Bill Gurley and Chetan Puttagunta – An Update on Consumer & Enterprise Venture Capital - [Invest Like the Best, EP.162]

My guests today are Bill Gurley and Chetan Puttagunta, both partners at benchmark capital. We review the early stage investing world in the face of coronavirus in a very timely conversation, which is one that will remain valuable once this crisis is done. We discuss enterprise and consumer, funding and growth, and the entrepreneurial spirit in the face of a crisis. Please enjoy. This episode is brought to by Koyfin. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag Show Notes 1:44 – (First question) – Landscape for venture capital ecosystem 6:47 – The experience in 2009 and the entrepreneurs that tend to rise to the top 8:24 – The relationship between early stage companies and public investors 10:45 – How this crisis impacts enterprise businesses vs the broader corporate sector 14:46 – Advice for early stage companies in a period like this 18:23 – What Chetan was doing during the last downturn and what he learned during it 20:27 – Early stage vs late stage companies in this environment 22:57 – On the Road to Recap 23:00 – Benefits of being small in a period like this 25:22 – How portfolio companies are responding and pivoting during this period 29:33 – Best practices for remote companies 31:39 – Themes that stand out during this period 34:51 – Closing thoughts Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

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

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 1:08Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Patrick O'Neal is the CEO of O'Neal Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Neal Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Neal Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 1:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My guests today are Bill Gurley and Chathin Puttagunta, both partners at Benchmark Capital. We review the early-stage investing world in the face of coronavirus in a very timely conversation, which is one that will remain valuable once this crisis is done. We discuss enterprise and consumer investing, funding and growth, and the entrepreneurial spirit in the face of a crisis. Please enjoy.

• 2:16Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Okay, Chaythan and Bill, thanks for doing this with me on very short notice. A lot going on this week. We've got a lot to talk about, so we will dive right in. I would love to hear the perspective of both of you, just where we sit here on, on March 12th, which is Thursday evening, just kind of get your temperature on how you're talking to portfolio companies, what you're seeing in sort of the venture ecosystem that might help those listening. Chaythan, maybe we'll start with you.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  It's a pretty unique time. I think if you just look at how we're recording this podcast, all three of us are in our own rooms and you know, there's reason for folks around the world to be concerned, to be taking precautions. And at the same time, if you go back to the, the business world, our portfolio companies are advised to take the necessary precautions and, and adjust work as they need to and take the necessary steps to protect their employees and protect the overall company. And once you go through that initial adjustment period, the spirit and the energy of these

• 3:19Speaker 03

  entrepreneurs sort of comes back because you're able to refocus that energy, that, that anxiety. And then you start talking to your customers and they too have a job to do. And as a trusted vendor, you have a job to do for them and then, and then things start to sort of roll back into place. And I think if you go back and, and step back and it all comes down to the, the health of the company and the position you've put the company in. If you can be conservative on cash, if you can be pragmatic in these times and continue to execute, as we've seen over and over in the history of downturns, and I know Patrick,

• 4:01Speaker 03

  you've studied them, that companies that stay disciplined and continue to execute through them, come out to the other side. Much stronger in a position to really take advantage of market dynamics that then end up thriving and building an incredible amount of value.

• 4:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Bill, how about you? I know you've been through this before.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, I mean, unfortunately, I'm old enough where I've been through this twice before in 2001 and then in 2008, 2009, around the mortgage crisis. And when you're in the depths of it, it certainly feels like, oh, my God, this is the worst thing that's ever happened. There's never been anything like this before, you know? And, you know, the truth of the matter is, there hasn't been something exactly like this, but there's been something kind of like this where, where the financial market shut down. And, you know, it does create a lot of anxiety for people. And there are startups that are more kind of on the tip of the spear. I think some of the travel stuff, people can look at the data and see they're going

• 5:03Speaker 04

  to have to live with the top line getting hit pretty severely, even if it's just for a short window, but that's not something anyone had in any of their scenario analysis. And so for those businesses, I think some of the stuff Chayton's talking about, they might have to move a little more swiftly, a little more quickly, and might have to make some harder decisions if your top line is being impacted. I think there are a few companies that might be in the middle of a financing, which can be kind of difficult because especially if it's later stage, the people that are doing the investments take a lot of their leads from the public markets. And if the comps are down 40%, it's hard for them to be certain about where to land on a price and that kind of thing.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  And so those entrepreneurs will have to make a decision, which is, are they willing to maybe take a discount or a haircut or whatever has to happen in order to get that done? Or do they want to manage the current cash they have and try and get to the other side of this? We don't know exactly at this point in time what that window looks like. Following on, on one thing Chayton said, which is, the companies that I've always felt had the best in these, kind of find a silver lining in all of this, are the ones that are started at about those times, companies started in oh, one or oh, eight. It's actually a really... Interesting to start something in a trough because then as your business starts to mature

• 6:30Speaker 04

  and you really get into revenue and customers, all of a sudden you're riding a wave of expansion. And inevitably, these kinds of downturns create things like layoffs and whatnot. So your competition for human capital gets a little bit easier and things like that. So one, we made a point in 08 of letting everyone know that Benchmark was open for business. And we focused almost exclusively on early-stage investing. And so if there are entrepreneurs out there that are worried that venture capital firms are just scared to death and are afraid to write checks, if you've got something early, come see us because we believe that entrepreneurism doesn't sleep and that it happens at all points in the

• 7:12Speaker 04

  cycle. And we've seen historically that companies built in these types of environments actually stand the test of time and do really well.

• 7:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Bill, can you talk about the specific experience, maybe in 09, since more people will have lived through that than lived through the tech wreck in 01, about the kinds of entrepreneurs that tend to rise to the top in a period like this relative to, say, a year ago, a more benign market? And whether or not the entrepreneurs starting businesses now are of a different character and also contribute to those positive outcomes, not just the riding the future wave, but the very type of people prone to start a business in this environment?

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think what we've seen is, first of all, I have this theme that I've now seen so many times, which is Silicon Valley takes on risk very slowly and accumulates over time. And then when we hit these resets, risk goes off very quickly. So you have 10 years of increasing risk and then risk is off. And in those periods where the risk-seeking gets high, capital gets easy, I think people who otherwise might have stayed in a job in banking or consulting or whatever, they become entrepreneurs because it looks easy. And I think you actually, that entire time that

• 8:28Speaker 04

  risk is increasing, the quality of your average entrepreneur that's getting funded is actually going down. And what happens when risk goes off is the only people that are left starting the companies are the ones that are choosing it innately as the way of life they want to have and not just because they think they can get a quick buck. And so I do find you typically have deal flow go down, but deal quality go up immediately after one of these resets.

• 8:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Chaythan, you follow the public market players in the sort of enterprise ecosystem. Sometimes it seems like as closely as you follow the private markets, you have a deep sense of what's going on there. How would you describe the interaction between, say, the private businesses that you're interested in and fund and sit on the board of versus the reactivity of the big public players? Anything interesting to note there that might be an advantage for earlier stage companies?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think one of the things that early stage companies have an advantage in these particular times is that they're able to engage with their end customers and have meaningful conversations around business value so much more clearly because if you are competing against, say, an incumbent that is a public company that is under tremendous pressure to hit quotas or whatever it is, the conversations quickly move to a sales-oriented conversation. Whereas if you're a startup, you all of a sudden have the ability to engage customers exactly along those business value propositions. So if you're a company that can help your end customer save money, for example, that becomes a more pointed discussion now.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  If you're able to help your end customer increase revenue, for example, that becomes a more pointed conversation now. So if you look at much like what Bill just talked about, the entrepreneurs that started, for example, enterprise software companies in 08, 09, or built really big enterprise software companies through that period of time, and you see what they've done, like they started a vast number of customer conversations that actually helped them run circles around the incumbent players at that time. And so you see these companies that were targeting high-end customers or high-end enterprise customers sign 50 customers in 09 because their value proposition became very, very clear and they went and attacked the market.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  In a very disciplined fashion, mainly because everything became a constrained environment. And so things become sharper, things become more pointed, and you get a real big advantage, especially as larger organizations have to move swiftly and are in a more reactive fashion. And that's when, as an early-stage entrepreneur, you can start playing a bit more offense.

• 11:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How would you guys distinguish between how this crisis impacts enterprise versus consumer businesses, broadly speaking? Chetan, I know you focus on, you look at everything, but with a deep expertise in enterprise and Bill maybe more of a generalist. Do you think there are key differences for how these businesses are running themselves, what looks attractive from a greenfield investing standpoint, say at Series A, where you guys are often investing? What are the key considerations of differences between enterprise and consumer?

• 11:46Speaker 04

  A good friend of mine, the other day, said a phrase that I thought was interesting, I'm sure he didn't make it up, that money never sleeps. And he was referring to how quickly Wall Street sends Zoom up and certain airline stocks down. And Wall Street's sorting this out already. And so, even though the broader markets have been hit, you can see the reaction to, I think, consumer stocks is more egregious than you get in the enterprise. And I think it just makes sense. If you're going to take 45 days off as a company, are you going to reset all your SaaS contracts? Probably not. If this becomes extremely prolonged, that could start to happen. As I mentioned at the beginning, some of these consumer

• 12:31Speaker 04

  companies, say you have a travel focus or whatnot, a top-line transactional model can get hit pretty quickly. And that's a more severe situation that might require more brisk action, which could include layoffs, that kind of thing. And so, we'll have to see if that happens in the next 30 or 45 days to those companies that have that type of situation.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  On the enterprise side, I would say that the observation, my observation's from '08, '09, on the enterprise side, is that the obvious things that most companies expect, enterprise sales cycles take longer, they get extended. There is a modest effect to renewal rates, primarily because of what Bill said, which is that Are you going to go replace your stack because of a macro environment very, very quickly? Usually unlikely. So there's modest impact to renewal rates. But what happened in 08, 09 for enterprise software companies is that cash cycles changed. Specifically, DSOs as it related to receivables, like cash collection cycles just changed.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Mainly because, Patrick, you know this really well, is that as liquidity in the system becomes a little bit tighter, the money flow throughout the system just gets a little bit tighter. And so companies that are able to continue to ride with their customers and allow them a bit more generosity in terms of payment terms and be sort of true partners. In terms of that, then get rewarded coming out of this time. And so it's just mentally preparing for sort of those kinds of volatile situations and the gyrations in the business motions that I think can help you just mentally prepare for the conversations your customers are going to want to have with you

• 14:21Speaker 03

  if you're an enterprise software company. But at the same time, as you're having these conversations, you're then also able to engage these customers more deeply about exactly what their business cases are. The minute somebody says, hey, like, I'm going to need an extension on this invoice, you can then dive in on like, well, what's going on in the business today? Like, is it a revenue problem? Is it a cost problem? Is it a conversion problem? What is it? And so it's a time when entrepreneurs can really start to be creative about how to engage customers in a deeper value proposition oriented way and be more leaning forward in terms of engaging their customers.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  And so I think it's these unique times that allow entrepreneurs to really sort of... Be very creative in establishing customer relationships. And so to use a cliched term, which is just like not to let a crisis simply go to waste and take advantage of the moment in time.

• 15:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Anything else that you would recommend early-stage companies think about doing differently in a period like this, apart from obviously being aggressive, trying to lay out a value proposition in very specific terms? Is there anything else that they need to consider, maybe how they think about burn rate or cash or headcount or the pace at which they're trying to grow that you think leads to better outcomes?

• 15:41Speaker 04

  At the end of the day, when you are a private company, cash is king. And when you have prolonged periods of expansion and good times as we have, you get further and further away from that mindset and you don't think about it as much. And so all of the sudden, you know, it can become really focusing when you realize that the key thing you have to do is keep your company and business through periods like this. And that can lead to some hard decision-making. Certainly, it's not a time for aggressive expansion without really thinking through all of the elements. It's probably a good time to refocus and really know what your company's one or two

• 16:22Speaker 04

  priorities are and not think about the other three or four things you could be doing. There's a chance that certain companies have to make layoff decisions. They're very, very difficult to make. I've been through them numbers of times and it's a horrible thing to have to live through. One piece of advice, though, is never do a five or 10% layoff because it doesn't create any meaningful gain, yet you go through all the excruciating cultural pain. And so if you get to a point where you have to do that, I think SWIFT and doing it at a level where you're actually going to buy yourself months and months of cash runway is a critical thing to think through.

• 17:03Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Is there anything else, Bill, in addition to that, not doing the death by a thousand cuts? And this could be any kind of spending cut or anything else, anything else like that that you would offer as advice, having seen companies go through hard times, not necessarily just in a crisis, but maybe even more generally?

• 17:16Speaker 04

  It's always good to do scenario modeling. And so if this ends up being six months instead of two months, have you modeled out what that means? And do you have a plan for when that looks like it's going to be true? So that you can, it's always better to make those decisions calmly and then with plenty of forethought than to be forced into critically difficult decisions very quickly. And so I've always encouraged in moments of uncertainty, even normal times, but build a model for multiple scenarios and have an action plan for each of those scenarios. And that way you can be in a better position to deal with

• 17:57Speaker 04

  the information that becomes apparent, you know, over time.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  And I think challenging the drivers and understanding the drivers of your business are particularly important in times like this. There are sort of like business as usual assumptions that most of us make and say, okay, in sort of like an autopilot sense, go to the next step and make extrapolations out of those assumptions. And so examining the core drivers of a business and understanding what if these assumptions change slightly? How does that ripple through the business itself? And how are we equipped to handle it? And so it's all just sort of taking the time as we've all changed our work habits and have gone to thinking about teamwork differently. It's also a good time to step back and rethink the business nature of these startups and understand what are the core drivers here?

• 18:46Speaker 03

  How might those change over the next couple of months? And how could the company adjust in a case where those assumptions start to change for the core business?

• 18:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Jayden, could you describe the work that you were doing in the last downturn in 08? What it was specifically and sort of what lessons you bring forward, thinking back on that time?

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I was primarily working on restructuring at a time when the financial crisis was going on. And I had two clients that I was working with. One was a semiconductor equipment company and one was a hardware company that also had a software business. And the primary thing that that happened in both cases was that the data that was coming at them was so surprising from the beginning that it was always assumed by the teams that things would return to normal. And things just took a little bit longer to return to normal than was assumed in all of their models and all of their scenarios.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  And the scenarios never pushed it far enough out to what actually ended up happening in reality. And so things much like how Bill talked about, which is that risk tends to come off very, very quickly, but tends to return very incrementally and very slowly. And that pace of that return is quite unpredictable. And it can also come in fits and starts. And I think one of the things that we often forget is that when the market bottomed in March of 2009, the wide prevailing wisdom was that it was going to be a double bottom recovery. And so as risk slowly came back on towards the second half of March 2009,

• 20:24Speaker 03

  and we went into April 2009, there was an assumption that around the summertime, that there was going to be sort of another dip to retest the lows. And so risk was coming on, but was coming on very, very slowly because everybody was sort of hesitating and guarding against another turn and another retest of that bottom. And so, so that's the unpredictability of what happens as things start to recover and start to normalize, is that there's that pace that comes back. It could be a lot slower and take a lot longer than than anticipated.

• 21:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Could you talk, Bill, a bit about the dynamics inside of the venture ecosystem? And how they might be different in this period for very early stage or maybe series A business versus very late stage private businesses that maybe were on their way to going public? I'm thinking most acutely of a company, I'm sure that's been heavily impacted like Airbnb. Maybe that one's too idiosyncratic to explore. But, but generally the differences between what you see in late stage companies versus the earlier stage ones that are still private?

• 21:26Speaker 04

  I already mentioned it, but a lot of the late stage investors are crossover investors. And so they are simultaneously managing a large portfolio of public stocks in addition to their private ones. And so. When the comps comparables come down 30 or 40% in the public market, they know it because they've got another issue in their public fund. And so that's going to affect how they think about private. And part of this expansion phase that we've had for the last 10 years, some entrepreneurs have opted into this mindset that people call SPL or stay private longer. It's times like this where that strategy, I think, gets exposed

• 22:05Speaker 04

  as a fraud that it was, precisely because private company capitalization charts don't go down very well. They're designed to really only go up. And when you start doing down rounds, there's, there's anti-dilution protections that kick in and, and there are things that I won't go into all the details, but it gets super complex. And one of the things that the IPO does is unlocks all of that complexity and converts everyone to common. And it turns out that surviving down periods is a lot easier as a public company than a private company because you've converted all that away. And even the greatest FAANG stocks of all time, if you go back through their histories, have had moments like this where

• 22:50Speaker 04

  they go down 40, 50%. And it's not the end of the world. And so oddly, it's easier as a public company than a late-stage private company to go through these types of periods. So it'll be interesting to see. You may have some companies caught in a situation where based on the comparables that are out there in the public markets, their last round looks really, really high relative to anything they could affect today. And if they run out of money as a private company, with that being true, it can be tricky. Some people will come in with things like converts and whatnot. I wrote a whole blog post about this called "On the Road to Recap," if anyone cares to go deep on that subject.

• 23:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Jayden, before we hit record, you were talking about some of the potential benefits of being small through a period like this. Can you expand on that idea?

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, essentially, that just comes down to numbers. If you're a billion-dollar top-line company and you're looking at sort of like a 10% hit, that is a significant impact. If you're today sitting at about a million dollar run rate and you're looking at 10% hit, it's much more manageable today. And so if you just are able to, in those early startup scenarios, really understand what a potential churn rate or a potential increase is customer payment delays or anything like that, you're able to quantify it and realize that can be contained. And then move past it very quickly and use that as an opportunity to really restructure your customer relationships. So the customers that were never really fully bought into what

• 24:24Speaker 03

  you were doing, never fully engaged into, into what you were doing, and they're sort of the lost leader customers that are taking over company's resources and not exactly using the product as intended, it's probably a good time to sort of cut there and then really double down on the customers that are investing deeply in your solution, making your product a core part of their business. And then coming out of it, this is how you see those really great enterprise software net retention rates that sort of explode in the early days. So like in early days, you can see companies that go from like a $9 million revenue to like $30 million of revenue purely driven by expansion rates. Their customer base doesn't

• 25:05Speaker 03

  really get much bigger. And that often happens by using crisis times to build deeper relationships, get more corely integrated into your customers workflow.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  I also think if in the past three or four years, I think there's been this pressure around things like you'll hear about MVP for minimal file product and like people have just been racing to get these companies going as fast as possible. I think now with this type of environment, you can take a deep breath when you're in that stage of say two to five employees where you got a lot of people working for sweat equity. Take the time to get the product right and the product market fit right and take a little bit longer there and feel a little less of this kind of need to move fast kind of thing. And I think it'll pay off in the long run.

• 25:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Is there anything that you've seen talking to existing portfolio companies this week or recently that you think is interesting or relevant that's bubbled to the surface?

• 26:04Speaker 03

  You know, I think everybody is figuring out companies that are based in California. Most of them have moved to working remotely. Most employees have now switched and team members have switched to working from home. And really understanding sort of like how to collaborate and get work done in these new modes, especially in companies that are like four or five people that are used to coming together on a daily basis. All of a sudden, the new work habits start coming together. And it's always a really good reminder that working remotely is not at all about the software tools that you use, but rather about the culture that you've instituted as a company. And we've talked about this before, Patrick, which is that the main thing that happens

• 26:45Speaker 03

  when you start moving to a remote culture is that asynchronous communication becomes paramount. And so companies like Elastic, who have been remote from day one, have learned well before all these remote software tools were available, that writing things down such that your teams can consume sort of the day's activities asynchronously become extraordinarily important. The level of transparency that you're able to communicate with the day-to-day activities throughout the team become way more important. And so communication and how you're sort of distributing the day's goals and the day's KPIs throughout the company changes. And so those are the things that, like Bill said, it's part of the reexamination of like

• 27:28Speaker 03

  how you're going about and doing your business. And it's okay to take a bit more time to step back and reconsider all of this and just go a bit slower and use this time to your advantage to go slow, frankly, to eventually go fast.

• 27:43Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Bill, any anecdotes from this acute period now or from the past of portfolio companies doing something interesting?

• 27:49Speaker 04

  I'd start just by saying, this notion of being able to make sure that you're fully funded and to adjust your expense rate to a level to where you survive can be really valuable in the long run. We had a case with OpenTable in 01 where there were two other venture-backed competitors. And ironically, I don't even remember their names right now, but they both went bankrupt. So they did not do what I just said. We were able to get lean and mean and thread the needle. And as a result, you know, I think there were network effects, but nowhere in the history of OpenTable's success story does anyone read two companies went out of business. But that's what happened.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  And so there's a scenario where being prudent

• 28:38Speaker 04

  Through one of these types of periods actually led to quite a bit of reward.

• 28:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Any other anecdotes from the past Bill worth sharing?

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have a great one. And this one's it just sometimes constraints lead to creativity. You know, that was a famous phrase that Jobs used to use inside of Apple. And the same thing's true in a business. And I remember for many years, Bob Kegel and I used to check in with Tony Hsieh. We never did Zappos, but we always loved meeting with him. And one day he was telling me, you know, about the business and I asked him what his days payable were to the shoe vendors. And I don't remember the exact number, but he said something like 90. And having worked with Nordstrom at Nordstrom.com, I knew the industry standard was like half that, like 45. And I said, how in the world did you accomplish that?

• 29:28Speaker 04

  And he said, I just called them all and said, if they didn't move to 90, we were going out of business.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  And so there's a what everyone else would have assumed was a hard constraint. But he pushed the edge, you know, in the tough period and enabled quite a bit of cash flow and inventory for his company in doing so. So you never know what you might be able to pull off and if you ask the right hard question.

• 29:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I love the idea that things weird things happen in this period, good and bad. And you should be thinking about ways to affect those in your favor inside of a company. I love that. That's a great story. Chathin, any other thoughts on best practices or kind of what you've seen from the best remote companies? I think writing things down, you know, more asynchronous written communication is a great starting point. Elastic, you've been involved with for a long time and is natively this way. Any, any other best practices you'd be willing to share on remote work that might be helpful to people out there that aren't used to doing that?

• 30:25Speaker 03

  I think that organization and how you think about the company itself and how it's organized also changes. If you're used to just working all in one location and you have created an environment where folks just talk to each other and that's how tasks get done, organizing around that starts becoming a much more organized and systematic thing that you have to do consciously. And it's not something that can just say, okay, hey, let's all jump into a meeting and talk about it. Because that's not necessarily what happens when everybody is working remotely. And so.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Organization of the team itself becomes something that requires more effort and requires it to be naturally more systematic. So in agile development, there are lots of practices about doing daily stand ups. There's like in Scrum, there's like very specific techniques about how to do that. And those are all done in this construct of like everybody being around each other. But all of a sudden, if everybody's separate or remote, or everybody's in multiple time zones, all that means is that as you plan a week out, you kind of have to put the plans in place on Monday morning so that the entire team can plan every single day around those pre-planned organized activities. And so it just takes a bit more conscious

• 31:47Speaker 03

  effort to go around and understand really how your team gets a task done. And then being very conscious about planning those things in a very methodical fashion so that that information gets disseminated across your team and they know exactly when you're going to recheck in and all of that. And so, you know, it just takes a couple of weeks to adjust. But once you start to get into the flow with that new mode of working, things start to become quite natural.

• 32:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Chetan, I know you don't like this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. And it's a thematic question, which is, is there anything going on, maybe that you had been watching, trends that you had been watching, that could be a bottom up observed trend as well, an interesting company coming across your desk, that you think is maybe now even more interesting? So obviously, work from home startups might be an obvious example. Zoom, you know, if you look at Zoom stock in the public markets, it's been an unbelievable story in this one month period. I'm amazed it's still working. We're using it here right now. So kudos to them. Any themes that really have your attention, bottom up or top down, either one of you?

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say that the things that are very capital efficient, that then don't require a lot of resources to get up and running and have sort of natural values, really fast time to value inside of companies, start becoming even more important today. So.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Things that are easy to install and get going very quickly. For example, things that, once installed, very quickly make the customer quite productive. And so this is where all the investments that in product that these companies have made start to pay off really, really well. And especially as everybody starts moving remotely, those that have invested really well in online distribution, for example, especially in enterprise software, do really well. So I had a board meeting of one of my companies that have heavily invested over the years on online distribution. And if you look at their sort of like last two weeks of sales data, it'd be very hard to infer that anything else was going on, anything was going on in the macro world

• 33:48Speaker 03

  because so much of how they think about sales is hitting customers as they're ready to purchase. And so that, and the way they've been able to do that is by investing heavily on product over a number of years. And so it's those product investments, it's those efficiencies, and it's the times that you've put in that you could have gotten around with capital or people now start to pay off really well in these times. And so that's sort of a bottoms up theme that, that is, I think, very important to watch, that ends up becoming an advantage.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  I'd probably steer away from just trying to chase this thing at this moment with like a new company start because the companies that are benefiting from this are ones that were started eight years ago and are flourishing as you run into it, as opposed to reacting quickly. And one thing, you know, I would encourage everyone to keep in mind is that this will pass, just like 01 passed and 08 or 09 passed. And so keeping a level head and not freaking out is generally important. But that's also why I wouldn't start a company for this particular environment because I think, I don't think it's going to stay this way forever.

• 34:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think, Bill, that kind of UGC-based and maybe even some marketplace businesses, not necessarily ones that are being started this week, reactively, but ones that were started more recently are well positioned going into this market?

• 35:10Speaker 04

  It's going to depend, but certainly a UGC company where most of the interaction is online should not see a great deal of disruption from people being asked to work at home. So that would make a lot of sense to me.

• 35:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Any closing thoughts, guys, for people out there in markets in general, running businesses, running investment portfolios, things that you want to leave them with here?

• 35:32Speaker 03

  I think I allude to what Bill said in the last correction in oh eight oh nine is that as investors, we make money by deploying our capital versus like sitting on our capital. And so the main message to all of our entrepreneurs and to entrepreneurs period is that entrepreneurial spirit and entrepreneurial energy and innovation is timeless and it's not dependent on sort of macro environments. And as a firm that's focused on the earliest stages of innovation, we're going about and doing our business and we're open for business. And, you know, I think we're getting more creative about how to be more interactive with our ecosystem, how to open ourselves up to the ecosystem so that as people move to work more remotely,

• 36:15Speaker 03

  how they continue to feel integrated and connected into the broader innovation ecosystem and the entrepreneurial energy. And I think those things will be creatively solved over a couple of weeks. But as Bill just alluded to, situations pass and things take time and things take time to work out, but things pass over time. And so it's important to continue to stay connected and continue to just keep going while taking the necessary precautions, of course, and continue to really have that positive and hopeful energy that makes innovation and entrepreneurial energy so special. Keep that going.

• 36:52Speaker 04

  Patrick, I'd leave everybody with this final thought. I think it was Graham and Dodd before Buffett that said, be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. And I think, you know, now that we're clearly in a fearful world, it is interesting to ask the question for every entrepreneur, depending on stage or where their company is, what does it mean to be greedy right now? And the Tony Hsieh example was a great one, right? Where he improved his competitive position.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  By changing a business tenant in an environment like this. And you know, there may be certain companies that have way more funding than their competitors. And so if things get tough, they might have an advantage, a relative advantage. And, and they might even decide to push more aggressively in this window where someone else has to retreat. And these are all independent, but I do think that if someone can figure out what that question means for them, how can you be reasonably greedy at a time where everyone's panicking? That's a really interesting provocative question for all of these entrepreneurs.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Bill, I love that as a closing spot. I think this conversation, as I knew it would be, is, was, was very nice and balanced, but it's great to close on a somewhat optimistic note. So guys, I really appreciate your time. This will be up much faster than in our past iterations, be up tomorrow morning. So have a great evening and thanks for doing this.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  Thanks, Patrick.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest Like the Best, go to investorfieldguide.com/podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com/bookclub. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter, at Patrick underscore Oshag, O S H A G. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening.