Transcript: DocuSign Founder on Building $16B Company | Court Lorenzini

Host: My guest today is the co-founder of DocuSign, repeat entrepreneur, and is now creating a new company called Founder Nexus to help the next generation of founders.

We'll talk about, you know, his experience as an entrepreneur, founder, and why he's starting his new company, Founder Nexus. And most importantly, you know, what was the exit like from DocuSign?

Um, so to listen to the continue to listen to this, please subscribe to Start a Project wherever you're listening to the podcast. Um, with that, good, welcome to the Start a Project.

Guest: Hey, thanks for having me, Nagaraj. It's great to be here and I'm looking forward to the interview.

Host: Uh, where are you, where are you joining us from today?

Guest: I'm in Seattle, Washington.

Host: Um, so, I mean, you have started, uh, four, five, six companies. I've lost count on your LinkedIn profile. Um, can you give a little bit of background, you know, I know DocuSign is your, you know, big company that everyone knows.

I was just checking out what is the market cap of DocuSign and it's $16 billion today. Um, and everyone will know about DocuSign, but you've done a couple of companies before and some companies after.

Uh, just give us a little bit of background of your career till now.

Guest: Certainly. So, I started my career as an engineer, so my undergraduate degree was an engineering, and I did three postgraduate master's programs in different forms of engineering. But I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

So, for me, that was just a pathway to getting to where I am now. And I worked early career for a semiconductor equipment company, ran a division for them in Europe, and then went to work for Cisco in the early days at when Cisco was on a rocket ship.

It when during the years when Cisco was considered the fastest growing company ever, uh, which was a fantastic place to learn leadership.

Host: I had CEO of Baffle was on his fourth company, who was also at the same time on your on at Cisco because Cisco acquired his company.

Guest: Yeah. So you're my second guest in the last five guests who's been the Cisco rocket ship.

Guest: Well, Cisco, and Cisco fostered a lot of successful people. A lot of people came out of Cisco because it was such a great place to learn.

Um, I moved to the Northwest, which is where I reside now, in 1996 and started my first company at the dawn of the internet era, before there was e-commerce.

And I built one of the very first e-commerce engines back then, and ended up selling that company.

I tried my hand as a venture capitalist for a little bit, but realized that I really enjoyed building companies more than I liked investing in them at that time.

So, DocuSign was my second company and I co-founded it with a friend of mine who had worked for me in my first company.

And I ran that as the founding CEO until 2008, and then left because really my passion, Nagaraj, is the first beginning phases of a company.

Like, I love what I call napkin to product market fit phase of development, where every decision is life or death, everything is consequential.

There's lots of twists and turns and you have to remain quite nimble to survive, and that's my favorite part of growing a business.

So, in my career, I have structured it so that by the time I get to about year five in the company's evolution and there's some product market fit signal coming through, I will tactically exit and go start another one from scratch.

Host: So I left out DocuSign at 08.

Host: Uh, what was the original thesis of the DocuSign when you guys first starting about?

Guest: I'm sorry, say again?

Host: When you were starting DocuSign, what was the original thought or like, did it evolve? And talk to me about a little bit of like how that formation happened.

Guest: Absolutely. So, my co-founder, Tom Gonser, was the one with the idea. So, he actually came to me, um, he had left my first company, gone and started his own, and was in the process of, uh, in his, in his company, selling some assets from a prior venture that his company had acquired after it had failed called, um, what was it called?

Host: Something with Net.

Guest: DocuTouch was it was the Seattle company that had, and what he had at the time, and he called me and said, "Hey, I think we should go build a company around the IP that my company acquired and is now trying to get rid of." And what was in that package of IP from DocuTouch were two things of value.

Number one, the name DocuSign. They had trademarked that name. And number two, was a an issued patent for signing documents via the internet. And I thought that was really interesting.

There were other things in that IP stack, that was those were the only two things I thought were valuable. And so we extracted that. I actually bought the IP from his company and that's the basis around which we founded DocuSign.

He left and I built it and we built it together. It was amazing.

Host: Was it obvious from day one that this is going to be big or like, did you see the sign of like product market fit immediately or like, was it a slow grind?

Guest: It was a really slow grind. It was a really slow grind. I mean, I I remember telling the very first venture investor, who's Ignition Partners here in Seattle, that it was going to be a winner take most proposition.

And they kind of scratched their head and said, "What does that mean?" And I said, "Well, someday in the future, not determined, there will be a one market leader who has about 70% of the worldwide market share of electronic signing.

They will probably be a second player that has about 20% and a bunch of other copycats that'll be falling to that last 10%." So, if you roll the camera forward to today, DocuSign owns about 76% of the worldwide market.

Adobe has about 12 and everybody else exists in that last, you know, 10 to 12%. So, pretty much came true exactly as I predicted it, you know, 16, 17 years ago. Uh or no, sorry, 20. 20 Yeah, 20 plus years ago. Yeah, it's been a long time.

Uh, 21 years ago. So, it was not obvious. It was a grind. Um, there was a lot of creativity, shall I say, in trying to figure out how to get product market fit with that offering, and it took years.

And even from then, it from the founding in '03, we didn't go public until 2018. So, it was 15 years to get to a public offering.

Host: 21 years.

Host: Uh, who who were the first customers that sort of committed to using DocuSign?

Guest: Well, I I think the better, the more interesting question wasn't the first customers, it was the most impactful customers.

So, what were the relationships that really took it from, "Oh, this is kind of cool and interesting" to, "This is going to be amazing." Uh, the first one was Microsoft. And this was actually an interesting sidebar story.

So, we were a very early adopter of .NET technology in the early 2000s. And it turned out that at Microsoft's executive briefing center, they the .NET team was presenting to the executives of the rest of the company.

And without telling us, they actually used DocuSign as their example of a company using .NET on a cutting edge way, in a really unique, fascinating, value-derived manner. And in the audience that day was the chief legal council for Microsoft.

And from that meeting, I got an inbound phone call from him saying, "Hey, I was just at the EBC. I heard this pitch. I heard this thing is really cool. We should be using that." And that's how we landed Microsoft.

It was not even me calling them, it was them calling me. It was quite amazing. Uh, and because it was from the legal team, it became sort of blessed inside the organization from day one.

So, it was really not a challenge that I was having selling it within the context of Microsoft. So, that was the first big singular customer and I I will also mention here that at that moment in history, Microsoft was the biggest company in the world.

Certainly the most influential. And so that really helped a lot of other smaller companies, even if they were big themselves, get comfortable, right?

Because if they understood that Microsoft was willing to use it in their legal and business operations, they it sort of was the the seal that I needed, the seal of approval at the corporate level.

So, that was probably the most impactful first early customer. And then the next one, by far, was the National Association of Realtors.

And the NAR, as they refer to themselves, had a piece of software that they built and was being used by 3 million nationwide realtors to create residential purchase and sale agreements for homes.

And they liked what we had and they had no way to close documents. So, they agreed to embed our tool, in this case, the signing operation, inside their piece of software.

So, it was a white label embedding deal, but it made meant that every realtor in the country immediately had an opportunity to send their documents to home buyers via DocuSign to get signed.

And so that was a huge deal because not only did it give us the volume, but it gave us exposure to an incredible group of end users.

Because most people that were buying homes obviously have jobs somewhere and they have a day job where being able to sign things electronically would be fascinating. And so we got a tremendous amount of lift from doing that deal.

Host: I mean, once you convince Microsoft to be your customer, I think that becomes an easy sale to sell to other organizations, right?

I mean, um, I think it's also a sign that when you have customers inbound versus you going to reach the customers outbound, that tells that you're really doing something new, unique, that the market really needs and you're solving a real problem, right?

It's sort of like a proof point when you have a lot of inbound versus you are trying to do outbound and trying to sell that that tells you that something is working or what you're solving is really worth it.

Um, going back to your thought about, you know, one player will have 70%.

In one sense, you're right, but there's also a sense in the market, um, you know, primarily on Twitter, when I see when DocuSign is, you know, this gigantic company and people sort of, um, sometimes facetiously say, why is DocuSign still dominating as one why is one player dominating?

It's a seemingly simple software, right? Why is this one player still doing this one unique task, whereas you see competition in um, you know, other areas. Like, for example, just documents, you know, Adobe is there, Google Docs are there.

You know, the Box Box, the company which does this is there, you know, OneDrive is there. There's so many other, you know, companies around document management. But why does DocuSign still dominate 70% of the market?

Like, what is the core reason do you think?

Guest: I would tell you that there are two core reasons. The first one is that humans prefer consistency.

Meaning, if there was a whole different a whole satellite array of signing methodologies that you and I were being thrust upon us on a daily basis to sign things, it would get confusing, it would be hard to find, you know, those documents then get stored in the in the platform that issued them.

So it's hard to it would be hard to find your documents. So from a business perspective, that's why I project predicted the 70% domination. Both human characteristics we're going to Just trust factor, right?

Like, if I see a link from DocuSign, I know that once I'm exposed to it, I trust the DocuSign link versus, you know, some other sign, like X sign or I don't know, whatever sign that company's people are naming things, right?

Like, once I know DocuSign, okay, that is a trustable link and next time I'm trying to send a document, I'm going to use DocuSign.

Guest: Yeah.

But the other main reason and the reason I would say that it remains dominant from a business perspective is that early on we recognized that one of the main elements that needed to be resolved wasn't the actual signature, it was actually the flow of data between the universe of document creation tools that exist sort of upstream of us, and the universe of document implementation and execution tools that exist downstream of us.

So, the way I visually described it as I said there was like two giant land masses separated by a huge crevasse.

And upstream you have Word and Adobe Acrobat and you have all these special purpose platforms that create documents, that include a lot of relevant data. So, the signing is part of that execution model.

And then across that crevasse, um, you have a whole different group of players, big software companies, Dynamics, SAP, back office things that Salesforce, things that that need data for or need that sales-derived data to produce the product, ship the product, support the product, update the product, bill against the product.

Um, so you have all these back office systems that need the same data that the upstream systems created.

So, what we started investing in very early was a set of very robust APIs that could take the data that was put into the document by those upstream systems, and seamlessly move it to any downstream system.

So, we built over years and years and years and expertise and data translation from platform to platform via APIs, such that we now have such a large constellation of those tools that we really cannot be replaced by a third party.

Because any company that would come in and try and replace us would have to have all of the same tools that that particular customer needed, and they would have to work perfectly on day one. Were And so most enterprises will not take that risk.

That's too big a risk for them. Um, so we find that that is perhaps the biggest moat we were able to create and we've really leaned in on that.

That has been a, you know, that's been a really long haul for us in terms of differentiated advantage and it continues to bear fruit to this day.

Host: So, when you left DocuSign, did you, uh, sell your equity or did you keep your equity? Or did you just, you know, kept all your equity and move on to your next project?

Guest: The last one. I kept it all, moved on, started several more companies, and, uh, by the time the company went public, you know, 15 or seven, eight years later, I still had all my equity.

Host: Um, I was I I think I mentioned in our last conversation about Martin, I think, uh, who runs Insight so VC. And I was talking to him a while back and he mentioned that he was one of the investors in DocuSign.

Um, and he said he was held holding his shares since the IPO, so he even he never sold his shares. Um, and he was telling me some ridiculous multiple on his investment.

I'm curious what was your multiple if you are willing to share, like, how did that multiple look like?

Guest: Oh, well that's funny. I've I've never well, imagine that I got, let's just we can the the shares were founder shares, so they were basically fractions of a penny and they got to over $300 a share. So it's like, I don't know, I guess.

It was a very healthy return, let's just say. There it's no longer at 300 tonight, but, you know, you sell on the way up and so, you know, my but my I we did fine.

Host: Yeah.

Host: Um, so, you knew that DocuSign was, you know, relatively successful, like after five years, it was running well. Uh, and then you still went on to find other companies, like, um, do you think you're an ambitious person?

Guest: I think people would describe me that way. I'm I'm certainly an optimist and I love the thrill of getting something off the ground.

Host: So, uh, once you're successful, if you're doing repeatedly, that means you're really into it. That that's the difference between like someone who's just doing it for the sake of, uh, you know, I need to get that exit, but what will you do after you get the exit? Then you'll still do the same thing. That means you're in it for in it because you love the game of doing it, right?

Guest: Yeah.

Host: Um, so I mean, you've done, uh, so post DocuSign, what was your career like? You went on to find another company. Um, how did that pan out?

Guest: So, you know, this the third one was a renewable energy company, which I was trying to take a swing at a business model that did not require a lot of venture capital. Actually didn't require any venture capital.

It was a little bit a few hundred thousand dollars of angel money and that was it. And it was intended to be a cash flow business, which it did turn out to be.

So, that one worked out in that I was able to get, uh, start returning cash flow to my investors during the course of that business. And, uh, so, you know, there was a it wasn't, you know, I would never say that was a giant hit.

That was a reasonable set of experiences, but I would say, you know, it was okay. Um, it did return capital, but it wasn't returning it at a high multiple or anything. That was unfortunate.

Um, that one had a natural end point because it was a licensing business that that ran its course and that's sort of the way I designed it.

And then I started my fourth company, which is a consumer data acquisition company called Metabrite, and that one was my most spectacular failure by all measure.

That was a that was a rocket ship that was going 50% month over month growth on a multimillion dollar run rate, and between that and absolute catastrophic failure, took less than three months.

Host: What was why did it fail so drastically?

Guest: Yeah, that's that's a fascinating story. So, how do I, uh, to brief. So, the technology we were building was data extraction from checkout register receipts.

So, when you get the little slip of white paper out of a checkout register, it has all this cryptic writing on it, and we were able to build an OCR-based system that could read and translate that into real product data, okay?

We'd spent years and a lot of money building our solution and we were licensing it to other application providers to embed in their services and we were taking a fee for processing this data. Okay, that was the business model.

The biggest customer we had at the time was developing and delivering 90% of our revenue. Um, and they were growing like gangbusters, so doing super well.

One day, the founder of their company was at an event where sitting next to him at random was a young man who had just finished his master's program in Croatia.

And as it turned out, he and his buddies had written a program as a master student to read receipts using a cell phone. And this young man basically was willing to give his code to my customer effectively for free.

And so within a matter of weeks, uh without me knowing it, my customer tested his thing. He's like, "Hey, this works great. He's willing to give it to me for free.

Metabrite's charging me a fortune." So, he called me up one day and said, "You're out, he's in, bye." And when you have your 90% revenue customer walk away with no warning, you don't have a way to survive that.

There is I I tried, I I, you know, went to Croatia to try and convince the buyer or the seller of that technology to sell to me, couldn't get a deal done.

And so I called my investors and got my employees together and I said, "There's no way for us to recover from this. We have to shut it down." So, that's how it happened. It was it was very gut-wrenching.

Host: But but you run it for seven years, right?

Guest: Uh, Metabrite wasn't that long. Metabrite was only four years. Uh 2014 to 2018.

Host: Got it. Um, so you started, I mean, now four, five companies. How do you think a when an opportunity comes, what is the sense? Like, how do you evaluate it? Like, how do you look for value? Is this valuable worth my time? How do you look at that?

Guest: Well, I'm I'm no longer looking to start an I mean, I'm starting another venture right now, uh Founder Nexus and we'll talk about that perhaps, but I'm not looking to start another tech company per se. So, that's

Host: Uh, let me rephrase it. Like, when you were looking at the previous ideas, like, how were you looking at in the perspective of, you know, for value for time or how do how are you evaluating the opportunity then?

Guest: So, I have a methodology that I really try and promote to early stage founders that I've used in each of my companies and it's a bit rigorous, but I think it makes sense.

And that is number one, as soon as you um, you you need to be able to validate your product by by testing the if somebody's going to pay you money for it. So, you don't don't build anything before you can get somebody to pay you for it.

Don't even build a prototype. Try and get them to pay you for something just the concept of it. Put down a down payment, do something else.

But test the idea enough so that you can actually offer something to somebody that before you even build it, they're willing to pay for it.

So, that's a that's hard to do and there's a whole methodology behind that that that I I could go into, but it it's takes a while to unpack that.

And then once you have something that actually has somebody willing to pay for it, the second step and this is the one that most people miss is to try and actively kill it.

And by that I mean, I I have a methodology where I go back and I try and find all of the founders of the companies that had preceded me in that in the solution space that I'm trying to enter, reaching out to them and saying, "Hey, can I get a few minutes of your time to talk about what happened to your company when it was going through this cycle?

And why did yours fail?" And I would learn through that exchange all of the fatal flaws, is what I call them, the the foundational flaws that I needed to be aware of, and it was incredibly it is an incredibly eye-opening process. I'll say that.

And you have to if you are diligent at not only uncovering all the fatal flaws, but then resolving them.

Figuring out a way that your idea, your approach, your model can can or does inherently solve all the failure modes of your predecessors, those two things together mean that you probably are on the right path.

And then it's worth leaving your job or starting a thing or incorporating a thing. But I tend to be pretty rigorous about both of those things before I jump into something new.

Host: That's actually really smart and often people when they either ask me to review their pitch tech or you know, suggest their idea is a novel idea, I often see that they haven't looked upon and searched for, you know, common other related businesses or someone who's already done it and tried and failed it and didn't really understand.

I mean, it's a Google search away today. It used to be much harder before, I assume. Uh, but you can clearly like do some research and figure out if this idea has been done or not.

And you'd think like all founders would do that, at least a basic research on, you know, what competition exists, but it it it isn't. Uh, only a few set of founders actually do that.

Um, and I think the way you put it, I I try to actually kill it, I I think is an interesting way to look at it as well. Um, so let's talk about Founder Nexus.

Uh, so you said you're starting, uh, I guess this is not a venture scale company that you're trying to do. You're not raising outside money. Uh, it's sort of like a different approach.

Uh, talk to me a little bit about what is Founder Nexus and why do you want to do it?

Guest: So, Founder Nexus is really my thank you note to the venture capital industry, basically, as a way of saying, I don't I'm not looking to use it as a venture to get myself or anybody else rich.

But I am trying to use it as a vehicle to help founders on what is otherwise a very difficult, lonely journey that is almost statistically destined to fail.

You know, like, you know, just the the odds of failure for a venture scale founder are 90, over 90%.

And I look at those people and myself included as as a multi-time venture scale founder as a very valuable global resource that basically is not being optimized, right? If we're letting that resource fail so frequently, couldn't we do a better job?

And so I've set out to try and figure out how to assist that process in a way that would raise the odds of success for venture scale founders. And so Founder Nexus is the basis of that, right?

It is a way for founders with experience to get together on a regular basis and be both systemically and programmatically motivated to help each other by sharing experiences and not advice.

So, what I do is I gather these venture scale founders, uh, I put them in a room, I break them into subgroups and I allow them to share, I create opportunities for them to actively share their experiences with one another so that they can level up their game.

Because the way I look at this Nagaraj is that success in building a venture scale business is a series of variables that are, you know, variable one, variable two, variable three, all multiplied together to variable N equals success.

And if you think of it like a math problem like that, two things are true. Number one, if you get a single variable completely wrong, meaning zero out of 100% achievement of that variable, the entire equation fails.

Single variable can tank the entire organization and that is true of start.

The other thing that's true is that if you are only achieving at any one of those variables or any number of those variables 10, 20, 30% of its potential impact value, if you think of it holistically, then the trend of that curve is actually curving tending downward over time, because you're multiplying by 10%, 20%, 30% in that variable, and if you get a few of those, the odds that it's going to go up to up are diminishing, right?

You're going to ultimately flatline or go down.

So, how do we make it so that founders can help each other so that at every decision point throughout their entire journey, no matter where they are on that journey, they have the ability to share experiences and level up their own decision-making capabilities so that every decision is made at 50% or above of its potential value to that organization, just by gathering information.

And and by if I can make that easy and fluid and do it on a global scale, which is what Founder Nexus is doing, that will inevitably raise the odds of success for all of the participants.

Host: So, I mean, uh, I've seen this type of businesses. Uh, I don't know if you've heard of Hampton. Uh, there's this company, um, uh, I forgot his name, but Sam, something. Uh, he's the host of My First Million. Uh, he has Hampton.

Um, I know a company in India called Offline, uh, which is sort of uh similar to Hampton, but I think it's more similar to Founder Nexus now that I think about it. It's also for venture funded.

I don't know if they're restricted to venture funded, but it's mostly founder community. Um, how do you differentiate, uh, is this going to be a location specific differentiation? Um, does every venture founder get access to this community?

Uh, how do you make sure because communities are all about like, um, how do you curate the right community, right? Because if you keep it too open, then, you know, the value dilutes.

If you keep too closed, then there's not much, you know, new information flowing in. So, you have to have right curation.

So, how are you thinking about because at the core, it is like you're creating a community of individuals who can help each other and also take help from the community.

Guest: So, number one, curation is key. So, I I person I filter out anybody that's never built a company before. Like, if this so, if they haven't tried before, automatically not included, not not allowed to participate.

Host: So, this has to be their second venture company or second company which

Guest: It might be their first one, but they have to be already well on their way. In other words, they might have already like it's first one, but they've already raised their first venture round or their first outside capital, etc.

So, what I'm looking for specifically is valuable lived experiences, right? So, if you are looking to become a founder, this is not mine is not the group for you. There are other places to go, right?

You need to you need to be running a business now or have tried once and maybe succeeded or failed, I don't really care. But the idea is you're bringing lived experience to the group.

Which means that I'm also filtering out investors, advisors, um, service providers, all the peripheral people who are very important to the venture ecosystem, but their experience is different.

And by doing that, every time we hold an event, everybody knows that the room is pure, meaning everyone sitting next to them is another venture scale founder that's been there and done that before, okay? So, what does that do?

It means that when I create these moments where they start to interact and talk to each other, there's an immediate sense of trust.

You there's an immediate sense of vulnerability because you're willing to share both what you did right and what you did what when they were negative outcomes. And the learning is immediate. I mean, it's just the magic is extraordinary in that moment.

And then I borrowed a little bit out of the book of the YPO's, EO's, Hamptons, etc., where they build forums, right?

So, the concept of a forum is a small group that builds trust over time and can therefore become sort of a a coaching group for you personally.

The challenge with that model that I found having been part of all of those organizations or very many of them was that after about 18 to 24 months with your forum group, it ceases you've you've extracted all of the business wisdom from that group and it becomes a wonderful social, friendly, support life support system, right?

But it's no longer a business um resource for you because you've already gotten everything you can get from that group.

What we do at Founder Nexus is I've actually built a piece of of software that based on everybody's profile breaks them into small groups like forums, but those forums only last for 40 minutes each.

And then I break them up and I send them a message and saying, "Now you you've been assigned from group three to group seven, topic is changed, group members have changed, you you physically move to another space" and you get another 40-minute forum of experience founders talking about specific challenges they're facing and sharing experiences.

Okay? You get three of those per event. So, now every time you come to an event, you've done several things.

Number one, if you if you are facing challenges, you've heard anywhere from 12 to 20 new voices of lived experience that you can extract value from. Okay?

That's in and of itself amazing at leveling up your decision-making and ability to make a higher probability successful decision.

The other thing you're doing is you're grossly expanding your network of highly qualified people so that when you it's time for you to recruit your next participant in your C suite or you're wanting to recruit co-founders for your next new venture, you've met so many people and heard so many different interesting points of view that you're this is the group you're going to be seeking to find those cohorts from, right?

So, it's both a problem-solving venue as well as a recruiting venue, I think. And that's different than all of the other platforms that I've seen or heard out in out in the wild.

Host: And how how has the traction been? What's the size of Founder Nexus now? Uh is it limited? I know because you are in Seattle now in Seattle. Is it limited to Seattle or is it beyond Seattle as well?

Guest: So, we've we've held three events so far. We have about 150 people signed up after three events. And, uh, we've just opened it up to full membership, uh, today as a matter of fact, interesting that today was the day.

Um, and going forward, our event that's coming up next week on November 21st will be the first one where we simulcast it. It will be both a live event and an online event where we will allow non-Seattle participants to join for two purposes.

Number one, to expand the community and number two because my long-term objective is to make sure that there are chapters all over the world.

And that those chapters are then stitched together in a way that founders in one community can help founders in another community openly and are motivated to do so so that if you are living in a place that might not have a very dense founder community like we do here in Seattle, you can still get the support you need both in a timely and in a scope in a in a scale manner and get it from all over.

Uh and there is therein lies the secret. Is I'm trying to facilitate something that broadens the venture ecosystem to such a degree that it can that venture-backed companies can live and excel anywhere, physically.

They don't have to come to Seattle or San Francisco or San Diego or New York or London or Tokyo. Um, they can they can exist in all of the any market, basically.

Host: Um, slightly shifting from topics. Um, you're also LP in a lot of funds, uh, at least a couple of them that I know. Um, how how do you decide on which funds to invest? As that's a good question.

I'm I'm very active in the Seattle ecosystem, so I've again, in in in the sense of I want to be able to give back to the community that helped me. So, I'm very active in many of the funds here in Seattle. But I'm not restricted to Seattle.

I have funds that are in Europe, um, in Asia, um, in South America.

So, I'm I've definitely diversified around the world in terms of where we invest in funds and my wife and I collectively have probably invested in almost 20 venture funds around the world.

And in terms of answering your question, I would say it's always hard to decide who's going to be a good picker. And I say picker because venture funds if depending on where they exist in the pipeline, I tend to like either very early stage.

Well, for venture funds I like very early stage people. Like, that's where my passion is. It's where I think I know the most. And so I think I can assess the the people that are doing that job early stage uh, quite well.

But sometimes it's just a gut feeling. Like, hey, what is there a market or an area a way you're approaching your fund thesis that gives you a leg up.

Like, a number of the funds, uh, we've invested in are run by non-traditional uh venture capital, you know, venture capitalists. They they might be women, they might be, uh, people of color, different regions of the world.

Like, we are we want to be inclusive both in terms of our distribution of capital, but we also think that those investors know their market better than other people might and they're going to probably get outsized returns as a result.

Host: Not if you are in AI.

Host: And because you're investing in, you know,

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