Transcript: Chris DeVore: Managing Partner Founders Co-op (Remitly, Auth0 & Outreach)

Host: Hey Chris, welcome to the show.

Guest: Thanks for having me, glad to be here.

Host: Uh, so you you had so many interesting different roles in your career, you know, as an operator, investor, advisor, board member.

Uh, but I thought uh it would be a good place to start the conversation was uh, you know, your work at Patagonia and uh especially working in the e-commerce business.

Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what was your uh experience back then working at Patagonia?

Guest: Sure, yeah, I know I'll I'll try to be efficient but it but it's uh it's sort of a winding road of how I got there.

Um, I uh, you know, got out of school before the internet in the early 90s and had worked at uh consulting firm and then at uh bigger firms like AT&T and McCaw Cellular.

Um, but when AT&T bought McCaw, I knew I didn't want to work in that kind of environment again.

And so I started looking for for something just different and I got wind of a of a product leadership role at Patagonia at their headquarters in Ventura, California.

So I wound up getting the job and moving down there in 95, but it was I would I had sort of gotten exposed to the early, very early days of the internet uh in my previous role.

And so even though it wasn't part of my job mandate, I started basically agitating for the company to sell uh online. And so the company was and still is owned by its founders uh Ivana Melinda Shinard and they are sort of famously anti-technology.

Um, so they they didn't really want to hear about it but I I persisted and finally I said, look, why don't we do this? I'll let's create a a one-year contract position as head of e-commerce.

I'll take that position and I'll build you an online store and if you don't like it, you can fire me and shut it down. So I tried to derisk the choice as much as possible.

You know, in the early days of the internet, it's interesting there there was, you know, this this was early, everything about this was sort of new and it's hard to play back the tape if you if you if you weren't there uh at the time.

One of the things that Patagonia had going for it was in addition to being a retailer with its own stores, they sold both wholesale and through their own catalog operation. So they already had a distribution center, customer service operations.

So in in in terms of the the actual lift of the of putting them online, it was actually relatively light duty. The biggest decision and the biggest kind of mind shift at the time was, what is, what should a brand do online?

What is our what is our place? What is our responsibility to our customers in the digital medium?

And that was the most interesting set of conversations which is how does a brand put itself online in a way that is both true to the brand and serves the business interests.

So it was just a great learning opportunity for me to think about that intersection of of brand and business and technology at the very beginnings of kind of the internet era.

Host: Patagonia has such a unique brand identity even today uh and it's ironic that it almost became a mascot for venture investors to wear a Patagonia vest and uh anti-tech. Um, how do you see Patagonia as a brand today?

Guest: So, you know, and again this is, you know, interesting to think about different kinds of companies.

One of the reasons why I do what I do is I just believe deeply in in the power of founders, that founders are extraordinary people and it's the vision and energy of founders that creates great companies.

So the fact that Patagonia has never raised outside capital is sort of not really the point.

The fact to me that it's still a founder led business and that the ability to stay true to a vision uh through many different kind of business cycles and you know growth, growth and change in the business and the world around them.

That's what's allowed them in my view to continue to hew to a very clear, strong brand identity and not get distracted by, you know, the the way that commercial winds are blowing.

So the the brand I think has always stood for a deep commitment to, you know, quality and to the outdoors as a as a, you know, basically preserving preserving the wild spaces so that we can enjoy them as humans.

And and doing that in a way that is as as light impact as it can be on the world.

It sort of, I mean again, ironically, you know, it's a company that sells things and I think they they've never lost sight of the of the irony of that which is, we are, we are part of the consumer economy and yet in many ways we uh, we believe that that economy has lots of negative externalities.

And so so sort of walking that knife edge of authenticity while pursuing a business aim.

I think it's just a really fascinating kind of case study in what does it mean to build an authentic brand that that that cares for people in the environment in the context of of, you know, late stage capitalism.

It's it's it's not an easy balance to strike.

Host: Also, um, if you look at like what other brands and where fashion as an industry has moved or consumers in like the Zaras and H&M's where fast fashion is a thing where you use anything for one season or, you know, and then it's out of your closet.

While I think Patagonia is the only one which will offer you uh, you know, we'll fix your Patagonia vest or uh sweaters that you have and we want you to own it for as long as you can.

I think I I haven't seen any other brand do that because it's anti, you know, anti-sales mentality, right? You want to sell more versus sell less.

Guest: Exactly. No and I think if you were driven purely by market forces, let's say it was a public company or owned by shareholders that you wanted to maximize return, you wouldn't do things like that.

But because it's still owned by the founders, they have the freedom to pursue things that are authentic to them as as humans and their values, um, that allow them to sort of, you know, find find a middle path in in in a world of, you know, maximizing return.

They're they're they're not maximizing return, they're maximizing, you know, the the total the total, if you want to say the completeness of the of the brand and the brand experience.

Host: So at at what point did you get into uh early stage investing?

Guest: So that was again a bit of a of a winding road. I had uh when I was at Patagonia, it was sort of clear to me that the internet was was happening in Silicon Valley and I needed to figure out a way to get there.

So I wound up applying uh to business school only to Stanford graduate School of Business and I figured if I get in, I'll go and if I don't, maybe I'll just move there. I didn't know how I would solve the problem.

And I was lucky enough to get in, I would have been in the class of 99. But the the guys that I had hired as my outside vendor to build Patagonia's site because Patagonia had no native software engineering or digital design capability at the time.

It was a bootstrap company five or six people who um, a combination of graphic design and CS undergrads that had basically mostly dropped out of UV Madison. So they were based in Madison, Wisconsin.

They moved their little company to San Francisco right when I started school and I had been their first customer for a for a actual e-commerce site.

So we we had basically helped build that practice together and I was close really close with the founders there. So I wound up dropping out of business school after the first year, joining them as a partner um to build that business.

It was a bootstrap, we never raised outside capital.

We got it to about 50 people and about 15 million in revenue and then um, you know, this is 98, 99 and we could sort of feel, feel the world closing in on us in terms of lots of people had raised a lot of money to pursue the same opportunity.

So we wound up hiring an investment bank that no longer exists called Robertson Stephens to run up an auction process and sold the business to a public acquirer called Sapient in in 99.

So that was sort of my first experience of have been involved at the beginnings of a company all the way through the the liquidity cycle. And I just got got interested in that whole process.

You know, again we were a bootstrap, so it was a different experience to raise money. I moved back to Seattle, which is where I'm from for personal reasons.

Wound up wound up starting a venture back business here and for me the the sort of light bulb moment was it having been in the Bay Area in the in the middle of the kind of venture you know, Web 1.0 bubble and experienced what that was like good and bad.

Seattle was such a weird place to to practice that work because it's so deep in engineering talent because of Amazon and Microsoft and and now, you know, most of the of the big platform companies have have engineering teams here.

We're so blessed in terms of the the depth and diversity of our engineering community. But as a founder community it's still very weak.

Most people come here to be employees and some subset discover that they're really more entrepreneurial minded, but there wasn't a natural community of entrepreneurial energy where everybody was connected and you know, meetups and fundraising and.

And that just felt like a hole in the market based on my experience. So I wound up um starting a fund in 98, really which is, you know, calling it a fund is sort of grandiose.

It was it was my money and my original co-founder's money and and other founders that we knew in town who'd experienced that same problem. And said, hey, let's let's get together, we'll do the work.

But let's get some capital together to try to provide first dollar risk capital to founders who want to build, you know, a Silicon Valley style business. a really, really great high growth venture venture scale business, but to do it here, we need to change the ecosystem around us and the best way to do that was to create kind of a a first check fund or community that would support founders from the very beginning here in Seattle.

Host: Were there any interesting companies um that got funded um with that uh fund?

Guest: So the the most interesting from my perspective was was one that for a while was our most valuable holding in the end it turned out not as not as well, but um what I got out of that first out of that investment was my current investing partner.

So there was a there was a we had invested in a company called Aperture that was founded by a guy named Kabir Shahan who's now the the or until recently was a CEO and founder of a company called Amperity here in town, which we also invested in.

One of uh Kabir's engineers, individual contributor engineers and then engineering leaders was a guy named Aviel Ginsberg.

And so uh I got to know Aviel through our investment in Aperture and Aviel was interested in in he'd moved to Seattle from the East Coast, he was interested in startups as well.

And um there's a little bit of a side joke here which I'll talk about in a minute which is which is Tech stars.

But I wound up engaging with Aviel as a diligence partner on a bunch of investing investing opportunities because he was excited about and interested and he was a great counterpart to my kind of business lens to come and look at look at engineering teams and engineering kind of mindset in in the organizations we were looking at.

So Aviel and I started doing investing together even though he was still building his his company over the time. The company was called Simply Measured.

He raised from us, uh then a firm called MHS Capital and then from Trinity Ventures and Beamer Ventures down in the Bay Area. So he kind of went through this very rapid growth cycle.

Um, and and learned a lot again about that that whole journey as a venture backed founder, a technical founder becoming CEO. Like lots of kind of valuable lessons learned.

When when he was uh kind of they they'd found an acquirer, it wasn't as a good outcome as they'd wanted, but they found an acquirer for the business. And so the conversation we were having was do you want to found again?

I'd love to, you know, happy to back you as a founder because I think you're an amazing founder. Or I really enjoyed working with you as as a partner in the investing work, would you ever want to cross over?

And so we wound up um working together to create an accelerator program for Amazon with Tech stars called the Alexa accelerator that he ran for three years.

He joined me as a venture partner for fund three and then has been my full investing partner for funds four and five.

So not only was it a really interesting journey as an as an investor, but I got an even more valuable thing out of it for for me and for our work, which is which is a really complimentary partner in the work of supporting entrepreneurs here in Seattle.

Host: Talk a little bit more about, you know, what with Tech stars. I think you were running Tech stars Seattle uh at some point for a couple of years uh because this Tech stars is interesting because there are other similar kind of accelerators.

Uh there's 500 startups, obviously there's YC which everyone knows across the world. Uh how do you see Tech stars particularly different? What what does it do better than let's say, you know, 500 startups or YC?

Guest: Yeah, no, great, great question and I'll give you sort of the history which is when we were starting founders co-op, which is in 2008, YC was just getting started and and we you know, we had this same idea of a community of founders.

So we were really inspired by what by what YC was doing.

Um, and and even, you know, kind of you know, candidly kind of borrowed some of their best ideas in terms of, you know, we still have on our site an application form which anybody can walk in, you don't have to be referred into us as a firm.

If you want to tell us what you're doing in in a short text email, we'll we'll evaluate that and respond ourselves. So have always been inspired by that that very open door transparency model of investing that YC I think really pioneered.

But the company that I co-founded here in Seattle, one of our investors and board members was a guy named Brad Feld, who at the time was at Mobius VC or now Softbank, but he had left to to start his own firm Foundry Group in Boulder and had been a co-founder and original investor in Tech stars with David Cohen.

So we were aware of the model of of accelerators um from early days from YC and then when Brad and David started Tech stars and and they were explicitly sort of everywhere but the Bay Area, right?

So they they were starting in Boulder, which is an obvious geography. Seattle has always been kind of a, you know, as I mentioned more of a company town than a startup town.

But we just thought it would be a really powerful accelerant to the community to to have a Tech stars program in Seattle.

So we basically said, hey, you guys are whenever you're ready to expand outside of Boulder, we would love to to run the program here.

So the their first expansion city was Boston, we were the next and then New York was the was the fourth and for a while they were sort of seasonal where Boulder was summer, Seattle was fall, New York was winter and Boston was spring if I remember correctly.

All that's of course gone gone by the wayside now. But we we um the model was very different then too, which is, you know, Tech stars has become a global business with its own fund and capital formation.

In the beginning, Tech stars was uh a community, a shared community and a brand and a set of values, but the fund for Tech stars was actually raised locally. So all of the LPs for Tech stars were local.

We were the GPs of a fund and and it was another kind of way of thinking about bringing together a community of interest around high-performing entrepreneurship in Seattle. Um, again, that's that's evolved since then.

But to to us, you know, having having a fund was a useful tool, having an accelerator to us, if you think about entrepreneurship in a community where things are quite diffuse where there's pockets of excellence but but no one really it's not that well cross threaded.

A Tech stars is almost like an API or a fabric that says in a very legible way on an annual cadence, there's an application window, startups can apply. There's a program window in which the work will be done.

There's a way for mentors to engage programmatically, there's a way for investors to engage programmatically.

So it gave almost a substrate that allowed the entire community to come together around a cohort of high-performing entrepreneurs and get to know each other and and collaborate in the work of entrepreneurship.

So I think that's still true of Tech stars today and I think it's it it it allowed Seattle, I would say, it was a it was a contributor to Seattle becoming a a higher performing community around supporting entrepreneurs.

So I think hopefully that answers your question a little bit of a long answer but it was it was a journey.

Host: Yeah. Um, so you then started founders coop after Tech Seattle or.

Guest: Yeah so this is this is what's always confusing is that we started the fund first and the fund has always been the through line of the business.

Tech stars was in our view a companion project but for for lots of reasons I I can go into, a fund is a is a better business for the owners meaning for the GP than in running an accelerator.

And as an entrepreneur, as much as I love, you know, Brad and David and and the Tech stars community, it was always somebody else's company.

And I think, you know, just the way that my brain works like I I I I prefer to be master of my own destiny than to be part of somebody else's machine.

And so we we helped build the brand of Tech stars in the community here, but when it came time to choose, it was clear to me that the fund was and would continue to be sort of the center of my work.

Host: So uh, what was your thought process when starting the fund? You know, fund and how did sort of that thinking change um, you know, after, you know, maybe 200, 250 plus companies.

Guest: Yeah. So I think the the beginning as I mentioned was very is like very naive if you want to think of it that way.

Like you know, I I joke sometimes that I'm an accidental money manager because at some level if you're running up an investment fund, that's that's your job.

You you, you know, accumulate capital from investors, you make a set of commitments about the work you're going to do and then you then you produce return for those investors and and if you're successful, you you keep that cycle going.

I don't think I had really any appreciation for that side of the work at the beginning.

For me it was very much focused on the founders and the work of supporting founders and having been an operator, really being in the in the business of of sitting side by side with founders from the earliest days.

And I think that first fund was very experimental in that sense which, you know, we we did sort of quasi incubation work where we we were working with founders before they even had. In fact, Aviel's company began life as untitled startup.

They didn't even know what they were going to do at the beginning. So very, very hands on work.

I think over the course of that first fund, I got clearer about what it means to be a professional investor, meaning both the fiduciary responsibility and and the the motion of the business as a as a business as opposed to just getting in there and doing some work.

And it was really from fund two forward that I that I started to to think more clearly about, you know, what is the role of our fund in the context of the market? What is our competitive set?

How do we fit into the landscape of venture capital more more broadly?

So again, the the journey from I just see a problem and I want to solve the problem, which is a very entrepreneurial thing to to developing a more mature kind of view, holistic view of what role does my entity play in in the in the broader competitive set in which we're playing?

And how do what is our edge as as a fund and how do we how do we prosecute that edge in a way that creates advantage and defensibility for the fund over time, much in the same way that you're building, you know, we help people build businesses of their own.

We we have a business that we need to think about how we nurture and and develop over time as well.

So lots of lots of detail I could go into, but I think it was that going from naive to a more mature understanding of what is the role of a venture capitalist in the context not only of a community but of the industry, has been a real journey for for me.

Host: I think I was I was reading your uh post about, I think it was on the occasion of when Remitly went uh public.

I think you wrote a post uh and I think you referred to uh Remitly's founding team sort of uh defining how you pick, you know, uh how you pick your next companies.

Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the how how did it, you know, picking or investing in Remitly define how did you, how you pick, you know, your next companies?

Guest: Yeah, I know and I think that's it's a great way of sort of getting at becoming an investor. It's not like it's it's a learned skill, right? It's not something that I think people are necessarily good or bad at from from the inception.

A lot of it is just building the muscle of you have a lot of experiences with lots of different kinds of companies, lots of different kinds of founders and you develop not only a sense of what you believe, like what's the kind of founder or kind of opportunity that I I can deeply get behind, but also pattern recognition around what kinds of people tend to produce success and what is that success based on.

And I think for me the Remitly experience is is just it's it's a it's a great highly visible example of which I have lots of other examples that I could share.

And it's reinforcing of the of the brand and philosophy that we have as a fund, which is it it really has success as an entrepreneur has much less to do with the what, meaning what problem you choose to solve and much more to do with the who and the how, which is what what are the unique values and characteristics and capacities of the founding founding team, not just the founder as an individual but the founding team with complimentary skills and values and skill sets.

And what is their, what habits do they do they do they develop on the way to building a business that allow them to continue to adapt and learn and succeed in the face of adversity?

Because it's really again, there's you know, up into the right is is a is a is a fantasy that doesn't exist in real life. I I've never seen an entrepreneurial journey that didn't have lots of drama and twists and turns and setbacks.

And it's the it's the mindset and temperament of the founders, their resiliency on the journey and their ability ultimately because no even the founders can't do all the work.

Their ability to to assemble a team of people that share their values and their commitment to an outcome through lots and lots of adversity.

That that kernel of founder values and capacity, the tenacity and persistence and the leadership ability to build a team and navigate an entire team through through adversity and difficulty is really what we're solving for first and foremost as investors.

We we will follow founders into lots of different domains that we don't know anything about if we believe in the people and their capacity to do that thing.

And and for us so so Matt um the original founding CEO and still the still the CEO of Remitly was referred to us by another investor.

He he had, you know, this is all kind of out out in the world, I'm sort of retelling his story, but he had um experienced as as a leader of Barkley's Bank's business in Kenya, what it what it was like on the receive end of the remittance business, how important remittances were and how broken that experience was for the customer on the other end.

And because mobile technology mobile phones had just, you know, coming into the ascendance, his and Josh's original idea was why isn't there a better solution end to end send to receive solution that leverages the power of of mobile phones that would just be just coming up.

In fact, the company's original name was Beamit Mobile, um, which Remitly is was a brand that came later and it was this idea of, you know, beaming money from one phone to another. that was the kind of the the kernel of the idea.

And you know, lots of twists and turns in the in the end mobile phones wound up not being as important as we thought they would be on the receive side.

There I could I could go chapter and verse about all the challenges and difficulties and and reimaginations we had we had to do what the founders had to do and I was just early on.

But it it was the the quality of the founding team Match and Josh and their resilience and ability that that that is the sort of the beacon for me, not the business itself or the software or the technology or anything else.

Host: Um, just uh going back to what you said when you um were going to work for Patagonia, uh you said the internet, you know, coming the coming of internet was very clear.

Um, and if you combine the same logic with, you know, what is happening with uh Web 3, a lot of people, you know, tend to look at Web 3 as the next thing and it also intersects with what Remitly does, right?

Um, you know, in payments and, you know, uh cross-country cross-border payments. Um, on remittances and it is, you know, sort of like the number one use case you get pitched as, you know, a Web 3 use case.

Um, so combining those two things, do you think um, do you see Web 3 as as important as the hype? Uh how much how much do you see that there's a skills and since you worked with you have you're probably one of the best person to ask this question.

Um, you know, uh can cross border payments actually work with Web 3?

Guest: Yeah. No, I I think it's it's a great question and I will say up front, I I don't think I have answers to that question, but I have but I have opinions that I'm happy to share.

Um, I will say that that my clarity and conviction around the importance of the internet and the in the middle 90s was much stronger um than it is about any other technology before or since.

And and one of the things that I've noticed about the venture capital industry or the tech industry broadly is that there's there there tend to be waves of enthusiasm around technologies, some of which have proven to be deeply important and some of which have not.

You one example, you know, a few maybe five or seven years ago was was drones.

Everyone was sure that drones and UAVs were going to be big deal and, you know, huge wave of enthusiasm and investment and I think we have yet to see other than in a military context that that um enthusiasm being merited in terms of commercial outcomes.

So you develop a certain skepticism and investor about the new new thing um because I would say in some cases it's absolutely foundationally true and the internet was and is that, cloud infrastructure, the shift to the cloud absolutely is one of those things.

You know, is Web 3 one of those things? I frankly, I'm skeptical. I have yet to see evidence that it that it matters in the way that it's enthusiastically that it does, but, you know, the the future future will tell us.

I don't think I'm I'm right or wrong about that.

One thing that I will say about based on my experience with Remitly is I gotten a a much stronger appreciation for the the values and the reasoning behind regulatory frameworks around cross border payments.

And I think there are both national interests around um fiat currencies and the ability to control your own destiny as as an issuer of currency.

And then there are all kinds of, I think well-founded regulatory limits on cross border transfers having to do with criminal activity, whether it's, you know, drugs or child trafficking or or you know, organized crime, you name it.

So I I actually think that the the both the government's interest in its own currency and the government cross border interest in in maintaining a regulatory framework around how money moves across borders is is well-founded and and based on common interest, based on the social good.

So, in many cases what I see in the Web 3 environment is it's less, I mean certainly there's interesting technology at work around distributed um permissionless activity.

It feels to me more like a um almost a religious or political agenda than it does a technological agenda, which is there is a desire and a certain kind of segment of the of the society for, you know, freedom from from government, right?

So a anarcho libertarian mindset that, you know, we shouldn't have to to comply by anybody's rules and it should all be self-organizing and democratic and you know, we're going to go our own way.

I actually think that that is wrong, that that leads to bad societal outcomes. So not only am I skeptical of the technological merits of of Web 3 as as a the new thing as the foundational technology of the internet going forward.

I'm also frankly skeptical of of the rationale for why it needs to exist, which is to me the internet, despite its challenges around social media and other things, has brought lots of material benefits to to the world in terms of, you know, communications and connectedness and efficiency of business and all kinds of things.

I don't share the values of the Web 3 community in in removing the power of the state to control its own currency and and to control negative behaviors, negative externalities of of society both within and across across borders.

So you know, we'll see how that all plays out. Um, many many people I know disagree with me deeply about all of that, but based on my experience and my journey with with particularly with regulated money transmission across borders.

I I would be disappointed frankly if if the um vision of Web 3 comes through because I think it would lead to many more negative than positive outcomes.

Host: Uh, one, I mean, uh the one point of view that is often missed uh in this whole, you know, currency argument or like transfers argument internationally and I've done both B to C and B to B and I've done it for like 10 years now.

And it's it's actually right now happens with one click. I don't see why people keep saying that, you know, it takes a lot of time, you know, um, it only takes maybe, you know, 30 minutes to set up for your first time.

But after you set up and you're making a legitimate transaction, it actually takes one click. Um, I don't understand the exact reason from where, you know, the Web 3 community comes up with this idea that it takes a long time and it's tedious process.

Like if you use send money or uh which which got acquired by PayPal or, you know, remitly or any of these services like it's it's literally one click, it shows up in your Indian or, you know, whichever bank account within four hours, less than four hours and it's instantaneous after a couple of transactions.

So I I tend to not see a technological problem at all there.

Guest: No. No I if if if to be fair, I think the the two aspects of it that I think people zero in on. One is so if you're moving money, you know, across borders there there's a whole framework that's called KYC, know your customer.

And and obviously requires the disclosure of a lot of information PII about yourself so that so that we, you know, they can verify that you're not a criminal, you're not on a terrorist watch list.

Like there there are frameworks in place and the reason why KYC is done is to check against a lot of bad actors so that so that you limit the ability for bad actors to move money across borders.

That's and that's there's friction and privacy and basicness in there and I get I get that people don't like that.

And then the other one is if you're moving from one currency to another, there's always some some losses in terms of current like transferring from one currency to another inevitably involves a middle man and there's a rake uh or or a or a frictional loss or dead weight loss if you want to you want to look at it that way.

So the idea of a global currency that's the same in every geography, you, you know, where you don't have to disclose yourself and it's all anonymous.

You get rid of the privacy stuff and you get rid of the the actual there is legitimately cost to moving translating between currencies. Those are real objections, to me the the cost of those is is worth the pain, but everyone's opinion is different.

Host: Yeah. Uh, so then how do you equate with this because when I talk to a lot of VCs or like listen to a lot of VCs talk about how one of the core reasons that is given for you know, web 3 a category that we have to be in uh is a lot of young talented people moving there. Like how do you see that particular point? Like is that technology where young people move and nothing came out of it.

Guest: I mean, I think I think as I mentioned, there there are every couple of years. I mean, you know, pick another one, VRAR, right?

Like there has been even machine learning or artificial intelligence like there have been false starts in a number of different segments of innovation where for a while everybody was sure that VRAR was the next big thing. a lots of money went into it and I think, you know, for a bunch of reasons and and there's still, you know, meta is still deeply committed, a lot of people are deeply committed.

It may just be that the technology was harder than everybody understood and it's going to take more effort. I um in so let's zoom out a little bit.

The last 10 or 12 years have been uh one of the kind of again, you know, one of the global asset one of the big global asset bubbles of of our of our time.

Uh and it and it was driven by uh, you know, a couple of financial crisis that caused central banks in general to pursue a zero interest rate policy and to pump up the the balance sheet. Basically flood the economy with with um liquidity.

So whenever that happens, resources get scared. So we've seen it in the supply chain and the crunch and we've seen it in the labor crunch. So the perception is it's really hard to find engineers and I have to do the thing that they want to work on.

I think we're in the middle of a bit of an unwinding of that asset bubble and I think the idea that I have to I have to be pursuing the thing that the talent wants to work on. That's always that's always true.

Like the most talented engineers are going to flow towards the most interesting ideas.

Um, I think in general the the constraints around labor, much like the constraints around other other resources are going to fade as that as they um as federal, you know, as as the global federal balance sheets get paired back over the next five five plus years.

So the idea that you have to be doing the thing that talent wants to do, I think talent's going the job market's going to soften, people will be more interested in having just a job with a great company with good values that that that is interested in their contributions and the idea that only the best people are working on Web 3, I suspect some of the some of the heat will come out of that idea.

But I think you're right. Like in in general technologists want to work on the coolest, shiniest, sexiest new thing and that changes

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