Transcript: Founding Partner of Ascend.vc: Kirby Winfield on all things Venture

Host: This episode of startup project is brought to you by bear.tax. Bear.tax compiles all your crypto transactions and makes it easy for you to file your taxes. Check out bear.tax, that is b a r.tax. bear.tax. Hey welcome to the show.

Guest: Thanks. Happy to be here Narsh.

Host: So I'm excited to talk to you for, you know, a lot of different reasons. Uh, one being, you know, you're based out of Seattle and I'm based out of Seattle.

But I think few people can say that they're part of four exits personally and you are obviously part of uh, I think four exits if I'm not wrong, two IPOs and two acquisitions.

One of the things I want to start the conversation with is what was that through line in all the four exits, you know, that sort of drove you into making that decision into joining from one company to another.

Uh, just when you're looking at your own career as a, uh, point of view.

Guest: Yeah, it's a great question. I think and I think what you said is important, joining companies, I didn't start any of the companies.

I mean, I was on the founding team of a couple of them, but if we're going to like sort of peel back the the onion, you know, a lot of what folks position as, you know, founder is really someone found them and asked them to come come work with them.

And so I'm very, you know, I try to be transparent about that. But I think the through line, you know, to me was just picking, just picking the right teams to bet on, to bet my career on really, right?

Picking the right leaders and people who, you know, I thought could do one of two things.

One, either, you know, financially engineer, you know, a capital structure that could allow the company to scale and grow hyper rapidly, um, and create outsize value and take market share.

Um, or the second is just a company that has incredible technical talent and the ability to simply outperform, you know, established competitors by creating magical products.

And so, you know, the latter would be example would be, you know, Adam Dilt, who I was fortunate enough to work with uh, as CEO uh, of Dwell of Dwelleble. And Adam, you know, Adam was a guy who'd created a number of incredible technologies.

He's he created created one that end up being the home screen for Tivo. He created opentable, uh, sorry, open table, that now that now we be talking. Uh, not opentable, he created a urban spoon. Um, which was a huge hit, um, and a great success.

And so he always had this knack for, you know, just having a new take on kind of a an existing problem.

And so when I had a chance to work with him, I was like this is a slam dunk because I knew then my job would just be to sort of execute, make sure that we had the resources to uh, to give Adam and his team the space to to create the magic.

You know, the and then in the case of, you know, March Ax and Go-to-net, it was really, you know, Russell Horwitz, who was the CEO of both companies and had a strong background on Wall Street before he came into tech and knew how to use public market equity to rapidly create, you know, rapidly create value.

I mean in the second, the second company March Ax, we did a $200 million secondary like a year and a half after we went public that sort of 5x the valuation of the company and allowed allowed us to buy, you know, a huge amount of virtual real estate in the form of domains, which sent, you know, which it so so it's uh, I guess by by sort of coming back to the question, it's just it was about picking people who I thought um could give just an unfair advantage to the business and then hopefully give me a lot of leverage on my time, my investment, my opportunity cost, you know, because obviously, you know, I want to make sure that I'm spending my time doing something that's you know, something worth doing.

Host: The reason I was asking that question is because that's a well-known strategy right now a lot of uh, you know, early, you know, growth stage employees often do is, you know, you join a the pretty early stage company, series B, series C and you know, you work and, you know, sort of develop your own zone of excellence and just replicate the same thing in multiple companies, you know, over the next couple of decades.

Like that has been prettyable, um, you know, career path. So I was wondering what your take was, you know, working across these companies.

Guest: I don't know man. I never had really a plan. I thought I was, you know, I graduated in 1996 and I thought I was going to work, you know, I moved to Manhattan.

I thought I was going to work in advertising, which I kind of did end up working in advertising but just on the internet, funny enough. But but you know, I didn't have a career plan.

I mean I, I think I visited the career planning office at my college once.

Like, I just was fortunate, um, that I'd done some copywriting one summer for a guy who ended up co-founding an internet company and he asked me to come be the marketing person and but I kind of so I was on autopilot for most of most of the decision making.

And then when I did decide to, you know, do the third company, you know, it was I was recruited and uh I guess the fourth company too. So so by by that time I was taking seat suite roles.

And so I was like, rightly or wrongly I felt like I had my zone of, that's not true.

I guess the the the third job I had was chief revenue officer briefly at a startup that raised $18 million and then the CEO left and um, I got to be the CEO for better or worse.

But but I made that move because I did want revenue responsibility, direct. I'd had it as a GM, but you know, I wanted to have the vertical experience.

You know, and it was so that and then the fourth company, I mean I, yeah, I think I wanted another shot at being CEO.

I kind of the the third one I I took over it was a battlefield promotion and the fourth one I was like, okay now I can do this from day one. And uh, you know, I was wrong. But that's okay. Like we we managed.

Um thank God for the team um being super acquirable um and building something that was really cool. Yeah, I mean and that's that's kind of the thing is sometimes if you're, you know, the story doesn't always end the way you think.

Like if you're running around chasing your zone of genius, you might end up just realizing all you've discovered is the things that you're not suited to do.

You pick up a lot of skills, you know, working if as long as you're diligent, like I always say I worked really hard and that got a lot done, but I wasn't necessarily really great at too much.

But even just getting those skills over time and then figuring out that you don't really want to apply them to a startup, yeah, that's valuable.

Host: I mean, uh, one of the things about acquisitions is you hear it, you know, for a couple of days in the news cycle and then everyone forgets about it, right? Um, but there's almost a lot of activity that happens before it and after it.

What are some of the things, you know, that you think, uh, since you're all you're also now an early stage investing, what was your vantage point tell you about why companies acquire, um, and at least from the couple of ones you see.

Guest: Yeah, I mean I can speak to that. So typically companies are either they're buying, I guess let's leave out aqua hires um, because those are sort of not not that interesting except for if you're on the team and even then.

But you know, typically like good exits are happening because companies want one of three things. They're either buying revenue. They're buying, you know, and sometimes that's a revenue/ like book of business. right?

So you want to have those customers, um, because they're an adjacent industry that maybe you're not already playing in.

Um, the second reason is, you know, for sort of strategic evolution. so you think about IBM having done a lot of that historically, buying their way into categories where they couldn't necessarily build build a valuable, you know, beach head position in an emerging technology.

Um, and Oracle's done a lot of that type of acquisition in the last 20 years. You know, so companies that just they see the cloud coming and they're like, well we can't create, you know, the cloud so we need to buy a cloud company.

So sort of I would say strategic evolution is is another, you know, core support. There's there are companies that are playing, you know, offense or defense against competitors.

So we were acquired, you know, by home away largely because their mobile app sucked and they were getting their ass kicked by Wall Street over it and you know, because their competitors were outpacing them on mobile and we had a, we had an amazing mobile dev team and amazing mobile app and so we filled, we filled a hole for them.

Um, same when we sold to Comscore two companies ago, they were constantly getting beat up about their lack of sort of AdTech adjacent solutions or AdTech plugin and we sort of read those filings and we said, well, gosh, we fit right in there and sure enough they reached out.

We launched a product and it was doing $100 million, you know, two years later. And so, sometimes it's as simple as that. Yeah, I'd say, yeah, I don't know if that's a great answer but.

Host: Do you think companies strategically can position themselves for great acquisitions? I mean startups or companies, however you look at it.

Guest: Yeah, absolutely. So, I would say as you get past your zero to one phase as a startup, you start look picking your head up a little bit.

Like you should definitely have it, you should make your own sort of market map of the value chain in whatever market that you're playing in and who are the players and where which layers of that value chain do they live in and can you augment what they do?

Do you compete directly with them? You know, and then you can start to research, you know, if they're public, you can look at their filings and look at I filing looking at filing is painful, but like listen to their conference calls.

And there's always some like sellside analyst that's, you know, needling them about something in their business. Just pay attention to that. And look, like I I've always been a a long game kind of relationship guy anyway.

It costs you just a little bit of time and focus. By the way, it actually doesn't cost you because it's it's worth the investment.

But if you're a CEO of a startup, especially in B2B, you should be talking to the public company analysts who cover all of your competitors and potential acquiers. You should be briefing them.

They want to talk to you because they you have information that could help them do a better job of covering their their companies. And so, it's a symbiotic relationship.

If you can build it over time, you know, you build, I've built great relationships with Wall Street analysts doing tiny start when I was doing tiny startups, they start to whisper to the companies that they cover. Hey, have you heard about like this?

Why, you know, why are they doing this and you can't do that.

You can start to sort of plant like ideas in their head and that often leads to inbound from acquiers where if you're just quietly minding your business and hoping that the best product wins, you won't have those avenues.

And the second thing is, in the unfortunate case that you do have to sell the company, you'd much rather have relationships built. People, it's all people all the time, right?

So if you have a relationship with the human and, you know, they know about your wife and kids and you know, whatever, vice versa and, you know, you've kind of you've met at some conferences, you've had a couple cocktails or you've gone to dinner, you know, when year three comes around and you can't get your series B or whatever, now you can make that phone call.

And they're not going to be, you know, generous with their offer, but like it's it's warm. They know you, they trust you, you can shoot straight with them as much as you can ever do that.

I think that's so I think relationship building direct is also really important. You know, I think relationship building outside of Corp dev is really important.

I think product people generally make the right they make the buy decisions and deals that go well. Some people are always chasing Corp dev, but really you want to have an excuse to get to know the product folks.

Um, I think also this is a place where your board really can make a difference.

So you could have a board member who, you know, only shows up at half the meetings and, you know, is asleep the other half of the time and won't introduce you to any investors and is, you know, dead weight.

And if you're trying to sell the company and they can make three back channel calls to get a process to appear to have spun up for the sake of sort of stocking your main your main offer, they've just paid for themselves 20 times over.

And you need people on your board who can do that kind of work, ideal.

Host: I I want to talk more about uh the board uh dynamics, but before that, since we're talking about acquisitions, do you think any companies right now are really good, uh, or attractive in terms of acquisitions for larger companies?

Guest: You know, I don't spend a ton of time thinking about it anymore. odd as that may be. I'm so focused on, you know, really we write at Ascend, we write the first check into your company, right?

Our goal is really just get you from like first check to institutional seed or A. You know, we're we're very happy when our companies matriculate to a point where their decision is should we sell or should we go public?

Um, but by that time I don't have, you know, I'm not I'm not I would say I don't do a lot of like fantasy fantasy growth stage VC thinking where I'm like, oh what what what's going to happen to uh, name the unicorn?

You know, could I mean, could could Oracle marketing cloud by Emparity? Maybe, right? But maybe not. I don't know. I don't I don't have I don't have great thoughts around any of that stuff.

I you know, and I think the other thing you want to be mindful of is probably, you know, the best acquisition targets are going to be companies that are struggling and I I would never want to, you know, speculate about companies struggling or not.

Host: I think I mean, uh, I'd like to get your take on this is one of the things is because of so high valuations that are happening in early stage or, you know, whichever stage you pick, I think we're going to see, you know, a downround pretty much everywhere, right?

But the side effect I see for really high rounds, especially for example in Indian uh companies is you are pricing yourself out of acquisitions. Yeah, right?

So I I just wanted to get your thoughts on if that theory holds true for you in your vantage point.

Guest: I mean, that's why you don't want to have, you know, investors that can block. I mean, you really want to make sure that you're, you know, maintaining as much control of your destiny as you can as a founder.

And, you know, that's difficult to do after series C and that's typically where the, you know, valuation inflation becomes prohibitive for acquiers. So, I don't know, that's kind of a non-answer.

I think, I mean, I do think it's a real problem and I do think you're going to have it's going to be an interesting 12 to 24 months. Yeah, so I don't I don't, you know, again, I don't I don't have a ton of speculation on that.

Host: So yeah, I I I want to talk more now about uh Ascend and what you're doing with it. Uh can you talk like what was the thought process initially because I mean there are so many seed funds, there are so many, you know, preseed funds. Right?

There's there's no death of capital right now, um, you know, and it's pretty competitive to start something, right? Uh, in the VC space. So what was your thought process, you know, to start Ascend?

Guest: So I mean I started by just realizing that I was done done operating, uh, done being a startup, you know, operator or founder if I ever had been.

And you know, for the first time in my career I kind of stepped back and I said, well, what do you actually think you're good at? And where does that overlap with what you actually like to do?

I was kind of surprised when I did that because I realized I hadn't ever done it. And I don't know that a lot of people do.

I think a lot of us just make decisions based on momentum and that what the outside world tells us or what we, you know, what we think will make our parents or our wife or our, you know, whoever love us more.

Like it's a real psychological sort of uh, mind field. This this idea of chasing esteem needs, you know, through through career. And that's not news. I mean it's used to be doctors and lawyers and whatever, right?

But but I really did kind of realize that that's all I've been doing. I was just trying to chase I should be a sea level exect. No, now I was on the founding team, now I should be a sea. Once be a CEO, I should be a CEO. CEO, I should be a founder.

And I kind of never stopped to ask why. So I think a big step for me was, you know, asking myself that question. I kind of found out, well, you know what I like? I like I like doing deals. I like, you know, I like MMA.

I like marketing and content and people and network and kind of realized that and I had an investor tell me this once when I was a founder. He said you think like an investor, which is not a compliment if you're trying to raise money from investors.

But you know, I kind of had that mindset and I'm a gambler. And all that kind of came together and I said, oh man, I think I might be able to do something for founders. And you say it's crowded, you know, in in the Pacific Northwest, like it's not.

And maybe it is more so now, but it certainly wasn't in 2016.

And so I just started Angel investing and I took a chunk of change off my balance sheet and was like, I'm going to go, you know, it was like a it was like going to business school five times in terms of how much money, but I think, you know, that was the investment was like, let me see if I like this, let me see if I'm good at it. just from a standpoint of like, am I doing something unique? because the way that I interact with founders and the things that I've learned and the things I share with them and the way I can be supportive and help them, you know, grow grow a company, is that unique, right?

And if it is and if I like doing it and if it's unique and like people actually value it, then maybe I'm onto something that I could spend more time on. And I never thought I need to start a venture capital fund.

But after a couple years, it was apparent that, you know, there wasn't product on the shelf necessarily uh here that like the one I was offering.

And so, and I had some investors who I'd put into some deals previously that had done really well and they kept said, hey, why don't you just start a fund?

And I like to work a lot and I thought I'd be pretty good at it and so I became my own uh first investor and then brought on a bunch of LPs and we raised $50 million and that fund is uh now almost fully deployed.

And yeah, it's the best, certainly the best experience I've ever had, you know, in terms of just being happy and thinking I'm doing the thing I should be doing in my career. But there are there are certainly lots of sources of capital.

I would argue there aren't that many that are able to truly plug in and be helpful at that first check phase. And I can't, you know, necessarily be the most helpful person after series B.

So I don't hold myself out to be the best investor in the world, but I think in a lot of cases I'm the best investor for a set of founders who are, you know, starting their journey.

Host: How do you uh differentiate your check from, you know, someone else's? like because you talked about, you know, there're not a lot of people who do this and you know, have companies from zero to one stage. How do you like, you know, maybe if you have a playbook of doing it? Like how does it look like for a new company that is that has taken a check from Ascend?

Guest: Yeah, so I mean typically, we we lead a lot of the rounds that we do, which is it's usually a preseed and usually on a safe note. Um, but we'll, you know, do the diligence and negotiate the term, at least the price, right? of the safe.

And yeah, what comes comes along with that is a pretty intense commitment to bringing on incredible co-investors. Because my check size is like 250 to 750k. So usually that's not enough to cover a full round and I don't want it to.

I want to have, you know, I want to have a like a diverse robust group of people around the table who can help. And so for a lot of founders, they're maybe they're coming to me and they've got a couple angels that they've talked to.

A lot of times they'll have like their, you know, the CEO of whatever startup they were at previously is backing them and but they they're especially up here often under networked when it comes to investors.

So there's a great group of folks up here that I like to partner with on deals and there's also a really great group of folks in California that we like to bring into uh, into our preseed rounds when it when it makes sense.

And so it's initially just a flurry of activity with, you know, you know, dozens of introductions to investors. Usually the first thing I do after I commit is say, okay, now this is how I would maybe evolve the pitch and the deck a little bit.

So we we we work on that. After someone's onboarded, you know, we do things like offer pitch coaching and fundraising support, um, through a couple folks that we've worked with in the past.

We have a discord where, you know, now it's like 55 founders um, and their co-founders can all interact across the portfolio.

Um, so they're sharing, you know, notes about hiring, notes about, you know, how do you outsource, you know, SEM and what agency is good.

You know, uh, we have a database of investors that's proprietary to us that um where we actually keep notes on like, you know, interesting uh information that people might want to know about, you know, investors before they engage with them.

You know, we're looking at pulling together a pitch deck repository so that you know, when we've got companies that are going out to raise their first series A, we've got, you know, five companies have already done it successfully.

Here's their pitch decks. We, you know, so so I think there's, you know, I have a chief of staff who is incredible and does a lot of work. She's she's been a startup's ops person in the past. She actually runs a local slack group for ops folks.

So she does HR and ops support as a service to um to our portfolio companies. You know, and I think a lot but but but if it comes down to it, like I think a lot of that's differentiated, right?

But but I think a lot a lot of firms can say similar things. I think for me it's I I've literally gone out to I've had if you if there's an experience that a founder is going through, the odds are really high I've been through it.

Whether it's like writing your IPO docs, whether it's laying off half your staff, whether it's having to raise a bridge, whether it's recapping your cap table, whether it's going to raise your A, whether it's getting an aqua hire done, whether it's, you know, spending, you know, $5 million a year on marketing or whether it's hiring up a sales team or I mean whether it's pivoting.

Like what like I just kind of look back and I'm not trying to like I I'm not I'm I'm uncomfortable, you know, tuning my own horn, but I think it's just a matter of like I've survived and I got old and I look back and I've done all this stuff.

And maybe that'll decay in value a little bit over time. But as I look around right now, again, I see a lot of investors with 20 years of experience investing, which is really, really important and useful for companies as they move beyond seed.

But at that first first stage, I just don't see it, um, as frequently, folks who've kind of had the the length of and diversity of experiences as maybe I've had. And and I'm probably wrong about that, but that's that's kind of where I hang my hat.

Host: I mean it makes a lot of sense because, uh, right now there's so much information for every topic.

Like going to just one person who's an investor or, you know, co-founder and just getting the best practice answer for any question when you're in that early stage, it's just a 10x time saver is what I feel.

Like, uh, for example, what is the right way to, you know, start a company if you're an Indian founder and starting a company in the US? Like what the right people to connect with, right?

Uh if you are going through that as an individual and exploring, you could lose couple of months just to do that one single task.

So just that curation of the right people and the right, you know, sources can be really helpful at the early stages because time is of the essence at that point and in the and today in the world where like information is so dense and available everywhere, the real advantage comes if you can really curate what to take and what not to.

So I think like all these small, small networks which people, you know, create actually even though they're not big, they tend to be a lot more powerful in terms of go-to is, you know, accessing them.

But I wanted to ask you about since you've, you know, done the first fund, almost entirely deployed it, did you had a thesis change or like when you look back when you're starting and from now, like did you have like preferences in terms of sectors, you know, preferences in terms of less I mean, I know obviously, you know, big part of investing is investing in people.

Like removing that factor because people always like if you like a person and you know that they're great operators, even the idea is, you know, you know you can say that with Zoom, right?

Like Zoom is not a new idea, but if you know some, you know, Eric and then you're just investing in him to, you know, to create a new tech that is 10x better essentially, right?

Those kind of bets, if you ignore those kind of bets, did your thesis change in terms of the markets and, you know, the spaces and just ideas, uh, where you started and right now?

Guest: I mean, not really. I knew I wanted to focus on the Pacific Northwest because I felt like there was a real gap here. And I still feel that way and I'm more bullish than ever on where we we are as a an ecosystem.

I mean now for decades people said, oh we got two two, you know, trillion dollar tech companies but where are all the entrepreneurs? And, you know, moreover, like where are the people who can scale companies?

And I think the biggest difference between now and even five years ago is you have the tableaus and the Dsigns and the, you know, Athos and all of these gigantic exits which have, yeah, they've created like, you know, millionaires, but more importantly, those companies have created like a squadron of talent, business talent that knows how to scale.

And we've always had great technical talent here, but now you can go find someone to do growth, which I mean you literally couldn't there were five people who could do growth in the city of Seattle five years ago.

I mean, I'm not kidding and it's just so much better now and you can see it being 10 times better in 10 years and that's why I'm doubling down on the geostrategy.

I think category, yeah, I mean, certainly like our most successful investment was an e-commerce SAS, you know, company. So we do e-commerce, we do SAS, we do marketplace, we do, you know, AIML.

I don't think AIML is even it's like the first pitch of the first inning for AIML.

So I think that a lot of money got deployed there quickly early into, you know, stuff that that um that we're kind of figuring out like ML for ML practitioners is probably not the best thing to build a startup around because there just aren't that many ML practitioners.

So, you know, but so it's early days there, but like still super long the space.

And and so, and you know, these are all places where I've operated successfully or, you know, tripped and fallen into some success and and so I kind of know what a a good pattern might look like or what it takes or we've invested, you know, successfully or again, luckily, probably is the better word.

And so yeah, the category thesis kind of remains remains the same. And and and there's stuff I was talking to a founder earlier today and I said, I mean, I like the founder. There's stuff that I just don't want to spend my time on.

And if I don't want to spend my time on it, I'm probably not going to get smart enough about it to discern whether or not someone's going to be successful or whether if they're successful, it it matters.

And so I still feel that way about um, you know, cannabis. I feel that way about health by and large, um, although I'm getting a little better at that. Um, medical devices, biotech, hardware, like none of that interests me.

Um, and there will be great outcomes created in those categories and those are great for other investors.

Host: What do you think of metaverse?

Guest: Uh, I mean, I think I said earlier, we bought, you know, $200 million worth of metaverse real estate in 2006, 2005. I mean, it was just domain names, right? Websites are the metaverse.

You you know, the metaverse is Fortnite, the metaverse is, you know, I am less of a believer in like the sort of I I don't even know how to understand what the Facebook ad is about.

Like I don't even know how to understand how to conceive of how that is somehow unique to Fortnite. Fortnite's literally the metaverse. Put it I mean put some goggles on it. But you can already sell ads, you have concerts, you see your friends.

My son is 15. He's but he's been on the metaverse for five years. So I think it's hype.

Host: Actually the closest thing I would say to metaverse is, one is Fortnite, but if you look at the game engines, right? They are really in the metaverse. Like what do you say?

Do you need like if you put a headset, you're already in and you can generate and they can be generative, right? Because you can program it them to evolve.

You know, as a real estate or whatever, you can evolve those universes because you just click and there's a new building or a new tree or.

Guest: Right. Yeah. There's there's a reason that like most conceptions of the metaverse like somehow channel Ready Player One. Like it's humans are human.

Host: I think there's also the hardware limit of, you know, what you can perceive, right? So I think that's a big part of where the limitation is because the software I feel is already there in terms of, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

But also like the there our brains are very difficult to solve for and people still get violently ill when they work out with in VR for more than 10 minutes. Like you get violently ill.

Like you you know, it doesn't mean that at some point we all won't all be like, you know, hard wired in via wetware to like some, you know, Fortnite 10.0 version where everything where many of the behaviors that we, you know, engage in the and the things that we like to do will become virtual.

I that's probably inevitable. But the idea that that's going to happen in some like, you know, tectonic shape shifting like immediate way is ridiculous. It's what I think.

Host: I think I mean the rebranding is quite interesting, right? Because rebranded everything into metaverse. Uh pretty much every game is now non game, it's a metaverse. Right.

So that's an interesting aspect and I think meta the company has its own reasons for doing it, right? primarily probably the brand reasons, I would think because right now I think their biggest reason is and and I mean yeah, they're chasing a they're chasing a multiple.

So I mean happens, right? People like get tired of I think they realize that their their value has been extracted from social and that it's a dying category and you know, you need to stay ahead of that. Um, you have shareholders.

So that's understandable.

Host: And also the fact that now because of the scrutiny they face they faced over the years, they couldn't acquire their way to the next thing. right? because if you want to pivot to make it a gaming company, you can't acquire a big company, right?

So now they have to build it internally. And this is a great rebranding to set the stage that, okay we we're going to invest tens of billions into building whatever we want to build because we can't acquire, right?

Uh I think that's also one of the reasons I feel why they are, you know, heavily branding into metaverse.

Guest: That's really insightful. I mean, and you kind of call back to your early earlier question about why do companies acquire companies and that's right right there.

Host: Yeah. I thought, you know, when you're an investor, you're consistently getting pitch decks, right? You're getting pitch decks, you're in founder calls. it can feel overwhelming.

At least for me, you know, it gets overwhelming to continuously see pitch decks and after a point, you start to develop certain, you know, criteria. You obviously mentioned the, you know, you don't like hardware, you don't like health.

But do you have certain rules that you over time develop that you focus on uh in terms of and by the way your startup toolkit that you've written is so exhaustive and so very well written because you almost frame the pitch deck that you expect, which is actually very useful for anyone who's trying to pitch you.

Uh, I think more investors should do that or just copy that in their website and put it there because what happens often is the first time founders usually have this understanding of what a picture should be and what the investor is often looking for.

And like and I'll probably replicate your idea and put it somewhere in in one of our websites.

Guest: I got you great. I think it's great. I mean I think you're right. I think everyone should do it. I mean, because you're if you're look, if you're not plugged in

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