20VC: Reddit's Alexis Ohanian on How It All Started With Paul Graham @ YC, The Biggest Surprises About Making The Move Into VC & Why Alexis Believes All The Best Investors Have Operating Experience

Alexis Ohanian is co-founder of Reddit & Initialized Capital. After graduating from UVA in 2005, Alexis and his co-founder Steve Huffman started Reddit, which they sold in 2006 to Conde Nast. In 2015, he returned to a full-time capacity with Steve Huffman as the two returned to the helm of a fully independent Reddit, which is now the 8th largest US website. In 2016, he joined Garry Tan in kicking off the third fund for Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital firm. He's invested in and advised over two hundred tech startups and was a partner at Y Combinator; Alexis has also written a national best-selling book, Without Their Permission and was named on Forbes 30 Under 30 list two years in a row. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Alexis made his way into the world of VC from founding Reddit? 2.) What were the biggest surprises for Alexis about making the move into venture full time? What have been the biggest challenges? 3.) How do Alexis and Garry (Alexis' partner) look to integrate process into their investing with Initialized? What is core to the success of this process? Why should more VCs be doing so? 4.) What does Alexis believe makes the best seed investors? What are the benefits of investors that have been in the trenches? How can they add to their companies in a way those without operating experience cannot? 5.) How does kindness integate into Alexis' role as an investor? Can one win in investing while being kind? How does Alexis look to show his kindness to founders and investors? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Alexis’ Fave Blog: Reddit Alexis’ Fave Book: Slaughterhouse 5 Alexis' Most Recent Investment: Workramp As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alexis on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver – whether it’s time for you to buy a new car or not. RearVision is our first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl RearVision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10minutes to install and is completely wireless because it’s solar powered. Since RearVision is software based, we’re able to push updates and new features over the Pearl App in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone. Pearl RearVision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes. Pearl RearVision is $499.99 and available at PearlAuto.com. It’s also available on Amazon and through Crutchfield. Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device. When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at xero.com/20vc

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Hello and welcome back to the 20 minute VC for another week with your host Harry Stebbings and you can find me on Snapchat at H Stebbings with two Bs or you can find out more on mojito vc.com to hear my thoughts in more detail on the blog. However, to the show today and what an incredible guest we have joining us. I've wanted to have him on the show for a long, long time now, so I'm thrilled to welcome Alexis Ohanyi into the hot seat. Now, this intro is challenging one due to the sheer scale of accomplishments here, but here goes. So Alexis is co-founder of Reddit and initialized capital. After graduating from UVA in 2005, Alexis and his co-founder Steve Huffman started Reddit, which they then sold in 2006 to Conde Nast, and in 2015 Alexis returned in a full-time capacity with Steve Huffman as the two returned to the helm of a fully independent Reddit,

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  which is now the eighth largest US website. And in 2016, he joined Gary Tan, who will be joining us on the show on Wednesday, in kicking off the third fund for initialized capital and early-stage VC firm in SF. Alexis has also invested and advised over 200 tech startups and was a partner at the world famous Y Combinator. If that wasn't enough, Alexis has also written a national bestselling book without their permission and was named on Forbes 30 Under 30 list two years in a row. I also want to say a huge thank you to Judith Elsia at Weathergauge Capital for the intro to Alexis today, without which the show would not have been possible. But before we meet the man himself, what if accounting could be easy, efficient, maybe even enjoyable? Well, that's where Xero come in. Xero is beautiful, easy-to-use online accounting

• 1:25Harry Stebbings?

  software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere, from your computer or mobile device. When you add Xero to your small business, you're able to send online invoices and get paid faster, get an instant view of your cash flow, track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. You can partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time, whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over 500 business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of-sale, time tracking, e-commerce and more. It's no wonder over 860,000 customers in more than 180 countries use Xero, and all you have to do is sign up for a free 30-day trial at xero.com/20vc. That's xero.com/20vc. And now the books are in order. You might have some extra dollars to spend, and what better way to spend that than with?

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Pearl. Now Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver, whether it's time for you to buy a new car or not. And their rear vision is the first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl rear vision is the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10 minutes to install and is completely wireless because it's solar powered. Since rear vision is software based, it's also able to push updates and new features over the Pearl app in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone now. Pearl rear vision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in, as we said, less than 10 minutes. And it costs $499 and is available at pearlauto.com, amazon.com or through Crutchfield. However, it's now time for me to shut up and to hand over to Alexis Ohanian,

• 2:54Harry Stebbings?

  founder at Reddit and initialized capital.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:05Harry Stebbings?

  Alexis, it's so fantastic to have you on the show. I've been so wanting to see this for a long time now. So huge thanks firstly to Judith at Weathergauge for the introduction, but thank you so much for joining me today Alexis.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Thank you, Harry, and thank you Judith.

• 3:17Harry Stebbings?

  But I'd love to start today with how you made the move from incredibly successful founder to VC with initialized. So what was that transition?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Well, it all started with a suggestion from Paul Graham, which incidentally is also how I made the transition from clueless college student to founder. And he obviously suggested that Steve and I change our initial startup idea when we were applying to Y Combinator. What came out of that ended up being Reddit. And similarly, he had seen that Gary, Gary Tan, Harge Taggart and I were independently good angel investors. And we were obviously very close to the YC network and we were participating a lot. I think at the time Gary was a full-time partner. I might have been a part-time partner at the time, but we were very much in the YC ecosystem.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  And as angel investors, we were investing in companies and Paul had seen and heard that companies, founders really liked us. And he said, you know, you should do more of that. You should invest more money. And I told Paul, yeah, that'd be great. I just don't have the liquidity that you or some of the others. Senior, more senior partners at this firm have, right?

• 4:23Harry Stebbings?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  A lot of the other partners were in their late forties and had had very, very successful careers and basically just had a lot more cash money. And he said, well, there's a workaround. You could just raise a fund. I thought, huh, hadn't really thought of that. And so Gary and Harge and I sat down and said, okay, let's start a fund. Let's raise a little bit of money. We raised about seven. And it was, you know, the, the second piece of really good advice Paul Graham gave me. And I'm grateful for it because what we found was the experiences we had had as operators and as founders translated really, really well to helping other founders in their earliest stages of business. When it's less about financial models and more about just making something people want.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  And, and there's something really nice. I've, I've always been entranced by, and I think and charmed by those early stages of a business, of a company. Because, you know, it's you and your team. You feel like you're the pirates on the open seas trying to build something really special and really different. And it's you against the world. And the only thing that matters is that you're making something people care about. And that's it. There's no, you, you don't have enough money to waste on a Super Bowl ad. You can't delude yourself into thinking, no, no profits are going to be back next quarter. Like, it's just you, your team, and a canvas, a blank canvas where you have to create something that users care about, that they give a damn about.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  And it's a lot of fun. And it turns out there were not a ton of people doing this kind of early stage seed investing, who were willing to do the work or even could do the work. Because they just hadn't been founders before. They hadn't been makers or doers before. And what we came to find over the years was that game recognized game. And great founders want to work with investors who are actually going to help them. And everyone talks about that. But when it comes down to, you know, getting someone to give you feedback on your launch, on the product, on the marketing, on the comms, to actually be able to say, here is what you should do based on experience I have actually had. Here's the way you should go about thinking. You know, and obviously as a founder, you take all of this with a grain of salt and stuff.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Make your own decisions, but to have people in your corner who actually have done this before and been successful at it is the kind of unfair advantage an early stage founder needs and wants in their investors.

• 6:41Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Judith very much touches on that kind of transition of what you take with you from your operational experience to your investing experience. And she asked three questions for me to ask you. And so sorry for the repetition on the big.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 6:53Harry Stebbings?

  But she asked, what were the biggest takeaways from your operational experience that lend to you being now a better investor?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Well, you know what? I'll go through. This is a call I had today with a company in the portfolio. And it's talking in this case, it was about key metrics and what is the, this is a company that's had a very successful, actually very quiet couple of years. It took them a minute to find product market fit, but they found it. They have initial, they have some, they have some initial traction. Their product is far and away the best thing in the market, and that's just because their competition is very antiquated, very old, full of, their businesses are full of file cabinets. And, and this team is building first class software, which is a good place, good place to be.

• 7:33Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  They've, they've raised a significant seed round and gotten a good bit of press, getting a good bit of growth now because of that. And starting to think about six months from now, eight months from now, a year from now, raising a series A. You know, that's, that's all stuff you could read from, if you're a VC or an investor, you could read enough blog posts, even if you've never started a company before and get that. What it comes down to though, is having someone in the office hours, and Gary and I did this this morning, having someone there who can say like, all right, what is that number? What is the key metric for your business and why? And really drill down and get an answer from this founder and, and like an actual number, like what has helped them think through? What is the most important metric for y'all to be measuring between now and a year from now?

• 8:17Speaker 02

  That will give you signs of growth enough to be able to say, we're ready to raise a series A. And just getting that drilled down again, requires a certain amount of muscle memory because you've done it yourself as a founder. But okay, again, and maybe I guess if you read enough blog posts as an investor, you could do this. I haven't been a founder before. But then you go a bit deeper and say like, literally, what was this number? Once we figured this out, once we saw. This out of the course of the office hours. What was this number last week? Or maybe two weeks ago, depending on how often it makes sense to be measuring it. But let's say it's weekly. What was this number last week? What was the week before? What do these growth numbers look like? And literally start putting this number at the top of every one of your investor update emails. Put it on the wall in your office. Put it on the dry erase board, put it on the piece of paper.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  And that's the number that everyone in the office is thinking about. So that all the decisions they are making, because the only two things they should be doing is either writing code or getting slash talking to users. So in those two buckets, they can start every week and think, okay, here's my massive to do list with a billion things on it. Because every, everyone has it, especially early stage companies has a to do list full of billions of things. I can put them into two buckets. If they don't belong in one of those two buckets, I'm not doing them. And then of those things in those two buckets, which ones are going to have the biggest impact on that number on the board? And that kind of relentless focus, again, it's the thing you could probably listen to this podcast and be like, all right, I'm going to be a better investor. I'm going to have my founders do this.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  But it's really different when it comes from someone who's actually had that dry erase board, who's actually had that number on the wall before, who's actually done that before. And, and also frankly, been fortunate enough to have the success to say that like, this is by no means going to guarantee success. But this is the kind of decision making and this is the kind of tactic you would use as a founder. If you want to increase the chances of you and your company being successful. And like that little mental exercise, that was a 20 minute Skype conversation today. But as a founder, that 20 minute conversation could have a very big multiplier impact on the rest of your week, the rest of your month, and perhaps the entire business. And really good seed stage investors are having fairly regular, like monthly office hours with their founders

• 10:28Speaker 02

  to check up with them and to really help them to call their, call them on their bullshit, but also refocus them and, and also give them advice and give them feedback. And the ones who can do that best are the ones who have actually done this stuff before. Because they're coming at it from a place of of of being a practitioner. So there's automatic empathy, there's automatic respect from both parties. And I think it just yields it yields better results. And so that focus and driving home that relentless focus on the key metric, or maybe two key metrics tops, is so important for early stage founders, because that is the only thing that will matter.

• 11:03Harry Stebbings?

  You say about that relentless focus and that to kind of drive towards the key metrics. With regards to kind of benchmarking for a future fundraising, as you said, six to nine to 12 months. Jason Lampkin always tells me that the best investors are those that simply know the benchmarks required for the next round. Is that kind of very clear stage process investing true to you, do you think? Is that the best investors that know the simple benchmarks for the next raise?

• 11:30Speaker 02

  I think there is, there is quite a bit of truth to that. Now, now I want to be clear, fundraising is not success, right? Fundraising is not the goal. The number on that board is not X million dollars we hope to raise in a year. The number on that board, right?

• 11:47Harry Stebbings?

  Unicorn.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, the, you know, the number on the board is the key metric that shows the business is healthy, that you're making something people want and getting better at delivering it and and making it, frankly. You know, we go through a process pretty often. I love watching Gary do this because he's a master of it. And he's frankly, I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who's spent more hours with founders over the last decade than he has having these conversations, particularly with these early stage founders. Because he's this like maestro, because you want to think backwards from the goal. And having that idea and and, you know, investors have a general sense of what the market is looking for. And, you know, the bar is going to be higher for a hardware company versus a software company or what have you. But the really important thing is for a founder to understand,

• 12:33Speaker 02

  and this is again, assuming that they're starting a company with the ambitions of being a multi-billion dollar, high growth startup, which is not the only way to start a company. But that's the kind we're talking about here. If you have those ambitions, you need to at least have these milestones in mind for the health of your business, regardless of whether you want to raise. Around it just so happens that it's helpful to know basically what the appetite, what the the kind of market measurement for success milestones are. And so by understanding this is our goal, this would let us reasonably go to the market to raise a series A. For instance, you now have a benchmark for the business, which is really important, which could lead you to believe or lead you to discover in a year that you don't actually need to raise money.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Or in fact, instead of raising a series A round, you're just maybe working capital is your problem. Again, it depends on your business. But let's say you're having so much success, you just need a cash infusion to kind of deal with the daily churn of money in and out of your system. So maybe what you really need is a smaller, smaller investment, not a full series A, but an investment really to deal with those capital constraints so that in six months, you can raise a whole nother level of funding because the business is that much more de-risk and that much more proven out. So again, I want to stress the goal is not getting the next level of fundraising. The goal is growing the business so that that next round of fundraising could even be plausible. And it just so happens that these numbers and these metrics that that are pretty generally agreed upon,

• 14:00Speaker 02

  and they always change, but are generally agreed upon by the sentiment of VCs at the time. Those numbers happen to be really good general sort of markers for the health of your own business.

• 14:09Harry Stebbings?

  And then I've got another question from Judith here, and she says, what are the biggest surprises about the move into VC? Obviously, you move from kind of a less institutionalized, almost angel fund to now with the larger funds and the most recent fund, which obviously is very much an institutional angel fund, not institutional angel fund, institutional fund. So what are the biggest surprises about making that move?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  The biggest surprises is actually there is a really, really important value in process. Part of raising a fund of this size is that there are just different requirements placed upon you just, just in terms of just the rigor of managing the business. And the thing that's been really, really interesting, and I think really, really fruitful and helpful, has been this new set of lenses through which we look when we talk about growing the business of it.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  The products behind it, you know, we are, we're all makers ourselves. Gary, in fact, wrote just about all of the modern code that powers Y Combinator. And that software does a lot for making our lives a lot easier. And so, you know, after we left Y Combinator and put attention to initialized, the thinking was, all right, well, what's the software we need to scale this business? And what we found is by putting a focus on that, we're discovering just actually how much of a difference, like how much of a beneficial, it seems sort of obvious because a lot of, you know, the companies, so many of the companies we invest in are disrupting businesses with file cabinets, as we like to say. So it seems obvious that we should want to do this for VC as well. But the first two funds were a lot smaller and, and we did them sort of in concert

• 15:48Speaker 02

  with being partners at Y Combinator. And so it wasn't necessary to have all this infrastructure built. But now that we are building it, what we're finding is just how much of a difference it makes. And that's exciting because, you know, we were, we were very lucky to have success with the first two funds.

• 16:02Harry Stebbings?

  What does that infrastructure look like, if you don't mind me asking?

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Sure. All right. Well, so it's a combination of things. There's the table stakes, which are things like a portal for LPs, right? An easy way for them to get access and insights into how well their investment is doing. That's like table stakes at this point. The things that we're really excited about are the things that let us do what we do way more efficiently. So software that manages the relationships we have with founders. Originally, we just had an email set up called batphone at initialized. And that was an email that any one of our portfolio companies could email 24/7. That would hit all of us. Whoever first to see it would be the first to respond, get on the phone or just get on chat or texting and help them with whatever it is they needed, like the bat signal or like the bat phone, I guess.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  And we are now productizing that in a way so that all of those logs and all of those discussions live within software in a much more robust way than just here's an email and hopping into chat, right? So they all live in one place. These records, these histories all live in one place. And not just for on-demand, but also for recurring office hours. So that I'll know as soon as I start an office hour session with a company, their entire office Hours history with all the other partners. I know what they felt. I know what their milestones were in terms of targets for data. When I asked them for how they're doing, right, I can see that now in comparison to how they were doing. Whatever it was, they spoke to another partner and it just saves a lot of time getting up to speed with the business.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  And and let's just focus on the things that matter. We want it to be a really impactful 20 or 30 minute office hour session. We want to cut right to the chase. I'm a I'm a pretty friendly guy, but during office hours, it is just about the business. There's no banter. And we want it to be as efficient as possible because we don't want to waste our founders' time, frankly. And with this extra knowledge now, we're starting to learn a lot more about our companies a lot faster. And, you know, a lot of the time, we're the ones who have to tell founders like, hey, you know, you're actually doing really well right now. I think it's time you could you could probably raise your next round of funding. And there's a great Gary Tan story about Coinbase where we had done their seed round and then

• 18:10Speaker 02

  they were actually running out of working capital by 9 a.m. every morning. So they're a Bitcoin exchange. And they would have these regular sessions, Brian, the CEO, and Gary as an investor slash like executive coach at that point. And and Gary just was sitting there across the table from one day and was like, wait, you're what? You're running out of working capital at 9 a.m. every morning? Like, you need to, we can solve this problem. There are plenty of people who want to invest in a company that is growing this much. And we, I think we wired them money by the end of the day. And then within a few months, we were helping them set up their Series A. I think Union Square Ventures ended up leading that deal. And that was a really important insight for us because this was our first, again, this was initialized one.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  And what we saw there in that moment was, you know, we knew, and this is a very, very smart, very talented founder. But and you get this tunnel vision when you're thinking about your company 24/7. And sometimes it just takes having a close relationship with an investor you trust to say, hey, hold on a second, we can solve this problem for you. And that's the kind of thing we want software to help us with. Because it shouldn't have to take a breakfast once a month to have that happen, right? We have a lot more of this data floating around and we're lucky because our founders really trust us and really. Want to share with us and if we can show them how valuable that is through the software we're building and the services that we and the advice that we provide, that's a great thing.

• 19:31Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. No, it is kind of building a succinct thought process between you and the founders. Really important, but I'd love to dive into a quick fire with you now, and this is one of my favorites. So I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. How does that sound?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Okay, short statement, immediate thoughts. All right, let's do this.

• 19:45Harry Stebbings?

  About sixty seconds per one. Sound good?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 19:48Harry Stebbings?

  All right, let's do it. Okay, your favorite book and why?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Even I read mostly nonfiction now, but one of my favorite books was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It is fascinating to me how insightful that man was about life and how amazing he was at telling stories through some of the weirdest narratives imaginable. And I also, I did my senior thesis in history on the bombing of Dresden, which is one of the settings for that book. And actually Kurt was a POW in Dresden during the bombing. So he has a pretty unique perspective on it all. But I just really, I love his storytelling. He is, or was, rather, a really, really talented writer

• 20:28Speaker 02

  and very, very insightful. And, and one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes, which is, he's talking to a bunch of children and it's, god damn it, you've got to be kind. Is, it was the lessons from life. It was like, hello babies, welcome to earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies. God damn it, you've got to be kind. And I feel like there are plenty of faiths, there are plenty of adages all about kindness. This is not a new thing. But he just does, he conveys it in such a delightful, delightful way. That's not, it's not from Slaughterhouse Five, but it's still a Vonnegut quote, so I, I get credit.

• 21:08Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, this is a, this is a good one and a controversial one and sixty seconds. Okay.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  All right.

• 21:13Harry Stebbings?

  Can kindness win in investing in this macho negotiating?

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 21:19Harry Stebbings?

  It can.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  A hundred percent, yes, because kindness is a long-term investment. And if you're a smart investor, you are thinking about the long term. Kindness does not mean being weak or being dumb. It just means looking at the world as though it is not this purely zero-sum game. And that we will succeed in the long term if we are actually good. A specific example of this would be, I would love to furnish lies to be famous for rejection emails. Because we're not just going to tell an early-stage founder, hey, we pass, it's not a good fit. We're going to say explicitly, like, here are the things that we struggled with. Here are the numbers that weren't what we hoped they would be. And here's, you know, this is what we'd like to see.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  And this is just smart, because on the off chance this founder is able to get this right and come back to us two months later, and she says, hey, look, that feedback was really helpful. Here's what I've done to improve my business. Ninety-nine point nine percent of these founders will not do that, right? Just like ninety-nine point nine percent of these founders will not succeed. But the point one percent that do are exactly the type of founder we want to be investing in. So it's a good practice, not just because it's giving someone useful advice instead of just casually saying, oh, not a good fit, bye. But it's also insurance. And beyond that, it builds our reputation with other founders and hopefully makes us, you know, people that everyone wants to take money from.

• 22:40Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, three more questions, three minutes. Sound good?

• 22:43Speaker 02

  All right, Harry, I'm going, this is lightning round this time.

• 22:45Harry Stebbings?

  This is lightning round. CEO for the day, any CEO in the world, who would you be?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Elon Musk.

• 22:50Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 22:50Speaker 02

  No-brainer, because he is working on companies that are literally changing the world at scale. And I am, I am in awe of it. I would only want to do it for a day, though, because I really do appreciate the time I have, like, with people I love and experiences that I have that are not work-related. And I already don't get enough of that. So I don't know how he could possibly do that with his schedule.

• 23:10Harry Stebbings?

  Your favorite blog or newsletter, what are the must-reads for you when they come in? Other than the twenty-minute VC, obviously.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Harry, it's the twenty-minute VC and then Reddit. And it's, that is everywhere.

• 23:20Harry Stebbings?

  I'll pay you later, Alexis, that's so good. What a brilliant question. No, really, what are your, what are your must-reads when they come in in the morning? Reddit first?

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Really, all I read is Reddit. That's it. I subscribe to hundreds of Reddit communities at this point, so I get a range. I mean, everything I could possibly want to know. Updates about my favorite sports teams, TV shows, world news, it's all, it's all there on the front page.

• 23:40Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, penultimate question. I'm getting fat because now I'm working harder being a VC. How do you combine fitness and being a VC and having no time?

• 23:49Speaker 02

  You know, it's all about making priorities or making exercise or wellness a priority. I know, I know deep down, and hopefully this gives you consolation, I'm a better person at my job. I'm better at Reddit, I'm better working with companies, I'm better, I'm a better boyfriend when I'm taking care of myself.

• 24:08Harry Stebbings?

  Yep, no, absolutely. Well, I need to prioritize my life, I think.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  You, you, you deserve it, Harry.

• 24:14Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, thank you, Alexis.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Take better care of yourself.

• 24:16Harry Stebbings?

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

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Ooh, okay, the most recently publicly announced one would have been WorkRamp. And the reason why is because it's so unsexy and so mandatory. Basically, it's the easiest way to train and develop an employee. Companies all over the world use all kinds of crappy software or processes that no one likes to train a new employee, right? This could be everything from, you know, that wiki on your company's website for how to, I don't know, do a particular thing at the office that no one reads, or it could be for a sales team, right? Learning the sort of 101 of how to do a good pitch for a company. There's all these crappy solutions that everyone's hacked together.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  And it's a really strong team, box veterans who know how to build this kind of software, make it beautiful, and sell it to companies that desperately need it. And, and I love this stuff. This is the, it's a classic file cabinet kind of business that is, it's replacing really inefficient, dated software at best and like, pen and paper drawings and to-do lists at worst. And that's a, that's a good place to be for building great software.

• 25:27Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Alexis, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. As I said, I've wanted to do this for such a long time. So thank you so much for giving up the time today.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Thank you, Harry. Seriously, I wish you luck, man. Carve out that time. You're worth it. You're gonna be better at everything else you do.

• 25:41Harry Stebbings?

  I do also want to say how excited I am to have Alexis's partner at initialise Gary Tan on the show on Wednesday, so stay tuned for that. And a huge thanks to Alexis for giving up the time today to come on the show, really am grateful for that. Also, a big hand to Judith at Weathergauge for the intro. And if you loved the show today and would like to see more from us, you can find me on Snapchat at H Stebbings, or on the fantastically named new blog, mihitovc.com. I'd absolutely love to hear your thoughts and feedback on that. And as we said earlier, accounting always seemed like a massive headache to me, but it doesn't have to be. And that's where Xero come in. Xero is beautiful, easy to use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere, from your computer or mobile device. And when you add Xero to your small business,

• 26:23Harry Stebbings?

  you're able to track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory, partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time, whenever you like. You can also really customise your Xero experience with over 500 business apps, including time tracking, e-commerce, point of sale, and many more. It's no wonder over 860,000 customers in more than 180 countries use Xero. And all you have to do is sign up for a free 30-day trial at xero.com/20vc. That's xero.com/20vc. And now the books are in order, you might have some extra dollars to spend. And what better way to do that than with Pearl? Now Pearl believes the latest automotive technology should be available to every driver, whether it's time for you to buy a new car or not. And Pearl Rear Vision is their first step in driving this commitment forward. Pearl Rear Vision is

• 27:06Harry Stebbings?

  the only wireless backup camera and alert system that installs in minutes and updates throughout its lifetime. Pearl literally takes less than 10 minutes to install and is completely wireless because it's solar powered. Since Rear Vision is software-based, it's also able to push updates and new features over the Pearl app in the exact same way you receive updates for other apps on your phone now. And Pearl Rear Vision is perfect for anyone who wants to upgrade their car in minutes, and it costs $499 and is available at pearlauto.com and also through amazon.com or Crutchfield. As always, we so appreciate all your support. And as we said, we cannot wait to have Gary Tan on the show on Wednesday.