EUVC #287: Jan Voss, Head of Family Office at BLN Capital on family offices as investors in VCs & startups

26:52And then kind of once we figure out where we're going to invest, like which funds are relevant. So on the PE side, like I said, we said we would do a little bit of secondaries and the rest, the idea was like, OK, we're actually not necessarily aiming to have home run returns. We just want to have stable, predictable returns. And so we hit this break even of the fund portfolio. So that kind of said, OK, we're not going to do emerging managers. We're going to focus on established managers, but we're also not going to focus on the giant managers that almost have equity, like public equity-like returns, but maybe the ones a step below that they're a little bit higher octane.

27:23Could you put some fund sizes and names to that category? Sure, absolutely. So, for example, this year we invested in four funds. We started with a secondary fund this year, Adion, which is a French secondary fund. Then the second fund investment that we made was with CDC, so a big European private equity firm. Then we invested in New Mountain Capital, which is an American mid-market fund, I think about like$6 or$8 billion. And we're just about to finalize one more fund ticket for the year, which is also going to be another American mid-market fund. But all of them kind of not the$20 billion fund, not the$500 million fund, but kind of this idea of finding the private equity funds.

28:06Actually, I mean, CBC admittedly is a very large fund, but they do smaller deals, but kind of like six to ten million dollar range that aren't fully institutional just yet. And I think those are also very applicable learnings for us in the VC side, because, of course, I mean, the moment that people read that someone sold their company and there is money available, of course, you get a gazillion tickets, like gazillion emails, basically, about people looking to raise money for the VC fund, even before the current environment where things have gotten more difficult. And I think that's also really where we kind of try to turn the table a little bit and not be like, okay, let's look at all these funds that message us, but kind of turn things around like what actually could be an interesting VC fund investment for us.

28:49Where I think we also saw for ourselves, okay, when you then start comparing returns, maybe certain areas might not be quite as exciting, or you also would need to do very small tickets kind of to diversify properly, which also gets maybe a little bit more hands-on than we did. like you said one takeaway i think to take for people like especially when you start investing i think is to make this shift from the reactive to the proactive investing so really like not just look at deals when they come in but really start to think about okay like what is actually like what actually does my portfolio need and once i figure it out let's not look at one manager it's not okay two managers but let's look at 10 managers that fit there and make sure which one makes the most sense yeah and i want to ask you a more it's almost a technical question but it's just interesting because you mentioned four bets two mid-market bets we're recording this on the 20th of december of 2023 last week i believe i think it was friday last week pitch pitch book put out a report about u.s private equity middle market report something like that so i'd love to ask you why two bets uh within mid-market what's getting you excited i know that on pitch books report they said something around it being that middle market P would have like its best year yet or something like that.

30:08So it was very positive. But I'd love to hear your thoughts as well. I think the best way to answer that question might be kind of to explain why kind of the other two areas of the market might not be the best fit for us. So like I said, so kind of like middle market, I mean, it's, I think definitions vary, but kind of like, I think middle market is like your typical company with like an EV, I would say of like, let's say like 200 to 2 billion dollars. Of course, the range is a little bit fluid, but like 200 to 200 to 2 billion or maybe 500 to 2 billion. So if you go above, that's when you enter the territory of the very, very large funds.

30:45So like the Blackstones, the KKRs and so on that you buy outs that might be anything from 2 to 20 billion dollars. Those can be good deals, but I think just there's two factors. First of all, like those companies are just so big. So I think the exit horizon is a little bit limited. They might have very, very predictable returns, but of course, predictable returns don't necessarily mean that they're going to be very good. And of course, on the other side, if you do such large deals, at least I personally think you might have a little bit of a higher risk, actually, if you have a$20 billion fund, a$2 billion equity ticket in each of these deals and you do 10 deals and maybe one doesn't do so well.

31:20especially kind of as we see this churn in like economic conditions. So that's something I think where we're a little bit skeptical, whether that might not be a little bit too safe and honestly too boring on the one end. Then, of course, you can go to the other side, which is the lower mid market. I don't know what you call the small market or whatever, but basically these like smaller companies, 200 million or less. That is a very, very interesting area to play in. But you might have seen the study before, but there's a very interesting study that basically says, I think in general, industry-specific managers tend to do better.

31:53So if you want to invest properly in this lower mid-market, there's two options. Either you need to find individual managers, so it's like the best healthcare manager in North Florida or the best software buyout fund in Germany, which is great. But of course, if you do these specific bets, you kind of take diversification risk. Or of course, you can do a fund-to-fund, which we've done before. But of course, a fund of fund, even though it's really grown in the concept, of course, always has a little bit of an additional feel there. With those two things in mind, I think that's why we like the mid-market, because you do have firms that I think have some sort of specialization, of course, in strategy and in industry.

32:32But of course, I think they've also gotten big enough that we might not necessarily be concerned in terms of institutional risks. So like, oh, it's like one partner, the partner leaves, it's key interests, like the company falls apart. Those are typically firms that are a little bit better, bigger, more established, their fifth, sixth, tenth fund, for example. And of course, they're still not so big that it would limit their exit option. So they can still sell to kind of one, like two bigger PE funds. They can sell to strategics. They can do a continuation fund. They can go public. And of course, the numbers, the returns might not be as high on smaller funds, but they're also higher than the kind of numbers above.

33:09So we feel quite well that, or we kind of like that spot since we think that that might at least achieve these like long-term returns or ideally, of course, a little bit higher. So I want to come back to the initial topic, which was, you know, how you think about fund and direct and how you match them out. So we heard about the fund side a bit now. Talk to us a bit more about the direct and more importantly, how do these coexist? How does this feed into your portfolio strategy and model? On the direct VC side, I think unsurprisingly, that applies both to my bosses, to my prior boss, and I think also love clients.

33:43I think usually the reason you start with VC direct investments is that you have been a successful founder and you want to give back. You kind of want to have this excitement of working directly with company, helping them. I think in a lot of cases, people know that rationally that might not be the best move either because you don't have the time to do it, the access to do it, the money to do it right. But of course, people still do it. And we, of course, started out, we kind of did a lot of just, I think, investments out of interest. So we tried, like we literally did everything from co-found companies to investing into Robinhood pre-IPO.

34:17We really have done, invested probably across all stages there were. And I think after doing that, probably for a year or so, that's also when we sat down and said, okay, we need a little bit more of a career strategy. And I think basically the learning step we already made there is, of course, we don't necessarily want to invest so late stage because, of course, especially if you invest in something like American SPV, you don't get any information whatsoever. So I know I bought it to Epic Games, for example, but I get no KPIs. I have no traction. All I get is a tax form once a year. So that's the one side.

34:48And of course, in terms of the risk return model, it's also if like us, you invest smaller tickets, there isn't really that much financial benefit to investing 100K into Epic Games at a$4 billion valuation. I mean, at that point, you'd probably just buy 100K ETF or like a NASDAQ ETF. And I think also very important was for us the learning that you can sometimes get very, very involved in the company. But if you ride some small tickets, the question is like, is the time that you invest in really worth it, especially for the companies that are not doing so well? So that's when we adjusted our strategy a little bit to say like, OK, let's try to diversify a little bit more.

35:26So do more like pre-seed, seed type of deals where we also think that we can get in a privileged valuation. It's kind of like an angel, not like a VC. Invest very early, try to help, but generally also be a little bit more of a passive angel. So know that there's somebody literally or figuratively in the lead who's taking charge of this company, whether that's like one angel or angel syndicate that kind of taking charge, working closely with the founder, whether that's a VC, whether that's another family office. So that if things don't go well, We're not the ones that get messaged like, okay, you need to help us now.

35:58You need to sit down with us and spend two days going through our fundraising. We do still sometimes do that, but that is, I would say, more of an exception. Why do that in the end? I think that's always a valid question. I think for us in BC, it was a combination of having good access. And I think also some skepticism around how some of the BC funds that we maybe could invest in, kind of what the return expectations there would be. Because of course, a lot of the European funds that are out there, generalists, they just have large funds. They have to write bigger tickets, which just implies higher entry valuations, which I think left this opportunity open for us to basically come in one step ahead of some of these funds that we invested in.

36:39And put in a little bit more work, but also benefit from better valuations to basically just give a little bit of a hopefully return kicker for our overall VC bucket. The final question on my side on this train of thought is, and you've alluded to this, which is the time spent on a direct deal versus a fund deal. Very different. Ticket size also, you didn't say it, but I can assume very different as well. And naturally, this is my extrapolation, return expectations completely different. How do you keep that all in check internally as an organization? because direct investing can quickly be a time sucker.

37:26Interestingly, I think a lot of people told me that the fund side would be very, very complicated. At least so far, I wouldn't quite agree with that statement. So we, JC, just mentioned we have a very large Google sheet that we use for all sorts of asset classes. And on the fund side, I think managing capital calls, managing liquidity, that does take up, I think, a good part of great power, but actually in the operation side, And I think that's not so difficult, except now that we get to the point that all of these funds just want another batch of KYC documents from us. So if you've done like 20, 30 KYC documents, of course, that can take up a lot of your time.

38:00On the direct investment side, I think that's also interesting to see where I think actually tracking the value of the portfolio companies isn't so difficult because, I mean, mostly just track, okay, how many shares do I have? What's the overall valuation? What's my percentage that I own of that? And what's the current value? Like in a simplified way, you can also add Lickpress and so on. but tracking that is not so difficult. The bigger challenge, I think, is in keeping track of what the companies are doing. Because if there's one thing that I've personally seen as like a main sign of a company that might be doing well today, but it's not doing well in the future, is if they don't communicate well.

38:36So basically people are sending you updates when things go well, and then they message you like, oh yeah, we're running out of money this month. You need to give us another convertible or whatever. So that's actually where we've gotten quite strict on making sure that every portfolio company that we have ideally sends us some sort of reporting. So even if that's just once a month, like, okay, what's going well, what's not going so well, but really being aware of where the issues are. So we kind of can already expect when somebody might come back to us, when somebody needs help and kind of proactively help them rather than help them.

39:07when we have this German saying, like when the child already fell into the well, but basically, yeah, stopping the child before it falls in. And we did a few things. I mean, we also had a notion sheet where we tracked some of the financial KPIs, but at some point that we stopped doing that just because I think for us, especially as we try to become more of a passive investor, I think the value of that data is just less relevant compared to just reading the monthly reporting and kind of having a note in the back of your head, okay, maybe I need to check in with them a little bit. Now I would love to, and I think I have to ask you a question because I think you're one of the leading voices in European venture when it comes to the LP perspective.

39:5014 ,500 LinkedIn followers, not a lot of LPs have that because LPs are candidly incredibly boring. Like, no, all jokes aside, what is your candid take on the quality of European venture managers? I think generally we have a great tech scene in Europe. I think it really is less of an issue of the startups, to be honest. I think there's some really great companies being built. I mean, just seeing a few billion dollar exits coming out of Germany. I think on the VC side, there are some great exceptions. I think in particular, some of the more specialized funds coming out of Europe, coming out of Germany.

40:31So, I mean, three funds, I think, that come to mind where we're invested in. So, shameless plug for those funds, I think, is like on the deep tech side, for example, we invested in B-Squared, which literally invests in rockets and rocket science, which I think is just very exciting. Kind of like investing one step ahead of the generalist VCs. we invested in possible ventures in munich which is a very diversified frontier tech fund everything from biotech to nuclear fusion to crypto or we also invested in berlin for example in apollo health ventures which is very longevity focused and they've invested a lot of money into hiring great people to really set up this scientific base for vc fund i think what is a challenge sometimes a little bit is the courage of the vcs i think to do big bets i think that's something that personally bothers me i think a lot of people see it as the cliche but i honestly find it to be true is that i think vcs are very like animals driven by herd behavior in a sense where it's like okay like we're not going to invest until the first fund puts down a term sheet but we don't want to be the first one to put down a vc uh term sheet i remember what i found super interesting is like i think a year or two ago i talked to one of a talk to a vc fund and it was just after super return where of course every pe fund you talk to tells you like all our deals are proprietary Like everything we do, we're the only ones who saw that deals.

41:47Or if there was an auction, it was basically a fake auction so we would get the deal. But then I asked a few VCs, they were all like, no, proprietary deal flow isn't good. Because if I'm the only one who gets the deal, that means that like that person wasn't smart enough to talk to the other VCs as well. And I think that's a behavior that I find a little bit unfortunate that in comparison to the American VCs from my point of view, not a lot of VCs have that courage to kind of just go on and make bets on their own. I mean, I think just to tell two stories, one founder that I know, he was looking to raise like a pre-seed seed run from VCs.

42:23And like one European VC was like, oh, yeah, we're willing to give you 1 million on an 8 million euro valuation. It was like, okay, decent terms. And then they talked to an American fund. The fund was like, oh, yeah, I mean, our fund is really big. Like we can't really do 1 million checks. so you said like oh like after his pre-seat round you said he would do a 4 million seat round can we just give you 5 million and 20 right now and we have another portfolio company where the story was the same where they had an offer from european vc for like a tiny amount on like a 20 million euro valuation and then american fund came in and i think gave them like 10 15 on double triple that valuation so i think really not thinking about like okay like what deal can i make right now and then just carefully thread along we really have this courage to invest i I think that's something that we're compared to our American counterparts.

43:10I think, yeah, European funds can build a little bit more courage and really bring the adventure into venture capital again, I suppose. And on that note, let's go into the shout out.

43:29I'd love to ask you, Jan, to give a shout out to a co-investor, Angel or LP for being awesome. and do share the story behind that awesomeness. So the shout-out I would like to give is to Simon Leicht. Simon Leicht was actually one of the co-founders of Possible Ventures, so the VC fund that I just mentioned, where, of course, he built up a great track record. They made a lot of interesting deals. We're still a very big fund of Possible Venture, of course, in the team. But I think why I would like to give that shout-out to Simon is that I think he, among the VCs that I talked to in Germany, I think he's probably one out of three, four, five, like, of the probably most self-reflected VCs.

44:09I mean, just some VCs you talk to are like, okay, if a company is in a VC case, it's a bad company. Like, it's not exciting. Don't spend time on it. Throw everything away and go build the next rocket ship, build the next Gorillaz, WeWork, whatever. And I think I really always like Simon for being more self-reflected. But there's also, as I'm thinking about my own business, where some people also ask me, oh, are you going to build a startup? up he i think was a really good like i don't think he was he was a very good sparing partner thinking about okay what does it take to build a vc case in the space what does it take just to build a normal company in the space and somebody who doesn't think that a company is inferior just because it's going to be a 10 20 50 million euro case instead of trying to build the next billion dollar company so i think that's one side where i really value him but i think also on the other side and that's where i very much recommend my fellow vc investing family officers to reach out to him I think that he's been probably the best resource when it comes to thinking about portfolio construction so as we're thinking of kind of going from just investing all over the place to finding our strategy we talked to him a lot basically to consider okay like how many tickets should we ride should we do follow-ons should we not do follow-ons and for example recently I had a really really good discussion with him about for the companies that in your portfolio that maybe might not be doing so well does it actually make sense for you to kind of try to do early secondaries to maybe get your money back out get your part of the money back out like what's the value of that so i think networkguard is a really good resource so if you're looking to find a good sparing partner for the vc portfolio construction site definitely talk to simon and he's also already investing out of a new undisclosed micro fund so i don't actually have a lot of details on it yet but i'm very excited to see what he'll be doing next

45:49i love that plugin that's the type of plugins we should have more lps doing public. So thanks a million for that. So Jan, I would love to ask you to give us your three biggest learnings from the last 10 years of your life. I think the three things is, if I look back now, kind of what has, like, I think what has gone well in my life, I think the first one is to really figure out, I think, what you want to do in your life. I think it's, I'm probably like a lot of people out there, I think everything that I can do just sounds inherently interesting somebody tells me like oh want to set up a new family office want to join a bc fund want to start trying to start up like everything sounds super interesting and of course i'm like yeah let's do that we can do this those are great ideas like everything you can do there i think is like something i just like jump on and it's like okay i want to figure out what we can do there um but i think what's important too is to kind of think about like of course what are you good at but i think also what do you want to do in your life so i think And looking back now, like through my career was, I think, like when I was at Goldman, I would say it was a reasonably good analyst.

46:55But I think for me, I could really see like, OK, my career path would have been very sales focused. I would have stuck around there. I would have built, like basically become a salesperson, covering these like ultra-anneterred individuals. And I just wasn't sure at the time if I wanted to basically pursue this sales job or not. So that's when I decided to move along to maybe do something where I can gain a little bit more investing experience. So that's when I joined the family office stage. at Team Europe. I really learned a lot. I actually worked more then during my Goldman days. But I think I also saw for myself, okay, the setup, at least from my point of view, wasn't ideal.

47:26But also, I think this question, okay, like, do I really want to spend all my life just investing into venture and doing very, very hands-on operative ventures while working closely with these portfolio companies? And that brought me to BLM, where I think overall, I was very, very happy with the setup, with the chance I had to do, the work I did to do. I mean, otherwise, I would not still be working there. But of course, then the question comes up at some point, at least in my life, where it's like, okay, right now I'm well-established, I have some money saved up, maybe not starting a family yet, is now maybe the right time to kind of take a little bit more risk, try out some things that I've been wanting to do.

48:00So that's basically why I decided to move on with Kate Mays. I think just repeatedly asking yourself, like, what do you want to do? Do you think you're in a good spot? If you're not in a good spot, what do you need to do to get along on this path? I think that's just something that I ask myself again and again. Sometimes I don't have a question. Currently, I definitely don't have an answer to some questions that I ask myself. But I think it's good to just question what you're doing and make sure that it's aligned with what you want to do in your life. I think the second one is probably to be proactive and not be reactive.

48:33That's the right way of saying it. In things that you do and I think in all things in your life. I mentioned this earlier in terms of VC funds. So not just wait until opportunities come to you, but basically just also figure out, okay, like in line with that first point, like what do I actually want to do with my life? Like where do I invest? How do I want to spend time? And how can I drive forward my personal traction towards reaching this goal? So what I still love to do to this day is, I mean, of course, I'm generally a very, very linked and active person. But even when I was still just doing my family office job, I would just go ahead and say, OK, there's something that I want to learn about.

49:06Like there's some very niche distressed debt fund in Frankfurt. Why don't I just email their info at private equity fund dot com email address and see if they want to talk to me? Why don't I just message this random person on LinkedIn who does something super interesting, share some experiences with them? I think it's like this very often quoted anecdote of like you miss 100 % of the shots you don't take. But I think generally, like no matter if you're a student or a professional, I think nine out of 10 times people are actually very happy to talk to you and share their insights. I think if you're just generally curious, and just having these conversations, I think just drives you forward in life that through that, you meet somebody else, whether you find an investment opportunity, you make a friend, or in my case, you find a client.

49:45I think that's just something that I advise to people, especially if you kind of feel stuck with what you're doing right now in your life. So just going ahead, messaging to people, kind of taking things into your own hands. And then I think lastly, based on both of these factors, I think is that compounding is a great thing, but it takes time both investing in your career. So in terms of investing, so we started investing with BLN about three years ago now, three and a half years ago, depending on the investment. I think I'm always kind of biased where it's thinking these two-year cycles, kind of like do something for two years and you want to do something else.

50:21I mean, that's kind of what was the case for me now. But it's really seeing the impact of the things that you've worked on just take longer. So I remember, so I worked for Lukasz Kodowski for two years, left after these two years. I think in year three or four, that's really when you started to see that some of the investments that we worked on together really started paying off. Like Choco, where you let the pre-seed round turn into a unicorn, Miles Mobility became giant and piled it tremendously well. Those things all just take more time. And I think it's also something that we see now with the investments that we've done with BLN.

50:52It just takes time for the fund investments to do well, for the angel investments to do well. And the longer you stick around, I think the more you also really start to see your impact that you might have had on these companies. And in the end, I think it's also the same thing on the career side. I think it's very easy if you do something for a while to kind of get bored and think, okay, you need to do something radically different. but I think it really just pays off to stick with things and just hold on to them and really see like okay if something has done well for a couple of months how well might it do in a year I think that's really something that I especially have to remind myself of up to a year like this one I mean I started LinkedIn this year I think with 2 ,000 followers now hopefully before the end of the year I'm gonna hit 15 ,000 same with my advisory business I started like six months ago and it's really starting to do well and I think of course my instinct might be like oh maybe there's another an interesting opportunity out there that can follow.

51:42But I think I really just have to pinch myself and be like, yeah, Jan, don't jump onto the next thing. Just keep on holding onto things. Like 6, 9, 12 months from now, you're probably going to be glad that you just stuck with that and you'll be really happy with where you'll be and where I'll be in the future. So now we're going to go into the quickfire round. And now, the quickfire round. Quickfire. Quickfire. Quickfire. Quickfire. Quickfire.

52:12What advice would you give your 10-year younger self? This might actually be a little bit of a controversial one, but not to spend any time trying to learn programming. So I was a business student, but I had a business informatics, so like business management systems concentration. I spent probably so much time on data camp, like trying to learn HTML, R, Python, all of those things. And I think, especially by the time I reached Goldman, I just realized, okay, this is worthless. Because especially if you work in some sort of bigger organization, like at Goldman, nobody would have allowed me to build anything that touches any sort of code.

52:51Like, I'm pretty sure we weren't even allowed to do anything in BBA. So the time that I just spend, like, on random nights and weekends just to do programming, I probably could have better spent on something with more direct impact, whether it's just, like, financial modeling or networking with some people or whatever. honestly just not spend time on it and just have a good time i think today like a lot of like students that message me asking a question i just tell them like either be willing to fully commit like to like a nine-month boot camp or like a two-year masters but otherwise don't do it you will not use it in your life what are your top tips for emerging vcs who are fundraising i mean that's something that i write about a lot i think because it's a big pet peeve but i think first of all maybe really ask yourself if you want to be in vc like this might be a little bit of a harsh take but i think a lot of people just like okay i led some innovation team in a big corporation and kind of the next exciting move sounds now that i can do a vc fund and i mean in some cases people have built a background that is really really valuable i mean v squared the like vc team came out of a very big german mittelstand company but i mean also there's some other cases where i was like okay you let the five million euro innovation fund of some random german mittelstander where you did minority investing in companies across the globe that some bank brought to you, maybe the best natural take for you is not to do a VC fund, especially if you take into consideration what the consequences are of that.

54:14I mean, like I said, it takes 12 years for one VC fund that does well to return their money. How long are you willing basically to stick around with that to really see the impact of that? So leaving that pessimistic take behind, let's assume you have a good skill set and you really want to spend your time in VC. I think you really, really should start to think about or you should really think about what actually your value add is to NLP. I think it comes a little bit from this multi-asset point of view that we talked about earlier, but a lot of VCs don't really think about how their fund actually fits into a portfolio.

54:47I think people generally differentiate like, okay, generalists versus specialists, but then also wonder like, okay, what's the goal that I'm trying to fill? If you just get another software as a service fund, why would I invest into your company and not into one of the many funds that have done this for 10 years. Or if you're like some super niche fund, like, I don't know, American Midwest agriculture technology companies, like that can be super interesting, but how likely actually is it that kind of for like your run of the mill LP to invest into that? So really think about like, what's your core strategy?

55:17How does it differentiate you? And then of course, also the consequence, which VC, like which LPs are actually relevant for you? So you also don't waste your time because it's not always a family office that might give you money or right B or right B. And finally, what's the most counterintuitive thing you've learned since you've been active in venture? That profitability can be a bad thing. In the current environment, profitability, of course, can be good. And all the VCs are like, okay, just how much money do you need to get to break even? But I've also seen a few cases, I think, where profitability was basically fatal to the company.

55:51Companies basically were doing not so well, not really reaching their growth goals. And basically, of course, like there's two options. You try to raise money and kind of keep up your current path of growth or what they did in this case was basically to fire everybody except core staff to basically turn like brute force this company to profitability. And in that moment, of course, it's good if your alternative is to be bankrupt. But of course, kind of from an overall VC outcome, it's disastrous because what happens? Like, let's say we invested at like a 10 million valuation to that company. All of a sudden you fire everybody, you grow by a tiny margin each month.

56:25you make, I don't know, 500k in revenue a year. Like no way does like the current valuation just does not fit what the traction is of your company, which means that usually if there's some sort of leak prep in place, like you're entirely underwater, which also means for the team that if the company were to be sold today, they get nothing. Or also like how long would it take at that nail pace growth for that company actually to be worth something that they make money from it again. So aggressive cost cutting can make sense. And I think there are a lot of cases where people underestimate how much they can cut it.

56:57But I think you also need to be mindful that you don't force profitability in a way that basically just results in like a disastrous financial outcome for both the investors at the phone.

57:12now before we wrap everything up jan i'd love to just ask you to give us one very hard-held belief that you have that most other people don't agree with i think i might have touched on that a little bit already i think in the context like in the course of this conversation but i actually think that even though we see fund investing is so accessible because i mean you can do an angel ticket from 5k you can do a fun ticket sometimes even from 10 20k i actually think that vc is an asset class that most investors should stay away from because unless you have a very very long time horizon a lot of money and a lot of patience and you don't need the money right now there's a good chance that there might be other alternatives that are more suited for you from the risk and return standpoint than vc so on that very controversial note and definitely something that most might think that Dave and I don't agree with.

58:07Though we do, it's just that we always talk to the tech ecosystem and thus there's a lot of other motivations behind venture fund investing. So just plugging that in there to make sure that you don't listen in and feel like we just left Jan's words either completely contradictory to ours or me saying entirely that I agree. I think there's a small caveat there that explains why Dave and I communicate very differently on this point specifically. Everyone, thank you so much for listening in. Jan, thanks so much for joining us. Do all drop us a review if you enjoyed this podcast. Do make sure to follow Jan on LinkedIn, Jan Voss, and subscribe at eu.bc.

58:51Thank you guys for having me.

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