Ben and David on "Capital Allocators"
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Hello, Acquired LPs. At the end of last year, Ted Seides was gracious enough to have David and I on his show, Capital Allocators, to kick off their mini-series on Venture Capital. We wanted to make it available to all of you who aren't subscribed to that podcast, since one, it's a great podcast and you should check it out, and two, a lot of what we talk about on the show is what we talk about on Acquired, too, and it was a little bit of a deep dive into the current venture landscape.

We want to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading trust management platform. Vanta, of course, automates your security reviews and compliance efforts. So frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance and monitoring, Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple.

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It plays a major role in enabling revenue because customers and partners demand it, but yet it adds zero flavor to your actual product. Vanta takes care of all of it for you. No more spreadsheets, no fragmented tools, no manual reviews to cobble together your security and compliance requirements. It is one single software pane of glass.

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Like Vanta's 7,000 customers around the globe. And go back to making your beer taste better. Head on over to vanta.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. And thanks to friend of the show, Christina, Vanta's CEO, all acquired listeners get $1,000 of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired.

Quick reminder that this is not investment advice. We may have an interest in the things we discuss on this show. Do your own research. And with that, on to our episode with Ted from Capital Allocators. Hello, I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators.

This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can join our mailing list and access premium content at CapitalAllocators.com.

Mark Andreessen from A16Z famously proclaimed a decade ago that software is eating the world. His prophecy has proved prescient. Cloud computing enabled the rapid, cost-effective deployment of software, startups flourished, and venture capital returns have been phenomenal. Venture capital is a fascinating investment area whose many days in the sun shine brightest this year.

institutional portfolios with large venture allocations soared to their best year in history. And yet parts of venture are unique in being both efficient and unactionable. Many believe that Sequoia or Benchmark will produce returns at the top of the pack, but there's not much action anyone can take to participate. This miniseries explores the industry, focusing on some favorites of institutional investors who are still investable to those in the loop.

Each has a great differentiated story to share and something to prove. That said, this field moves quickly, so as the disclaimer goes, past accessibility is not a guarantee of future capacity.

My guests on the first episode of Venture is Eating the Investment World are David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert, venture capitalists and hosts of the Acquired podcast. Acquired is one of my favorite shows. In it, David and Ben tell stories of great companies and technology with thorough research and a fun, engaging style.

Our conversation kicks off the miniseries with their respective backgrounds and venture, the creation of Acquired, and their research process for the show.

We then dive into the origins of the cottage venture capital industry, inflection point after the tech bubble, rise of an abundance of capital, firms investing across stages, the competitive response of others, the mass introduction of angel investors, businesses staying private for longer, and the potential for crypto to change the game once more. Ben, David, great to see you guys. Thanks for having us. So nice to be here.

I thought it'd be fun to start with your respective backgrounds, and then we can dig into it. So Ben, why don't you kick us off? Yeah, sure thing. Well, I did computer science undergrad, ended up going to Microsoft, working there as a program manager on Office for iPad, which was super fun to work on that at the time. It was a very counter-strategy product for Microsoft. That's when it was like a big secret project, right? Yes. Yeah, very much so. Always fun to work on it. And

And I was constantly trying to start a startup, and I ended up finding my way to pitch the good people at Madrona Venture Group on a couple of apps I had made. When I was in college, I made an app called Seize the Day that right place, right time, got millions of downloads. It was an early to-do list on the App Store when Apple didn't ship reminders yet as a part of the operating system. So

found that as a nice hole to fill. And so I was feeling confident, feeling like, hey, I can make apps, I can start startups. And I think in large part, I was missing the business strategy element. And so when I went and pitched a bunch of venture capitalists, it mostly fell on deaf ears of like, cool, you can make stuff that people want to use, but it's like totally not defensible. There's not a good revenue model. And ultimately, what ended up happening is Greg Gottesman, who is now my partner at Pioneer Square Labs, then was a partner at Madrona, called me and said, hey,

maybe instead of us funding one of these, do you want to come and start this internal labs group with us at Madrona? And so joined up with him, we incubated some companies together. And after about two years, we spun out and started Pioneer Square Labs as a dedicated studio and now also venture fund. And it's just been a blast starting 27 companies there ever since. That was a

simultaneous to meeting David and actually at Madrona and starting Acquired. So maybe, David, that's a good place to hand it over to you.

Yeah, I started my career, very traditional finance investment banking analyst on Wall Street. I was doing TMT coverage at UBS right before I graduated from college in 2007. So I started analyst class of 2007, biggest analyst class on Wall Street ever. Until the time it was a really great six months, then the financial crisis happened. And

I lived through that on Wall Street. And all along, I'd always been interested in tech and venture capital.

and wanting to get into venture capital. And I did two and a half years in banking through 2009, through the worst of the crash. Then I went to the Wall Street Journal. I worked at the Wall Street Journal for a year on the business side, not as a reporter, but ended up becoming quite useful to what we do now at Acquired. And then I found my way out to Seattle and joined Madrona to finally do early stage venture capital. And I've kind of been a refugee from finance ever since. But that was in 2010. And then I spent about a decade

in venture, mostly at Madrona, doing early stage. I left, started a firm, a seed stage firm in 2018, did that for a couple of years. And then as of 2020...

acquired is the thing that I do. And I have a small angel fund on the side. In many ways, David and I have exact opposite career paths, where David started in investment banking that did proper venture capital, then started a seed fund, and now is an angel investor and podcaster. Whereas I started computer science, gone big company, gone tinkerer incubator, and now I'm a general partner in a venture fund. And it's sort of this hilarious crisscrossing.

So where did the idea for the podcast spin up? David and I had this budding friendship, and we were looking for some reason to get together more often. We'd go like three, four months between getting drinks. And one of the times when we were out at a happy hour, I pitched David on this idea that I wanted to do a podcast. And I think David was a little skeptical at first. Like we'd both been longtime podcast lovers. I can't say it's something I'd ever thought about. Yeah.

But when I pitched him on the concept for acquired of like, hey, you're investing in companies, I'm starting companies, like it'd be nice to understand when they get acquired for like a lot of money, and those go really well. Why is something clicked for you where you were like, I will 100% do that with you starting tomorrow, if that's the idea. It just became this thing that I just love.

And I loved doing it more than anything else I was doing over time. So one of the things I was really curious to talk to you guys about is your research process. I've heard it over the years, and I especially picked up a couple of the episodes where you did long histories of some top venture firms, Sequoia, A16Z, and A16Z

Just from an allocator's perspective, really curious how you dug in and did all of that research. Well, I think it certainly helps that we both came from industry. I mean, one of the things, as we get into talk about the history of venture capital in a minute here, Don Valentine, who started Sequoia in the 70s, his big innovation in venture was this realization that

Yeah.

And I think the same thing actually applies to podcasts and media. That is our secret weapon is that we came from and still are active participants in the industry. We're not outside media observers. So when we start our research process, we're

We're bringing 10 plus years of living in this. Some of the best research or aha moments for the show are when we're able to, along the storytelling, remember where we were when that news broke. I remember you having the insight of like, I remember reading the article that Instagram was bought for a billion dollars. Here's where I was in that career. Here's the context going on in the industry at the time. And there really is nothing like

actually remembering the feeling when a big piece of news dropped. So that's the, I think, our unfair advantage to start. But then I think the other thing that we do, you know, especially now, not in the early days, but now for our episodes is we, and especially I have the luxury of time. So we drop an episode every two to three weeks. And we ramp up the research process throughout that by the end of the last couple days before the episode. And

It's like tunnel vision, you know, nothing else is going on in my life except making this episode great. There's just no way around doing the work of doing all the reading, reading every article, watching every YouTube video that founders have done, reading every book. And then this picture starts to emerge of what the story is.

you kind of go into a trance. There's like this flow state of just chasing every curiosity of, well, that's odd. I kind of forgot about that little detail. Why is that true? And trying to figure it out. And two fun little tactic hacks that I'll offer, because I think those are fun to share on a podcast. You can scope Google searches by date.

And you can scope it by all kinds of stuff, by file type. There's really cool operators you can use in search. And so you can go and say, I'm looking for an article from these two or three months. And I think we very quickly forget the way that people used to talk about their companies and let the current way they describe the narrative change.

influence how we remember the companies. But it's all out there. You just have to know how to search for it. And the other fun hack is there's these criminally under-viewed YouTube videos, which is executives whose names you know and executives whose name you don't know giving industry talks at

And these end up on YouTube because they're giving out public information. It's just kind of like nitty gritty. And oftentimes it's not picked up by the press. And so when you go and you watch Gwynne Shotwell, the COO of SpaceX, give a talk to the

the Aerospace Industry Association that has a few hundred views on it. It's an unbelievable way to get insight into SpaceX that's not in the headlines. Was there anything different in doing that work on the venture capital firms compared to the companies? Actually, it was surprisingly similar. Sequoia is a wonderful example. It embodies all of this. I had been such an admirer and tried to

read and consume everything that was written about them in my career as a venture capitalist because I wanted you know like

they've always been the best. Why are they the best? And it turns out there's just like a lot of really obscure stuff out there. Like the University of California at Berkeley did this amazing oral history project of early Silicon Valley and posted the raw transcripts of like the research interviews, one of which being with Don Valentine. And it's 50 pages of Don going on about his history. And nobody's going to read that. It's buried at the Berkeley Library website.

website, but it's there. You can find it and read it. And similarly on YouTube. So it's surprising just how much is out there. It was very similar to what we do with the company. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the industry and maybe a little bit of a history of where we've come and then where we are today. David, do you want to take us into the history and facts? Oh, wow. Okay, great. This is a quiet episode. I love it. Well, we start back in... No.

Actually, we do. I mean, like, you know, I mentioned Don Valentine, early stage venture, it's this funny thing, right? Where now it's much more institutionalized and well known throughout the ecosystem. But for the longest time, it was the sleepy little corner of finance. You know, I was the black sheep in my banking analyst class who wanted to go into early stage venture capital. Everybody's like, I want to go work at Carlyle or KKR, you know.

It's crazy to me it was that recently a sleepier corner. Yeah, because it just wasn't that much money and it wasn't that many firms. Like we said, Don Valentine really, I think, should be credited with...

developing the industry as it is today. He was not a finance professional by any means. He was head of sales at Fairchild Semiconductor. And he had this vision. He knew all these engineers from Fairchild elsewhere. And he saw that semiconductors were going to have all these applications across every industry. And all of his clients at Fairchild were buying

systems. And he's like, hey, I can go help these companies get started. So he actually went to Capital Group. A lot of people don't know this. Sequoia, it's not quite a spin out, but Don went to Capital Group and with them started a fund there dedicated to doing seed stage creation financings of semiconductor companies. And this is the late 60s?

This is probably, yeah, around 1970. He did that for a couple of years and then spun it out with Capital Group's help into what became Sequoia Capital. There's Kleiner Perkins as well. There were a couple other firms, but like that was it for a long time. And you go back and you look at some of the rounds that they were doing, you know, they were putting like 2 million bucks into Cisco for like 40% of the company. It's just silly these days. Yeah.

The other thing is like there was no real notion of early stage venture capital versus late stage venture capital. There was venture capital and that meant writing a two-ish million dollar check and hopefully that was enough to get the company profitable so that it could go public. Maybe there'd be some creative financing along the way between those two things or maybe the firm would be able to double down. I mean, there wasn't like calculated reserve strategies the way there are now with venture funds, but it was kind of like, yep, this is the private financing you get.

When did that start to evolve? Yeah, well, you know, it's funny. We're on a real kick at Acquired right now on complexity theory and the Santa Fe Institute and all that. Probably a lot of your listeners will be familiar with that. We just had Michael Movison on as a guest to talk all about this. So venture capital and startups are such a perfect example of a complex adaptive system in that it

It evolves. It evolves at an accelerating rate. It's governed by the power law. But there are these evolutionary dead ends. And the thing before it started evolving towards what we know today, there was the tech bubble. We got to talk about that because that ended up being, I think, one of these evolutionary dead ends where at first there was sort of the craze leading up to it. And a lot of people think over the last few years, it's looked like that. But

But then the crash happened and people learned so many wrong lessons from the crash. And there was this hangover, right? And there was this view that these companies weren't profitable. They didn't have business models, pets.com, web van. Oh my God, these are terrible ideas. You're lighting capital on fire.

And the reality was that was all wrong. It was just timing and exogenous factors that made that not work at the moment. And David, the point you're making there is like a web van, a pets.com. If there was the capital available to those startups, then the way there is today, then perhaps I wouldn't be ordering from Instacart yesterday. I'd be ordering from web van because they would have been able to stay the course because at scale, that business model actually works.

And timing too. You needed the infrastructure build out of everything. You needed mobile. You needed the whole technology ecosystem to grow before all of that was capable of serving the markets with the efficiency that they are today. But everybody thought at the time that like, oh, no, no, these are just bad ideas. So really the revolution, and we talked about this in our two-part Andreessen Horowitz series, is

It was Andreessen who, specifically Mark Andreessen, who came in and he was like,

Guys, this is crazy. A16Z started in 2008, 2009. And his whole thing, both Ben and Mark, the whole thesis of the firm was there is no bubble. And these companies are going to work. And we've got the iPhone now. We've got mobile. We've got the cloud. We've got AWS. The infrastructure is there. The consumer adoption is there. We can build companies to attack these markets. And the software is eating the world thing.

And that's when all of this started to change. Yeah, it's funny. If I think back to my time at Yale, in the mid-90s, the main industry study of supply and demand for venture capital came from IVP. And if you looked back, when there was a lot of money raised, the returns were weak. And that went right into the bubble of

There's only been one direction since then. And Ted, to get into it, I think you specifically asked, when did that start to change? It's interesting how venture capital, even through the finance boom on Wall Street of the 80s and early 90s, venture capital was kind of a sleepy asset class during that time. There's really no big success stories or war stories of...

incredible firm building during that time. So we sort of had this boom in the 70s. And then until really the early 90s, when we were starting internet companies, it sort of developed slowly. And you did have the emergence of what we'd call late stage private startup capital that would come in after these firms before their IPO. But they could be reasonably undifferentiated because there weren't really a lot of people playing there. You were PE buyouts or Wall Street,

or this emerging early stage venture capital. But if you were going to go write a $30 million check into a four-year-old private, theoretically fast-growing company, it just was like...

shooting fish in a barrel if you could actually find a company that would take your money at that point. So I just think as we evolve to today, I think we can talk about what parts in the capital value chain got way more valuable and what parts effectively had extreme margin compression to the point where it's a really difficult place to even be operating right now. But I do think it's interesting that you had these firms that would sort of

observe that Sequoia wrote a check, six months later, come in and start offering to write another check. And then by the time 18 months rolled around, they were still the only bidder and they'd get to put money in. There were whole firms that that was their strategy. They just follow Sequoia and benchmark. That was the whole strategy. But it's funny though, you know, you guys, so Andreessen Horowitz was...

the start of the change here. And I think what they realized without necessarily having the words for it, which is that there's two ways to think about what you're doing when you're investing. You can either be buying a series of cash flows. And when you're doing that, you essentially are stock picking. That's public markets. But a lot of people for a long time in venture thought that that's what they were doing in early stage venture. And

And the reality is you've got to think about it with a different paradigm. And the paradigm you've got to think about it is buying options. And once you start to think about that, this whole industry makes a lot more sense. If you're just buying options at early stage venture, then price doesn't matter.

then you want to have as many shots on goal as possible. You want extreme volatility and long tails, right? All the stuff that you don't want when you're buying a series of cash flows that you want to predict with high accuracy. And Andreessen was the firm that really got this. It started deploying tons of capital, doing lots of seed investments, high valuations, high capital velocity deployment, and really has reshaped the whole industry around it.

It's interesting. Until Michael sort of gave us the language of you're effectively buying options, I was sort of calling it hedged speculation. And I was almost, it's funny, I'm sure I have LPs listening to this. I was almost afraid to on air say to my LPs, I don't really think early stage investing is investing. I think it's hedged speculation. And the hedge is partnering with the very best entrepreneur you possibly can find after years and years of relationship building and going into interesting markets where you have a unique perspective on the future. And beyond that, it's speculation.

And then I realized, like, of course it is. That is literally what we are in the business of doing. And we should in no way conflate that with underwriting the discounted cash flow about the belief of the future potential of a company other than is it market constrained? And beyond that, you're buying an option.

So he had venture capital and public markets. And Andreessen comes in and say, okay, we're going to go across stages. How did the market evolve to become more segmented like it is today? Well, there's today. And then there was the lead up to today. Today is a different animal. Why don't you go through the lead up?

Yeah, the lead up. Once people started to realize this, there's one more important implication of what we were talking about a minute ago, which is I kind of think of it as this concept of shame that has slowly been dwindling in venture capital. Shame about your losers. You know, and it gets back to the stock picking versus options thing. People even in the industry, but certainly externally to the industry, you know, the web fans, the pets.com, later the fab.com. What are some of the other big blowups? You know, Andreessen was in all of them.

And it used to be that like, oh, if you're in a big blow up, that's bad. That could be career ending. That could be firm ending. But again, when you're thinking about it as options, there's nothing wrong with it. It's great. I want to be in the big blow ups because it means I'm chasing volatility. And that means I'm going to get into huge winners as well. So once this shame idea went away, then the shame around

raising lots of capital went away too. So both the existing firms, you see like take Sequoia, right? They used to be $250, $300, $500 million funds. And those were big. They were like the biggest funds out there. Well, shoot, now they've got a $12 billion global growth fund. They went to China. They went to India. They're going to Europe now. The existing firms said, oh, well, we should just raise a lot more capital. And

and deploy it into these companies that we're investing in from the early stage. Let's become lifecycle investors. Let's go with them round by round. And then you had firms come in. Really, there were a few growth firms, as Ben said. There was Meritech, which I interned at when I was in business school. They're wonderful folks. They were one of the OG growth firms in the Valley, IVP that you mentioned. And then there were the summits and the TAs and the like. But then you got the hedge funds coming in and doing crossovers, the CO2s, the

And then you've got spin outs from those. And so just a whole lot more capital started coming in. You basically have a four minute mile problem where someone says, you know, a venture capital fund can never scale to deploy capital that is larger than X. And like, then someone does buy a lot and then everyone else freaks out and goes, oh my God, they're going to eat our lunch.

And you have, it's even funny looking at the most two recent iterations of this with SoftBank's $100 billion vision fund. And then suddenly deploying capital at the rate that they're deploying doesn't seem that crazy today with what Tiger came in and did. And so I just think it's funny how it is taken as the canonical wisdom that you couldn't possibly do this strategy. And then when someone does, all other strategies feel really tenuous and obsolete quickly. So before we get to the swaths of capital that's coming to late stage,

How did this play out in the earliest stages? Because one thing you can't do at the same time is scale your assets and write all these tiny, tiny checks that the old venture capitalists were doing.

Well, maybe. I think that was another thing that people thought. People thought that when you're investing at the early stage, you got to be hands-on. You got to be a board member. You got to really help these companies. They're such young companies. They need help growing. They need advice. They need all the resources your firm can bring.

Maybe, you know, and I think that contributed to this moving slowly during this period of the build up today. Like this didn't happen overnight. It took a decade from 2010 to 2020 for this to happen. But this was one of the knocks against Andreessen Horowitz that everybody would say like,

how could they be doing all these companies? How could they help them, you know, et cetera. Well, it turns out there's a whole class of entrepreneurs, a large percentage of them that don't need or want your help. So I would actually push back. I think it actually can scale quite well. My combinators are perfect.

example of this. They've done thousands and thousands of companies. The other thing, Ted, is even before we started to see these dedicated growth funds by the canonical early stage firms, Sequoia raising their global growth fund, and you started to see people raising larger and larger funds and doing more follow-ons out of their early stage funds. So they would stretch the strategy rather to say,

okay, we're going to do the Series A and participate in the Series B. To say, we're going to do the Series A, we're going to participate heavily in the Series B, and then we'll also do some of the Series C. And rather than just inflate these into one fund, where then you sort of have investors looking at it and going, wait, so what? How are you underwriting investments here? Your follow-ons are like dramatically different than the way you're thinking about your initial investments. You're smoking your own exhaust. Yeah.

Yeah. We started to see people raise what is now the common strategy of an early stage fund and a growth fund where you can follow your winners all the way along and you can be as, I think, Sequoia seed to IPO? Is that how they describe it? Or a full lifecycle investor? Yeah.

Yeah, that's one of their taglines. But obviously, you've got Sequoia, you've got Andreessen Horowitz, as David is talking about these firms that basically say, we have the access to capital ourselves to be able to be a major source of capital for you along the entire ride. And

we may now have the competencies to be able to help you grow when you're very large, rather than what the competency of an early stage investor used to be, which is, we'll get you to product market fit, and then we'll find the next person to hand you off to, and then you'll have a gigantic board, and that board will be full of all these people with competing interests. It's interesting to start to see that consolidation happen in-house at a venture firm to be able to add value all the way along the track.

How have the competitors to those precede to IPO, those few firms with basically unlimited access to capital, responded in a competitive environment, say, at the early stage? Well, it's interesting, right? There's this great article that actually Ben, you found originally and sent to me about Tiger called Playing Different Games. And

I would say it's been some firms have adapted to it. And some firms have said, we're going to try and play the same game. Like, I think Excel is a great example of this. Excel saw what Sequoia was doing by bear hugging their companies and saying, we're going to be a lifecycle investor seed IPO. And Excel said, great, we've got a great brand. We've got great portfolio. We've got access to capital. We're going to do the exact same thing. And so you look at them, and they've now got billions and billions under management in their current suite of funds.

Then you've got firms that say, you know what, we're going to niche down and we're going to be known for something really great in what we do specifically. Ben PSL is a perfect example of this, right? Like you got early stage Seattle. That is what you guys do. But the incubation and the early stage investing or like True Ventures, another great, great example of this. They started really as a seed fund. Now I think the current suite of funds is like 750 million, maybe a billion. But they're known as like

the premier early stage venture investors in a few areas. If you're doing connected hardware, they did Peloton, right? At first, you're going to go to them. If you're doing crypto, well, Kevin Rose, he's a tastemaker in NFTs, right? So you're going to go to him. So you're seeing the niche down. But

And frankly, you've also had a lot of firms, again, as we were saying, it was so uncompetitive for a long time that have not adapted. There's this great graphic in that they show on the left. There's like the benchmark. Benchmark is a great strategy of this. Like we are going to be the premier. If you want a board member and advice and real shoe leather, they call it at the early stages, you're going to go to benchmark. They call that the Tiffany's. You've got Tiger. That's the Walmart on the other end of the spectrum. And then everything in the middle, this is JCPenney. If you're undifferentiated,

you're not going to get the best deals and you're going to die a slow death. I think the mental model here really is to apply the same thing that happened to the media landscape to the venture capital landscape. So there were...

only two strategies that worked in media and journalism over the last 10 years because of the internet and social media. There's get huge like the New York Times and the Washington Post, or there's niche down. But if you are caught in the middle where you have a high cost structure, but you're not as good as the big player, you are totally screwed. And so I think the really hard thing, if you are one of these people that's looking left and seeing the big guys and looking right and seeing the niche players, you're

If you aren't able to actually go compete with the New York Times is the Sequoias. You can't raise that much capital. You can't hire that caliber of partner, whatever it is. It's really hard to downsize and pick a lane, uh,

when you kind of look around and you're like, well, it's not a problem for me tomorrow. It's just a problem for me three years from now. And that's why it's not an instant death. It's sort of a slow decline. You've had this period of time, even for those people, let's call them stuck in the middle strategically, where there's been a massive rising tide. More public markets have been receptive. You've had the large pools of capital in late stage. There's always another round for a

So how do you go about differentiating what matters in terms of driving returns? Is it being part of the right company? Is it being part of the right subsector? Is it having the right strategy as a venture capitalist?

Oh, that's a good question. I'm reminded of when I was in business school, I was lucky I got to take a class with Andy Ratcliffe, who was one of the co-founders of Benchmark, teaches at Stanford Business School now and also founded and is still, I think, the CEO of Wealthfront. He's a true renaissance man. I sort of asked him at the end of the course, I was like, because I had worked at Madrona before and I was going back to Madrona afterwards. I was like, young whippersnapper, BC, like, oh, yeah.

Tell me, how do I be successful in VC? I asked this to everybody back in the day. Andy's take on it is like, you got to have a strategy and your strategy has got to be unique to you. And that is your journey, both as an individual and as a firm, is to figure out why a great entrepreneur is going to take your money. And I can't give you the answer. And I think that's the journey a bunch of these firms either have been on or need to go on. And it kind of looks different for everybody. One thing we've seen, which I've seen...

firsthand, a lot of people are doing is what if you do venture without doing venture? I have a small fund. I'm a podcaster now. But I still I've never invested more in more companies or more money in my career. While I'm a podcaster, you know, Paki McCormick's doing the same thing with not boring. Patrick's doing this with invest like the best. So that's one strategy is like, come at the industry obliquely, you know, or like Ben was saying, there is a

natural lane that you and your firm could gravitate towards, just go all in on that. Go all in on Seattle. Go all in on some subsector of crypto, on L1 blockchains.

Yeah. And to share a little bit more on sort of how I'm thinking of that and the Pioneer Square Labs world is thinking of that, the answer is go earlier and incubate. If all companies out there are raising money at crazy valuations and it's crazy competitive to just put commodity capital in, okay, start companies, play the other side, be a co-founder. And like Greg, my partner started rover.com. And so we know how to start companies. Actually, David was very involved in that. We know how to sort of like

orchestrate what the right founding team looks like, help find product market fit, this sort of thing. And so to David's point, it's pletear strengths. And then of course, we have acquired, which is a 160,000 person megaphone, which then we can preach to once there is something we want to talk about. What's been the place in this ecosystem for all of these technologists that have done incredibly well because they were early at Google or Facebook or Amazon?

and they have capital and they want to be involved. Where does that fit into the ecosystem today?

Oh, wow. That is also changing rapidly. And a broader menu of options has never been available. Angel investing is alive and well, right? Like, I think about angel investing these days as this great analogy that applies to lots of things about when you're filling a jar with rocks, if you want to fill a jar, you need like the big rocks in there to take up the most volume, you know, that's like a lead in around that's a Sequoia, that's an Excel light speed bench, you know, anyway,

anybody who's leading the round. Then you've got maybe some pebbles and then you've got the sand that fills in all around. There's lots of sand and there's lots of opportunity.

There's never been more opportunities for sand, but some of those grains of sand become the rocks. And we're seeing that. Elad Gil is like a perfect example. Where did Elad's career start? He was early at Twitter, I think. And he started a couple of companies, Color Genomics. He was an entrepreneur, early employee, entrepreneur, Silicon Valley operator type. He started doing a lot of angel investing.

He started deploying more capital. You know, next thing you know, he's leading rounds. Next thing you know, he's leading large rounds. I don't know the exact figures, but I guess he's probably deployed hundreds of millions, if not billion plus of capital over the last few years. And it's just him.

There's definitely this interesting trend of power shifting from institutions to individuals. It's not just happening in venture, it's happening everywhere. I keep making this media allegory because I think it's very interesting to look at like journalists leaving and starting sub stacks. But I think, Ted, classically where people would have played is

Well, if they're really plugged in and they want to use the shoe leather, then they are angel investors and they go find very, very fledgling companies that can't yet raise venture, but just need 50K and a few people to throw 50K in. And hopefully that can get them to the place where they've done their angel round, they've found enough traction, and now they can raise a proper venture round. And these days...

there's so much institutional capital playing at that stage that often the angel investors are just investing alongside seed investors and often looking to seed investors and pre-seed investors for signal, interestingly enough, on where to come in. So I think what we're seeing is

Basically, those folks making the choice of, well, do I want to try and go the Allad Gil route and start deploying large chunks of capital myself? Do I want to start a firm and be a dedicated pre-seed investor, that sort of thing? But now you're in the profession of money management. You're a fund manager. Or do I just want to be passive capital and go be an LP and one of the best funds I can get into? There's one other thing, too, that I didn't say because it's just sort of like it's like a fish in water. It's just like natural to me now.

One big thing I think has changed for the angel environment is, Ben, there's sort of an unspoken assumption in what you're saying that a lot of people have, which is angel equals early stage. I think that's a limiting belief. I deploy just as much capital in series Cs and Ds and Es as I do in pre-seeds. Angels have realized we can invest in any round all along the life cycle, just like these other firms, just do it at a smaller scale. And in part because...

It's exactly the same phenomena you were talking about earlier, where early stage investing is really about buying options. But once a company is a business, they have product market fit, they're growing quickly, they have an underwritable financial profile, then

If you're an accredited investor with access, what's the difference between investing your $25,000, $50,000 into that versus investing $25,000 or $50,000 into your favorite publicly traded company? This one just has more upside left in it. So why wouldn't you do that if you're buying public stocks anyway? So what you described so far is...

Once upon a time, it's really once upon a time, there were a bunch of venture capitalists who really tried to add value with a small number of dollars and a small number of companies, maybe collectively a reasonable number of companies. And then if those companies succeeded, they would access the public markets. And now there's a lot more capital, there's a lot more players, there's a lot more individuals with money.

But part of the reason it all works is because you do have massive amounts of capital still available at the later stage in the private markets before these companies make it to the public market. So you mentioned SoftBank, you touched on Tiger Global. What was that unique insight that allowed these firms to attract so much capital into the later stage of the private markets? Well,

You're the expert and your listeners are the experts, but I don't think you can have any discussion about capital allocation these days without talking about interest rates. So I think that was probably the big innovation was Jerome Powell. Yeah. Why is money free for everyone?

Let's talk about it before that, because the SoftBank Vision Fund launched. That's a really interesting moment in the development of this ecosystem. And of course, we'd been in a six, seven year bull run at that point. But we hadn't seen the Fed doing what the Fed's doing now. We hadn't seen the stimulus checks yet. So what was going on there?

It's probably worth talking about stay private longer, because this was this mantra that happened after 2008, where it became harder to go public. So the set of companies that were being started, the Airbnbs, the Uber, they had been private for a decade and were looking and saying, maybe we should be private for even longer. And they were raising huge amounts of capital in the private ecosystem because they were

The skeptical view would be that they weren't robust enough to be public companies yet. They didn't have a handle on their business. They didn't have financial reporting. They didn't have controls in place. They couldn't keep an executive team without turning over, which all these things were true. And it was just way too difficult to be a public company and in many ways sort of still is. And so you have all these companies that really would like to stay private. And if they could find a good financial product for them, like...

a multi, multi-billion dollar fund to be able to invest and keep them private, then that has good product market fit. And so...

It was sort of this natural place where you have someone with just unbelievable gravitas like Masa saying, we're going to raise a $100 billion fund because there's an amazing fit with customers for my product of deploying huge private checks. And I think that was a, you can say what you want about some of the big successes or big failures of that fund. And actually, I think we're starting to see that there's some really big successes out of it. That was a brilliant insight at the time that

that these people really do want billions of dollars while they're still private, and there's effective ways to deploy that. It's funny thinking about this, because what we do on Acquired is tell stories. But there's been this whole story of what the venture industry is, and what tech is, and what startups are. And Ted, I think you said it when you described a minute ago of at the early stage, there used to be this small number of true VCs who really helped companies, then they went public. Those are all stories, right? The story was...

These companies needed help. The story was you needed to become profitable before you went public. The story was you had to go public within X number of years. And I think what we've seen over the in slow motion, but then fast is, is

These stories may or may not be true or may or may not be true anymore. And venture capital has gone from being something that was wholly outside of traditional finance, as we talked about, to something that is now much more like traditional finance. People are even talking in Silicon Valley about like, why is there not a native Goldman Sachs of Silicon Valley? And that's a really good question. There probably should be. You got people like Chamath and Altimeter that are doing SPACs and that's part of their capital stack. Like, why not?

They have capital markets teams. Why not? So how do you describe this whole where we are today? And then I think we probably have to talk about crypto in terms of where we might be going from here. But let's start with, we've walked through this history. What does this all look like today? So I think my one liner on what is it today is it's no longer venture capital. It's just capital.

And by that, I mean, with very few exceptions, you look at maybe incubation, maybe like true pre-seed. There are public market investors and very wealthy individual investors playing at every single stage, as David mentioned earlier. I think that I don't know that it needs that much more explaining other than

It used to be a niche commodity industry offering a very set of specialized skills. And now there's an enormous amount of capital at every stage investing in startups. And so it's just capital. And founders now need to think about access to capital, not the way that founders sort of used to, but the way that any operator, even in a public market setting, would think about all their options of access to various different types of capital.

So one of the things you have to think about with that is as more capital comes in and the cost of capital goes down, you have to wonder if the returns will ultimately be there. You do. You do. And in forming companies, right, it just takes a really long time to know. How do you see all of these players and all of this capital

competing for returns impacting what you see in the pricing environment? Well, it's interesting. There is this one of the still unique things I think about venture capital as opposed to most other forms of finance, although maybe this is bleeding into other forms of finance too, is that nobody really knows how big these markets are or how big they will be. And

I think the main thesis of venture capital that has proven out generation after generation is they're bigger than you think they are. Sequoia actually has this great saying about this, Mike Moritz adapted from Don Valentine, which is that as long as Moore's Law holds...

every successive generation of companies and generations in tech are measured in a couple of years, fund cycles, let's put it that way. Every successive generation should be an order of magnitude bigger than the previous. Because of Moore's law,

Every generation of companies is able to address bigger markets as compute gets cheaper. Like you're able to access more people, more industries, because the cost of doing something just went down by an order of magnitude in two years. As long as that stays true, that should continue. And historically, that has continued. So every generation of venture capital continues.

Everybody's like, this is crazy. These prices are crazy. Where are the returns going to come from? Andreessen Horowitz, oh my God. How are they going to make returns on this? Well, it turns out they invested in Coinbase and made $11 billion on it.

And then the timelines accelerate too. This great friend of Acquired, Modern Treasury, wonderful company. This company's three and a half years old, and they're doing over $2 billion of payment volume a month on the platform. They're a payment operations API company that would have been unheard of a few years ago. So I think that is the open question, right? On the one hand, at some point, Moore's Law may stop. At some point, this merry-go-round may end, but it hasn't ended for 50 years.

David, to your point, it's not just Moore's Law. It's all the similar laws that need to follow in the other characteristics of the business. So, of course, we have to be able to build more rich applications with more compute using Moore's Law. But then the unbelievable, magical invention that Microsoft had in the 90s of we can copy software, and then we have zero marginal cost in creating that next product.

thing, okay, that's another dimension of incredibleness to a business, right? Suddenly you have no cogs. You can have 95% gross margin businesses. Then the internet comes around and boom, that happens to distribution. So you've got that dimension now squashed to near zero. You don't have to send out floppy disks.

Right. And now, of course, you're going to have cryptos. And I think we should hold on that for a second. But it needs to continue being true that you take some dimension of cost in a previous business and squash it to near zero. And or you also keep discovering larger and larger markets. And Ted, I think where you're going with this question is,

The music will stop when one of those things stops being true. And I think much like any time that risk evaporates from a market, even though it's been boiling the frog slowly for everyone to be willing to underwrite more risk, have higher valuations, write bigger checks at those valuations, when it goes away, it goes away really quickly.

because someone says, wait, maybe these markets aren't as big as we all thought. And then there's some credible reason why everyone else looks at that. We don't know what that shining example is going to be yet, but if there is one, everyone will look at the same one very quickly and we'll have sort of a risk off.

Well, this happened with the internet bubble in 2000, 2001. And just to play out a debate that David and I often have, because David's Mr. Optimist on this, and it makes for a great straw man, David will go write an angel check into something at a $100 million valuation that is basically not a company yet. And I'm like, how could you possibly do this? I would never lead...

deal at that. Because even if I go put in $3 million, I'm going to own 3% of this thing. God willing, it goes well. I basically end up owning the de minimis amount by the time they go public. And he's like, these markets are so much bigger. Ben, it's not that they could one day be a billion dollar company. Coinbase is a hundred billion dollar company. We might have something IPO at a trillion dollars in just a few years. Whereas as long as that stays true, that's a great argument. And also how big are

all these markets really? Google, enormous market. Facebook, enormous market. Apple. But like, can there be 50 to 100 more of those companies? Or like,

Is there one per decade? Well, the wonderful thing is that's what makes markets, I suppose. Yes. Before I let you guys go, I think we need to talk a little bit about crypto as that potential for this, whatever you want to call it, Web 3.0, the blockchain technology, the next big platform. How do you see what's happening in crypto playing into the whole venture ecosystem?

Well, the first thing that I'll say is it's kind of hard to answer this knowing that this podcast won't ship for a little while because every week that goes by is like a whole successive generation in crypto land where like the thing that is commonly talked about by the time this podcast goes out, probably I don't have in my vocabulary yet. So forgive me for being a Luddite if you're listening and you're like, how come he's not talking about XYZ?

But the big thing to pay attention to, at least in my opinion, and why I've started really focusing on it as an investment area is every time David and I are interacting with someone in the acquired community who's a builder of some sort, or they're a passionate, not to be ageist, but 20 to 24 year old who's building stuff. They're not building iPhone apps, not building web apps, they're building web three apps. And like they're playing around in the blockchain ecosystem. And the

The blockchain is way better at some things and way worse at other things. The Ethereum blockchain is awesome because it's decentralized and really crappy because it's really slow. It's a really crappy computer if it weren't decentralized, but it is. So...

there's a certain amount of heat and energy and passion of engineers and of builders around this set of technologies right now that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy where there has to be interesting stuff built there because that's where the people are building. So that's like, I think the first thing to take as a given, even if you're an ultimate skeptic on the set of technologies and certainly, certainly on the hype. There's so much interesting about crypto. I think two things that really tickle me when you zoom out is

One, it's what we were just talking about, about Moore's Law and markets. It applies here too, right? Ethereum is a crappy, slow computer today. Ethereum was a really crappy and slow computer a few years ago.

Well, Solana is a really fast decentralized computer and all the changes that are coming to Ethereum hopefully will make it a really fast world computer. Moore's Law is alive and well. And if it continues, the scale of these things are going to, again, be bigger than anybody imagined a little while ago. But the other, from the perspective of the venture capital industry, I think crypto is fascinating because like we said, when we were talking about the non-crypto part of venture, it's this

massively capital inflated ecosystem right now, at least compared to history. There's so much capital coming in and the rate of consumption of capital is so high.

Crypto is different. Capital isn't nearly as necessary, if at all necessary. Braintrust is a great example. Super, super interesting company. My fund invested a little bit in it. When they listed on Coinbase about a month ago, they shot up to about an $11.5 billion market cap. And this is a real company. They've got tens of thousands of users. They're a labor platform. Millions and millions of...

revenue flowing through the platform, they only raised about $30 million before getting there. They just didn't need more capital. Because in crypto, you can bootstrap resources. You can incentivize players in your ecosystem to participate by rewarding them with the project itself, tokens in the project itself. You don't need to go pay somebody to do something. And that applies from...

partners, customers, participants, even down to employees. A lot of these crypto projects are

don't have employees. The founders aren't employees. And that really changes the equation. You know, when Ben was talking about successive generation putting a zero in the equation, crypto puts a big zero in the equation of company building. Or in many ways, it puts a big 100 in the category of stock-based compensation that you would normally think about as a public markets investor, where it's in some ways capital light in quotes, but a huge amount of the upside of the

what would be a company as actually going to the participants in the ecosystem. Can I make one more point on why I think Web3 is interesting? Sure. So we're really used to, in the venture world and in public market investing,

owning shares of a company and those shares becoming more valuable because the company gains enterprise value. And that is just not how this new paradigm works. And I've been trying to wrap my mind around it. For folks who don't know, a very common way that companies will decide to raise capital is they have a bunch of tokens that a shell company owns, like they call it a labs company or something like that. And rather than raising equity by selling shares in the company,

They sell tokens. And the reason for this is they say, well, actually, the goal of the company is to go away. We want to start, we want to kick off a decentralized ecosystem. Think about it like an open source project. And so we're going to lose money paying our employees. We never really have a way of making revenue. So you really don't want equity in our company.

However, we are bootstrapping this ecosystem by doing the initial $5 million of product development to get this thing out there on the blockchain that then can kind of be decentralized and self-sustaining. And the unit of currency or the unit of being able to purchase resources in this ecosystem, if it's a marketplace, think about the marketplace transactions, or think about it as the reputation, or if it's something like Audius, you can think about it as a way that you can

like a governance token, a way that you can decide on the future product development by being a holder of the token. Well, those things get more valuable as the network, as the ecosystem gets more valuable. And so actually what people are doing instead of selling the equity is selling the tokens. And it's this totally different thing to wrap your mind around where you say, huh, okay, well, I can't underwrite that this company will ever get more valuable. So how do I think about this?

this sort of total enterprise value in this ecosystem that's getting started? And how will the token that I'm buying actually accrue value in that ecosystem? And it forces a totally different set of assumptions when you're underwriting an investment. Yeah. As an example, take Uber. Uber raised gobs and gobs of money. They set a new paradigm that has since been eclipsed. But at the time, they were the new paradigm for capital deployment in companies. What did they do with that money? Yeah.

Well, mostly, you know, they have hired employees and stuff, but that wasn't most of it. They subsidized the network, right? Like they kept prices artificially low for riders and they incentivize drivers to drive on the network. And we're seeing it now play out with prices rising as they've moved toward profitability and all that.

In crypto, you don't need to do that with money. You do that with tokens. So it really changes the game. So within that paradigm of crypto, how do you think about brand? I think it's more important than ever. On the investor venture capital side of the equation, I think what this has done thus far and will become even more extreme over time, because capital is not as important as

But there are so many projects and there's so much noise out there, even for people who are very steeped in the ecosystem. You need a signal to follow both as an investor and as a participant in these networks. And so the signals become really, really, really valuable. You're seeing this. No place is this more playing out than in the NFT world right now. NFTs, these are projects that there's huge amounts of value transacting, but

But to anyone, even an expert, like, how do you tell them apart? Right. And so the difference is signal. So folks like Kevin Rose over at True Ventures have become real tastemakers when

When he buys an NFT, when he has an NFT artist on his podcast, people take that as a real signal. And this is happening in all parts of crypto. And then that starts to build density in the network. Solana, the same thing, right? Like there are other L1 blockchains out there that purport to offer the same benefits and features as Solana.

But Solana has built this incredible brand and following, and then they bootstrap up the node network and the validators and applications that are built on Solana and then value bootstraps. David, are you saying strength leads to strength? Yeah.

very famous Mark Andreessen quote. Yeah, a realization Mark had when they were building Andreessen Horowitz and they decided to raise a ungodly $300 million fund in their first fund in 2009. And then just like six to 12 months later, a $600 million fund where strength leads to strength. And it's just so true in crypto because the flywheel effect is so real. Guys, this is such an interesting exploration of this whole venture ecosystem. I can't let you go without asking you a couple of closing questions.

So why don't we do that? And I think it's worthwhile to have you both answer each one. So given that there are a bunch of them, we should...

try to figure out a way to keep this tight. But let's start with you, Ben. What's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family? Well, I would say cycling or running since it's like my most common, basically everyday thing. But I think that's probably a more common answer. I love mountaineering, backpacking. There is no more meditative feeling than climbing something tall, taking a deep breath and looking out over the earth. Hope to do more of that. David? It's funny. He was talking about the...

disposition of shame in the VC industry earlier in the show. I had a similar thing in my hobbies and personal life. I grew up playing lots of video games and loved them. Then I went through about a 10, 15 year period during and after college where I was like, I can't play video games anymore. Those are for kids. I'm serious now. And in the last couple of years, I've been like, you know what? I'm not ashamed about that. I love video games. So I actually play a lot of video games. All right, David, what's your most important daily habit? Ooh, let's

let's see i got two for acquired episodes really being able to when we're prepping just tune out everything else this doesn't happen every day but when we're like leading up to an episode being able to say nope i'm shutting down everything else in my work life right now and i am focusing the luxury to be able to do that is incredible and then the other one i would say is i make coffee for my wife in the morning every day and uh i think that buys me a lot of goodwill throughout the day

Ben? The morning workout. It's a mental and emotional reset. All right, Ben, your biggest pet peeve. So I was trying to think of one that is going to be an uncommon one on this show, and I could go into my... I have a very pedantic personality. Mine is when TV manufacturers, by default, put on the frame interpolation setting and

It makes me so angry. Like when I turn on the TV or I go visit someone else's house and I turn it on and the soap opera effect is happening where I can tell that like this was filmed in 24 frames per second, but it's being blasted at me at this like ultra high brightness, fake 60 frames thing. It kills me. So that is the pet peeve I'm going with. I love it. Ted, your listeners are going to be like, these guys are crazy. I promise we're normal humans. We just live in a weird industry. All right, David, how about you?

Oh, boy. Gosh, I'll go with this. The phrase up and to the right always gets me because it's always to the right. It could be up or down. But unless you've invented a time travel machine, you're not going to the left. David, which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life? Oh, my gosh. So many people. Well, I got to say number one.

is my partner here, Ben. Ah, you took mine. Just a love fest here. But seriously, doing Acquired has changed my life beyond anything I've ever imagined. And it's such a, I'm in no way comparing myself to Steve Jobs by any means. But it's just that line that he has from the graduation speech of like, you can't connect the dots going forward, only going backwards. And like,

this acquired was a dot that I and just you know been our friendship and our partnership was a dot that I never saw coming and has been like the biggest dot in my career and then you know the other one I would say this more recent but fun gotta give a shout out to Paki McCormick and Mario Gabrielli I feel like we've together been on this journey of like what does it mean to be a

in our industry and also investors. And we're figuring all this out together. And I think we encourage and push each other. And it's just great to have that community. Ben? Well, David, I wrote you down too. Thank you. My reason was you have helped me through imposter syndrome over the years where not being someone with a finance background, you've helped me realize my instincts are good. My intuition, I do have interesting things to...

say and reasons why entrepreneurs want to work with me and thank you for the confidence building that you've given me over the years. And

My second one is my partner, Greg Gottesman. And Greg is the person that made time for me when he was a general partner at a venture firm and I was a 22-year-old newbie at Microsoft who met with me quarterly to mentor me, who ultimately pulled me out of Microsoft and let me work with him, who started PSL with me, who always gave me way too much rope to go and explore and continues to. It's just awesome. And also, actually, he introduced David and I. That's right. I should have said Greg, too.

All right, Ben, what's your biggest mistake you've made and what did you learn from it? So I spun out a company from PSL in 2017 where I was the interim CEO. And I did that for all the wrong reasons. It was an esports company. I, unlike David, am not a gamer. And I was thrust into chasing a market because there was hype around the opportunity and not out of passion or understanding for the audience.

That business ended up not working in part because I don't think I ever actually had the insight of what...

reason customers would use the product that we were building was. It sounded good in theory, but I don't think I ever fully felt product market fit the way that I think great founders really do. And so my biggest takeaway is I'll never start a company again unless I really, really feel like I understand the crap out of the pain point and can go and build something great for that group. David?

Let's see. I think the biggest mistake that I've made at various points is getting too caught up in a specific vision of a goal or something I wanted to achieve or do. Most of it, a few years ago in my career, when I was thinking about leaving Madrona, they were wonderful and so supportive. I was like, I want to start and run my own venture capital firm. And that didn't work out quite how I thought it would. And what I realized since is like,

I want to do something I love and be great at it. And I don't know what that specifically looks like at any given point in time, but just holding too, too firm to a vision and a story like we're talking about with the whole industry. David, what teaching from your parents has most stayed with you? Oh,

Oh, my goodness. The biggest thing, at least in this context, that my professional context, I think my parents taught me was just normalizing entrepreneurship. They're lawyers. You wouldn't think of them as entrepreneurs in the same way. But when I was two years old, they left their firms and they started their own firm.

And my dad actually got into minor league baseball. He started and ran a few minor league baseball teams, the whole league, the Atlantic League and the East Coast. And so I just grew up with like my parents doing this stuff. And like, it was fine. And like, I'm sure they had successes and failures, but like...

I don't know. I was happy. Our family was fine. It all worked out. I just have so absorbed that as like the natural state of things. And I've realized over my life that like, oh, that's not normal for most people. So I'm so grateful to them for that. Ben? Among many others, I think lean into your strengths and passions. I'm thinking about when I was 17 and I was writing my college applications and I was going to be a marketing major. And my dad walked into my room at one point and he was like,

You built a computer. You like loaded Linux onto this old computer we found on the street. You've been like writing PHP and making websites. You clearly like computers. Maybe give it a shot. I know it's hard, but like you're kind of wired for it. And I don't think I necessarily wanted to believe him at the time because that was a much harder major than being a marketing major. But I'm grateful for it every day. All right, Ben, last one. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life? I think being likable goes a long way.

And it's not just likable, like a nice smile and making people feel at ease. It's being really good to people. Another way to put this is have the longest view in the room, which is something I've stolen from Sam Hinckley. And just treat everything like it's a 10-turn game, not a one-turn game. The number of times where I've done something that's not the most value-captury in the moment, but I've optimized for...

being a good human and building a long relationship with someone, you never know when these things are going to come back around, but they always sort of seem to. And so now I have a ironically selfish motivation to build great relationships with people. David? Oh, boy. Well, I take issue with part of the question, which is I don't wish I had known any of these things earlier in life, because I think life is a journey. You got to touch the stove, and that makes you who you are. I won't totally dodge the question. I will say a big thing that I've

really just learned in the past couple of years is that like there's, I feel for me, at least there's a direct correlation between, um,

happiness and success. It's not that success leads to happiness. It's that happiness leads to success. If you're happy, the odds are in your favor. And if you're unhappy, the odds are going to be not in your favor. I got to say, Ted, these questions are great. It's such a fun thing that you share these with your listeners and your guests asking us to reflect on these was super fun. Thank you, David, Ben. Thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks, Ted. Thanks, Ted.

Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com, where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one, and see you next time. An important disclaimer from Janice Henderson Group, PLC. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principle and fluctuation of value.