20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves

David Lawee founded CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, in 2013, drawing on his experience both at Google and as a serial entrepreneur. Since then, he has helped transform high-potential startups into some of the most highly valued businesses of our generation, including Airbnb, Lyft, Snap, Robinhood, Credit Karma, Oscar, Lending Club and Thumbtack. Prior to CapitalG, David played a pivotal role in Google’s growth story--first as Google’s Chief Marketing Officer and then as the instrumental VP of corporate development where his group spearheaded over 100 acquisitions for the company. CLICK TO LISTEN ON ITUNES In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How David made his way into the world of startups, came to be the first CMO @ Google and how that led to his founding CapitalG? 2.) Having operated and invested through both the dot com and 08', how has seeing the booms and busts impacted David's investing mindset? How does David think about temporal diversification today with CapitalG? Why does David believe diversification is largely overrated? 3.) How does David think about portfolio construction today, given CapitalG is a growth fund? How does David compare early-stage to growth today? How does David think about loss ratios at growth? How does David benchmark good vs great from a multiple perspective at growth? 4.) How does CapitalG approach investment decision making today? How does David avoid consensus thinking/following the crowd when it comes to deals? Why does David believe investment clubs operate much more successfully than partnerships? How does that change the structure for CapitalG? 5.) How has David seen himself evolve and develop as a board member of the years? What type of board member would David say he is today? How does that change with the founder? Who is the most memorable board member David has sat on a board with? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: David’s Fave Book: Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood David’s Most Recent Investment: Albert As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and what a show we have in store for you today. I'm such an admirer of the incredible institution this individual has built, and so I'm delighted to welcome David Lawee to the hot seat today. David founded CapitalG G, Alphabet's independent growth fund, in 2013, drawing on his experience both at Google and as a serial entrepreneur. Since then, he's helped transform high potential startups into some of the most highly valued businesses of our generation, including the likes of Airbnb, Lyft, Snap, Robinhood, Credit Karma, Oscar, Lending Club and Thumbtack. And prior to Capital G, David played a pivotal role in Google's growth story. First as Google's Chief Marketing Officer, and then as the instrumental VP of Corporate Development, where his group spearheaded over 100 acquisitions for the company. Truly incredible story there.

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  I'd also have to say a huge thank you to Ela Gill, Jean France and Leila Sturdy, for some fantastic question suggestions pre this episode happening. I really do so appreciate that. But before we move into the show today, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million. Check out hellosign.com/20vc to join the thousands of companies and founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. And if HelloSign helps you sign that term sheet, you need to get the term sheet in the first place.

• 1:28Harry Stebbings?

  And I want to give a mention to Draper Esprit, a publicly listed VC fund that invests in high-growth European tech companies with global ambitions. Their portfolio includes companies like Revolut, UiPath, Kazoo, Graphcore and many other top European companies. Draper Esprit writes checks of USD $5 to $50 million, focusing on sectors like consumer, fintech, health tech, deep tech, enterprise and SaaS. And their investment team has an incredible depth of experience, both as operators and investors, that helps businesses scale globally. If that sounds like the sort of investor you want to work with, get in touch with them at draperesprit.com. That's D R A P E R E S P R I T dot com. And last but by no means least, getting socked to complete

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  My word, it can be a nightmare. Well, not anymore. Not with SecureFrame. SecureFrame provide end-to-end compliance that scales with you. So you can get SOC 2 compliance ready in weeks, not months. You can secure an audit through one of their preferred auditor networks. And then, most importantly, you can stay compliant with their incredible automated reports and alerts. That's why SecurePass is trusted by the likes of Stream, Hasura, BannerPass and more. So check them out today at SecureFrame.com to turn months into weeks when it comes to SOC 2 compliance. But that is quite enough from me. So now I'm very excited to hand over to David Lawee, founder at Capital G.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:53Harry Stebbings?

  David, I'm so happy to be doing this one. I've been waiting for this one for a long time. And I've heard so many good things from Elad Gil and then also from your partners, Jean and Leila. So thank you so much for joining me today, David.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  It's great to be here.

• 3:03Harry Stebbings?

  I would love to kick off there with a little bit on you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of investing? It was an incredible career before, so I'm going to pretend like I don't know. And then, how did you come to found Capital G?

• 3:12Speaker 02

  So I started my career as a serial entrepreneur. And one of the businesses that I started along the way was a venture capital firm in Toronto. So I was first exposed to the business in the late 90s during the dot com boom. And Xfire was the first business I started here in California. So I guess I was always kind of exposed to the VC world and different levels of investment at different stages. And seeing kind of how the firms operated and the ecosystem, but from the entrepreneur side. Then I joined Google in 2005, ironically, for a green card and have been at Google since, which has surprised all my friends. They never thought I would make it even to the green card moment at such a big company. And I ran marketing first globally, the chief marketing officer.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  And then I ran corporate development for five years. We did about 100 acquisitions and kind of crossed the world in the business. And then in 2013, started Capital G, I guess. At that point, I was in the mindset of leaving Google. And I talked to Larry Page and the idea was for me, and that conversation was to see if he wanted to invest his own capital in my firm. And he said, why don't you do this within Alphabet? And I thought about that for a little bit and kind of came to the conclusion that we could do something in a super differentiated way inside of Alphabet. And so I decided to start Capital G with Alphabet as the sole LP and we got going from there.

• 4:27Harry Stebbings?

  And what an incredible seven years it's been. I do have to ask David, and it is off schedule, but I'm really interested because I haven't worked through and invested through massive market cycles. You've seen them both from the sides of the entrepreneur more and then also from the side of the investor. How did seeing that crash and boom impact your investing mindset stagey thing? And what would you advise me, having never seen it before?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  As an entrepreneur, it's super challenging to manage businesses where the environment is changing so meaningfully around you. So as an example, you're kind of in a prisoner's dilemma if your competitor ends up raising 10 times more capital than you have, where you need to raise the money and start investing at a pace to compete with them, even though that may be a little bit counterproductive and you're getting ahead of your skis. So that makes it extremely challenging. And the extreme of that, I think, is in markets like India, where capital comes and then goes, comes for two years, extremely frothy, and then people get nervous and leave the market. And those entrepreneurs go from having burns that are $50 million a year to needing to survive on $5 million a year. So it just is extremely hard from an operating standpoint.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  From the investor's standpoint, I think people are a little bit more cavalier and say, oh, I invest through the cycle and you're not going to make money. You're paid to put money to work and you're not going to make equal amounts of money in all parts of the cycle. And while that's true, I think the world is not uniform. And I think we have the luxury of being able to invest across a lot of sectors and countries, and we should be able to find good opportunities in any sector. So I hold ourselves to a pretty high standard there. I would say personally, I do feel that there's a little bit of a disadvantage in protracted bull markets of having lived through these cycles, because your experience has taught you to be more risk averse. And as you're living through a bull market, that's a negative. Ultimately, being a little more conservative is going to prove out, but it's not after years of money making.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Even in 2013, people thought the valuations were frothy. So this whole time, I've thought, this is getting really frothy, really frothy, really frothy. And that's, in a sense, been negative.

• 6:24Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, do you think about temporal diversification with capital G intensely? Or do you think, as you said, it's job to put capital to work and that is our focus? Invest in the best businesses regardless of time or temporal diversification?

• 6:35Speaker 02

  I think about making money and making money kind of every year. And if I feel like we're investing in things that aren't going to make us as much money, that's not, I don't want to like take the year off in terms of making money. I want to make money every year. So I do kind of hold us to the standard of trying to find equally good investments throughout the cycle, which I just don't think the averages are kind of really how things work out, that you can find good investments at any time. And it's not like we're making a gazillion investments, so we shouldn't necessarily reflect the market.

• 7:03Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, absolutely. Can I ask, and we're kind of mixing up the schedule, but we spoke about kind of the frothy markets. The thing that happens obviously with frothy markets is the prices go up and then obviously the multiples go down. And it's also kind of never more painful, I think, and you could disagree with me here, but never more painful, especially when you're investing kind of in the grossing growth equity rounds. How do you think about pricing your own price sensitivity today?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Well, like I said, it differs by market. So today, the SaaS, enterprise SaaS businesses are priced to the moon on average and kind of a lot of other businesses are not. So I think when we're making enterprise SaaS businesses, we may be going a little earlier, kind of taking different kinds of risk as opposed to just taking valuation risk. But we're trying to cast a much wider net overall. It's amazing to me that in business where people know they're investing for five years or something, most of our competitors think of that, we think even longer. Yet people are very impacted by short-term gyrations in the public markets. So we have kind of frothy public markets or fully valued public markets right now. And that affects B rounds, C rounds, kind of makes no sense. So I think you just need to kind of separate yourself from the moment.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  And it does affect growth investors more than venture investors to come in at super high prices because we're only expecting, we're underwriting three Xs. So if you have a one X, that's going to hurt you.

• 8:15Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, how do you separate yourself? It's something that I'm actually struggling with right now. It's just like not getting caught up in the vortex of excitement, valuation increases, the Twitter sphere. How do you separate yourself and ensure kind of purity of decision-making as a partnership?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  So we've thought a lot about that. At the core of it is kind of the decision process. And for us, which is extremely unusual for a growth equity fund, we make the investments individually. The group can and does hopefully help inform that, but it's more of an investment club than kind of an investment decision making. Body and I was born from kind of looking at a whole bunch of different investment firms and comparing their returns to that of clubs and coming to the conclusion that clubs were actually doing better. So we take more of that approach. It's still hard to get people to take risk because they're kind of leaning out on their own, but the group is trying to help you make a decision as opposed to making the decision.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  And so it becomes a lot less political and a lot more kind of striving for the merits because as an individual going into kind of our investment committee, I'm trying to learn as much as I can. So I come out of that meeting, I can make a good decision versus trying to sell my partners.

• 9:17Harry Stebbings?

  I love that in terms of the culture of like learning optimization for you, the kind of decision maker on say that particular deal and your partner is kind of championing you to make the best decision. But how do you kind of create that culture internally with the kind of champion and challenge, not the kind of bashing other people's deals, which it could devolve into in other partnerships?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  I don't really care what the group thinks because in the end I need to make the decision and I tell that to my team. Like I'm not convinced that if the group agrees with me, my decision is a better one. I think in all investments, you're almost by definition a contrarian because a whole bunch of people are deciding not to invest. I think once I say that to people on my team, let's say the more junior people, they kind of view their role in the meeting as different. And they see kind of time and again, the group is pretty negative on things and we're going ahead and making investments. That's why I kind of answered your question with kind of what the decision making structure is because I think that has a lot of impact.

• 10:09Harry Stebbings?

  No, absolutely it does. Has that decision making structure changed over the years and have there been any lessons in terms of optimizing it?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  It's always been the case that we kind of have organized ourselves to make decisions independently. I'd say what's changed is trying to figure out ways to get people to take more risk. And what ends up being very theoretical discussions at the partner team because they haven't spent enough time with the company to kind of know the level of detail and nuance in the decision. So I'd say, you know, we're always trying to kind of lean into risk.

• 10:38Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I totally get you in terms of leaning into risk and optimizing for that. Because you said that kind of contrarian, something that is surprising says contrarian, but as every firm says, going multi-stage, going up and down the stack in terms of going aggressively into seed and pre-IPO. You chose for a very specific growth strategy. My question is kind of what was the thinking there and what value do you think comes from being so stage focused on growth?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we started with growth because we thought we would have a very differentiated perspective on that and be able to help companies in a unique way by leveraging a lot of the people at Alphabet. So that was our starting point. And I guess we could have gone earlier, but my view is the job of the person during earlier stage investing is quite a bit different. And when I talk to my friends in venture, they're invested in 15 companies, they may be on almost that many boards. And they're connecting with people, kind of 20 meetings in a day type thing, because they're trying to get kind of the information on what's happening in the community. Versus, we're being a lot more prescriptive in terms of where we go. So it's like, oh, I'm going to look at these types of businesses and I'm going to go out and call on all those people.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  The process is totally different. And then I might spend a month researching a given segment. And I will come back to that six months later and spend another month. And over 18 months, we've been exploring crypto for seven years, you know, kind of made an investment in the space. And I'm connected to a lot of the best crypto minds in the world. I just haven't found an investment that I like. I will eventually, same with gaming, but sometimes you just need to be patient in these categories. So the process of finding something is way different. And then I would say the rounds in growth are extremely competitive, just like any segment. And the way to compete is by being in the ready position, like already having your thesis, already kind of knowing what price you would invest, already kind of being able to activate diligence kind of really quickly.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Cause you've kind of got an outside in view. So in order to be good at the growth side, it just takes all of our attention and focus.

• 12:32Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, you mentioned that kind of the intense competition obviously comes to a large extent also with the proliferation of capital that's come into this stage. And I spoke to Gene before the show on your team and he said, I'd love to hear David's source on this question. Is now fundamentally good time to invest in growth equity, given the proliferation of capital?

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Well, in hindsight, it was a better time in 2013. If you just kind of take average multiple as kind of your measure for when it's a good time to invest. But then from an innovation standpoint, I'd say during the seven years, we've gone through different waves. And I think now COVID and work from home is sparking a whole new kind of innovation in terms of consumer expectations and. Enterprises needs to kind of facilitate a global workforce or a remote workforce. So we want growth, extraordinary growth, and that change helps with that. We want to pay a good price and the market has kind of figured it out. So that part of it has more downward pressure.

• 13:23Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, absolutely. I totally get you in terms of the downward pressure there. In terms of kind of investor mindsets, you mentioned obviously you started Capital G seven years ago. I know my mindset's changed immensely over the last three years. I'd love to hear, how's your investor mindset changed over the last seven years? And what do you think the big evolutions have been?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd say we're kind of much more focused on why now? In our kind of assessment of when markets are going to take off. More often than not, when you're investing in growth rounds, in order to pay the top price, you need to believe that things are going to compound more than other people. Like the growth is going to compound, the size of the market expansion is going to compound. And so you need to have a good pulse on the why now? Like, why are things going to change significantly now? And crypto as an example, that becomes kind of a big question. Like, when are we going to get enough people to kind of transact, meaningfully transact? And what's the tipping point? If you were thinking about VR, you'd be like, when are we going to get to 10 million headsets? And that's a lot of times the tail on our investments. Like, we'll make three X with a reasonable expectation of market growth.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  If things go as we hope, then this could be a 10 X. And that's independent of multiple, we're just talking about market expansion. So I'd say that has become more important for us over time.

• 14:33Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of multiple expectations, something I've spoken with Jean about before. And again, it's my naivety around growth actually here being much more early-stage focused. What are the benchmarks for good versus great look like in terms of multiple expectation? Like, is three X good? And I don't mean that flippantly or naively, but like three X succeed is not a great outcome. How do you think about good versus great on multiples?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  I think our funds are still going to perform in the same IRR neighborhood as venture funds. But the distribution, so we're three X IRR could be 30%, depending on how long it takes you to get to three X. So the IRR for the fund is going to be the same. But the distribution across the investments is going to be different. So we don't have that many zeros and a lot of twos. So it's kind of more twos and tens, so you're hoping to average to, let's say, 25, 30% IRR.

• 15:18Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah. How do you think about kind of lines? Diversification, given that kind of much lower loss ratio. How do you think about getting enough lines of diversification, but not too many also that you've split bandwidth wise? Obviously, in venture funds in your early stages, it's normally thirty to forty. How do you think about that?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  I think people overvalue perceived diversification. I think you get a diminishing return in our business once you get past five or six investments. And the added diversification, like if you kind of take a more mature category, public stocks kind of be around that five or six. And the extra value you get from the next investment in terms of diversification is actually quite low.

• 15:50Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I do agree. I think you said largely overhyped. How do you think about reserves? Because that's another contention, Bob. A lot of people say, actually, you're much better off adding another line of diversification than concentrated capital. How do you think about reserves?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Practically, we don't really need to think about reserves because we have one LP. So in every fund, we have the same LP, and so we can just think about every decision discreetly. And so we think about the diversification from the standpoint of, well, from Alphabet's perspective, the whole thing is like pretty small. So they don't need to think about it. So then we can think about it from the point of view of our concentration of, let's say, my own investments. And I feel we've made forty five investments in seven years. I feel more than diversified. So actually, I feel like the concentration is better for us. That's why you'll see us kind of trying to participate in as many rounds as we can for kind of companies that we're backing.

• 16:36Harry Stebbings?

  No, I do get you. And I think kind of that LP structure changes everything and changes a lot. It also changes something that potentially with regards to generational transition. I see a lot of managers who say, God, our LPs are absolutely drilling us on generational transition. And it's front and centre for that reason. How do you think about generational transition? And does it differ because you do have a fundamentally different LP structure?

• 16:56Speaker 02

  I don't think it differs. Maybe the incentives are different to do it. One of the benefits of being started within the Alphabet family is there's a lot of experience in company building. And so a lot of the things that you might overlook as a small business, we have the benefit of people thinking about for a lot of different businesses. And so that could be like gender diversity, racial diversity. When we have these issues come up, we have the ability to tap into Alphabet to get really good thinking in terms of how to kind of address these issues. And the same is true for some of these basic companies. Building things, people were asking me who's my successor from the beginning. So I didn't feel that it's something I'd kind of need to think of all of a sudden. I've always been thinking about that.

• 17:38Harry Stebbings?

  Got you. That makes total sense. Can I ask, in terms of, we spoke about kind of investment mindsets evolving. Another thing that I was really keen to ask is you're on the board of some incredible companies from Lyft to Credit Karma to Convoy. How would you describe your style of board membership first? And I guess has it changed over the years?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  It changes all the time. I think what I've realized increasingly is that different management teams need to be influenced in different ways. So I try not to have, here's the David Lowry formula for motivating people. And that takes a lot of personal time with the CEOs and the management team. You know, I think you need to know how they think and how they make decisions and what things move them. And then you need to kind of work both inside the boardroom and outside. The goal is to be tuned to a pretty phenomenal company and try and help them. And that is an extremely hard thing to do. And so the last thing you want to do is kind of be tuned out in terms of what's the reality for them. Because then you're going to have more limited ability to influence them. And so that tuning time is a lot more nuanced than I kind of appreciated at the beginning.

• 18:39Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, I've just joined my first boards over the last eighteen months. What advice would you have for me, having been on the boards and having sat with the incredible families you have done over the last seven years? What would you advise me?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  I find it's not very effective to tell people what to do as a minority investor. I'd say it's a lot better to try and get them to see you as a mirror and be an honest reflection of what they're saying. And help them think about whether they're focused on the right question. And so if people say to me, well, we're going to launch this product in six months. And then six months later, they haven't launched it. My goal isn't to kind of give them a hard time about that. But when they're kind of talking about future deadlines or goals, I can be like, well, do we feel that we're better at estimating now? Based on kind of what we learned the last time. And I'm just reminding them without trying to, because who hasn't worked on software products that have taken longer? That, you know, their judgment should be improved now.

• 19:31Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I totally get you in terms of that thinking. First, David, I'd love to dive into a quick fire round. So I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts in about sixty seconds or less. How does that sound?

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Sounds challenging.

• 19:41Harry Stebbings?

  It's incredibly challenging. And let's start on probably the hardest of all, which is your favorite book and why, if you had to choose one?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  This summer, I read Trevor Noah's Born a Crime. I don't know if it's my favorite book of all time, but I kind of read it in May and it was super timely to kind of tune into those issues and kind of understand his life growing up in South Africa. So I'd say for this summer, that's been my favorite book.

• 20:01Harry Stebbings?

  What's the hardest element of your role at Capital G today, do you think?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  We want to have a high performing team and it's challenging to figure out what the right time is over which to measure performance. You don't want to be short sighted measuring it every year. You kind of, after like five years or seven years, you need to know where you are. So it's somewhere in between that you need to kind of make decisions on people. And because we're aiming to be a partnership that is compensating the partners equally, you need to have the bar pretty high. And so those decisions and when to make them are by far the hardest.

• 20:34Harry Stebbings?

  What does success look like for you with Capital G?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  We really want to be involved in some of the most consequential companies in terms of impact and innovation. And getting to work with those entrepreneurs is incredibly thrilling. The byproduct of that is strong returns, which is really the only way we're measured. So those are the dimensions.

• 20:53Harry Stebbings?

  What would you most like to change about the world of venture?

• 20:55Speaker 02

  More diversity, diversity of thinking, diversity of people. It's incredibly clubby and white male oriented. And I don't think that's helping the entrepreneurial world. It's kind of not helping the venture world decision making. So that's the biggest thing. It's also the hardest thing, but it's kind of the biggest thing that needs to change in my view.

• 21:13Harry Stebbings?

  Who's the most memorable woman that you sat on a board with and why?

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Well, I really like working with Ben Horowitz as an example. I was always struck with how much detail he has around the functionings of a business. Like he could explain in detail how the planning group of the finance team versus the accounting group thinks and the challenges of having someone who's doing one role, doing another. And it's that type of nuance that I think makes the real difference in advising CEOs because you can Tune in more to the challenges they're thinking about.

• 21:43Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I think the level that Ben links is just so granular. And then tell me, final one. What's the most recent publicly announced investment for you? And why did you say yes and get so excited?

• 21:52Speaker 02

  We invested in Albert, which is a fintech firm. And I think for us, in that case, what was exciting was that the finance problems for Americans can be automated. And kind of a lot of decisions don't need to be decisions. They should just be done automatically. And that vision, I think, for the people that are not able to save money and pay their bills and are getting dinged by fees at banks for kind of that failing can really improve people's lives.

• 22:18Harry Stebbings?

  David, as I said before this year, I had some really great chats with Leila, with Jean, with Eli. I had so many great things. But thank you so much for joining me today. This was such a pleasure to do.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Terrific. Thanks a lot for having me.

• 22:30Harry Stebbings?

  I just love that. And such exciting times ahead for Capital G and the portfolio there. I do want to say huge thank you, Stephen, for taking the time today. It really did mean a lot. And if you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, you can on Instagram at H Stabbings1996 with two Bs. I always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million. Check out hellosign.com/20vc to join the thousands of companies and founders who value fast, secure, and simple e-signatures.

• 23:15Harry Stebbings?

  And if HelloSign helps you sign that term sheet, you need to get the term sheet in the first place. And I want to give a mention to Draper Esprit, a publicly listed VC fund that invests in high-growth European tech companies with global ambitions. Their portfolio includes companies like Revolut, UiPath, Kazoo, Graphcore, and many other top European companies. Draper Esprit writes checks of USD 5 to 50 million dollars, focusing on sectors like consumer, fintech, health tech, deep tech, enterprise, and SaaS. And their investment team has an incredible depth of experience, both as operators and investors, that helps businesses scale globally. It now sounds like the sort of investment You want to work with, get in touch with them at draperespry.com. That's D R A P E R E S P R I T dot com.

• 23:59Harry Stebbings?

  And last but by no means least, getting SOC 2 compliance, my word, it can be a nightmare. Well, not anymore, not with SecureFrame. SecureFrame provide end-to-end compliance that scales with you. So you can get SOC 2 compliance ready in weeks, not months. You can secure an audit through one of their preferred audit networks. And then most importantly, you can stay compliant with their incredible automated reports and alerts. That's why SecurePass is trusted by the likes of Stream, Hasura, BannerPass and more. So check them out today at SecureFrame.com to turn months into weeks when it comes to SOC 2 compliance. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you a fantastic episode next week.