Reinventing Upfront and building LA (with Upfront partner Kevin Zhang)
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All right, well, Kevin, thank you for joining us. It's great to be on your show. I've been a big fan. We've met several times. I know you and David have hung out and it's one of these things where...

Every time I think I have a conversation with you, I walk away and think like, wow, I wish I could have more time and I wish I could have taken better notes. And here we are recording for posterity. So now we get that. That's our strategy with Acquired is then we have people on the show who we want to take notes from. Well, I feel very honored and it is an excellent strategy.

All right. Well, listeners, we're sitting here. I in Seattle, David in San Francisco and Kevin down in L.A. on Friday. What is today? The 22nd in the afternoon. We just saw a couple of more S1s drop with Zoom and Pinterest. So excited to see what plays out there. And then obviously with Lyft coming next week.

But in the meantime, before that insanity begins, we're going to have a fun conversation today with Kevin. And David, I'm going to kick it over to you. Who is Kevin? Kevin, for those who don't know, is a partner at Upfront Ventures, which is the premier and largest venture

venture firm based in LA. He's been there for many years and helped build it into, over the last several years, into really the kind of national force it's become today, which we'll talk much more about on the show. At Upfront, Kevin focuses on digital health and life sciences, along with gaming and digital media, which we've talked about a bunch. Maybe we will get into some of his gaming obsessions later in the show if we have time.

Hope so. But yeah, super honored to have Kevin on the show and thanks for joining us. Yeah, I'm super excited to be here. Yeah, I actually just fresh off the plane out of San Francisco from the Game Developers Conference. So fresh on my mind. Oh man, GDC was always one of my favorite conferences. All right, well, we'll get into gaming in a minute. I want to hear your Google Stadia impressions desperately. Yeah.

Happy to. Tell us about Upfront. So most LPs listening to the show have probably heard of you guys, know about Upfront, but they may not know that Upfront was started back in 1996 by Eve Sisterson, not as Upfront, but as Global Retail Partners. That's quite the ring to it. Yeah. How did that happen? Yeah.

What was the state of play back then? Yeah, very different. 96 was actually the year I moved to LA from Shanghai. Obviously, very different world back then. And

Yves, who's still with us and has really been a driving force over the last, I guess now, what, 22, 23 years. He effectively, and a couple of earlier partners as well, built out GRP because they had invested in some incredible retail innovation companies back in the day, places that we all still shop at like Costco and Starbucks and PF Chains, Jamba Juice, PetSmart, et cetera. And the idea to start

a venture fund, a brand new fund was it didn't seem like there was that much innovation still happening on the retail storefront site. And instead, there was this thing called the internet and it turns out maybe people will buy stuff online. So that was kind of the point of the fund and that was really the genesis of how it all started in the mid-90s.

Because that was what I was super curious about, whether you were looking to invest in traditional bricks and mortar up front. But it was always about the intersection of retail and the internet from the beginning. Exactly. And then, you know, obviously, then you realize if you want to buy something online, you need a website, right? You need payment methods. You want to market to people. You want to keep records of them. That's really sort of how we then pretty much transitioned into just a full stack of

software tech investment firm. And that's how we've been for the last 20 plus years. E-commerce was a very interesting entry point. We still do probably more than our fair share of what I like to call commerce-related investments. And that could actually be everything from a direct-to-consumer brand to a logistics platform to use your latest technology

fancy machine learning based customer segmentation tool or whatnot. But even coming full circle back to you and I were talking about a couple of weeks ago about the wing, which you guys just invested in, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah.

If you sort of really expand your mind a little bit about a retail thesis, that's a very broad thesis if you want to think about the whole value chain, because you got to think about marketing the products and processing the sale and allowing those people to do marketing analytics. And basically anything you can think of that's in the B2B realm would qualify under sort of this broadened brick and mortar retail theme. Exactly. Exactly. You guys were investing sort of in the run up to the first .com boom and then through the bust and...

you know, memories of Madrona, similar life cycle of, you know, up and down and Maritech where I interned my summer in business school, you know, same, there was a great winnowing of venture firms after the dot-com bust, but you guys along with, you know, several other like Madrona and Maritech of kind of the strongest folks sort of survive and come back out in the mid 2000s

And it was, it was right around then that your partner, Mark Schuster joined. You guys obviously had a great track record and, you know, investment performance before and since then, but he really started putting you guys on the map kind of nationally with, with his blogging, you know, how, how did he end up joining and how did that strategy kind of evolve for you guys?

And Mark's been an incredible mentor to me and really all of us at the firm. You know, back then it was, that was quite an unusual strategy, right? I mean, I think Fred Wilson had started not long before that, Brad Feld. And really he came from it from sort of an entrepreneur's angle. He had started two companies before that, both of which actually upfront had backed. The second company he sold to Salesforce. So it was in San Francisco and he was living there. And Eve,

Kind of convince them that, hey, you should maybe think about jumping to the other side. And maybe there's this dual office thing we can do where, you know, come join us and spend some time down in L.A., get to understand the investment business a bit. And then you can spearhead something up in San Francisco, obviously, where you've been and where all your network is, et cetera, et cetera. And turns out he was able to convince his wife to move down and then loved her so much that he just stayed.

Such a hard sell, Southern California. Such a hard sell, right? And then the blogging idea, he had been reading some of the stuff that the other partners I mentioned have been putting out. He's always been a very good writer and he's not the type that

you know, write something and then goes back over it, you know, 10 times and editing before sort of just putting it out, you know, sort of that kind of more direct, authentic voice worked quite well. And so one thing led to another and he just started writing prolifically. And that was his strategy, right? Much like,

The incredible things that you guys have done with this podcast series of getting to build out a network and get to know other people. And it was kind of an excuse for him to be able to talk with anyone from the entrepreneur side or the venture side or the LP side. And he still does it. And for LPs who are listening right now, who are sort of acquired LPs, that is, who are newer to sort of tech or VC or startups in the last five years or so, what

this has been copied 11 times over and pushed in every direction. And for every question you possibly have, there's 11 people's medium posts on their thoughts opining on the subject. This was just not the case. I mean, this was, VC was closed. Most old school VCs leveraged information asymmetry to their advantage. They were not writing about it. They were sort of, the tribal knowledge was a competitive advantage. And this is just, this was,

ludicrous to see, you know, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Mark Schuster, really like open sourcing and saying, here's what I think. And really winning over the trust of entrepreneurs and other VCs and would-be board members and everyone around the table to say, look, like I trust you because I really understand how you think rather than you trying to leverage this for your own gain. I think important to understand the context there.

I'm curious since you joined right around that time. I mean, what were the dynamics like internally as Mark, you know, I mean, very quickly, you know, as we've said, became like prolific, you know, writing almost every day, very long blog posts about like what was totally inside baseball at the time. And it did great things for the firm. And like I said, I think really did put you guys on the map. But what was it? Were people nervous internally or like, you know, did you guys realize the power?

Yeah, I joined in 2012. So at that point, he already had a pretty decent following, you know, because I worked at a startup before that. And when I was

Thinking about doing more in the startup land and potentially looking at something on the venture side, I had already come across his blog and found it super useful. And I think I obviously wasn't alone. A lot of other folks sort of liked his more direct style and him shedding some lights on the industry. It was obviously an experiment, but very quickly the firm realized that

What do we have to hide anyway? At the end of the day, if we're going into entrepreneurs and trying to get a meaningful stake in their company and telling them that we're aligned with them, if they have no idea how the actual venture business works and how we all make money and how we get paid and what motivates us and our own careers and how does it work inside a firm, it's only fair that they know that so they can pick the right partners for themselves. Yeah.

The outcome of all that is reflected in the new name that you guys chose shortly after you joined. But I want to make sure we ask a little bit later in the firm lifecycle, you guys brought on Chameleon Air as an entrepreneur in residence. How awesome was that? What was it like to work with him? Yeah, it was kind of amazing. He started showing up to the office and

quite a bit. Was this before he was in EIR? Yeah, because he's known Mark for many years and people who know him knows that he's been angel investing for a few years before that. It was just very interesting in the startup community. And so you would see him taking meetings in the office and then next thing you knew, he and his partner was going to start a company and we were going to try to help them best we can. And it was the type of company that served what he really understood, which is

you know, sort of how complex and how voluminous the interactions can be between celebrities and fans and all his, you know, sort of initial pilot customers, right, would be effectively in Hollywood. And so, you know, we just felt like we've gotten to know you over the years. Super excited that you're finally ready to jump into the company building phase. And if we can be helpful, come sit at our office. You can

sitting on pitch meetings. You can see what other people are building. You can get some insights on companies at different stages and how they hire. He really leveraged that. He and his partners were actually in the office every week. On top of, he was still doing other stuff. He was obviously still investing. He gets requests all the time to go do events and speak somewhere or be part of a show, etc. So

Kudos to him for sort of, now I'm ready to start a company. I'm just going to do it and spend all my time on it. What ended up happening to that company? Still around. They raised a seed round a year and a half ago, a year ago. Oh, nice. What's it called? Yeah. The original holding name for the company was X-Empire.

And then as he built out the product and got a lot more customer feedback, he was trying to obviously was trying to pick a name that resonated with his audience. And it's called Combos, C-O-N-V-O-Z. Yeah, the kind of stuff that, you know, we would have entrepreneurs in residence at Madrona in Seattle. Very, very, very different. Super, super cool. And the kind of stuff that happens, you know, in L.A., not maybe in San Francisco, it can happen, but not in Seattle.

slightly before that but but also i mean i remember when chameleon air you know joined you guys this was a big thing that you know mark wrote about that you guys talked about as part of the summit too in uh the middle of 2013 you made a bunch of big announcements all at once you closed fun for which is uh

Huge achievement. I remember at Madrona, Fund 4 was like, it's the kind of point in a venture firm's life cycle where you can raise... Fund 1 that we just did at Wave is you sell a dream. Fund 2 is like, okay, are you doing kind of what you said you'd do?

And then fund three, but especially fund four is like you have to actually be showing real performance from the early funds. So it's kind of a huge milestone to get to that point. You guys moved offices from Century City to Santa Monica. And then the biggest thing

You changed your name to Upfront from the old GRP. That must have just been an insane amount of work for the year or two before that leading up to that. How did it all come together? I joined Q4 2012. I think it was October or September or something like that. And we changed our name, like you said, mid-2013. It was...

Well, first of all, I guess in some ways, lucky because I would have been terrible at this. I did not directly work on the brand change. We went through a lot of different agencies and ultimately picked a great one to help us with that. And really my colleague at the time, Jordan Hassan, who now is VP of strategy at one of our portfolio companies, Appeal,

So he kind of took on that assignment and worked a lot with the partners to figure out, you know, really every aspect of a rebrand, right? And that's obviously the name, that's our branding, our website, our messaging to the external market, our messaging obviously before that to our own LPs, to our portfolio companies, et cetera. It was a lot of work. That's pretty much all he did for those companies.

for those eight months. - Do you remember what the impetus of it was? What started the tornado of that, of shifting office, changing name, raising a new fund? What was the first of the dominoes that then said, "You know what, actually, we need to be different in all these ways." - Yeah, I mean, all of it is to get us closer to entrepreneurs, right? And I think our brand at the time still is WYSIWYG, right? What you see is what you get. Being in Century City, that's literally the land of bankers, lawyers, and Hollywood agents.

Not the land of startups. And so that was why, hey, we should move to Santa Monica, really. Santa Monica, the whole West Side at the time was sort of the epicenter for all things startups in LA. And now it still is a huge, dense and clustered area. And obviously, it's now expanded beyond that. But that was really important. The name itself, I mean, you ask people what GRP means or really any three words.

letter acronyms. It's just not as memorable. I wouldn't know anything about that. And you kind of like lose out on that opportunity to tell, you know, tell a narrative about yourself, right? Like I'm sure we would tell all of our portfolio companies, you know, pick a name that people understand,

kind of what you're trying to do the problem you're trying to solve who you're trying to sell to or at least one aspect of it right versus like if we had portfolio companies that had acronyms i think everyone would be like please hire a head of marketing um that was a part of it um and then and then lastly actually it's also you know we have been in la the whole time and really about sort of six and a half years ago around this time um that was an la was i would argue sort of

getting attention again. Obviously through the dot-com boom, there were actually quite a few VCs down here. There were quite a lot of companies that got built and had good exits. And then with the dot-com boom, that wave quieted a bit. And then this was really the time where people felt like,

It seems like people are building more and more companies again in Southern California. It seems like people are starting to move down here. Snapchat has obviously just become like a global phenomenon. Yeah, exactly. And so along those lines, you know, if we're, if we are to be a firm to be associated with LA and we want to, you know, push, you know, all of LA, yeah, we should have a name, right? And this is a chance for us to tell that story in a fresh way. So, so all

So all of those factors together made it, you know, I think if you ask any marketer, it would have been like, yes, this would have been the perfect time to rebrand. We dove into it and it was a lot of work, but it paid off. Yeah. So I was going to ask you about this. So one thing that I've heard that's through the grapevine and, and not, not from anyone at upfront. So I wanted to ask you directly was that the name in part, at least comes from the upfronts that happen when TV shows show an early peak to advertisers sort of before the world gets a look and,

They get to see it before anybody else. This person was telling me that, you know, it's very much like that, that upfront sort of see stuff first, both they see companies before they really sort of go out to pitch other people, but also they sort of like see what's coming before the rest of folks. Is that at all true or did you pick it for completely different reasons?

That's a small part of it. I mean, what we wanted in the name was obviously one, that it rolled off the tongue and it's something that's easy to remember. Two, we wanted it to stand for something that's related to our values. And three, we wanted to have at least some sort of connection to LA, right? And it's sort of what you pointed to as kind of that third part. Like, for example, one of the other names that we were

That sort of made it all the way towards the end, I think, if I remember correctly, was Dogtown Ventures. That's actually the sort of colloquium name for Venice. But again, if you do something that's just purely geographical, then again, people might have the misconception of all you ever do is...

that geo. And obviously, you know, we invest nationally and have been since we started. But really, the more important piece is, you know, that sort of value component, right? And then again, it's to what we discussed earlier in terms of

How do we be more transparent with our entrepreneurs? How do we show them that this is a firm where you should hold us accountable for that because it's in our name? And if we're not being upfront with you, then yeah, we're not going to do very well as a firm. Yeah.

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I remember reading it at the time, but in preparing for chatting with you,

with you today, we, uh, I went back and, um, read Mark's of course, cause Mark like basically live blogged this whole thing. And, uh, I read his, his post announcing all, all, all of the announcements from, from 2013, you know, the new fund, the move and the, the rebranding. And he talked in it

about the conversations with your guys' LPs throughout all this. It sounded like it mostly went well, but he said there was one LP in particular that was like, you guys are changing way too much all at once. This is crazy. What are you doing? I'm surprised to hear it was only one knowing LPs, not acquired LPs, of course, but limited partners in the venture ecosystem. I

by and large, tend to be fairly conservative, very large institutional investors. I mean, it makes sense. They're large pools of capital, like university endowments and the like are first and foremost in the capital preservation business. And then venture is the...

high-risk, high-return portion of their portfolio. But by nature, they tend to be much more risk averse than VCs. It was extreme for a firm to change so many things all at once. How did you guys think about, were you nervous about how the conversations were going to play out with LPs? We love our LPs. And we obviously talked to them and discussed them about all these changes. And they were pretty much all on board. And I think fundamentally, it comes down to

I think what LPs are most sensitive to is, are you changing things for the right reasons? And two, how are these changes going to affect

your actual investment strategy and performance. And so I think that's an important part. All the things I just talked about earlier about why we wanted to be more transparent and put our brand out there and talk about LA and all those things, that's obviously all brand positive and it helps hopefully bring entrepreneurs closer to us. The actual investment strategy part

that never changed, right? Like from the beginning, we were lead oriented early stage investors. We weren't telling them that, you know, was this, was these changes? We're now going to try to dabble in other areas. We're going to,

bring on a lot more people and then trying to do things differently, right? I mean, we told them we wanted to expand the team, but also we expanded the dollar amounts of the fund correspondingly. So ultimately, if you look at per partner dollars, it basically hasn't changed. And it means fundamentally our strategy to be early and lead and take board seats, like that never changed. And so I think that...

That obviously was a very important constant and a strategy that RLPs believed in and continue to believe in. And to dive into that a little bit more specifically, what is that dollar amount per partner? What is the total fund size? And what does that end up looking like in terms of number of companies that each partner leads per year? Yeah, so right now we're on fund six. It's $400 million.

It was raised almost a year and a half, or we started deploying it almost a year and a half ago. You know, 400 divided by six, and we end up doing about 35 investments, maybe up to 40 per fund. And so if you run the math, then it's effectively each partner is making $1,000

two to three investments a year. Right. And I think, you know, when you're going in early and leading with two to three investments a year, you end up in a position where you're not, you know, one, you have good ownership, you know, your companies or most of your companies. And two, you also don't end up with, you know, 15 board seats, right. Or 12 board seats, but five seat deals and two, you know, later stage deals. Right. And, and kind of running around with your head cut off, you know, our whole strategy and really sort of how much reserve, right. I mean,

call it roughly two-thirds that we reserve for follow-ons. It's all meant to, you know, for us to be able to continue to work with, you know, these 35, 40 companies through good times and bad and really be able to spend enough time with them. That's, you know, from the dollar side strategy. And then from the people side as well, it's all about how do you get

additional leverage to the investment team. And part of that was expanding our junior investment team. Before I joined, we had historically had typically one to two associates on the team. And when you have only one to two, obviously more of their time is locked up in working on transactions and deal support and things like that. Then we expanded the program and started thinking about

grooming from within as well and hence you know now we typically have three to four at any point in time right and now we have principals as well and then on the other end of the spectrum you know we wanted to add more leadership uh in various functional roles that are obviously critical to building startup companies and that's you know sort of how we over the last six years brought on our coo uh how we brought on our you know amazing head of marketing who's done it at

large companies, startups, and agencies. Brought on our head of talent most recently, who has done talent and recruiting at Hulu from a few hundred people to thousands. And then left was Jason to join to start Vessel through the acquisition. That's why we have a head of platform who then hired an engineer because we're building up

internally for us to be more efficient, right? So all of those was, you know, it's obviously you're growing the asset center management, but at the same time, we're ramping up our ability to use that capital and support our companies in a better way. This is a total sweeping trend, I think, in the sort of Series A, especially world, where

VCs are broadening out their platforms is basically this trade where partners are willing to be more generous with management fees of taking on significant operations and obviously probably carry as well, but really building out something that if you're a startup you start to think about like, okay, this has a higher burn rate, but

is that higher burn rate worth it? You know, are we getting a lot of leverage on spending this money to be able to improve in all these ways? Kevin, you gave a few examples there, but you know, firms today are not five people who are making decisions in a room. And I think you guys are kind of pioneering this too. There's just so many different jobs to be done in so many different ways that at a firm like Upfront can really help entrepreneurs. Exactly.

Kevin, you said two to three deals per year per partner. And it's not exactly that. It's going to be less sometimes, more sometimes. But I think it's really important to think about that because that's not an obvious thing when you see a fund size or a number of partners. And David, you're sort of similar in that one to two deals per year. If you're building a relationship with a venture capitalist...

know that they're only writing a big check and leading a deal a handful of times a year. That's important to sort of understand in an expectation setting when you're going out to raise a round. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I always tell entrepreneurs that, you know, you're not only competing within companies in your space when it comes to getting the attention and interest of investors, but really you're competing against every other way they can spend time in every other industry with companies

every other company that's your stage earlier than you after you, right? Like it's,

Yeah, it's not easy. Before we get into talking about the LA ecosystem and how it has evolved over the last, you know, well, since this time, perhaps I think the like most extreme and yet incredibly coolest thing that you guys have done as part of this rebranding and big transition is the summit, the upfront summit, like for listeners who aren't familiar with this. So

you guys up front puts on the upfront summit every year, which is a major conference. Well, Kevin can talk about it, but it started as, you know, your annual meeting. So venture firms, you know, from, um,

I assume PSL does this with the fund now. We're about to have our first one at Wave in June. You're required in your legal agreements with your LPs to have annual meetings where you bring all your investors together and you update them on the performance of the fund and the goings on at the firm and whatnot. And usually these things are terribly, terribly boring for all involved. But upfront, you guys have completely transformed it and made it like

So awesome. So tell us a little bit about how all that came together. You hit one of the key points, which is annual meetings are not exactly the most exciting thing in the world. And, you know, obviously, if you're an LP and you've been at it for a while and you have a whole portfolio of managers and you go into these things.

you know, every month, really the format starts to look awfully similar across the board. And they are incredibly boring. I still remember the first one we did was pretty traditional. It was at, I think everyone fit into a hotel ballroom. And then I think we all had dinner across the street. And we had a

Some of our portfolio companies obviously talk about what they've done, try to give the LPs sort of more direct view and hear it from the mouse on the horse. We had some, I think, if I remember correctly, other entrepreneurs that were not in the portfolio, but they've been part of the LA ecosystem for a long time and

talk a little bit about their views and how things have been changing. But really the goal was twofold, right? One, obviously being able to build more of a relationship with our LPs. And then two, you know, how do we talk about LA in a better way? Right. And then we really felt, you know, things were changing rapidly. A lot more companies were going to be started in Los Angeles. It was still at the time a geo that was relatively underlooked. You know, I would say even by VCs and then sort of by extension, you know,

The LPs largely, I would argue, think, oh, we've got all the coverage we need because look at how close LA is to San Francisco. There are plenty of VCs that we've already backed and they have some exposure to LA and why do we need to go to LA to learn more about LA? And we wanted to change that. Really, the only way you can do that is

not, you know, talk to the LP in their office, right? And do it on a slide deck of like, look at these great logos in LA, right? Or look at this chart that's going up into the right. It's to actually get them in front of, you know, the people who are making all the changes in town, right? And that's both, obviously, mostly entrepreneurs and also entrepreneurs

all the venture investors, the corporates in town, et cetera. So that became kind of a driving motivation for us. And we started thinking about, well, does our annual meeting have to be only open to our own LPs? Like we want more LPs to come here.

Why don't we open it to prospective LPs? If we're going to have some people from the community come and speak, why don't we have it open to more community members or more entrepreneurs, other VCs here as well, right? And if we're going to do that, I mean, ultimately we want money from elsewhere too, right? Like we don't want to be the only fund or we don't want this room to be the only people investing in Los Angeles. Why wouldn't we want, you know, our peers in the Bay Area or New York or Boston, et cetera, to come down and see what's going on in LA firsthand as well, right? So that's kind of,

how we started to build out our upfront summit. And really over the years, it became sort of, you know, from a single day event to two day and then now at three, pretty much a three day event. And the way we structure it is,

We have the first half day that's only for LPs, both our own and prospective LPs. And actually the one that we just had in January, there were, I think, 200 or a little over 200 LPs coming from all over the country and some from international as well. And that's crazy. I mean, like a typical venture firm would have, when I think about the number of institutional LPs...

you know, at wave, we have a handful at Madrona. We had, I don't know, maybe 15 or 20, like to have 200, like that's incredible. Yeah. And it keeps growing every year. It turns out there are a lot of LPs. It's funny. That's like the merging these two trends. So one is like the, the sort of platform concept you were talking about earlier, where like, it's more than just picking startups. It's really sort of like building this broader ecosystem and like what better way to, um,

sort of spend money and resources than by making yourself the center of a thesis, which is invest in Los Angeles and you guys bring everybody together to see what LA has to offer. But it's also this thing that David and I have been talking about over and over again. It keeps coming up that to do something great, you have to take a risk and you have to be out on a limb and you have to plant your flag in the ground and say, I'm over here, even though maybe nobody else is over there yet. You kind of have to like

be willing to start a movement and be willing to be wrong and be willing to have some egg on your face. And like you did something nobody else was doing and has turned into this enormous success. And of course, we have survivorship bias where like had you guys started this upfront summit and like it turned into this thing that didn't work at all. And we probably wouldn't be talking about it now, but

There's a lesson to be taken here regardless of what you're doing, whether it's venture or company or some creative pursuit in your own life that's like, go do something different and see if you can get people to follow you. Exactly. I think it's incredibly important

to have conviction and then to take risk on that conviction. It'll take time for other people to come around to it, but you got to be early to it in order to have any kind of differentiation. Having all of those LPs there means that all the VCs want to be there too, obviously. The LPs want to catch up with themselves. They want to, hey, if we're going to come see this one fund,

We might as well see all the other funds who are locally in town. And hey, there's all the other funds that we are part of as well that are coming from San Francisco or New York or elsewhere in the country or even Europe. And then lastly, obviously, how do we bring all the LA entrepreneurs to our event? That was something against like, look, you will now have access, obviously not to us, but not just to us, but also to us.

all of the other amazing investors that are in town, right? And they're not in town for half a day where they might, you know, have only one window to meet with you and then they're off meeting somewhere else and then taking a, you know, flight back at night. It's, I mean, they're here, locked down, right? For like three days. And then of course, at the same time, you know, it's, it becomes a great platform to attract later stage companies as well. And because, you know, again, there are funds of all sizes. So really there's capital, you know,

And range of all sizes as well, right? So then that becomes a very sort of authentic and natural way for some of the younger and earlier stage entrepreneurs to be able to meet with, you know, folks who are a few stages ahead of them. And sort of everyone, again, is concentrated in this place together for a couple days. And it's just a great way to build a lot of very organic networks.

Before we move on to talk more broadly about LA, it'd be great to illustrate for folks who are sort of first learning about the summit now and didn't see all the stuff on Twitter, you know, the last few years, every time it's happening. Give us some of the craziest highlights of things you would not expect to be at an annual meeting that has happened at an upfront summit. Yeah, well, that's a long list, actually. We built our own stage.

We wanted, you know, something that actually, you know, you can have sort of the panels and keynotes on stage, you know, at the right size. But at the same time, you had separate breakout rooms for, you know, folks to convene in a network and talk about other topics. Building our own stages also means that, you know, we have a lot less constraints on, you

what we can do on stage. I think this year, probably the first time you saw VC, in this case, Mark, ride onto stage in a bird scooter. We brought on this year the entire Angel City Choir, which is 50, 60 people on stage, drummers and musicians coming down the aisles, something that's quite hard to get an existing venue to agree to let you do. We actually turned the entire outside part of the venue, which is this giant ranch,

kind of built out a carnival theme. So we had, you know, games and food trucks and attractions and, you know, obviously that's fun and all, but the other point being that, you know, again, this opens up sort of the space constraints and a lot more people to come, right? Like, look, we can't,

have thousands of people there, then you kind of lose that serendipity. But throwing a party at night and opening it up more, you know, allows you to invite a lot more folks to come out, you know, at night, right? And again, that was something that we had figured out over the years as a strategy to deal with the, obviously, you always have the struggle of who

who to invite and how many to invite from each firm. And what if you want to bring someone extra and, Oh, I got to swap someone out and, Oh my God, we forgot someone, et cetera. Um,

So, yeah. It makes sense. Going big and doing something that has a tremendous amount of creativity and entertainment is a very signature LA thing to do, especially relative to... David was making jokes about Seattle earlier that you see very different types of companies often incubated up here, B2B, SaaS, and cloud, and AI, and all that stuff. So let's talk a little bit about LA. And before jumping into... We've got a great set of questions here. There was one thing we talked about earlier, and I have to ask...

With the rise of Snapchat and then that became Snap, how much did that change things? Like how sort of binary was that for the startup ecosystem and what changed as a result of that blowing up?

So actually, before I answer that, can I add one more thing on our summit? Please. So one thing we keep trying to challenge ourselves with is let's not make the upfront summit just another tech summit. At the end of the day, there are more than enough of them out there. And I'm sure we all go to way too many and try to pare back. And, you know, what's really a way, you know, to get people to come and spend not just time

day, but multiple days, right? And hence, if you look at our speaker list and our attendee list, it's not just the tech luminary CEOs who just sold their company or sold their company or, you know, longtime VC who's been doing it across multiple funds and firms. And you also see a lot of folks that are very relevant to the discussions, you know, in this country, right? At that moment, right? Everything from

politics, to entertainment, to larger societal issues around everything from healthcare to education, to the diversity challenges that obviously we've seen across pretty much every industry. And so we try to have a lot more folks come in from those areas and spread their message as well. And I think that makes it a lot more interesting. And so just as a quick example, I mean, this year we had

the CEO of Time's Upcome, and speak with us, obviously, about all the incredible work that they've done. We had Duff McKagan from Guns N' Roses, Seattle shout out, who, you know, on the surface, you might be like, why is Duff McKagan here? But on the other hand, I mean, if you look at what that band has done over the years, it really, a lot of the struggles and the successes they've had parallel sort of the ups and downs of an entrepreneur. Yeah.

Just hearing that story from a slightly different lens, from someone that's not just directly doing what you're doing, I think sometimes can be more powerful. We had Adam Schiff come out and speak slash not speak about obviously what he's seen. And that's ongoing with all the investigations in the government. And these are all something that's slightly outside of what you would typically see at a technology summit. And we think that really helps in getting people to come as well as understanding

sort of increasing dialogue on some very important issues that, you know, ultimately affects all of us. Cannot underscore how different this is from your typical VC. You're just catching a glimpse of what is in David's eye for the Wave Summit this year.

It's not going to be a summit yet. We need to crawl before we walk here and let alone run like you guys. Oh, actually now it's back to the Snap thing. Sorry. Oh yeah, perfect transition to LA. Having anchor companies locally that grow up here and continue to thrive and spin off talent, that's critical to any ecosystem. Snap has obviously been a tremendous...

anchor for Los Angeles, you know, one of the most recent anchors over the last few years. And, and, you know, I think people kind of forget that Snap is not just a mobile company or,

media company, right? I mean, like they're a full stack company that has engineering talent, you know, from backend to front end to hardware, right? They have offices around the world. They've bought companies, you know, from all over the world. It's the type of company that was built and you sort of always want a beginning with very high ambitions and wanting to build a long lasting independent company. And those are the kinds of ones that obviously over time, you

not only trains talent as well as spins off talent to start new companies and create sort of that second time, third time entrepreneur, right? As well as, you know, it creates that more voluminous angel capital and angel investors to sort of help the ecosystem at the earlier stages. Snap in particular, and there are other companies like that as well here in town, obviously like SpaceX, that really has done an incredible job

drawing talent from across the country and really across the globe to come to Los Angeles. I probably overhype them sort of specifically. I think you're right. There's more anchor tenants and has been many anchor tenants long before.

Right. Yeah. I mean, right. Games is down here. They have 3,000 people. I think in LA, they have almost 2,000 people and they have over 3,000 people globally. Tinder, of course, was, you know, still in West Hollywood. And yeah, there's been, there's a lot of companies here now that's, that's been added and been successful. And, you know, people forget LA is obviously very large. You go down to Orange County, Orange County, right? Questionable whether that's LA or not, but, you know, it's close enough where, you know, people don't remember that in Orange County, there has been

you know, some of the most successful gaming companies, right? Like Activision, like Blizzard, right? Or that, you know, hey, it turns out there is an incredible cybersecurity talent base down there, right? With companies like Silance or CrowdStrike. A lot of defense, right? People forget, you know, why is SpaceX here, right?

The existing, the aerospace industry has always been strong in Los Angeles, right? Like you, if you fly into LAX, you'll see, right? Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, right? All those tenants, you go up to Pasadena, obviously that's where JPL is. You go up into the Valley, Amgen is created there, right? There's,

actually more life scientists in Los Angeles than I think anywhere else in the country. Again, this is greater LA and that's obviously how we think about it. And I think it really allows for the training of a very diverse set of talent and mobility of that talent. So with this new generation of anchors, with companies like Snap, what I would argue started off as like, hey, you should move down to LA and join this hot company and

hey, at least come try it for a couple of years. And if things don't work out, you can always go back to the Bay Area or go back to New York or wherever. That very quickly turned into

oh, it's really nice here, it turns out. LA does kind of win on lifestyle and just sort of a more inclusive and diverse place to live. And these people then, like I was saying earlier, then obviously go on to find their next jobs and create their next companies and make their next investments and ends up having more of a local flavor. And then that's what we want to encourage.

I wanted to get your take on what are the superpowers of the LA ecosystem, so sort of sectors, talent, concentrations, things like that. There's a way to answer this question that's like, well, you know, people mischaracterize this and we actually have strength in a lot of areas. But like if you had to generalize, what things tend not to thrive in LA and tend to maybe be something that you should look elsewhere for? LA has the benefit of a very large and diverse population. And

and a lot of fresh graduates. In fact, it has more engineering graduates every year than we also in the country. And that's really just a base of talent that the question is, how do you hold on to them, right? And how do you encourage them to continue to stay here and build companies? So when you combine that raw talent then with entrepreneurs, obviously, especially in certain areas of strains, that's how you start to build out little ecosystems here and there. And then ultimately, when you have enough of them, you get into sort of this

unstoppable force, right? So obviously Hollywood is in LA. I actually always like to say that

Hollywood is not the biggest industry in L.A., actually. It does not sort of dominate the L.A. landscape as much as, for example, financial service. I think actually the biggest industry in L.A. is health care, if I remember correctly. There are actually an incredible number of very large health care systems that are here. And obviously they employ a lot of people. And then also the aerospace industry, obviously less people, but higher dollar values.

And that has continued to be here as well. What you get with Hollywood is obviously storytelling and just sort of generations of not only, of course, creative people who get trained and who want to come here to build their careers, but really if you think about

you know, sort of the media industry, a lot of it is actually is about taking on risk, right? And trying to get someone, right? Get a producer to buy into your little script and get someone to believe in you. And then they introduce you to the next person. And, and, oh my God, you finally have enough capital to start,

putting together a reel and get some of your initial actors and actresses sign up and then it balloons from there and wow, overnight success and also then you are the one, right? Obviously, I'm being a little facetious here, but there's a lot of entrepreneurial struggles to try to get content produced. Obviously, sort of how that ultimately happens, how that distributes

very different from technology startups, but a lot of that same risk-taking and entrepreneurial spirit is there and has always been a part of this city. Another, I think, very important thing to think about is you just have a very large and diverse population as your customers, right? And I think that is a reason why you look at a lot of... Which is definitely different from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Exactly. And, you know, of course, New York is enormous as well, a lot of people there. But

New York is, I would argue, you know, like you have Manhattan and you have areas outside of Manhattan. Right. And they're actually quite distinct and quite different versus here in Los Angeles. I really think of L.A. as 20 cities rolled into one. Hence, you see a lot of, for example, consumer tech companies and services or companies that basically directly face consumers if they didn't open their first store.

office or if they didn't launch in Los Angeles, usually that is the second one, right? And so you take Uber as an example. I mean, Uber LA was effectively where they experimented with most of their new services that they rolled out with, right? Again, the idea being that, hey, if you can make it work in LA, it has 20 microcosms going into one, that probably work elsewhere in the country, right?

I mean, I remember in the early days of Uber, LA being the first place I really used it. Because it was so game-changing for living and being in LA. Oh my God, to drive everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Actually, as a small side, Uber and Lyfts are the world. And nowadays, a lot of the micromobility players like Bird, their repercussions are felt probably more strongly in LA than anywhere else in this country. Like, for example, I don't own a car.

or I actually just Uber and Lyft it wherever we were, or I bird to the train to go to downtown. Right. And that saves me, you know, that takes me an hour, not two hours. Right. Um, my wife, Jenny did her PhD at UCLA and like, that was 2010 till, well, she finished in 2016, but anyway, in 2010 to 2014, that was unfathomable. Like to not have a car in LA, like you'd be nuts. Yeah, exactly. And, uh,

rapidly changing. Well, Kevin, I want to pin you down on that other question too. What is LA not good at? One of the things that is more challenging, especially as a company scale, right, is having the right go-to-market talent. And if you especially look at areas like enterprise SaaS, they're just such a high concentration of those companies in Silicon Valley. That is where all of your, you

enterprise sales, marketing, go-to-market, customer success, talent is. And some of that you can try to replicate from other industries. And LA has pretty much every major industry in town with meaningful Fortune 500 representation. But those are exactly the kind of things that come with experience and actual Rolodex built up over 10 plus years that will get better in LA and elsewhere, in other ecosystems as well as you continue to see more diverse companies being built here.

And again, kind of like Snap, attracting the talent from elsewhere so that you have more of that base here as well.

Before we leave LA, one last question is, you know, wave. I mean, we're seeing lots of people moving to LA either to start companies or join companies, you know, from, from Silicon Valley, from Seattle, from New York, from elsewhere, somebody shows up, you know, they're, you know, a great PM engineer who would have you from, uh, say Silicon Valley and they show up in LA. What's the best way to, you know, integrate into the ecosystem down there?

We love meeting other people who are coming to LA. In fact, we end up actually with a lot of, I'm thinking about coming to LA and I wonder who I should call and let's talk to some entrepreneurs there. Let's talk to some people who've worked there. Let's just talk to a couple of local VCs. And so we're always super happy to jump on a phone and get to know folks who want to come to LA and sort of give you our view on the ecosystem, how it's evolved and the good and the bad, right? And everything from career to actually trying to build a life here in Texas.

So always happy to do that. Two, you know, I think if you're actually at a point where you're more serious about moving here and you're actually visiting, I guarantee you probably if you're visiting pretty much every week, we're throwing some sort of event at our office and we have a pretty sizable roof deck so we can fit, you know, 100 plus people. And really, we just try to have as many community oriented events, whether it's

to connect local entrepreneurs, to have outsiders have at a glance sort of what the local ecosystem of talent looks like, to bring experts, talk about areas that they excel at and to spread some of that knowledge to local talent. We're always doing something. So reach out to us. You'll probably end up

meeting us and meeting a bunch of other folks as well. And, you know, kill two birds with one stone. It's always challenging, right? Trying to balance your time as a VC and sort of figuring out where you should be spending time meeting with people. And so one of the things that we actually did was, you know, was the hiring of Megan, our head of talent. She has now sort of done an incredible job with

pretty organizing a lot of the, what you sort of just described as folks that are inquiring and thinking about moving down here. And she has resources that, you know, that she's built up that she can share very easily. She can do that call with you as well. If you're not already getting directly to one of us, she will sort of very often funnel that then to the right person, right? And that right person could be me. It could be one of my partners. It could be one of our principals, or it could be, you know, directly, Hey, you need to talk to

a VP of Inch over at Snap because that's kind of the type of company you're thinking about, right? Hit us up, leverage us, you know, we're more than happy to help. All right, so I want to move on to, we have a little section here called investing in opinions. And I know we didn't give you a ton of time to think about this, sending the outline over beforehand, but curious to get your thoughts

what's something that you believe right now that you think is either sort of counterintuitive that it sort of dawned on you at one point and you're like, oh, you know, that's not something that, you know, most people are thinking about or continuing even further in that direction, contrarian. Everybody's believing something over here and Kevin's dancing on a different hill over there. Since gaming is fresh on my mind, I just made a new investment that got announced on Monday and also obviously the game developer conference just happened and

Tons of things going on there. Can you talk about the investment? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I just made a new investment. Actually, Seattle company. It's half Seattle and half LA. And then the LA talent is actually moving up Seattle. It's a company called Straight Bombay. They're a gaming company trying to build much more cooperative and social games. And both of them are veterans of the industry. I mean, like...

Chet was a decade plus veteran at Valve and both on the game design side, but as well. Chet Prevel, he's awesome. Yeah, he's amazing, right? And obviously then he also went on to just be one of the biggest voices in

with developers in gaming because he took on all that evangelism work with the arrival of virtual reality. And he teamed up with Kimberly Voll, who originally from Vancouver, has been down in LA the last few years working at Riot Games. And I think really what's super special about her is

She's actually a professor in computer science. She specifically focuses on artificial intelligence systems within games and focuses on, you know, how do you create more cooperative and sort of friendly and team-based player interactions. And so really when she was hired into Valve almost four years ago, a lot of it was to, hey, look,

League of Legends is a billion dollar plus game, super successful, tons of people play it, but it's been many years and the player community itself has become quite unfriendly to new players. How do you actually build product to change what rewards and punishes people in the game so that you can foster a healthier community? And so she actually built up that entire player behavior system team

then that you know sort of spread across all the games that they were working on um looked at a lot of internal data built out some machine learning systems etc so she's she's going to be spending a lot of time you know working on all the ai back-end systems um so anyway super exciting to have back those two um and yeah it wired on friday and announced on monday so nice that was perfect time for recruiting at gdc i bet i bet all right so what's your contrarian bet there

I think especially investors in Silicon Valley and, or really just maybe investors outside of Los Angeles and investors outside New York as well, to a certain degree, have historically viewed content businesses as less scalable, less venture business, hits driven, you know,

And I have a bit of a different view on that, I think, especially with games. I think of them actually no different than any other consumer tech business. And in fact, I think more positively about them than most other consumer tech businesses other than maybe social networks. And again, the reason being that I think what's critical is do you have a product and a team and a culture that

sort of your job and your drive is to continue to iterate on that product with user feedback in mind. Games are actually naturally designed where you just have to do that period, right? Games don't get made and just stay static. I mean, the most popular games in the world have been popular for like 10 plus years, right? Like,

Or more. I mean, like, I think World of Warcraft just passed like 16 years or something, right? League of Legends, we just mentioned, you know, that's been, what, year 10 or 11 now? CSGO, Counter-Strike, like all those, even, you know, more recent games like Candy Crush. I mean, it's still not that recent. Other than like Fortnite and Apex Legends, like a lot of these games have been around for a while.

For a long time. And that's because games really are actually a live product, a live service. And you live or die by how much you continue to iterate and experiment on that. And I think, so along those lines, it's not,

Hey, you're going to invest in a game company to get one shot, right? No, like every week they're putting on the build and trying something new. That level of cadence, you know, if you can assess the team correctly, right? And, you know, if they're not just trying to build something that's similar to most other games on the market, I think that's a super exciting area to be investing in. And that's really one of the driving reasons why I just invested in Chad and Kimberly's companies.

I think one way to think about it is that game companies, especially like how you're describing them, can be more like software companies. So there's sort of more of an investment thesis you could have around their iteratively solving this problem based on feedback. I really like it from the other direction too. That is, look, a lot of consumer experience companies that consumer social or consumer entertainment are like game companies anyway, where they do have to create that magical moment. And even though it's not maybe technologically

a game, it has a lot of the same characteristics anyway. And if people are comfortable investing in consumer, it's not a hard leap to make that say, look, like games have a lot of those same sort of difficult to find the magic characteristics, but potentially even more upside once you do find that magic.

Exactly. I think game companies are, again, you have a lot more ways to monetize a game. And in fact, most new user engagement tactics, monetization strategies, a lot of those are pioneered in the gaming industry. You look at the most successful game companies online.

they are incredibly profitable, right? I mean, like what? Supercell is still three, four hundred, a few hundred people, right? And they do billions in revenues a year, right? And I mean, I kind of challenge you to find really any other consumer product that has anywhere near that level. In fact, that should probably beat out most enterprise products as well. And again, I think that's something that, again, people see it numerically, right? They see some of the most successful companies, but they have a lot of

almost instinctual fear of like, but how do you get there? And isn't it only like one out of a thousand, right? And they're like, what? Look, venture is a history of a business, right? So none of these things are easy. Pot meet kettle. Yeah. You know, if you look across...

not all venture firms, but a lot of really, really good venture firms, you know, you guys included understand this about the games industry, that it is a very viable venture investable category. But if you look at some of the top returners in some really great funds, like I'm thinking about Excel, I believe, and our friends at Excel can, can correct us if we're wrong, but I believe the top two returns,

returning companies in the history of Excel. Number one is Facebook and I believe number two is Supercell, which is pretty incredible and like nobody thinks about that. Yeah, exactly.

Kevin's like, I think about it. And I think what's also changed a little bit now is gaming companies, much like any other type of tech companies, obviously goes through cycles as well. And a lot of those cycles are driven by changes in technology. So Supercell and King, they became such successful companies partially because they were built in a new era of distribution. Mobile became...

became a thing. Before that, you know, all games were on PC and console. Zynga and Facebook. Zynga and Facebook, right? You know, before, retail box game days, right? Activision and EA, right? Or the first generation of online game stores, right? That was Valve, right? With Steam. Now, again, we're kind of facing this to your earlier comment about Google Stadia. You know, look, whether ultimately it works or not, what is exciting is that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Epic, Discord,

EA, all of these companies are spending tons of dollars to try to improve distribution in games. And that is only beneficial, I think, to developers. You have more sources of capital and better publishing deals. And obviously, I think very much that it is more choice for the consumer. Again, people are competing with lots of dollars. Pricing is coming down, and I think you'll have more choice. So again, now is another moment I feel like this sort of

shift where I think it's time. It's a good time to be building a gaming company and creating something, you know, generational. All right, Kevin, that's a super good transition. Google Stadia, your thoughts and maybe a quick what it is for folks who haven't read about it yet.

So the idea behind Google Stadia and similarly Microsoft xCloud and Amazon's rumored service and everybody else's is, you know, do we have enough internet speeds? Do we have the right, you know, sort of more modern networking technologies? Do we have better hardware that have that latency that you can actually access?

stream a game to your computer, to your TV screen, to your phone, and be able to play them instantly without having to own an Xbox console or a PC or download a game, right? That's 40 gigs. And so basically, how do you, can you actually play a game much like you can instantly click a button and watch a movie on Netflix?

And I think, by the way, this is not the first time it's happened, right? Obviously, there was a previous generation of companies like Gaikai and OnLive that tried to do this as well. A lot of people don't speak very fondly of that era. The tech wasn't there yet. Well, if you actually dig into it, the tech was there for specific types of games with specific geographic constraints.

If you were playing on the West Coast with other people on the West Coast, connected to servers on the West Coast in a game that is not extremely fast moving, it worked. It actually worked. Right. If it's a turn-based, like it's like Hearthstone or something that's not super graphical, not real-time, there was a lot of ways that, a lot of types of games that it could have been suited for.

And I think this time around, you know, obviously the technology has improved tremendously. But again, it's going to be an adoption cycle, right? Like, am I going to be skeptical about playing an extremely fast moving and high accuracy game like, you know, the ones you mentioned earlier, like Fortnite or Apex Legends, right? Yeah, that I might have some doubts about, right, on a streaming service, unless I have, you know, Google Fiber and live in San Francisco or LA or New York, right? But I think we'll get there. We'll get there.

Are we going to see any sort of breakout in the next 12 to 18 months with Stadia or a cloud gaming service? Or are we still on that, we're still three, four, or five years out? I personally think it'll take a little bit longer, three to five years as opposed to one to two years. Partially it's for some of the underlying technology reasons. Partially, actually, it's also related to

types of content. The type of content that gets made and is now popular on Netflix and Hulu and Amazon, et cetera, are not exactly the same as network television series. And I think the same thing has to happen. More bingeable. Yeah. Right. They changed the format, right? Because again, you have more options to consume whenever you want instantaneously and that historically was not possible, right? And two, if I now all of a sudden have a library of a hundred games, I can try it whenever I want.

The existing behavior of you get super obsessed with,

typically it was one to three games at any point in time and spend all your hours in those games, that's going to have to change a little bit, right? Like what's the value of a whole library if I'm only playing two games at once? And not to mention, as we talked about earlier, those games last like 10 years, right? There is a sense of like, if you're a game developer, a content developer, you have to think about making games that are one, obviously very suited to sort of immediate onboarding, right? Like you click a button, I can get in and I get it. I don't have to go through an hour long tutorial.

And two, these have to be games that actually want to come back and play after six months. If there's so much hurdle to come back and play, then I'm never going to touch your game again. And you only have one shot in a giant library and good luck on making any money as developer, right? I mean, like you brought up Hearthstone. That's the kind of game where there's an entire strategy behind the deck of cards that you're trying to build to compete against other people. Well, guess what? In six months,

what's considered the top decks in that game have changed. So if you come back in, you're literally relearning what is currently popular and working. That's a lot of work and a lot of investment that only sort of the most, the strongest fans of that game will sort of put themselves through, right? Versus

Especially if you think services like this opens access because price is lower and you don't need a console, you're going to end up having more and more casual players. And I think it'll be challenging for them to try to play the same types of games that we currently play that are just frankly less friendly towards recurring play behaviors over time.

Cool. Well, deeply appreciate you sharing your thoughts on that. Of course. I will always take upon a chance to talk about games and play games with anyone who wants to. Well,

This is perfect. This is usually the part in the show where we ask guests where listeners can find you on the internet. We should definitely share your Twitter and other ways, but are you on Twitch? Can we watch you stream? Yeah, I don't think you want to watch me stream. I'm probably not the most interesting streamer. There are people with a lot

A lot more interesting person. I think streaming honestly is mostly about your personality and less about the game. And like, it's just incredible the amount of talent that's out there. And I am definitely not one of them.

I am on Twitter. You can follow me at KevinWaiZane on Twitter. I do write blog posts here and there. That's actually one of my goals for this year. So you can follow me on Medium as well. And then lastly, probably the only game that I really have time to play now every once in a while consistently is Overwatch. That's made by Blizzard. So if you play games on Battle.net, feel free to...

shoot me a note and we can play together. Love it. This is a first for a choir. The theme of the episode, the theme for you guys is, you know, um, be contrarian, line up with your strategy and go hard into it. Love it. Yeah, exactly. Indeed. Um,

All right. Well, Kevin, thank you so much. It's been real. Thank you guys so much for hosting me. This was super fun. Listeners, we will talk to you very soon. Live on the scene. The playoffs are starting. Lyft IPO coming at you end of next week. We will be there. See you then. See ya.