E465 | Jon Coker, Eka Ventures: 🏆 Impact Leader of The Year Finalist: Why Concentration, Conviction & Impact Are the Future of VC

0:00Welcome back everyone to the European VC podcast. Today I have a dear friend John Coker with me another bald guy just like myself so what a piece of love guys that are in this podcast today john do you feel comfortable with that intro i do yeah yeah i love it gotta own it i'm very happy about that tear down this wall it's more than just an ally this this is a union of values

0:35This show is not investment advice and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. So to everyone that doesn't know John, he's been on the podcast a couple of times. He's a very thoughtful guy, especially on concentrated portfolios where he has a strong view and a well-developed thought. So for that reason, we'll talk a bit about that. But first of all, let me just say, John Coker, your GP and co-founder of Eka Ventures or Eka Ventures. Some say one thing, others say the other. What do you say, John? We say Eka. You say Eka. I think it's actually Eka. Yes, because there's a Latin origin, am I correct, or Greek?

1:14Yeah, yeah. And actually also Scandinavian as well. So yeah, I think it is Eka. I just can't handle the idea of doing a verbal rebrand. I've never heard of that before. and so we stay with Ika. I think that's right. We stay with Ika then. You are just doing the first close of your second fund and you're headquartered in the UK. You're targeting seed, UK companies with international ambition, consumer health and sustainable consumption. You've invested in companies like Rona, Hived, Axel, Jude, Forsythe and Pluck. Did I say too much when I revealed that you're doing first close on the new fund?

1:50I don't think so, yeah. And John, congrats on the massive success. You have managed to be nominated for not one, but two awards in the EUVC Awards. So that's why I wanted to bring you on for yet another conversation. The first one is Emerging Manager of the Year. I think that is well placed. I think you're doing incredibly well. And the other one is Impact Leader of the Year. So for that reason, we'll also talk a bit about how you think about impact, because it's not necessarily the same thing as everyone else. Congratulations, John. Thank you. Yeah, really excited to be nominated for Tournament as well.

2:26I think obviously both of those mean a lot to us in terms of how we're thinking about building Eka, so cool categories to be in. Yeah. And if we then go to the very first one, which is in a way the driver, I think, of both categories, because for our impact leader, we are requiring that first and foremost, there must be outstanding performance. If that is there, we can go on to look at the impact metrics. But we say we are an inventor after all. If you don't have great performance, you're not in any venture category relevant. That's kind of how harshly we think about it. So, but let's start then on this metric that I at least think is a driver, which is that you have a very strong view on concentrated portfolios.

3:08And that is the model that you're pursuing. And I'd love to understand why you've decided to go down this path. And of course, we'll dive into all these things about how you build conviction, because that's, of course, incredibly important to be able to build a concentrated portfolio. And then we'll have a looser talk also about sourcing and winning deals. But if we start contrasting concentrated portfolios versus the broader portfolios, why is it that you're bullish on concentrated portfolios and have decided to double down here? there's probably a few different ways that we'd think about it the first is that we believe strongly that being a lead investor in a round at seed and pre-seed is important to the founders that we back and our ability to i guess have a kind of purpose and a right to exist as a venture investor it's also how we feel comfortable so and then i think if you're if you're going to lead a seed round or a pre-seed round now you need to be able to invest enough capital in that round and that round and if a company's going to raise money from a fund they want to raise a decent size round so we have a 68 million pound first fund we're leading seed rounds with investments of kind of one and a half to two million or one to two million pounds in rounds of like three to four million pounds if we're doing that that means that the kind of math tells us that we then need to have quite a concentrated portfolio.

4:34The second thing is we're pretty, well, we're very thematic in the way that we invest. It comes back to some of the impact stuff we talked about, but we focus on two themes, consumer health, sustainable consumption. We focus in the UK and we focus at seed. Once you've done all of those things, then the universe of companies that you're going to back is restricted a little bit. And so therefore you need to be a very conviction-led investor. And so I think those kind of structural things lead into us building a concentrated portfolio. And then I think it is Camilla, Dolan, my co-founder and me, stylistically it's how we feel comfortable investing too.

5:14Like we want to spend time with teams. We do only want to make kind of four to eight new investments a year. We want to spend time building out that portfolio through the investment period. And that just is the style that has worked for us, does work for us. leads us to making better decisions. If you go back to that maths point, if we felt like we did the maths and we're like, you know what, we need to build a portfolio of 40 to 50 companies in a three to four year period, we just wouldn't be able to do it. It just would not sit with, we wouldn't be able to make, like we wouldn't be able to get comfortable that amount of times to invest.

5:46Whereas we're building a portfolio of 20 to 25 in companies over a four year period, that feels about right. First of all, let me ask you, because you mentioned kind of that your portfolio model and your approach to investing comes from structural things, such as the wind dynamics in the market that you perceive, and then the vertical dynamics, so to say, also that, well, our vertical is actually quite constrained, so there's not that many, so to say. There's not an unbounded number of deals that are relevant in our space. So for that reason, we also need to really focus on a small subsection.

6:23And then you also described the style of you guys as investors. But I'd love to ask you, because there are some LPs, I'd say, and also definitely the VCs that are quite dogmatic about either you go one way or you go the other, and especially probably the broad portfolio point. I hear many that are quite dogmatic around and saying this is almost the only path you can take because this is venture. It's power law driven. It's also high uncertainty. and for that reason you need a lot of shots on gold. This is what the statistics tell you. What do you say to this viewpoint? Yeah, I think if you're building an index tracker, then that would be 100 % true, right?

7:11If you were like, I want to track the performance of venture across Europe, then you'd want a massive portfolio. That isn't what we're trying to do. If you took that argument and extended it, it would extend to founders, right? The argument to founders would be, well, you're mad to start a company because you have a portfolio of one and that's not a successful way to build. And I think if you say that to a founder, a good founder would look back at you and say, yeah, but this is not a game of luck. I'm building a business. I believe I can build a business. I've picked an interesting market. I believe I can execute on that.

7:49So that kind of extends up to having a slightly more concentrated portfolio. I don't believe VC is a game of pure luck where you can do things that mean that you can improve your likelihood of success in the way that you make decisions in the same way that a founder can. That's my feeling. Like if it was just a case of trying to get into every single company that is on thesis for us, regardless of whether or not the chances of success in that company, then it would suggest that the only thing that you do in VC is source. And no one does that, right? So even the people that say that they're building a wide portfolio, they have some kind of filter.

8:31So they're admitting the fact that a filter works. And what we're just saying is that we believe that we can kind of layer on a slightly different filter and make better decisions off the back of it, as well as sourcing really effectively. Do you see any of that because of this more concentrated portfolio, do you see any LPs that kind of then consider you more risk on than if you had a broader? Because they're saying, well, it is a narrow subset. or do you believe that the majority of the risk sits with the manager and the fact that you've picked the right manager and whether they then pursue a 40 or a 20 company portfolio that is actually not the driver we don't get that pushback a lot actually i think for good reason because if you're an lp with a venture strategy you're going to get that power law by investing in lots of different funds so actually i'd argue that even an lp that believes in like who has a polar opposite view to us and thinks you know you need to get a lot of companies they would still they would be better off with a portfolio of concentrated gps than they would be a portfolio of like real they get they get that effect through the gps so maybe if you were if you were an lp making a single VC ticket then you know we're probably not the fund that that is that yeah that would be different you're at least in no way claiming to be an index um which might be somewhere the strategy uh where they could claim but honestly it's very very few um some might say it's someone like Seekamp or Tiny but but I still think that that is um stretching it stretching the argument I do you think that most LPs would be very wise to have multiple funds to cover their exposure?

10:21Otherwise, you'd go with a funder fund, which then takes care of that. I think that what I'm not saying is that that broader portfolio, like less constant doesn't work because it clearly does. Like there is a lot of data points to point that it does. But I think there are also that you need to have conviction in your style and double down on it and be the best of that rather than like believe that other people can't do a different style. So that is exactly what I wanted to go to next, because what I think about is kind of I want to know where the manager positions themselves on this continuum of portfolio size or portfolio philosophy.

10:56And then I want to make sure that the manager is making the right decisions about how they're designing the firm and the activities within the firm and the thinking within the firm in relation to that overall style, as we just referred to it as. And that is really where the magic happens. And that is where I think that some people that are less experienced in venture maybe get it a little bit wrong because they don't, at least I think, necessarily design their firm and every single process and everything they do within the firm to match exactly the portfolio and the strategy that they have. And that is, as an example, you're describing it by saying we're very concentrated.

11:39That matches our style. And then so this style statement you put covers a lot of things, right? Because it covers about how much time you spend with a portfolio once you've invested, covers how you build conviction, how much time you spend with each company, covers also the thesis in terms of how wide you want to go. And it covers so many different things. and decision-making processes, how the whole team gets involved in just one deal versus you empower every single investor to be able to do deals everywhere. So it's like it's having that perfect line for every decision made in the firm and it does stem from your portfolio strategy, I find.

12:21At least it's a very important part of it. Yeah, I agree. Well, it's not totally clear to me if the portfolio strategy drives the style or the style drives the portfolio, but if they're out of sync, you're in trouble in a number of different ways. And we definitely feel like ours is in sync. Yeah. Yes, well, there's one drive, the other. It's not that important, right? The matter is that it is in sync. So let's talk about how it's in sync at IKA. If you tell me, you've just described now a portfolio strategy that's quite concentrated. You want to do 1 to 2 million euro bets. That also drives that you're spending a lot of time with the individual portfolio companies, for example, start with time to decision making.

13:06We try not to be slower than other VCs in the way that, so it's sort of like, you'd think that, okay, if you're making less decisions, if you're making less correct decisions, does that mean that you're taking longer? And that's definitely not the case for us. We talked about this before, but we emphasize like founders and how we think about founders a huge amount in the way that we do our process. And our process is really set up for that. I think one of the other things that we were doing some analysis on the investments that we made in fund one and three quarters of the investments there was not a competing term sheet and that isn't the same as saying that you know we found those companies they weren't raising they were it's just at that point in time we were the VC that was that was happy to lead and I think that points to a bit like you were talking about you know your construction and your style need to be in sync you also need to have like a high level view on the kind of companies that you want to back and like build behind that and our view like we love consumer tech and specifically that means that we love direct-to-consumer businesses but we also kind of love the layer below it so you know direct-to-consumer businesses like runner um run training and and jude in bladder control like out and out d2c businesses that are absolutely flying and we we kind of love what they're doing and their model and then the layer below it you've got businesses like axle which is building in the home energy space but selling distributing through manufacturers or hive which is logistics and and working you know their customers or retailers but consumer experience is the product their service like those things to us we just love and understand and i think that isn't the case for a lot of bcs today like there's this kind of natural tendency to shy away from stuff that operates in the real world and is providing something to people in their life outside of their work.

15:03And that is a huge, again, a huge part of our decision-making process. And then I think another thing that people don't talk about enough in VC is kind of knowing where the bar is and how that influences your decision. In consumer, we have a really direct to consumer, we have a really strong view that capital efficiency, as in kind of building without burning a lot of cash or growing quickly without burning a lot of cash is important and possible. But a lot of people don't share that view. And so the reason they don't share that view is because they just haven't seen it. And when you see it, when you kind of work with a company that is growing four or five X a year and profitable, you're like, well, that's the bar.

15:40So when you meet another team and then they're not growing because they say they don't have the cash or that's got to factor into your decision-making, which I suppose all just comes back to So having a degree of focus enables you to be like, that's the bar. And we're not going to back companies that aren't meeting that bar. I think you're absolutely right. The way I phrase this, so I have an edge framework that we'll soon publish, or maybe at the time this goes out, we have published. I think what is so integral to what you're describing here is that when you're really knowledgeable and thoughtful around you having picked this sector and doubling down there, you're building reps constantly within that.

16:26And it's both within the decision-making process that you're putting in place and have for your portfolio model. So you're thoughtful about making yourselves better and better at executing at this, but also within the vertical. So I actually think that you're not doing yourself enough service when you say, well, we don't have a longer time to decision. You might not in days, but you do an hour spent because you also when you meet a consumer founder, you have tons of hours already invested that you're building on, which if you're a generalist investor, you don't have. And when you run a portfolio that's very concentrated, you want to be typically also, I think, very specialized so that you can piggyback on this increased concentration of your work hours as well.

17:14Because it's not just about concentrating capital. It's also about concentrating time spent and invested in thinking about this. Does all this make sense to you, John, the way I talk about it? Yeah, it does. And it kind of triggered another thought in my mind, which is the value that you get from working closely with companies that you back that are performing really well is so far beyond just the kind of value increase in your shareholding. Because you see what kind of great execution looks like and it becomes the bar for everything else. And it becomes the way that you interact with companies that maybe aren't performing at a level at the moment in terms of helping them think about how they can get there.

17:50and it becomes how you think about when you're making decisions on new investments. And so, yeah, again, that's something, that learning is something that VCs don't talk about enough in my view. I completely agree. And I apply it a bit to the LP world as well, in that I say that it's inherently incredibly difficult to invest in venture because almost any VC out there is incredibly good at what they do and they are put in the game because they are already very accomplished. So the average person walking on this earth will be meeting someone who is very likely to be an outlier based on their own frame of reference.

18:32However, if you spend time in venture, you realize that even within venture, we have outliers that are a million times more thoughtful, that are a million times more networked, that are a million times more experienced than the average VC. And it's the same thing with founder land, right? When you're a direct investor, when you meet founders, you meet incredible human beings with a go-getter energy that no one else has. So as an angel coming into the space, you can very quickly be baffled that this guy is incredible. This person is incredible. I'm also going to back her because... But the fact of the matter is that once you've been in the game long enough and you've seen the ones that build unicorn companies, then you realize, okay, this is actually the bar.

19:15And I think that we call it a bit having experienced greatness. And I think it very much applies to venture. Yeah, we talk about something internally called bias for action. And it's that kind of, when faced with a problem, is the kind of natural instinct to take action, make a decision and move on and see what happens the other side of it? Or is it to pause? And the best founders we work with just have like unbelievable, even like almost uncomfortable bias for action and until you've seen it you kind of can't even believe it's possible and so one of the things that we're always talking about when we're meeting as a team is like how long is it like what have they achieved in the amount of time they've been working on this and and you can kind of tie yourself to knots on it and then suddenly you meet a team where they've built you know you don't really understand how they manage to build what they build in the time that they built and it's kind of out there and people are using it you're like oh okay that's what we were looking for like it's the problem is you see it so rarely that you You kind of have to keep reminding every now and then until you meet another company like, oh, that was what it was.

20:18Can I ask a really difficult question? It's a controversial one, especially if some of your associates and principals listen in. I had this conversation with a GP a couple of weeks back. We spoke about the relevance slash role of non-senior people in venture because of exactly what we just described, which is if you haven't seen great. It's very, very hard to judge whether what you're in front of is great. And almost by definition, you have to be quite experienced to have had exposure to a large data set of greatness. And then I'm sometimes thinking, does it make sense to have an army of analysts or principals that come not from, and principals can be incredibly, and so can associates as an analyst, but many of them, by definition, will have been hired in from roles where they have yet to prove greatness.

21:20How do you think about that in terms of can you really, how do you make sure that you're comfortable having founders not getting to you as the partner because of someone who has yet to see greatness having taken them out of the pipeline? You can spread that across a few different things. So one, I think paranoia in venture is really important. What good looked like or great looked like 10 years ago is very different to what great looks like today. And so I actually think there's a massive risk the other way around, which is if you sit in your early 40s thinking that you understand what excellence looks like from a 25-year-old founder without surrounding yourself with people who are closer in age to them, you're probably going to miss some stuff.

22:18So, and it's, it's been, I've been in venture now 18 years and, and it's the kind of weird transition from being the youngest person in the room to the oldest person in the room and not really realizing it's happened until like suddenly like, whoa, okay. And what that means in terms of your ability to build affinity with an entrepreneur, who's at a completely different life stage for you, all of that kind of stuff. So I think having different points of view in a team and people who are using products in a different way and people who are interacting with their peer group in a different way is really important point one and then i do think if you were to say to someone who doesn't have a lot of experience in venture go out and make investing decisions that could cause all sorts of problems because they don't have the experience that's built up in in making bad decisions making good decisions but to say to them that you can meet and assess teams and put them through to the the next round which is for us is a first meeting with Camilla or I that for me is is fine because you know as long as their job is not to make investment decisions their job is to find companies and teams that look like they're doing something really interesting and then for us to make investment decision as a team once we get past that stage how do you describe this John inside the firm how do you describe it to your your employees your juniors how do you describe the bar?

23:43Do you describe it as you need to be super interested in wanting to back this team before you put it forward? So Camilla or I? Or do you describe it as this is the bar? This is what it needs to kind of qualify at? And once that is hit, it passes on. So it's changed a lot because so we have two people doing that. It's Esther and Hamish doing that at Ica. Hamish has been at Ica for four years and Esther for three. So they, and if you look at the, a lot of the really high performing companies in the Ica portfolio, they've had like close engagement with. So they built up a lot of that bar themselves.

24:28It's not like they don't know, they don't have that. So it's super important that you make sure that the junior team members have exposure to the established portfolio as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then I think the other thing is that you can, so when someone first joins, first of all, you don't immediately get their meeting teams on their own. And then second is when they are, you make sure that they're comfortable having a very, like what they put a lot through. So you want it that way around rather than the other way around. And then they get the feedback from you on once they put through that, you know, within 10 minutes of a call, it's clear that they're not going to meet what we want to do, like what we're looking for.

25:10They're not necessarily bad companies, but they're not going to be what we're looking for. And then they start to get that kind of pattern recognition of what teams get a long way through the eco process. And then I think the other thing that we do internally, which is that every company that Hamish or SGM meets gets put into a Slack channel with a recommendation, but with a summary of the notes. So we can say, actually, you know what, I'd like to meet that team because it looks interesting. Or I don't want to meet that team, even though you'd like to. So we see everything. it's not like there's this kind of whole batch of companies that we're never seeing as and as a team as well because like hamish esther and lissier all have like really valuable insights into into the companies that we're looking at yeah i love decision making within vc firms it's so interesting but it's also also the product of a vc firm almost right good decisions so one of the things we really respect you guys for is how you valued founders um and your whole framework around that we've spoken a bit about when are we going to do a full episode on this you're a bit like ah it's actually one of our core things so i'm unsure how much i want to divulge to the world but at least a little segment here will you tease us yeah sure so so well it's not too i mean it's not a secret because we do it right so um we just have this belief that single biggest driver of success in the companies that we back is a founder's ability to scale the leadership ahead of the company so So you see a lot of times where company grows and then the founder kind of is trying to catch up because they're so busy.

26:52Whereas we think it needs to be the other way around. Like the founder is constantly trying to get ahead of where their business is going to be. Therefore, if that is what we believe is the single biggest driver of success, then in our decision making, we need to optimize for that. And so we have a process that involves a combination of a psychometric into what we call a founder interview which is 90 minutes with each founder where we go we basically say look we don't want to talk about the business we just want to talk about them and understand how they got to this point and what their strengths and weaknesses are and then we do a really detailed set of references alongside that and all of that is about trying to build a picture of the founder and what they're looking to do and what they're capable of doing and how they're thinking about development and how they're impacting on other people and where they've been successful in other areas of their life and how they learned from that and how are they going to apply it and i think like you have to really believe in it because we give up other stuff in order to do that but i just i just think it is really important and and i come back to that if you ask any vc pretty much any vc what is the most important thing in the way they make decisions they will say people if you ask them how do you make people decisions it normally breaks down and it goes back to product to market and if you if you really think about a pitch it normally is someone pitching product to market for an hour not pitching how they're going to build their business like what they've done that leads them to this point and that's what we're trying to change and we yeah the more we've done it we've been doing it now for four years the more we believe in it i always say like the other thing is that you then go into an investment really understanding that person and understanding the life that they've lived.

28:44And that's kind of cool. Even just on a personal note, you know more about them than you would do. Would you ever bag a founder you don't like on an individual level? I mean, yes. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because I don't tend to not like people but like reasons outside of them like demonstrating low integrity you know like i i really definitely don't need to feel like i i could be like i would want to be in the same friendship group as the founder but someone you like uh let's say elon musk um because elon is just a great example of such a personality that's so over the edge compared to anything that anyone has ever experienced anyone that you know has taken the time to talk to a journalist about their experiences with elons all say even his friends this guy is very intense and very special to be with let's put it like that i mean that is a question that i think a lot of bcs are like are like struggling with it's very hard to go back so we're backing founders at seed it's kind of very hard to post rash like i'd love to know what he was like at the seed stage of you know when we would have been able to invest whether or not we would have then felt comfortable or uncomfortable the character you see now is not a seed stage backable founder right with a 68 million pound fund so i don't know like he has kind of behaviors and characteristics that work for him also because he comes from the position that he does so to say yeah but it's it's challenging to me because i think tesla as the leader in the transition to evs you know has really accelerated that transition which i think is an important transition we get asked the question a lot as an impact investor and and how but i just don't like it it's not for me it's not a relevant question today because of what he's trying to achieve and who he is it's just not really like i go back to like the value set of the founders when i said like people i don't like without question their integrity the value set of the founders matters a lot and i would really struggle i mean i just wouldn't back someone who i felt had been dishonest in a meeting that's something that i personally find really hard to row back from but that is also that's a true or pure business decision, right?

31:20It's not about you not liking someone. It's about saying, first and foremost, business for anyone successful will typically stem from high integrity decisions and way of conducting themselves. Because you can build a short-term success without integrity, for sure. But it's very rare you can take it all away if you leave a long line of corpses behind you? I think the intensity point is interesting. So most of the people I've worked with who are very successful as founders are very intense. Like when I'm going to meet with them, I'm a little bit on edge because everyone around them has to perform.

32:04They're not nasty people. They're not like they communicate. They care about the people that work for them. They care about what they're trying to create as a business. But there's this whole kind of like weird dynamic adventure where a lot of people kind of see themselves as the customer. I think with the best founders, if you see yourself as a customer, you really won't get on with them. Like you have a job to be, you're a part of their company, you have a job to do. If you're going to see them, like they want, you need to be prepared for that meeting. You need to have thought about what value you're going to bring.

32:34You need to think about the way you're interacting in a conversation. like at this you can feel the bar that they have for people around them and it is intense and i i love that that's different to like liking someone that is such a great point i haven't thought about it as such but i think you're absolutely right the people i in a way want to put my money with the most are the guys that i'm i'm not sure i would want to spend the whole weekend with him or her because i know it's going to be so hard like i'm going to be thinking all the time, trying to catch up, trying to like, because I know that the bullshit meter is super high with them.

33:12Their patience with lack of performance is super high. So it's like, I think I get you 100 % that with these types of people, the ones that I am the most impressed with are also people that every time I have an interaction with them, I'm being very thoughtful about how am going into this. Be curious to hear if everyone would agree with that. Do you ever use it as your measure in terms of, I like the company, I like this style, I like the business and the whole ambition and so on, but wait a second. I'm not anxious about meeting the founder. One of those steps in our process is our all-team meeting and it's really early on and the five of us are in the room and and the founders we try to make it face to face and and we ask the founders to to go through the the deck those meetings where i'm walking into those meetings like worried about how we're going to show up as a team we i think we always show up great but just you know you're like we need to like ask good questions and those are the meetings probably where like that's a good pointer and it's got nothing to do with how competitive the round is that's different this is just like these people really know their stuff and we need to like show that we can we can kind of get yeah yeah again i want to be super interesting now i want to ask you a completely different question before we go into uh to your views on impact and i want to ask you just because i'm curious any strongly held beliefs that you recently have had to change your mind on a lot of what we do is in in health and we're really focused on shift to a more preventative healthcare model And a shift towards a more preventative healthcare model requires earlier diagnosis, right?

34:55We need to get ahead of things quicker so that we can treat them outside of the clinical setting. Like I always just thought like earlier diagnostics was a complete no-brainer. I couldn't think like why it wouldn't be a total no-brainer for every part of the system. Like it should be, you just diagnose a condition earlier, it's a lot less expensive to treat it. and the health outcome is likely to be much better and that the life experience for the patient while being treated is much better so it's like you know everything is better it's lower cost it's better outcomes i still believe that like that is definitely true and it will happen but i don't think i quite realize some of the like structural barriers to that shift and there are two that are kind of interesting that are slightly mind-blowing.

35:44So one is because of the way that treatment pathways develop off the back of research studies, when you diagnose a condition, if you're diagnosing it significantly earlier than it's been diagnosed before, you don't have the research studies behind the treatment. As in, no one's done the research to show, okay, if you can diagnose this particular condition in year one rather than year five, then you treat it like this. And so therefore, or the health outcomes are much better. It's kind of common sense that they would be. But if you don't have that, you don't have the economics to prove into the system that that diagnostic should exist.

36:20So it's not just, okay, we've diagnosed this early. You need to prove that it's better. So what you're saying is actually this, you walked around with this conception that early diagnosis is a total no-brainer for health. And for that reason, it would also be a total no-brainer when it comes to a good venture investment. Because the outcome would be so many times better. But the fact of the matter is that the structure of the industry is so fucked that you end up having, you know, actually not a market for these solutions because you don't have the clinical studies and the treatment pathways for it.