EUVC #260: On Raising Pale Blue Dot Fund II without traveling a single mile with Hampus Jakobsson

0:00Hi, everyone, and welcome to the European VC podcast. I am David and I'm joined by Andreas. Today, we are welcoming Hampus Jacobson with us. Hampus is a GP at Pale Blue Dot. Hampus has been on the pod, so you probably remember him if you're a loyal listener. Pale Blue Dot is an early stage venture fund in Sweden backing European climate tech companies. Pale Blue Dot are investing out of fund too, with a total of 200 million US dollars in AUM and an established portfolio of 32 companies. Notable investments include Montepatch, Overstory, ClimateX and Opna. Today is a special episode and it's fully dedicated to raising a fund virtually.

0:39It came about because Hampus casually mentioned that he hadn't traveled a single mile in the raise of Fund 2, which of course got us super interested in just wanting to do this. So if you're listening in and love our show, drop us a review, follow the pod and subscribe at eu.vc. And now some words from our beloved sponsor. AppyDay is the leading all-in-one ESG platform for GPs. Central to AppyDay's philosophy is that ESG for your portfolio companies must be relevant and value-adding, making you a partner to your companies, not adding more reporting burdens. AppyDay offers AI-led ESG reporting, full SFDR compliance, including disclosure templates, EU taxonomy, carbon accounting, due diligence assessments, and most importantly, tangible tools to help your companies like ESG resources and policy templates.

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2:22Stop acting. Acting. This show is not investment advice and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. Are you tired of only knowing what European VCs sound like? Yawn no more. Leap over to eu.vc where the episodes come alive. Now with every new episode featured in full video, high def, pristine lighting, emotions up close and men and women who pick their boogers, don't settle for eavesdropping on Europe's best investors. Join the Peak Show instead at eu.vc. We had this conversation on the back, I think of me inviting you to Dubai. And to that, you responded, fuck no.

3:07I haven't traveled a single mile. With those exact words, by the way. I think so, yes. So, Hambridge, let's start this off by asking you the obvious question. What was the motivation behind you saying, no, I don't want to travel for this fundraise? It's a confluence of many things. I think that part of it is that we've raised Payable.1 when COVID started. So I think that that, of course, taught us that it's very like you can raise a fund without traveling, like in a sense. I think that also Fund2 came about very peculiarly. What happened was that one of our LPs tried to push us to start Fund2 earlier.

3:46And we're saying, why don't you raise like an opportunity fund or like a second fund or something? and I kind of we had a conversation with them and started talking and then I kind of I don't know I really like I'm obsessed about dating and I just want to say this like I have three kids I'm married I'm not looking to meet anyone else in my life I hope again romantically I think I'm really happy with my relationship but I'm like besarcantly obsessed about dating I think it's like one of the more fascinating topics because the crazy thing about dating is like I'm looking for you you're looking for me and everybody is right which means that it's a strange world in that you have to kind of show enough of yourself, but you can't be transactional and you have to be long-term, you have to be short-term.

4:23And it's very similar to a lot of stuff, right? But the thing is like dating is one of those phenomenons, which we don't talk about a lot. Very few people talk about like the mechanics of dating, but people happily talk about the mechanics of fundraising or the mechanics of recruitment or whatever. And I think that it all boils down to people and dating. So I think that getting back to your question, I think that like, so, okay, we could fundraise and like fund one and when then our own lps said hey do you want to do fun too i just kind of turn it around and thought okay what happens if i ping some of our biggest lps and saying hey peeps we got the question if we should raise fun too same size 100 million dollars this time here is different since like this what we're thinking is that would you join and then i like asked a handful of people and when they're all were like yeah we could take like same ticket or twice i was like shit this is happening like we are like on on like zoom email whatsapp we have like 50 million or 40 million euros then i was like okay we have to build a deck because like it's embarrassing not to have a deck um like it's just strange when people say can you send me any info i'm like i don't have any info i have like a you know google dots notes in front of me that i typed some questions to myself so like then we're like we build a minimal deck we try to explain it and i think that actually fundraising is extremely educational experience for the person fundraising you have to actually They think, what is my strategy?

5:37What's the reason we exist? Who do we invest in? How do we think about this? So I think it was great for us to kind of craft a handful of slides, like five, six slides, and just to explain what they didn't get back to people. And then what we didn't expect, that there were quite a lot of funds, LPs, that have followed us and had talked to others about us and vice versa. And I think one of the reasons for that is that I think that fundraising is way too hard. And I mean, both for startups and for funds. So if somebody, some friend of mine is raising a fund, like a whatever, a cybersecurity fund, the climate fund or whatever fund like i happen to like you know go on a call and spar with them and i just want to say like i don't have a lot of time so it's a bit stressful so therefore i think it's great that we're doing this because then i maybe can say a lot of stuff so people can listen to this but i happen to spar with people and then what happens people say is there any chance you can ask you an MLPs i end up saying of course like i have tons of people who want to invest in funds right they're looking for funds you're looking for them a dating again right so then i'm just saying send me a blurb like a one screen iphone screen with a deck that i can forward they send me this saying hey thanks a lot i would love to talk to blah blah blah blah famous lp i forward it to the lp and say hey i met this twice i like most people i have no idea if the fund strategy is good i don't know anything about cyber security on a national level do you want to meet them every single lp that's got email opt-in email says jeesh thanks we don't invest in blah blah blah or love to have the meeting please do it which means that roughly per week i do like two to three lp meeting intros to other funds which means that what happens is that when we're raising fund too when I pinged people and said, by the way, you've talked to other people, we're considering now doing Fund 2?

7:06People are like, hell yeah. And I was like, what? And then people said, yeah, we usually take tickets 5 to 10 million. I was like, well, how did this go from like me pinging you on WhatsApp to you saying you want to do 10 million in Pable.2? So we were extremely, extremely lucky with Pable.2 that we started fundraising in October and we kind of wrapped it up in kind of January. And then it was like the legal process. and like we had Credit Suisse falling about, you know, Silicon Valley Bank crashed and the whole market there was like a bit wild. So we kind of delayed a couple of months just to make sure that LPS didn't have, we didn't force them to invest or anything.

7:39But it was crazy because like we did this crazy strange fundraise where we were fundraised upon. Like, I mean, it was like, we were like, what just happened? Can I interrupt you just to ask you to paint, you know, you said that I just reached out with an email saying this, this and that. And you know, for the unattentive listener, that might sound like you just kind of quickly draft something up. But there was a lot of intentful thinking in that. Just the fact that, you know, very similar strategy because fun size was the same, slightly adapted. So there's a lot of details in there. And I think you skimmed so quickly through it that it feels like, oh, the guy just sent a freaking email on a WhatsApp message.

8:15That's definitely not the case, right? So I'd love you. Could you expand a bit more on the details of that process of sending out that email, the thought process there and the interactions that came from it with DLPs? Yeah, I would actually like, because Fund 1 too was so peculiar. I think like Fund 1 is an easier example to talk about because we traveled very, very few miles for Fund 1. I mean, I was in Munich once. I was in Luxembourg once. I was in Stockholm, I think twice. I think that was it. Yeah, I flew to London this summer when everybody was on vacation. So I didn't meet the single MP.

8:47So that was the great fundraising trip. So like, you know what I mean? Like it was very few miles. Great lesson learned there. Great lesson learned. Like don't be there in mid-August. Like all the Brits are like, what are you doing here? It's like fundraising this week or vacation this week and fundraising in two. Like, okay, I get what you're saying. It was a really bad week for fundraising. Lots of hikes and walks, coffees. No, but I would say like for fun one, I think one of the strategies we did is that we had like two tracks. We had like, so maybe I should say three things. One, we worked a lot internal work.

9:14What the heck is our strategy? Like what the heck do we do? And like, you know, we really thought about like fund size, ticket size. Like how does the market look? We talked about this like obsessively internally. and we have like massive imposter syndrome as people all three of us so we don't like if anything is like how do you source deals we sort of deals like this like everyone else but we are so much better like no no no no no every single thing we're like we're fucking worst so we have to be so much like try much harder and grit much harder because otherwise we won't win so like we never ever ever in anything we wrote to ourselves we just wrote because we're good we were like no no no no no we will never win anything because we're good we have to like fight harder for everything So there was so much work internally about that.

9:53And then I think number two is like the way we fundraised, like we had one track, which was like the enterprise behemoth like sales fundraise when you're like, you talk to these mass institutions that are like, they're probably going to invest in fund one, two or three. And we filled out DDQs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, you know, you need those because they are the ones that anchor your fund. If you don't have one of those, you can't raise a fund north of 20 million, I would guess, maybe somewhere where you have all of your friends being billionaires. But all the times you need somebody to put in, you know, 10 % of the fund and say, we're going to read all the agreements.

10:25We're going to be on the LPAC. We're going to be that, make sure that these crazy people are not too crazy. So we talked to like a lot of people like that and like fill out DDQs and like, you know, and it's a long process. And then the other thing we did is like we had this spreadsheet with like a lot of different people that either we just had on a hit list that we were like, this is like very much like how you rate the seed round. Like you're looking to get a lead of the rounds, the seed round or the round but then you need to fill the round with lots of smart people the angels do you think are going to add value right so the things the way i think we did that is like we had this list of wanted people and we try to get it like oh could you ping it is there any way you can intro to the supercell founders and somebody's like yeah i know them we got the intro right and then same thing like when you get that ball rolling you get a lot of people say oh you should talk to these people you should talk to these people the thing we had for them is we actually had an email that said like thank you very much for the intro louise move you to bcc louise did the intro hi mark here are like five reasons not to invest in Pebble.one just so we don't end up wasting our time by mistake.

11:23So it's an emerging fund. It's going to be roughly like 80 million euros. It's domiciled in Sweden. We are tax transparent set up, but we're not in Luxembourg. We're investing in climate tech, which is going to be mostly about software and data. There might be some hardware in it. We don't really know. This is an unproven sector. We believe it's going to be big, happy to explain more of that, but it's a huge risk that this might do early in the market. and we like had literally five reasons not to mess them pale without one and we didn't try to sugar we were like we're three emerging managers but we have a lot of experience we were like no and then we ended the whole thing by saying if you want we can have a meeting when we've done first close instead if you want to because then of course we're up and running I would say 50, 60, 70 % of the people said thanks Hampus, great I'm happy to do the intros but we only do managers set up in Luxembourg or this was really educational I would love to talk to you when we've done fun goes, like when you've done the first goes.

12:17That meant there were nobody who said, can you please come to the mansion or to Luxembourg? People were like, thanks for the respect. Talk to you later. And we in the CRM, we either wrote no, because they can't do it. We'd have to be a Luxembourg vehicle. Or we said like, they're keen, but not that keen. The crazy cool thing is that the 30 % that came through and said, I know all that, but I really want to talk to you. The cool thing is that we didn't have to like sell them. And like, we came to the meeting and we're like, we explained our theories. like we talked about how we thought about stuff right and they sparred with us and sometimes they said we never really do fund ones but i really like the way you're thinking so like i think we're going to do it but the ones that are sure can't do the fund one because of mandates they just responded on the letter email saying i'm really sorry we can't do it right and it was so great because that saved so many trips but also so much just like waste of effort and you know anxiety and everything for everybody so that email i would really recommend it but you're like craft honestly what are the reasons not to invest in us?

13:10And actually be not trying to second guess it, but actually write it. What were the dating equivalent of that strategy? Yeah, so the thing is like, I actually think raising a fund is like raising an A round in the sense that I think that raising a larger round, like an A round and a fund is the Venn diagram of three circles. Dating, selling your apartment as a real estate agent, and presenting your bachelor master thesis, PhD thesis. and you have to ping pong between these in a very nice way like you have dating you can't come to the meeting and say i want 50 million from you because people are like what the fuck i haven't had coffee yet like what who are you like you're like such a strange person right and then but you can't just sit there and like talk about life and your children and how nice they seem to be these people and how much i like jenna and then people left the meeting it's like what did they want i don't know but also you have to like so the the trick is like you start with dating you start by just being a nice person and talk to people and just learn about them right and figure out if we You want to hang out together.

14:05And then you kind of move into presenting your thesis and your academic thesis. We really think that climate has three big verticals. We see inequality, infrastructure, and innovation. Inequality is very hard to invest in. Infrastructure, most of the money you see, the trillions of dollars, they go to infrastructure. We don't think that venture can play in that. If you look at innovation, that's where we can play. If you open up innovation, we see three big circles. You see behavior shift. You see policy and incentive shift. And you see technology shift. This is how we can address it. People are like, well, this is cool.

14:34like good thinking we talk to people right but then we're not sitting here like presenting a thesis so they can take notes so then we have to move in to be a real estate agent and say so what's your ticket size what vehicle do you invest from and they say like oh we haven't set up anything right and it's like oh okay because like uh and then it's like great conversation and then like you know again we don't want to make them awkward so like we move into dating and say it's really no worry like i'm fine with having like casual conversations you know just nice to them and then they say i'm actually really keen you know so like moving between these three in a nice way is like what makes a good meeting and we came at a lot of meetings with lots of notes from us with interesting questions where people ask stuff we're like that's it's a very good point i haven't thought about that question actually so like we learned so much from these video calls and we had like calls with like horse the bridge and you know whatever sapphire all these people who said to us there's a snowball chance in hell that we're gonna invest in fund one just so you know like literally nothing will happen but i mean elizabeth be the amazing person said but ampers we met a couple of times i really like you as a person more than happy to have a call and you can just pick my brain and i can pick your brain about time a bit because i'm curious i mean like elizabeth thanks like beezer is amazing like you know talk to her about stuff and she was like i would worry about this when you're raising i was like oh thanks that's great thanks like wrote so many questions and stuff and she said can you tell me a bit about how you're thinking about like first-of-a-kind financing and it was like you know maybe i helped her with something but she for sure helped me with lots and there were so many people like we're so happy to like we're so lucky to talk to like the cfo of like 0.9 creandum excel all of these people who are like helped us on fund modeling and like we just talked a lot of people and learned stuff so i think that going to those meetings and us like again pinging between those three if we go to meeting with excel cfo we're not going to leave the meeting until i understood their fund model because that's my real estate agents who like i want that right but i'm not going to be the douche bag who just joins the meeting and send tell me the fund so i have to like be nice and like care about that right but i also will have to leave them with something which means that i will tell about how we are thinking of it so i think that's like one of the favorite things i find is really figuring out this balance in a meeting so people leave the meeting feel like that was nice that made my day better have this uh during the um and we all remember this quite at least i were quite clear it was more or less when we started uvc actually when covid first hit and uh the kind of, I don't know, the mainstream claim was that video calls and meeting remotely was great to keep existing relationships alive, but incredibly hard to build on new relationships and create trust and et cetera, et cetera.

17:04What you're saying goes kind of against that, right? Because you're saying by focusing on adding value, we created that relationship. So do you think there is something fundamentally wrong with how most investors are looking at these GPLP relationships that are too transactional? Did you just strike gold by chance? I'd love to hear your thinking there. I am completely sure that we were lucky with a couple of things. I think we were super lucky that the fact that we happened to go on to do climate when you did climate, right? Like, and people were just like, okay, I want to talk to these people.

17:34And I think that we were super lucky with timing because of COVID. That means a lot of people said, let's not fundraise right now, maybe. So like we had so many things on timing. And of course, 2019, there were a lot of people who wanted to deploy money to venture as well. So I think timing wise, we were just crazy lucky. And like, I would say luck is like 80 % of the cohort, right? So I think that that's the main thing. I would say that the thing which I think was very interesting about the actual fundraise is I think that I just feel like super peculiar. Like if somebody says, do you want to meet the dates of your life?

17:59Like, you know, meet like the person you want to fall in love with and marry and, you know, move off to Portugal. I know you're in Portugal, David. We all want to live in Portugal. But I think that the answer is like, do you want to come to this meat market event in Berlin, Superventure, and like, you know, meet people speed dating them and just like quickly, like stand there in a suit and like pitch your thing. That is how you get one night stands. That is like how I want to, like, if you want to like marry somebody, you like meet market is not the thing. Like you want to meet people randomly at a friend's party when you're like standing, talking to them and like, oh, you're a super interesting person.

18:30So like, I always feel when people say like, you want to come to our LPGP meeting when 50 GPs pitch 50 LPs and you get 60 seconds each i feel like i don't absolutely don't want to go because i don't think that we're going to meet the g lp in that world i don't think they're going to like us because i gotta i gotta challenge you hamper sorry for interrupting you there but i gotta challenge you because you guys are the proud co-organizer organizer i don't know what the term is of the drop which is an event which brings a bunch of people together yes how is it different but the thing is like we actually have zero pitching at the drop we actually have no pitching stage no way that people can actually We actually had no announcements that people said, like, can I announce, but we said no.

19:10We actually designed the drop with like vegan lollipops and like activists on stage. And also like we clicked up, like clicked yes to every single person attending, which means there are no salespeople coming, which means that everybody feels super safe. And when the people are talking on stage about like the PR language of fossil fuel companies, you feel like, whoa, we're all in the same, like that vibe, I think it would change the difference. and and and we're actually discussing now should we actually add a track next year for the day before which might be called like allocate to ventures or something which means by like lps talk about like how allocate to climate sorry which might like lps talk about how they would allocate to more to climate but we don't want gps to kind of stand there and pitch so that's the headache is like how do we do that without that becoming a meat market so so i totally agree i love events because events is when you build trust as you said david i think that it's one of the great things in building trust is if you meet a person and talk to them and you see their body you just build a lot of trust and i think that the trick there is i think what most people don't do is like when you're on video you should just try to figure out ways that you can show your whole self you can just like you know i don't know and i don't mean physically for god's sake but i mean like just be a real person just like you know if you met me for coffee you wouldn't like you would talk to me differently like you would start by saying oh what hotel are you staying at by the way.

20:28And you'd be like, oh, this is, oh, wow, wow, isn't that a super fancy hotel? I got it on hotels.com. It's only like, you know, it's 90 euros. Whoa, 90 euros, that's crazy. Is it a room with a window or no? You know what I mean? Like, you would start the conversation like that. When you go on Zoom, you wouldn't say like, oh, is that painting behind? Is that the, you know, people don't. And it's so stupid. You should be like a person. You should be like, where are you? Oh, Portugal. Oh, I love Portugal. It's such a nice country. I was there. I learned Portuguese and the only thing I remember is barboleta.

20:52And you're like, ah, useful word. No. And like, you know, we start a normal conversation. We're people, both of us. And sommerfull is it in Danish, by the way. Yes. Was it when you had that conversation? No, it wasn't. That it's a unique word in every language. Yes. We had that conversation with Mick from Lunar as well, I think. It's amazing. Perron in Finnish. None of these words have anything in common. It's just completely crazy. It's one of the few words that the humanity never traded. So we don't have any useful reason to talk about butterflies to each other. So therefore, we have unique words.

21:24Anyone thinking that Hampus is a listening and thinking that Hampus is just a just a well-schooled actor here talking about the importance of personality. The thing that David said before Hampus joined was, do you remember Hampus's shirt that he had on when we met him at Tech Barbecue? And I said, yes, I do. And here we are, Hampus tunes in and then he's wearing. Well, I can't remember what's the painting that you have on your shirt. Yeah, this is a pretty famous painting. The cool thing that people don't know about this painting is this guy who painted this painting painted the same painting for 30 years.

21:58So this is true craftspersorship. This person painted this painting over lots of years to make it better and better and better. Just like Chisilov. Chisilov made it better and better. Just like a fund. Just like you make it better every time. It's not Joe Harry. It's Joe something, right? No, this is Japanese. Yeah, Japanese guy. Is the picture on Notion? If you go on Notion and then you say you want the cover photo thing, then that's the one that you get there. Yeah, exactly. Very cool. So, Hambus, I want to ask you though, because, and I think that we probably have some people in our audience thinking, this sounds like a great story.

22:39And Hambus is, we can hear that Hambus is a good storyteller. So I can see why it would work for him. but what would you say to the skeptic listener the skeptic person saying come on i've been on those zoom calls it doesn't i i can't make it work or at least you know i'm struggling i'm traveling to italy to meet some rich guy wherever because that's where he is and that's what he's asking for so what would you say to that person i think that you should work with what you're good that. I think that like if you feel like your super skill is like meeting people in person and being like really really good at like connecting them I think you should probably do that.

23:20Like I think it's super strange that you say like I'll squeeze my in to like a couple of thousand pixels well a bit more than a thousand pixels nowadays but I think that it feels like I mean you shouldn't be like oh I'll just do this but I think at the same time I think that the way that I thought about it a lot when we started was like okay I know you're in Tureen I can come if you want but is there any chance we can just start with a video call? And most people said, of course. And some people say, no, I want you to meet the whole family. And you're like, that's the trick. It's like, it is that.

23:48But it's if people say, no, we can start with video. Then you can start with video. And I think the most important thing, I think, with the email saying no, or with the first video call, is trying to get people to say no quickly. I don't think you can persuade anybody for real to marry you or persuade anybody to invest in your fund. I think that people have to want to do it. of course you kind of like you help them you know you can explain what you do and stuff but i think at the end of the day if you're coming in and somebody says i don't want to invest in this fund stop doing it how did you gauge the interest we actually try to get people to say no yeah we try to tell people like these are all the reasons you shouldn't test until that one and we also like when when covid hit for real we started fundraising just before covid and then covid hit for real and then it was that was like two months before our fund closing date so we He actually emailed every single LP that had said that he wanted to join and said, now it's very clear that COVID is a global phenomenon.

24:40I just want to make sure that you have the chance to say you don't want to join Payable.1. I have complete respect if you say that you don't want to join now. So you have now, we have just opted you out. Can you please respond to this email if you still want to invest in Payable.1? There was two people who said, I would really prefer to wait until after first closing. Can you give me a couple of months? everyone else said 100 % we're in it we had another thing that happened was that one of our LPs asked I think a couple of weeks before first close they asked me do you get like a premium for investing in first close um like what's the like what's the you know the financial advantage of investing in first close and I was just like I don't want you to invest because of a premium so I said like I think that we were not going to have a premium and maybe this is unfair and I actually asked them like ask them seriously I was like I would prefer that there's no premium and if you feel doubt you should probably join the second closing and that person said we're doubling our ticket and i was like what sorry he said i love you just did that there's so many managers that tell me that you get this little thing and it's like at the long if you look at the economical thing it's nothing it's nothing and actually we actually discussed if we actually would print the t-shirt to everybody who joined the first close and when people ask that question we said yeah we're going to send you this t-shirt and you know but just so that they can feel like we recognize you as a believer but financially sorry we can't really do anything and i am so happy the fact that we said if you feel a doubt you should not probably not join and i mean there's a second closing for god's sake just during the second closing and i like the cool thing is like i think that what that creates is that people feel that we're confident and they feel fomo and they feel like well they really think this is gonna happen right so let's join now and also i think that what's really cool about it is that some people many people, I think.

26:29You know, back to the old question, you know, do you want to be in the Navy or do you want to be a pirate? The thing is, I think a lot of people felt, let's do this. I'm going to be part of the people that created this fund. It's super cool to be part of the OG that did the fund. And I felt like it was so cool that like people kind of felt that feeling of like, yeah, we're going to do this fund together. And I think it was, it's a great feeling when people kind of feel like I'm one of the believers. I'm not going to be the ones who said like, let's wait till we see cool logos. But then there are fund managers whose job it is to manage other people's money and they said i'm really sorry i cannot invest until i've seen the word like no respect why would i push you right yeah one question hampus how have these uh relationships evolved over time so we're doing this this whole episode about raising virtually are these virtual relationships you have with your with your lps with your with your family right uh or or have they grown into something very different some of them have grown into good relationships and some of them are completely you know like they're people who send us money and like we email with them but i'm really happy about the fact that we we email our lps a lot like you know of course quarterly updates and stuff but we also do a lot of stuff when we're thinking about shifting something we email all of them and say hey anybody's got a cool ideas about this would love to jump on a phone call i think it's just like when you raise a very large angel round what happened or a very large like when you raise a seed round let me say when you raise a seed what happens is every single all of the angels in the round most of them just get that email And I'm like, okay, I don't care.

27:51One of the angels cares a lot. So he or she responds like, I'm happy to jump on a call. I was in this situation. And your lead investor will say, don't do anything stupid. We need a call about this next week. So what happens is like, you're like three or four biggest investors. When you send that email, they will say, they might not know anything about it, but they will say, of course, here's 30 minutes. Let's talk about it. And it's just good governance, right? But then you have one of two of your LPs in their respective size who would say, I've had this shit situation. I'm happy to talk to you about it and that's been really really good to have a couple of those people stand up and then in fund two we decided we had a couple of LPs that didn't agree with our fund strategy and who said I don't want you to invest in we don't have a company that is like machine learning design GMO of plants like one of our LPs was like when they got the thing they were like you invest in GMO and we were like yeah we think we need GMO to be able to survive on this planet and get food for everybody and not have food wastage They were like, yeah, I'm a climate investor.

28:50I don't want to do GMO. And I was just like, I'm really sorry. But like, you know, if you look at the LPA and like investment policy, like, you know, GMO is not part of it. Like, I mean, we can't invest in human cloning, but I mean, this is not human cloning. And he was furious. And I went on a call with him and I'm really, really sorry. I'm really sorry, actually. I didn't want you to be furious about this. And then I offered him to talk to the CEO and I was like, do you want to talk to them? I think you're going to see why we like it. He was like, I don't care I think this is shit I don't think you should have done it and I was like I'm really sorry when we did fund two I emailed them and said I would actually prefer like I think you feel a bit awkward about this situation and I have zero hard feelings if you don't want to join fund two and he said no if you feel that way then I mean I would be fine you know not joining fund two and I mean I like him a lot as a person we're great like I mean talk a lot like you know re-like him but I don't want to be in a situation where every time we don't invest in I'd be like can he be pissed off and I think that he would probably feel the same it would feel like it's much nice to know.

29:40One of our big LPs, they were really messing about reserves. I thought with them a lot about reserves. And when we raised Fund 2, we were just saying, we're going to disagree on reserves again. I think you're going to hate Fund 2 because we want real having reserves this time. And they said, yeah, we're going to hate that. And they said, I don't think you should own Fund 2. And they said, okay, great. And they didn't. I think it's so much better. It's just like, we met EIF. EIF were like, we need this special kind of carry structure for climate. We just said, I think this is really dumb because I think this means that, you know, we won't actually invest in bold companies.

30:11We invest in like the safer ones. So they said, yeah, I don't think you should invest in us. And they said, oh, you were EIF. We're like, yeah, I know you're EIF. But I mean, I think you're going to piss off at us. Like, I mean, we're going to have a relationship where every time we send an update, you're going to respond, but you didn't follow what we said. And we said no. So like, then it's just like, why build a relationship with attention? Why not just say, I think we disagree. Let's agree. We disagree. And I mean, I've referred a lot of people to EIF. I think they're great. But it's just like you have to, you know, again, it's dating.

30:37It's like a relationship. Do you think that, no, I was about to ask you a question about EAF there, but it's tough to talk on publicly in a podcast. So I'll refrain from that. We will, though, let this comment stay in the podcast because I do think it's important that we speak openly about the fact that there are players that are so big that it's difficult to talk about. And I think that we should leave it at that because I think that's a fair commentary to make on the podcast. I'd love to ask you about the tech stack because some people get very techy when they do a virtual fundraise or about everything that's virtual in their fundraise.

31:21I'd love to ask you if there's anything that you've employed there or you tried and then went away from that kind of thing. Yeah. So for fund one, we had like Docsend, Zoom, Notion, I would say is probably what we had. for fun modeling we love causal like it's a superb tool to kind of show and explain fun modeling but we also have like R simulations and like you know Google spreadsheet with like shitloads of JavaScript in them the headache is like when you go advanced is that you can't share it I mean it's like oh can we talk to the Python coder on your side they're like sorry what you know like it's just so like you end up doing screenshots and like they look at these screenshots and they're like super complicated and they're like what is this all the deals that YC ever done all the seeds that EIF has ever publicized and we didn't market like a thousand million Monte Carlo simulations over those with this kind of fund cutout people are like okay you know you know like what am I going to do about that like I think that it's you know I'm not I think it's good I think it's one of those things where like on the the first pillar is like we want to be prepared and we want to be really curious like we want to talk to people like do you think it's better to have 20 percent shareholding and a 20 portfolio fund size or 10 percent shareholding and a 40 a fun size.