20VC: Doug Leone, Bill Ackman, Bill Gurley and Orlando Bravo on "Does Price Matter"; When to Pay Up vs When to Stay Disciplined, The Biggest Lessons on Price Discipline from 8 of the World's Best Investors

Doug Leone is the Global Managing Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s most renowned and successful venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Google, Airbnb, Whatsapp, Stripe, Zoom and many more. Marcelo Claure is the Founder & CEO of Claure Group, a multi-billion-dollar global investment firm. He is the Executive Chairman and Managing Partner of Bicycle Capital, a $500M Latin America-focused growth equity fund, and was appointed Chairman in Latin America of SHEIN, the global #1 on-demand fashion company in the world. Claure was also the CEO of SoftBank Group International where he launched SoftBank’s $8B Latin America Funds, and had direct oversight for SoftBank’s operating companies. Geoff Lewis is a Founder and Managing Partner of Bedrock, one of the breakout and new venture firms of the last decade, famously in search of narrative violations. He serves or has served on the Board of Directors for companies including Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT), Nubank (NYSE: NU), Epirus, and Vercel. Bill Ackman is the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, L. P., an SEC-registered investment adviser founded in 2003. Pershing Square is a concentrated research-intensive fundamental value investor in long and occasionally short investments in the public markets. Martín Escobari is Co-President, Managing Director and Head of General Atlantic’s business in Latin America. Martín is Chairman of the firm’s Investment Committee and also serves on the Management and Portfolio Committees. Orlando Bravo is a Founder and Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo. He led Thoma Bravo’s early entry into software buyouts and built the firm into one of the top private equity firms in the world. In Today's Episode on Price Sensitivity We Discuss: Doug Leone: Why the attitude of "deploy, deploy, deploy will get so many in trouble"? Marcelo Claure: How to know when price matters and when it does not? Geoff Lewis: What is the right framework to assess price at an early stage? David Tisch: How does the importance of price change vis a vis company vs portfolio? Orlando Bravo: What have been Thoma Bravo's biggest lessons on price? Cyan Banister: Why does Cyan believe there will be a reckoning?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Price matters. Price really matters.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Everyone who says price doesn't matter hasn't been around long enough to have experienced that it does matter.

• 0:08Speaker 02

  The key is to determine in advance if it's a company where price matters.

• 0:13Speaker 03

  It is important to be price aware on a portfolio basis and I don't think on a deal by deal basis. Price is a determinant of making a decision.

• 0:22Harry Stebbings?

  One of the core questions in venture capital and investing is when should I as an investor pay up for an asset or company? When do I stretch and given the size of outcomes in venture, when does price matter and when does it not? Today, we sit down with the best investors in the world from Doug Leone, Bill Ackman, Orlando Bravo and more to unpack price. When it matters, when you should pay up and the right way to think about it as an investor today.

• 0:51Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:55Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:02Speaker 05

  You have now arrived at your destination. Let's change the question. In a world where the breadth of opportunities has never been as broad, if you look at the number of $1 billion market cap companies, or $10 billion, or $100 billion market cap companies, and you compare 2005 to now, it's a drastic number. It's a drastic increase. And furthermore, the largest increase in the number of largest companies in percentages. Okay, so you have to recognize that the opportunities have gotten broader. But at the same time, you have to recognize competition has gotten greater, and we face irrational type of competitors. And so it does become a pick 'em business, meaning deploy, deploy, deploy. It's a pick 'em business. The further you are to the funnel,

• 3:47Speaker 05

  seed investing in the top of the funnel, the broader you can be. At the end of the day, what is seed investing is a smart person in a generally interesting area. That's it. There's no need to overthink it, because they're going to zig and zag in ways that you can't predict. As you move down the funnel, venture, growth, pre-IPO, the checks get larger, the valuations get a lot higher, and the further down you come, the better you have to get at picking them. And if you go broad there, you're going to get stung. And so the further up you go, the looser you can be in your aperture, because that's part of top of funnel. That is the mandate of top of funnel. Further down the funnel you go, further down the river you go, the better you have to get a pick in them.

• 4:30Speaker 05

  And if you pick them right, you'll be rewarded at the end because of the large market caps being created. But if your attitude is invest, invest, invest, price don't matter, don't matter, don't matter. That is going to serve you well in a momentum driven economy and may serve you well for one fund cycle, maybe two fund cycles. As long as the momentum increases, you've got a public market adjustment after a 12 year bull market or soon to be a 14 year bull market. And prices adjust by 40%, you're in a world of hurt. So I think you've got to go during these times, the further down the funnel you go, the more attached to quality you have to be.

• 5:09Harry Stebbings?

  If we flip over now to Jeff Lewis, founder and managing partner at Bedrock. Jeff, how do you think about and reflect on your own framework for price?

• 5:17Speaker 06

  And so my framework on price is for point of entry for one's initial investment, less price sensitivity, I think is okay. I think if you're doing a smaller ticket, you're getting into a company, you can be a little bit less price sensitive. Where I think there's more potential to get tripped up is in this situation. When you're already high conviction, you already know the company and you really want to double down. Getting that pricing right is actually really important. But I will say that you're already paying 100x ARR multiples. The difference between 100x ARR multiple and 150x ARR multiple, the reality is those are both insane. And so you have to have extremely high conviction and to have done your diligence and really believe this set of entrepreneurs, this company is going to transcend.

• 6:00Speaker 06

  And if you feel that way, I would go for it at 300 versus 200. If you don't, I would do zero.

• 6:05Harry Stebbings?

  What if we hand over now to Marcelo Claw, co-founder at Bicycle Capital, formerly of SoftBank?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  The key is to determine in advance if it's a company where price matters or it doesn't. For some companies with an immense opportunity, think of Alibaba, think of Facebook, think of Google, think of Amazon, whatever. It was worth coming in at almost any price because the market was so large, because the size of the pie is so large. That it really doesn't matter what you're paying at the beginning. Other times when the market size is smaller or the opportunity is Smaller, then you have to be a lot more disciplined. So the most important part that we do is we make that distinction in advance. I'll give you an example. I passed on Nubank because of the price at the beginning when we started the fund. And it was the wrong decision because opportunity was huge. Now, I made that mistake. I said, oh, my God, it's too expensive, but I didn't realize that the size of the pie was so large that it really didn't matter.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Now, in other companies, we've done incredibly well because we've learned to make that distinction where price matters and where it doesn't.

• 7:03Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask where it doesn't matter? Do you still want to get involved? Because you can still make a lot of money where it does matter. You just know that it's capped at five to 10 billion, but you're still getting in at 500. You can still see a 10x on your 100 million cheque, which is a billion back. Do you want to engage where price does matter?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's 95% of our investments. There's a 5% where price doesn't matter. And those, you cannot afford to make a mistake. Perfect example of that is Cabac in Mexico. The size of the used car marketplace in Latin America, especially in Mexico, is gigantic. So therefore, at the beginning, it didn't matter. The price was 200, 400 million. It really didn't matter because the size was so large. And we have 50 companies like that that we've done that. There are others where the size of the market is not that big, so we have to be a lot more disciplined, and that's what we do.

• 7:47Harry Stebbings?

  Wouldn't it be great to hear Bill Gurley from Benchmark talk about how he thinks about price and reflects on his own price sensitivity today? Well, let's hand over to Bill Gurley.

• 7:56Speaker 07

  Well, part of why I was smiling so much when I said, okay, Boomer Harry, is like, we can sit here and complain or be worried about a reset or a bubble, and it has absolutely no impact on what's happening out there day to day. And the problem is, it's a highly distributed field of players. There are thousands and thousands of VCs and way more of that of entrepreneurs. And we don't get to decide. The market does that via supply and demand. And so you have to play the game on the field. I think I told you this on a previous call, but I had this amazing meeting with Howard Marks, where he asked me to explain the venture industry to him. And afterwards, he told me, well, that sucks. I said, what do you mean? What's wrong with it? He goes, you're gonna have resets all the time. There's no way to invest across the cycle.

• 8:41Speaker 07

  And I had seen supporting data out of Bridge, I believe, is one of the largest fund to funds where if you looked at like a 20 year window that included the dot com boom, if you took out 96 to 99, like you took out the majority of the return. And so I think you have to invest as a venture capitalist over the cycle, like over a 20 or 30 year period. And the biggest mistake you could possibly make is trying to call the top. And so unfortunately, I think you have a little, I call it the Thelma and Louise attitude, where you just push the gas pedal and run it to the end. Despite that, I fundamentally believe in conservatism and capital cost and all the things that you're talking about. I just don't know as a venture capitalist that you have an alternative. There

• 9:25Speaker 07

  were several firms in Silicon Valley that in the 96 timeframe said, this is all crazy. This is too expensive. And they pulled out and they missed the best three years in a 20 year window of return.

• 9:36Harry Stebbings?

  It was interesting, Keith, your boy actually said on a different podcast that the only firm to have retained price discipline, the only firm, was Benchmark. How do you feel about that?

• 9:44Speaker 07

  I think he's misinterpreting price discipline for stage discipline. So we have notably stayed focused on early stage investing, whereas most people have moved to multi-stage. I think that makes the impression look like that your price discipline, because you're not doing the billion dollar rounds that are in the series C and D. But when we're competing for a great series A deal with a great founder, we're paying market for sure.

• 10:09Speaker 08

  Bill mentioned the early stage point. The thing at Olive that guides us, which, you know, one of the things I learned at Benchmark is that ownership still matters a lot. One of the things I hear a lot of people talking about, which is, is mixed up with price discipline, is how much you own. And I still think because there are so few wires, the ownership really matters. So what we're doing is, even if we have to pay more, we're optimizing for ownership and we'll continue to do that. And then the second way I think about this, if I need to be the highest priced bidder on the company, on the founder, the CEO, I'm doing something wrong. If I'm forced to pay the highest price, it means I'm not doing my job well. I'm not building a good enough relationship with the founder. I'm not adding enough value prior to him taking my capital. And I'm certainly not accelerating the business into the next round. Whether, by the way,

• 10:51Speaker 08

  it's reputation. So the next round funders will pay a higher price, or just follow on and make sure there's capital there, or business development partners. And one thing I've been saying a lot recently, I prefer to optimize long term on reputation rather than optimizing on dollars. And I think that matters.

• 11:08Harry Stebbings?

  So from one legendary bill to another legendary bill, we move from Bill Gurley to Bill Ackman.

• 11:13Speaker 09

  So the way we think about it is we're willing to risk a certain amount of capital on any one investment. If you're investing in the world's most dominant music company, Universal Music, it has very little debt. It has a great market position. You can predict business with a very high degree of confidence and you're buying it at a fair price. You can assess what's the chance of our losing 25% of our investment over a several year holding period. And if the answer is very close to zero, which is our assessment, we can make an investment like that quite large. Let's say the most we could lose in our view on that, not just daily mark-to-market loss, but a permanent impairment. What would have to happen for us to be permanently impaired to lose 25% of our capital in that investment? Something pretty extraordinary. That kind of investment can be 25% of our assets because it's something where the risk

• 11:57Speaker 09

  of loss is very diminished by virtue of the capital structure of the company. Whereas you're buying an interest rate derivative. We bought, in effect, the way to think about it is we bought a call option that paid off when two-year interest rates went above 93 basis points. And we had about an 18-month term. And at the time, we bought that instrument, two-year rates were at 12 basis points. So it's a bit like buying a call option on a stock. The stock is 12 and the strike price of the call option is 93. It looks massively out of the money. And there's a fixed timeframe. So on something like that, the risk of loss is high because just to break even, the yield, if you will, has to go up 9X or something to get into the break-even territory. And so something like that, we make quite small. It was less than, it was about a point and a half of our, a little under 2% of our capital. But could it have been 3%? Could have been 4% for sure.

• 12:41Speaker 09

  And so when I look back at something like that, I would have been willing to lose more, but we had not been an active participant in the interest rate derivatives market. So we were a little timid. Timidity has held back our results for sure. What's interesting about those kind of bets is when you find a hedge that will protect you if rates rise, but it's also a really interesting investment on a standalone basis. You'd make it even if you didn't own a portfolio because you said, look, on a standalone basis, the payoff here is massive if our views on rates kind of hold. You know, you can make those larger than just a pure hedge. If you don't want to spend too much money on insurance, otherwise it's too expensive to live in your home, right? You don't want to... The payoff on your insurance policy, if the storm comes, you collect 10 million for your $2 million home. You can't even do that today, but let's assume you can. If you knew that there was a storm coming, the insurance company was still willing to sell

• 13:25Speaker 09

  you that homeowner's policy at the same price as if there were no storm, you should over insure. And so I think our only mistake there is we could have over insured a bit more because we knew a storm was coming.

• 13:34Harry Stebbings?

  I want to move to a different part of the funding environment now to Insight and Devon Parak at Insight Partners.

• 13:40Speaker 10

  When we do our analysis of the deals that work and the deals that didn't work, we often find is when we did something that we thought was cheap, those didn't work particularly well either. And I think that where we've generally had misses, they've been more because we said no on valuation and the company actually executed incredibly well at a very, very large market. So I'm not going to sit here and tell you that every company that raises money at a one and a half billion dollar valuation of 4 million of ARR is going to work, but you're going to have a subset that are definitely going to work. Our job is to make sure that we're getting in the right ones and that the ones that we're paying up for are the ones where our long-term growth underwriting is correct. And we won't always be correct, obviously, but we need to be correct enough.

• 14:17Harry Stebbings?

  Let's stay in the world of later-stage financing and I want to move to one of the biggest, General Atlantic and their president, Martine Escobar.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Price matters, especially in the later stages. Everyone who says price doesn't matter hasn't been around long enough to experience that it does matter, actually. In negotiating price with an entrepreneur, it is often that the investor has a lot more information than the entrepreneur. And it is often that the investor has a lot more experience negotiating terms than an entrepreneur. One of the things I have done since the beginning of time is I believe in paying the fair price. And I start with the fair price and I don't really move very much to the fair price. And if it works, if it doesn't work. The fair price is the price that allows me to get at least a 25% return in five years based on a P multiple exit by the time I'm in. And I backtrack into what I can afford to pay today on a base case. And sometimes we do scenarios because it's weighted average base case. And that's the price I'm willing to pay. And it's hard sometimes to negotiate

• 15:08Speaker 01

  and sometimes it's not hard. But I think that's the point at which a partnership starts. And the partnership with the investor and entrepreneur should start at a fair position.

• 15:16Harry Stebbings?

  If we move from one funding powerhouse in the form of General Atlantic to another in the form of Tomo Bravo, I'd love to hear your thoughts, Orlando Bravo, on how you think about price today.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Price matters.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Price really matters. It's interesting because many of the principles, even if you're doing a seed stage and you're doing a buyout, many of the investment principles are the same. You may have in the early stage, less data, of course, than you have in terms of being able to see trend lines and being able to see, but your equity check is small, so you're diversifying the risk. In a buyout, you could be writing a $10 billion equity check with your partners, and you cannot get that wrong. That would be really fatal, making a mistake on something that big, which is an interesting disconnect sometimes between the technology world and technology executives and buyout. The risks that company can take with an investment of that size

• 16:11Speaker 00

  and the chances they can take on different things and experimenting a different way are very different than when somebody's invested 10 million and there could be some behind it. And the expectations are different as well.

• 16:22Harry Stebbings?

  Let's move back to the early stages of venture, to earlier, maybe seed, series A, B. And we're going to talk to Justin Fishner-Wolfsen now at 137. So, Justin, how do you reflect on your own price sensitivity in relationship to price today?

• 16:37Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think this is an interesting question because my answer is oftentimes price doesn't matter unless you're off by 5X, in which case then price is the only thing that matters. Think about it in two ways, right? One, if you're wrong about the company, it goes to zero. The price doesn't matter. So it only matters when things go well. And so then the question is, can you invest at prices that ultimately hit your cost of capital? Because as venture investors, if we don't put up returns, eventually all of our investors will fire us. So it doesn't make any sense to insanely overpay for things. Because we're in venture and because the companies that we're investing are high-growth companies, there's a lot of uncertainty. It's very hard to have exact precision as to what a valuation should be. So, you know, whatever, if you're off by 20%, heck, maybe you're off by 30%. Like, you can sort of overcome that with a high-growth company.

• 17:21Speaker 11

  On the other hand, if you look at companies that are just overpriced by a factor of 10, then it's very hard to make money over almost any period of time. That's just a very hard thing to overcome.

• 17:32Harry Stebbings?

  Only is, especially when you're off by that magnitude. I think, you know, this leads to the discussion on ownership and, you know, a lot of VCs have... Very centered around ownership, often the more traditional we're seeing kind of a relaxing of that with newer firms. But the more traditional definitely with what was 20 now more 15. Before you said to me and before you said to other people, in terms of like concentration of capital on my ownership, these issues care more about their cost of capital and less about their ownership percentage. Why do you think that is when so much of the industry is predicated on ownership percentage?

• 18:03Speaker 11

  I think a lot of this has to do with heuristics that were created a long time ago. They make sense, but only when you view them in the context for which they were made. You look back at the Facebook investment that Peter did, right? So a lot of firms looked at that and a lot of people just decided that they were unwilling to do it if they couldn't get their 20%, right? And then the question is, where does this magical 20% number come from? And what it effectively comes from is people are thinking about potential exit values, fund sizes, and saying, I need to own a certain percentage of a company based on some assumption of exit values to return my fund. So that way, if I have a couple of winners, I can generate fund level returns that are attractive to my investors. And like, that all makes sense, but and then when you ran that math, you sort of ended up with something approximating 20%.

• 18:45Speaker 11

  The reason why it's important to not just use heuristics, but to understand where they came from is, you know, what happened with Facebook is Peter ended up investing half a million dollars for like 10% of the company. Well, who cares if you only have 10% of the company when the company ends up being a hundred billion dollar IPO? Whether or not you own 10 or 20, if your options were, you know, 10 or zero, you pick 10. And so focusing strictly on ownership percentage really, I think, blinds people to opportunities that may be much larger. And they just can't get over the hump from the process perspective to make those investments.

• 19:16Harry Stebbings?

  Let's go even earlier. Let's go to one of the best angel investors in Silicon Valley history and now running Long Journey Ventures. And let's join Cyan Banister and discuss how she thinks about price today.

• 19:27Speaker 12

  Well, what's going to happen is there's going to be a reckoning, and there always is one, market will work itself out, where people look at their returns seven, eight years from now, and they're not going to be great. I think that will create some discipline in the market. So one of the things I love about my partner, Lee Jacobs, is he's incredibly disciplined. I can become irrationally excited about a deal, but the price can be out of whack. And then you have to sort of do the economic. Economics, okay. And you just say like, okay, well, how much dilution am I going to take on? Am I actually going to do my prorata? How does this play out if this company becomes a billion dollars, $10 billion, et cetera? Because everything has a ultimate endpoint value. It's not infinite. And I think some people think that things are infinite. But if you actually count how many companies in the last 10 years have been worth over $10 billion, it's very few, right? Sure.

• 20:09Speaker 12

  So to be able to get those kind of returns, you've got to be more price sensitive. And the other thing is that I think that people have FOMO. They don't want to miss the deal of the century. And the deal of the century may look good on the outside because you see only valuations being posted. But what you don't see are the returns that people are making on those valuations. Somebody pointed out the other day, and it was very wise, which is a company that exits for $250 million that you have better economics on is a better return profile than a company that exits for a billion dollars that you don't. So if you're in the returns business, you should definitely care about these things. And that's the business I'm in. And so I think that at Long Journey, we're often the first check in. We have led deals now that we're excited about, and we have to get our target ownership.

• 20:50Speaker 12

  People who are not conscientious of this, what's going to happen is at the end of the road, LPs at the end of the day, look at returns. And then the fund managers that have the best returns will continue. And the ones that don't will probably have to hang up their hat.

• 21:02Harry Stebbings?

  We're jumping around the funding stats today, but now we're going to join Altimeter and their founder Brad Gerstner on how he reviews and reflects on his own relationship to price.

• 21:11Speaker 13

  Listen, if somebody comes to me and they want me to invest in a company that is at a price higher than I in my own underwriting and all my research, right? Assuming that things go well, I can't get to that price, then I'm not investing. That is just momentum. What has happened over the last 24 months has been a great disservice to founders and is the worst example, I think, of lack of discipline. And listen, we get caught up in it too. There is an entire body of work in behavioral economics around the lemming effect, group think, et cetera. And boy, was this industry caught up in it over the course of the last 12 to 18 months.

• 21:48Harry Stebbings?

  Dave Tish, we always have slightly different views around portfolio construction and pricing. How do you think about price and price sensitivity today, both at a company level and then at a portfolio level?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  It is important to be price aware on a portfolio basis, and I don't think on a deal by deal basis. Price is a determinant of making a decision. Pretty simple. If you love a company and you want to invest and the deal is what the deal is, you make a decision to invest or not invest. I don't control price. The market controls price. Now, on a portfolio basis, right, if I look at a fund and I say our entry point is up 3X from our last fund, that's a problem. So I need to have some understanding of the portfolio price, but I don't need to have rigid discipline on a deal price. I have a hundred plus million dollars that I manage. I know what returns I have to make in order to succeed without much money.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  The founder doesn't need to care about that. If they build a great company, I can figure out the map. I promise you, if we invest in unique outlier companies, our math works. Every VC's math works if you fund great companies. And so it's not about this like ownership threshold. If anybody owned 1% of Facebook, 1% of Uber, 0.1% of Coinbase, your math works. Your math works really well and it scales.

• 23:07Harry Stebbings?

  Let's do one more. So let's hear from David George, who runs Andreessen's Growth Fund. David, how do you think about price and price sensitivity today?

• 23:15Speaker 14

  I wrote a piece about this called "When Entry Multiples Don't Matter." I'll just talk to you about our process and then I can address the valuation point. So we first start, we assess the company, we assess the market, we assess founder, all independent evaluation. If those check out, then we spend a lot of time on valuation and scenarios and making sure that we see our way to target returns. So the best thing that we can do is invest in great companies that are growing very fast, because those afford you more degrees of freedom on valuation. They're the ones that are more likely to deliver upside scenarios. So one of the frameworks that we use and talk about a lot, and it's, you know, this is relevant for valuation, because it speaks to the flavor of companies that we tend to mashmake with, is, you know, we look for what we call

• 23:58Speaker 14

  Gary Glenn Ross market structures. So, you know, the famous movie, you know, we can't get this wrong. Like this is like independent evaluation. We just absolutely cannot get this this piece wrong. So what that means is there's a scenario. Have you seen the movie? I haven't, so explain it for me. Okay, all right. It's sort of like a boiler room sales old school movie. So it's there's a scene where Alec Baldwin is presenting to his team their monthly sales competition. It's his famous line where he says, okay, here's the prizes. First place gets a Cadillac, second place gets a set of steak knives and third place gets fired. And so we actually think most many or most tech markets play out in market cap in a similar way. Where the leader captures the vast majority of the market cap creation. You know, if you're not the leader, it's going to be a challenge situation.

• 24:43Speaker 14

  So we look for those kinds of market structures. You know, this is very well known and well covered in, you know, consumer land. Companies like Google and Facebook that have clear network effects. But surprisingly, you can see it actually in a lot of industries that don't have network effects, but play out in similar ways. So in B two B, you know, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, they command almost all the market cap in their respective markets. So the way we approach the valuation question is, you know, if we can get to that point right and the company wants to work with us, you know, more often than not, we can reach an agreement on valuation. Now, you know, the biggest point is, you know, in a market where valuations are higher than they used to be, you have to think long term. So we think in five to seven year terms. And try not to worry if we're off by a year or two on the valuation. Like that's a risk that I'm willing to take.

• 25:28Speaker 14

  If we underwrite something five years and it takes us seven years, I'm okay with that. The last piece is just tech markets are bigger than ever and there's going to be a lot of market cap creation. And so if we're long term oriented enough, you know, we should be okay. You know, tech's about a quarter of US market cap and that's just going to grow fast.

• 25:46Harry Stebbings?

  So I need your help. I want your feedback on how we can make the show better for you. If you liked compilation episodes like this, let me know. If you didn't, let me know. I want your feedback to make it as good as possible for you. But before we leave you today, there's no shortage of helpful AI tools out there. But using them means switching back and forth between yet another digital tool. What was supposed to simplify Your workflow just made it way more complicated, unless of course you're in Notion. In Notion, you can automate the tedious tasks like summarizing meeting notes or finding next steps, really freeing you up to do the deep work that we all want to do. And that's why Notion is used by over 50%, 50% of Fortune 500 companies.

• 26:28Harry Stebbings?

  And teams that use Notion send less emails, cancel more meetings and reduce spending on tools. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/20vc. And speaking of amazing products like Notion there, I'd like to talk to you about a company called Digits. They're a full-service AI accounting company. And if you're in need of an accountant or looking to switch, there's no better solution than Digits. Starting at just $350 a month, which is less than half of what you'd pay a traditional firm, Digits is the most accurate, most efficient solution on the market. They've developed proprietary AI technology that automates tedious financial tasks and delivers reports to the actual close of the month, not two to three weeks later as always.

• 27:11Harry Stebbings?

  And they also allow you to keep track of key metrics like revenue, burn, cash flow and runway in an incredible live dashboard. The best part of all of it, this is vetted and signed off by their in-house CPAs. If you're interested, visit digits.com/20vc to claim your special offer today. That's digits.com/20vc. And finally, travel and expense are never associated with cost savings, but now you can reduce costs up to 30% and actually reward your employees. How? Well, Navan rewards your employees with personal travel credit every time they save their company money when booking business travel under company policy. Does that sound too good to be true?

• 27:53Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Navan is so confident you'll move to their game-changing all-in-one travel corporate card and expense super app that they'll give you $250 in personal travel credit just for taking a quick demo. Check them out now at navan.com/20vc. Now stay tuned for an incredible episode this coming Monday with Alex Towesig at Lightspeed and Thomas, CEO at Vinted, one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe. And it's an awesome combination with the investor and founder blend. So stay tuned for that on Monday.