that category if you like it at all?

Yeah. No, it's it's a great question. I think there's there's like two angles that I would take for this one on frontier capabilities versus like where open source is let's say for like general models. Um, I use something that I call the mom test, which I refer to my mom. And I always joke that like there hasn't been a query on chat GPT that my mom has made that like GPT like 3.5 couldn't handle. So I think there's like an increasing amount of queries and there's an increasing amount of need for this from the moms.

From the mom, not moms in general in the chat. There's some moms that are watching right now. This is the most controversial thing you've said. I'll I'll show uh you you can take shots grow funds community

mom will say actually actually I'm puppeteering 25 clawed code instances right now to run this family and you better show some respect the rand the randle mom test uh and I think there's like an increasing amount of queries as frontier intelligence continues to get pushed there's just an increasing amount of queries an increasing amount of inference that you just don't need the frontier capabilities for anymore

some of this stuff you can even cache like because like if I had asked for like just give me the highle history of benchmark arc like it could just that you don't need 51 you don't need five you don't it's like yeah you could do a Google search so so there's so there's there's that piece which I think that like increasing amount of the like there's always going to be

places that are important

in businesses too because there are certain things where it's like we just need to scan every transaction for fraud and we're not actually doing a deep research report on it. just saying, "Hey, does this have like bad words in it?" And for a large language model, you can just use a 3.5 level model.

And then and then actually in other in other modalities besides like code or I mean co code, there's actually some great open source models now, but like in generative media especially, the open source ecosystem is extremely vibrant. There's a ton of amazing open source models and I think the open source models probably have way way more um tokens and like token volume than closed source models. And the way that you actually make money on this, there's an amazing company called FAL. That is a uh generative media. Yeah, give it up. [laughter] We're sponsored by them.

Are you sponsored by FAL?

Yeah, we did.

Shout out B and Gorham Legend, Batwan, all the guys there. But they uh but they're an inference cloud for generative media. And so they're like a distribution mechanism for open source model providers to get video um develop like generative media developers to use models. And then for the developers, it's like the onestop shop. you get like a single place where you can drag and drop anytime a new model comes out. And so it's almost like, you know, like this destination point that they then monetize via providing the inference for the models. And so I think like when you have all this open source, there's still a ton of money to be made via inference and via kind of like reselling GPUs, if you want to call it that. Um, and all the stuff that you can provide in terms of like inference optimization on top of that. Um, even if you're not just providing like a LM output via an API like you would with a closed source model.

Yeah. How how are the portfolio companies that you work with uh how do they think about competing with OpenAI? I think the question of like what if OpenAI does this uh is coming up a lot. Uh we've you know seen we had Mikey from Sunno on they've they've grown tremendously. There's been talks that OpenAI will get into music generation. So that's kind of a conversation. I don't feel I don't I don't think Sununo will be very threatened by that. Um, and generally it feels like OpenAI is already at the scale like and and and is operating like Google does where they're going to launch a lot of products that don't work and that's kind of okay and so if they copy you it doesn't mean you're dead. Uh but but it's a real threat. Uh how are you h what are those conversations like and how how do you think the CEOs view that as a competitive threat?

Yeah, I I think it's like it's I think it's incredible for these startups to have like this bar. It's almost like having it's like the lockin bar.

And it's like if you're not gonna like if you're not going to like exceed the lockin bar, which is like whatever the labs can produce when you're probably not even their their number one priority, then like maybe you should pack it up and like and and just like and call it a day because

like like if like that's the like that's that's the bar like you need to exceed it. And so I think um I don't like people had this concern about so many different companies like people had this concern about 11 Labs at one point when like OpenAI was coming out with all the these voice products and people were like oh my god what does this mean for 11 Labs and now they're like they're doing they're accelerating they're they're doing better than they ever have before. I think we really missed like the taste element. When we were talking to Miy from 11 Labs, we noticed that uh even though Midjourney has been on a very different path, there's something about what David how David Holes runs that company at Midjourney. The way he thinks about training the model that it just looks

it doesn't it's not that it looks like there's no benchmark. It doesn't necessarily look better. It just looks more like David Holes's vision for what good looks like. And it's like I feel like when I see midjourney Image, no matter who prompted it, I'm seeing the art of David Holes. Yeah. And I feel like there's something about that and the texture of the voices from 11 Labs and the flavor of text that comes out of of of Open AI. And there's a little bit of like the people talk about this with like the flavor of code from Claude, for example. Um, and and the vibes can come out of the organization in a way that it's hard to just say, okay, we have good vibes in images. Let's copy paste that all over the place. Yeah, it's just the culture doesn't necessarily shift

100% and I think most of the times that I've heard a pitch from somebody around like well like this this you know this part of the like this model or like this modality is rapidly commoditizing

if a founder and a team is able to build a high taste product

in a market that's big enough where you can have ACVs and like prices that are high enough per customer

to like build and be able to distribute the product. All those companies are doing tremendously well. There's not been a single company, I think, that like died because of the labs. It's because you didn't build a high taste product that could be distributed to a wide audience.

So, it feels like we're probably not in the like the the the era of like getting steamrolled by AWS was like, well, yeah, I want my I want my hard drives right next to my CPUs. Yeah. And and I don't know that people are right now saying like, I need my voice model right next to my, you know, uh, agent model. They're like, "No, actually, I'm okay with a little bit of latency because the whole thing is slow. Basically, it's all it's all, you know, a couple seconds lag, sometimes 10 minutes of lag, and so maybe uh there's not so much." Uh, I want to talk about uh the NeoClouds and these interesting deals that are going on. Uh because Benchmark, where you're at in terms of the scale of the firm, feels not necessarily set up to do some sort of uh company that's going to wind up being super capital intensive, but then at the same time, they did fireworks. you've done fireworks and then also

founder gave the most one of the most iconic lines of this month. He said a lot of companies out there are going to be scaling into bankruptcy.

Yeah. [laughter] Uh but then also like the private equity background bond. I feel like you're you're maybe better equipped to understand how private credit will interface with a founder. You're somebody that would make sense to have on the board potentially. Um but how are you thinking about these new companies that where it's not just R&D spend? not just burn for salaries. There's something else going on in the almost financial engineering of building and winning a category.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think like our role at Benchmark and we've done investments like we've obviously invested very very early in fireworks. We have some robotics investments that we're incredibly excited about that will be very capital intensive. I think one of the pitches that we can give to founders is there there's like there's nothing more scarce than a benchmark a in today's market and therefore there's no higher signal and there's

we have we we have another sponsor uh numeral who who on their website they had benchmark series A and every time we did the ad readm series A [laughter]

every time. So, you know, you know the mantra, but the uh so so like part of our value prop in our job is like downstream capital

should not be

more cheap

for anyone else than someone that has partnered with us. And I do think we put an immense amount of effort in into helping companies understand and helping downstream investors understand the business equation of these more complex companies. like a company that did this extremely well actually in the public markets, a firm when it went public, um, a lot of the sellside analysts that were covering a firm I think just didn't really know how to like handle the company and didn't really know how to like model out the actual business equation of the company. Yeah. So, they actually did like an I think it was called the financial modeling day

and they like walked through like a 30 slide deck that you can actually still find on their investor relations site of like this is our business equation. this is what we optimize around and this is how we grow and produce value for shareholders and it was just like extremely clear, extremely legible and I think it really helped the investor community and the analyst community like better understand the business and that's like one ideally the founders also have some sense of their business equation because they're they're building their businesses but it's also something that hopefully that that myself or any of the other of of the partners here can also help both sharpen the thinking of the founders but especially the downstream investors that want to know that there's a strong business equation that they're investing behind

uh Emil Michael was was getting into it with you earlier this week. Feels like the the TK era has sort of continued.

Two different government officials coming through.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. You really

So the the whole TK was wait obviously you know 10 years apologize for it.

No. Can you take full responsibility?

No. That's not what I'm saying. I wanted to understand like you know when that comes up when you're when you're in process with founders like what is what is the like what what are those conversations like from your side and how how is the firm approaching kind of those concerns from founders about actions that the firm took a decade ago.

Yeah.

Yeah. I I I mean amazing question and I think um our response every single time whether or not it comes up and I think it it I mean it's week four so I actually don't know how rarely it comes up but it's rarely come up so far in my my time at benchmark

is talk to the founders we work with today or that any of the partners within the firm have worked with

and see like what like benchmark like I am 25% of benchmark

Jason is 25% Eric is 25% Peter is 25%

benchmark is not some corporation that has like rules rules and bylaws. Like the firm is us

and so talk to as many founders as you want of people that we have worked with and see if our references are better than any other investors.

And our bet is that and and one one that has proved to be true I think more often uh way more often than not is that you will not find a better reference firm from the founders that we work with as individuals. Um so again benchmark

I was you know I think I was in

high school or maybe I was in college [laughter] you know like dancing to to young like what was uh

I was doing private equity deals and get hammered on the weekend.

Yeah, I was doing I was doing like a private equity case study during during that. So I'm like I literally I can't speak the No, but I think I think I think being able to like focus it in and be like the firm is the four of us.

Yeah.

And so go as deep as you want on any of

our track record. Yeah. And I I know there was the song the college anthem. That was great. [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. Uh- what about uh you know, you're you've been on a on a meteoric rise uh principal, then partner, now general partner. What do you think it takes to get to general uh to steward?

Oh, to to senior to senior steward.

Senior steward. You think it's in the cards for you?

I actually did have a I if you were at Sequoia as senior steward next year, [laughter] I am going to blow. It's going to be insane. I would put it. How how does does Gurley still play a stewardesque role?

How how involved I'm assuming a bunch of his money is still

Yeah.

in in in the funds.

Yeah. A few a few things on this one. There like there is I think this is a common misnomer just because some people like Bill obviously extremely famous for his blog. He was he's very like outward facing

podcast too. I mean he really sailed off in the in the sunset. He had some great takes on BG2. Um but there is like there is no sense of stewardship. There's no that does not exist in the slightest. there is no senior partner and like and like there's there's nothing like that both in the actual economics obviously but actually just in like the culture and the way that we do business like it is completely um like there there is no sense of that and I think that's a common misnomer because some people are a little bit more public or like outwardly facing or more famous um that is not how the firm operates but it's true that like the retired partners um that are no longer active GPS play an unbelievably active role in a lot of our active investments now in in a lot of the capital for the funds comes from both the current GPS and the previous GP. So they feel extremely bought into the continued success of Benchmark. They also just like it was such a huge part of their identities for so long that you you know it's like I yeah I now regularly talk with Bill with Matt Kohler with all these people that um were Florida Gator.

Yeah. Are you brushing up on the sports?

Bill's Florida Gator.

Yeah. Well [laughter] state school pride between myself.

Still working on that impression.

That's great. That's great.

Um but yeah, so they're they're super involved. Um they help us with companies that we're looking at with companies that we already work with and I think that's a really unique part of the partnership.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh what what's his uh what have you learned from Bill Gurley? Have you learned anything yet? Has he updated anything? Have have you obviously you go from Bond Mary Mer one way of thinking about the world to founders fund PT wildly different way thinking about the world but you probably take lessons from both I imagine. Have you learned anything from Bill either in the last four weeks? I know it hasn't been that long, but uh even just from reading his work and listening to him.

Yeah. I feel like Bill was the first venture capitalist I ever learned anything from because when I was like interviewing

to get into the business, I was always reading above the crowd.

Sure.

I was always reading his blog. He had such pragmatic instructive blog posts like all revenue is not created equal. He had all these great things about network effects and marketplaces and like when you're looking for buzzwords to say in an interview and you're like 22 and you have no idea what you're talking about, they were an absolute gold mine. Um, and so I felt like I I've been learning from him for

Let's give it up for buzzwords.

Shout out buzzwords.

They're a fantastic [applause] way to advance your career.

Um, uh, useful buzzwords. I'm not saying that as a draw for me thing is so real. We we go to YC demo day and they they've had to like reinstate like, okay, what's contracted ARR versus ARR? What's how how fuzzy is this? There was something on the timeline earlier this week. Someone was saying that they went to go interview at a company that said that you know the real revenue was like one6th of what the founders had said and that that's uh you know in frothy market those uh the the temptation to lie gets even further or embellish right

so I I think like the biggest learning I think that people can take from Bill is like he just keeps it real like it doesn't matter what the market is doesn't matter if it's up market down market like he cares about the real like he cares about like what is the like what is the business quality when you actually dig in it's not about, you know, eyeballs. It's not about vanity metrics. It's like what does this business look like and what is it going to look like over the next 10 years? And it's not like he hasn't taken immense amount of risks, like he invested in a bunch of marketplaces before they had flipped network effects, but um he just knows how to like drill down and kind of figure out what is fluff and fake versus what's real.

Yeah.

How are you guys thinking about consumer social? I feel like as long as I've been uh in and around the venture world, when there's a hot series A consumer company benchmark is is at least on it, paying attention, it just feels and then and then I can say personally I've I've experienced immense pain investing in consumer social. Well, it doesn't matter if a company has a million users. They can go from 0 to a million users in in 48 hours and you can invest right there and then it'll be right off the week the next week. [laughter] Uh so it's extremely painful. But I'm curious about how the partnership is thinking about it today. Is it is it uh obviously you guys are a generalist fund, but is it still is there anybody specifically on the partnership that

like cares a lot about backing the next breakout consumer, you know, uh consumer software company?

Yeah. No, 100%. And I again it's it's such a deep part of the firm's history that I think all of us are itching um itching for

it's the highest status like like uh winner, right? Because it's like you know if you back

Snapchat and then and then and then you have a half a billion users out there that are like yeah use and love Snapchat every day. It just hits harder than backing like even uh the next data bricks because people are probably

a cultural like a cultural touch in a trophy. Yeah. Um I I think so so the I think the toughest thing about consumer social why it's been really really hard is that back in the day um when consumer social was starting it was actually about consumer social like social networking was actually social networking. Every single social networking platform has turned into an algorithmic short form video platform

because that is the most addictive

yep

form factor of of content that someone can consume. And eventually you you just have this profit motive that means that you optimize for the amount of time spent on an app per user per day.

And so there like they just crowd out like the currency of these companies. One is obviously users, but then the amount of time spent um interacting with the product or interfacing with the product typically. And when you have these

um these like extremely addicting algorithmic um short form video platforms, you just kind of squeeze out the seconds in the day. It's like so hard to like how could you get someone to spend 30 minutes a day on your app versus versus any others? Like the challenge is just so much harder than it used to be when when people still weren't spending that much time on their phones and now we all spend all day on our phones. So I think that the bar and the challenge is actually much much much higher but I do think that I mean one we we do have a new breakout which chat GPT which is unbelievable. So that's amazing.

Yeah, I'm talking about the next you know like the next year basically like who's really itching. So, we we um uh obviously I'm not going to say the company because we just signed this, but we actually did just sign a consumer social series A. And so, you can you can stay on the lookout for that

for that. Get the gong for it. I was I was looking for an excuse to do the gong.

Yeah. For the for the anonymous series A that we [applause] can't

solid first hit.

First hit. First of many. Uh

thank you, sir.

Last last question I have.

That was a big gong. I

little little pop quiz. I'm not going to tell you who wrote this, but I want you to guess whether or not this was written with AI. [laughter]

This This is not just a partnership. It is a living, breathing legacy.

This is Alfred Lyn this morning, right? [laughter]

Better than that.

The student of the game of the game.

Well, that doesn't answer the question whether it was written AI or not. We don't have it. Do you think it was? I mean, I I think I think most people are at a at a at a at a point where they might uh let Chachi do like a run through at the end and it might have inserted this uh it's called contrastive parallelism. It's not this, [clears throat] it's that. Uh I'm not a fan of that particular construction, but it's something that Chach just kind of sneaks in everywhere.

Um but who knows? It can be a tell. Uh but uh yeah, if you you kind of you kind of got to rip some of the stuff out because if AI starts doing M dashes too much, even if you love using the Mdash, you just kind of lose it because otherwise people will be like AI. Totally.

Uh last thing predict last last uh question.

Uh do you think that uh it felt like this year just a flood of deals meant that there was less seasonality

in venture? Right. There was companies that were raising there's companies that have raised like three four rounds this year which meant that like they were raising during winter like winter kind of holiday time they were raising during

I mean talent wars were during summer like Zuck was like having dinner with people in mid middle of summer opening I tried to take a week off and got but ton of people poached.

Yeah. But it feels like going into I I could see people taking a bit more of a breather this this uh this kind of like holiday season. But I'm curious any any kind of predictions around that front.

I I I think we've moved to not having season like I think the seasonality thing at least for now is that anytime you're in a hot market. Um you're just going to have people working around the clock because again it's almost like the the return to office thing. If you're like a sales rep in like 2022, it's like how do you want to differentiate? Well, if one guy's just doing Zoom meetings and you're willing to fly to the prospect's office, that's a huge edge. So I think that's the issue now, especially in a hot market where things get marked up and and sequential rounds happen very quickly. you just end up having like that that like you know Christmas is now the opportunity for someone to go preempt something. Yeah. I do think that most of the good teams kind of realize that even if you can get a deal done December 24th also like it's probably just going to be better if it's done when everyone there is just like a level of energy that happens in the fall that happens in the spring that happens. There's also a little bit of like if like there's like wow the VC uh you know gave me a call to try and close the deal like from the from the operating room when his first kid was born and I'm like yeah dude sounds kind of like a psycho. I don't know if I work with that guy. I think I'm good if you just like waited

or the founders it's like yeah I raised my round while my wife was giving birth. [laughter]

I don't know if we actually want that. that might just you can go a little bit too far and kind of turn people off. But uh but that is fascinating. Thank you so much for

course guys. Thank you so much. I want to give a shout out shout out to my wife Kayn. Shout out to my six-month old Theo my Bernie S.

Sixmonth old. Imagine you guys imagine imagine being a Imagine being a baby and you and you come on come onto this earth

and you're like wait my dad's a GP at Benchmark. [laughter] I hit the jackpot. I hit the jackpot.

Papa is a GP at Benchmark.

You just spawned into Wealth Post Economic on day one. Let's go. [laughter]

Let's go.

Let's bring in our next guest. We have Adam Faze, CEO of Gymnasium. While he's hopping on, [music] let me tell you about aidsleep.com. Get a pod five. How you doing?