20VC: a16z's Martin Casado on How the Venture Model is Broken, Why VCs Should Be Running Wall St, Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next Generation of Venture & Investing Lessons from Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz and Chris Dixon

Martin Casado is a General Partner @ a16z where he focuses on enterprise investing. At a16z, Martin has led investments and serves on the board of dbt Labs, Fivetran, Material Security, Ambient AI and many more incredible companies. Before venture, Martin was previously the Co-Founder and CTO at Nicira, acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, Martin served as Senior VP and General Manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit, which he scaled to a $600 million revenue run-rate business. In Today's Episode with Martin Casado We Discuss: 1. From $1.26BN Founder to Leading Enterprise Investing for a16z: How did Martin make his way into the world of VC and come to lead enterprise investing for a16z? What does Martin know now that he wishes he had known when he started investing? What have been some of his biggest investing lessons from Marc and Ben? 2. The VC Model is Broken and Why: Why does Martin believe that the current model for venture is broken? Why does Martin believe that VCs are not oracles and they were not gifted with picking ability? How will asset allocation more broadly fundamentally change over the next decade? Why will Silicon Valley take over and run Wall St? Why does Wall St not care about innovation and true technological development? Who will be the winners and who will be the losers in the next 10 years of venture? 3. Surviving a Crash - What Founders Need To Know: Layoffs: What is Martin's advice to founders on doing layoffs today? How much is the right amount to cut? Should it be done in one go? How should this be communicated to investors and the board? Scenario Planning: What three scenario plans should all founders be creating right now? How should they know which one is the right one to execute against? Comparisons: How should founders use and look to public company performance and market cap to determine which plan they should choose? Hiring Freeze: Why does Martin believe the biggest companies in the world make massive mistakes by freezing hiring? What should they do instead? 4. The Changing Guard at a16z: What have been the single best and worst changes a16z have made over the last 24 months? What are the first things to break when a firm scales as fast as a16z has done? Does Martin agree a16z returns will reduce with the scaling of their funds larger than ever? How does Martin look to train and educate his junior team? How does he advise them on surviving a downturn? What should they do? What should they not do? 5.) The Makings of a Great Board: What are the three types of board members? What is the best? What is the worst? What does Martin believe makes the truly great boards? What is the biggest advice Martin gives to young board members today? How has Martin changed as a board member over time? What does he need to improve? Items Mentioned in Today's Episode: Martin's Fave Book: The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think that we should be running Wall Street, not the finance people that don't believe in any of these things. So I think like where venture is broken is it's time to grow up.

• 0:07Harry Stebbings?

  Oh my, this is such a great 20 VC. I cannot wait for you to hear this episode. In prep for this show, we did 13 reference calls with the board that this guest sits on. We have 48 pages of notes and so we are more than ready for this one and I'm so thrilled to welcome Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Well, he focuses on enterprise investing and at Andreessen, Martin has led investments in the likes of DBT Labs, Five Tran Materials Security and many more. Before venture, Martin was the co-founder and CTO at Nicira, acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, Martin served as Senior VP and General Manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit, which he scaled to a staggering $600 million revenue run rate business.

• 0:50Harry Stebbings?

  And I want to say a huge thank you to Angela Strange, Patrick at Orbit, Ida at Rapid API, Tasso at Action IQ, Tristan at DBT, John at Tackle. So many amazing suggestions and we couldn't have done this without you. 20 VC is supported by First Republic Bank. When private equity and venture capital firms are funding the innovations of tomorrow, speed is of the essence. That's why at First Republic, you'll be paired with your own banker, who will remain dedicated to helping your team through all market cycles and will be ready to respond quickly to your requests. As a First Republic client myself, having a direct relationship with a personal banker, who I can really depend on to help me make the right decision, matters a lot.

• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

  In fact, your banker will serve as your single point of contact by phone, email or First Republic's secure app. Visit firstrepublic.com today to learn more. That's firstrepublic.com, member FDIC and equal housing lender. And speaking of amazing partners with First Republic there, if you are a venture capitalist or corporate strategist, I want to tell you about Tegus. Tegus is the only company in the world that aggregates qualitative information on private companies from seed stage to pre-IPO. With Tegus, you can access other VCs and founders' expert call transcripts from previous rounds to help source fast-growing companies, create compelling emails to really get a founder to respond and be Excited to speak and to diligence companies when around is moving fast.

• 2:13Harry Stebbings?

  Tegus also provides the most flexible and highest quality way to run your own expert calls with no upfront fees or call minimums. The ability to do a 30 minute call and simply pay the expert rate at an average of $300. Tegus makes expert calls easy. Find out why a majority of the top venture funds are using Tegus on a daily basis. Head over to tegus.co/growth for your free trial. And speaking of incredible resources like Tegus there, I've always been a massive history fan. And so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley is one of the most active law firms representing both early stage and late stage financings,

• 2:54Harry Stebbings?

  handling more than 1,300 private financings every year with an equal split of investor and company clients. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC backed companies going public, head over to Cooley.com and also check out Cooleygo.com. Cooley's award winning free legal resource for entrepreneurs. But that is enough from me. So now I'm so excited to hand over to Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

• 3:25Harry Stebbings?

  You have now arrived at your destination. Martin, I've referenced the shit out of you as we've just been talking about. I'm so excited for this show. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  No, I'm just delighted. Absolutely.

• 3:38Harry Stebbings?

  That is very kind of you, but I want to start with a little bit of context. So you're at Andreessen today. In your words, how did you make your way to be a GP at Andreessen today before we dive in?

• 3:48Speaker 00

  The quick story is I'm a failed physicist. I'm sorry. In undergrad, I did computational physics, worked at a national lab. Decided that computer systems are much more accessible. And so I moved into systems, ended up doing a PhD at Stanford, starting the company based on the research. Ben Horowitz joined my board. This is, by the way, this was in, I started the company in 2007. So 2008 was a great recession, almost went out of business. Mark and Ben saved the company. We ended up selling that four years later to VMware. I ran that business for a while. And then I decided that I'm super in love with innovation. I love startups. I love infrastructure and systems. I spent 10 years doing the operating thing, built a billion dollar business,

• 4:31Speaker 00

  and it was time to move to a different abstraction level. And so I joined and I just focused on infrastructure and recent Horowitz. So that is the crooked path I took.

• 4:40Harry Stebbings?

  There is this weird correlation between the more successful someone is, the shorter their intro is, and the more successful they are, the longer it is. But that was the interesting thing. I want to ask you, you've mentioned the incredible operating career there. How do you think that operating career impacted your investor mindset today positively first?

• 5:01Speaker 00

  In my experience, you kind of have three types of board members. I think the mean board member, the average board member, they're investors. They've seen a lot of stuff. They'll roll up their sleeves, they'll help a recruiter or whatever. But otherwise, they're just not close enough to product market fit to add much value. They'll say the things, they're polite, they're nice people. They're the kind of net neutral, right? I think this is the average board member. I think unfortunately, the next most common board member is the frustrated operator. They've kind of think they're an operator, maybe were an executive at a large company, maybe had a small exit or whatever, and they really want to kind of backseat drive the company. I've definitely dealt very directly with those. And they can be incredibly disruptive just because they don't realize that it's not their company. And then periodically, you get like a pretty phenomenal board member. Like for me, that was Ben Horowitz, which had a huge exit,

• 5:45Speaker 00

  spent 11 years really learning a craft, but also kind of getting it out of the system. I'll say a couple of things. On the investment side, I don't know if operating helps or not. Like, I don't know if it helps you pick. I don't know if it helps you close. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know how to answer that. Probably not. It probably hurts more than helps. But on the operating side, if you can realize it's not your own company, you end up having seen a lot of stuff and having a deep level of empathy that unless, like basically you had to pay payroll out of your bank account, which I had to do, unless you almost shut down a company multiple times, which I had to do, unless you had to go begging for money about 50 times, like I had to do. Unless you like almost sold a company that didn't sell a company and almost get fired by your board, like I had to do. But it's hard to have that kind of level of empathy and also just understanding. And so I think for that, that's useful. But I just want to caveat it. Like hopefully you did your run and it's out of your system. Otherwise, Can be disruptive.

• 6:30Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you in terms of it kind of taking your run. Can I, I spoke to so many of your founders and partners before and they said, Martin is on so many boards.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:40Harry Stebbings?

  How do you manage your board load, Martin?

• 6:42Speaker 00

  There's a few things to consider here. So the first one is I honestly don't know what VCs do with their days. It's just wild how many don't work in evenings or are gone on Fridays or don't work over a week. It's just unbelievable over weekends. I just don't know what they do. I grew up business from basically zero to 600 million globally. I was working 100 hours a week. I was flying all over the place. That's what I spent 10 years doing. It just turns out there's a ton of time in the week. If you put in the time, there's an awful lot of time in the day. And even if you're on a lot of boards, it's nothing compared to running a 4,000 person team, hundreds of millions of run rate in my experience. The second thing, I'm very lucky at Andreessen Horowitz to work with basically the best junior partner team on the planet.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Many of them could be GPs at other firms and they know their areas very well. They have tremendous help and I literally couldn't do what I do without them. A lot of times I get credit unfairly for the work that my team did. And I'll say one more thing, which is I'm pretty good at recruiting. I've recruited a lot of people. I'm pretty good at sales. I've sold a lot of stuff, but I'm not nearly as good at recruiting as Jeff Stuck, who's our executive recruiter. I'm not really nearly as good at sales as Brad Kern. I think part of the Andreessen model, which is so effective is we really have the industry best people that pitch in at stuff. Where often it's the GPs that are doing it. It's a combination of you work hard, like you, Harry. I have, I don't think this, I've done a lot of podcasts. I've never in my life had somebody being so thorough.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  You're just so clearly good at what you do and you put in the fucking time. It's what you should do and you should work in the evenings and you should work on weekends. And if you don't, like I don't think you deserve to be investing in these companies. You just don't. And then you surround yourself with great people. What in the time?

• 8:21Harry Stebbings?

  I have so many LPs and they're like, we're worried about your time. And I'm like, I don't know what VCs do. I run a media company with many people and a venture. Fuck, I need to learn golf in my life.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Here's another thing, which is what I do in my spare time, I'm just being very honest. Like my first love is infrastructure and systems. It sounds like a weird nerdy thing to say, but I love it. I just absolutely love it and I love how it intersects with finance, especially when it comes to the adoption of new technology and everything else. For those of you listening, I mean, I even started a Discord with Tim Chen and it's 1,200 people on there and I'm there all the time. And we literally talk about infrastructure because this is what I want to do. If I wasn't in a board meeting, I would be wanting to talk about this stuff anyways. And so I know so many VCs, you go and you talk about a bunch of stuff, but it's almost never technology. It's almost never category creation and it's always ever how do you position marketing? It's always, oh, what's the new company? What's the new lead?

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Which I'm much, much less interested in that and much, much more interested in what's going on. So I also just think that my interest level is much more aligned with kind of what service should be thinking about.

• 9:26Harry Stebbings?

  We mentioned time there and some elements of we don't know how venture investors do that time. Many of your founders asked this one, which was where does Martine think the venture model is broken?

• 9:36Speaker 00

  I think it's actually twofold. The first one is the whole market for private capital and technology two decades ago was about a 50th the size it is now. A 50th, the technology was much less mature. It was so much more fringe. And if you go forward to today, the market's enormous. And then I actually think you can view software technologies more like you'd view a mature industry, like say real estate or something, where you can be a bit more thoughtful about the placing money. It's less random and outcome, et cetera. And yet we have this model that we use for investing where it's investors are basically generalists. They play monies and they don't scale out, et cetera. That was born in this earlier year.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  And I think that we can now think of venture much more like a mature market investment and have portfolio synergies, scale ups thesis, be very specialized and still be able to deploy a lot of money, have multiple products and venture everything from seed through public through debt. At the end of the day, I think that venture believes in innovation and we're very tech positive. And I think that we should be running Wall Street, not the finance people that don't believe in any of these things. So I think like where venture is broken is it's time to grow up.

• 10:51Harry Stebbings?

  So what does that actually mean in reality? Because that was going to be one of my questions because I've heard you say before that really the winners in venture are scale ups, are the ones who scale, it's your Andreessen's of the world who enjoy the benefits of scale. Why? And what does that mean for grow up?

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Well, yes, let's. So I actually think it's not the winners that scale up. I actually think it's a barbell. Either you're operating at scale, you can help a company everywhere from seats or public. I think that's one end. Or there's a lot of alpha in relatively niche plays, right? Like you're just focused in a certain area or a certain stage and you build out operating around that. So I think both of those. So boutiques will continue to fare very well. And I think the ones at scale will continue to do very well. I think it's in between where it's kind of a little bit more difficult because you've got pressure on either the side of these. So what does it mean to scale ups? Here's the way I think about it. If you're a founder building a company, you're going to need pools of capital. Today, the largest pools of capital either come from public

• 11:45Speaker 00

  markets, which they don't care about innovation, clearly having been a public company. They just want like repeatable earnings. Or you can get it from large debt providers. They don't care about innovation. They just want to get their money back. Or you can get it from large financiers like private equity. They clearly don't care about innovation. They'd much rather fire people to get efficiencies than do innovation. And so eventually you graduate to pools of capital. They just don't care about innovation. Tech investing, VC has always been in the early stage where you're like, we dream with the founders and we believe in building new things and adding value. And then all of a sudden they quote unquote, finance, big boys and girls come in and then basically say, okay, now everything's

• 12:26Speaker 00

  just a spreadsheet. I believe tech has matured to the point that you can scale tech innovative investing for the life cycle of a company. So why is it that these billions of dollars are being deployed by people that just honestly want to fire people for a whole thing?

• 12:44Harry Stebbings?

  Wouldn't that look like tech innovation investors in public markets? Is that post going public?

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Oh, I think it's everything. And that's the whole point. It's the entire life cycle. Of a company. I think one way to think is step back, think about the entire financial industry, everything from private equity to the big banks to venture capital, etc. And if you pull a dollar at random from that pool, it's quite likely that dollar is going to come from a large bank or private equity or whatever. And what is their goal? Let me tell you, it's not innovation. It's just not. It's predictable returns, it's arbitrage, all this other stuff. And like kind of the top of the value chain is this cohort of people that they're not interested in building companies and backing founders. I remember speaking with a private equity person, I was just talking to myself, I'm like, you know, we're just having a conversation, idle conversation, like, you know, if there's a public company and the founder's still running it, I'm bullish.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Just because it's the founders and founders can weather transitions and they can weather market transformations. Look at Reed Hastings, look at Jensen, founders are amazing. And this PE guy was like, I was speaking Greek. He's like, why do you care if the founder's running it? I'm like, dude, it's the fucking founder, man. It's the person that made the magic to begin with. It's the person that has the credibility. That's everything. My point is here is I want a future where if you pull a dollar of random finance, that dollar is given by somebody that believes innovation is good and believes in company teams and believes that you can continue to scale capital deployment far beyond just like C R E C or whatever.

• 14:06Harry Stebbings?

  Can I dive in and pose, which is, okay, if we think about financing a company seed to post IPO, one thing I don't like about having multi-stage investors where I'm on boards is the founders continuously having to sell. They don't bring the truth to the board with Martine because they want you to lead the next round as well. And so they continuously have to bring this veil of truth because they're selling for the next round whilst you're already in. How do you think about that and respond to that as a problem that you face?

• 14:35Speaker 00

  I think that would indicate a really broken relationship between the board member and the founder. In all of these cases with multi-stages, the actual investor and board member is aligned to a fund. For example, if you graduate from seed to venture to growth, it's an entirely different team that's making a decision. The board member is very aligned with the founder when it comes to the next raise. And so, for example, I focus primarily Early on, we see days and Bs. Sometimes our growth fund decides that it does the deal and I've been there pitching them too. So I'm very much aligned because I think it's great when an investment goes in.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  And so I think a situation where the company is reliant on one person to make all the decisions is not healthy. But certainly to have a partnership where they can have access to pools of capital to the life of the company is positive.

• 15:32Harry Stebbings?

  The next question that I have is if we think about returns, we both know that small funds generate great returns. When you see this explosion of capital within these scale up vehicles and going, as you said, through even to public markets. Do you know why that we're going to think the denigration of venture returns to P like returns with the maturation of the industry?

• 15:52Speaker 00

  I think this is just a bundling question, which is, I think you create funds for different risk buckets and you provide LPs exposure to that. Like debt will never get the same return as equity and early stage one that forget the same as late stage. And so you've got just different variances on all of these. This is probably why I would be a horrible financial investor, just horrible. I don't even really care strictly about thinking on returns. That's not what I maximize. Here's the way that I view it, which is very simple, which is strongly believe technology is a good. I think it solves problem. I think it adds value. I think it creates productivity. I think if you look at any graph on human betterment, which is infant mortality or how long we live or the number of diseases we have or whatever, this is just correlated with technical advancement.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  So I think technology is a general good. And so anybody that's building technology that weathers the Darwinistic ecosystem of economics is going to be adding value. I view this asset class as investing in an index of the top innovators in the world. And that's a very productive asset. And so my mental model is for anybody that wants exposure to the top software innovators in the world that are adding value. I want to provide an opportunity for them to have exposure to that. And I want to help those set of top innovators. Now, what happens specifically about the Returns is a question on macro and all sorts of other stuff. But I guarantee a lot of value is going to accrue there. And historically, a ton of value is going to accrue there, right?

• 17:20Speaker 00

  And so I like to think at much more of an index across innovation and much less specifically about, if you give me a dollar, I'm going to kind of make this one dollar go up or down by exploiting every aspect that I can of a market.

• 17:32Harry Stebbings?

  I'm really just going for it, but you're very open and wonderful human. So I'm going to be too. If there was a criticism, not criticism, but you just have thought about some of your investing. It's that you're not so price sensitive, Martin. A question for you, do you think that's a fair summary? And how do you reflect on your own price sensitivity, given what you just said there?

• 17:48Speaker 00

  So I think pretty much every single deal that I can recollect, I've been on the low end. The market's the market, but if you actually look at any independent investment that I do, I'm normally on the low end as far as prices that go in.

• 18:02Harry Stebbings?

  Is price a big factor in your consideration? Do you think you're price sensitive?

• 18:05Speaker 00

  I think the market is the market. But I want to be very honest. I think people say things like this, but they either don't have data or they just don't know what they're talking about. A lot of people say a lot of things in this industry. It's so funny how many rumors I hear about myself. It's like this constant set of rumors that I tend to ignore. I will say, many of the companies I'm in have hit great prices and I'm very happy for them to do it. That doesn't mean that I price them up. These are two very different things.

• 18:35Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think by your own investing style today? As we said, you've invested in a generational, the last five years, an index of the best enterprise companies. Has your investing style changed over the years?

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. And my philosophy has changed a lot. It's going to sound really simple, but it's kind of the deepest truths that I've learned in this job. I used to have the hubris to believe that if a company walked in, I could look at the company and I could determine if it's a good investment or not. And you think, of course you do, that's the job. I've decided that's a totally underdetermined problem. And by underdetermined, there's just way more variables than equations, right? Like mathematically. And if any company walks in, I haven't a clue if it's a good investment or not. With a few exceptions, for example, this is, I'm talking about the early stage here. The late stage, sure. Or if it's a second time founder, it's probably good, right? So with like first time founder, new space, category creation, who Knows. On the other hand, and this is this obvious unlock that I I've had mentally.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  If I meet five companies, I can probably tell you which one of those five has a better chance than the others. Not to any level of certainty. There's a bit of alpha there. There's a bit of judgment there. So I think that's a much more determined problem. And so I've stopped actually being in the oracle game. I just don't wanna in any given investment. Who am I to second guess these founders who are doing amazing things? I don't wanna be in that position. And who am I to say something's not gonna work? I don't wanna be in that position. And so more and more, what I love to do is I just take a space and I just study the shit out of it. It's my favorite thing to do anyways. I'm gonna do it anyways. I'm just gonna fucking learn about databases and backends and frontends. And that's what I did my PhD in and I love it. And then for there, see which one of that cohort I think is most in line with that. And I think that's actually a decidable problem.

• 20:11Harry Stebbings?

  So that's fascinating you say that because I spoke to Angela Stranger on your team before. And she told me that the process that you go through is incredible for each kind of examination that you do. Is there a process that you engage in for each examination? How do you approach a new topic and approach that learning and discovery phase?

• 20:27Speaker 00

  I got this one from Chris Dixon, who I actually think is probably the most thoughtful investor on the planet. I really do. And probably the smartest, which is, I think the founder network is just more intuitive and smarter and more prescient than any other network. And by that, if smart founders are going to do something, there's something probably interesting there, right? I don't care if VCs think it's interesting and I don't care if analysts think it's interesting. And I don't care if Twitter thinks it's interesting. I care if smart founders think it's interesting. I look to see where founders are going. And if there are kind of a few of them really smart ones are looking at an area, then I get very interested in the area. And then I do what I love. Like this is, I'm an awkward nerdy dude. I think a lot of VCs like to go out and network. I like to sit at home and chat on Discord about databases. And then I really like to try and understand what's going on.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Now, one thing that is, I think, a product of my past is I'm much more interested in how technologies hit markets. How markets adopt them. How do you do category creation? How you do messaging? For example, when all the GoD C, CEO of Databricks and I have dinner, we almost always just talk about category creation and building out go to market. From a technology standpoint, it's actually a very interesting problem. It's one that's not talked about enough. And so I just spend a lot of time trying to understand. Understand like how the market's evolving, what are the macro trends, who are the players, what's involved, etc. And I try and go very deep, then based on that, then we try and make decisions that we think are smart decisions in a space.

• 21:42Harry Stebbings?

  This is my job. You say go to market applied to category creation isn't talked about enough. What do you think should be talked about within GTM and category creation that isn't being talked about?

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Can you name a good resource for category?

• 21:53Harry Stebbings?

  No, not like a centralized.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  How about a decent one? I mean, let me tell you, it's not play bigger.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Why would, why would you go read about category creation? Let's say you're a new infrastructure company like me, so I like it. I was very heavily involved in the creation of software defined network and network virtualization. I spent 10 years, I call it market annealing, just hammering the shit out of a market, just fucking beating on the market for years until it comes around. This is like selling into an existing market's easy. The annealing you've got to do to soften up a market for category is hard. Where would you even start to read about that? Who? Name a blog or a Twitter post or?

• 22:25Harry Stebbings?

  I think what I would advise is you learn from people who've done it before.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 22:28Harry Stebbings?

  Advise the one to one conversation and dialogue with someone who's done it before.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. It's just something that hasn't really hit. There is no crossing the chasm for category creation. For the types of technologies I'm interested in, it's as important as the product development and it's as tricky and it's as hard and whatever. I just think it's a very interesting space.

• 22:49Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about market timing with regards to category creation? The one thing that worries me is that the market can kind of continuously stay irrational for longer than a company can stay solvent, especially on the adoption side and the innovation side. How do you think about the importance of market timing?

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Working against a macro trend is just brutal. And so forget timing, if a market is shrinking, if a trend is moving away from you, while there's still market and opportunity there, if like the first derivative is negative, you're just in a really tough spot. The second one is there's varying degrees of market readiness. And I think this is just more correlated with the amount of effort that you as a startup need to do to establish yourself. If I am selling into an existing market with something that's 10 times faster, the timing question is not really a question. It's easier to sell. It ends up being kind of questions around churn and pricing pressure and stuff like that, just because the category already exists. When it comes to category creation, I think that companies that really. Put in the time, we'll carve out a niche. And then the question is more, what's the staying power of the company?

• 23:47Speaker 00

  And how much money do you want to invest in the go to market death march of a new category? And you can, I know of companies that through just absolutely sheer will built markets. And it wasn't timing, it was just sheer fucking will, but they spent a decade doing it. I would say make sure you're trend aligned. Realize that if you're in the new market, the amount of work you're going to have to do to make the market pliable is going to be commensurate with your speed. And then hopefully things are online. I believe you can death march to a public company without the market ever actually unlocking.

• 24:15Harry Stebbings?

  The thing that I think is fascinating, the state of storytelling today is, I think, pretty poor. And I think in market creation and category creation, it's more important than ever. How do you feel about the importance of storytelling on the founder perspective with regards to category creation?

• 24:29Speaker 00

  I think it's very important and not just for educating the market, but even like leading a team. I would say the two best people on this who both should write books are McJanet and Steve Mulaney. Dave McJanet is CEO of Hashi, Steve Mulaney, he's a CEO of Avatrix. Both come from marketing, product marketing backgrounds. Both are iconic world-class CEOs. And what they'll tell you, which I think is exactly right, is it's very important at some point in time. Kick everybody out of the room, sit there for three days and then write down the very lucid, very description vision of the company. Like why it matters and what you're doing in a way that you deeply believe in a way that outlines the future and outlines kind of the why together. It doesn't have to be the path, just the future.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  And then you use that to kind of drive everything about the company from recruiting to culture setting to early sales to marketing, to speaking to analysts, et cetera. And so I do think that in early categories, it is just a crucial exercise to do.

• 25:22Harry Stebbings?

  We sit and look at many companies today, some in your portfolio, some not in your portfolio, creating amazing categories with incredible innovative technology. And with the change of funding environment, suddenly they're being told cut burn, cut costs. And that naturally impacts one's ability to expel the mission, to tell stories through events, to really project the category forward. How do you advise them who are in the process of creating a category, but also being told to cut burn?

• 25:47Speaker 00

  I don't think these things are at odds. I think that's a bit of a false dichotomy. Let me tell you what I think is a mistake to do. Companies should be sized to the market opportunity and the funding environment. Otherwise, everybody loses their job and the company goes to zero. If the macro situation on this stuff changes, like the funding environment, or you've got to right-size the company in order to do that, just so the company can stay viable. What I see happen at large companies, and smaller companies are much better at this, which is great, but I think we can use large public companies as an example of what not to do, is often the first thing everybody says is let's freeze hiring. So the problem with freezing hiring, it happens in large public companies, is basically out of the hiring market. And then normally, performance management kind of goes out of the window.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  It's like every manager is, we're not even backfilling a trip. So I'm not letting anybody go. I'm not moving people around. I'm not going to put this player into another team where they'd be better served. And then you're also not adjusting the company relative to the needs of the market and the company. What if you have to, like, invest more in sales and less in R and D or something like that? You can't make those types of decisions. I think that once you, if you have a market contraction, you need to decide, is our existing operating plan, is that still viable in the current market? Because you can't control the macro. And if it's not, I would actually do a full replan to make sure that you can still operate like a company. What, just because the market's shrunk 20% doesn't mean you don't have a company. It's just that your company now has to operate, you've got to cut somewhere. It could just be spend, it could be all sorts of stuff. It doesn't have to be layoffs or rifts or anything like that.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  You're gonna have to do category creation regardless of cutting spend or not cutting spend. It's independent. I just think that you need to be very thoughtful when markets contract and capital will contract about how you run your business. How many of your companies have you had to do replans on? In this market, if there's a company that's not doing a replan, they're probably negligent. Minimally. Normally in downturns, you move to scenario planning. And so the recommendation I'd give any founder, if you see this much of a dramatic shift in the macro, you should sit down and you should create a median, barren, bull case plan. And you should at least do the exercise. You don't have to enact it, but you should at least do the exercise. What is a median, a barren, a bull at like in terms of how you adjust dependent on each? I cut my teeth in 2000. I started my company in 2007. A year in, 2008 happened and I was like,

• 28:00Speaker 00

  oh shit, fucking nuclear winter, end of the world. I literally paid for salary out of my bank account. I couldn't raise money. It was horrible. I had the same team of 10 people for three years. I just thought we were just, anyways, I deeply appreciate and I empathize with what founders are going through on this, but I also think a lot of this skillset has been lost because it's been a long time since we've seen them reset this large. So you created a plan probably in Q4 of 2021, assuming some level of growth. Now, what I think companies should have done in Q2 is being like, oh shit, the world has changed. We may not be able to raise for three years. Our top line might go down by 20%. Now, what do we do? What I would do is do a bear case of what do you think the maximum impact of the top line is going to be?

• 28:42Speaker 00

  And then as a result, revenue. That median case, which is probably, normally you do look at public companies or other cohorts to see how they're being impacted and you do that for a median case. And then you do a bull case, which is let's assume nothing changes. Do we do the same thing? Or are we going to be recession accretive so that our business accelerates? For whatever reason? And then you can do a bull plan. But at least you have to go to scenario planning. So you have done the exact work. So if it turns out that like you totally whiff a quarter, like you do a 50% quarter, 40% quarter, you have everything planned out exactly how you'll respond to that.

• 29:14Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get you. In terms of the response plan, I have a lot of fans say to me layoffs, I hear that I need to do them and I'm told do them hard and do them once, but I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't know what the right amount is. How do you advise founders on layoff strategies? And you've been through it in 2007, 2008, I'm sure. How do you advise them on this challenge now?

• 29:34Speaker 00

  I tend to be very top down on these sorts of things, which is the goal is to keep the company solvent and successful, to protect common and as many employees as possible. The right approach is to create an operating plan, given the current economic environment and ask the question is what is the right company in order to do that, given whatever risk profile that you're comfortable with as a board? And boards are very different. Some boards are like, hey, listen, to hell with it. This is a time to build. Let's go ahead and accelerate into it. I 100% work with companies that are, this is amazing. Fuck it, man. Now we're gonna It's like hire, pull out the machetes, we're going to war type thing. The level of response is all over, but you have to force discussion in the board. The board has to be aligned. I do think you have to do a top down replanning. What is the right posture for the company? And then everything falls out of that. And it may or may not be layoffs.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  It could be all sorts of stuff. You could decide to reduce cloud contracts or whatever. But the top down plan is everything. I do definitely sit on boards or I know board members where they have these knee jerk reactions of we have to cut by 40%. And you're like, why? It's very funny if like an investor board member tells a company, but we have to cut by 40%. And then you're like, okay, why? It's not like they need to put together an operating plan. It's just this number. So I think everything needs to flow from an actual plan. At the same time, you're asking a founder to create an operating plan as well as asking for a cut. It makes absolutely no sense. Come up with a plan, then figure out what's the right thing to do.

• 30:51Harry Stebbings?

  I want growth and I want cuts.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:56Harry Stebbings?

  You'd have an incredible young team behind you and like working with you. In terms of your advice to young board members, how do you advise them, having been both founder and now of the investor and board member with both? How do you advise them on being the best board member they can be?

• 31:09Speaker 00

  I've made some mistakes early in my career for sure as a board member. This is even prior to being an investor, right? Like after, you know, I sold my company, a lot of people asked me to be an advisor and a board member. And I just dramatically overfit my experience early on. And that was a real mistake. You all mature and grow and that's something that I realized that I did. And what's annoying about this is it used to drive me fucking nuts when other people did it to me. So I'd be like, oh, like I built this billion dollar business. Like I had hundreds of millions.

• 31:35Harry Stebbings?

  You say you overfit your experience. You mean you saw it in your company and you overlaid it on top of this company?

• 31:41Speaker 00

  There's two things that I did wrong, that I see a lot of ex operators do wrong as board members. One of them is I would provide guidance as if I was the one running the company. And I've got my own way of doing things and it's uniquely mine for all of this quirks. This is a huge trap that investors can do. This is what I would do. Like, why aren't you doing this? It's not their way. So that's one. And the second one is, yeah, I happen to have a great experience in the company that I built, but that's just one path. And so early I didn't have the deep board experience that I have now. And so I just draw from that for my intuition. The best junior board members that I know don't try to Be helpful with advice. They try to be helpful by doing stuff that only VCs can do and companies can't do. So what I even I got my own team. I said, listen, don't tell them how to run their company.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  Don't tell them a strategy around open source. Unless you really know, don't. What you should do is you spend every fucking day researching this space, all the competitors, the people, you've come up with a thesis. No founder has the time to do that. They don't have the time that you have just taking a meeting. Synthesize that information, provide them with data and input for making decisions, but don't try and tell them how you build a company with them. That's their job. Having myself had that as a failure mode early on, I do think that everybody could use this. I do think it's worth noting that we always make fun of junior partners, which I think is a mistake. As an industry, we really undervalue junior VC partners. I think they're fantastic. They're hugely valued. But we always make fun of them because, oh, you're a PM in some crappy company or you're giving advice. I think that particular criticism is very valid.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  What I think we do underappreciate is how much these people know about markets. It tends to be far more often than the founders and the companies themselves. And I think that's something that if you're an early investor, you should just lean on.

• 33:19Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of junior partners, the team you have behind you, how do you make decisions as a team in your team? And how do you reflect on that? Is it good, bad, or could be improved?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Did you ever read Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove?

• 33:32Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, totally.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  I've got so many kind of anecdotes on this specific question. I'm going to give you two. They're going to sound a little bit tangential, but I actually believe this to be the case, which is when you've got massively complicated, underdetermined systems that consider a bunch of variables. How do you systematically make a decision? Who fucking knows? I don't know. Nobody knows. So there's two people that I think said something very enlightening. One of them was Andy Grove. He basically says, for any hard decision, the only way you can get to the bottom of it is lots of vigorous debate. I think he's dead right. And you have to have it over days, literally days or weeks or months. And you haven't had that, you're just being kind of reactive. You really need to explore this. I'm so blessed to work with the best team on the planet. I'm so lucky to have this team. Basically, all we do is talk about infra and that's all we talk about. And I think that over time, we end up with a pretty even view on these types of things.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  We actually tend to make decisions as a group. It's another thing, I think, for all of your listeners to understand, which is junior partners have a lot of pull. It's not I make decisions and they don't. They have a lot.

• 34:25Harry Stebbings?

  I have two questions for you. One, I agree with you in terms of the rigorous debate, but deals and great deals move fast. You don't have the luxury of having two weeks of debate.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 34:35Harry Stebbings?

  How do you deal with time and practice?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  It's a great question. The majority of my time and my team's time is actually mapping out spaces. If a deal's going down very quickly and we don't jump on it, the number one reason is we just haven't done the work. This is why I appreciate you so much, Harry. I just so appreciate you and I so respect what you do, which is I think that the only thing you can't gain in investing is the work. You can gain anything else. You can gain heat dynamics, you can gain everything, you can just gain it. But you can't gain somebody spending, doing the work and meeting with all the companies and understanding. Our method, it doesn't happen at deal time, typically.

• 35:10Harry Stebbings?

  It doesn't happen at deal time. Got you. It happens then before. You then have to create a culture where they can say, Martin, I hear you. I know that you feel this way, but I disagree with you.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:20Harry Stebbings?

  How to create a culture of safety when bluntly, you are a very seasoned operator? You've seen it, done it before. How do you create an environment of safety where all young people can feel they can challenge you and have debate?

• 35:31Speaker 00

  The good news is I'm wrong all the time. So I think that I was being a very faulty human being that often literally is just wrongly, I think, is part of it. Here's another thing that I think that we actually got wrong early on in the firm that I think we fixed, which is early on junior partners were very junior and they'd come and go and the tenure was two to three years. So you didn't really have a common vernacular. And now a lot of the team members I work with, we've been working together for four years and it's just a different level of communication and a different level of trust. I think I've really enjoyed that. But I will say it's probably something that I should watch because I can be pretty opinionated. And by the way, I don't think it's nearly

• 36:14Speaker 00

  as acute in venture as it is in operating. In operating, it's a real problem.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Where you just surround yourself with people that just agree with you all the time. The bottom line is it's something that you need to be aware of. If you're actually having a discussion, then people need to have an opinion. Otherwise, there is no discussion. So if you force discussion, something will come out. I do think everybody, including myself, should keep this top of mind. I think it's a great question.

• 36:36Harry Stebbings?

  If you don't have an opinion, you're fucking boring to me. Right? Yeah. Have no opinion. Oh, great. But my question to you is, how do you retain mental plasticity? Because I often have an opinion based on a historical data point, which could be front end databases. Don't make money because no one fucking pays for them. And it's wrong. Markets change, markets move. And so how do you retain plasticity with time?

• 37:00Speaker 00

  There's this interesting question of do operators make good investors? I think that you got to rework a lot of brain damage on the operator's side. I think that there's another interesting question is do engineers make good investors? I think that this gets to the heart of your question. The first decade of my career, 20 to 30, I wrote papers and I wrote code. That was 20 to 30. When you're an engineer, especially in systems, and in systems, you go through techniques that work. There's a few things that work, like caching works, like distributed consensus works. And you don't do things that have historically not worked. And so bad ideas, this is even on my Twitter thing, bad ideas just tend to stay very bad. You kind of just stick with a few good ideas. That's the method in systems. That just doesn't work for investing. And the reality is many companies end up working after three or four iterations.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Google, very famously, the third iteration of search, Facebook, the third iteration of social networking. And I will tell you, my biggest lesson in this is just talking to Mark Andreessen. I've known Ben and Mark, they invested in my company. I met Ben as I tried to hire him as my CEO. Well, you get a lot of H P and you're like, Toby, I'm too rich. To me, people that really dream about the future and really dream about technology and really care and like really believe and are on the fringe and whatever, that's the right view. Is this positive futurism view and not the curmudgeonly engineering view, which is I came from.

• 38:12Harry Stebbings?

  I'm just going for it now. I have a problem with the tourist V C, which are the ones that go to the events, do all the panels, put all the pictures on Twitter and LinkedIn. I loved Vancher 12 years ago when I first saw it in the social network, which like it or not, was my first exposure to it. But I just feel we have this different class of V C now. Where it's not that love of innovation, where it's not that love of working, where it's more about being seen. You feel that same feeling that I did.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  I actually, I actually don't, I actually don't. I actually think now VC is becoming very real. I hate to be the old guy, but when I raised money, every VC show up late and on their fucking phone, like all of them on their phone, they're all generalists. None of them are specialists, really. They mostly have like random backgrounds. They didn't treat it like a discipline. The classic sandhill dude, it was always a dude at the time. And I think now there are people that you can talk to that really view this as a real discipline on the order of taking over all of finance. And they think about it in very, very structured ways. They work incredibly hard and they understand the spaces very well. And I don't think that existed 15 years ago. It just didn't exist. And they

• 39:22Speaker 00

  really believe in value accrual to innovation and applying money to that problem. Now that said, we're at the tail end of a decade long bubble. You've just got a bunch of people that just want to get the spoils. And of course you run into them the most because they're the most flamboyant. But I think with this downturn, we'll see a lot of the tourists go away. And I think what will be left, that kind of cohort are very serious, very smart people that have realized something that just didn't exist 15 years ago. And it's for me, that's very exciting.

• 39:51Harry Stebbings?

  We've spoken about the scale ups. We've spoken about changing nature of venture. And Teresa's changed so much as an institution in the time that you've been there, but especially over the last 24 months. What have been the best change? What's been the worst change?

• 40:03Speaker 00

  I think scaling anything is hard, whether that's a distributed system or an organization. I will say scale is an unsolved problem in venture capital. It's a solved problem in finance because you don't have conflicts. Every asset's fungible. The best change is that each independent investing arm has become very empowered, which I think is fantastic. And so, for example, bio or crypto or the venture fund or whatever, the operations have been decoupled. So we can really focus on the areas and build a platform that's more relevant to that area. So I think that's very positive. I suspect you're going to say, what's the worst? And so just to preempt that question very quickly, it's just, it's scale is hard, right? And so it just takes a while. You change operating model, go to distributed to actually smooth that out.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  Now, I feel like we're, we've done a phenomenal job, having been through a bunch of big company reorgs. So we've done a phenomenal job.

• 40:51Harry Stebbings?

  What things break with scale? Culture, communication, decision making, that's most prominent to you do.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Well, I think in this case, it's just basic, simple stuff. Who do you ask for to do certain things? It's just basic process stuff. It's actually much more banal than I think people would assume. Oh, now we've got independent teams. So like, where does P and L sit? And how do you do budget allocation? It's basic stuff like that. It does slow everything down once you're hammering out those details.

• 41:16Harry Stebbings?

  How could you improve as a leader of a team today?

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Here is one that I think that the industry and myself could be better of, which is, I think I get a lot more credit than is due. I, I think my team is so phenomenal. And it's kind of interesting though, because we'll do a deal and we'll do a lot of work on a space. And then often I'll be the one that's credited with it when I was involved and invested in et cetera. But I certainly wasn't the primary backer. I think this really matters to people's careers. I also think it matters for people to understand actually where the value is coming from. And so this is something that I've been working on is making sure that we're just a lot more equitable in general. As far as like, I think that the A60 infra team is a phenomenal team. And I like it much more as the A16C infra team than like a Martin Casado, anything. And I just think that's actually more reflective of reality. That's one for sure.

• 42:03Harry Stebbings?

  How do you advise investors, young investors today, going through an abyss? It happens in investing careers where you have one not so good investment, two not so good investment. And then you're going, ah, fuck, am I any good at this? And actually you really lose confidence. How do you advise investors on going through the abyss? And is there a difference between those that make it and those that don't?

• 42:23Speaker 00

  I think this entire job is literally about controlling the things that you can control, but being very clear about what those are. And I do feel when I talk with a lot of investors that they're just kind of winging it. And I think that's a huge mistake. I think you need to come up with basically what is your belief as far as investing? That's the first thing you do. And then realize that there's two main challenges as an investor. The first one is getting emotion out of it, which is really fucking hard, man. Dude, I'm Latin. I'm like, I'm as emotional as it gets. It's right on the half Spanish, half Italian. When it comes to follow on decisions, it's very easy to fall in love. And so getting emotion out is very hard. So that's one thing that you've got to find a way to do. And the second one, you need to realize that there's a real principal agent problem in investing. And it's not even conscious. If you have a team or whatever, people are going to do what's best for their careers or whatever.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Here's the way that I think about it. So the first is you need to come up with an approach that you believe in. So in my case, I think the right thing to do is just to focus on top companies index, interesting spaces where the founders have gone to the space. That's it. And then I don't try and overthink any independent investment. I just say, does the thesis hold? Historically, has the thesis holds and whatever. And then I always measure myself relative to that approach. And then I do my best to make sure that we're not falling trapped to emotional issues and principal agents. And then other than that, there's not much you can do.

• 43:35Harry Stebbings?

  Do you worry about confirmation bias? So you have a thesis, you've done your work and you see this going this way. And you find something that aligns to that thesis and you back it.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  A lot of investors talk about thesis. I don't think that's the right way to think about investing at all. It's just so crazy to come up with some story, which to your point is more retrofitted. So I'm definitely not a thesis investor in that sense. Here's my thesis, it's very simple. Founders are smarter than I am.

• 43:57Harry Stebbings?

  Then what are you, a space identifier?

• 43:59Speaker 00

  I think so. I think that the principal value is understanding the spaces, which is led by the founders, not by me. I don't feel like I'm smarter than any founder other. I just don't. I think they're smarter. I do think that I can have a broader view than they have because I can meet more people and I have a team that can do the diligence and call on the customers. The selection is between a set of a given space, who I think is a leading company in that space. It's really that. But that's not a thesis. A thesis is like some grand unified theory of how the backend and this and that and whatever. Like, I don't do any of that stuff. I just think that it's just too easy to spin a narrative for yourself.

• 44:32Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of a narrative for yourself, I do want to touch on kind of a narrative for venture looking forwards before we do a quick fire. When you look forward, we've spoken about kind of venture ecosystem, what could be changed? When you look forward, we're in 2032 now. What does the venture ecosystem look like then in 10 years?

• 44:46Speaker 00

  I think there's going to be a question of like, if there's a dollar deployed in the future, is that dollar going to fund innovation? Or is it going to basically get predictable returns and basically stifle innovation? I hope it's going to fund innovation. The bulk of the dollars are just not. If you think about the bulk of the dollars literally are so you can fucking fire people. And get better operating margin or whatever, or get predictable returns or whatever. That's what the majority of dollars are for. And it makes sense for like 401ks and stuff like that. But I just think that now technology is mature enough that you can invest in innovation, get predictable returns. It's a fundamental belief of mine. And so I hope that in 10 years, that venture looks a lot more truthful point out.

• 45:19Harry Stebbings?

  Does that displace traditional finance?

• 45:21Speaker 00

  Sure. And it never makes sense to speak categorically about anything, right? I don't believe in zero sum games. I think the market is expanding. I think it erodes its hold on companies earlier in their lifecycle. But that includes public companies because there's so much value that has accrued to companies after they've gone public. And it just makes sense that pro innovation capital should be available to them. Displace, no. Categorically, clearly not. Take some of the territory that it currently has, absolutely yes.

• 45:48Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I think it's capital shifts on LP's budgets, which is traditionally ventures. I mean, it used to be like 8%, now it's 20%. I'm seeing in some endowments, it's like 35. I want to move into a quick fire, Martin. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll give it a shot, yeah.

• 46:04Harry Stebbings?

  What's your favorite book and why?

• 46:06Speaker 00

  So bad with favorite questions, but I just read The Weirdest People in the World, and it's the most remarkable book ever. It's a reminder of two things, that really brains are hardware and software, and the software really matters. And in the case of this book, the thesis of this book is just basically like Western Protestantism is that thought pattern has physiologically changed humans and is one of the reasons that the Western world is more pro-social, that willing to work with strangers to solve hard problems. It's just a remarkable statement. And one of the reasons that I'm lying it, one of the reasons that it's not just kin based, we don't just stick with our clan, but we actually work with strangers to solve kind of broader ideals is because there's high level abstractions there that we kind of glom onto, universal good and stuff like that. So it just shows you how powerful brain software can be.

• 46:49Harry Stebbings?

  What's your biggest lesson from your time with Mark?

• 46:51Speaker 00

  So often, like morality comes down to the aesthetics and I just, I'm in love with the aesthetic that technology is a real good and we're making the world a better place and the future is bright on that. And it's a great way to spend time and effort.

• 47:04Harry Stebbings?

  What do you believe that most around you disbelieve, Martin?

• 47:06Speaker 00

  A lot of what I've said now people start to believe. It was very controversial when I said that. I think The cloud is breaking beyond its borders, which I absolutely believe. I think that the cloud is disaggregating. A lot of people just believe that.

• 47:17Harry Stebbings?

  What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started at Andreessen?

• 47:20Speaker 00

  My bedside manner has improved an awful lot as a board member, and I think that my expectations on how smart a venture capitalist can be have also been tempered, and a lot of the hubris is gone. Life would have been easier if I didn't have to take the hard path that way.

• 47:33Harry Stebbings?

  What did you make of the crossover fund activity over the last years?

• 47:37Speaker 00

  I think it was actually brilliant. I think that was a very, very smart model, and it's the right one. I think it's very hard for finance people to deploy money effectively at the early stage, but I think it's the right model if you can actually understand the markets. It's like the right model, kind of the wrong people doing it.

• 47:53Harry Stebbings?

  What's your biggest miss and how did it impact your mindset?

• 47:56Speaker 00

  I've missed so many, and they're all huge. We don't even have a bet in cloud security posture management, like the Lace Works and the Arcas and the Wizis, right? We still have the starvation mentality of the early 2000s of, oh, the market's limited. We should only deploy a little bit of money, blah, blah, blah. The reality is you can't deploy money fast enough in the current market, even with the downturn, and there's more opportunity out there, and it's bigger than any of us know about it, and it's time that we all kind of mature and believe that.

• 48:20Harry Stebbings?

  What's the best investment advice you've received?

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Follow the Founder Network is probably the best advice.

• 48:25Harry Stebbings?

  Who's the most underrated angel in the ecosystem fee?

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Ram Sreeram. There's a bunch of great angel investors. Ram works so hard. It adds so much value to the boards that he's on. It's just unbelievable. It's just so rare that someone of that stature and fame contributes so much. It's not what you were expecting as far, but like, he really is something else. I really owe a lot to the guy.

• 48:45Harry Stebbings?

  Martin, as a most underrated, it's perfect. This is exactly what I wanted. Final one for you. Martin Cisardo in 10 years, where do you want to be?

• 48:51Speaker 00

  I would love to continue to focus on how West Coast product-focused, founder-focused investment can continue to rotate at East Coast finance, and I would love to continue to be playing a part of that.

• 49:03Harry Stebbings?

  Martin, I have never quite had a guest who swears as much as me. I love this.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Can't help it.

• 49:09Harry Stebbings?

  You could be British deep down. I love it. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Such a pleasure, Harry. Thank you so much, Harry.

• 49:18Harry Stebbings?

  What an incredible guest. As you can tell, it was such a live and natural discussion. Want to say huge thank you to Martin for being such a great guest. You can find us on 20VC on YouTube. You can also find us on 20vc.com. But before we leave you today, 20VC is supported by First Republic Bank. When private equity and venture capital firms are funding the innovations of tomorrow, speed is of the essence. That's why at First Republic, you'll be paired with your own banker who will remain dedicated to helping your team through all market cycles and will be ready to respond quickly to your requests. As a First Republic client myself, having a direct relationship with a personal banker who I can really depend on to help me make the right decision matters a lot.

• 49:59Harry Stebbings?

  In fact, your banker will serve as your single point of contact by phone, email, or First Republic's secure app. Visit firstrepublic.com today to learn more. That's firstrepublic.com. Member FDIC and equal housing lender. And speaking of amazing partners with First Republic there, if you're a venture capitalist or corporate strategist, I want to tell you about Tegus. Tegus is the only company in the world that aggregates qualitative information on private companies from seed stage to pre-IPO. With Tegus, you can access other VCs and founders' expert call transcripts from previous rounds to help source fast-growing companies, create compelling emails to really get a founder to respond and be excited to speak, and to diligence companies when a round is

• 50:42Harry Stebbings?

  moving fast. Tegus also provides the most flexible and highest-quality way to run your own expert calls. With no upfront fees or call minimums, the ability to do a 30-minute call and simply pay the expert rate at an average of $300. Tegus makes expert calls easy. Find out why a majority of the top venture funds are using Tegus on a daily basis. Head over to tegus.co/gross for your free trial. And speaking of incredible resources like Tegus there, I've always been a massive history fan, and so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley is one of the most active law firms, representing both early-stage and late-stage financings, handling more than 1,300 private financing

• 51:27Harry Stebbings?

  Every year with an equal split of investor and company clients. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC backed companies going public, head over to Cooley.com and also check out Cooleygo.com. Cooley's award winning free legal resource for entrepreneurs. As always, your support means the world to me and I can't wait to bring you an incredible 20 product on Wednesday with Marty Kagan.