ACT #225 Gloria Bauerlein, Puzzle Ventures

0:04Hi everyone and welcome to At The Cap Table Podcast, the series that shines the spotlight on investors who are changing the VC industry in Europe. I'm your host for today, Sav Stann. And our next guest is Gloria Baulein, founder and general partner at Puzzle Ventures. Puzzle Ventures is a new pan-European 21.5 million euro fund investing in super early stage B2B companies. And it's one of the first solo female GP-led funds. Before Puzzle, Gloria was a prolific angel investor, but that's not why we're speaking with her today. Uniquely, she has actually sat on all sides of the cap table as an investment banker, VC investor at TCV and Index, startup operator at Cree and Back, an angel investor, and built Puzzle to continue backing Europe's top founders with larger checks but with the flexibility of an angel.

1:00Gloria's LPs include founders and operators that you'll have heard from, from the likes of Cree, Stripe, Coinbase and WhatsApp and more who've tread in the founder's footsteps. They offer assistance beyond capital to Puzzle Ventures portfolio and can share valuable insights and connections with founders to help them grow. In this episode, we'll hear more about Gloria's journey into VC, her thoughts on ownership versus allocation, tips for micro funds on sorting out the unsexy side of fund management before getting carried away with deploying capital and how to have a culture of giving first when nurturing relationships and being collaborative in VC.

1:39As she says, at worst, you can make a great connection with someone and at best, you could invest in your next fund returner together. Stay tuned for a great conversation. And now, some words from our beloved sponsor. Tactic is the leading forecasting and scenario planning software for venture capital funds. Tactic combines portfolio construction, portfolio management, forecasting and reporting into a unified platform. Investors are empowered with data-driven insights on fund strategy, reserve allocation, exit planning, and fund performance. Tactic was built using quantitative techniques researched from hundreds of data-driven fund managers and is trusted by over 250 funds globally today.

2:21Tactic is a proud sponsor of the first season of the At The Cat Table podcast series. If you'd like to learn more, please check out tactic.io. T-A-C-T-Y-C.io.

2:38hi everyone um my all my five listeners um welcome back to at the cap table and the podcast which interviews amazing gps from all over and finds out a little bit about the people behind the deals so today i've got the amazing gloria bowline with me today i often think of myself as someone who's jumped across many different sides of the investment table. But I think Gloria absolutely personifies this, starting off her career at Morgan Stanley with investment roles at TCV and Index and stints as an operator at Cree and at Back. Now Gloria is the founding partner of Puzzle Ventures, a solo GP fund investing in B2B companies all over the world, I think.

3:29So, So, you know, really looking forward to hearing a little bit more about you and quizzing you about your journey into venture, what it's like to kind of move across many different sides of the table and your approach to investments. So welcome. Thank you so much for the invitation. No problem at all. So I think we alluded a little bit to sort of your career history in kind of venture and would love to know sort of who gave you your break into VC? do it's very hard to point out one person that's probably like two people who are really detrimental to me being here today one was dominic vidal one of the partners at index ventures who i met back in 2014 when i talked to index for the first time and he was the first investor we see i've ever talked to in my life probably and i remember meeting him for breakfast in new york and it It was supposed to be a 45-minute conversation.

4:26And we ended up talking for one and a half hours. And two of the things that got me really excited was, one, the fact that he really loved his job. Like, he had a very successful career as a founder, sold his business to Yahoo, ran Yahoo Europe back in the heydays. So he was very accomplished. And he certainly didn't have to work anymore. But he was still coming to work every single day, being super passionate about working with these entrepreneurs. that would change the way certain industries work. And I could just tell from like talking to him how passionate he was about what he was doing day to day.

5:03And then the other piece was that he really cared about who I was as a person and understanding like how I was ticking, like how I was making decisions, et cetera, which is very, both of those aspects were very new to me because I was at Morgan Stanley before. And there I felt like I was seen as a resource and no one really cared of like why I was doing this job and what I liked about it. And most crucially, no one really seemed to love the job. They were all miserable. And I looked up to them. I was like, I never want to be like that. And Dom kind of was this person who the first time ever was like, yeah, he really loves what he's doing.

5:42He really cares about me, et cetera. And so I was really lucky to then later on be able to work with him and really learn from him. and I don't think I would have been keen to go into VC if I hadn't met him in the first place. And then the person who really got me into venture is John Doran, the general partner at TCV, who at the time, so I was a Morgan Stanley, we were raising capital for ADN, the payments provider back in 2014. He looked into investing in ADN. We met on the deal because I was on the advising side, on the Morgan Stanley side. And then he reached out to me and was like, hey, do you want to grab a coffee and that coffee turned into interviews and then the interviews turned into a job offer and he really was the one person that really believed in me and gave me that break and believed in my ability to work with founders and to pick the right investments and I'm really grateful for him today to see that in me.

6:38Well amazing and you know having an early sort of believer and someone who can see your potential even if that's not what you're even if you're not doing venture day to day is such a great endorsement to kind of coming in and feeling confident and making those decisions right yeah especially because I never wanted to become an investor like when I joined BC in 2015 it wasn't a career path like there were very very few junior investor roles out there and so I in my whole career and I interviewed for two fund with two funds and that was TCV and index so I never had this idea of like look I have to talk to everyone and then get into venture.

7:18And so then having someone who like, even though you're not the one who's super well prepared for the interviews because you've done it 10 times before and you know exactly the type of questions that a VC might ask you in the interviews, but still seeing something in you and feeling like, hey, this person can really be passionate about working with founders and be a good investor. This was particularly special for me because I wasn't even trying.

7:46Yeah, I don't think anyone grows up being like, oh, mom, I want to be an investor. But when you think back to Kate, your plan was never to be an investor. And yet here we are, Puzzle Ventures. What was your plan originally, if you had one? I never really had a plan. As you can probably see in my career, I'm being driven by curiosity and by working with people that I really respect and I feel like I can learn from. So I grew up in a super small town in rural Bavaria in Germany, risked one of my family to ever go to university. But out of luck, I stumbled into this university called WHU, which became very well known for lots of, that lots of founders studied there.

8:29And so when I graduated in 2011, there was like this first crazy wave of the internet in Germany with rocket internet. But I really disagreed with the way they were building businesses. So I didn't know any better. And a lot of people went into investment banking and I did several different interviews and I really liked investment banking and M &A. And so I ended up going there. It was really driven by, hey, I want to work with different businesses. I want to learn about different industries. want to work with very ambitious people and it feels like m &a could give me exactly that but i never wanted to like i never saw myself as an investor banker in the long term and then like yeah i i advised adyen and then all of a sudden i realized wow it's really cool to work with startups and not to advise to telecom because these founders they're like risk takers They really see the world in a different way.

9:25There are eternal optimists, which made me an optimist myself. And so I just got infected by this kind of energy. And so that's kind of what's drawing me through my career. It was always this kind of learning something new, being pulled in by people that have a special energy. Like the same with Cree. I met Johannes while I was on the board for Index Ventures. Johannes is the founder of Cree. and he has just this infectious industry energy just like loves to see to create a world that he wants to see and I was like yeah I could really learn from him like from the way he builds companies from the way he crafts a vision and so that's probably what is kind of the the red line throughout my career being being curious and trying to learn from other people and trying to learn new things.

10:21If we look at kind of those roles at back in Cree in particular, you mentioned that, you know, it's initially kind of like a founder pull and, you know, you could learn from them. What kind of one or two lessons did you take away from your kind of years there? Yeah, so Cree I joined when we were about 130 people just post Series B and I joined leading global strategy when in reality it was a lot like just getting processes straight thinking about like how to steer the business on a day-to-day basis and what I learned there is that strategy is all about what not to do rather than what to do meaning as a company you have so many different things over time that you can go into so many different directions so many different countries, you can expand into so many different partnerships you can focus on, etc.

11:17And it all looks very shiny. But in reality, you only have a limited amount of resources and capacity. And if you're doing too many things at the same time, that can really slow you down massively. And kind of focusing on a couple of things that you're really good at and saying no to other really, really, really attractive other opportunities is, I think, absolutely crucial. And I personally think it's why a lot of companies are not managing to switch from zero to one. So getting to product market fit and then scaling that product market fit. Because when you go from zero to one, it's all about throwing things at the wall and see what sticks.

11:53So trying out new things. But when you're going, when you are scaling from one to infinity, it's about making conscious choices of what to do and what not to do. And if you are doing too many things, you're dragging other things along and you will never be great at anything. So that was probably the biggest lesson learned in my growth stage. And then back, I joined as employee number six or seven. So the first business employee ever. So very different stage. And then all internal functions, customer success, partnerships, sales, like really different areas. And there, what I learned was really more about kind of how can you figure out who your best persona is that you should target.

12:43And that actually is a lot about understanding what drives that persona rather than what type of product or that you're building the very best product. meaning we were selling mostly into HR professionals and I think we thought initially that they were very much driven by like streamlining their processes, automating tasks, saving a little bit of money and in reality that was nothing that the HR teams really cared about. The HR teams we sold into were like thinking about employee experience and like really like more the upside case rather than like how to themselves out and so now when i talk to founders i ask a lot of questions around like who you're selling into why what's the ri for them how they're thinking about it etc which was really something i probably didn't think about too much before because i was mostly investing in growth stage businesses at index so most of those businesses I'd already figured out the personas.

13:47They had already made tons of mistakes. And now I'm just much more sensitive to that. Did you start kind of angel investing while you were kind of working at startups then? Correct. So when I moved to Stockholm to join Cree, two of my colleagues, three of my former colleagues actually, approached me because they were starting businesses. And I was anyways advising them on like fundraising, on also sometimes also on the product side, et cetera. And then as part of that, I just decided to put in very, very small amounts of capital. Initially, I was really putting in 5K, then 10K for some time, etc.

14:25And so those were the first three investments I made while I was still in Stockholm as an angel. And then I moved to Berlin at the beginning of 2020. And then COVID hit. So there was not much to do. And so my angel investing escalated quite quickly. And I ended up investing in like 27 companies within three years. And that was then really while I was at back, while I was in Berlin. And then, yeah, I had to decide what to do. Because at the time when I moved to Berlin, I was thinking I would start a company eventually. That was really the idea behind going over to the operational side. But then at some point I was like, okay, I'm spending more time angel investing than thinking about which company I want to build.

15:04There's no topic that I'm really passionate about that I want to do for the next 10 years other than supporting founders. that was the only thing I could think about and then I was thinking at some point like okay how can I combine this like being entrepreneurial while at the same time working with the coolest founders and the most logical step for me seemed to start my own fund because then I can I can be very entrepreneurial I can create something it's my own it's my baby while at the same time I can continue backing the most amazing entrepreneurs across Europe and the US. Tell us a bit about the genesis of Puzzle Ventures obviously it's gone through a bit of a rebrand recently but would love to kind of hear obviously it's to continue your angel investing but you started off with a much smaller target right than what you ended up with so tell us tell us the whole journey yeah so originally I wanted to build an operator syndicate that was kind of the first the first idea because what I saw when I was an angel myself was that I was co-investing with a lot of operators but a lot of them didn't really have the network and also the skill set to find interesting startups and then evaluate whether it would be worthwhile investing but they were amazing once they invested because they could come with like their networks and with their operational expertise etc and so I was always seek them out and try to get them to co-invest with me but they were like look we don't I don't understand anything about it can we just put in 5k whenever you're investing and call it a day, basically.

16:37And I was like, yeah, that could be really cool. But to do it as like an SPV point of view, it's just like very, very difficult from an administrative point of view. So I felt like if we can do it as a fund, it's basically with one ticket, you get access to all these operators. And the operators can still choose to be active somewhat by like talking to the founders on a regular basis, helping them with introductions, et cetera. But at the same time, they don't have to build a diversified angel portfolio themselves, which is A, very costly, and B, it just takes a lot of time because then you have to invest 15, 20 companies over time.

17:12And so that was kind of the initial idea, really. And then the other side that I saw was that there was a gap in the market where seed funds were raising larger and larger funds. Multi-stage funds were raising seed funds as well or more actively investing at C stage. and they could no longer collaborate with each other because given the fund sizes, they needed a certain ownership target. And I saw this kind of gap in the market opening up where there was still some allocation left in the round whenever one fund was leading around, but there wasn't enough space for two proper funds, for two large funds.

17:54And so I kind of saw that opportunity as well to be collaborative with all of these different funds and basically invest with them versus compete with them. Because as long as you raise a small enough fund, you don't have the same ownership targets or you don't have to have the same ownership targets as the larger funds. Because the way I'm thinking about it is you can either, as a new kid on the block, as a new fund on the block, you can either optimize for ownership or you can optimize for access to the very best founders in the European ecosystem. And I just find it much more interesting to work with the very best founders.

18:30But when I want to work with the very best founders, I probably can't get the maximum ownership that I would want to get theoretically because someone is going to lead that round and it's hard for me to compete against them. And so that's why I felt like a collaborative strategy with all the different funds and with those operators in the background as LPs in a fund would be the best setup. And so I went down to raise 10 to 12 million. That was kind of the minimum that I thought. I needed in order to make the strategy work. And that was like in April 2022. And I got really lucky because I found an anchor investor fairly quickly, and then was able to get to first close in August at 14, about 14 million euros, and then decided to bring a couple of very strategic LPs on board beyond that.

19:18So I ended up raising 21 and a half million, so about twice the front size that I anticipated going in. But it just felt like the right kind of people to bring on board. I decided to increase the investment period so the pace is really not that different from what I originally anticipated because I also ended up increasing the reserves. And so I felt comfortable with deploying that fund size. Do you see yourself as like a micro fund GP or kind of an amped up angel investor? Like what label would you give for yourself? depending when i speak basically i probably would see myself more as an angel investor for several different reasons one is i feel like the more i'm an angel investor and the less i'm a vc founders see me more as like someone that's on their side versus someone that has any corporate governance rights and like that they need to be afraid of from the most vcs you probably don't me to be afraid of but I feel like there's a power dynamic in place typically when a VC owns 20 % of the business I want to be stay away stay as far away as possible from that situation because I really want to optimize for whatever is best for the founder and then think about okay hopefully that's gonna result in a very good reputation that I have and that's that will enable me to get into very competitive deals right as further down the line rather than optimizing on like what I can get out every single time I invest.

20:50And so I kind of try to be really this kind of compagnon for the founders, for the entrepreneurs. And then at the same time, I also really don't want to be seen as competition by any of the funds. So that's also, I had the opportunity to lead rounds as a fund manager and I decided not to and bring in other VCs because I feel like you can't be competing sometimes and then trying to be friendly the next time. I think people won't trust you as much anymore. And so I really, really try to be very, very collaborative. And I feel like if I'm more called like an angel, a super angel, that comes across as much more friendly, much more collaborative than being just another seed fund.

21:34The way you set yourself up is to optimize for how to work with founders. So if I turned around to one of your portfolio companies and said, you know, describe to me how Gloria works with you. what would you want them to say in an ideal world yeah i always called myself a pull angel not a push angel and i think they would they would agree with that meaning there was no structure around it there was no monthly catch-up call there are no reporting requirements whatsoever etc even today right and there's certain like minimum reporting requirements so i can do my lp reporting but i don't even ask for financials or anything like that actually so i really want them to pull me in whenever they think i could be a good fit that's usually across three different areas the one is i want to be the person you call when you probably want to discuss something that might be relevant for all your investors and you want someone to talk things through with because i have both the VC perspective as well as the angel perspective.

22:38And so I can give you a good perspective on all the stakeholders in your capital base. So I basically want to be like the trusted advisor that you call whenever there is something bad happening. So that's the one piece. The second piece where people would usually call me, I'm entrepreneurs, what they usually call me is anything fundraising related. I try to be as independent as possible and really help them think through how VCs would think about it, what they would need to see in order to invest here, how to run the process, who to talk to, which person within the fund to talk to actually, not just which fund to talk to.

23:16And so I try to be this kind of fundraising advisor and really be in-house to the founder. And then the third piece where I can usually help is through my LP network, but also through other people I know is like customer introduction. So I need to invest in B2B companies. A lot of my companies are selling into either industry agnostic or selling into other tech companies and so usually there's always like one or two or three or four introductions I can make to relevant people who might become customers and so that's that's probably the three areas where I can help and where founders would would see the most value add I would say that feels super clear I mean one thing that I often think about and my role as an LP is you know allocation reserves and I guess kind of that governance piece taking board roles observer roles to what extent do you think micro managers need to worry about those things or first-time managers if at all it depends a little bit I think the three different aspects you just mentioned I would think about them very very differently so for board roles i actually would think they don't need to care about it and it's probably initially it's quite a lot of effort for not that much in return especially i think a lot of micromanagers they might not be the the lead investor and around but maybe the second largest investor so they might not even have full power over the company and actually they can't really make any decisions anyways on their own plus i actually don't think it's a good idea to have a board at seed.

24:55I would only establish a board at A or above. And so I don't really think anyone should care about the board relationships. It's about relationships. It's about how close I am with the founders. But whether that's on the board or not, I wouldn't care too much about. I'm a little bit mixed on reserves. I think it needs to fit to your fund size and to your fund strategy. I decided for myself to have reserves, but not do very high reserves. Why is that? So I didn't want to have very high reserves because I think it would pull down your TVPI. And I think my profound managers are really benchmark on TVPI and not on IRR, because actually, it might be actually positive even to IRR, but it's negative to TVPI because the average entry valuation is going to be higher.

25:46And so I didn't want to do too high reserves. At the same time, I didn't want to do no reserves because if you do no reserves, you just have very much like 2 % of the fund in this company or 3 % in this company and 3 % in that company. And it's very hard to generate a fund returner versus at least I want to have some companies where I deployed 5, 6, 7 % of the fund. If they're doing really well, there is the potential to have a fund return here so for me the right thing to do but it's personal preference was to do like a third reserves and two-third initial tickets so i think thinking about reserves and like making decision is very important for first-time fund managers and then the third piece is ownership and there i think it depends heavily on fund size if you have a certain fund size, have to really, really be cautious with ownership.

26:39It's about how focused you are on a particular vertical and how many other people are going after that vertical and how much of like a brand name they already have, how established they already are, what your ability to win against them or to win in the very competitive deals are, et cetera. And then to think about and combine that all together and then come up with the right amount of ownership whether that's going to be one to three percent or four percent whether it's going to be five to eight percent where a couple of fund managers are in that bucket or whether that's ten percent plus really depends on very much different aspects of it uh what i struggle with is funds that are doing a little bit of this doing a little bit of that i just don't think that that's going to work where you sometimes are investing, you have like 3 % ownership and in other cases you have 10 % ownership.

27:34I just think it really confuses the brand and it makes it very hard for LPs, but also for founders to understand who you are. Are you a leader, a lead investor, are you a follower, et cetera? So I think what's important there is really to be very kind of, okay, either I'm going to be a follower more or less forever, or I'm going to be a lead or co-lead and I need a certain minimum ownership. I don't like the funds that make funds of exceptions all the time and where I'm also sometimes confused and like what's their role and like yeah like well yeah how are they how are they in the mix basically yeah and there's something there about kind of consistency transparency and messaging to people and it goes back to the to kind of what you mentioned about this being essentially a relationship kind of business whether that's between LPs and GPs or you know you as a you as a GP to kind of your portfolio we'd love to kind of you know we talked a bit about kind of prioritization earlier you know and how the best founders kind of prioritize as they get series B and beyond you know to hit product market fit again and then again and then again What tips do you have, I'm going to just be bold and assume that you have them, for new solo GPs on managing their time and what to prioritize?

29:01I think initially, don't do too many things at the same time, meaning I spent quite a bit of time thinking about where to set up the fund, talk to a lot of CFOs, a lot of general counsels, try to understand the lesson learned. but I did that before actually starting to fundraise. I sometimes feel like a lot of the fund managers don't do a lot of research before they're actually starting fundraising and that's just stumbling into it. I had a very clear view on like, this is the law firm I want to work with. This is the jurisdiction. This is the setup I want to do. This is the implication on what type of LPs I can actually have in my LP base, et cetera.

29:38But I did that before I started fundraising. Then the second piece of advice would be try to find an anchor to the extent that you can that really changes the game someone that really believes in you that you've probably met or like known for a longer period of time that can ride anywhere from like 10 to 25 percent of the fund because that really gives you brings you into a position where you don't have to like start with 100k tickets because that takes a long time to have all these conversations and move them over the line the third advice would be start from the strategy so look at like okay this is the type of strategy i want to i want to execute on this is like i i want to do i'm a high conviction investor so i can only do five or six investments a year or i'm i'm more comfortable like spraying a little bit more broadly i want to be a follower lead etc and then from that understand what the right fund size is and like start with a minimum fund size or maybe a little bit of buffer and go out to the market with that rather than going for like this kind of very very hairy ambitious goal and then needing to backtrack on that i feel like a lot of the fund managers i talked to they start way too aggressive and then they're really really struggling to get to the target that they set themselves but like they wouldn't need that large of a fund to make ends meet and to execute on their strategy it's just that they want to be very very ambitious and i feel like that creates this situation where they can't really get anyone over the line because everyone is waiting for the final close because they just know that all the lps are waiting for the final close because they just know that there is still 90 ahead of the fundraising ahead of them and so i would always start with a relatively small fund size and then i would try to surround myself with a couple of very experienced partners gps at different funds who've been there who either scaled a fund or even started a fund and tried to create this kind of group of three four trusted people that they can ask for advice around stuff like should i go and invest in fundamental models for example right now right in capital sense of businesses?

32:00Should I invest in hardware models? Like how much should I think about early exits versus how much should I play for the long run? Should I think about secondaries and year three or four? Or should I wait until the companies are exiting? All these like strategic questions that you have at some point as a fund manager is very good to have someone who's been in that situation maybe five or ten years ago and who can like help you think through it and particularly people that have been through different market cycles as well because i guess vc well until now has been on the up for so long that it's a relatively young industry in many ways right you know i wouldn't want to be a fund manager today if i had only done angel investing in the last two or three years because every single company got an up round pretty much in my portfolio so i i was quite happy that i was also a vc and like 15 16 17 but yeah it wasn't like a downturn but it was at least a very normal market where like it was still hard to raise larger rounds right so whenever i see the market now and everyone who's only been around in like 2020 and 2021 feel like this is a terrible market i'm like it just feels like a normal market right now there are certain pockets yes that are very tough like very late stage rounds etc but in early stage it just feels like a very normal market and i at least i have like that perspective because i was in venture back in like 15 16 and i think that's that's very very important to just understand kind of where you are currently playing which which part of the cycles are we currently in and then react accordingly when it comes to secondaries valuations and entry like all those things you know in the same way that you know you can lean on sort of peers and and sort of advisors and strategic people when we met you were very clear also about the kind of LP you you want what is kind of an ideal relationship with your LPs for you?

34:14So I was very focused on only having LPs on board that understand venture, meaning every single person in my LP base, and I've got about 100 LPs, including the individuals, has basically been in tech or invested in venture before. I didn't want to educate any LP around what it means to invest in a venture fund, because I was not keen on explaining to them in like four or five years why they haven't seen massive returns yet and why it's still going to take five or six years to return their capital or to have like a considerable return, right? So I really wanted someone who was kind of patient enough to understand how venture works.

35:02The second piece was really around I try to get a balance of different LP types. So initially, I actually only wanted to raise from individuals. So from operators and founders and from partners at VC firms. At some point, I talked to a couple of my mentors, and they were like, no, try to get some institutional capital in board that is going to be more stable over time, that already now knows that unless something goes terribly wrong, they're going to be in for fund two and fund three, and then maybe they will evaluate them. and it's an individual might get divorced and all of a sudden not have cash anymore next time you're going on fundraising right and so they really encouraged me to get a couple of people not like 10 or 15 but a couple of people on board who are professional lps who have experience investing in funds who will be there in 10 years time and who can kind of help you along in your journey and can also help you like hey this is maybe how you should consider changing your reporting or hey you are looking to hire a platform person you should chat to these other two funds that we backed that have successfully hired a platform person etc so that's kind of full fund building exercise you can get it from individual partners or certain aspects of it but the more kind of administrative side or the more LP relationship management side you can also actually really learn a lot from more institutional capital and at the same time it was really important for me that I wouldn't be stuck with fundraising for a year a year and a half time so I explicitly said no to LPs where I knew from other people that their processes would take six months and where I felt like either they weren't fully committed to Europe or they weren't fully committed to emerging fund managers and still figuring out the strategy when it came to emerging fund managers.

37:12I just felt like it was important for me to get back to business, back to investing. And I didn't want to do too many things in parallel and so I really wanted to get the vast majority of the capital in before I started investing as a fund and hence speed was really really important for me as well well look I feel like I've absolutely grilled you if you were on the barbecue now you'd be well cooked I've got two final questions for you one is how big a role do you think luck played in your career and then I would love to ask you because I was asked this the other day what your biggest indulgence is to yourself I think luck played a big role but I think you have to be curious to be lucky meaning I think when you're sitting at home and not trying to learn new things not trying to meet new people etc you can't be lucky you can't get your lucky break because no one like no one is gonna find me at home and giving me like a job offer and offering me to invest in the company for example right it's about putting myself out there trying to learn new things trying to meet new people being curious about a new industry etc and then you might meet someone who then ultimately will give you like will give you a lead to a founder that you back that turns out to be a unicorn and such right so I think yes I was lucky in many ways because I met the right people and on my journey and they helped me to get to the next double but then at the same time I think I was also always trying to meet those people without any expectations but just putting myself out there and meeting new people and and also giving first before expecting something in return.