EP 43: Semil Shah (Partner, Haystack) - The State of Venture, Investing in Figma, Hashicorp, Doordash and Almost Investing in Coinbase

In the 43rd episode Semil Shah, Partner at Haystack, joins to discuss whether the company brand name or partner matters more in VC, how he almost invested in Coinbase when it was at only $20M, the flywheel of VC and how it’s evolving and what he looks for in a founder. (0:05) Welcome Semil Shah (7:08) Early VC content creation (18:12) Brand name vs partners in VC (26:06) The VC flywheel (35:03) Your role in venture (45:00) What you look for in founders (54:12) Where do your deals come from (58:20) Open AI (1:02:45) Dry powder (1:06:27) How would you manage your third fund? (1:14:40) Semil’s take on crypto (1:21:02) Podcasting evolution (1:27:24) Outro Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Andrew Nadeau and Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://instagram.com/cartoonavatars 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/cartoonavatars 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@cartoonavatars About the Show A Saturday morning podcast hosted by Logan Bartlett (Partner and Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures) covering the tech news with his friends and other people with industry expertise. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:04Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the 43rd episode of Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and I am joined today by Semil Shah, who is a... Semil, what's the title? Is it General Partner? What have you decided to call yourself?

• 0:17Speaker 01

  I just say Partner.

• 0:18Logan Bartlett?

  Partner.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  The terms of last meeting.

• 0:22Logan Bartlett?

  They really have.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  They really am.

• 0:24Logan Bartlett?

  A partner at Haystack. For folks that don't know, Semil's now on Haystack 6. He's had a number of really successful investments, including companies like HashiCorp, DoorDash, Instacart, Figma, Carda, Applied Intuition, among a bunch of others. And Semil, someone had suggested, or I think you had posted, "Hey, I want to do more podcasts", and someone had added me in the comments here. And so that was the genesis of this. But I think the reason, from my perspective, this would be an interesting conversation, or I was excited to do it, is I think ostensibly, we do the same job.

• 1:07Logan Bartlett?

  We probably both call ourselves venture capitalists when people ask what we do, when we don't just try to say we work in tech and avoid explaining or telling people we're VCs. But I think we approach the industry in very different ways. And I sort of grew up within Battery and then Redpoint. You sort of started your own thing, and you did it within a venture firm, and started small and then built up. I think you do kind of seed, pre-seed. I don't know how you defined it, versus I'm definitely more growth as well. So I figure we could have a pretty interesting conversation about the state of the industry, how we approach venture capital, yeah, all different things in a particularly interesting

• 1:50Logan Bartlett?

  market environment we're in. So, yeah, thanks for doing this.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:54Logan Bartlett?

  So, just to level set people, can you just take us through your path into Haystack 6? The version of how you actually found yourself being a VC and a partner at a firm that you founded?

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a lot of people do come up to me and say, "Wow, you did this", or "Haystack's doing that", and "It's great and how you designed everything", On the on the rare occasion where I stop them and really have a conversation, I usually tell them all the ways we got here were basically through, one, avoiding things I didn't like. And two, I had no other options. So it wasn't like a grand design. It it and I don't mean to say it was accidental, but um, really, I didn't want to do late-stage investing and and we'll get into more of that when you when you talk about the craft of like entry points being later or sitting on boards, for example, or getting into spreadsheets. It's just not how I operate.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Um, and then also I was never able to raise the size of funds I wanted to, so they always stayed constrained. And I think that constraint, uh, one of just staying earlier to like, avoid the formality that happens in venture as more capital gets put in. And two, to avoid larger funds because the market wouldn't afford them to me. I think drove a lot of the success of why I'm here today, but it wasn't the original driving force.

• 3:17Logan Bartlett?

  It's it's funny when people ask like prescriptive questions like that of how to get into venture and I I uh, I I similarly like either through just uh, forward momentum and in part rejection like I remember I I, when I was graduating, I wanted to go work in private equity because not for any reason that I knew what private equity was, but I was told that like paid well. And uh, and that was what successful people did. And so because I was rejected from some private equity jobs, I like sort of explored my way into venture. And funny enough, I I like actually internally, I say I was rejected from an associate job at Redpoint in 2013. Uh, I think the team would say that uh,

• 4:02Logan Bartlett?

  there wasn't actually a job opening, but like, you know, for me, had I joined Redpoint in 2013, I I feel like I wouldn't be here today, nine years later, right? It's sort of like the path that got me here was different than, and so in being prescriptive about these things, so many people kind of accidentally fall into uh, the industry over the last decade. And I don't know if that's going to be the case going forward. Uh, it certainly was in the past.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Mine was a little bit different in the sense I I really felt like I wanted to be in venture. I knew a lot of people in venture. I was sending a lot of friends and founders to venture capitalists who were getting funded. Um, I had consulted with a bunch, so I actually just assumed. Oh, I'll get a job and you know, that never happened. So I think that was one of the things where I didn't have an alternative. So you start the small fund. And then every fund I tried to raise, I wanted to raise it, you know, a larger amount, not, not huge, but larger. And I couldn't. So I just went with this sort of army, you know, I fought with the army I had.

• 5:05Logan Bartlett?

  What were you doing at the time that you were like plugged into the venture ecosystem enough to know that you wanted to do this and be hired by firms?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:12Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, what was your, what were you doing at the time?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  You know, I had like the, the hustle card, if you will, like I was working at startups. I worked at a few different startups that were all, you know, had modest acquisitions. I was consulting with a variety of venture firms on the side. I knew a lot of VCs and they were like, hey, we like having you around. And you know, I didn't charge them much. Um, and so they, they would put me on a retainer and, and so I literally was getting like eight to 10 different paychecks per month. Uh, for about, oof, probably a six year period.

• 5:45Logan Bartlett?

  What year did this sort of start?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  First check was in, um, March, late March of 2013, and then had my first kid in April of 2013. So. It was like a totally different life that just unfolded from there.

• 5:59Logan Bartlett?

  And were you advising before then though? Like when, when were you sort of like this, this nebulous consultant startup person in the ecosystem? When did that kind of start?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  It was basically nebulous is the right word.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Two thousand nine, 10 till about.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  You know, I would say probably till 2015. Was a pretty nebulous time. You could argue post 2015 was also nebulous, but.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  And you know, some people ascribe that to just the Twitter and the writing. And I always say. There's no doubt that the original ideas and the writing in the blog I was doing and Twitter as being like, you know, really strong network. For what, you know, for what we do in our ecosystem proved to be the right call, but that only really opened doors like. In order to close things or like close opportunities had to be done in person. And so. I think I was just lucky to be in downtown Palo Alto at the time and. You know, sort of mentored by a lot of people, picked up by a lot of people. You know, I don't know if it would happen now in the Bay Area, you know?

• 7:08Logan Bartlett?

  A lot of people, I mean, honestly, the path you took of like blogging or writing and tweeting and I mean, you were doing videos early on. Like I know in prep for the conversation I with Peter Fenn and I went back and watched a video of the two of you from like a decade ago. And you're posting YouTube videos and doing all, all of that stuff. Was that all with, did that just come naturally to you? And you, you felt like this is my way of getting out there. Or how much was that to some ends that you were thinking, okay, I'll build, you know, an audience. And then I can leverage that to do all these other things.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm really glad you asked that and I hope you believe the answer.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  I never started tweeting

• 7:55Speaker 01

  or, or writing on my blog or, or doing like the, some of those videos for audience lift. I wasn't thinking like that. I was actually just really trying to learn and meet people.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And I think what ended up happening was is that I was pretty consistent with the content that I was writing. It was relatively short and like digestible. And I think it was more in like the vein of synthesis. And so I think what ended up happening is that like people who were smarter than me ended up reading it and sharing it. But it wasn't, it was not the intention. Like I have a line at the bottom of my blog from Epicurus that just says like you and I or something are enough of an audience, you know? I, I always thought of it as that. You know, lately, in the last few years, it's changed because I know who subscribes to my blog.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Uh, I think I remember one day like for the partners at Benchmark all subscribed to the blog. And I you realize when you hit publish, like it all goes to their inbox, right? And then, uh, some of the old partners at KP before that. So I was like, okay, I'm I need to be a little bit more careful of what I write out. But it wasn't the original intention.

• 9:11Logan Bartlett?

  And so, uh, the intention, it was just sort of you thinking out loud about different, uh, different things that were going on in the market and like what your perspectives were. It was really just like almost a journal for yourself and and learn and get feedback.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say I would only, I would add one important thing to what you said is true with a caveat, which was, um, I don't have a background in product, technology, finance. I don't come from that world. Um, and so a lot of this stuff was really new, also exciting to me. Some of it was inaccessible. And so I found I found that if I put it in writing for myself, I could synthesize and and sort of cleanse the random myriad thoughts that were colliding around my brain. And actually Twitter serves the same function for me, you know?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  It it actually is a part of quieting my own brain and moving on from a thought.

• 10:15Logan Bartlett?

  It's very in contrast to like this whole thing for me was very purposeful, right? Uh, in, uh, I was actually super uncomfortable doing it where I guess my version of this was I was basically during the pandemic, kind of fucking around on Twitter and I just joined Redpoint and I was bored at home and I just like kept tweeting. And so I was getting like, you know, uh, incremental validation that this person would follow or this person would share. And it was like this weird dopamine hit.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:45Logan Bartlett?

  And then after like 18 months of basically fucking around, I was like, you know, I should do something else, right? Like I, because to some extent, it's like a one dimensional presentation of myself. And I was kind of this character and anytime I deviated from a character, people were like, hey, I signed up for you to be the character. So like, you know that scene in Wedding Crashers? It's like, make me a bicycle clown. I felt like it was, everyone was just like wanting the bicycle. And I was like, well, no, I have some other thoughts. And they're like, shut up. No, no, no. We came here for this. Give me this. Right. And, and the market was so competitive. And I was like, I was nervous. And I was like, hey, why don't I try this? And I've said this before, the All In podcast

• 11:29Logan Bartlett?

  was definitely like an inspiration that they were just messing around. And so it felt like you could put a camera in front of your face and talk for a little while.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:37Logan Bartlett?

  But it was very purposeful, right? It was like, hey, I'm gonna go out there a little bit more and try to be known more as like a three dimensional human than like this person that just makes jokes on Twitter. So it's interesting, I guess, different time periods.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  And I, well, one, look, whether, whether, whether people like what you created or not, I think the fact that you did it is awesome. It doesn't really matter why. And it can evolve, right? So I think, who knows? Like, I've listened to, I would say probably 80, 90% of the three cartoon avatars. Because I'm actually, I knew Zach a long time ago.

• 12:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  So I would always listen, R I P. And then I would listen to you.

• 12:23Logan Bartlett?

  And I had to tell him, yeah.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  And so I think, and so I think like, you've gone, you're in your third, maybe even fourth phase now of the show. And who knows, a year from now, right?

• 12:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I, you're right. You're right. And it's one of those things, I guess, that I'm sure you feel this in blogging. Now I find like more gratification in it. I mean, before I was so anxiety riddled. And you talk about like the four benchmark partners signing up, or the original Kleiner people. Every episode, and Justin, our producer, can attest to this, but like, I would stay up, no joke, on Thursday nights, we would record and I would stay up, I mean, some nights till four in the morning, editing, like, scrubbing, you know, making, and just like, and it was, I was trying so hard because I was so nervous, right? I was just like, oh my gosh, this is going to go out there in the ether and all these people, I'm so exposed, right? Because

• 13:14Logan Bartlett?

  the medium of Twitter was 280 characters and I could be very curated and one dimensional and I wasn't exposed to criticism, really, right? It was kind of like, hey, well, I'm joking anyway, so like, if you, you know, you can't, you can't attack me in any way because the joke's on you if you do, right? And then you expose yourself in such a meaningful way with such intimacy that like, people know my apartment, the back of my apartment, right? And like, people know my intonations and my mannerisms and I get corrected on, hey, you know, you misuse this word or something, right? Or people know my relationship status and all this stuff. And so it was so debilitating initially. And then at some point, you get

• 13:57Logan Bartlett?

  to the like, hey, fuck it, you know, like, who cares? People are going to criticize you or maybe not. People will agree with you or maybe not, right?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:05Logan Bartlett?

  And it's a weird, I'm sure you got to that point, blogging at some point as well.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will say I had a little different, right? I do think, and a lot of people, this is a very nuanced point, but I think your audience will pick up on it. I think a lot of people will say, well, why, why don't, you know, VCs, like, let's say, like Logan, create content or say what's on their mind or blog or tweet what's on their mind. They don't realize they work at a financial partnership organization where you can't just say anything.

• 14:34Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  And you have to be a cheerleader. So when I started tweeting and blogging, I didn't have a real job. No one gave a shit who I was or what I was doing. So I was able to have more latitude to just say whatever I felt like. Whereas if, you know,

• 14:51Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and your firm is you, or it was once upon a time, right? You were the totality of the brand initially, right?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I didn't think of it as a firm per se. I just thought of it as like, hey, I'm just, this is how I interact with the ecosystem, right?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  It it just, it was a place like everyone I basically met in tech and VC, I met through Twitter. Like just this morning, I met an old friend who he was a original co-founder of Thumbtack. And, you know, I haven't seen him in like seven years. So we just got coffee this morning. And he walked me into my car and he goes, hey, I remember when I first met you. I asked you a DM on Twitter, then you just called me and gave me, you answered my question. And he was like, I met you through Twitter. And I just reminded like, basically all these relationships I have do trace back to Twitter. Um, I would say eighty to ninety percent, but they were for, they were, they were sort of created and hatched in the network on, on Twitter. But then they were forged in real life. That's the difference, right?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  And we didn't really have that the last few years. Um, and it may take a while for that to come back in the Bay Area again.

• 15:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And what's interesting about the Twitter point is I actually give Redpoint a lot of credit. Back to the, to the earlier, uh, thing about you just being out there in the ether is, uh, as doing all of this. And if you're at a registered investment advisor, like, you know, General Catalyst was for Zach or Andreessen Horowitz or Battery, my former employer, right? There are a bunch of considerations of what you can say and can't say. And that's like legal things that can get you in trouble with the compliance department. Then there's the more nuanced thing that's actually like the brand of the firm that, uh, Redpoint certainly had a brand before I joined. Uh, and so, you know, I, I joined at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020.

• 16:37Logan Bartlett?

  And so that was a longstanding, uh, uh, brand for the last 20 years or whatever. That stood for something before I came in. And then it's a partnership with a bunch of different opinions and styles and all of that. And so if you're going to expose yourself and kind of talk openly about stuff, inevitably people are going to disagree within my own partnership. Right? I've had, I've had people go up and be like, hey, wait, Redpoint's doing crypto investments. Don't you have that anti crypto guy? And it's like, uh, people have to quasi defend me and they're like, hey, no, like he kind of, he's, he's kind of the anti crypto guy. But it's that other guy, Zach Weinberg, who's like the really anti crypto guy, right?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  To me, there's like a very natural way to diffuse this and like show, show that like, it's not a big deal. Like if you check the CNBC, um, YouTube feed any given week.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  There's four people from like either Blackstone or Goldman Sachs who are all MDs, who all say different things about the economy.

• 17:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  The firms are made up of people with different points of view.

• 17:40Logan Bartlett?

  But it starts to be like that works at a point that the institution is such that like you almost need some longevity of like institutional awareness such that the brand can can be above and beyond any one individual versus on TikTok, right? Probably most of our our viewers there just know Rashad for making jokes or like maybe they know me or maybe they they knew someone's blog or whatever it is, right? And so it works better when you're Goldman Sachs and you're a hundred year plus institution and all that. But I guess interesting kind of segue of how do you think about the the venture capital

• 18:20Logan Bartlett?

  industry right now and like brand, like what role does brand play in venture capital for individual partners versus firms as you think about it? I sort of feel like you get this this viewpoint that you're up funnel, right? And so we're upstream from like if I say things, if I go shit on a firm, that has implications for my deal flow, right? To some extent, because inevitably like at some point, it's going to come back around and come down that that firm doesn't want to work with me. You're early enough that you can speak your mind a little bit more and I get the feeling you're friends with a lot of people in the industry and don't and don't aren't going to go out of your way to shit on different firms or anything.

• 19:05Logan Bartlett?

  But I feel like you have an interesting kind of viewpoint.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm happy to share my viewpoint. I mean, also, it's not good business to publicly denounce any company or fund or person like it's not. You know, there's nothing to come from that, but what

• 19:21Logan Bartlett?

  It's good content, though.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, sort of. I mean, does it really matter, though? I feel like it just matters to like 101 people. And what I really think matters is like, what do you actually founders every year on an annual basis, who are actually qualified to raise or in some point on a path to raise venture capital, who are under the age of 25? And what I think, and again, I can't back it up with data, but like talking to a lot of these people every day for years. I think there are certain brands they recognize because they've been incepted in college and those brands have done a really good job of doing that. And then it falls off a cliff. And then the next point, and we can walk through all of these.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  The next point comes when they're trying to raise that five or $10 million check. The brand matters. And I think it used to be that the partner at the firm mattered a lot. But right now, you either get that logo or you don't, you know? And I think the partner matters less to the entrepreneur now and the money and the logo matter more. And if we had had this podcast a year ago, I may have had a different answer. So we can walk through that, but like

• 20:37Logan Bartlett?

  You see, I would have, I would have thought the opposite that like in the go-go times of the last two years, that you wanted the optimization of the brand, right? Because like, who gives a shit? You know, we saw with FTX, people weren't taking board seats at all, right? Or people were kind of just buying, you know, the reputation of the firm to have you with credibility. And now I would think that these firms are ultimately made up of individuals. And maybe you discount the advice that, that any one partner would have if you're, if you're a founder. But like, there are material differences of having someone that's like very credible within their firm and their ability to give you follow-on financing

• 21:22Logan Bartlett?

  in incremental rounds coming down the, or their ability to get you financed in the next round after they invested in all that.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  But I think those are, those are champagne choices, like Let me walk through those and we'll get to your answer real quickly. I think if you, if Logan and I were college buddies and we're thinking about entrepreneurship or starting something in college or once we graduate, what are the brands we know and recognize when we're 20, 21?

• 21:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  What I hear constantly, First Round Capital, which had the content and community, YC, which has, you know, content and community to the wazoo, and Sequoia, and then recent. And then I think there's like a huge drop. It doesn't mean to say any, those are the four best places ever and no one else matters. It's just the awareness of like that cohort that's really, really young. Okay. Then I think, let's say you and I are 22, 23, 25.

• 22:25Logan Bartlett?

  And one question on that, when you say, do you think awareness ties into at that point? I mean, obviously access is kind of the, you know, the funnel is so big at the early stage that it's actually impossible. I sort of equate my job to spearfishing a little bit where I'm out there actually hunting with a spear for these fish versus at the early stage, you're very much net, you know, you're fishing with, with the nets out there in the ocean. And so you need to cast a wide awareness.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  So yeah.

• 22:54Logan Bartlett?

  Does awareness equal access in this case, as you sort of think about it?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  I don't think necessarily. I just think these are the brands that the, I'm coming at it from the founder's point of view, right? Where the founders, when they're in college, this is the brand recognition that, that impacts them. They get the content, they get the emails, they get the events. They, you know, these organizations are professionally run to go into these junior networks and, and sort of mine for talent and they've done a great job at it. Now let's fast forward. Samuel and Logan are, are the sprite age of 25 and you know, we're, we're going to start our company. We get some seed funding, who knows, right? We learn through First Round Community, we go through YC, we raise a, we raise a million or so. And let's say things starting to work and then we, we want, you know, that $10 million check.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Today in 2022, moving into 2023, would it be great to have our choice of partner at regular firms? Yes, but I think for most people, they're just not going to get even the meaning for the $10 million check. So if you and I go grab it from a great fund, it doesn't really matter who. We all kind of know who's in that basket of 30 to 40 great funds. That's a huge win. And I think it sends a signal to the rest of the market, even if it's a junior person, even if it's a 75% player, that you went through some institutional process because everybody on the street knows that like to get a $10 million check in 2022 beyond,

• 24:30Speaker 01

  multiple people have to sign off on it. It just doesn't happen. And so that's why I think it matters more.

• 24:36Logan Bartlett?

  It kind of goes to a fundamental question of like, what is the most hopeful element of venture capital in general, right? Is it the advice, counsel, support, credibility of an individual and like what actually happens at a boardroom? Or is it the external validation of hiring and customers and you know, perception and follow-on financing and all of that stuff? And the answer, I think those two things, it goes back and forth, right? And inevitably in different markets, it's going to be different things and different firms are going to have, and different businesses are going to have different answers to that, right?

• 25:21Logan Bartlett?

  To some extent.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  I do think it ebbs and flows and it's not either or. It's probably some pie chart of like what matters to a company, but I tend to always come back to the Mark Andreessen line where he said like venture capital early kind of like fills that credibility gap. That the 25 year old Logan and Samuel have when they're starting their company that gives us air cover to go tell people we can hire, we've got money, you know, Lightspeed, Greylock, Excel behind us. Like other people in the ecosystem say, oh yeah, I know, I know that firm, you know, I know that firm. Like, oh yeah, like Redpoint, let our, let our series A, like, we, we know them. Like, we've worked with them, you know? And so I do think that has tremendous value.

• 26:06Logan Bartlett?

  What are institutions in general, right? Like, what is YC? Or what is Princeton? Or what is whatever? Bain, right? And to some extent, there's like, I, I sort of think there's three components to it. It's like what you actually learn there, which I don't know, from my college experience, I can't recall anything I actually learned. But then there's the, the stamp and the mental association that people have. It's like a shortcut of, hey, you did this, right? Which is sort of what we're talking about. You went to Princeton, or you went through Bain, or Goldman Sachs, or Google, or whatever. And so it's the credibility and the association around it. And then the third one is kind of like the alumni network and the, the people that you get access to. And so in some ways, I feel like I've been

• 26:49Logan Bartlett?

  most impressed with YC as like a durable school, an institution, right? Because if you were to map like what Princeton or Harvard is against what YC is, it's actually like all the things that Princeton and Harvard would say for you, I think YC also kind of has as well.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:10Logan Bartlett?

  One of the, um, one of the things I would love to get your, your, your perspective on though is, so we lived in this world of constrained capital from a limited partner standpoint, right? Uh, and, and so to have success was to be in great companies, was to therefore, uh, have the opportunity to have more success. And so it was kind of this compounding flywheel where like you do good deals, so you make great returns, so more people, you have more money. And so more founders in the future want to work with you. So then you do good deals again, right? It's kind of this like loop that exists. And it was very much compounding there. What, what ultimately kind of happened, I feel

• 27:55Logan Bartlett?

  like over the last couple of years is, As more and more capital entered the asset class from an LP standpoint, the returns became less and less of something that delineated the ability to raise capital. And so it actually was founders stopped looking for the inherent validation that came with great returns and instead were looking more and more for, you know, maybe it's the firm that gives you the least dilution, right? The highest price, the firm that has, you know, the most

• 28:38Logan Bartlett?

  network that they can make intros, customer intros for you as well. And so returns actually, in some cases, started to be a contrast signal because that means you're taking advantage of entrepreneurs to some extent, right? It's like, hey, if you have amazing returns, then that means potentially you got better deals and took more of the company from the founders. And so if you look at Tiger at an extreme example, that they were paying the highest prices, right? And were giving the most control to the entrepreneur and all that, which actually goes against the access to capital in a lot of ways that some of these

• 29:23Logan Bartlett?

  VC firms have held precious to. Do you feel like there's this flywheel and this constraint that still exists now as we're sort of entering a recessionary environment? Or do you think that the toothpaste is out of the tube and each of those discrete parts, be it access, picking, helping, raising money, access, like that flywheel is forever broken?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  I do think the flywheel has changed, partly because I do believe LPs are going to re-underwrite everybody with a fresh set of eyes now, particularly looking at fund size. It will, I think, get the most scrutiny. But I do think there will be this flight to quality in the same way it's happening in the VC market for equity, where LPs will look to smaller funds with more experienced managers.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  It's the same behavior. They're going to fly to quality. And so

• 30:36Speaker 01

  it's already happening, but it will really kick in gear next year, right? Because LPs now, you know, everyone is sort of licking their wounds. Everyone's wounds are different. What what happened with LPs is they they also invested in a lot of funds where where literally the capital is either stranded or torched or may never come back. So it's just a reflection of like re underwriting all of this. And, you know, I think it's it's going to people, you I my prediction is you'll see, we'll see people we know who are really good investors who have a more modest fund number the next time.

• 31:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, I think that that definitely makes makes sense.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  One part that you mentioned that I never thought of before was like, if you have good returns at taking management entrepreneur, I think in a lot of cases I found to like, when you're investing early, both you as the investor and the founder don't really know what anything's going to be. And so the the sort of math works out much, much later.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So yeah, I think there are multiple ways of looking at it.

• 31:44Logan Bartlett?

  I actually agree a hundred percent with that.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  I think the the big fight coming up, the big fight coming up, Logan, in my opinion, is around ownership. Because you have the last 10 to 12 years, you have so much, you know, you have YC and first round come up, you have so much startup content from other founders online and accessible, and you could say too much. And so founders have learned to really protect their dilution, even at, you know, at some threshold minimum. And I think as these funds are going to be forced to go smaller and forced to go earlier into truer, let's say truer venture capital, right? They're gonna have more speculative investments by nature and they're gonna need

• 32:29Speaker 01

  to concentrate them more to drive a return. So they're gonna ask and need more ownership. And so it'll be interesting to see what happens because those things are sort of at loggerheads right now.

• 32:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I agree with that. And also, one of the things about like all the content that's been out there over the course, I mean, I give, I have a lot of respect for all the firms that have really democratized the access and the insight that had been kind of this cottage industry and old boys' club in Palo Alto that was kind of like, you know, only, only spoken at Sam's or whatever, and now was, has been made much more accessible.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:09Logan Bartlett?

  The, the flip side of that is I've seen, especially over the last two years, that like, things got very prescriptive in how you should run a fundraise, right? Or how your data room should be prepared, or how, how much time to, you know, devote to the term sheet, or like, what were market terms and all that. And it was this interesting, I'm sure for like, maybe 75% of the scenarios, it was a very, it was very helpful. And I think VC, once upon a time, was, definitely had elements of like, usury, because of the

• 33:50Logan Bartlett?

  lack of access to information and some of the power that having the capital afforded you. But at the end of the day, I felt like I was trying to build relationships with people. And it was like, they had this cookie cutter thing. They were told like, oh, don't give them more than two turns on diligence questions, right? Because, or make sure all term sheets come in on the Friday after the Monday meeting.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think your, your experience and my experience, just given the stage look, I mean, it's gonna be so different. When they're, when they're coming to you, you know, they've been trained by all these founders and their existing investors to like, have all these parameters. And it's an enterprise sale, you know, and that's what they've been trained to do for over a decade. It's just, it almost seems like an unstoppable force. Versus when, when we meet a lot of people early.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  They don't even know, you know, they don't even know what to do. And so part of our job is to like, guide them, syndicate with them, teach them how to raise over time and build relationships over time. It's something we spend a lot of time, you know, now, does it work always? No.

• 35:03Logan Bartlett?

  It's actually an interesting, I mean, I appreciate you flagging that. Like, what do you, what do you do? What is your, how do you view your job? And how do you practice that craft of venture, if you will?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Well, we always say like, our business is limited by people. We're excited to get the chance to partner with. And so we're constantly meeting people, constantly turning over stones to meet the next Mitchell Hashimoto, right? That's, that's the job. And so the problem is, you just never know who that's going to be, where they're going to come from. And it's been harder over the pandemic because you haven't really got to spend time. Like, I spent a lot of time with Mitchell. I spent a lot of time with Dylan, you know, years before funding them. They were just sort of industry buddies.

• 35:51Logan Bartlett?

  Mitchell is the founder of Apache Corp., which is, you know, whatever, four, five, six billion dollar public company. And I assume Dylan is Dylan Field, CEO, founder of Figma.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what we try to do is say, okay, like, this is my philosophy, right? Is like, the LPs who are in, you know, institutional LPs who are entrusting us with their money, we've heard, you know, we've had to build up the LP relationships from zero and have had long-term LPs across three and hopefully now four funds. So we're, we're just super lucky to have gotten there. We sort of say, okay, we're taking the money from the LPs. And what is our product? Our product is to build a basket of founders, right? Because we don't know what's going to happen. And I usually tell all the founders, like the math, like, we put 25 to 35 of you in the basket. And what ends up happening, if we're lucky through the power law, is one or

• 36:43Speaker 01

  two of you groups will end up covering the rest of these folks in the boat. That's what the math ends up showing. And so what we try to do is say, okay, we're making a commitment to the person. I think one of the, one of the, there's three reasons, I think. Haystack has been able to be successful is the constraints of the fund size, the fact that we took shots on goal that were mathematically commensurate with the fund size and that we had a people orientation. So we spend time with people and we sort of say, hey, look, we're going to help you get to the next goal. That's usually in this like a larger institutional round. But hey, most oftentimes that doesn't happen. So we're going to help you land the plane

• 37:26Speaker 01

  or get the next job. This is just how it works. And so we make the commitment to the person.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Do people listen to what we say? No, not all the time. But what we try to do in the round is like the Nirvana stage is when we lock arms with the founder and then we say, let's design the round together. So then we sort of work them through. We introduce them to some people. Sometimes they've already met people that they met. Great. We teach them how to close it, how to close a round.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  You know, all the little mechanics, but by the time they get to you, they've already done this a few times. We teach them that. Then we get it. Once the round is done, we sort of reverse engineer and say, okay, what are the milestones that matter to you over the next 12 to 18 months? Why do those matter? And then how do we set you all on a trajectory to get there? Do most people get there? No. But along the way, we introduce them to people we think could be a fit. And we, our advice is like, you go build relationships with investors that you have a natural rapport with. We can introduce you, but we can't do much more. And so our, our guidance to

• 38:36Speaker 01

  them is like, your job as a CEO is to build relationships with a set of investors downstream or upstream, whatever you want to call it, who want to invest in you.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  You can't just go into hiding and then come out and say, have a million ARR and workday is like a pilot and we want to raise capital. It just doesn't work that way. And so we, we try to guide people along that path. Will they listen to us? All the time, maybe, maybe, maybe not, but that's the goal.

• 39:07Logan Bartlett?

  So, so if you think about like, there's kind of two discrete products that I think about within the venture capital world and one is the LP customer that we all have, right? And one is the the founder customer that we have. And so what I'm hearing in terms of how you practice the, so are you guys leading round? What percentage is leading versus participating in these initial investments?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  It's changed, but I would say we, we either lead or catalyze probably little over half of every round over the last five years.

• 39:41Logan Bartlett?

  Got it.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  But we don't try to position it that way. Like, we're very flexible.

• 39:46Logan Bartlett?

  And so you're doing 25 to 35 in a given fund, initial investments. And the distribution of that are, I mean, it sounds like between, you know, Hashi and Figma and Karta and Instacart and all that, you've had more than a few balls that have gone way out of the ballpark. But are you thinking, hey, one, two, three of those are going to be 10x, 20x plus type things? And then, you know, it'll be a bunch in the middle and then a bunch of zeros as well? Is that sort of the way the fund makeup ultimately plays out?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  I mean, it's too early to tell, but if I look at funds one and two that are already been, you know, DPI distributed at a high multiple already. There's a pretty clear power law to it.

• 40:32Logan Bartlett?

  By the way, DPI, for people that don't know, dollars paid in, actually giving money back. The ultimate goal of our job is not just to take the money, it's to give it back.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, but, but it's too early to tell on the other ones. And now with the correction, I don't know, but I do think of it in that way. Actually, I was thinking of it a slightly different way, Logan, is like, if we get our initial ownership, so our initial ownership target, we tell very clearly to founders is like, five to 10%, you know, and we have a bunch at 10, we have a bunch at five, the medium's like 7.8 or something. We like to work on the cap table with one or two other people that we know it's really important to us. So I, I really focus on that. But what we, what we sort of tell them is that like,

• 41:16Speaker 01

  the, the way I sort of think about it is if we can't find a few good companies out of that many names, then we shouldn't be in business anyway. Right? And so that's kind of the math of like, I I think if we can get three billion dollar outcomes out of the thirty thirty five. Um, with our fund size being small, like it will be a great outcome, but who knows?

• 41:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  We've been part of these bigger, like multi-billion dollar ones, but like, you know, there used to be when I started a bunch of these companies that would raise, you know, five, 10 million buffs and then get acquired for like a few hundred million really quickly. I've never really been a part of that, you know? Um, so there's so many ways to return capital.

• 42:00Logan Bartlett?

  And then your product to founders, uh, so you're not taking board seats, right? Uh, so how do you think about your, your pro? It sounds like increased probability of success for, uh, the companies either through a round construction, uh, at the time of investment, introductions for follow-on financing, soft landing for M and A. Do you view it as like that window when you initially invest? Uh, and, and then through the next round of financing and then someone else, uh, picks it up from there and you, you, you've succeeded if they get to that next point in time? Or do you stay involved throughout?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  It just depends. It's not definitely not formulaic. I mean, the, the pitch to the founder is really just like taking care in like learning what they're doing. So like, it, it's bizarre. Like I'll have two or three conversations with an entrepreneur and they'll stop midway and be like, wow, this is so interesting. I've never had an investor pitch like this. And I just think we're just talking. Um, so I, I just try to get to know the people and then make a decision without having too much information. I'm just trying to interview the person in a way. Um, because a lot of what we're investing in is, is people based. Um, but then I think they look on their own, like they'll stalk me on YouTube or read,

• 43:19Speaker 01

  listen to your podcast or they'll read my blog. Like I'm surprised how many people follow my tweets or read my blog and then it comes up in a pitch. You know, where I'm like, hey, that I've got this body of work. I've been pretty consistent in terms of tone, in terms of like what I talk about, what are the values I talk about? So if you really care, it shouldn't be that much of a surprise. And then I think you and I may underestimate. Just the types of people an entrepreneur meets and how awful that experience can be. So the bar is pretty low.

• 43:49Logan Bartlett?

  It is having some level of humility. Both, I feel like both of us at least somewhat, not the traditional, neither of us worked at Morgan Stanley or Google and then went directly out of there to venture capital. And so I, I still very much feel like an outsider to this. I am obviously not, and that's part of my shtick, I think, is like, I'm sort of an insider that still views myself as an outsider, which is resonant, I think, with entrepreneurs, right? Definitely in contrast to some, some other folks out there.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I mean, I think you have to remember too, like when, when we're investing as opposed to when you're investing, they don't, a lot of entrepreneurs, we don't know what they, they have underneath the hood. They don't really understand what the potential is sometimes. And so you're just, you're putting them in business in a way that they're grateful for. And you know, there's a market for it.

• 44:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  But, but I think part of going early means you have to take more shots on goal because the future is really like hard to predict.

• 45:00Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and so what are you looking for? I mean, those are, I'm sure there's some survivorship bias inherently that in looking at Dylan and Mitchell Hashimoto and you know, Henry at Carta and all this stuff, but like, what are the traits as you sort of try to prescribe this early stage investing? Cause for me, I, I'm always post-product market fit investing, almost always, right? Where like, there's some established customer or validation that I can get from the outside in that like, this is a real thing and I pay a higher price because of that. But inevitably it ends up being less people backing.

• 45:41Logan Bartlett?

  And so I'm curious, like, what are the consistent things that you're actually looking for in founders? And what have you seen be successful consistently?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of it just comes through the conversation and the conversation I try to have is a mix of.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Like, understanding on a professional level, the insight that the entrepreneur has, how they achieve that insight, and how deeply they've thought about that insight through conversation. So I always use this line, like, you can't hide at dinner, right? And so if you have a dinner with somebody, it's three hours, pretty soon you kind of realize, like, can we have a conversation or not? You know, and then if you can, it's like a long dinner. Uh, but if you can, you're like, oh, my God, it's already 11:45. I'm like, I gotta go, right? And so you're kind of looking for that.

• 46:34Logan Bartlett?

  Does that mean that inherently, like, you're investing? Because that's somewhat similar to what I would say of, like, the product market. Now, you're talking to kind of the founder market fit, quote unquote, of this. But is it actually, like, has your, have your successes come from the confluence of the founder and the insight into the market, rather than just the, the, hey, this is going to be a really successful founder, no matter what we throw them at?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  No, no, the market definitely matters. It's just a matter of, like, you know, it's the jockey horse racetrack thing. When we're investing at Haystack, the, the racetrack may be unknown or doesn't exist yet. So we can't really evaluate what it is. Like, it's kind of futile, right? And we probably want to invest in more things where there isn't a racetrack than there already is one. When you think about the horse, the horse is kind of like a fledgling or embryo. It's like, is it a horse? Like, probably not. So all you can evaluate is a jockey, but all those other elements matter. The other side of the, the sort of three hours of conversation is more personal

• 47:47Speaker 01

  and almost like profiling, where you're trying to understand what drives this person, have they faced adversity? Have they gone through hardship? Do they have a commercial sensibility? You know, and I think all these things can come out through conversation. Uh, right? And you're, no one's going to be, hit everything on every dimension, but you can find people who kind of spike in different areas. And I think What I try to look for is just those spikes. Who has interesting spikes, right? That doesn't, you know, and often they're often sometimes difficult to handle, difficult to converse with, difficult to persuade, and you just have to sort of power through that.

• 48:27Logan Bartlett?

  The spikes is something that I attribute, I feel like Keith Raboy, we have an investment in Ramp together. And in talking to him, he's always talking about like what the things that people singularly stand out. He's always like, you can hire for weaknesses, right? But you can't, it's like the 10x outlier type thing, that if someone is uniquely special in some way, you can figure out where all the other things you can augment around them to harness that capability, right? I guess I struggle, I've, I've, I've never seen something go from like

• 49:08Logan Bartlett?

  an idea to this huge manifestation. And so I'm always kind of back solving for what, what would be viewed as a spike. And so I always use the example of Toby from Shopify, that like for the longest time, he was like, oh, this guy is probably too meek and not assertive enough. And then now that he's had all this success, it's like the highest hindsight bias of like, oh, well, he's, you know, he's this genius and people compare people now to Toby from Shopify. But I remember people didn't think that at the time, right? And so how much of this is hindsight?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  I'll give you some clips of like real life. So I was friends with Apurva before he started Instacart. I ran into him at a party. He's like, I'm starting this grocery thing because he used to work in Amazon. And maybe he was in Y C at the time. And we just started talking about the Uber go to market and the city launching and blah, blah, blah.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  And he literally was like, we're just gonna launch cities multiple times and we're gonna like, deliver groceries and like, here's how I'm gonna do it. And I literally remember telling him, I'm like, I don't think that'll work. We literally had this conversation.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  This is before he even had the service up. Or Dylan, who I'd spent a lot of time, he would say things like, you know, he dropped out of school, he moved to Palo Alto, we would be hanging out and he would say, hey, you know, I was lucky, I was a designer as a kid and I would design these tools and my parents would buy me, you know, Adobe and I would, I knew how to install it on my computer and I had a nice computer. And then, you know, I would buy the updates and I would install my computer. And he's like, I just wanna put that in the cloud.

• 50:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Or Fred Wilson has a great post on the original Twilio pitch. He said that Jeff Lawson, I think, walked into his office, said, I could do X, Y, and Z, and turn a telephone call into an API. And he was like, no, I can't. And then he saw the demo and then they just invested. So I think what I found is if you meet lots of people early,

• 51:06Speaker 01

  and you're paying attention, and again, it's a very retail thing, you have to meet lots and lots of people. The spikes will sort of emerge where you see people. And then you'll, you'll, you'll also see a couple of people who have those spikes and you don't believe them and you don't invest. And then three years later, they, you know, the Series B shows up on TechCrunch, and you go, oh, shit, you know, like, I, he, he did everything, or she did everything she said she was gonna do and I didn't pick up on it.

• 51:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  One other story, one other story I'll share is Peloton at Series B, I was at a private event in New York and people would tell me about John Foley. Now, now Peloton today is having a lot of trouble, but he got up in this private presentation, brilliant presenter, and started talking about how they wanted to build their own, like iPad interface and all this other stuff. And I remember turning to my friend and thinking, this guy's crazy, you know? And then everything happened that he said.

• 52:04Logan Bartlett?

  Were you guys, you guys weren't investors in Peloton, were you?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 52:10Logan Bartlett?

  It is a good feeling when I've had this happen a few times where you recognize an insight, and I've never had the insight myself, but you recognize something about the world that's going to be true, and a founder leads you down that direction. And then you get there, and it's fun sitting there and watching the inevitability of this happening, right? And like, I know, I mean, I give you, obviously, the return speaks for itself, but like Dylan, specifically in Figma, there had to have been points in time that there were very well-funded competitors, right, who just approached it a little bit architecturally differently,

• 52:54Logan Bartlett?

  and had a little bit of a different consideration for how they were going to build this product. And there was probably some point that, I remember, I give, I give Mamoun at Kleiner a ton of credit, because that realm was expensive that he did. There was a much bigger, better-funded competitor. Figma hadn't launched into GA. And I remember thinking like, oh, gosh, that feels like a, it feels like a risk that I, I don't know if I would actually take.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:22Logan Bartlett?

  But the insight that Dylan had was, was so inevitable that I'm sure from your vantage point, it's like, well, it's only a matter of time before everyone sees this, right? And so that's always a interesting feeling.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you know that feeling from, I mean, many companies are red point, but with HashiCorp, right? Like, I, I remember very distinctly, the first or second time I met Mitchell at age 21, he would say things like, "I'm obsessed with automating infrastructure software." Thought, are you out of your mind? He's 21.

• 53:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  But like, literally, that was his obsession. And he was like, "Why are so many people working on it? You can just automate it."

• 54:08Speaker 01

  You know, so I think the job is to meet these people.

• 54:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So how do you spend your day or where do your deals come from? Because you're back to the spear fishing versus net fishing element. Like, how do you actually go about finding these, these people? And how thematic are you in terms of like, hey, I'm, I'm going to go deep into crypto? Cause you actually have to versus just being a people evaluator. You have to be a people market evaluator, right? And so you have to have domain across like, I mean, Instacart's a very different business than, than Figma is, than HashiCorp is, right? And so you have to have like, you have to be a generalist in that way.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Very, very general and I, and I like that too, for the intellectual variety. I think that they're, you know, open to any, they all come through referrals, obviously.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  And all, you know, you put goodwill into the ecosystem and good, the ecosystem brings you back goodies, right? And so that's what I love about working in this industry.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  In, in terms of the, the sector approach and like the generalist approach, I, I try to as much as I can, wake up every day, try to meet two or five founders every day. And try to come into those meetings with no preconceived notion about their market and how the world is going to unfold. I just try to see who I can get into a conversation. Now, there are definitely some things I'm a little bit hesitant to like, I'm a little bit hesitant to go in. So like selling to hospitals or selling to schools or, you know, like, I think as a senior investor and I, I've been, you know, guilty of this in the past, you can get seduced by the entrepreneurial vision and wanting to believe that a software and product can change things or make things better.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  The reality is sometimes enterprise technology buyers are the best buyers. And, and that's been that way for a reason. And so I think there have been some trial and error there, but definitely there's a pattern around. If you look back over the last five years and you look at kind of a median haystack deal, I would say it's 500 to 3 million of capital, 500K to 3 million of capital in. There's not too many people around the cap table. The founders are product oriented or technical in nature. And they've been obsessed with some sort of problem that they uncovered in work in a previous job. And then they already started building the solution to this on their own. They, they, they started with the solution rather than thinking about designing a company or fundraise.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Versus starting to fundraise and then going to design it. Um, and that's kind of the pattern. And I would say, you know, on the occasional. You know, like venturing out in the sector. What I've found, and I, I hate to say it, but it, it is my experience and I feel true. Is a series A investors are extremely, you know, they. We, we need them to follow our deals, right? That, that needs to happen. They are extremely sensitive to certain categories and like avoiding certain categories. So we had a couple of companies where the metrics were really, really good in a questionable VC category. Couldn't even get a meet, I couldn't even get them a meeting with some folks.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  So that was a, that was a lesson for me as well.

• 57:23Logan Bartlett?

  What, what's an example of, uh, I mean, is that the hospitals and the schools type thing? Uh, and like you can't be too far out on the risk curve of some of these things. That's what's actually funny is you do need, you need industry consensus or, or at least people that agree with you in the industry. Right. Uh, to some extent.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Put it a different way. I would put it differently. When, when you're, when you're in another industry that has a questionable perception about their adoption of new things. You need to prove that they're not shitty buyers. Because the last thing that we see, like a large VC at a firm wants to do is show up at the first board meeting. And go, how are we going to go sell this? You know, versus they know the playbooks of how to sell in, in enterprise organizations or how to like have product led. You know, sort of go to market. That's more accessible to them and they could at least have some control over that.

• 58:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, interesting. What are there are there areas you're spending time thinking about now? And like something, how do you how do you go into preparing yourself for like, I mean, GPT-3 or OpenAI and all that with generative AI that's going on now? One, is that an area you're spending time in? And two, like, how do you go about diving into these sectors and being prepared if lightning does strike or come across your desk?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I don't prepare in any sector. I try to just meet lots of people and I feel like if your network is good enough and you're picking the right first meetings, my job is to see the things that most people are going to be talking about on Twitter a year or two from now, not today. Because today, it's too much, it's too noisy. So like, we in the past have made an investment, a seed investment in a enterprise search AI company that came out of DeepMind, but no one was really talking about that then. Or we made an investment in this kid named Sharif Semil, who started a company called

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Lexica, which is a generative AI, you know, R-KI product that sort of blew up a few months ago, but we made that investment two years ago. So for us, where we do, once something becomes generally accepted, or like, that's the thing to do, we have to move on to the next thing. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't take those pitches and everything, but like, we can't be, as an early-stage fund, we can't participate in the hype cycle part of it. You know what I mean?

• 1:00:01Logan Bartlett?

  Is there any correlation between heat around the deal at the stage you're investing and the ultimate success? Like, does it end up being inversely correlated, directly correlated? How does it, how has that played out for you?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  I think if you look at like, you know, like, if we were to fast-forward. A few years and look at like the top 10 positions by like dollars returned. I think it would, sorry, sorry, not a satisfying answer, be half and half. Half of them, they were competitive rounds and like known quantities of people where like, it was a matter of knowing the founder and getting in and half were like, you just had to have a heartbeat and like not be an ax murderer to have invested in the company.

• 1:00:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I've only had one successful, like really hot investment. I mean, presumably successful, who knows, but uh, and, and I've had like everything else was passed by a bunch of people or competing with a firm that I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't hold as a, as a core competitor, uh, which is just interesting. And you would think, especially at the stage at which I'm investing, like it would be more correlated with consensus, right? But for whatever reason, uh, and my data set is small. Uh, I'm talking, I don't know, eight investments I've ever made or 10 or whatever it is.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Well, I'll, I'll try it. I'll try it. I'll try a new theory on you. And I don't know if this is true, but I, I kind of feel like one of the, one of the features, not the bugs of a venture capital firm, is that like, actually you can pick a few companies to really support through a, through a rough patch, like, like we're have today and going to be entering. Um, and increase ownership and concentrate and really take more risk and help a company you feel is on the right track. So I think there's like a, a very famous example of USV and Etsy, right? Where they really, really built up ownership. The, the huge example, this is the WhatsApp and Sequoia, not to suggest that WhatsApp was struggling,

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  but you know, that I think a lot of people, uh, don't see that as a feature of venture capital firms, but I, I kind of think it is. And so why not, you know, why not go? Like, I think a lot of VC firms are, are picking in their portfolios of three to five that they want to continue to support with their reserves and.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  You know, that'll end up helping the entrepreneur in a tough environment and it'll end up helping the fund and the limited partners as well.

• 1:02:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's a, uh, that would be interesting to see how, how that plays out.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I thought like, depending on whatever direction you want to go is like, okay, who are the people that come to me? So like, I think founders probably know what to expect, you know, in the next year or two. Um, I'm not sure if a lot of our venture, uh, sort of brothers and sisters who have new funds or like newer vintages know what to expect on the LP side. So, I'm happy to talk about that. Um.

• 1:03:09Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I would, I would love to hear your opinion about that. And one of the things I've been noodling quite a bit is all the dry powder on the sidelines and how that plays out, right? I mean, we can take it to its furthest extreme, which is people that have raised multi-billion dollar crypto funds, uh, at a point. And now, you know, crypto, uh, I don't know how you're going to deploy all those. And so a question I've just had is, uh, I mean, this downturn in general, from a founder's standpoint, we're able to say, give that advice, right? But if you're sitting on, uh, huge funds and you're a, a new manager, um, like, what, what's your perspective on the industry and how all that stuff kind of plays out?

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think I've been trying to really warn people that it could take a long time to raise their next fund. Um, and the length of time, although it's idiosyncratic and you could get lucky, um, you have to really get in the shoes of an institutional LP or even family office to understand, how hectic, how hectic it is for them. So in the same way that, these like founders went out over their skis and VCs enabled the founders to go out over their skis. A lot of LPs are the same, right? And so there are, everyone's licking different wounds. Um,

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  what I'm, what my sort of like high level guidance to, to let's say the smaller funds or earlier funds, is to expect a longer fundraise to have a lower target. Um, you know, because people don't want.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Like 350 million, 400 million dollar plus seed funds. They want sub 200 million dollars, 750 million dollar seed funds. They don't want multiple strategies and products. So people, I think, like entrepreneurs, a lot of fund managers would say, I want to have this strategy, or this office, or this fund, or this vehicle. I think there's going to be a lot of narrowing of that and focus on narrowing. And then it'll just take longer to convert, if at all. So like, I think a lot of people won't be able to raise because it won't even get through a committee. There could be somebody at an endowment or foundation, or what have you, who wants to invest in the committee just says, no.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  And you know, we don't, you never know what's going on inside an LP. You know, whereas we hear more chatter about what's going on at VC firms. So I think that it's going to be really, really hard. I put myself in that category, I think paranoid every day. Of like, you know, what does it take? Like, long-term relationships, having people understand what you're doing, being constrained, having the check size match what your fund size is. And

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  it'll probably be really, really hard. You know, and there are a bunch of people with two or three funds under their belt, who might have raised them over Zoom, deployed them in 12 months. It's not constructed properly. There's no distributions.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's going to be hard. And I, I do think from, from talking to, like, talking to a lot of people, like, there's been an overabundance of advice from VCs to founders. Like, we don't even have to cover it anymore. But I don't think a lot of those people have taken that advice for, for themselves.

• 1:06:27Logan Bartlett?

  What would you do if you were a manager that, like, let's take that, let's take that straw man that we were just talking, kicking around? Let's say you're, you're on your third fund, you raised the first one in 2018, you raised the second in 2020, and then you, you raised your, you know, the next one at the beginning of 2022 or something, and you're sitting there, and you've had LPs re-up for three cycles, maybe not a lot of distributions, but a lot of good markups. Like, what, what are you actually doing if you're a manager in that situation?

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think you're, number one, you're, you're coming to a fund size for the new economy.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  That matches a portfolio construction that fits your strategy. Number one. So that could be a $200 million seed fund, that could be a $500 million Series A fund, whatever it is, just be able to stand behind the math and the construction of it. I think too, if there's no distributions or there's like really high fair market value to like, what, you know, take the time with the LP to walk them through different ways of thinking about the portfolio, because I think a lot of LPs just looked at TVPI in the same way VCs looked at top line growth without really thinking about, actually, TVPI means nothing.

• 1:07:52Logan Bartlett?

  You want to explain TVPI?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Sure. The total value to paid in capital. So like, um, like if a venture fund, a way to measure it, because it's a liquid, uh, just for the audience is, you know, if you're, if you're an LP and you give the VC a dollar and the portfolio is marked up to, let's say, a 4X TVPI, that means on paper, which is not real, that the dollar that the LP gave you is now worth four. But the problem is that the DPI is very sporadic and very random and may not be realized in the timeframe that you want. So the DPI being the distribution. So.

• 1:08:34Logan Bartlett?

  So, so the diff, just, just to give a real example here, Semil invested in Figma in 2012, 2013. And now there's a proposed acquisition by Adobe, uh, at a $20 billion price with an earn out on top of that, right? This is going to be an amazing fund returner for Semil. Do you hold it? TVPI would say, hey, that was a whatever, 500x investment for Semil. DPI would still say, hey, zero, you haven't given those dollars back to us yet. And the discrepancy between these two, you know, Figma, knock on wood, is going to, that's going to be an acquisition that'll actually happen. But if it were, hey, instead, the round that happened a year ago with durable investing

• 1:09:18Logan Bartlett?

  at $10 billion, right, in Figma, you could say.

• 1:09:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, one person decided it was worth that, but now it's, you know, who's to say that that's actually what it is worth today. And so that's a, uh, yeah, the, the difference between actually getting the money back versus seeing it on your plate is a, is a pretty meaningful one, and particularly right now.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  So let's see, so we, so you have the round properly, and then you go through the portfolio. So let's say you were one of my institutional LPs, Logan, right? Just to make it even more specific, and you'd say, hey, Simeon, we'd love to support you. Um, we, we, we believe in what you're doing. You've been good to us. You've been transparent. You've done all the right things. But I can't go back to my committee. You haven't returned capital in these previous funds. I know the markets changed. I would say, hey, Logan, let's go through the portfolio one by one, and just have a quick, honest conversation about the, the companies, right? And sort of where, where they are today. And I think, um, where, where people are going to get really hit is on their entry price. Um, so, so the first thing is

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  going to say, well, hey, I'm in this company, but I got in at 600 post. So, so it comes down to cost basis, meaning the cost you paid per share, um, at the time of your investment. Because people may look at that and say, I, I don't know if, if it'll be bought or go public at 600 million valuation. It may, it may not, who knows? Um, but if your cost basis was, hey, I started at six post, it was marked up here, but it still could be acquired for 100 to 200 million, the math still works. I think cost basis is going to be something that sophisticated LPs look at. Um, I think they'll look at the portfolio

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  construction more. So I could come to you, Logan, and say, Logan, look, I would never tell you in any fund, like, what's going to happen. We're building the basket. But I can tell you, everything we put into the basket is put with a certain type of deal geometry that should three or four things work, which we hope they do, otherwise we suck, um, that the fund has a chance to win, right? And so part of it, the second part, I think I would stress would be the deal geometry and the, the, um, The sort of discipline around that. So yeah, it'd be fund size, cost basis, deal geometry. And Andy Weisman from USP has a great post of like, the venture capital is a process or something like that. I'll see if I can send it to you.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Where it's like, if you just get your process down of like, okay, your fund size is limited. You've got a certain amount of deals in, they sort of look the same. And they give yourself a chance to win. Like, I think you'll be in a good position with LPs because they'll say, okay, you're deploying capital for me in a way that's going to give us a chance to win. Whether we win or not, we don't know.

• 1:12:11Logan Bartlett?

  Which is, which is actually, I mean, it's one of the most interesting things about our asset classes. Everything is just a process for decision making ultimately. Like if our product is investing, then we really can't unwind the decisions that we make, right? In the public markets, you could change tomorrow, the decision you made today. If you bought the company, you could sell it tomorrow. Once the toothpaste goes out of the tube this way, then that's, that's kind of all she wrote on your, on that investment, right? And so for the most part, you're along for the ride. And sure, you can try to time distributions or you can potentially sell along the way, or you can be supportive to the founder to increase probability of success.

• 1:12:55Logan Bartlett?

  But like, for the most part, that's your product. And so optimizing the decision making framework is sort of what you, what you need to constantly be doing and also constructing the funds in a way that you do what you're, you told your LPs you were going to go do.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  The other thing I would do, Logan, if you were the institutional LP is basically just level set and say, hey,

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  sometimes even as VCs or as an LP could, you focus too much on the past of like, what happened in the past. And I think in the past, you can only really pick up on behaviors. Like if Logan, if you saw my previous funds and you were like, hey, you did this kind of erratic entry price or you kind of portfolio construction was all over the place. You're going to think, hey, his behavior in the future may be erratic. But really, the main thing is like, what, what is that next investor? What's that next vintage? What are they going to put in there? Because we don't know. And you could argue it's a great time to deploy early. Um, and make those arguments.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  And so I do think LPs will pick people, you know, that they feel like are experienced managers. There, there is a flight to quality there. The fund size is going to stay small and they can get a venture return. Um, you know, in the, in the products that they pick, meaning these VC firms. So I think there's a way to do it, but I think what a lot of people have learned, and I hear this because they come to me asking for help, is um, it's been pretty easy to raise. And I had, I had to learn the hard way. So I'm just wired of like every, every fund being like a, every fundraise being sort of a journey. Um, but, but I think, I think that's the way I would position it.

• 1:14:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, makes sense. Any parting thoughts or topics that we didn't hit on the ecosystem, on venture as an asset class, on Twitter, on anything?

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  Let's see, I made some notes here. Um, I think we, we've covered all of it except crypto.

• 1:14:59Logan Bartlett?

  You know, it's so funny is the one note, the one note I got here was, uh, was I, I asked our guys for questions and Rashad said, maybe ask him about crypto as a closer. What, uh, so what, what is your stance on crypto? What, what, have you made crypto investments? I feel like this is my parting, you know, my parting topic for people now.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  I think like a lot of VCs, and I'm sure you, when, when the Bitcoin white paper came out and people were buying Bitcoin initially, it was, it was really exciting. Um, and so, you know, I bought some Bitcoin, I bought some Ethereum. You know, we all read the USV blog, so this is really interesting. I remember Coinbase, the seed round, I tried to get in that seed round. So I think there was an optimistic phase and we made some small investments. You know, one, one was like one of the first Bitcoin exits in this company called Gift, run by Vinny Lingam. He just kind of pivoted into the space and found an exit. And then we were early investors in Filecoin, which has been,

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  you know, incredibly accretive investment, like true power law investment.

• 1:16:12Logan Bartlett?

  By the way, what, what happened with the Coinbase investment? Did you just get boxed out or what? How did it play out?

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Um, what happened was is that there were, there were two lessons from it. I'm glad you asked. One is, um, when, when Mickey Malka and Fred Wilson are looking at a deal, like you're not looking at that deal. And then that number one.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  And number two is like, you know, Gary, Tam is a good friend. I, I asked Gary for an intro. He immediately intro'd me to Brian. Brian and I started emailing him and we kind of had our, our phone call moved a couple of times. And what I should have done is like literally bombarded him and been like, I'm showing up to where you are. You know, and I was just waiting politely to like schedule. And it didn't really get scheduled in a proper way. And then boom, it was gone.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  That was a 20 million post round.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  But, but what ended up happening is that, um, because I'm so people oriented and founder oriented, I frankly started to meet more and more crypto founders, let's say 2015, 16, 17. And two things happened. I was like, look, nothing personally against these people, but I don't know how to jive and communicate. It's like a different language, different style. It, I, I don't know what I would offer these people. We're, we're speaking different languages. So at the same time, I had some really good friends who would start crypto funds. So I, I would help them informally raise these crypto funds, introduce them to LPs I knew. Uh, I would make personal investments from our family.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  So I ended up, we, our family ended up becoming a personal investor in variant, one confirmation paradigm.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Hive Mind, Canonical, and that proved to be the right play for me where, you know, I could go to an LP and say, hey, I'm meeting all these founders and I'm working with Dylan, working with the purva, working with Tony at DoorDash. I couldn't say that in crypto. So I just felt, hey, why, why would they ask me to go invest with founders that I can't really gel with? And so that ended up, that's how we ended up sort of playing crypto was like, I'd buy a few tokens and still have them from the earlier days. And then I would let other people who are specialists do it. And I think, you know, what's happening this year was like, I think kind of like, obviously crucible moment for it. I think a lot of

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  people are still frankly, kind of delusional about what the impact of this is going to be. And it's, it's sad. I think it's just sad at the end of the day. I don't think the technology like this, the cat's, the cat's out of the bag. Like, there's no way to put it, put the genie back in the bottle. It is a disruptive technology. No one said it would be disruptive in a positive or negative way. It's uncertain. But I still do believe in the core of like, of, of people building protocols where other people can build on top of them and having a different economic model. I do believe that will happen. Will

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  I be the person to find that? Probably not. I hope it happens. But I, I think, I, I guess my, my penultimate thought here for the Potter and crypto would be like, we're, we're probably as an industry, underplaying the significance of this year as like a sort of black eye.

• 1:19:44Logan Bartlett?

  That the ramifications are going to be felt for a long, long time within what crypto can ultimately be and where the use cases will pop up from.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  And again, like, you know, like Uniswap is a really cool company.

• 1:19:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  And I have.

• 1:20:00Logan Bartlett?

  Uniswap's one of the coolest, the coolest one. That, the few I can get on board with, Uniswap is a very cool piece of technology.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  Totally. And anyone who's heard like Michelle speak about it, or like, you know, unlucky enough to like be invested in funds that have exposure to it. So like, if it works, great. I love the idea of it and I really hope it happens. But I think to date, the successes, if you take out the centralized exchanges.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  And a few other token launches that you could have questionable value. The, the real marks of it have been dark, not light. Uh, and that, that's just a fact. Um, and so hopefully, hopefully there's more, you know, next time we do this, there's more uniswaps types out there.

• 1:20:43Logan Bartlett?

  Simeon, thanks for doing this. I, uh, I, I really appreciate, uh, this is, we went in a bunch of different, uh, directions here, but, uh, I, I really appreciate your, uh, thoughtfulness on the industry. This is definitely more inside baseball type stuff than I think I've, I've hit before. So I appreciate you going through all of this.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  No, thank you for the invitation and, uh, yeah, um, thank you for doing the podcast too, because I feel like during, uh, during the pandemic and coming out of it and like, these things are really important. You know, like, I think a lot of people listen to them. And so, thank you.

• 1:21:18Logan Bartlett?

  It's been gratifying to, yeah, at the end of the year, I got a bunch of, uh, Spotify did a good job with their wrapped and a, a number of people. I presumably everyone that listens to this podcast sent me the screenshot of, uh, the podcast with, with, uh, on their wrapped. So that was, uh, definitely a gratifying and humbling experience to be in people's ears over and over again, especially, uh,

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And one, one day we can talk offline too, because I worked, um, in the podcast industry before.

• 1:21:48Logan Bartlett?

  I didn't know that. What, what year was that? This is a good, good end here. What year was that?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Uh, 2011 to 2013, there was a product called Swell. If you imagine during that time, 10 years ago, you have your iPhone, you have Pandora on your iPhone. What if Pandora had an AM button? And so we would license professional radio content, compress it, uh, stream it from different servers. And you would have your own personal radio station. I use a product like 30 to 40 hours a week. It was acquired by Apple mainly for the streaming technology.

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  And what I learned in that is that podcasts are generally too long. And the format is not.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  You know, pretty formulaic. It's usually two people having a conversation.

• 1:22:38Logan Bartlett?

  So I mean, as, as we've droned on for an hour or whatever plus here, uh, I, do you, do you think that has changed now, uh, in the world? Cause if you look, uh, I mean, Balaji will sit with, uh, Lex Friedman for eight hours, which I don't know how anyone in the world would listen to that in its entirety. But, uh, you know, some are more popular as YouTube has kind of conflated with podcasts and video and all of that. Do you think it's changed or?

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  Yes, I think, I think it's changed and I'm glad you brought up YouTube. So one is, I think the meta meta change is that like someone like a biology, um, is going to be like a professor, thought leader, um, worldwide where people want to learn. And this is someone they feel like they can learn from versus going to a school or university. So yeah, I think it's like the Jordan Peterson effect of like, you know, all that sort of, you know, um, like almost unstoppable. I also think YouTube has the most unique podcast content. It's just not a podcast format. So if you get the premium version, which I'm sure you have, every video is just an audio feed and it takes less bandwidth

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  and you can move it, have it on the go. And so that's just been the super powerful feature. Um, and so I, I'm, I'm less bullish on, um, like the podcast in the traditional sense or like when I worked there, but I think people will start, you know, you know, I don't think I'm saying anything revolutionary, but like what Mr. Beast is doing or what Lex Friedman are doing, frankly, what you're doing, right? Like the next people starting this adventure will probably be more likely to start, uh, a podcast like you or like Rashad's Tik Tok is more likely to do that than any other medium.

• 1:24:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. The unstructuredness of it. I, I agree. At some point, the podcast medium was built off of the New York Times Daily or Serial or whatever, like the, the handful of big ones were. And then there was Bill Simmons and a few other people, but it does seem that the, the confluence of, I also think speed and the ability to speed these things up and jump around. And there's better annotation now within YouTube and, and Spotify and all that.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  I also think what you, what you and the All In folks have done is like a, is like a soothing behavior. Cause I remember when I was growing up, every Friday night, my dad would watch the McLaughlin Group or something, you know?

• 1:25:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jason Calacanis took a lot of inspiration from the McLaughlin Group, by the way. He like, he, he brought that up as like, one of his things that he really modeled everything off of.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or, or, you know, I would watch Meet the Press with my dad. And so there's kind of this nice thing at the end of the week, you, you want somebody to like, help you close the week and, and digest what just happened.

• 1:25:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  And so I think it serves a great function. And actually, it's a, you can deliver that emotion and closure in a way that you can't in any other medium.

• 1:25:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I, that's one of the things I struggle with is how much to make the content ephemeral in nature versus persistent, right? And like, how to balance back and forth between, because All In is a-

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  I think you're on the, you're on the non-evergreen, right? You're in the, let me recap-

• 1:26:00Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, currently-ish, but then like, some of these will, with founders and stuff, will stand the test of time, in terms of them telling their story. And so I've definitely bounced back and forth. I started for sure, I mean, it was basically just a ripoff of All In, right? And so like, I started for sure in that direction, but I don't know.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  But what I like about what you're doing too, or when, when you had Nikita and Zach, or maybe, oh, sorry, Nikita and, or the other Zach, sorry, there's two Zachs, is that you have different segments. And so that also follows a TV format, right? Like, Meet the Press, for example, it would have two kind of political interviews, and then it would have like, the roundtable, right? And so your audience could, could only be like, so now when I listen to Meet the Press, I just fast forward-

• 1:26:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  Right to the last 20 words of that. And so it's great, you know?

• 1:26:54Logan Bartlett?

  No, and that's, that's kind of the format we've landed on, is like, a little bit of content so that it, it needs like topical stuff, and then also more longer discussions. And if the discussions prove to be ephemeral or persistent, then so be it. But having that mix, yeah, has been interesting.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  So it's awesome. So thank you. Yeah, it's a great, great medium.

• 1:27:17Logan Bartlett?

  Well, thank you for coming on. This is great.

• 1:27:24Logan Bartlett?

  So that'll do it for the 43rd episode of Cartoon Avatars. Thank you, Semil Shah, for joining. Thanks to everyone for listening in. Obviously, we went into a bunch of different weeds of the industry, so hopefully people found that interesting. Look forward to seeing everyone next week on the 44th episode of Cartoon Avatars as we get back into something of a more regular rhythm with more consistency of episode publishing. Hope everyone has a great weekend.