20VC: Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook on The Commonalities of The Truly Great CEOs, How To Hire The Very Best Execs, Why Cash is A Defensible Moat Today & The Pros and Cons of M&A and IPOs

Elad Gil is the Founder @ Color, the startup that shows you your genes can help you make better health decisions. They have raised over $112m in funding from the likes of General Catalyst, CRV, 8VC, Aaron Levie and more incredible names. Elad is also an incredible angel, counting the likes of Airbnb, Stripe, Optimizely, Opendoor and Wish all in his portfolio. Now Elad is adding a new string to his very talented bow with the release of his book, High Growth Handbook, published by Stripe in which Elad interviews 14 leaders from the valley from Marc Andreesen to Reid Hoffman to Patrick Collison. Plus shares his own experiences from Google, growing from 1,500 to 15,000 and Twitter, growing from 100 to 1,500. Not only is this the first book I have read voraciously from cover to cover in a long time but it is now outselling Zero To One and Lean Startup as pre-order. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Elad made his way into the world of startups, came to found 2 companies that sold to Twitter and Google and came to invest in Airbnb, Stripe, Wish etc? 2.) How does Elad define the role of the CEO today? What are the commonalities in those truly great CEOs? How do the very best CEOs hire the very best execs? How do they address role allocation internally? How do they determine between employees that do and do not scale with the firm? Where do CEOs make the most fatal mistakes in high growth startups? 3.) Why are pre-emptive rounds so common today? Why does Elad believe many people will lose a lot of money in them? What advice does Elad give to founders when they are an option? Does Elad believe the lack of liquidity is good for venture this cycle? How does Elad assess the emergence of megafunds? How does this alter and distort the market? 4.) With regards to market share, how should founders prioritise between pricing and market share? Is cash ever a defensible moat? What does Elad mean when he says that "too many people are stuck on Amazon as the winning model"? Why does Elad believe that margins and capital leverage are the unsung heroes of tech? 5.) Why does Elad believe we have seen such a reduction in M&A? Why do many founders not fully assess the financial benefits of being bought by a high growth startup? What are the big questions founders should ask when an M&A opportunity does arise? What does Elad believe are the reasons to avoid IPOing? What are the inherent benefits of going public? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Elad’s Fave Book: Ben Horowitz, Andy Grove As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Elad on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The reality is that hiring amazing developers is hard. Terminal.io is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, setup, and support these teams – from physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But don’t take my word for this, take the word of Eventbrite, former 20VC guest Hims, and Dialpad – all customers and lovers of Terminal. You can find out more today at Terminal.io. Whether you’re starting your own small business or getting serious about making your small business more efficient, you need to invite FreshBooks to the table. FreshBooks makes cloud accounting software that’s so ridiculously easy to use and you’ll quickly understand why over 10 million people use it to radically streamline how they deal with their admin and paperwork. Plus, FreshBooks can handle a lot more than accounting related tasks. Using FreshBooks is kind of like having your own admin assistant who’s got your back, 24/7. To claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial, click here enter Twenty Minute VC in the “how did you hear about us section”. Highfive makes meetings better for thousands of organizations with insanely simple video conferencing designed for meeting rooms. It’s the easiest-to-use solution, with all-in-one hardware and intuitive cloud software. Plus, it’s a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. It’s so easy to use, that there’s no pin codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser, and you’re in the meeting. With customers in over 100 countries, Highfive is already trusted by the likes of Evernote, Expensify, and Betterment and you can learn more by simply heading over to highfive.com.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  We are back for another week on the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. You can find me on Instagram at H Stebbings 1996, where you can suggest both guests and questions for future episodes. But to the show today, and I'm honestly not sure how to introduce him. He's an immensely special member of our ecosystem, who's really helped and supported me since our first episode. So I'm gonna try my best. Elad Gil is the founder at Color, the startup that shows you your genes can help you make better health decisions. And they've raised over 112 million in funding from the likes of General Catalyst, CRV, 8VC, Aaron Levie, and more incredible names. Elad's also an incredible angel, counting the likes of Airbnb, Stripe, Optimizely, Open Door, and Wish, all in his portfolio. And now Elad is adding a new string to his very talented bow with the release of his book, High Growth Handbook,

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  published by Stripe, in which Elad interviews 14 leaders from the valley, from Marc Andreessen to Reid Hoffman to Patrick Collison. Plus, he shares his own experiences from Google, growing from 1500 to 15,000, and Twitter, growing from 100 to 1500. Not only is this the first book that I've read voraciously from cover to cover in a long, long time, but it's now outselling Zero to One and Lean Startup as preorder. I cannot recommend it enough. And if you buy one book this year, it has to be this. Full stop. You have my word. However, before we welcome Elad, the reality is that hiring amazing developers is hard. And it's much harder if you're looking only in a 25-mile radius of your office. And that's where Terminal comes in. Terminal is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality?

• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, set up, and support these teams. From physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But don't take my word for this. Take the word of Eventbrite, former 20 VC guest Hims, and DialPad, all customers and lovers of Terminal. And you can find out more today at terminal.io. And speaking of products people love, whether you're starting your own small business or getting serious about making your small business more efficient, you need to invite Freshbooks to the table. Freshbooks makes cloud accounting software that's so ridiculously easy to use, even I can use it. And you'll quickly understand why over 10 million people use it to radically streamline how they deal with their Admin and paperwork. Oh, and Freshbooks can handle a lot more than accounting-related tasks.

• 2:14Harry Stebbings?

  Using Freshbooks, it's kind of like having your own admin assistant who's got your back 24/7. And to claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial, go to freshbooks.com/VC and enter 20 minute VC in the "How did you hear about us?" section. But with every function, from accounting and finance to software development, communication across the team is really crucial. Enter Hi5. Hi5 simplifies business collaboration with a conferencing platform that builds connected cultures. It's an all-in-one solution, including intuitive cloud software and purpose-built meeting room hardware. Plus, it's a high-quality experience with industry-leading audio powered by Dolby Voice. And it's so easy to use, there's no PIN codes or app downloads. Just click a link in your browser and you're in the meeting. Growing fast with customers in over 100 countries,

• 2:56Harry Stebbings?

  Hi5 is already trusted by the likes of Harry's, Rula La, Expensify, The Atlantic and Betterment, just to name a few. And to learn more and start simplifying your team's video and audio conferencing, visit hi5.com/20vc. That's hi5.com/20vc. However, that's quite enough from me, and so now I'm very, very proud to welcome Elad Gil.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:25Harry Stebbings?

  Elad, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Such exciting news about the book, but thank you so much for joining me again today for round two.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Ah, thanks so much for having me.

• 3:33Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all. I've been so excited for this one. But for those that maybe missed round one of our interview, I'd love to kick off with how did you make your way into what I always call the wonderful world of startups and investing?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, so I moved out to Silicon Valley to join a startup. It was a telecom equipment company, so it was a hardware company back as the last bubble was sort of collapsing in the early 2000s. And at the time, I'd just gotten my PhD and realised that academia wasn't really for me. And so it seemed like the best way to have impact was to go into startups and technology. So that's really what got me into the startup world. On the investing side, it really happened organically where I started a company after I left Google. And right around the same time, a bunch of other friends of mine were starting companies and I kind of fell into the entrepreneurial scene more deeply. And I just started helping out people with advice around fundraising or... advice around selling their companies or doing other things. And so people just start organically asking me if I want to invest as part of rounds that came together.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  And so it was really just helping people out that led to this sort of angel side of what I do.

• 4:30Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And what an angel portfolio it is. Actually, I haven't told you this before, but when people ask about your portfolio, I say, do you know the unicorns of the last decade? Well, E-Labs in all of them. So that's my description of the portfolio, but I do want to break the interview today up into a couple of core components. Starting on all things CEO ship, then maybe VC trends, and then finally the founder trends behind the VC backed companies. How does that sound?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  That sounds fantastic.

• 4:55Harry Stebbings?

  So starting on the leaders that form these crucial part of our ecosystem, the CEO. I've interviewed many and the prevailing wisdom is the dominant role of CEO is management upscaling. I'd love to hear, how do you respond to this? And how do you truly define the role of CEO today?

• 5:10Speaker 02

  I think the role of CEO varies pretty dramatically depending on the scale of the company. And so if you look at what an early company needs to do, so a seed stage company that's just getting started, the surface area is actually quite limited. There's only three things you need to do at an early company. Number one is find product market fit. Number two is don't run out of money, which is another way of saying find product market fit. And number three is don't fight and implode as a founding team. And if you do those three things, then you'll succeed as a seed stage company. As companies start to scale, there's a much larger surface area to what the company has to do and what the CEO has to do. So suddenly there's tons of different items to deal with around internationalization, adding product lines, scaling up the employee base dramatically, hiring executives and functions that you've never dealt with before,

• 5:50Speaker 02

  and a variety of other things. And so the role of the CEO kind of adapts to that complexity and really shifts. And really it consolidates down to four or five different areas. The first is hiring executives and talent. The second is really resource allocation. So determining where capital should go, where people should go. Third is setting strategy, the direction of the company and the overall vision of the company. Fourth is being the external face of the company and that has different aspects. And then fifth is really sort of fundraising and making sure that the companies will capitalize. What you'll find though is as a company scales, a lot more of the CEO's time really goes towards people, management, different issues around people being happy or unhappy, as well as really figuring out how to attract the best people and then deploy them against the areas of sort of strategy that the company needs to accomplish.

• 6:36Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, what a phenomenal lead into my next question on attracting the best people. Cause you've seen many a great CEO, a great CEO yourself. How do the very best CEOs hire the very best execs?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  I think there's a multi-stage process to hiring great people. And I think the definition of great, again, kind of evolves with the scale of the company. And so a key point, I think Ben Horowitz makes this in his book, is, and I think it's a general truism, is to really focus on hiring people who will be great for the next 12 to 18 months of the company. So hiring somebody who's ran a multi-thousand-person team, if you're only a 50-person company, doesn't really make sense because that person is going to get bored with sort of the lower scale that they have to deal with. And similarly, hiring somebody who's only managed two people, if you're looking for somebody who's run, or who's going to run a 100% team within a year, is also sort of the wrong thing to do. And so the first thing is figuring out what's the right type of person in the context of the scale that you have at that time as a company.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  And then secondly, I think one of the best tactics is to really go almost on a tour of the experts in a specific functional area. So for example, if you've never hired a general counsel, or if you've never hired a CFO, really what you want to do is figure out what is great in that role, and that means talking to people who are great at that role. So, for example, if I were to hire a great CFO, I would first go and figure out who are the best CFOs, not just in Silicon Valley, but maybe more broadly in terms of great companies. I'd then go and meet with them and ask them what do they view as their actual job. So how do they define the role of the CEO? I'd ask them how they screen for excellence, what they would look for if they were hiring this person, what sort of questions they would ask. And so really, the first step would be figuring out what's the most important characteristics for that function at the scale of company that you have.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  And then the second, I think there are some generic things that tend to be true for executives in general. One is, do they have functional expertise and excellence? So I wouldn't hire a generalist businessperson to run engineering, for example. I would look for a great person who's run large engineering teams before. Second, ability to hire exceptional people under them and manage those people well. Third is to be very strategic, because I think people always say, "Oh, well, we only need product to be strategic," or "We only need engineering to be strategic," but really every function, when all said and done, can boil down to a strategic function. Next is somebody who's collaborative, works well with their peers. Obviously, there's always going to be a natural tension between sales versus product versus engineering, but they should all be able to work together and get along. And then lastly, somebody who just puts the company's interest before their own and is generally ethical. So I think that last criteria is actually very key.

• 8:56Harry Stebbings?

  I couldn't agree more in terms of the ethical element. I do want to ask one question because it's one that all founders ask me. You mentioned about hiring for the next 12 to 18 months ahead of time there. It's often conventional wisdom that you should hire for the role six months ahead. But founders often say to me, lovely idea, Harry, but I've got constrained runway and having that luxury of six months ahead of time isn't always possible. How do you think about the conventional wisdom of hiring six months ahead and would you agree with it?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  I think you should start looking three to six months in advance of a role that you want to fill. If you're a breakout company and you're truly scaling, usually capital isn't the issue. So traditionally, things are really working well. People are trying to give you money versus you having to take it from them in some sense. And so I do think usually you're capitalized well enough to be able to hire ahead. The key thing is that sometimes companies scale way too fast. And they start to really lose their culture or things start to sort of come apart at the seams because say, for example, you're a hundred person company and you add 300 people over a 12 month period. That means that 75% of the people at the company are brand new. They have no contacts. They don't know how things operate. They don't know the other people very well. There's no cohesion.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  And so as you're scaling very rapidly, the key thing that can happen is that the wheels sort of come off culturally. And so you sometimes actually have to slow down growth rather than accelerate it. Not because of capital constraints. Usually you have the money to do it if things are really working well, but more because you're just going to kind of blow up the way that the company works.

• 10:19Harry Stebbings?

  I am intrigued though, because I spend a lot of time with Jason Lenken, who says that startups, especially in the valley today, with the big incumbents paying huge checks for the exec talent. That startups can either hire the jack of all trades who's maybe very young or the semi burnt out experienced exec whom maybe might be plateauing. How would you respond to that, having seen kind of many scaling startups? Would you agree with that?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  I think when a company is very early, and this comes back to early companies are very different from late companies in terms of their characteristics, or I should say, pre-product market fit companies are very different from post-product market fit companies. If you're pre-product market fit, unless you have a strong network of your own that already exists or you're a known quantity, it's going to be harder to hire the very best people who are going to go out and scale things. And honestly, it may be too early to hire them anyhow because you need to find product market fit. So the type of team that you want very early. Early on is the team that can be geared towards finding product market fit, which generally means either generalists or people who know the industry well enough, but who can do other functions or roles. Because if you only have a five, six, seven person team, you just don't have that many roles available. If you're really scaling, so suddenly your product is starting to work and things are ramping.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  I think the model shifts pretty dramatically. And I think sometimes generalists are good there, particularly if you have GM style roles. But I think if you're looking to hire somebody who's a great CFO or a great VP engineering, hiring a generalist isn't the thing that's going to do it for you. What you're going to want to do is hire somebody who has that excellence that we discussed earlier in a functional area or role, and who's scaled something up themselves or have dealt with a large enough organization that they can be very effective for you. And if your company is truly breaking out and post-product market fit, you should actually be able to hire exceptional people like that. So I do think that the very best people that I know tend to be very hungry. They tend to want to work hard. And often what you need to do is instead of hiring the SVP of engineering from an organization, you hire their key senior director or their key VP,

• 12:09Speaker 02

  who is really excited to take on an entire functional org. So I'm guessing, Jason, I don't know the full context, but I'm guessing Jason Lumpkin's advice is more geared towards a pre-product market fit company. Because once you're post-product market fit, often you have the pick of the very best people that you want.

• 12:22Harry Stebbings?

  You did mention one very specific word there that I want to touch on, which is role. I'd love to discuss role allocation because once these very special individuals have been hired, how have you seen the best CEOs approach who will run what function?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  I think ultimately, there's no correct org structure for a company. And really, there's a series of trade-offs. And so the main trade-offs are sort of twofold. Number one is who in your organization has the bandwidth to take on a function if nobody has the expertise for the function? So say, for example, you're organizing your executive team, and you're trying to figure out, do you have a COO? Or do you have multiple executives? And how do the different things roll up under those executives? So number one is just who's available, frankly, on your team? What are they good at? What sort of bandwidth do they have? And pragmatically, what else can they take on? And then the second thing that you want to think about from an org structure perspective is tie-breaking. Where do you want the decisions to be made? So for example, if you want decisions between product and engineering to be made by you, then both functions should report up to you.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  But if you want product and design to sort it out between the two of them, then maybe you have product and design rolling up into the same person. And so a lot of organizational structure, I think, ultimately has to do with decision making. And then the other piece just has to do with pragmatism in terms of who's in place. So for example, when I was at Twitter, one of the teams that reported to me was the M and A team or corporate development, you know, the team that buys other companies or does certain strategic partnerships. And when I left, I think it went over to the then CFO, eventual COO, Ali Rogani. And before I was at Twitter, it actually rolled up into the general counsel. And the reason that it rolled up to the general counsel was he was a very capable individual. He actually also had trust and safety roll up to him. He had, I think, customer support for a while. And that wasn't driven by the fact that he was a customer support expert.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  It was driven by the fact that there were very few executives in place in the early days of Twitter. And he was good at general management. And so things rolled up to him until a better fit came on board as an executive to actually own that function. And so that was a good example where it was more about bandwidth and pragmatism than anything else.

• 14:15Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. I mean, in terms of kind of owning a function though, sadly, not everyone can scale sufficiently with the company over time. I do have to ask, how do you know when you have an executive or employee that maybe isn't scaling sufficiently? And what are the signs that it's a stretch too far?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  There's a few common signs and sometimes there's very unique signs per person. The first one may just be how frazzled are the people? Are they always late to meetings? Do they seem put out and stressed out? Like you can typically tell these things in terms of somebody running very ragged, which shows that they aren't able to either find the right people or delegate or really scale a function. Second is they sort of collapse into micromanagement. So often the tendency is to get two hands on versus the other way around. If you're a little bit in over your head. Third is whether they're unable to recruit great people for the layer under them. So exceptional people want to work for people that they feel like they can learn from. And if that individual just can't attract great talent, that means that people of that function just don't view them as very competent.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  So for example, say you had a great marketing person that was unwilling to work for your CMO or repeatedly your CMO was unable to ever close anybody senior. That would suggest that that CMO may be out of their league. And then lastly, if they're not thinking far ahead enough or anticipating issues or opportunities. So it could be Team issues, product issues, customer issues. But if basically they seen behind the ball versus six months ahead in terms of planning and thinking forward and what should be done next, then that's usually a sign that they just aren't really ready for that role.

• 15:39Harry Stebbings?

  So if that's maybe employee struggles, sometimes it's not the employees themselves and it's actually the CEO. You've seen many scaling CEOs. Where do CEOs tend to make mistakes or maybe screw things up in not so delicate a term during high growth times?

• 15:53Speaker 02

  You know, it's really interesting. I actually interned at Cisco years ago, like I think back in 2000, I was an intern there. And I talked to somebody who was a very early VP on the Cisco team. And his comment was that growth covers up for an enormous number of mistakes. And so I think every company goes through a stage, especially the founders and the executive team are new, that feels very chaotic and where things really seem kind of broken. And in general, every mistake that you can imagine that could have happened has happened at one Hagworth company or another. And in general, startups with product market fit tend to have enormous momentum and actually be anti-fragile. And so from the outside, these companies appear incredibly well-run. But once you go inside, you're like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe they survived, you know, all these mistakes. I think the most common mistakes tend to cluster into three or four areas.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Number one, the way that you communicate to everybody really needs to shift. You need to start getting very repetitive. You need to focus on more written communication or large group communication versus one-on-one. And you need to really think through as a CEO, how to cascade communication down a hierarchy. So the first issue is just that, as mentioned, if you have 100 people and you suddenly scale to 500, 80% of the entire team is new in the course of a year. People just don't have context and that repetition and that cascading down through your team to say the same thing over and over. Why are we here? What are we doing? Why are we doing what we're doing? What are our goals? What are our simple processes that we need to follow? Like those things are very important to reinforce and often founders don't do that initially. Second is this point of hiring around the wrong timeframe, which we discussed,

• 17:18Speaker 02

  where again, people tend to in general hire executives that are either too senior or too junior for the timeframe that they're in. Third, on the talent side, is really keeping people who are merely good versus people who are exceptional. So there's a lot of loyalty going both ways between you and your early employees. And sometimes you'll continue to promote people beyond sort of where they should be. From a scale perspective, and they may actually benefit dramatically from a mentor or somebody more senior than themselves coming in and taking over an organization that they've run for a while. And there's too much of a temptation to keep around people who are okay versus awesome. And so that's a very common mistake that people make. And then I think the last two things would be thinking of your company as a product organization instead of also a distribution organization. So most companies tend to succeed because they come up with a great product

• 18:02Speaker 02

  and then they build distribution against that product because it's 10x better than anything else. And then what they forget is now that they have distribution, that's a great offensive asset and potentially a moat. And so a lot of companies from the 80s and 90s and early 2000s would go and they'd either buy other companies and push them through that distribution channel or come up with new products rapidly. And so that's everything from Microsoft, starting with their OS and then launching different components of Office, which they either bought or built themselves and distributing it as a bundle. It could be Google distributing things like Chrome or Android or other things through their distribution. My, Facebook has made a number of very smart acquisitions that they then helped really push distribution on. And so I think the most recent wave of companies tend to be much less aggressive about reimagining themselves as a distribution-centric company and not just a product-centric company. And so I think that's a pretty common mistake early on.

• 18:47Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, what a breakdown of a team and CEO there. But I do want to slightly move away from the CEOs and the companies now to maybe the ecosystem and the VCs around them. I think recently a dominant trend we've seen is the rise of preemptive rounds. I have to ask you that, why are they now so common?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  I think there's a few drivers of preemptive rounds. So in a normal venture round, as you know, typically what happens is there's some big milestone or step function in distribution or customer adoption that happens that then prompts a venture round to happen. In other words, a seed company will suddenly raise a Series A when they feel like it's time to pour money on a problem. Or maybe Series B is a better example because Series As now have increasingly kind of blurred in their purpose. What's been happening more recently is that venture capitalists are coming in much earlier than they ever would with much less data than they normally would to basically offer the terms that would have happened six or 12 months later from a progress perspective for the company. And so they're basically preempting before the company normally would have been considered ready for that next round. I think there's a few drivers to it.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  One is funds are just getting much bigger and so there's more and more of these billion dollar funds, which means that one percent of the fund is $10 million and before one percent of the fund was $3 million. And so the amount of capital that they have available to deploy is much higher, which means they can take sort of bigger bets from an optionality perspective with a hope that they can buy more ownership in companies that will really work and therefore have better fund economics. The second is there's really fewer great companies right now, I think, than there were, say, five years ago. And so this is a very qualitative thing, but it does feel to me like the average company has gotten worse rather than better and the number of companies has gone up dramatically. I think there's now a few thousand venture-backed companies a year or seed companies, I should say, a year, when a few years ago was maybe a quarter of that.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And so that means that the ones that really seem to be working, people try to double down on more aggressively. The third reason is the outcomes are bigger than ever. I mean, nobody would have ever thought that Facebook or other companies could be worth half a trillion or more after just a decade in operation. And so since the outcomes are so much larger, the value of a company earlier tends to get bigger. And then fourth is that a few venture funds have actually shown that continuing to double down on the same companies in their portfolio has actually worked out extremely well. I mean, Sequoia's investment in WhatsApp was brilliant and there they just kept doubling down and more or less being the sole investor throughout the life of the company. Similarly, Andreessen Horowitz made a very large bet into GitHub and that's really worked out for them. You know, General Catalyst has participated in big ways in companies like Stripe.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  And so I think some of these venture funds have really proven to themselves that the model works and therefore they should continue to double down in very big ways.

• 21:20Harry Stebbings?

  So two subsequent questions from hearing that, Elad. First is you're an investor as well as an operator. How do you assess and analyze preemptive rounds, maybe when investing?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Honestly, I think it's pretty tough because what you're trying to do is guess an extra round forward or an extra 12 to 18 months forward in terms of where a company should be. And so really you kind of have to start thinking about it in terms of TAMs or total addressable markets. In other words, how big could this thing really be if it really works? And then how do I want to think about investing relative to that? And honestly, I think preemptive rounds are best suited for venture capitalists who have large funds because I think it's much harder as an individual to manage capital. Relative to guessing whether something will work or not. Now, that said, sometimes there's companies that you just know are going to work. Airbnb consistently was one where I think it was at least clear to a subset of people that the traction was so strong and the momentum was so strong that it was really going to be a massive franchise. And therefore, that would have been one that today probably would have gotten preempted.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  And it would have made a lot of sense to do so. So I do think that traditionally, there are companies where the traction was clear, but the size of market was more self-evident than others. Ultimately, it comes down to absolute market size versus anything else. I do think a lot of people will be making mistakes on the preemptive side, though, because they're basically investing ahead of time with little data evaluations that aren't merited by the data. And so you either have to be extremely good or extremely lucky. And most people aren't that good or lucky.

• 22:42Harry Stebbings?

  If you put on the operator and advisor hat, what advice would you give to founders where maybe this preemptive round is really a tangible option and possible?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  I think in general, many preemptive rounds work well for founders from the perspective of it de-risks the future of the company for them. So in other words, they can raise money ahead of where they normally would. And that means that they have the capital to keep going for longer. The downside of that, of course, is maybe they should have exited after the seed round. Maybe it's a bad market and the investor is giving them a lot of capital because they're a great founder versus because it's actually a good opportunity. And then the founder ends up locked in for a much longer time period, pursuing something that maybe just shouldn't have worked. And so I think the downside of preemptive rounds and extra capital is it also locks in the entrepreneur to a longer story. And it removes the option value of actually exiting at a valuation where lots of people would have bought them. I think that's one big point. The second point is if somebody preempts multiple rounds for you,

• 23:34Speaker 02

  you end up with perhaps too much concentration in the hands of a single investor, where they can really end up controlling the board, or they may have a much stronger voice. When really, what you may want as the company continues to evolve is a few different investors or a few different voices around the table to help give different advice. Because sometimes people give conflicting advice and that's actually good. And if you only have a single investor, maybe there's only one voice heard. So I think there are some trade-offs to taking a preemptive round.

• 23:58Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned one of the drivers of these preemptive rounds being the just hugely phenomenal exits that quite frankly, I didn't even know one anticipated. One other Dominant trend in ecosystem now, though, is the extended period of privatization for companies. I believe we have close to 580 billion in illiquid company stock. So is this lack of liquidity good for venture this cycle, do you think, Elad?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  I think the lack of liquidity is, it depends on how you define liquidity. So liquidity can either be defined as people's ability to exit a position, or it could mean a company actually getting bought or going public. And people always say that in the short run, markets are a voting machine, and in the long run, they're a weighing machine. And I think what's happened is we have a whole generation of startups that have never been weighed by the public markets. And I think, for example, that, you know, half of the unicorns are probably dramatically overvalued. And if they were public companies, their valuations would get chopped down pretty dramatically relative to where they are today. So I think for a subset of companies, it's actually been positive for them to be private for longer, but it may be bad for the ecosystem overall because it's tying up a lot of capital and talent

• 25:02Speaker 02

  into pockets that may not deserve that capital and talent as much. From a venture fund perspective, I think it's had both positive and negative impacts. The positive impact is that VCs can continue to mark up certain companies in their portfolio and raise follow-on funds. And therefore, if half of these unicorns should really be worth dramatically less than what they're worth, some of these venture funds perhaps shouldn't have been able to raise future funds. And so the lack of liquidity in some sense actually helped them from that perspective. Obviously, the negative is that capital hasn't cycled back as much, except for some of the big secondaries that have happened, which means that there's been much less liquidity in the system. Angels haven't turned over capital, which means they, I know a few angels have dropped out entirely because they just ran out of money to keep investing. And ultimately, it removes the ability to really measure what's working.

• 25:46Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned the raising of future funds there. The other kind of dominant trend is the rise of mega funds from SoftBank to Sequoia, to Lysspeed, to General Catalyst, all billion dollar, or in SoftBank's case, multi-multi-billion dollar. Everyone is raising record amounts. What do you make of this? And is this a sign of a bubble?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  I think that the sort of mega fund that's mattered the most in terms of impact is probably SoftBank, simply because at $100 billion, SoftBank is the equivalent of 100 General Catalysts or 12 Sequoia funds. So just the sheer scale of capital that they have. is pretty immense. So I think that's been the thing that's impacted the ecosystem the most. I do think these billion dollar funds will effectively lead to an ongoing trend of preemption. And it also means that certain VCs will double down much more aggressively on companies that are working and potentially shut out others from participating in their companies. And so I think we may see a trend towards VCs being more defensive of their companies versus more collaborative. And I think in general, venture capital has gone through waves where VCs wanted to own as much as possible

• 26:47Speaker 02

  of a single company and push everybody else out. And then there have been waves where VCs have wanted to spread risk and collaborate as much as possible. And I think we're about to enter a wave where people are going to have sharper elbows and try and sort of defend their turf in terms of owning as much as possible of the companies they're involved with.

• 27:01Harry Stebbings?

  For sure. And I'm seeing that already, actually. But I do have one final question before we discuss founder considerations, which is I'm seeing especially kind of multi-stage money increasingly in kind of the much larger funds dipping even into seed rounds. What advice would you have to founders who are contemplating taking these mega fund money at such an early stage?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  I think ultimately it depends on the fund and the relationship you have to them and the degree to which you think they can be helpful. So I would really focus on the helpfulness of the investor versus the valuation that they give you or anything else. You know, for my own companies, as I've run them, I've started two companies and in both cases, there have been rounds where I've taken lower valuations to get a better investor on board or somebody that I thought would be more helpful. So I do think it's really important to make that trade off for that consideration and really ask, what is this person bringing to the table? The other thing I would keep in mind is that people who tend to invest late may be good sources of capital later. And if they own a lot of the company early, they're just not going to participate later. So there may be some funds that you want to sort of keep to the side for when they're willing to deploy larger

• 28:01Speaker 02

  checks, because those large checks can actually be very valuable later in the life of the company.

• 28:05Harry Stebbings?

  For sure. No, I think it's important to sometimes keep those that price out later rounds out for sufficient time. But before we dive into the quickfire, I do want to switch from the world of VC to the big questions that founders have to face. So one of the main questions relates to market share and land grab scenarios that occurs today. Frequently, there's the question of pricing versus market share. From your perspective and experience, what should founders focus on? And what would your advice be?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  I think that in Silicon Valley, too many people are stuck on Amazon as the primary model for what will succeed as a company. And Amazon is actually the exception versus the rule. In other words, Amazon is a company that went for very high market share with very low margins. And the reason it did that is because it's a retailer. That was actually Walmart's strategy from an offline perspective before, and it works extremely well for retail. But it tends to work really badly for almost everything else. And really, if you look at the other most valuable companies in the world, be it Google or Apple or Microsoft, these actually tend to be companies with extremely high profit margins. And they also tend to have superior pricing, so they can charge more for their products versus less. And in many cases, they can keep raising their prices, like Microsoft used to do pretty aggressively over time.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  And so I think that's really the model that most people should aspire to, is how can you both have market share, which all of them have gotten to over time, but also how can you have high prices? And Marc Andreessen, I think, has a great quote on this, where he says that if somebody were to ask him what to write on a billboard, and you could only write one thing, he would write raise prices. And I think that's great advice, because having higher margin means that ultimately you can use that cash flow in really aggressive ways, both to build out better R and D and a bigger team that can build more features faster and therefore win in the market. But it also means you can actually afford customer acquisition. And buying customers actually has real costs, be it through salespeople or online ads or whatever your customer acquisition channel is. So higher prices actually gives you way more leverage on your business and in general is something that founders should be seeking out versus avoiding.

• 29:55Harry Stebbings?

  I'm too intrigued not to ask this. You mentioned that kind of improving margins and merging that with kind of the rise and rise of larger and larger rounds. I have to ask, is cash ever a defensible moat, you lad?

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I think that despite large amounts of capital in the system, there does become a point where it becomes reasonably uneconomical for other people to compete from a capital perspective. I don't think that there's ever been a business where the sole defensible point is capital, but it's more about whether you can use it as leverage on your business. And in particular, if you have a very strong LTV or lifetime value for a customer, you can really use it to drive outsized customer acquisition and use that as a moat. And so I think that Google was a great example, where people always talk about its growth as very organic, when in reality, Google was Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire customers via things like toolbar distribution. They bought the homepage of Firefox for many years. They basically did whatever they could to push distribution as hard as possible.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  And it's sort of one of the unwritten stories of Silicon Valley is about how aggressive they really got. And the reason is, first, they understood the lifetime value of their customers and they knew that search customers are very profitable for their advertisers. And then secondly, they really understood the network effects around data. As they got better and better data from more and more customers, that improved the quality of the search results, which also made them the best destination for people to do search. And so I think time and again, one of the things that people miss is the degree to which capital leverage combined with extremely valuable customers is a winning formula. Facebook ultimately ended up doing the same thing where they were literally buying ads in Europe against individuals' names so that they could convert those people onto Facebook as a platform. I just, I just think that margins and capital leverage are sort of the unsung heroes of technology.

• 31:34Harry Stebbings?

  No, I absolutely love that. That's a fantastic explanation to that question. I do have to ask, navigating kind of market share successfully, obviously then exit becomes an option either M and A or IPO as both Google and Facebook obviously did. If we start on M and A, we've seen a large reduction in the M and A market. So starting on that, why does so little M and A today?

• 31:53Speaker 02

  I think there's two waves of M and A that have sort of slowed down. The first one is there aren't as many breakout companies who are buying talent as they're breaking out. Like Coinbase has recently announced a number of acquisitions and I think they've been very smart about it. But any company that has a market cap of a few billion or more, in my opinion, if they're new, should actually be buying up other companies pretty rapidly. And I think in some cases, those teams just haven't hired a corp dev person or they haven't professionalized the function, or the founders have not really focused on that as a channel for bringing on talent or filling product holes. And I think part of it is just a lack of familiarity. And part of it is the prices of these companies have gone up a bit. Although again, if a company's not working, which is most companies eventually, you should be able to buy them reasonably inexpensively.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  The second big trend on the M and A side is larger companies are doing less large strategic buys. And really, a lot of the corporate buying in technology seems to be shifting outside of the technology market for people. Who want to enter it. So you know, it's GM buying Cruise or it's Dollar Shave Club getting acquired or things like that in terms of large exits. And so that gap in terms of large company buys or tech company buys has actually been pretty surprising to me, especially given the current market caps of some of these large players. And I think in part is just driven by the fact that we're at the end of a, or not at the end, but we're eight years into sort of a boom cycle in the public markets. And that's really trickled into private markets with the valuations of these companies really getting inflated.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  And so part of it may just be a value equation where people are saying if half of the unicorns aren't really worth a billion dollars or more, what can we really pay to acquire these things that otherwise would be very attractive assets? So I think part of it too is just the private market pricing is a little bit out of whack.

• 33:29Harry Stebbings?

  You've seen many M and As and advisor to many founders who've been acquired. What are the big questions that founders should be asking when this opportunity does arise?

• 33:37Speaker 02

  I think first and foremost is just whether or not to engage in the M and A event itself or to talk to people. I think once you start talking as a founder, you start going down that path where mentally, you've effectively started spending the money that you'd get if you got acquired or thinking about how much easier your life would be. And so I think the first thing is to decide whether to even have the conversation because it's not an explorer and you can always back away. Often you kind of get seduced into it. So number one is should you even consider it? The second thing is, will it be a good home for you? Ultimately, unless you're truly selling an asset in a competitive situation where there's five buyers who each want to buy your company for a billion dollars, in most cases, you're going to have to stick around at the acquire for many years. And so I think the second thing to ask yourself, is that really the place where you and your team will be happy?

• 34:21Speaker 02

  And will you thrive there and will your product thrive there? And so I think the second question is just sort of happiness. And then lastly is the one of financial return for your shareholders and for yourself. And these aren't meant to be in order. It's more, you know, these are three different things that you need to consider. And on the financial side, I actually think people tend to undercount the value of exiting early to a breakout company. Because if a company is truly breaking out and it still has a five or 10 or 20 X on top of it, then that magnifies the impact of the acquisition that you just had. So for example, when I sold my last startup or my second to last startup to Twitter, we sold in part because we were really excited about Twitter and we thought we could have a lot of impact there and I thought my team would be really happy there. But we also sold in part because we thought that Twitter would still have a 10 or 20x on top of the baseline of the acquisition.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  And at the time Twitter was valued a little bit more than a billion dollars and so that that proved out to be true. And so anything that we sold to them got amplified by 10x or more. And so that means similarly that the financial outcome that you can have can be dramatically larger. Then if you just kept going and went through multiple rounds of dilution, even if you exited in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 35:22Harry Stebbings?

  No, I completely agree. I think it's also often a forgotten element. I do have one more element to touch on on the M and A front. A Hunter Walk recently tweeted about Mike and Kevin not getting enough credit for staying and leading Instagram and Facebook. How do you think about founder retention and engagement post M and A?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  There's a few really great examples of founders who've stuck around after getting acquired. So for example, John Hanke stuck around Google for many years after getting acquired for Keyhole. And then he eventually ran, I think, all of Google Maps and local and other areas. And he had an enormous impact through doing that at Google. Similarly, Andy Rubin was acquired when Android was, I think, about 11, 12 people. And then obviously that led to this amazing handset OS and sort of platform for the world. So fundamentally, I think if you can retain some of these great founders, you can really end up with outsized outcomes for your companies. When all's said and done, it largely boils down to three things. Number one, the level of responsibility that that individual has and can they really have big impact? Like many founders are driven by the impact that they can have. And so can you create a platform for them by which they can do that?

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Number two is frankly, keeping politics and bureaucracy out of their way. Founders tend to be least happy when they have to deal with those sorts of things, just given the personality traits of many founders. And so creating a shield or protection for them is important. So for example, Instagram was allowed to run pretty independently from the rest of Facebook. Similarly, Android actually had its own hiring practices, which at the time was Anthema at Google. And it was set up so that they could really run their team very independently, hire independently, make decisions independently. And that was a very explicit choice so that they didn't have to deal with everything else that would normally slow them down. And then lastly, just making sure that the financial rewards and outcome are there.

• 36:59Harry Stebbings?

  And then the final element that I have to touch on pre quick fire round, being my favorite of course, is the element of IPOs. Today, the prevailing wisdom is to Lay as long as possible. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And first, what are the reasons to avoid IPOs, Zelad?

• 37:12Speaker 02

  You know, I touch upon this in my book in a in a conversation with Keith Rivoi from COSLA. You know, when all is said and done, I think there's a couple of things that are pointed to as the negative implications of an IPO. And I think some of them are very correct and some of them are very overweighted in the minds of founders. And in general, I think there's a class of founders between 2008 and 2012, or some other sort of overlapping time period, who seem exceptionally averse to going public. And I think they're sort of overstating the case for avoiding it. And a number of founders that I know who have taken their companies public, and they're actually very happy that they did so. I think Aaron Levie from Box would be a good example of that. In general, the things that people point to is, number one, transparency. So you do have to reveal a lot more information and you do sometimes reveal things that you don't want your competitors to know. So I view that as a true negative.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Right before Google went public, I remember going to an all hands, where I think it was Larry Page who said that, for many years, Google was like the kids in the candy store that nobody knew about, because they knew what a great business search was and the ads business that they built. But nobody had transparency into it. And so they wanted to stay private so that nobody would ever know how great their business was. The second negative that I think is a real one is people do end up watching stock price, especially if you're a subscale market cap company, you know, under five billion, in which case you're going to have a much more volatile ride typically. And there's ways to correct like for that, like RSUs and other things to sort of smooth out the financial reward for people with market cap. But that does tend to sort of self-correct over time and go with time in terms of people, people sort of self-correct for over watching it, but it does happen. There's a bunch of stuff that I think aren't as negative as people really say they are.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  And I think Keith actually covered these pretty well in the book. Examples of this would be, one fear is that you become less innovative if you go public. But if you think about it, the most innovative companies in technology are actually the big public ones, right? I would argue that Google and Apple and, you know, Amazon are the most innovative companies in the world. And they do that as public companies. And so I do think this whole, you have to focus on the short term and you can't do anything innovative is incorrect. I think what you need to do is set expectations with shareholders and have shareholders self-select in the public markets into ones who really believe in that long-term vision. And then you have to be willing to sort of buck the ride a bit as things go up and down from a stock price perspective. As you do make some of these innovative changes. So a friend of mine runs a technology recruiting firm and he has data that shows that when a company goes

• 39:23Speaker 02

  public, they actually close more candidates at lower price than right before they went public. And he thinks the reason is that people really value the stock as a liquid asset. And they also view it as less risky and they can actually understand the company now. And so it's sort of a sign of quality. So I think the hiring thing tends to be something people point to that is incorrect. And then lastly, a lot of people point to overhead and process. And they say it's going to be a lot more overhead, it's going to be more process. And that's true, but it's not as terrible as people think. You will need to make a set of hires on the finance team or on a compliance team. But for a 500 or 1,000 or a 5,000 person company, that additional headcount is actually going to be incremental. It's not going to be the primary driver of the business. So I do think people tend to overstate that one, although that's a real consideration.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  The other reason that people tend to point to public markets is opening up new pools of capital to invest in a company. And for a true breakout company, sometimes that gets a little bit overstated. Because as you've seen, Uber and Airbnb and a few other companies have been able to raise literally five or $10 billion, in the case of Uber, more than that. And so the scale of capital available is actually quite high now on the private market side. If you've really hit sort of a top few percent. But if you're not one of those mega, mega companies, public markets may actually be a good way to raise additional capital and find new sources of capital over time.

• 40:35Harry Stebbings?

  Now, Elad, I am so excited for this. This is obviously always my favorite, the quickfire round. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts in about 60 seconds or less. Are you strapped in?

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm ready to go.

• 40:46Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so your favorite book and why?

• 40:48Speaker 02

  On the business side, I really like books by Andy Grove, Ben Horowitz and Reid Hoffman. I think they've all written really fantastic books. And they each provide a different view on tactical advice for either individual, in the case of Reid Hoffman, around things like, you know, your own personal roadmap and your sort of startup of you, or some of the books that Andy or Ben have written around tactical startup advice. Reid actually has a great book coming out on scaling called Blood Scaling later this year that I'm really excited to have come out. So that's the business side of it.

• 41:17Harry Stebbings?

  What would you most like to change about Silicon Valley and VCE, Elad?

• 41:20Speaker 02

  I think the biggest shift over the last decade is the amount of optimism in Silicon Valley, I feel, has really eroded. And so I think we need to More optimism back. I think people are doing amazing work. They're accomplishing great things. They're helping society on a fundamental level. And I think that's not talked about enough or that's almost sneered at sarcastically through shows like Silicon Valley. And so I think bringing back optimism in a bigger and deeper way is really important.

• 41:42Harry Stebbings?

  What was the most memorable interview from the book and why? I'm excited for this one.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  There was a ton of interviews I really enjoyed. I mean, Reid Hoffman talking about boards and board members or Marc Andreessen talking about a variety of topics. Or, I mean, the list goes on. There's, there's great people in the book. I'd say the one that I enjoyed the most was Clara Hughes Johnson, the CEO of Stripe. And in particular, there's an appendix to the interview called The Guide to Working with Claire, which is a guide that she issued at Stripe when she joined, which basically said, here are the ways that you can work with me that are most effective. And I think that every executive or potentially every manager should basically write up the one-page description of how to engage them, how to work with them. What are the things that work well or don't work well with them? I thought that was a really outstanding insight.

• 42:24Harry Stebbings?

  I thought it was so good. I did one myself and gave it to my partner Fred. He wasn't too pleased to receive a guide to working with me.

• 42:32Harry Stebbings?

  Considering it's a two-man team, it was a little.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was about to say, two-person team, it's a.

• 42:36Harry Stebbings?

  It's a different story. You're a mentor to many, you lad. Who's your mentor and what's been the biggest learning?

• 42:42Speaker 02

  I think there's so many people that I've learned from over, you know, the last 10, 15 years that it'd be an opportune to mention just one. I think, you know, a number of the people that I've interviewed in the book, I view as strong mentors. I think when all said and done, the key thing to navigating a career is to figure out who's the network or group of people that you kind of want to work with repeatedly. And how do you increase the amount of time spent with those individuals? And so my focus often has been less on who's a mentor to me and more, what's the community of people that I really want to be part of?

• 43:11Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more with that. Tell me, the biggest surprise through the book writing process?

• 43:16Speaker 02

  I think it was just how much there was to learn from the interview side. So the book basically has two portions. There's the sort of tactical how-tos that I wrote. How do you buy a company for the first time? How do you do a reorg? How do you hire executives? How do you manage your board? Things like that. But then I did interviews to supplement that with Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, Miram Nefesi, Aaron Levie, Shannon Stube. There's, there's a long list of people, Patrick from. Stripe, etc. And I think the biggest surprise for me was just how much I learned from those different individuals and for those interviews. And it's not surprising because these are world class individuals, but it was more just how much I enjoyed those conversations and how much I took away from them was really awesome.

• 43:53Harry Stebbings?

  What's your biggest strength and weakness, Elad?

• 43:56Speaker 02

  I think on the strength side, it's probably very strong work ethic and focus on ongoing reinvention. So I'm one of those believers that work-life balance means you really need to enjoy your work if you want to be good at it. And I do think you need to find work-life balance, but fundamentally, often that means work really hard too. Weaknesses, I think, is really sort of a late realization on the value of platforms and thinking through how to build them. And so I think one of my big takeaways over the last five years is the degree to which platforms can really accelerate the impact that people can have.

• 44:25Harry Stebbings?

  And then I want to finish today, and this one I'm fascinated by. So many options for you, but the next five years for you, and what does that personal roadmap look like?

• 44:33Speaker 02

  I think it's really about moving from a situation where I did a lot of stuff individually to a situation where I can get leverage on time. And so that's things like this book, which is a way to try and codify a lot of things that I've just had as one-on-one conversations with founders over the years around scaling companies. It could be things like I've been helping out a crypto fund called Electric Capital, and I'm just there half a day a week. But you know, that's a way to sort of get a little bit of leverage on time. And so really the big question in my mind is, how can I get ultimate leverage so that over the next five years I can do as much as possible and work with as many great people as I can?

• 45:06Harry Stebbings?

  Now, Elad, I want to say a personal thank you to you. Seriously, as I said to you, I read very few books. This was the first book in years I've read, cover to cover. It's by far my favorite in a long, long time. So thank you so much for providing such an incredible resource to the startup community.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Ah, no, thanks so much for reading and for having me on the show.

• 45:23Harry Stebbings?

  It's been a pleasure.

• 45:27Harry Stebbings?

  And I do want to reiterate what a fantastic resource it is for the community. And you can now buy it on Amazon. It is live today. It'd be fantastic to hear your comments on Twitter. Likewise, it'd be brilliant to see you behind the scenes here at the 20 Minute VC. We're on at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs on Instagram. And you can find Elad Gil on Twitter at Elad Gil. However, before we leave, Today, the reality is that hiring amazing developers is hard and it's much harder if you're looking only in a 25 mile radius of your office. And that's where Terminal comes in. Terminal is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Well, Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, set up and support these teams.

• 46:08Harry Stebbings?

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• 46:51Harry Stebbings?

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• 47:35Harry Stebbings?

  And to learn more and start simplifying your team's video and audio conferencing, visit hi5.com/20vc. That's hi5.com/20vc. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you a truly very special Founder's Friday.