E568 | Ivan Burazin on Building Daytona, the Computer for Agents

27:03So they say, oh, we're using this. They told us, oh, I know what that is. Like, even if they don't know, I want them to know. And that's sort of the idea for us. Sort of saturating the mindshare in that place. Tell me a bit about, and this is for both of you, VC behavior support during a pivot. Like, what has been helpful? What has been absolutely not helpful? He didn't tell us. He told us after the pivot. Yeah, so I actually... He's like, oh, by the way, we just pivoted like three months ago. To be clear, to be clear, if you look at your investor updates, I hint on them the first few, like three months before, I start like preparing them.

27:39It's like, oh, we're trying this thing, this collab with AI, this collab with a cloud ID, this collab, like I hinted on... Oh, you did a hackathon. So you did a hackathon. And then he was also mentioning that one of the outputs of the hackathon was actually a good idea. So why not spend some time, you know, building that? Yeah, so I did, I was very, like, very conscious, like, self-conscious of this pivot. And I did. So Upfront Ventures, which is on our board, like, they knew. Like, we sort of, I felt the obligation to tell them. Like, we're doing this thing. What do you guys think? They were like, okay, sure.

28:12Like, we explained it. And they're like, okay, this makes sense. But I have to tell you. And so we have a bunch of angels on our cap table. Like, we have a bunch. It's like through an SVD mostly. But when I shot it out, the amount of support was insane. and i was like oh shit like almost like half the people replied so like 30 emails i get back and this was one of them and they're like go fucking go like let's fucking go amazing that you pull this off i'm like okay i should have done this sooner like i didn't sleep for like two weeks trying to figure out should we do this or not so we did i didn't seek support i was more like getting the the terrain sort of ready but once we did it um it ended up being really really people were really supportive even before we've got proof points that it makes sense like the proof points came what two months ago or something like that like that's when the proof points came but before that they everyone was quite quite supportive um of that which is an interesting dynamic i feel that the more i think about the world in general and this is like my personal observation is like the world appreciates you for having i don't know what the lack of a term is like courage or balls like whatever you want to say like i'm not trying to say it's like it's not a male thing can be male female doesn't matter um it's just like to have conviction and that's why you sort of see i think and this is my breakdown of like you know we people celebrate criminals we can say whatever we want like there's a ton of movies about criminals like everyone watches it like it is a thing and everyone that has the gall maybe there's a better to like try something it doesn't matter on what side of the legal framework or what you're thinking about it's like if you have the gall to try something audacious people respect that it's insane like it's very hard to generalized personally but like so even fire festival which i used to run conferences so watching that was terrifying to me um because you all we all think we're fakes until that actually happens and you actually do the conference and so like the fire festival just because he had the gall to like invite you know the top influencers the top supermodels do it on a public rose island there's like two documentaries about the guy right he ended up in jail he's doing another thing fine but you know we work like you know everyone adam new industry is a new fund like congrats to him like just having the goal to do something for better or worse like people actually respect and i might have done wrong examples here and hopefully no one cites me on saying like you have to do negative things that's not what i'm trying to say that's not what i'm trying to say at all he wants to spy into these people yeah yeah no no but i'm like so like you look at you know musk who just who tries like has the goal to say oh i'm gonna make a rocket ship and we're gonna like reuse that and go to mars like you have to have a goal to do that like how who gives you the right to say that?

30:41Like, how do you, you know nothing out of this, like, right? So it works in any dimension. I feel that we as society respect anyone that like has the gall to do that, which is a quite interesting. And it's hard when you're the one that has to do that. But once you do it, like people very much do respect that. I think it's really the type of people you surround yourself with. But in our ecosystem, if you're surrounding yourself with the right type of people, 95 % of what you're saying is correct. Whether that is true for the general public, I'm not sure because people do like the, you know, when you rain, you fall down.

31:13People do like to hit you in an hour. They do. They do. But it's not, it doesn't exclude it because you still have people watching all the movies of like all that. Like you have everyone watching Wolf of Wall Street and all the five Steve Jobs movies. Like, I don't know how many Steve Jobs. There's like a ton of them. Right. And so like, it doesn't matter on what side, just like if you had, if you went out and said, I'm going to do something super crazy and audacious, everyone's like, oh, I want to watch this. Of course, if Jeff Bezos lost all his money, everyone would spit on him right now. I mean, everybody in the sense of general population of people.

31:47But I think that doesn't exclude each other of being an entertaining thing. I don't know. But yeah. Honestly, I think that short form social media, TikTok shows very clearly what you're describing because it's almost people doing audacious things in some type of microcosm. I'm going to go in my kitchen. I'm going to do something incredibly stupid. And then that goes viral because we all love to see it. And I think it is true on a big scale and low scale. And then I actually thought a bit the opposite when you were about to talk about your angels and how they reacted. But it goes to show this importance around the sophistication of angels that you have.

32:25When I say in sophistication, it's in venture. It's in understanding what venture is. your pivot story and the market that you went for will make an angel that is happy to see you go for the moon and just maybe this will fail completely. I'm perfectly all right with it. I made 50 other bets last year. But if you have an angel, which we unfortunately have too many of in Europe, especially where they have five bets, they care enormously. A lot, yeah. No, no, no. work like you have real revenue. Don't fuck it up now. And here I'm being a bit facetious as well, but I do think it is. I think there's something very important there for anyone listening in that like it takes that wide portfolio to be able to wish for every one of your founders to just run at the biggest opportunity the fastest they can.

33:17I'd love to ask you, Ivan, because now you've very much laid out how you've caught lightning in a bottle. The question is then, what have you done these last six months? Because when the Uber drivers know you and they all almost ask you to give together with the payment details, they also ask you for your API key. What do you then do? How do you make the company ready? What are the first things you got to get right? What have you maybe gotten wrong that you think could have been done differently? Whereas funding and all of this? The thing that we all get, I mean, I don't think it's all, like I used to get caught up with is all the things around the company is like, oh what is the brand what is the logo what is this like how who is the what is the structure what is like the all that that all means nothing that's like that's all useless at this point in time right it is can you make it sounds like like very cliche paul graham's make people make something people want but it's like i've done multiple companies i've never actually felt pure pmf which i think it is now and i think i haven't like because i've never had it before and i think i have it now right where the point is that you have so much work and so much customers and so much demand that you just can't finish the date like the day ends and just you don't sleep no one sleeps my cto is gonna die i think he sleeps like four hours a day or something like that like and yes yesterday i was speaking to evan i was like hey like we're still a catch-up call yeah i haven't spoken for a while and he was like we're having the podcast tomorrow no like that's our catch-up call yeah that's our catch-up call although we can't talk about a lot of things there's a lot of interesting things to talk about it's insane to be able to get that thing and so when you get that there's a lot of things you have to do so we obviously we had this great idea when we started even daytona we had like this brand the brand guidelines design of the web construction of the team we had like cycles of releases everything was as you should be a company daytona 2.0 has nothing like none of this like we don't have official releases we push out every day or every other day as soon as you like get a chance to you feel like internally things are falling apart sometimes it's like you have we sometimes have outages because of like so much the usage that we didn't plan on having that because someone just like fired up, you know, 50 ,000 of these sandboxes instead of the average 10, which they usually do.

35:27And you have like customers coming in and then you have, they have requests and requirements and you're trying to solve all these things. And so what you're trying to do basically is every single day, make sure that more people are coming in at the same pace, which my CTO wants to shoot me because of this, because I'm still doing the mansion things to get people in, but you have to make sure that nothing breaks at the same time. But you also don't want to over architect things because I've done that. And we've done that historically where you're making this massive product for like massive usage and then no one shows up.

35:55Right. So it is basically how quickly can you make that small thing that people want, which I really didn't understand. That is basically the thesis of YC and those companies of YC. You often see, and we work with a lot of these companies, we're like, the thing that they created is so thin. I'm like, oh, but it's so thin. It is because they're just trying to figure out what is the key problem they're trying to solve. the depth will come later they'll solve that um as you go and i think that's probably the most right way to build out these companies especially in that it's always been fast moving but this one's insanely fast like the the ai boom is like so fast and so if you haven't hit any turbo pmf like after three four months just like kill whatever you're doing and like move on to the next thing it's hard to do that but you should and sorry i i didn't answer your question exactly but But actually, Ivan, let's stay on that.

36:43And then we go to the scaling part afterwards and how to get the organization and everything ready. But I would just love to ask Enes to react a bit to what you said. Because hopefully, being an investor, he has seen other people catch lightning in a bottle. And can then maybe elaborate a bit on the pattern here. You think you do. And now you just realize you haven't. There's always something that gains even more. So, I mean, we had three unicorns in our portfolio in fund one. Obviously, all of them grew super fast. you would see 3x your year growth for like, you know, five, six years straight.

37:13And then that gets you to almost 100 million ARR and then, you know, makes you a unicorn. But then with AI, that completely reshaped our thinking. Even in our portfolio, our Fall AI went from zero to a hundred million dollars in ARR in like, what, 15 months? I vividly remember when they signed their first customer, it was like end of Q1 2024. And now they're like a hundred million dollars in ARR. So you think, you know, how strong product market market looks like. And then something even stronger comes around. and I'm like, oh yeah, I mean, now I understand what fast means. But a lot of the founders, just like what Ivan mentioned, they think they have product market fit when they don't.

37:47And then they try to do these brute force sales and that company initially turns into more of a linear progression and that has almost like a diminishing or an asymptote where growth stalls and you end up with companies with a couple of million dollars in ARR. We've seen a lot of those in our portfolio as well. So what Ivan mentioned in terms of that iterative mindset, understanding when there's a pull from the market and then doubling down as you feel the pull, but not doubling down when there's no pull. Instead, trying to iterate around the business levers definitely makes sense. That's why C-Montra works, especially in AI, more so in AI.

38:20No, for sure. And like, it's more, I was talking to my CTO the other day. It's like, it's more like a feel, like there's metrics, I can share metrics and I've shared with our investors, but it's just like a feel like every single day that you have like five new customers are like pinging you on Slack. Then you have five new emails. People are signing, you have no idea where all this stuff is coming from. and then something breaks and then 10 people call you because it's broken well that means that someone's actually using your thing right because otherwise if they weren't using it no one would call you right so there's like all these things happening and they're happening at the same time and then you look at metrics and they're good they're great but the the feel is even more that you know that that that is happening right now so yeah uh so what we're trying to do at the same time is add gas to the fire but also make sure that like you can contain the fire or generate revenue or serve those people there.

39:06I was going to ask, fastest company to reach 1 million ARR. How did you come up with that? What does that mean? Did you go company by company and looked when they reached a million? Yeah. So for us, it was like month two. We're like, oh, it's like 80-ish, whatever. It ended up at 84. But the three weeks in, we're like, huh, we're like at 67, whatever it was. You could see your own trajectory. And I remember the companies we did before, you know how long it takes to get a million ARR? Like it took a long time to get there. I'm like, shit, this is in two months. Has anyone ever done this? And you start researching and obviously there's not a lot of exact data.

39:42And most people look at that zero to a hundred million, which is, I completely respect that. And also I respect that zero to one million is not as impressive as it was zero to 100. I get it. But also as a founder, one of your jobs and to keep top of people's mind is like, what things can you push out to the market so that people continuously think about you, right? And that's just one of them. And then I started researching this and there's not exact data, but I do have like quotes or citations of where I pulled this out and you have like rough ideas. And so you have like Guillermo of Vercel saying, oh, we started monetizing 18 months ago and we just passed like a million or whatever.

40:19So not exact dates, but you get like approximately where that is. Right. And then you have like Cloudflare and all these other companies you can sort of like work back. And then you have like public investor updates of Twilio when they're at 750 ,000. in and that was whatever x months in it wasn't two right it was like 10 or 12 or whatever i forgot the number right now but basically they're all and when you look at all the companies especially infra companies it basically starts at 12 months like at 12 months is where you start getting close to the millionaire and then it goes out to like 36 months the reason the the the examples that were closer was aws us and i forgot which other company was closer to here but aws was super fast similarly because it was Amazon, because they built it internally and because they already had internal customers that were trying it.

41:06And then when they opened the doors, it just basically like started right away. And even for them, it took them like three-ish months to get there from the data that I had found. Right. And so the reason is like, oh, well, we seem pretty fast. And the reason is because Infra, in general, the way Infra works, unlike consumer, consumer, you can think of like lovable, fastest company of all time, is that you guys will come to lovable swipe a credit card, same day, revenue comes in same day. For Infra, so the Twilio's, the Stripes, the US, the AWS, whatever, is like, oh, cool. I know this exists. Okay, I know what this is.

41:40Then I have a use case. Then I build a use case. Then I launch the product. Then users come in. So you have like these steps. And that's why we did the billboards in advance, because we're already cognizant of these steps that happen. And then can we already skip over these steps before the product is launched. And so that's the reason we sort of like announced that. And we did screenshots of our data because like today everyone's the fastest growing company and all the graphs are like without numbers, they're just graphs. And like, okay, we might as well like be more authentic with this and actually shoot out screenshots so people can say that.

42:11And people did respect that. There were some people that hated on it. And they're like, there's an actual screenshot and they're like, okay, done. Respect, we're out, good for you. And I mean, obviously now we have to get to the 10 million and to the 100 million and whatnot. Yeah, now we're all waiting that. Now, if you extrapolate going to a million in two months and with all the pipeline that you have six months in, a year in, how would the error look like? I mean, now there's built up expectations. Yeah. But just on expectation-wise, our plan was to be like three million-ish end of year, end of year, originally.

42:42And it's way faster. But now you're there probably, like end of August. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I did not say end of August. Do not expect that in the investor update. But yes, it's definitely sooner than we expected, for sure. And then this is the perfect pivot, obviously, to then talk about how do you make the company and everything ready to be able to actually accommodate this skill? Because it's not as simple. It's one thing to catch the genie. Now you've got to harness it. You have to harness it. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things that you have to do. And so one thing people think about always is throwing headcount on that, which true, you have to add people.

43:15But also if you add too much headcount and it breaks up the team, you hire less higher quality. There's like all these things you have to figure out what to do. and what is the most impactful and slow, I actually think about slow way of hiring people because you don't want to overhire. Like the easiest thing you do is hire 50 people, easiest quote unquote, right? But like, what is the type of work? What is the culture? What is, and I don't like the word cultural specifically. I feel there's like a bad connotation to that now. But basically when you come in any company, there's a vibe sort of like how people work, right?

43:45And so our vibe, and so there was like, and last week there was like a huge, huge, I should say, there's a huge interruption in work there's like a two really large customers just came in and overloaded the system and i was in the u.s that most of the team was in europe i had woken up gone to sleep woken up they were awake the entire time like the engineering team all the time no one was asked there was no like hey can you please stay awake to solid trial they just like piled through like i think they took like two hours stints of naps or whatever to survive but no one ask them to do it right and so if something is needed to do and that's the way we you know work there's no question that you will or will not and we all have our own like jobs and scopes of jobs and everyone takes care of those and so that is how we get things like it's just one example but like can you hire more people like that the same thing with like flying so i was in europe two weeks ago i had to be in a meeting in san francisco 2 p.m the next day i was there 2 p.m the next day like literally that's like two it's two flights it's across the world 2 p.m the next day i'm there and everyone else like depending on what your job is you will be there where you need to do and no one's sort of asked to do that it's like just like if it is understood then it's understood that we have to do that and so like can we back to your question is like one of the things you have to do obviously one of the things we have to do is get the right people in the right places that are literally breaking to be able to harness um that genie but make sure we hire them in respect to what is needed.

45:11So on the GDM side is like, we have a part-time head of compliance, probably have the full-time there. It's interesting, especially when we get to larger customers, how much compliance and docs you have to go through with them. It's not just having SOC2, it's like all these security questionnaires and all of these things you have to jump holes through and you literally have to have a person to run this. Otherwise I have to run this instead of doing other things. And continuously we have, we do a lot of white glove support. People say about white gloves or board. I'm not sure if they all do that.

45:40I haven't experienced it. But for us, every sophisticated user, sophisticated means it could be a large or small customer, but they have a high probability of usage. Because in infrastructure, we have a large power law like NVC. So what we have to do as a company is make sure we get the fast growing companies, because those are the ones that will help us grow. That's how we got to a million. And if we get the right two companies, we're at 10 million, like two, not 100 companies, right? And you have to make sure we're in these companies. And so the way you make sure they get in is as soon as they're interested, they're in a Slack channel with the entire team.

46:13Obviously one person owns that, but like every question, every bump, every feel, everything they get, there's a person on the end of that just flying to them. You can use AI for support. Obviously we can help. You can do a lot of things, but making sure that they get from, we want to use your product to be fully onboarded and integrated with zero bumps or at least every bump is taken care of goes a very very long way i read a book and i'm sorry i'm feel like i'm giving you guys a chance to talk just one thing is i since i ran a conference i read all the books i could find about conferences and there's not a lot there's books about experiences theater and um what are the disneylands of the world what are they called these adventure parks yeah theme parks right They all are part of this experience economy.

47:02And the thing that a lot of the key lessons I learned through that is every experience can be into a positive. Not even every, but every bad experience can be a net positive experience. Like if a shitty experience, so that example is like an airline, right? Your flight is late or it's canceled, whatever. If at the, before they come, the person that has a canceled flight comes to you, that you come to them and say, you know what? but we're sorry, it's canceled because of this or this. The next flight is at this time. We have booked you a hotel, a whatever, blah, blah, blah. And you have the next flight.

47:37These people are not only not angry, they will actually positively remark that airline. Because even though their timelines are missed, everything is missed, the way that you presented a solution to the problem before they got the opportunity to get mad at you, because we're all human. And they're like, these guys appreciate me. These people appreciate me. They solve the entire problem. There's nothing for me to do now. I can't get mad because there's like a car waiting for me to take me to whatever hotel. I have dinner and they'll drive me back and they'll compensate me for all these things. Like, this is great, right?

48:12These are the things that you do. And I remember there's one about Disneyland. And I haven't been actually to the hotel in Disneyland. I don't know who has can reference check. This is that there's supposedly this red phone, which calls room service right away. and like magically give you whatever, like ice cream sundaes for the kids or whatever it is. And just pick it up as like the bat phone. And like you right away get connected. There's no way they say, what do you need? And they serve it right away. And it's like these experiential things, people don't think about this much in products because products are not supposed to have experience with people.

48:42But if you do these things, you can win a lot. And like we're a startup, we're an infrastructure company. There's issues obviously. But if you get ahead of all these issues and make sure you're ahead of that, all of them become net. positive things. And I want to keep doing that for as long as I can. And I want to ask you, is there something here on the growth journey, the getting ready to scale or actually starting to scale part that you'd love to ask Ivan about? I heard this phrase yesterday and I loved it. It's called seed strapping. It's companies raising seed, not raising an A or a B and then becoming unicorns.

49:17And apparently it became a term in and know, with cell phone with AI and with the growth that Daytona has seen or companies like Daytona, Fowler, a bunch of examples like that, you can see, strap your way towards a unicorn, right? And then obviously what that means for series A, B, C, V, C is tough game. And then obviously they want to go, you know, they want to do this shift left movement as to doing more preceded investments. And then what that means for us is obviously even fiercer competition. But from your perspective, as Daytona, and I'm looking at your margins, your growth, do you think you're in a trajectory like that or do you think some some companies are in such a trajectory where they would raise you know three four five six up to 10 million and then go the unicorn route i mean there's a lot of ways to think about this and i see like raising pre-seed and seed seems so easy right now in hindsight like i could like the next come i could raise a pre-seed tomorrow for my next come like easy like not even me like i could teach someone to do that like you just talk to people all day there's so much so many ways to do it like we only had one call no we only had one call yeah i think so just one we had two calls we had well we met i met with dunia and then and then there was a call and that's it yeah yeah okay but you can do so many routes like as a pre for a pre-seed that's a pre-seed i mean like this is like a two three four million thing like that is a seed usually that could be a seed as well and to do that you can do like you can do a one multi-stage when dreesen can write your check sequera can write your check you know ennis can write your check or it could be like a a couple of pre-seed funds like it's the first time someone mentioned my name among those you know yeah yeah i'm trying yeah i'm trying yeah yeah and you could do that but you can also be like i think you were the counter example yeah it's still the same it's still in the same sentence it's still in the same lines don't take it away from him don't take it away from him um and you can also just like do a party round where you just like do a bunch of angels there are so many angels that will write like 20 50 000 100 000 checks and you'll get your your number so there's there's so many ways to get to that initial amount and what you need.

51:19The interesting dichotomy of AI right now is that on one side, you have people saying, oh, you'll never need to raise money because AI automates everything. On the other side, like it has never been more expensive. Like the cost of everything is so, so high. And so you're raising more. So there is both of that. But to your specific question, like potentially, yes. And we think about this as well. And so I've talked to a partner at almost every VC fund in San Francisco, I think. If someone hasn't, they can reach out. But I think I've talked to a partner from every single one. The thing for us is when we talk to them, especially since in the position we are at without exposing too much, is the potential next round that we would do is an A.

52:03And so if we do an A, it has to be on the terms that we want with the partner that we want. Otherwise, we're not going to do it, at least now. The reason is we have enough cash from our investors among them and is here in the bank account and revenue is growing at a pace that is pretty good, pretty insane. And our gross profit margins are there. So we're already, as far as like, as far as COGS are concerned, like we're already in the positive, like we're already making that money in. And so we were just, we're in the negative for the employees that we hire. And I assume in the next six months, we can already be cashflow positive or neutral if we decided to do that.

52:40Now, you also might want to grow faster. There's competitors. There's other things you want to do there. So it is a, you have to think about it. But I would bet you that there will be more and more of these, as you call them, what was the word? Seed? Seed strapping. Seed strapping. Seed strapping? It's like bootstrapping, but seed strapping, yeah. And I don't know where that puts for investors as well, because it depends on where you get liquidity later on. The thing that's interesting for me and the way I think about investors always is why are public companies more interesting to people than bootstrap companies?

53:15Even if the owners, the founders get even the similar. So you have like bootstrap companies that make$10 million a year or whatever it is. And so over the course of 10 years, they'll make$100 million. And so getting$100 million is not trivial as a founder still. Like even as an exit, you personally all the way down, right? And the reason I think that this is true is that the vested interest of a large number of people in the company push that to hire. So the thing is like, if I raise a new round, my lawyers love it, right? Like they love it because they get to charge me more, right? Then there's more investors in there.

53:50And then I have to like hire external services. Like we have a bunch of external services and the bigger I get, the more external services I have to pay for, right? And then they all have a vested interest that like Daytona is not successful. Now, like the, the billboard companies are, have a vested interest that I'm successful because I like, if it's not us, but someone else, and then as you grow and go, and then when finally, when you're public, then the retail investors outside of the, you know, the BlackRock's, the KKR's and whatever also have a vested interest to be doing well. And then all of these sort of like push you upwards faster than if you were a bootstrap.

54:22So to your question, I think we'll probably see more of these that are the seed level that don't do it for sure, especially if there's no bullish board seat. So no one's pushing them to do that. But net net, I think that a more successful company in general will continue on a similar path as history because of that. I hope so. It's better for us. I like it. I don't want to be obsolete. I like this asset path. Yeah, there you go. Well, honestly, I think that there's VC wisdom is a bit obviously valuation only increases from rounds to rounds. There is especially in AI, not a lot of learning from necessarily a pre-seed to a seed to a series A.

55:03And for that reason, well, if you're a multi-stage fund, might as well plow in the 8 million or 4 million early, make it a bigger round then. And then either you own a bigger chunk later by not having had dilution or it's just gone and then it's smaller checks in the end. So I do actually think that there's a lot of sense behind that. And the growth of funds has definitely allowed it. And then this fact that we have less learning from round to round. There's so much we could unpack. You mentioned something around you wanting your next round to be on your terms. And there's a bunch we could unpack there.

55:41I only want to ask you one question on that because the frothiness of 21 led a lot of people, a lot of founders to have rounds being done where some of the good old governance parts of VC, which can actually be valuable and value add, kind of went out the window. And some would say that that's exactly what's happening in AI today. I love to ask you, good terms in your next round is that no one can ever impact me. I can run the company entirely on my own. Or do you see a point to having governance? I'm sure there's a point to have the governance and that all makes sense. And it's all in the details rather than, oh, I want like a blank check type thing, right?

56:25The way I think about it, if we continue down this path, you don't know if you're going to need dilution again, depending on what you're doing. So if you go down the average path, you're going to do like a series A, then B, then C, then D, then, you know, IP or whatever it is. You dilute yourself on every single one of these, right? And so if you go down that mathematical equation, like how much do you dilute yourself? How much do you let yourself be diluted now versus later? And then there's also a question of like, when you dilute yourself, for what reason are you diluting yourself, right? So very transparently, because of the growth that we have in the revenue that we have, like we can raise money from like individuals if we need it.

57:04We can do like, not essentially, we can do smaller VCs plus community round plus angels plus whatever and still do an A size round today. Like literally we can do that today. But then in that case, you just have the cash. You don't have necessarily the value add. And then when you think about that, it's like, okay, if I can get the money either way, if I need to do it, who am I going to take the money from and who is going to impose these things on top of you. So it's not the same thing to say if VCA, I'm not going to name anyone, gives you 15, 20, 10 million dollars. They impose whatever governance, but they also give you all these other things versus you can get just general money without having anything imposed, but there's very, there's no benefit outside the actual cash.

57:51That's also another way to do it. And then everything in between doesn't really make sense to get guardrails imposed without actually any benefits? Because, I mean, there is order of magnitude, like 1 ,000 VC funds in the Series A. Order of magnitude, there's like 1 ,000. There's like 10 ,000 VC funds in general. And so, right? And so we always talk about like top tier funds or S tier, tier one, tier two, tier three. Like there's a lot. There's like literally 1 ,000 funds we can accept checks from right now. So there's a lot, right? And so who do you take it from? And obviously, depending on the value that they can add and different ones have different value, right?

58:27Some of them are like media outlets. Some are just like super strong brands. Some have like a sales team. There's like different things. Some are like strategic. They can be a huge customer. And so all of these things have trade-offs. So you have to think about all these things. But if no, none of these funds give you anything significant, but they impose different things because they certainly do oppose, then it doesn't make sense to take that. That being said, I also think it's quite different than the 2021 era where a lot of the main metric today is run rate, not ARR in the sense of reoccurring revenue, but it is run rate.

59:00And so there's actually cash being collected and made. I'm not sure that in the 2021 era there was like that much actual cash. It was just like hype and growth and cheap money and all these things. So there is some difference to that. I'm not saying that all these companies were - No, you're absolutely right. Yeah. 21 was driven by frothiness in the capital markets. Now it seems to be frothiness in the customer and demand market, if anywhere, which is a good thing. I mean, they can still die. Like we're in a hype cycle. If this all dies, then all these customers die, then it all falls down. But it's kind of different in that sense.

59:31Like I feel it's different. Ivan, Enes, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It was a pleasure. Well, thanks for having us. It shall be incredibly exciting to see what comes next, Ivan. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys. Before we start the show, a quick note. If you're building or running a fund, you know it takes the right partners. At EUVC, we only work with sponsors we truly believe should be part of your tech stack. Please do take a moment to hear about them. And if you do, reach out, mention EUVC. It's the best way you can support what we do. Thank you so much. Starting off, HSBC Innovation Banking.

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1:01:17It's not just a conference, it's where East meets West, capital meets innovation and the bold set the agenda. If you're playing on the global stage, join us going to Guy Techs this year. If you're gearing up for your next fundraiser and want a placement agent who truly understands emerging managers reach out to cfunds their boutique placement agency that has helped gps across your brace capital from top tier lps we've been on the other side of the table here they are actually good ones to work with so i do urge you to go to cfunds.io to go and check them out and hey before you go if you're looking to discover startups raise capital or connect with innovation leaders do check out dealflow.eu the eu-backed platform bridging founders vcs and corporates.

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