Yoni Rechtman Unfiltered on Trump, AI Roll-Ups & Why VCs Backed the Wrong Side

27:39That stuff is hard to take. I don't think it will pass, and I also don't think it would stand up to a court challenge. But yeah, the wealth tax idea in that way is really stupid. I think the actually right way to do that is get rid of the step-up in basis, which is basically like a reintroduction of the estate tax. and then the second thing is like come up with some ideally on a national level so people are in state shopping and and and do some approach to taxing the like buy borrow die strategy right and then give people health care yes i think if the tax is for something yeah it's easier to sell sometimes when democrats are talking about it just as a tax without saying yeah this is the policy we want to pay for yeah it just feels sort of mean-spirited and anti yeah capital i mean look Look, I think what's happened in New York is actually like a really encouraging version of what this could look like, which is New York introduced congestion pricing, which is functionally a consumption tax.

28:38Instead of talking about it as a victory of how much revenue we've generated, I think Kathy Hochul in particular, like, has done a really good job of talking about the outcomes that it has achieved. I was such a hater. I know. She's so much better than I thought. It's like crazy. She's like, oh, yeah, just wait until after the election. Like, do it in a much more politically valuable way. Get some seats for Democrats. Like, she's totally right. She's a badass. She's a political. It's like not my, like, vibe and aesthetic, but, like, she's fucking knocking it out of the park. And part of it is, like, she has been very, very, she's had really hardcore message discipline about not talking about how much money they've raised, but instead talking about the outcomes and what they're spending the money on, which is like, you know, improvements to the subway system.

29:24And hey, look at all of the outcomes we're achieving in terms of like shorter commute times and lower air pollution and less noise pollution. And, you know, more shoppers on the street. And, you know, all of these things are like awesome and real. And we have proof of, and like, it is just, that is a positive way of talking about government intervention that is like exciting and you make a case for how you're going to make people's lives better instead of making a case about how you're going to make their enemy's lives worse. All right. So talking about the business of venture capital, talk a little bit.

29:59Oh, that? Yeah, our job, you know, your job and sort of the main thing I write about. I think probably like all of, you know, the rest of my team is - They're skipping to this moment. Yeah, they're like, oh, thank fucking God, he's done. We'll have a little link where people can just join us. It's like, oh, they're done with politics. Talk about business. Yoni Eric living out for 20 minutes. Give us your articulation in classic spicy slow fashion of what slow venture philosophy is. Look, we are a very decentralized partnership. So it's four partners investing in seed fund. And I think we often, it's like 80 % alignment with the last 20 % being language.

30:38What I always say is like, we need to find really awesome people with weird takes on important stories. And that's it. The really awesome people thing is like self-evident. We talk about what awesome people look like, what really, really exceptional people look like. But by and large, everyone buys the premise. You need awesome people. I think where most people in venture get wrong is they just look for really cool stories. And they forget the second part of it, which is like weird takes they're on. So my belief very deeply is that we need to find things that are a little bit like off kilter, out of center, non-obvious, non-consensus.

31:19Basically, you need things that are like unique inputs to achieve unique end of one outputs. And like, that's it. That's the entire business. There's nothing else. If you believe in power laws, like don't invest in things that are obvious or same, same. So I am a generalist. I think I can find those kinds of weird takes and important stories in a lot of different places. But really try and like constrain myself to companies that can sort of be articulated through these like big if true statements or really feel like when you first hear it, you're like, that's fucking stupid. And then if you think about it for a little while longer, it kind of starts to, it grows on you.

32:00There's a creeping realization. So how do you invest around AI? Yeah. Are you in foundation models? No. Okay. No, we're not in any foundation models. What? That's a big mistake on some level. All right. Look, on some level, yeah, we probably should have done it. It's a great trade. We should have done it and sold and, you know, we could have, whatever. We didn't. Sometimes maybe we're a little bit too, like, honest and principled for our own good. And if we see something that we think doesn't make sense, we just don't do it. But no, we're not in any foundation models. So I am at this point much more interested in the, like, second order effects of AI.

32:36So rather than saying like, how do we like max tokens? What happens after we do? Let's just like accept as a general premise that like, yeah, it's like, this is a real thing. It's going to keep getting better. It's going to wind up in more parts of the economy, like not without some pain and struggle and strife, but like it's going to wind up in more parts of the economy. What happens then? And I think to my point on like, okay, the like improvement and deployment of AI is a really important story. like but the most basic version of that is like well i'm just going to make the capabilities better i i think that's the wrong approach i think honestly already at this point um we're on the wrong side of some scaling laws around this where like and and frankly a lot of even feels unnecessary i think that all of the model development could stop tomorrow and we would have like 10 or 15 or 25 years of really big important work in front of us and we have some evidence for that, which is that like, you know, we're still in, we, like the whole economy is still in the move to the cloud, like 25 years later, you know, so this is not going to happen overnight, but like, what are then the things that only make sense or only possible in that world?

33:46What are either the types of problems that AI creates and new businesses will need to solve, or the types of opportunities that only become available once the capabilities have gotten there. Give me some examples. Sure. So I think throughout probably the number one feature of what AI is really good at is inverting any kind of system that relies on scarce production and abundant attention. So like things like writing, phone calls, hiring, coding, all of these are things which previously we had pretty like limited ability to produce. You can only make so many phone calls. You can only write so many lines of code.

34:33And we have entire social systems built on the fact that you have like effectively unlimited bandwidth to like review and process those things that have happened, those things that have been produced. That is very obviously reversed. So like, what are some of the consequences of that? Well, like everything is slop now. Like, sure. Yes. But specifically like, you know, uh, even as the amount of code getting generated is going up in large or in, in, in large organizations, large companies, velocity is going down. Uh, because now code review has become this like unbelievable bottleneck and like all of our system of, of every AI hater is just going to be like, oh, they're just, they're pumping out tons of words.

35:13Yeah. Yeah. It's not valuable. It's creating problems for them. When it's like free to produce code, you produce more code, but it's not free to review that code. So like I think – I mean I think Git is like really, really structurally challenged. And GitHub is, you know, in this weird moment where they're like basically all the good talent is left and they're in this feature freeze. And GitLab is like sort of perpetually on the verge of – Do you have a bet in this race? Of course. What is it? Yeah. So, so we backed this business called Atomic, which rather than trying to be like this layer between Git and, you know, the LMs or something like that, which a lot of people are working on, they want to just be an entirely new, you know, replacement for Git.

35:55So it exists down here. And we've seen this happen before. You used to have centralized version control systems. And then sort of the advent of open source and specifically Linux broke that open. None of those centralized version control systems could manage it. Linus Torvald created Git. And we have this unbelievable amount of enterprise value created off of the back of that. Well, that's 20 years ago. It seems unlikely to me that Git is going to really survive like CodeGen and LLM-assisted software development for the next 20 years. One approach that has taken venture capital by storm, and you guys were early on it but are also passionate, is this roll-up idea.

36:46Take some old-world business, give it AI, make a bunch of money. What is slow doing in this? Three steps. What is a SLO's approach and what's your view of sort of venture capital embracing this philosophy? So this is what we internally refer to as a GBO or growth by buyout. We've been doing this for a long time, since well before I joined the firm. So, you know, the first kind of canonical example of this that we have is our business Metropolis. Metropolis started off as software for parking lots. They eventually wound up raising$100 million, buying a parking lot operator, installing their software, making that business way more profitable.

37:25They then raised another, I think, billion and a half dollars, bought the biggest public company in their space, took it private, did the same thing. They recently announced that they raised another, I think,$4 billion. AI for parking lots, just to underline that. AI for parking lots. It's doing well. I mean, they just raised, I think, another$4 billion. Four, five, six. Who's to say? And the idea is just like computer vision, the monitoring is much easier now. They basically run these parking lots now entirely autonomously and they monetize the payments. Harder to not pay. Yeah. Right. And so the basic idea in all of this stuff, in our view, is that there's a lot of markets that are screaming out for software or AI, but are fundamentally unsound places to build a business selling it.

38:19So rather than trying to like, you know, invest a ton in sales and marketing to bring this product to market that nobody wants to win a very, very small amount of budget, you know, in each one of these customers. is like, why don't you just go, if the economics are transformational enough, just go and buy the business, transform it yourself, own all the upside and like be, compete on the basis of technology using M &A as a go-to-market motion. So this is, I think, where this is very different than private equity, where our view is like, is really trying to be laser focused on product, not process.

39:00So we meet a lot of people who will say like, well, I'm just like really smart. I went to this school, I did this thing. We're just going to be really good asset owners here. And I think that is an awesome private equity approach that is actually going to perform really well in this moment. We're like, we're going to know how to use these tools the best. We're going to integrate them the best. But it's not necessarily built for scale or built for repeatability or built for defensibility. So we're very interested in these opportunities where we can underwrite like a product team to go and really validate some kind of transformational, economically transformational product in a market that we think will support this kind of motion.

39:38But, you know, you could envision buying a professional services firm, you know, that has like, you know, call it 10 or 15 % EBITDA margins. And if you've built a product that you think transforms that into a, you know, call it 30 or 40 % EBITDA business, like that is huge value creation for yourself obviously it also means that you can afford to buy these businesses like much more aggressively like you're maybe not quite as sensitive on entry price like maybe you can pay you know 11 times instead of 10 times earning something like that so you have your pick of the litter on on which business you want to buy and if you can go and start buying increasingly large businesses over time as metropolis has done you have a chance to within a relatively short amount of time own this like huge cashflow generating, really, really like unique asset and just like run it forever and take it public.

40:36And so we're not interested in these opportunities to say like, we're gonna go and fix a broken business and like modernize it. And we really wanna think about, and this is I think why it really is fundamentally venture is like be very, very focused on the upside that we can create in these businesses rather than thinking about how we can make money through financial engineering or turnarounds or any of that. It's just a different go-to-market for software instead of some different business model for us. But all the competition for these businesses has got to drive you crazy, right? Now there's all this money pouring in.

41:14So every strategy is going to happen. All of a sudden, if you have a dry cleaning business, all these VCs said, oh, I need that company. we're going to bring AI to it. So I think the answer, just like anything else, is it means you have to be willing. Like a few years ago, it was unconventional enough to even be thinking about this strategy that like that alone was the off kilter, unique kind of end of one approach. I think today we just need to be looking in weirder places. I think we need to be looking at like weirder types of teams. I think we need to be looking at them earlier, different kinds of interventions, different kinds of product approaches.

41:51But it's just the same. It's like... Private equity at least respects expertise in the domain. Whereas venture capital often scoffs at the people who've been running the dry cleaning business or whatever. And then they don't understand sort of the particular things that make a business succeed or fail. So I don't know if I agree with that premise, honestly. I think that if you're coming in to sell software that I mean look let's let's use like real examples here you know if you're coming in and you're like building toast for you know smbs and restaurants and stuff and you don't have like toast the payments processor yeah yeah toast toast the like you know right yeah and you don't have like a ton of respect for your customers and you're not like really willing to listen to them and understand them and like they're not going to buy your product it's not going to work you're going to build the wrong thing like i don't think that it's unique to this instance to say that you need to like if you think about these companies that you're acquiring if you think about them as your customers and your partners you're just saying any successful entrepreneur any success empathetic but it's just easier if you've grown up in the bit where it's you know i'm in media yeah you watch people get into media sometimes and famously you're like i don't know any of the famously private equity is extremely respectful when they go in and buy media companies well Well, there, but those strategies are just like, you know, burn them and take the profits as we can.

43:12But whenever somebody says, oh, I really, I'm not from media, but I'm a smart guy. I'm going to like really reinvent it. It doesn't usually work. I mean, this is one of the reasons why we tell people build, then buy. Like don't start the business and immediately go. To become that thing. Like do a version of it first. Well, what I mean is like go and service them as customers first. Build a product that is like really good and transformational to them first. Frankly, it's a lot cheaper to build software than it is to go and buy a business, especially today. So you should be able to test and validate that what you've built actually like justifies going and raising a bunch of money to buy these assets.

43:54And in the doing, you're going to learn a lot about the like customers and partners that you're serving. um so i just i just don't i think it's a different go-to-market but i don't think that it is exempt from the same kinds of like basic physics of build business building which is like you know customer centricity and like deep respect and interest in solving problems for them if you had to bet on one other investment firm doing roll-ups who would it be i think to some extent it might just be like look the whole collection of like kind of what i would call bald bracket venture is doing this well.

44:30They're taking a very different approach to this than we are, which usually starts with capital rather than starting with a product. I don't think it's wrong. I think it will trend towards a very different kind of outcome. But like every one of the like, you know, mega funds, which they increasingly look indistinguishable from the mega private equity funds and even the mega hedge funds, you know, they all have teams now focused on this, I don't think that they will be wrong. I just think that they will wind up selecting for different kinds of people and opportunities that we will, and they're going to capitalize them very differently.

45:05So one of the reasons this whole idea is so attractive to them is because it's an opportunity to go and like deploy Mondo dollars from day zero. That's not our approach. Our belief always is that like too much money too fast throttles progress and like, you know, You have an overstuffed pig and it dies. It allows a level of poor discipline and loose thinking. You've talked some about kingmaking in venture capital. It can work. I mean, if you throw enough. OpenAI right now is sort of proving a too big to fail strategy. So yes, I think it's a question of when though. Because like OpenAI was so profoundly non-consensus from its start, it wasn't even, let alone a C-corp, it wasn't a for-profit company.

45:59So it's all of this stuff looks, like the present looks inevitable in retrospect. But the number of companies that are like wildly successful today that were deeply, deeply non-consensus at the time, you know, OpenAI is actually a really good example of this. where like it was not an investable business at its inception. It wasn't an investable business for its first like five or six years. Anthropic people thought was an insane thing to even attempt at the time. Cognition started as a video conferencing app. Clay wandered in the desert for like, you know, 10 years. There's so many examples of this.

46:38And in retrospect, yeah, we all know what the chart looks like. And eventually the chart starts going crazy and it was always going to happen and it never could have gone any other way. Like each one of those are really, really, I mean, Ramp. Ramp was like the stupid, everyone was like, what the hell are they doing? Don't they know about Brex? And like, it's what? It's worth five times Brex now? So like these things always look, like winners always look inevitable in retrospect. I just don't believe in that as the reality on the ground. and I think history largely proves me right. What the problem is with this whole sort of like idea of king making is it's not putting, this is going to be an overwrought metaphor.

47:23It's not putting a crown on the crown, on the head of the crown prince upon the death of his father. It's like putting a crown on a baby out of the womb and believing that the crown itself confers legitimacy instead of the like the legitimacy conferring the crown. And in each one of those examples that I mentioned, those are businesses that now today like have unlimited access to capital and incredible talent and everyone wants to work there. But they like fought in - Somebody was calling it like the coconut seed round, you know, saying coconut rounds or avocado or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, is that, that's where you're sort of pushing back again, the sort of, we're going to put so much capital into this business?

48:03It's a question of scale. I think there are businesses that require a lot of capital up front and like that's a ton of risk and power to you if you have the, you know, if you have the piggy bank to pull that off and, you know, the balls to do it, like good for you. I think that's different than saying by mere dint of putting a bunch of money into this company, we just know it will work. Like that's not true. I don't think there's any evidence in history to suggest that that's true. You guys have had a very creative creator economy strategy. I mean, Sam has been bullish on this idea of like, we need to invest in a person, not just a business.

48:41Like get our talents into someone who's promising like now and like watch them go. Is this when you ask us for money? No, no, too far along. Think about how much further along you could be with a couple million dollars for newcomer. Yeah. How's that strategy going of investing in individuals? So basically we have, in addition to our seed fund and our opportunity fund, we have a third vehicle, which is our creator fund, which is a$65 million fund. And basically what it does is rather than investing in like consumer media brands or the companies started by creators, we're trying to make these like sort of, you know, 360 deals with creators to just capitalize them for everything that they do.

49:24And we own our piece of it. Who runs our fund? So that's run by my partner, Megan and Sam. Megan, Lightcap is awesome. She came in to slow at the same time I did to kind of figure out this and like really make it a thing. And it's going really well. The idea is basically that like in a world where, and I would put this under, by the way, like second order effects of AI. In a world in which like all of these kind of performance channels are getting really like clogged up, owned access and distribution is like a hugely valuable asset. And so rather than saying, hey, like we want to be media investors, we want to invest in media brands that can go and build really big businesses on top of them.

50:06And so there's a lot of like obvious places for this. You know, I think like Glossier honestly is a good example of this. It was started out of Into the Gloss, which was a blog that Emily Weiss started, and then built this really big commerce company on the back of it. So all of those kinds of consumer opportunities, I think, are fairly obvious. We backed this guy, Jonathan Katz-Moses, who's a woodworking creator on YouTube, who's built this really successful tools business. I think that these opportunities are also - Do you bring in the entrepreneur? Or is there somebody beside them to run the business?

50:38Or are they - It depends. I mean, in our view, he's the entrepreneur. Like, does he need someone to help support him on, you know, maybe it's a president or something to help support him on the operations of the business? Totally. We can maybe help him with that, but it's largely on him. As ever, like, we're money. You know, like, we're money. We're willing to make bets that other people aren't willing to make. It's like, you run your business. Good luck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, let's find incredible entrepreneurs. And it just, we think we found a whole new category of entrepreneurs that like the market doesn't yet really have a good way of backing.

51:18But are we at peak creator yet? Or where do you think we are in this sort of arc of? Now, I mean, I think it feels very evident to me that that's just what the future of, I don't know, all media is. I mean, we're seeing more and more companies adopt, like mature, large companies adopt top strategies that look like that because they're finding that their performance channels just like don't work and they need some way to reach people and to talk to people. So this is very clearly like we've looked at any number of B2B companies doing like some version of this. And we're going to look at a lot more over time.

51:54I'm really bullish on the idea. We look at healthcare companies. I'm really bullish on the idea that we're going to find these kinds of like creator led opportunities horizontally, not merely within like, you know, consumer discretionary categories. Yeah. Running a newsletter can definitely feel like running a marketing channel without a product. I mean, thankfully our events business has delivered on like, oh, that's something that people just don't love paying for content. I know, you know, obviously Sam is married to Jessica Lesson who I work for and really believes in subscription. Even she has, you know, expanded the business beyond just subscription.

52:34But I just think as much as, you know, I love our subscribers and think it's a cornerstone of newcomers business. And yet you never say thank you to me.

52:45I'd be curious to go back. Like, where do I, you know, where am I? What number subscriber? I couldn't be, I must be a triple digit subscriber. I might even be a double digit subscriber. I can try to check. Paid, I bet. I mean, I just think people don't like paying for media. You know, they have this feeling that quality content will just get to them. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think this idea that you use media as a way to build a relationship with people and then sell them something they're more inclined to pay for makes a lot of sense. I mean, I should get in the chocolate bar business. I mean, that's Mr.

53:21Beast, right? I think it's an interesting exercise that genuinely, like sometime when Megan's in New York or you're in the Bay, I think you guys should get up on the whiteboard together and be like, I'm 100 % serious. I think you guys should get up on the whiteboard together. And what are the kinds of products and opportunities? I think what you've done in conferences, for example, is fairly directly extensible off of the media. It's part of a media business. It's still part of within the category of a media business. I didn't invent the idea that you would pair a newsletter with events. I would bet that if we sat here for five minutes, we could come up with a list of 25 things.

53:58and some of them would probably require capital for you to do. You know, like it's crazy to me that you don't have a headhunting business. It's crazy. Their business is similar to mine where they do that. Yes, you could make so much money if you hired a recruiter to work within the newcomer brand. And like that's not hugely capital intensive because that's like paying a salary and they're probably largely commission-based, so you don't really need it up front. But if you then told me like, you know, there's this product I really like. Aaron Harris used to be a partner at Y Combinator. You've probably interviewed him or met him or something.

54:38Yeah, I talked to him. You know, he now has this product called like the Venture Codex, which I use. It's like a really cool like, hey, like who should my company raise from? It's sort of in the overall category of like a pitch book or something. But like – But he doesn't monetize that. He monetizes like an investment banker for fundraising. Correct. Correct. But my point is like, if you told me that you were going to build some, if you told me like you're going to build a product like that, that's a really interesting product that you have good distribution for. I've thought about building a data product, but then it's not my expertise.

55:10Honestly, my biggest challenge for a lot of these ideas is just like getting a coder excited about, I'm looking for a coder. You know, it's always finding the right. Haven't you heard we're all coders now? I know. I've tried. I have vibe codes. I just feel like it's not working for me. It's getting it from 70 % to 90 % and then maintaining it. And then my time is not well spent there. It's like I have a long list of things. And so by the way, that would be on the list of things where it's like, well, as a creator CEO, my time is too constrained. I don't really have the budget for this. It's kind of highly exploratory and it's risky.

55:50there's maybe a lot of upside to it but it's hard for me to underwrite with like you know a relatively fixed pool today i could just basically pay the person out of my own pocket like that's the case where we come in with the creator fund and say like hey show us those 10 experiments that you want to run and we'll give you the money to run all of them and as and like something will work as long as we're like disciplined about choosing the you know choosing and prioritizing these experiments and we find people who are entrepreneurial and ambitious and and aspirational enough to actually like do them and have the execution ability to pursue them doggedly.

56:22Like that's the business. And have you stuck to this idea that your investment really needs to be in the person rather than the company? Yes. Or you're just worried people will run away from the company and or why? It's because the whole sort of thesis undergirding it is that the distribution is what differentiates it. And, you know, like we want to bet on a person to run all of those experiments. I mean, Mr. Beast is a good example of like where this kind of doesn't work, where like Beastburgers didn't work. Beastburgers, like if you had invested in Beastburgers, you would have lost all your money even though you totally made the right – I – you know, like – this, by the way, goes back to like weird take on important story.

57:03You're like, hey, I think this influencer is like a huge amount of reach is going to like build this really awesome thing. You'd be completely right on a directional basis and completely wrong about the vector of approach. Like – He doesn't keep them all within the same company. He might not. He's the risk, I guess. He now does. There's Beast Co. I'm running like Jeffrey Hausenbold from SoftBank to be a top executive. If you say so. Yeah. Chamath, I think, is a big investor. I would believe it. I mean, look, we have our issues with Mr. Beast specifically. Like we're more focused on kind of like topics.

57:36You have your issues or? Yeah. I mean, it's like the challenge that we see with Mr. Beast is like how much does he have actually like sort of proprietary owned audience and how much is what he's doing basically like kind of running on a treadmill to like hack an algorithm repeatedly uh and like if he stopped doing that how quickly would his audience media you know you're only because your last story you have to yeah consistently so so you know you don't feel that way about your woodworker that he still needs to have great woodworking content he definitely needs good word woodworking content but we know why people it's not like for instance stunt based It's not celebrity.

58:11So the answer is not like you always need to one up the last thing that you did. That's like a really hard place to get into and like probably burns out over time. Like I don't think you grow up with people that way. And then that means you have like a shorter shelf life. All right, Eoni, last question. Who is hustling right now? Like when you look out, like when you think of who's your short list of like startup founders that you think they are hungry, that want to win right now? Of startup founders? Yeah, startup founders or other people in venture, but startup founders. Yeah, I mean, look, the startup founders are all of my companies that haven't yet announced rounds.

58:48Yeah, obviously. Those are the people that are not interested. Does it feel like – it feels like a quieter time for me. Or I don't know if it's like the foundation model is like looming so large. It just doesn't feel – like the new doesn't feel as urgent to me. Genuinely, if you spend time with – like I think – and this is a challenge for you, I think, of being in a media business, where like you spend time with people who are on one side of the hill. Right. Like the people who have - People want to read about names that they've heard. Yes, for sure. And as a result - They think they want to read about people they haven't heard of.

59:20Yeah. And the reality is if you spend time at the earliest stages, when companies don't exist yet, when it's just people, when they're in the early phases of building, when they've launched, the energy right now is unbelievable. Like for all the posturing about like 996 and blah, blah, blah. the real people doing the real work, they just fucking show up and do it. And they're not going to like talk about how hard they're working because they're too busy working. The like level of energy and excitement. I mean, we have this company that just announced a seed round in New York a couple weeks ago called Phoebe, which is like basically building like a network of agents for healthcare labor.

1:00:01And the CEO, Justin, is like unbelievable. and his team is just like the the energy in the office is insane they're like they're like very technical very focused very heads down and they're just like winning every day they're like these are the last five years to make wealth before underclass yeah like i think if you honestly i i would just really encourage you to try and spend time around some of the like less polished more Or just like in the thick of it. Basically when people go from being, you often meet people when they've gone from being founders to being CEOs. And I think if you spend more time around people who are just founders, you will completely reverse course on this idea that like things are quiet or people aren't hustling or there's no energy.

1:00:50Like the amount of energy within our early stage portfolio is unbelievable. When I'm around New York and the founders that I meet who are like, I mean it's like they're like killing themselves with happiness you know because they're so excited about what they're working on it's like it's a very very exciting time that feels really different than when I started my career and people had a level of uh like maybe caution about entrepreneurship and I can't even imagine what that felt like compared to 10 years before that but like no I I kind of reject the premise of the question I think there's a lot of people in venture who are lazy for sure but like right yodi uh thank you for standing on principle thanks for talking politics playing pundit next time i guess courtside yeah all right next time courtside all right all right thanks so much for listening to the newcomer podcast i'm eric newcomer follow us on substack at newcomer.co hope you enjoyed the episode see you next week