20VC: Why Cheque Size & Follow On Decision-Making Does Not Matter, Why Intelligence Is Overrated & Why You Should Do Everything You Can To Make Other People Successful with Anthony Pompliano, Founding Partner @ Full Tilt Capital

Anthony Pompliano is the General Partner @ Full Tilt Capital, the firm that wants to reinvent friends and family investingby democratizing access to opportunity for the thousands of founders who are underserved. They have done 22 deals in just 90 days and shows no signs of pulling back. Prior to VC, Anthony lead the growth team at Snapchat and before that ran product and growth teams @ Facebook. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Anthony made his way from leading startup exec with Facebook and Snapchat to being General Partner @ Full Tilt Capital? 2.) Anthony has previously said that he likes to 'prioritize the founder over the company', is this any different to the traditional 'founder-friendly VC'? How does Anthony like to stress test the founder's ability to withstand stress *& establish comfort with unpopular decisions? 3.) How does Anthony respond to suggestions that 39 investments in 9 months is 'spray and pray'? Why does Anthony believe that cheque size and follow on allocation does not matter? 4.) How does Anthony differentiate between 'picking' and 'building' investments? Why do most VCs go wrong with their thesis around this and the belief in the 'J Curve'? Is it possible that the traditional J curve does not correspond to outsized returns? 5.) How does Anthony respond to Hunter Walk's thesis around the presence of 'dark deal flow'? With such a growing portfolio, how does Anthony scale his ability to add value with the ever scaling portfolio number? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Anthony’s Fave Book: Rich Dad Poor Dad Anthony’s Fave Blog/Podcast: Polina Marinova: The Profile Anthony’s Most Recent Investment: Everly Well As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Anthony on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Zoom is the No 1 Video and WebConferencing Service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and business instant messaging. Plus, it is the easiest solution to use, buy and scale with the most straightforward pricing. Do not take our word for it, Zoom’s their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100m funding round says it all. Zoom is a must for your business. ViewedIt is a free video-recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. ViewedIt enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the Vidyard platform, video creators will know who is watching what, and which video messages resonate with viewers. They’ll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. Find out more and download ViewedIt for free at vidyard.com/viewedit.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is the 20 Minute VC with me, your host, Harry Stebbings, and you can ask any questions or give me any feedback on Snapchat at H Stebbings with two Bs. It would be great to see you there, and all ads get a personal thank you from me. But to the show today, and we have a very different guest for you today, outside the realms of the traditional Silicon Valley ether. And so I'm delighted to welcome Anthony Pompliano to the show today. So Anthony is the general partner at Full Tilt Capital, the firm that wants to reinvent friends and family investing by democratizing access to opportunity for the thousands of founders who are underserved. They've done 22 deals in just 90 days and shown no signs of pulling back. Prior to VC, Anthony led the growth team at Snapchat, and before that ran product and growth teams at Facebook. I also want to say a big thank you to the wonderful Eric Torrenberg

• 0:42Harry Stebbings?

  for the intro to Anthony today, without which this episode would not have been possible. But before we head into the episode today, a lot of people ask me, "Harry, you do so many calls and interviews, but what do you use?" My response? Zoom, the number one video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to an array of activities, including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and business IM, just to name a few. And it's the easiest solution to use, buy, and scale, and for sure, the most straightforward pricing. But hey, don't take my word for it. Their partnership with Sequoia in their latest $100 million funding round says it all. Zoom really is a must-checkout for your business, I cannot emphasize that enough. And you can find them at zoom.us. Speaking of video, though, to power your company there with Zoom,

• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

  you must check out Viewdit. Viewdit is a free video recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for personalized communications. Viewdit enables sales professionals, executive leaders, and customer support teams to easily record personalized videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the video platform, video creators will know who is watching what and which video messages resonate with which users. They'll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. And you can find out more and download Viewdit for free at video.com/Viewdit. But it's now time for me to shut up, and I'm delighted to hand over to Anthony Pompliano, general partner at Full Tilt Capital.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:18Harry Stebbings?

  Anthony, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. I've heard so many wonderful things from Eric Torrenberg, but thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Got it, man. Thanks for having me.

• 2:27Harry Stebbings?

  I'd love to start this day with a little bit about you and how you made your way into what I call the wonderful world of VC with Full Tilt.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So I served in the US Army for a while, then had two technology companies that were both acquired and then went and worked at Facebook and Snapchat, running a couple of different product and growth teams. And then in 2016, started Full Tilt Capital, which is an early-stage venture capital fund based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

• 2:55Harry Stebbings?

  And we're going to start today with probably one of the most contentious topics on the show. So a statement that you've said before to me, and that is you like to prioritize the founder over the company when evaluating investment opportunities. So talk to me about this. And is this really any different to the founder-friendly VC theme that's so prevalent amongst VCs today?

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that there's two aspects to evaluating companies, right? So there's the idea, and then there's the people who are going to go execute that idea. Most of the investors who talk about being founder-friendly, they're talking about the investment terms, the way they interact with founders, et cetera. But they're still making decisions based on closer to a 50/50 on the company idea and the founders. From our perspective, we really focus more 90/10. So 90% on the founders, 10% on the idea and market. The idea and market are obviously important, and we want to understand kind of what's the vision for that. But if you think of an early-stage startup, we're investing incredibly early. We're talking $5 million valuation or lower usually. The only thing that is going to remain constant in the chaotic environment of building the company are the founders.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  So the idea may change, the team may change, the market conditions may change, all of these things can change, but the founders are probably going to be one of the only, if not the only, thing that stays constant. And so we want to make sure we make a really intelligent and intentional decision about who we back. And so part of this is not only believing in the people that we invest in, but it's also having a strong propensity to ensure that we have a diversification of founders. And so if you think of this From the portfolio theory, a lot of investors will say, well, I want to have a lot of companies across many different verticals. So I want to maybe have an enterprise SaaS. I want to have a consumer software. I want to have this. I want to have that. The way we look at it is we want to have a diversification of founders.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  So we want to have men. We want to have women. We want to have African Americans, white, black, Asian, you know, kind of all across the board. And so what ends up happening is if you can get the diversification of founders, you also get the diversification of thought, perspective, industries, experiences, et cetera. And we think that's the best way to, or the best way for us to build an early stage portfolio today.

• 4:59Harry Stebbings?

  You said before, in terms of kind of founder assessment there, you said you really like to really get to know them and evaluate the founders themselves. By testing their ability to withstand stress and establish comfort with unpopular decisions. I'm reading from your fantastic report from the other day. I'd love to hear then how that plays out and how you look to stress test this. And have there been some interesting findings?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that the overarching thought process here is my partner and I, we really believe in the idea of we're looking for gamers. Right? So what is a gamer? If you think of sports, sports is the easiest analogy, right? We're looking for the person who in a basketball game, when the game's tied at the end of the game, wants the ball. They may, they know that they may miss, they may make the shot, they may be the hero, or they may be the zero, right? But they want the ball. And so those are the people that we're looking to invest in because we feel that those types of personalities and individuals are the ones who, they don't make excuses, they just will not stop until they're successful. And when they find either a weakness or an issue, they obsessively work to turn that into either a strength or into an advantage.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  And so, you know, we just sum it up as we're looking for gamers, right? Who wants the ball at the end of the game? And so how do you assess this, right? One, there's no perfect process. Where we've come out on this is we do a lot of hypothetical situation, kind of wargaming, right? So it's not uncommon for us to talk to a, um, talk to a founder and what are you working on? Why are you working on this? What, from what perspective are you coming from, et cetera? And then to go through, well, what happens if A occurs? What happens if B occurs? What happens if you're faced with choosing between C and D, right? Kind of all of these hypothetical situations and what we're really trying to understand again is can this person take a complex amount of inputs and make decisions with a sound framework? Can they be comfortable by making the unpopular but right decision?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  What drives their decision making? You know, what are they motivated by? Some of these things that are more soft skills, right, that are really hard to tease out just based on, you know, what school you went to or where you've worked previously and things like that. And so what's the best way to get that? In our eyes, it's to try to recreate those situations as accurately as possible. And so by hypothetically kind of wargaming that stuff, we get, you know, at least a glimpse as to how will they handle that stuff? And then also we get a glimpse as to who is this person and what drives them to make certain decisions.

• 7:18Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about founders that will not stop. Those are the words, will not stop. It's always an intriguing one for me in terms of the balance between stubbornness and vision. Where do you lie on this kind of scale of vision and stubbornness and the balance between the two?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So I think that it's one of these things of inevitability, right? In the sense that I know where I am and I know where I'm going. The path in between where I am and where I'm going may not be clear, but I'm not going to stop until I get there, right? And so where most people think it's a straight line, I think most of the founders that we invest in are very transparent, which we see as a sign of kind of a self-confidence, right? So not arrogance, but they're self-confident enough to say, look, again, give me the ball and I'm going to figure this out. And so I may start going down a path and hit a roadblock. We've got to back up and go down another path and I'm going to keep doing that until I break through. And I'm not going to stop until I reach kind of that, you know, end endpoint, right? And so understanding where you are is really important and kind of what you have in terms of resources and advantages.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  And then understanding where you're going and why you're going there, we think is important. And if you invest in the right people, they'll figure it out, right? And so there's this whole thought process we have of we will never take credit for one of our founders' successes because we were not going to take credit for their failure. We're essentially by investing and then we're saying, look, we expect you to be successful with or without our help. We're giving you the ball, go. And then we do everything we can to remove obstacles on their path there. But ultimately they've got the ball and they've got to go win.

• 8:40Harry Stebbings?

  And speaking of investing in the founders there, you made thirty nine. Investments in the last nine months, according to a report, fantastic report, which everyone must read, actually, I'll add the link in the show notes. But I do want to ask, because many might argue that's simply spraying and praying, such a delightful term. But how do you respond to this suggestion that thirty nine investments in nine months is spray and pray?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So we went back and we looked at data before we started the fund. And if you go back and look at about the last thirty to thirty five years of venture returns, the only thing that correlates to outsized returns across different economic boom and bust cycles is being early in the best deals. Right? So check size doesn't matter, follow on decision making doesn't matter. All of that stuff that people think is really important, while it it matters to make good investments, the greatest investments, it doesn't matter from a sense of middle of the road, above average return, right? And so we're not looking for

• 9:37Harry Stebbings?

  Benchball style.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're basically looking to diversify, again, our portfolio of investees, right? We want to find a diversification of founders. And so what we've found here is we've got portfolio companies, you know, thirteen different cities, right? Kind of all over the coast, across the Midwest as well. Twenty five point six percent of our founders are currently females. And what we've seen on the early data, you know, signal is that we're on to something, right? So most venture capital funds are big believers that there's something called a J curve. Basically, when they begin making investments, the, in the early days, companies will go out of business. And then on the back end, they will begin to realize returns. And so in the first six, twelve, maybe eighteen months, they will actually see a negative return on paper because the companies that they funded are going out of business in the short term.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  But over the long term, they will recover and then see a return on the back end. Our data shows that we've eliminated the J curve. So we've already had a company that was acquired that that isn't public yet, and we've had no companies go out of business. So on paper, not only have we had that acquisition, we've also had a number of companies that have raised additional money at valuations two, three, you know, three and a half X more, which creates this really interesting kind of early signal on, in venture capital, it's been accepted that the J curve is just how venture capital returns work. What if that's not true? What if you can actually? Create a portfolio that can eliminate the J curve and you can show that you don't have to go into the red to eventually get into the green. And again, you know, I'm always careful to say that I have no clue for right, right?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  We think that what we're doing is interesting. We think that the data is showing some really encouraging signs early. But we need, you know, five, seven years to figure out how right we are, right? And if we're good at this, frankly.

• 11:15Harry Stebbings?

  I'm very proud to say that I started Twitter. Uh, I think it would be debate would be a nice way to put it between the likes of Michael Kim at Sandana, Roger Ehrenberg at IA. And then obviously Dave McClure and Matt Lerner at 500. Uh, and Roger Ehrenberg said that seed stage investments are highly idiosyncratic. And they do not subject themselves to maths, but they do to investment process. I'm intrigued, having kind of discussed the elimination of the J curve, how you would respond to that.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that we're very disciplined in our investment process. But we believe that math is also really important in this. And so you're operating in an uncertain world, an inefficient market by making incredibly early stage investments. And so what you're doing is you're playing a game of probability. And so anything that you can do to increase the probability of being successful, we think is something that you should be doing. And so again, the investment process is a is derived from that math. So we sat down, we did math and said, hey, this is how you increase the probability of success. And then we designed an investment process based on that math. And then we stayed disciplined in the investment process and we believe that if we kind of really fall in love with the process, the outcome will take care of itself.

• 12:25Harry Stebbings?

  I'm intrigued by one element though, and kind of using the maths and the model behind this. Does that take into account the, as Hunter Wall recently said on the show, the truly great deals come from dark deal flow. The likes of Scott Belsky previously at Benchmark, who founded his startup that was internally funded within Benchmark to Series A pre-announcement. Does it, is, does this dark deal flow not go contra the model and the thesis then, based on potential outsized returns and their availability?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a number of deals that we've invested in that I'm 100% confident. There's not another venture capitalist in the world that knows about it because we were there from day one and we know that the founders never talked to. Venture capitalists about it. So there's the idea of just knowing about deals that nobody else knows about, right? That that is really powerful. And then two is, you know, we're also working pretty aggressively to incubate things internally. Our team is full of experienced operators, right? That's our background. That's why we're doing what we're doing is because we think that we can help founders from an operational perspective. And so naturally, we're inclined to continue to operate, right? And so we're incubating a number of really interesting things that we think can prove to be valuable over a long period of time. But again, it just takes time.

• 13:32Harry Stebbings?

  A delightful LP said to me on the show the other day, there's no such thing as proprietary deal flow, Harry. What do you think about that? Given the fact that we just discussed data deal flow founders not speaking to any other VCs? Do you agree with that statement? Or do you think that there is still most definitely proprietary deal flow?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  So I don't think that proprietary deal flow is, I think it's a misleading term, right? I think that what ends up happening is there's serendipity. So I can think of the two companies that we invested in that no one else has heard of. We're friends from years ago, right? These were not founders who were randomly looking for, you know, I needed an investor. And so let me go pitch a bunch of VC firms. So there's nothing proprietary about like a deal flow. They didn't come through the normal channels. What they did was they started a business and I was literally the only person they knew that invested in early stage startups. So these are people completely outside of, you know, Silicon Valley, New York scenes. They have no connection into a lot of the networks, I think, people think of when they see early stage startups.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  And so you can call it proprietary, you can call it, you know, friends, you can call it whatever you want. But I definitely think that those deals exist. There's not a lot of them, but to me it's more serendipity than anything.

• 14:40Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. In terms of the portfolio itself for you now, I'd love to hear your thoughts because you've said before about the importance between picking investments versus building investments. Talk to me, what's the difference? And why is it fundamentally important between picking versus building?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So picking investments to us is basically you're trying to financially engineer your results. And it shows through in two very distinct ways. One is how you actually select your investments. So what most venture capitalists will do is they will see either a company or a space that they're intrigued by. They will then go do a bunch of competitive analysis on that space. They would try to. To select, right, or pick which company they think is going to win the vertical, right? And then they will invest in that company. Right? So they try to get as much of a perfect set of information as they can and then make the decision. The problem is they don't have a perfect set of information. And there have been, you know, a ton of academic studies that have shown if you take an investor's portfolio and you sit them down and you say, can you please stack rank your portfolio in terms of who should have the best outcome? And who should have the worst outcome?

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Even though you've done all the due diligence, you've invested all this stuff, they're almost always wrong at the end of the day. And so what ends up happening is there's a ton of human bias and there's a lot of assumptions and non-perfect information sets, et cetera, that are going into this analysis. What we basically say is, again, we're looking for gamers. We want people who want the ball and we just, we're going to ride or die with them. And so we don't go do competitive analysis. We don't do any of that. We say, we want to invest in this person and we're going to help them run through walls to be successful. And so I think that's very different from a pick versus we're trying to help them build their company, right? Very, very different mentality there. The second is on the support side. You know, we've got thirty-nine investments and we still find time to do some, what I frankly think is some pretty incredible things. We've got a company that I went for a week to Nigeria with the founder to go do customer research, right?

• 16:24Speaker 02

  On my own dime. And so there's just not very many investors who are willing to get on a plane to go visit their portfolio companies, let alone go to another continent on their own dime to do. And so we think that things like that, where you're willing to do anything and everything to see that your companies are successful, is very different. Um, but also it's what founders need at the earliest stages, right? They just need cheerleaders in their corner who are going to give them straight, no bullshit advice and tell them, listen, things are going well, things are not going well. Here's what I would do in your perspective. Here's five people you should go talk to who have seen this exact situation. Just whatever it takes to be successful. If you can support those companies, we think, again, it just increases the probability of them being successful.

• 17:03Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, if I was an investor in full tilt, I'd be concerned at the scaling portfolio and your ability to scale your time accordingly and add that incredible value you illustrated there with such a large portfolio as it scales. How would you respond to that?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  So anyone who, who doesn't believe that we can do it, shouldn't be an investor, right? It's kind of the top of the funnel there. And then two is, again, going back To the investment process and being very disciplined. You know, our, our promise to founders is we're looking for companies where we see a viable path to creating a significant measurable inflection point that changes the value of the company first 90 days post-investment. So we make an investment in the company, we want to run full tilt right at that investment for 90 days. And we think that we can create some pretty significant inflection points with the company in that time period. And then we kind of hand them off. There, there should be other investors or advisors that can help them kind of pass that 90 day uh, investment period. And then we go back and, and we start it all over again with another company.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  And so by kind of having this, you know, very focused timeline and very specific area where we want to help with experience and expertise. It allows us to kind of do this at a much more rapid pace than say investor who comes in and says, I'm going to help you with everything.

• 18:13Harry Stebbings?

  Have you, have you found any areas or particular patterns within the, the founders and the teams where they need the most help? Be it go to market strategy, be it UI, UX, marketing, accounting, kind of legal structure. Is there areas which continuously arises problem areas?

• 18:30Speaker 02

  The number one thing that we focus on is growth. So, so that's usually customer or user acquisition. And there's a ton of things that funnel into that. That could be everything from strategy to marketing to product to whatever. But it all falls under, how do we help you grow? Full tilt capital, right? Most people think that it's kind of a tip of the hat to poker, right? But the actual definition of full tilt is a mass acceleration at top speed, right? And so what we believe is we can go in after making an investment, we can take a company and get them to mass acceleration at top speed in 90 days. And if we can do that from a growth perspective, it will change the value of the company, right? And so, so that's kind of where we really see, one, our expertise lining up, but two, that is the biggest need of a company is building momentum or growth.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  And if you can build that momentum, everything becomes easier, right? Customers want to use you, people want to work for you, investors want to give you money, the press wants to talk about you. It's just building that momentum through growth.

• 19:24Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, what's your take then, having had this kind of firsthand operational touchpoints with the founders you invest in? What's your take on the rise of the operational value add model that we've seen? With the likes of Andreessen in VC over the last few years.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I I think that it's each model definitely has value, right? I don't think that there's an investor out there that says the model I'm using is invaluable to every founder, right? I think that it's really a match. So there's some founders who fit great into that type of model. There's some founders who absolutely hate it or don't find it valuable. And so I think that part of this is finding the match. And then we do a lot of work with our founders to say, look, this is exactly what we do. We do not hide what our ambition is or our working, you know, relationship with founders is. And we say, is this something that one you want? And is this something that you need, right? Because if you can't answer yes to it's that you want this and to you need it, then we probably shouldn't work together, right? And it's not a reflection on the company or the quality of the founder or anything.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  It's just, it's not the best use of our time. And frankly, we're probably just going to be kind of dumb, quiet money in the deal. Right? We only want to invest in deals where we can put our expertise to work. And so, you know, kind of having that double opt in of here's what we do, we're interested in your company, like, but getting the founder to opt in as well and say, look, I need that help. Right? Or I want that help. We think is really important because it sets the right expectation and increases, again, the probability of having a successful working relationship moving forward.

• 20:45Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, Mr. Pompliano, are you ready for the quickfire round? Sixty seconds per one. Ready?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Go ahead.

• 20:51Harry Stebbings?

  So favorite book and why?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  So probably the first book that I ever remember reading on the like business side and kind of changing my mindset was Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.

• 21:01Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, it's brilliant. Yeah.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  It has nothing to do really with what I'm doing today, but I think it just opened my eyes to so much. So I highly recommend that to a lot of people, especially, you know, younger students, et cetera.

• 21:11Harry Stebbings?

  What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  I believe that intelligence is quite overrated and EQ is quite underrated. Um, I think that you can be very successful by having a high EQ. And if you have intelligence as well, then you kind of just double your probability for success. But I think that most people overrate intelligence on a pure horsepower level and they underrate EQ.

• 21:34Harry Stebbings?

  I could not agree with you more on that one. That's one of my guiding principles. You've said before, the traditional model would work if VCs were as clever as they claim to be. Where do you see? C C suggests then that they add the most value, but really they don't.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  My my alarm to every founder is the more a venture capitalist says I'm going to be helpful after we invest. There's usually less likelihood that they will be helpful, right?

• 21:57Harry Stebbings?

  So if you like to add value pre-investment.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  I almost regularly tell founders, hey, we're passing, but I think that we can help that, you know, add value in these two areas. I know we're not going to be investors, but I think it's important to furthering your growth. We're still going to do this. And, you know, what ends up happening is founders want to appreciate it. And two, you know, there's some, you know, there's definitely some some self fulfillment there as well in terms of, you know, they send us deals in the future, et cetera. And so we just generally think if you're a good actor over a long period of time, not only does it help from an investing perspective, but two, it's just the right thing to do. Right? If you can help somebody, you should. And so I think that whether you're an investor or not, if you've got the ability to further the growth or increase the probability of someone succeeding with their company, you should do it.

• 22:41Harry Stebbings?

  Tell us me, favorite blog or newsletter, what are your must reads?

• 22:44Speaker 02

  I'm a huge fan of Paulina Maranova's profile. She's a reporter at Fortune. Every weekend she goes out, she finds like the best in-depth profiles on people, companies, technologies, et cetera. And so I love to to kind of just read these, you know, in-depth profiles because they usually provide a different perspective than the public narrative and some like behind the scenes. You know, information that that I find valuable.

• 23:06Harry Stebbings?

  No, that is a fantastic suggestion, one we've actually not had before, and I haven't heard it, so I'm adding it to my list. What would your advice be to a junior starting out in the industry? You're nine months into full tilt. What would your advice be to a junior starting out?

• 23:18Speaker 02

  I think I would tell them to do everything they possibly can to make other people successful.

• 23:24Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. In terms of in the team, in terms of founders, in terms.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  So so I again, I think that we're looking for gamers, right, to invest in. I think that founders are looking for gamers to take money from. And so if you're known, whether you're an associate, whether you start your own fund, whatever, if you're known as a person who will do anything and everything to help make a founder successful, you will very quickly build a reputation, right, that spreads. But two, you will see that all you'll get better deal flow, you'll you'll get better co-investment opportunities. And so you want to be just like the founders. We want gamers. We I think that founders want investors who are gamers.

• 23:57Harry Stebbings?

  And then let's finish today on your most recent publicly announced investment and why you said yes.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Most recent public investment is a company called Everly Wellness, Julia Cheek. They do online e-commerce for at-home diagnostic testing. They no-brainer, no-brainer deal. And again, you know, Julia was the prime example. When we talked with her, I think that we hung up the phone and my partner and I both said the same thing almost simultaneously. We just were like, she is a savage. And what I mean by that is she's the type of person that we wanted to invest in because we knew she wanted the ball at the end of the game and she already had a good business, right? We thought that we could be incredibly valuable with some very specific things around the business. But with or without our help, she's going to be successful, right? And so that was the exact type of person that we wanted to invest in. And so we pulled this right down the deal.

• 24:46Harry Stebbings?

  Anthony, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. As I said, I so enjoyed your report and I heard such great things from Eric. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  You got it, Harry. Thanks so much for the time.

• 24:56Harry Stebbings?

  So fantastic to have Anthony on the show there and very exciting times ahead for Full Tilt Capital. Again, a big thank you to Eric Torrenberg for making the introduction today to Anthony, without which this episode would not have been possible. And if you'd like to see more from me, then you can follow me on Snapchat at H Stebbings with two Bs to see all things behind the scenes on both the 20 Minute VC and the official Saster podcast. But before we leave you today, a lot of people ask me, Harry, you do so many calls and interviews, but what do you use? My response, Zoom, the number one video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to an array of activities, including online meetings, video webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and business IM, just to name a few.

• 25:38Harry Stebbings?

  And it's the easiest solution to use, buy, and scale, and for sure the most straightforward pricing. But hey, don't take my word for it. Their partnership with Sequoia in their latest 100 million funding round says it all. Zoom really is a must-check out for your business. I cannot emphasize that enough. And you can find them at zoom.us. Speaking of video, though, to power your company there with Zoom, you must check out Viewdit. Viewdit is a free video recording tool that makes it easy for organizations to embrace the power of video for Personalised communications. Viewed it enables sales professionals, executive leaders and customer support teams to easily record personalised videos and add them to their email conversations. Plus, with built-in tracking powered by the video platform, video creators will know who is watching what and which video messages resonate with which users.

• 26:22Harry Stebbings?

  They'll receive immediate playback notifications that will eliminate the wondering of whether the recipient received or watched their content. And you can find out more and download Viewed It for free at video.com/ViewedIt. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you Friday's episode with Chris O'Neill, CEO at Evernote.