Transcript: Eric Bahn: Co-Founder & General Partner of Hustle Fund

This episode of Start 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 e a r.tax, bear.tax. Hey Eric, uh thanks for coming on to the show. Thank you Natraj for the opportunity. Really excited to have this conversation with you today. I'm super excited uh, you know, for a couple of reasons because uh if you look at the uh sort of the VC brands uh like post sort of A16C era. I think if we can identify like, okay, who built VC brands after that era? I think Hustle fund is probably in the top five out of there. So it is pretty cool uh, you know, to talk about that and we'll absolutely talk about that. But I also start want to start the conversation with, you know, what you did before Hustle fund and uh sort of uh give a brief background of, you know, where you're coming from. Yeah, certainly. So uh thank you again Natraj for the opportunity to speak to you as well as your audience. Um yeah, as mentioned, I'm one of the co-founders at Hustle fund. But for 15 years before I launched the fund, I was an operator, um just like yourself, just like many people who are probably listening today. So, I started my career as a product manager. Uh I was lucky to be in a rotational leadership program at intuit uh where I eventually landed in in product management. So, was there for the first few years in my my life as a as a professional and then uh in the in the process I was bootstrapping on the side a media company, which was an education media business called Beat the GMAT. It was a very specialized focused community of people applying to business goals globally. And that experience actually just by accident uh began to iterate and change and turn into its own full-time project. I ran that company for nine years and then eventually sold that business to the Daily Mail, which is a larger media business based out of London. So that happened around 2012 and then after after that, I spent a little bit of time at uh Facebook and Instagram, again as a product manager, was actively Angel investing around that time as well. Um decided I wanted to start another small company and uh that's when I was in entrepreneur residence at another fund called 500 startups to try to think about what I wanted to do next. Um it's from my experiences at 500 and reuniting with my old co-founder Elizabeth Yin, uh whom I work with today at Hustle fund. That's when we came up with the concept behind Hustle fund, some of the brand ethos and all that. So I've been actively focused on uh investing since 2017 at Hustle fund. So um operator turned VC is the quick summary. You you also created uh read your story, right? which was acquired by jib jab recently. Yeah, that's right. That was a somewhat brief side hustle as well. So uh the start behind that is uh read your story. It's um a children's book company where we have these cute children's books, parents are other people can upload photos of their kids and then their faces become the main characters in these physical books that are mailed to you in very high quality. So, I actually started that company with my sister. and uh, you know, had a good first year there, got kind of pulled into Hustle fund around that time, had to make that choice and decided to focus on the fund and I wish I could take credit for it, but really the success of that is that team as well as my sister and her co-founder, Donna. Uh so that company just got acquired um a few months ago in 2022. So you've seen at least two acquisitions uh and you've probably seen some more with Hustle fund, right? Like do you see a common pattern why uh, you know, companies get acquired or at least in your specific cases, like what was the value the acquiring company saw? Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question in the sense that I think there's no single narrative or pattern that I could discern since it's so specialized. I would say that broadly speaking, there's a couple of reasons why companies I'm seeing get acquired. Uh the first is it's uh it's a great business and uh it's throwing off lots of profitability and cash and it would just be nice to add that to my portfolio of businesses that I'm already running or some sort of conglomerate. Um, you see this a lot with maybe like private equity deals, which is like, okay, you know, Natraj's business is stirring up cash, he wants to retire, I can buy him out. or possibly like I think I could do it better than he can and he's getting a little bit tired of running this business, so let me go ahead and buy that. Um, the more exciting uh category of acquisitions and I felt this one a little bit more with like Beat the GMAT was there's something strategic here. So an example would be, you know, I'm very excited to get into this adjacent industry for my large parent company, but we don't have any of that DNA or skill set to do it ourselves with very high confidence. What if we bought Natraj's business instead? You know, we'll have to pay up for it, but we know that his technology, uh some know-how within his team can accelerate uh the plan for us to expand our our entire business lines, you know. So, in the case of Beat the GMAT, um, you know, we got acquired by the education arm of the Daily Mail, a business called Hopsons. And they were interested in moving into uh serving students at the test prep phases, you know, giving earlier earlier uh leads. Uh they're primarily serving universities and students. So, uh they and they liked our technology and knowhow and Silicon Valley chops. So, uh that was I think the context behind that acquisition. And I will say just as a venture capitalist, you tend to find better acquisition uh values when it's strategic, more so than a cash cow. In the strategic case like Natraj it might be just you is like, we have to have him on our team. Perhaps your value is like a hundred million dollars just you, your knowhow because like you have some special qualities that just do not exist anywhere else. Um versus companies that are maybe more cash cow oriented, it could be like a multiple on how much profitability you have. Those tend to be a little bit lower in terms of the the outcomes. But um, yeah, those are some random thoughts. Hopefully that answers part of that question. So why did you uh start Beat the GMAT? Were you really good at cracking GMAT or uh vice versa? So, that was a an accidental business as I mentioned before. So the the origin behind that was um, I was coming out of college and then I was a really mediocre student. So, uh and very lazy and privileged too. So I didn't do any summer internships, I didn't participate in any extracurriculars. I basically had a very mediocre GPA and I was graduating. And then by my senior year, I was freaking out. I was thinking like, what am I going to do next, right? Um and I'll never forget this. I talked to my mom at the time and said like, what should I do? And then in her own words, she basically said to me, Eric, you're too dumb to be a doctor or a lawyer. So maybe you should try sticking with business. Again, I probably insulted every single person in this audience right now, but but like that's, you know, in this sort of Asian immigrant diaspora, like being a doctor, a lawyer, accountant, there's like engineer as well. Like there are these fields which uh feel very safe that our parents encourage us to go into. And uh so um, you know, I kind of stuck with it and I thought maybe I should go to business school. And usually the first thing that folks do when they apply to business school is to prepare for the entrance exam, which is called the GMAT. The GMAT is like the equivalent of the SAT for undergraduate, maybe the CAT exam in India and so forth. So, um I started uh studying. I got some books from the library and then I decided I was going to create a day-to-day study blog to keep myself accountable where it was like day one, you know, open your Princeton review book, do these problems. What did you learn? I try to summarize it. Try to make it a little bit funny too where I could and I did this for 60 days and got a reasonable score. And I thought I was done, but it turns out that in 2005 uh within at least MBA students and people applying to business goals, my blog became like a miniature viral sensation because there weren't that many self-study guides that existed even back then. So, the audience grew, eventually the blog turned into a forum. The forum grew, eventually that turned into more of like a social network. The social network grew, eventually that became a data analytics platform. and by the time we sold our company, we were actually selling $100,000 a year contracts to business schools to get predictive analytics on uh what their applicant pool would look like before they received the applications. And that was very important for their diversity planning initiatives and so forth. So, it was a weird multiple pivot nine-year journey that I just accidentally fell into, but I think the thing that kept me there was I always loved the mission of that business, which for us was to democratize access to education resources to allow you to achieve your business school dreams. And back in 2005, it was not uncommon to find that there are markets in the world where you couldn't even find a GMAT book, right? Or even had reliable internet back then. and you were trying to go to Harvard business school. and so that's like an unfair advantage if you're like a rich person in New York with all these resources. Uh, you know, and you're someone in Ethiopia, I'm thinking of someone specifically there who ended up going to Harvard actually. Um, we wanted to level the playing field of that kind of access education. So we kept the site free for students and monetized by the business schools, GMAT test prep providers, MBA missions consultants who wanted to get in front of our community. So did you end up going to business school after all this? I applied. I got in. And then uh uh at that time when I was about to enter school, uh I remember going to the Dean and saying like, this, I got to just get one more year running Beat the GMAT. There's something very special happening here. Can you defer my admissions? I just one year. And I'll never forget what the guy said. He was very sweet about it, but he said, Eric, I look forward to seeing your application again in the future, right? Which was basically uh absolutely not. You know, like you're this is a you're in or you're out kind of thing and I decided I was out. So, ironically, everyone that's worked at Beat the GMAT, it's been like a couple dozen maybe, no one has gone to business school actually. But you helped a lot of uh people get into business school. Yes. Uh, we had at one point 90% of the global MBA applicant markets on our website. Um it was a a deeply satisfying project and you know, the the thing that I always reminded our team was, you know, there's bigger problems to solve. There's more money to be made elsewhere too, probably. But the thing that we will always measure ourselves is the number of bodies that we served. Like literally I can count uh the millions of people that benefited from our resources. And while the outcome was fine, um, you know, that's the legacy that gets me excited because education is one of those inflection points that can meaningfully change the quality of your life and I'm deeply proud of that. Yeah, I mean even uh when people talk about startups in India, if you look at what is the most successful company which is not just based on valuation, but also like in terms of, you know, positive cash flow is by Jews, which is uh I think at this point some 12 billion dollars and it is worth that much because they actually generate a lot of uh uh, you know, operating income as well. But but they do face a lot of criticism because um, you know, there are some aggressive sales tactics, you know, that people don't like and people, you know, when I speak to, you know, my friends who are Indians and who are not into startups, it's like they're always complaining about byjus. But to me, what it looks like is if you look at what what the world is with byjus and without byjus, it's much, you know, a level playing field. Yeah, there are some bad things with every company and, you know, that have to be corrected. But if you look like post byjus and pre byjus, what a tier four or, you know, tier five uh, you know, city kid can achieve now versus what was possible before is entirely different, right? He has the access and most of it is free. Like we can say that, you know, hey, you know, there are some bad things about this particular company or that, but at the end of the day if you look at on a 20, 30 year timeline, what change that cause is actually really big and it sort of level plays probably at 200 million population. Yeah. Um so yeah, I mean just giving access is much more important. You know, just talking about India for a second, I know it's a bit of a side orthogonal kind of departure to conversation. India was a massive market for us at Beat the GMAT. Um, there are some really amazing CAT prep and education communities like Pul guy out there. I'm not sure you've heard of it. And like uh it was awesome, but everyone was focused on like a singular goal at least at the time which is get into an IIT if possible, right? And that's awesome. But one thing that I think has changed that gets me so excited about maybe some of the less privileged kids who don't who can't like prepare for CAT exams in the same way is, you know, global education is becoming more accessible. You like it's possible for you to get an MBA from UNC, for example, University North Carolina, uh couple of School business online now. And you know, I think the options just globally, um especially for Asian countries, like India or Korea where it's just like there's three great schools and then everything else is like far lower in terms of reputation. Um, going out global and saying like, well, I can actually still remain in Mumbai or whatever and then uh do my MBA in North Carolina. Um, it's it's getting really exciting I think for even creating more opportunities for accessibility of great education and um bringing some of those like, you know, concepts back to your home country uh whilst staying within your home country too if you need. So, that's it's a very exciting world to see how it's evolved. So at what point were you uh exposed towards, you know, uh investing or venture investing in particularly? Is this uh during your time with uh Peter GMAT or while you were working at 500 subs? So, when I was running my first company BTG Man, I was laser focused on that work. It consumed my entire life. I was super burnt out because that's all I thought about. And then we got an acquisition a little bit of money finally. And um, you know, one of the accidental things I started to do was I thought maybe it would be really fun if I began Angel investing. And I think what I credit my career in at as a venture capitalist now as being is actually rooted on the fact that I was able to Angel invest with completely pure dumb luck into some really good companies in the beginning and found that like I this is a very satisfying thing. So, while I made like most while I was an okay founder and I made like okay money as a founder through my outcomes, the majority of my family's wealth is actually because of Angel investments. And the first company that I Angel invested in 2012 or 2013 was a company called Webflow. So, Webflow is a no code builder. It's currently valued at like $3 billion or $4 billion right now and was lucky enough to be part of the early seed investors there. And you know, what that sort of taught me was a couple things. One is um um, you know, even with like a relatively small check, there could be very meaningful life outcomes if you're lucky. Now, the way that you get lucky I think is by consistently writing checks. You know, you can't just start by saying like Natraj is smart, I think he's going to make it and I'm going to put all my $100,000 I have for Angel investing to just one company. That probably is too risky. Um I would rather spread that to 10 bets of $10,000, which can still be really meaningful. The second thing I kind of learned personally was just that there's so many better founders than I am out there out there. you know, as whenever I encountered a problem I got passionate about. I just meet these founders and then discover, you know, I don't think I can ever compete with them. They're just so much smarter or hungrier than I am. What if I just gave them a little bit of money instead? Uh so there's a lesson in leverage there. But the third was this, which is actually now the seeds of like modern day Angel investing and maybe emerging managers like the ones that you're speaking to, which I saw on your list and hopefully me too is um there's a better way to also engage with founders as an investor than from what I found in like the early 2000s. In the early 2000s, it was kind of much more hands off. It was like Natraj is my VC, he's going to give me a bunch of money and then it's maybe I'll meet with him like a quarterly on a board meeting, but the expectation is for me to like impress him. Um, it's very arms length in terms of relationship. Now, it's different. Like when when when Natraj invests in me, I know that he has like deep engineering skills on like Azure and infrastructure and and uh, you know, storage and data and things like that. So if I'm working in a relevant space, he might give me $10,000 or $100,000, but what's more valuable is the expectation that I can turn to him for all these infrastructure questions as well to unblock me. It's more of like a services kind of model. And uh so when I discovered that uh I was observing this over 10 years after my first check that, you know, there's a real opportunity here to just continue down this path to make it feel like venture should be no different than like a uh your bank or your payroll service or something. It's just another service provider to help you unlock founders. That was sort of the concept that really embedded within our brains is for our model for how we're trying to serve founders at Hustle fund. Yeah, and you know, I've been doing Angel investing is sort of similar to mine in the sense that I really wanted to, you know, start a company and I realized I have the all these limitations being on a visa and navigating that process. Then I realized, hey, you you can create your own company at any point of time, but in the meanwhile, you can actually own, you know, a bunch of companies which probably might be better than your ideas. Yeah. And that's how basically I got into Angel investing as well. Uh and then you realize that, hey, instead of one company which you can anyways do, but you can also have leverage in terms of, you know, invest being invested in a bunch of other companies, which are also good ideas and which probably might be successful as well. And now there are many more sources to Angel and probably back in the day it was you have to be part of a smaller network. Well. Yeah, and you know, what gets me excited about like taking a check from you for example is again like um you are an active operator, an active engineer too. So, you know, there's a lot you could do to help me with some of my engineering uh product pipeline kind of work or if I have problems with like a Microsoft resource I need to gain access to, maybe whitelisting me or pulling some strings there. Um, I think I think like, you know, for angels like yourself, but this is really advice for anyone listening who's considering to be an angel. Um, again, it's not enough to just have money and to offer, right? I'd really get precise also on your pitch, which is like here's why you should take my money. Um, I'll give it to you fast, but I'll also help you in these areas whenever you need, it's like recruiting or product management or brand design or whatever it's going to be. And um, I think if you can get that pitch down to something that's like your own 30 second elevator pitch. That can be really effective in getting into some astonishingly good deals. And that's also probably reflective of this trend that we are seeing, right? Because like single person funds being almost equivalent to a large fund. Yeah. And you know, all of them leading deals instead of like just, you know, being a smart check writer, like we've seen I think Elad Gil leading some $100 million dollar rounds and Oh yeah. things like that and even individuals raising a billion dollar funds and their first time funds. Yeah. Which is which is I mean crazy to think about even like five years back. Um but so once you decided to start Hustle fund, what was the process of because often the way I look at fundraising, especially for a fund versus a startup is in a startup, you have actual real value that you're proposing in the sense that uh hey, I'm doing this new product, new tech and there's a good story that you can tell based on what your plan is to do. Uh but it's often much more there are only few ways you can pitch a fund. Yeah. And what it's actually 10X harder because you don't have a product, your product is your decision making. Yeah, right? Uh so what was that process for you to um, you know, go from being an operator/ you know, Angel investor to actually forming a fund? You know, what you're citing Natraj is actually something that I've heard a lot of LPs directly express or allude to, which is at this point in the United States alone, I think there's something like 4,000 VC funds. Um this is actually based on some data that I saw on Twitter from Samir Kaji who um previously used to be the head of um venture banking at First Republic Bank and now he runs his own company, Lcape, which is really awesome. But um so he really pays attention to this space. A lot of funds. And what a lot of the LPs have said is like, you know, you could slap a logo, keep swapping them like on these decks. They all sound exactly the same. You know, we bet early, we're high conviction, we have proprietary deal flow and all that stuff. So, I think the where we were able to make some inroads early was we spent a lot of time on how we tell the story around the thesis of what we look for in founders. And um, so I can sort of talk about um the core of the question, which is like how did we get going? But it might might actually be good also Natraj to explain how we invest because this is actually the narrative that we used to pitch. So, we think that the as as pre-seed stage investors at Hustle fund. So pre-seed being like these angel rounds, we're trying to come in very very early alongside of your family, angel friends, uh relatively few institutions. uh usually when we're writing the first check in these businesses. We think that the very best leading indicator of success that you can find in teams even at the earliest stages of company formation is a quality that we call hustle. So, for us, hustle is defined as great execution meets high velocity. Okay? So we think that hustle is also even more important than things like, where did you go to college? You know, like where did you even work before this? That's important too. But uh or even kind of like veiled like racism or sexism too. like there's a lot of pattern matching that venture capitalists traditionally have had that orients them closer to like wider Asian men, or South Asian men who went to like top colleges and and so forth, right? You see this in the media too all the time. Anyway, so hustle. So our view uh we want to find hustlers. Uh people who are oriented towards measurement, experimental, have very high throughput of work and are just grinding out the business week after week, month after month, year after year. Now, in order to understand hustle, we think that the only way you can do this is actually by working with the team for some period of time. The analog I sort of challenge you to think about is, you know, when you worked at Microsoft or other great places not tra in your career. Um, you know, I'm sure that you've done some recruiting, you're like, oh my gosh, this person is like a Carnegie Melon CS student and worked at like Facebook or other great companies. Uh they interviewed super well and you're just like so excited like this is a slam dunk hire. Sometimes they're great, but in the course of working with that person, you see the truth. And sometimes the reality is like actually they're not that great. They're a little bit slow, they're smug, they're just not a good fit for the team. You see truth by working with them, right? And this is kind of the analog that we're applying to venture. We first start by writing a lot of small $50,000 checks into a lot of teams. In each fund we target about 250 companies per fund over three years. We'll then work with the team on a growth project, usually between eight and 12 weeks uh on sales or user acquisition. We've developed a school on growth that's only for our founders called Redwood School where we can structure like a kind of very lightweight programming to collaborate together. It's from collaborating and working with the team after we write that first check that we can get a better sense of how they work. Are they good hustlers? Are they operating well? Do they have a market that gets us excited? And then about 20% of the cases, usually after you write that first check and run the growth project, we find that we have very high conviction about the team's hustle because we saw it. And then um uh we really like the market. The team also judged us and you know, hopefully viewed us as hustlers too. And then in those cases that's when we concentrate second and third larger checks between $100 and $500,000 each to make them what we call a core position with our fund. So, the summary is buy a bunch of small option bets, work with the team on growth projects and then plow the majority of our fund's dollars into a subset of true hustlers. So that's the thesis of how we uh that was our thesis hustle and then that's the how we deploy it. And what we found is when we got really precise and explaining this well, um that was a pretty good differentiator because most VC funds are still oriented towards their secret sauce on due diligence when they hear pitches and pattern matching. and then like, you know, traditional funds like me and get together and it's like we're going to deploy $500,000 checks out of the gate. It's like, well, what is your process? It's like, well, we have a better process than others. That that's harder to explain than like we don't think we are smart enough, so we're just going to work with the team and and figure out just through that process. And that was a good differentiator for us. I'll pause there to see if you any reaction before I start to talk about like what happened next then to once we had the thesis. So, I think that thesis also reminds me of what larger funds are doing right now. like for example, A16 is announcing a million dollar check at seed or pre-seed. I think everyone realized that hey we can if you had running these larger funds, we might as well do a top of the funnel to get to know the teams better so we can own much more larger percentage of these companies that we are anyways going to you know, do the next round. So which which is where they focus essentially. Like so this you can sort of relate to all the larger funds moving down the cycle towards pre-seed and seed. I think that's one correlation I think which is paralleled to what you guys are doing. I would like to say that like funds like us have helped inspire those funds to actually understand this, but there's actually a key difference for why I think we are very easy to work with with founders versus sometimes the larger funds. We're small. So there's and and venture if you're thinking about starting a fund at some point or your audiences, the size of your fund actually really does matter when it comes to strategy. Let me give you an example here. Let's say that me and Natraj or like come from great networks. We decided for fund one, we're going to focus on pre-seed stage investments, but we can raise $250 million out of the gate. That's $250 million that we need to find a way to put to work. So you don't you can't write a $50,000 check, right? You want to write like a million dollar check or $500,000 check or $2 million more check, you know, because it's if if you're writing $50,000 checks, it's it's going to take you forever to deploy the capital. Our fund is 50 million. Our third fund is. We have about 100 million under management. And then uh uh but that's the size that's like allows us to be pretty nimble and writing smaller checks and and and working the model well. But there's another reason why fund size matters, which is we can afford to write 50 million $50,000 checks and then because our fund is small proportionately and it gives plenty of space for the founders to bring in other co-investors. So this is actually the nuance point that I would want your audience to think about which is it's totally fine and sometimes the great decision to take money from these larger funds, but they may need 15 or 20% ownership of your business at that point. Versus a fund like mine, Hustle fund or smaller angels and so forth, in the early stages, sometimes it's less about the capital. I would argue it's really less about the capital and more about the people, the brain trust you're trying to put together. So if you want like 20 awesome funds and angels involved, there's plenty of room for that. Like we are actively trying to bring more people into the deals that we invest in. We're not trying to elbow anyone out. So, this is why like emerging funds, especially younger, smaller AUM funds, asset under management funds are so exciting to work with is that they don't need to be greedy about like I have to on 20% in's business. It's like, no, no, no, I can I'm fine with 5%. Let's let's find like the remaining 15% of great human beings together to do this. Yeah, I think that uh a lot of first time founders don't understand this, but you know, whenever there's uh and I've had experience of elbowing out is you find a company figure out that the team is really good and something is working there. and all of a sudden, you know, a couple of weeks later, you know, there's a larger fund coming in and saying, hey, you know, we want to take over the entire round. And it takes some explanation especially with the first time founders that why that is, you know, not always a good thing, right? You don't want one person. You it's almost like a portfolio, right? You want don't want all the eggs in one basket sort of thing. that already want someone else with a different incentive who can give you the truth when it requires. And is not really influential on your board or whenever that time comes, he's not so much on the investing side, but he can also, you know, sort of operate in this middle ground where he's telling you the truth of what is happening and what is not happening. So I often see this happening with the first time founders who also sort of don't understand the leverage they have because you ultimate the founder, you can tell the VC that, hey, you know, I I want to, you know, take this much. I see especially this happening more on the India side. In the US side, I think founders do understand that they have all the leverage. Yeah. Um but on the India side, especially the first time founders often think, hey, we don't have that much leverage. We want to close the round, you know, a VC is telling us, you know, they want to take the entire round and they're sort of excited and also worried that this just by asking and negotiating they might lose the deal. Um, so you do see this in, you know, mostly the first time founders. Well, I think the global aspect of your what you brought up is very clever too. So, we invest very heavily globally uh primarily Southeast Asia, but we've done Africa, Latin America, a little bit of India too. And you're right, which is um I I think actually one part of it is there's fewer seed investors and angels in those markets even though like so a traditional path I think in Asia is like me and not judge like get super rich, maybe even as a tech founder, right? We IPO. Traditionally, there isn't very much culture around let's deploy new angel checks. It's more like let's start by real estate, right? Like that's like where a lot of the money just goes like let's just start to buy buildings, right? Um and I I don't fault that necessarily. But because there's fewer choices, um, you know, uh founder leverage does diminish quite a bit. But I think you're right which is there's there's like a uh a little bit of uh newness to founder mentality there of exactly the phenomena you stated. In the United States, early founders are getting much more educated that they have a lot of leverage. Uh, and then in Korea or India or, you know, elsewhere, it's perhaps uh they're not quite there culturally and I I sense that, you know. Um, so I'm glad that you're you're putting light to that because I hope that one lesson that some of the global founders outside US are hearing is to really challenge that idea that they can counter negotiate and get better terms for themselves too. It's almost the complete opposite because one of the things I see in the US is like almost in no investor has that much leverage at this point to even negotiate. Like uh I see these larger deals uh happening at very high end especially like you know, at the top end where you know, you're talking about series B or series C, there are only very few firms even in US. But I always thought that there is some leverage at that level. Yeah. But looking at the numbers, um I see that there's actually not much leverage even when you're operating a billion dollar fund, especially at least from what the outsider information that you're seeing about valuation of companies. So what do you think about that is is there a leverage like when A16 or, you know, um, you know, KBCB or Secus are going in? How much of the leverage is there on founder side versus investor side? because the valuations tell me that this might not be the right valuation but A16C or someone else is doing. Um, I feel like investors didn't have leverage as much as I thought. Yeah, and I love this because if I were to pick like which side should have more power when it comes to raising, should it be founders or should we be the VCs? I would pick founders every time. I mean, um, when I was raising capital for my previous companies in the early 2000s and mid 2000s, it was kind of crappy. I mean like you would just go down Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, which is where all the VC funds were. You go to these uh very big board rooms full of very bored looking men wearing Patagonia vests, paying like playing on their phones, eating their lunch, they're not paying attention to you at all. and it kind of felt like you're being judged by Caesar. It's like thumbs up or thumbs down, right? Uh it was obnoxious. You can't really do that anymore in this era of venture