Transcript: Richard White: Founder of Fathom.Video (YC W21) & Uservoice

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Host: Hey Richard, welcome to the show. Super excited to have you here.

Guest: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Host: Uh so when I was, you know, uh looking at what you did before uh fathom.video, one of the things obviously you did is uh user voice, your last company. and this was sort of a good uh roundabout moment for me because in one of the products I was working on we used user voice as the customer feedback system uh in Microsoft.

Guest: Oh, very cool.

Guest: The star the startup world is smaller than I ever imagined. I think it's also what I've learned too. So yeah, I think you see this a lot. But yeah, like we had we had a great footprint in Microsoft uh user voice great customer. So.

Host: So I thought a good place to start this conversation was just to talk about, you know, your experience with starting user voice and what are some of the key pivotal moments that shaped uh, you know, the user uh voice as a company experience and uh where is it now?

Guest: Yeah, I mean it's it's interesting because I started that company 12 years ago now, maybe 12, 13 years ago and then started fathom last year and it's studying kind of like they're very different, right?

It's very different I think doing your first startup. and obviously the startup world is very different than it was 13 to 14 years ago.

Um, you know, and it's I think I'm pretty unique amongst my peers and other startup people I know that started kind of mid 2000s in that I stuck with that company for about 12 years.

I think most of my friends did three or four startups in that time period. Uh, but user voice itself was kind of three or four different companies within it, right?

And I think that's sometimes not atypical for startups where you start with a certain business model, a certain target buyer and it shifts and frankly we did every model under the sun, right?

Uh and if you're not familiar user voice uh a platform for product feedback.

Uh originally we started almost like a originally it was kind of almost like a Reddit for customer feedback. and I think our original claim to fame was we kind of invented like when you see like the little feedback tabs on the side of websites, like we were the first person people to do that.

Uh, lesson learned, you know, if you're going to build something, uh think about which things you actually could be like, you know, like IP. You can't make IP out of putting a button on the side of the side of a web page, but that's what we did.

Uh, and so yeah, we we started off it was very organic, very scrappy, really like, you know, that company's rough beginnings, right? It's like hard to find co-founders, hard to find developers, hard to find investors.

Yeah, I was like actually slept on a couch. I was couch surfing for like eight months of the first year we were working on that that company.

Uh, we found one investor believed in us to put money in uh, and then we kind of went from there, but it went from a completely free product to a premium product, to a more top down sales like sales model um, all on the way and you know, scaled that thing from zero to just shy of 10 million rev. uh and and a team of like 40, 50 folks.

So it was a it was a good run.

Um, but it's it's it's so funny, it's it's night and day compared to fathom where like I started with like with top engineers, we raised money in like, you know, the first like week of of, you know, having the company up and running.

I didn't couch surf at all. Airbnb surf but didn't couch surf at all. Uh, but yeah, it's it's you know, taught me a lot.

Host: So uh what is the state of user voice now? It's a it's own company and uh you now, you know, you've moved on to fathom. Uh but user voice still exists, right?

Guest: Yeah, user voice still exists.

Um our the our former VP of engineering uh basically ascended to being the CEO and I meet with him on a regular basis and it's it's it's great because I think after honestly about after about 12 years, you know, I I'm I like to run through walls and probably one of my strengths is probably perseverance, but even I was like, okay, we need fresh ideas in here and we need some fresh blood and uh and it just so happened kind of the idea for fathom kind of came up around the same time from some of the work I was doing at user voice and so applied a natural time to like, great, I can go take this thing uh and and take it zero to one and user voice is in good hands.

Host: Uh so let's talk about fathom.video, right? So how did uh were you actively thinking about what should I do next and were evaluating different ideas or uh how did you, you know, go about this idea of uh making Zoom calls more productive.

Guest: Yeah, it's it's interesting. I think when I was at user voice every year, I asked myself two questions at the end of the year. Uh am I uniquely qualified to like run this company?

And is this company giving me like differentiated like learning? Like is this like something am I you're earning something unique. And so for a lot of times I was generally saying yes to both those things.

So I wasn't really thinking about other ideas. In fact I kind of like firewalled my brain off to not think about other startup ideas. I like let's stay focused on the mission with user voice.

Um, but we were actually we'd actually started the process of diversifying user voice and I'd actually taken a small team inside of user voice and we were building out or not really building out as much as prototyping and testing new products that user voice could build, you know, and sell to his existing audience of like product managers.

That's kind of our target buyer. And in the process of doing that, I did just a ton of like customer research kind of early last year.

I think I did like 300 Zoom calls in the first like five, six weeks of 2020 and it you know, it was just back to back to back every day.

And you know, that that experience is what kind of led to fathom because I would yeah, be on these calls, you have like 15, 20 minutes. Uh, I love user interviews.

I love kind of like it's like a it's like a it's like a lightning around Sherlock Holmes thing, right? where you're trying to like with the right questions unlock some interesting pain point or some interesting insight that maybe wasn't surface level obvious.

And I love the conversation, what I hated was I'm trying to talk to someone, I'm trying to pull this information out of them and I'm like rapidly trying to type out like, oh crap, here's what they're saying, right?

And then I had like a limited window once the call ended where I had to clean up those notes, make them make sense because they literally shouldn't like random words on on a Google Doc.

And you know, that combined with once I take those notes and share them with my team or even I should them two weeks later, I'm like, I don't remember this call. Which call was this again? I yeah, doing tons of these and I share with my team.

I'd have amazing moments on these calls.

I'd have like people get really excited about something I mentioned to them or or really confused. and I'd like share my bullet point notes with my team and they'd be like, okay, we don't get the big deal, right?

It was like, and that was when it hit me was like, oh my gosh, we're losing so much fidelity here between, you know, the nuance, the tone, the face, everything of having these conversations and then all that shows up is a couple bullet points in a in a Google Doc.

And then I thought about I ran as I mentioned, I ran a bunch of different parts of our of user voice at different times and I remember I ran our sales team. And I when I ran our sales team I had the opposite problem.

My sales team were people on the calls and I would looking our CRM and I'd see a bunch of notes and I would like note quality very wildly, but no matter how good the notes were, I was always left being like, what did these people actually say when they pushed back on price or when they objected or they brought in this competitor.

And so that was the aha moment for fathom. It's like, this is ridiculous that we are like trying to like play a game of telephone with bullet points and trying to be, you know, court reporters while having conversations.

Let's build an app that just real time records, transcribes and gives you almost like a soundboard to highlight those moments and then you're your your call actually becomes that living artifact of the conversation.

No one wants to rewatch the entire call so like we'll give you the way to send snippets of it, send the slack, send the CRM, etc etc. And so it it worked out very well.

Like it just kind of like fell into my lap in some ways which like, you know, this is something a pain point I was acutely feeling and I was like, we protet a few ideas and then we kind of I was like, okay, there's something here, let me go start a company and build around solving this problem.

Host: So when when you found this idea and was thinking were thinking about, you know, creating a new company, how did you estimate the opportunity here?

Because uh if you look at just the product of the space today even in remote like there's so many products, right?

I mean there's Zoom, there's Teams, there's Slack and there are like different ecosystems around productivity and if you're a remote knowledge worker right now your, you know, cognitive ability is stretched thin across multiple products.

So uh how did you think that, you know, whether there are uh you know, there are there are obviously other transcribing products as well out there in the market, right?

Uh so how did you think about, you know, is this a company that could actually, you know, be a company on its own or is it just a product or a feature? Like how did you make that call?

Guest: Yeah, I mean I think it was that was pretty easy because we as soon as Dawn I was like, this could be bigger than just, you know, product research. You like sales, customer success, maybe even recruiting.

Um, you know, there's other analogs. I just looked at comps, right? So I was very familiar with chorus and gong which are kind of the the you know, top two heavyweights in kind of the sales coaching recording space.

Uh, and and both of those I think are Gors just got bought by gong was, you know, raising at multi-billion dollar valuations.

And so my my company tried that product and I you know, before we even got into this, first thing I did was I went and interviewed like a hundred gong users and chorus users and asked them what do you like, what do you not like. because I was like, I think this already exists. and I went and dug in and found, okay, no there's some like serious gaps or like windows of opportunity both product wise. and then I look at it and say like, these guys are still relatively new, they're now at multi-billion dollar valuations and they're only focused on like sales and they're only focused now on like mid-market enterprise sales.

They're pretty expensive product.

So it kind of like that's kind of honestly like the you know, later on we got to Why Combina and we had to do all these like Tam different like analysis and you know, there's 11 million sales and CS people in the US alone and if you could charge them 25 bucks a month, like but honestly in the beginning it was just simple as, okay, well who would we be competing with and how bigger are they and how and you know, how well saturated are they, right?

Like they're still pretty early in their journey, but they're already multi-billion dollar valuation and I think we can, you know, take them on and and we can do a much bigger market than them.

So that the math just said like this could be a really huge opportunity.

Host: I think uh uh I mean just not quantitatively but qualitatively Tam expanded from, you know, sales to almost everyone, right? because of right. Right. Right. Yeah, yeah. Because so much of our meetings are now fully on Zoom and Zoom sort of also became a household name because of that, right? So it's sort of qualitative gut sense is there that okay Tam is now extremely large.

Guest: Yeah.

The other you know, I mean the other thing we looked at is you know, look at how did those companies get started and and how has the world shifted since those companies got started and you know, when those companies got started, they had to build integrations with like 10 different video conferencing providers because there was no runaway leader.

And we are research now there's a runaway leader, right? And that's Zoom. Um, and so that obviously helps too like reduce the scope right, okay, we can just focus on one video conferencing provider uh and and do and hit 75% of the market.

Um, so there there are another other of factors. It's like one looking at the total market but also then two looking at what has changed in the technological landscape that makes now a good time to do this.

And you know, we looked at that with the rise of Zoom. We also looked at the commodifition of uh transcription.

You know, transcription is still a thing that's not it's good but not great and one of the things we lean on versus there are a lot of tools like we'll transcribe the thing for you.

Um, I don't think that's enough because if you read a transcript it's not the same as like hearing the clip. It just there's something about it that just doesn't convey the knowledge.

So we always knew that we wanted to share clips as opposed to sharing transcripts. But we knew transcription is something people wanted. It's an important output of that.

And we looked at and said, you know, these guys five years ago when they started going course had to build their own transcription and now there's a ton of transcription providers and we can do a bake off and the price compete them and stuff like that.

And so that also is what led to us thinking there's a there's an opportunity here uh to build a big business but also build a big premium business because the costs are are getting lower every day.

Host: I think uh just for the audience sake, uh can you describe what Gong does?

Guest: Yeah, so so Gong is probably the the first big company that was built around, you know, recording all your sales calls and and rather than I don't think they lean much on like helping you take notes.

They have some facilities for like sharing portions of the call, but they really lean on more of we're recording the calls so that we can tell the manager how the team is doing.

Oh, they're talking too much, they're talking too fast, there's they're saying um too much, you know, they they start wait, they end wait, that sort of stuff. It's more coaching. Yeah.

Um Uh, and so, but yeah, and so that's a subset of what we do, but like we found like, oh there's a there's a big opportunity here just actually help them run better calls, right?

Uh as an example, you know, one thing it's going does like tells you your talk time. like oh you talked too much on this call. But it doesn't tell you till after the call is over.

I was like, well, I would want to know while I was on the call that I'm running my mouth too much. So, uh that's what they do and they're you know, they're a fantastic company.

It's, you know, they've got a great brand, uh they've got a loyal following and so in some ways is one of the things where a lot of people thought we were crazy to go in the space because you they look at Gong again, it's not an old company.

It's not like you're competing you with a 20-year-old dinosaur. It's a relatively modern company with good branding, good marketing. But that's what I think made it such an opportunity because no one wanted to go up against it, right? Yeah.

And people actively went around it.

Host: And also I think uh that uh going back to the Tam concept of what pandemic did like it changed who's the customer, right? From, you know, companies to managers, to sales folks, to pretty much anyone who's in knowledge economy now has a, you know, Zoom or Zoom like tool and they want all these services that will be more productive.

Guest: Uh Yeah. Yeah. And the and the and also just the delivery mechanism to be able to go bottom up.

I'm going to I'm going to give, you know, rather than you sign a five figure to six figure contract, wait a month for an audition, yeah, two minutes in, cool, you've got access to the product. You can get value from it.

And I think that I think any industry where you look at and you you see a dominant player that has a top down model and if there's a way to do a bottom up model, PLG motion, it's, you know, I think it's, you know, there's there's probably some opportunity there, right?

And that's what we we're kind of seeing.

Host: In terms of like the actual product, right? Right now you can uh, you know, have uh action items, bookmarks, insights, pain points and feedback and a regular feedback and obviously transcription of a zoom call.

Um, when I look at the you know, the fathom.video as a product uh as an outsider, I can just think of, you know, different interactions because you're almost at the center of where productivity or your productivity is starting or or all the workflows for productivity are starting, right? then that means if I create action items now I already have these action item tools from you know, Microsoft's products to Google products to Asana and you know, all the other competitors out there or, you know.

And similarly for other uh for feedback you have user voice and user voice like companies, right?

Um, how are you thinking about in just product direction and I felt that, okay, from here on you can just start exploring and expanding the product portfolio to integrate into different sort of things.

And how are you in general thinking about this because I think to truly make a Zoom call productive, now you have to also think about the end-to-end workflow from where are the users going from here uh to actually, you know, make them more productive.

Host: So I would like to get a sense of where how how are you thinking about prioritizing and, you know, coming up with ideas in this direction?

Guest: Yeah, you know, I think one of our core product tenants from the beginning has been, you know, integration, right? like I think in this day and age, no one wants everyone has enough SAS tools, right?

No one wants to pick up something that doesn't work with everything else they already have.

And you're right that Zoom meetings are kind of like this like it's almost like this uh, you know, one of those gift boxes you get in the mail a bunch of random stuff.

It's like you're going to have some stuff, you know, you're going to have some technical questions, you need to go to technical resource. You might have some product feedback, needs to go to product team.

You've got action items you need to follow up on. You've got, you know, an objection that your sales manager might want to see. And so there's all this work afterwards to like get all these things to the right places.

And I think, you know, that's another place where we looked at what existing solutions were doing and they were just kind of like, here's your recording in a in a box and you've got to go still do all the work to get it that last mile.

Uh, and we saw that early on too where we, you know, we built everything but these integrations. this is pretty good.

And then we built out the CRM integration that would like, you know, automatically log your call, auto generate the call summary, put your task in your CRM and people were like, this is amazing, right?

And that's like a I think a classic like jobs to be done type concept, right? where it's you got to think about this thing more longitudinally of like, what is what is done for my user and you know, can I get I get them nine tenth of the way there?

It's almost like a it's like playing American football. It's like that's not a touchdown. Like you're just you're it's a turnover on downs, right? You got to get to the end zone, you got to get to the goal state.

Um, and so, you know, we've had folks dedicated, you know, CRM integrations, product management integrations, obviously Slack, right? as communication, um, oh, you know, that stuff I think is killer.

I mean, you look at companies more and more you see that this is like a key product tenant of a lot of successful companies.

I mean the one that comes to mind now is like click up, right? who is kind of crushing it out there is they from day one just built a raft of integrations and not just integrations but really good integrations too.

And that was everything we knew we was like, these need to be five star integrations.

This isn't, you know, used to be like you build this crap integration that doesn't really work but then you can kind of check the box and say, we got this integration to close the deal and that works maybe in a top down sales model.

But the PLG motion you get exposed very quickly if your integration is actually any good, right? Because people just turn out because they're not stuck in an annual contract.

So it's been a huge boon and I think also it's great from a partnership angle, you can do co-marketing around it and so, um, yeah, we yeah, it's we probably spend a third of our time on core tech right now. like core product.

We spend about a third of our time obviously on onboarding and we spend a third of our time on integrations.

Host: So how how has the growth been? uh because the ideas very much friendlier towards sort of helping the pandemic effects and post pandemic effects and you started the company in between the pandemic. and you know, we've gone through the ups and downs with the pandemic cycle.

Have you seen any change in terms of uh adoption or growth during this up and go cycles of pandemic and how do you see the post pandemic growth being uh even for like let's say last couple of months?

Guest: You know, I think most of our, you know, we we've only been out, you know, we launched really August 1 of this year.

So we had a very long internal beta like like private beta period and we launched with the new Zoom apps platform that came out July 21st but really probably about 1st of August.

So, you know, we're here in December so it's you know been about five months here. Um, so it's not enough time for us to see any particular trends. I do think that, you know, a lot of our use cases is external calls, right?

Like someone meeting with a customer. and even pre pandemic that was already shifting or in most cases a lot of cases was already 90% on some sort of video conferencing solution.

Um, I think the pandemic's pulling some of those like field sales things to permanently remote tele sales.

Um, you know, uh, I think we so we haven't really seen any effects of like a pullback on like internal usage because honestly we can't tell because we're just growing so fast that I don't think we would notice if people there's some slight pullback in that. but um, mostly that's why we also focused on.

We think customer calls are where it's, you know, you can't get customers back on the line. So if you miss something it's really gone and that's where the stakes are the highest and that's what we've really focused on.

Internal calls, yeah, we have a bunch of used internal calls, but I also think there's other things that are undermining internal meetings, you know, we focus a lot on asynchronous communication, right? I I send wooms and and woom of meetings often.

Um, so there's a use case there, but I don't think it's as strong as the customer call use case.

Host: Okay. Uh yeah, shifting uh uh a little bit towards fundraising and you've raised funds at user voice and now you have done fundraising for fathom.video and obviously the whole ecosystem is now night and day from last 15 years, right? Yeah.

Uh what was the like experience that you've had with fundraising back then and when you see, you know, even uh right now, uh how how did the experience change for you?

Guest: I mean, I think, you know, it's funny we went through last winter's uh YC batch and you know, fun trivia fact about me actually was an employee for a YC company in the first batch of YC back in like 2006.

And so seen like both ends of the the book end, right? Um, you know, it's a great climate to be fun to be a founder in.

Uh, you know, I used to I was joking some folks in YC batch, you know, you'd show up to a VC meeting 10 years ago and people would be like, who the hell are you, right? And they'd be on their phone within 10 minutes, right?

If you didn't if you didn't hook them and now I think there's much more competition for for for deals and so you you know, just frankly many more investors are founder friendly, many more investors are ex founders themselves, right?

Like 10 years ago, they were the ones getting the crappy VC experience.

Uh, we've done something kind of unique we haven't I can't go into too many details because we haven't really announced our funding, but you know, with user voice, we, you know, had a seed round and it was, you know, one firm did the entire you know, the entire allocation.

And this time we've almost raised money every four months. Every time we've hit a milestone, we've raised more money. and you know, we've raised, you know, a couple million dollars. I won't say how much, but our average check size is like 50, 60k.

And so we've been very intentional about getting lots of small checks. Um, and that kind of my theory of like, you know, this is partially because of the market.

There's a lot of people want to write small checks, but uh, part of it also is I've just, you know, as this being my second time around, I'm I less need like one really loud voice, like one early stage VC that could really show me around and what I really want more now is a multitude, a diversity of smaller voices, right?

I send an investor update to 70 people and I get back, you know, a whole different set of networks, perspectives, connections, etcetera that I think is really, really helpful.

I think it's also one of these things too where it's really hard as a founder to assess which investors will be the most helpful. And also helpfulness isn't really well as correlated with check size as I think you would think it would be.

Um, often the person writing a 10k check even out of their own money and it's one of five investments they'll do this year is, you know, way more invested in your success than that early stage VC that's writing out of a $300 million fund and you know, they they drop 10k on the floor for lunch, right?

So, you know, I we've actually optimized for, I optimized for like angels and also I love like new funds. Someone starting a new fund, they really care because they're trying to make a name for themselves, right?

So there's a good alignment versus the you can tell when you get to a meeting with someone where they've already made their brand and they're kind of like, yeah, I don't care whether your company makes it or not.

I'm already on the list type thing, right? Um, and so I think that that process is a little bit different, right?

And it's also derisked because rather than me have to take 20 meetings and hope one of them works or two of them work, I'm kind of just slowly getting checks as we go.

Um, again, that has its own risk too and you know, if you're a first time founder you may not have the network to do it, um, and and or you it may just be better to just get one big check and go back to work.

Uh, but our case I think it's been really beneficial.

Host: Yeah, I I like the fact that now founders are trying to raise money from a lot more people than just having, you know, one or two funds or investors on their cap table. Yeah.

And when I talk to for some of the founders, especially first time founders uh I I don't think they don't really get the value of why it's important to have more investors on the cap not like thousands, but you know, you want to have or derisk how many investors are you on on your cap table and whom you can reach out for different sorts of, you know, things.

Um, I almost see that that comes with experience.

A lot of the second time founders often have this idea of, you know, positive sum game better than first time founders because they, you know, realize that this is a long-term effort and uh, you know, you have to say sustainable and if let's say you have one investor and if you as a company is not exciting for them uh in their portfolio then for the rest of the, you know, time you have to find another investor who you can make uh excited about your vision and company.

Guest: Yeah, it's it's like this unspoken kind of thing where it's like, you know, when you're when a VC invests in you, they're excited when they first invest in you, flash forward a year or two years later, if you're not in the top, they're going to make their money on the top 10% of their portfolio or even the top 5%.

If you're not in that bucket, they're not going to, you know, they're not going to not help you, but they're certainly not going to be as helpful as they would to that. And so I think that's something that I think first time founders aren't aware of.

And also I think brand, right? I think it's easy to get seduced by the big brand VCs that you know, you hear a lot about, but at the end of the day it's about who you're working with the partner you're working with.

And you know, you could have a I've heard plenty of stories from like name VCs that still did weren't the most helpful at the best case or were kind of shady at the worst case, right?

So, I think in general it's just nice to derisk that because again, last thing I want to do is spend a bunch of time doing a shotgun wedding with someone who has 10, 15% of my company.

I'd rather it's much easier to do it when I'm talking about giving up half percentages here there and everywhere, right?

Host: And so the infrastructure, you know, behind fundraising has also so much improved right now because 10 years back to now, it's so much easier to take smaller checks without the hassle of founders going through a lot of work.

Guest: Right. the between like safe notes and things like pulley and Carta and curky and all sorts of stuff like, yeah, it used to be also like everyone would be worried about the headache of, oh gosh, you can't have 20 investors in your cap table. that would be a nightmare. who cares it's the rose on a spreadsheet, right?

Uh, and so, yeah, I mean we're actually even doing we're doing some crazy stuff where we're actually like even uh make like we're doing the same sort of strategy for advisors too where we used to have, you know, you'd have two or three big name advisors.

Uh, now we're going to we're going to have a pool of a couple hundred advisors and a lot of them are going to be a lot of our early users who are giving us great feedback.

And now think about the effect of that of like, okay, now I'm arming hundreds people out in the world are have a vested interest in my in in our success and are telling their friends. you know, social media has made it a word of mouth world once again and I think there's a lot of a lot of opportunities to hack that that people are today.

Host: Yeah. uh in one of the previous episodes I was talking to Eric from Alto IRA. uh and they they raised a large round uh from traditional VC firms, but what they also did was uh do an equity crowdfunding round for a very small amount like a million dollars or a million dollars compared I mean it's smaller compared to the larger round that they're raising.

But it's important for them and when I asked Eric, why are you doing this then it's almost like and I had this notion about equity crowdfunding as well because the difference between Kickstarter and equity crowdfunding is now you have real interest for the customers to actually promote your product.

Right. Right. If there is a competitive competitor who is entering into the market with same goals, same products, maybe even better sometimes you're protected by your network uh who's you know, incentivized to promote your product.

Uh and you have like this army of people talking about it without doing any marketing campaign. In fact it's what I call negative CAC, negative customer acquisition cost uh for you know, a big marketing campaign.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: So it's that it's It's such a crowded space now like like every vertical is crowded, right?

So you have to find some way to get an edge, you know, and and even when you have a great user, you got to do something that surprises and wows people and this is still something you can do to do that. Uh we're we're thinking about the same thing.

I think the crowdfunding thing is really exciting. I also think it's great in general. I just it's always frustrating to me when, you know, the accreditation, you know, rules block so many everyday folks from getting involved.

Again, I kind of get why they're there, but I think, you know, once you have products that are in the wild and you're using yourself and you know it's great, you want to be able to you want to be able to participate in the upside of that.

Host: Yeah. What what what what are your thoughts on uh valuations because one of the things that happened in last couple of years is every round valuations are extremely crazy. Uh what what are your thoughts on that?

Guest: I think I'm very grateful every day for all the crypto projects out there because they make all the valuations and SAS seem very, very reasonable. Um, even if they don't seem reasonable by historical SAS perspectives.

Um, you know, it is a certainly much better market than it was, you know, 10 years ago, you know, uh or 10, 15 years ago. Uh, but it's also like, you know, the public stock market is crazy too, right?

Like everything is we're I don't know, everything's kind of reaching this kind of a tipping point where we get to inflation points faster, you know, things ramp up quicker as therefore valuations ramp up quicker.

Um, also though at the end of the day like I don't I think it's important not to get wrapped up in the valuation game, you know, at the end of the day, it's I I actually push back a lot on people who like over optimize for ownership stake, right?

Like, yeah, you don't want to give away the farm, right? in your first round. But at the end of the day like it's all about

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