Parker Gals | From Advising to Investing: Building a Career in PE (w/ Katie Yuan, Hg Capital)

0:00You are ultimately in control of your own career and you need to have the agency to put in actions to achieve what you want.

0:24hi everyone i'm liz shu and we're back with another episode of parker gals i'm here in the parkergale hq today i'm joined by my friend katie yuan calling in from london hi katie Hi Liz, how are you? I'm doing well, how are you? Good, good. Thank you for inviting me onto the podcast. Super excited. Of course. Yeah, super excited to be joined by you today. Katie and I met in 2022 at IB training for JP Morgan back in the day in New York, actually. But Katie, why don't you tell the folks at home where you're calling in from, where you work and all that good stuff? Yes, of course. I'm currently working as a private equity associate at HG in the Saturn Fund, which is our large cap fund investing in B2B software and tech enabled service companies across Europe and North America.

1:16And I've been here for a little over two years now. And prior to this, like Liz said, I spent two years at JP Morgan in investment banking and got the chance to meet Liz. Yeah, I feel like it's been a minute. I actually met up with Katie a year ago in London in her hometown. And that was the last time that we connected. So this is really fun to be able to chat again. Easter 2025? Yes, I remember. Yes, yes. It was Easter because everywhere we went, like we were trying to visit all the beautiful churches and everything and everything was like closed because they were having services everywhere. But yeah, no.

1:56Not the nicest weather. Yeah, well, I would love to reminisce more about our times at JPMorgan, but I'm going to first jump into our kind of intro section called the Indication of Interests, where we're going to get to know Katie a little bit more personally, and then we'll jump back into all the fun career stuff.

2:15So, first things first, what is your go-to comfort show? so my usual answer would be friends no surprise but I feel like that's a very common answer so my alternative backup answer is so there is just a selection of kdramas which I adore so I'm a big fan of kdramas in general and there's just a few that I would re-watch over and over again so I think the top ones are probably Crash Landing on You Business Proposal Hospital Playlist Something in the Rain all the classics, I love them and I have rewatched them basically all of them more than twice at this point that's kind of impressive because all of those are really long shows for the people who don't know each episode of Hospital Playlist is like almost two hours I want to say It's like an hour and a half for some of them.

3:13So that's quite a feat. Yes, but they're just shot really well. Really, you know, good actors, good scripts, and just good storyline, and just easy to watch. And yeah, I love them. I love it. That's a very creative answer. And that's the honest answer for folks like you and me. We're just trying to blend in with our friends' answers. Are you also a big K-drama fan? I definitely had a phase. Crash Landing on You was my 2020, like, you know, lockdown COVID show. I like blasted through that in probably a week, which again is very impressive. It's 16 episodes. Each one's definitely over an hour. Yes.

3:49And I cranked through that. But that was actually my intro to K-drama. That was my first ever K-drama. Okay, that's like really hard to beat though. So can't recommend enough. So good. All right. Second question. What is something that you can cook without looking at a recipe? So my close friends watching this will know this, but it's a my own recipe that I've created a couple years ago. And I would call it an Asian fusion sausage pasta recipe. So the sauce is essentially made up of gochujang sauce, which is Korean chili paste, bit of oyster sauce, bit of rice wine, and then I mix up kimchi with cherry tomatoes.

4:34And the flavors are just divine. It's so easy. How did you, did you like intentionally curate these flavors or was it like an accident? Like how did you come up with that? I think when I went to Korea a couple of times just for like friend trips, I've had like pastas there, which are kind of a fusion between Western and Eastern, like Asian flavors. And that really inspired me to sort of just do something in that same vein at home, something super easy with really simple ingredients. And essentially that was my inspiration. and I've cooked a few times for my friends and everyone's loved it. So that's, yeah, my go-to top favorite recipe.

5:15That sounds so good. I'm going to have to ask you for that recipe later. Next time we visit London, I'll make sure to make that for you. Yes, next time, next time. All right, and then the last question in this section, what is your perfect Saturday? I'd say perfect Saturday slash weekend in general definitely involves a lot of tennis. I have lessons basically every Sunday and I just love it so much it's so healthy it's social I've met new friends through it and yeah it's definitely not the easiest sport but I'm just obsessed with sort of constantly improving at it and then just seeing friends and just having nice dinners with them just hanging out and I think lastly just having the downtime to relax and chill you know of reading and just, yeah, and just rest.

6:03So I think that would encompass my ideal Saturday slash weekend. That sounds lovely. Did you play any racket sports growing up or is this like brand new adult beginner territory? I grew up playing badminton. Okay. So that's always been my racket sport. And I still love badminton. But then as an adult, I realized actually, you know, a lot of people play tennis slash paddle and it's very social although it's both racket sports techniques are very different with tennis there's definitely a lot more power involved so when I got to the stage where I could actually you know hit and do rallies nicely it was very satisfying the next section is kind of the meat of the conversation we're calling a shop talk so I'd love to hear a little bit more about your career trajectory so far, where you started.

6:56You could maybe even walk us through like from what you studied all the way till now and I'd love to ultimately land in kind of what drew you to private equity and how you ended up where you are. Yeah of course. So I'll start with my university. So I studied at University of Cambridge, did economics for three years, which was a great time despite having COVID in the middle of it. I did my internship in the summer between my second and third year of university at JP Morgan in the industrials team, which is where I ended up for my first full-time job after graduating. And I spent two years in the same team at JP Morgan, and I would say it was such a fantastic first job to have after graduating.

7:46I'm sure Liz you would agree as well. It really was a great training ground for getting that fundamental set of sort of skills and knowledge needed for working in finance overall and open up a lot of doors, met so many and worked with so many great and smart people such as Liz and being very honest here and And yeah, and I learned a lot, truly, worked on some really interesting projects. And then I would say around my second year working there, I started exploring potentially different options and career paths within finance. So I just began speaking to different people in PE and investing and ended up really liking the sound of what people do in private equity.

8:42I think those conversations were really helpful in helping me to learn not just the theoretical difference between PE and IB, but more importantly, the differences in the ways of working, in the ways of thinking. And what drew me to PE is that And in IB, where you are mostly just advising on, you know, transactions, on M &A deals, in PE, you are making the investments yourself, right? You're deploying the capital. So there is just so much rigorous ways of analysis and thinking. And it's constantly learning about new things, you know, learning about new businesses, tech, products, because when you're investing in millions and billions of dollars in the company, you need to have conviction and you need to have comfort in knowing that you understand every single facet of what the company does, its customers and markets, so that you can truly sort of balance and weigh the risk and rewards and know how to underwrite your investments.

9:46All of that, I think, involves a lot of intellectual rigor and curiosity, which still is my favorite part of my job to this day. I think whenever I get to work on an investment opportunity and I get to evaluate businesses or I get to lead due diligence in certain areas for a live deal, I truly love the process of just digging deep into a business, into market and learning about what that entails and then finding answers to things that aren't always obvious or easy to understand. and then ultimately I think then you translate those into your own investment views and I think that is just sort of the process that drew me to this to this career lastly I think another different thing compared with IB is that after you make an investment in PE right you sort of you hold the company typically for five to seven years and you get to sort of participate in that post-investment value creation process and to sort of get your input into the operational and commercial strategic discussions, which is a super interesting part to me.

11:00Yeah. So you were in the industrials group at J.P. Morgan, and then HD is a tech-focused fund. So tell me a little bit about that transition and what have you noticed being in tech versus in industrials and what drew you to kind of, you know, switch verticals, if you will, and what do you like about it now? Yeah. So I actually liked my experience in industrials. I think in my second year at JP, I was, you know, I worked on some really cool things, actually infrastructure advice on a airport sales ideal, did work on, you know, airlines, all of that was super interesting but then when i was thinking about having a career in investing you know tech was definitely something that um appealed to me just because it was around 2023-24 when you know ai was on the rise there's so much innovation happening and i just knew that tech was something that was touching every vertical of our economy was you know impacting every aspect of our day-to-day lives.

12:06And I wanted to have my career be in a vertical where I can stay on the forefront of what's happening with these latest innovations. HG is one of the largest tech investors in Europe where we have the most specialist knowledge and experience in investing in B2B software. and that creates a lot of advantages from the perspective of investing because you get that compounding effect where your expertise over the years of focusing on particular tech verticals really builds up and creates that flywheel effect. So I was drawn to HG for that aspect. And I was lucky in the sense that HG was quite open to people from non-tech backgrounds.

13:02So I got my foot in the door and I obviously when I was interviewing, I spent a lot of time learning about how you think about businesses in tech, how you model businesses in tech, which is fundamentally quite different to industrial businesses. But all of that is all over the internet. You know, there's a lot of resources over the internet. I spoke to people. Especially now, yeah. Exactly. I spoke to people, so that was actually not too challenging in terms of understanding at least the first layer of software investing. And I think it's a really great vertical to being right now because of AI.

13:41So much is happening and always cool things to learn every single day. Yeah. And I think one of the things that stands out to me about you, Katie, is always that you've you are very curious, very smart, very, you know, personally driven as a person. And I think like that came through all the way from our IB training days for the people at home. Katie and I were in the wave two of IB training, which wave one, I don't know if they still do this, but wave one in America is like mostly Americans and like people from New York, the California teams, et cetera. I happened to be in the wave where it was like 90 % Europeans and then 10 % Americans.

14:25And all the Europeans like Katie would come in with like, I guess, I don't know about you, but a lot of them were like had masters in finance, like basically like sleep through all the classes and just like cruise through the exams. And then the Americans were over here like grinding and like stressing out every single night and worried about the exams. And Katie and them are just like cruising through. I was not cruising through. I had to grind. Yeah, no, it was. I'm so glad you ended up in wave two, by the way, Liz. Oh, yes, yes. Best thing that happened to me. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I remember we had exams every single week.

15:05Was that right? It was every week. Yeah, it was crazy because also we were doing some of us were still finishing up our like the what is it called? The FINRA related exams, like SIE, like all that stuff, series exams. And so there was one week where I had overlapping exams, like I had my last series exam on the Saturday. and then we had like accounting or something on Monday. And that was a rough week for a lot of the Americans. And then the Europeans are just like easy breezy, like partying. Yes. And I think because the classes and training exams, that sort of distressed me out a little bit. And because of that, I don't think I truly utilized the time I had in New York.

15:49It was my first time in New York. Oh, was it? Yes. and I spent majority of it, I mean, it is the right thing to do, but I spent majority of it focusing too much on the job and training. I just didn't get the chance to really explore New York as a city. I've been back a few times since then, and I absolutely adore the city now. But I think back then because of the stress, it sort of concealed the fun of New York for me at the time. I have to say I agree. I think I saw basically the subway between the training center and the hotel, And that's like basically it. But where I was going with that is I feel like that curiosity and kind of intellectual drive, like it makes it so that no matter what vertical you end up investing in, whether that's industrials or tech, like you're applying the same principles to all of it.

16:40So the way that you have communicated about researching and being proactive and learning about how people think about making investments in that field, like that is applicable to whichever, you know, industry that you end up investing in. So, yeah, I think that's it. Finding something that like is inherently, inherently interesting to you is really important. But then also like knowing that you could, you know, apply this across whatever is also some is, it's also comforting on some level. I think that's a really great point where it's still PE, right? And fundamentally, it's still the same concept.

17:18No matter what the vertical is, it's still the same investor toolkit and way of thinking. and evaluating sort of returns and risk and rewards. So, and I also think at a junior stage, this is exactly the right time to jump around and explore different verticals and not narrow yourself into one from the very beginning because there's so many different things out there. You never know where your interest actually lies. So I think definitely at this stage, encourage people just to think outside the box and truly have the opportunity where you can to explore new things. Yeah, totally. All right. My next question for you is a bit more personal.

18:05Who in your career has shaped you the most so far and how? I was thinking really hard about this question because there's been so many different people that I've interacted with, so many mental figures I've had in my career so far. So it's really hard to pinpoint one person. so it's a bit of a cop-out answer but I would say that on reflection I was thinking about sort of the piece of advice I received from various people which I still lean on to this day which I think is I think you are ultimately in control of your own career and you need to have agency to put in actions to achieve what you want for your career.

18:51I think over time, I've really learned to be conscious of exactly what my goals are and what I want to achieve, and subsequently what I can do to achieve those, which sounds obvious, right? But I think it's no longer the case, you know, like when you're in school, in college, where there's a set curriculum and you have teachers telling you you have exams on XYZ date and you have these many weeks to study and you have to study XYZ. Now, as an adult in the world of sort of having an adult career, it's on you to ultimately really drive what you want to achieve. For example, you know, if there are particular meetings you want to attend, it's then on you to be proactive and ask someone simply, can you attend that meeting?

19:42and or if you want to get better at what you do it's on you to seek feedback so you know how to improve and get better at your job it sounds easy but it definitely needs I don't know that sounds hard to me I think for yeah I think you're you're you're definitely in the top like percentiles I think of no confidence knowing what you want setting goals and going after those goals I think a common source of like the quarter life crisis is that you start realizing like, oh, like my decisions actually are impacting my future and my who I am right now. And to your point, if you don't have active goals that you're pursuing, you may just end up, you know, going with the flow and ending up somewhere that you maybe didn't intentionally want to.

20:33And then that's kind of the result that you're living with, which I think is hard to stomach for some people. So I totally agree with your advice. But from my seat and hearing that, like that sounds really hard. Like what are you what's your advice for people who maybe don't know what they what their goals should be and don't know what they want right now? I think that's okay because these things take time and I don't always know exactly what I want you know what goals I have for particular things I think these things come with time but I think in the interim it's important that you put in the action to work towards that clarity this might be just speaking to a whole bunch of people if it's something if it's if the question is what what career path should I follow?

21:23Then maybe one of the things you can do to get close to the answer is to speak to a bunch of people who work in very different sectors, in different career paths, who have gone through different stages and just through those conversations, hear about what they do, what the experiences are, and then evaluate how does that sound to you? Is that something that's appealing to you? Is that something that you think you see yourself doing? And they're just doing a bunch of reading. There's so many resources online nowadays, especially now with AI available to you, you can do so much good homework. The right thing is just to take action, no matter how big or small.

22:08I think every step you take is ultimately a step closer to figuring out. And for me, sometimes I do realize that I'm in a bit of autopilot mode as well and I have to sort of step myself out of it and actually it's important to be very proactive you know it's even as small as just in my day-to-day job when I'm you know looking at my to-do list rather than just sort of autopiloting through you know my list of to-dos that I've accumulated over that week I should actively think outside of the BAU perimeter and think about, okay, how else could I add value to my different work streams and projects?

22:50So I'm not just cornered into the same lanes and same paths. Right, yeah. No, that totally makes sense. And I think that's great advice for many people who are in similar roles right now as us. So that's definitely great advice. I feel like we've covered kind of the next one, which was what is something you figured out recently and wish someone had told you earlier. but I want to put the flip side back on you, which is what is something that you're still trying to figure out now? That's a very good question. So I think one thing I'm still working on, one of the things I'm still working on, because for sure there's many, is having the confidence in my views and my judgment when it's not something I'm super familiar with.

23:38I think especially in this job where we're constantly looking at new things, new businesses, new markets or new processes and ways of dealing with things. It's important that I trust my own judgment, having done my homework, having sort of thought carefully through different things that I actually have the confidence in what my brain is thinking and in my own views and judgment rather than being you know skeptical or have you know not that much confidence in what I'm saying I think that is something I'm still sort of working on don't know if you share something similar as well no a hundred percent and I think to your point like in like tech is such a broad broad word that like you end up we actually end up looking at so many like businesses that are entirely different entirely different markets and I like what you the way you framed it where it's like the the source of your confidence isn't like blind confidence or cockiness it's yeah it's preparation it's homework and and also trusting your instincts and judgment but it's like a com it's a combination of those things yeah and that is what is that's the basis of your confidence in a conversation with a colleague or um a boss or a management team member or something like that So I like the way that you put that.

25:04I think judgment and instinct are slightly out of your control, but I do think that those get developed and strengthened over time as you are exposed to more deals, to more reading and research and all that stuff. And then the one that's really in your control is the preparation piece, the homework piece that you've mentioned a few times of there is all this information available to you. And now with like all these tools at our disposal, it is the only thing between you and knowing something is you, right? Like that's really the only barrier now. So I like that framing where as a junior team member, it is hard to feel like you have a right to speak up or a right to have an opinion.

25:48but I think that's part of what is fun about our job as well which is that having an opinion is is the job like you know developing a thesis having an idea about what you think about a business or an industry or a market like that is that is kind of the crux of the job so sure yeah and sometimes it can seem quite intimidating to express your views when it's different to other people in the room especially different to more senior people in the room but I think like you say that is the fun part of the job where you get to debate and have these discussions because often there's no right or wrong answer you know we're thinking about underwriting and investment sure there absolutely can be wrong answers but within that reasonable range it's not like it's black and white and so it's definitely encouraged for juniors for everyone in the room to to express their views um and even if others disagree you know there is that safe forum where you get to debate and have a discussion which i um uh really like because uh it's similar to when i was studying at cambridge where we'd have what we call supervisions which is where instead of like big classrooms with like 20 plus people it would be one um professor and maybe three or four students mags and you would do your homework and then you would actually debate um your homework it could be you know maths problems or essays in that small group session um and sometimes you can get into quite heated debate where you know if you have like quite strong opinion professor or other students it can be you know very interesting just to you know hear out different views and um and i think that setting is something that again really allows you to practice that intellectual muscle yes i think that's that's great that you had that experience i think similar at u chicago there were like discussion sessions is what we call it yeah um but i think not nothing as small as three to four that's that's quite a good teacher to student ratio yeah um but yeah i think one of the other hard things about doing that as a maybe like as maybe maybe it's just me or or maybe it's for other similar people like me but like separating the intellectual and um fact-based debate from like personal uh personal offense where like if you get offended if someone doesn't agree with you or if somebody pushes back on you and like not like you said it can get heated if everyone has really strong opinions and I think in our industry most people have really strong opinions about stuff.

28:30And that's also part of the fun, but like kind of being able to keep your cool and like, you know, in those situations and bring it back to the facts, the research, the homework that you've done and, you know, having an open mind that you could be wrong, I think is also a big part of it and being open to changing your mind. But yeah, that's just another thing that I feel like is it could be hard once you actually are in the throes of it. And when someone's coming at you with a lot of heated thoughts, it can get hard. No, agree, agree. It's important for sure to keep the composure and to be flexible enough to change your views and opinions.

29:11The British are pretty good at that, right? I feel like you... I'd say we are a British HQ firm. So everyone is, I'd say, very nice and polite and we don't ever get into heated debates or discussions, but everyone here is like an intellectual. Everyone very much likes to dig deep when we do DD. It's, you know, it's actually one of the reasons why I connected well with people here when I was interviewing because everyone is so smart. I instantly could tell I could just learn so much from every person here. And very thankful that it is still holds true to this day. Yeah, I love that. All right. The last question in this section for you, what are you most interested in or excited about right now in the industry?

30:00Definitely AI. And I know it's a very commonly said answer. But like I said earlier, there is just so much happening in this world. You have new businesses and startups and tech and innovations popping up constantly every week. I would say from my personal experience and working, what I find the most interesting right now is what we're doing at HG with our portfolio companies. because of the pace of innovation in tech right now, induced by AI, we have a huge focus right now to help our portfolio companies with basically becoming AI first in everything that they do, from product engineering to customer support to sales and marketing, essentially every aspect, all of it.

30:55And we collaborate very closely with our internal value creation team on those processes. And we actually have developed an in-house AI incubator called HG Catalyst, which consists of small teams of top tier AI talent and experts, which embed into our portfolio companies to essentially help them to build and launch AI native products in super fast timelines. So for example, usually products might take 12 to 18 months to be launched, but with the help of those AI talent, they can ship the product out in about three months. And I think, yeah, these resources are super invaluable to a portco's because we've been able to attract some really top-tier AI talent that are otherwise quite hard for the portco's to obtain themselves, just because the demand for AI talent is super high right now across the world.

31:59And it's been really interesting to participate and input into a lot of those discussions. For example, for one of my portco's, they're currently working with with HG Catalyst on developing an AI-native product suite in the tax and counting software space. So yeah, super exciting to see that evolution. So I think overall, in the world of AI, I think it's more about, I think more than just the AI tech itself, but just seeing how this evolution is prompting companies companies to think about and change the way they manage their operations and even just the way they think about the organizational structure.

32:45I think all of that, yeah, super exciting and I'm very intrigued to see how this further develops. What have you seen firsthand that's like really exciting to you specifically? Yeah, so for what I'm portcows, we have regular discussions with the C-suite and the CPO specifically, along with our value creation experts that work on this with us, just to figure out sort of the product roadmap. You know, how can we embed AI features and AI products into our existing offerings? How should we think about the pricing model? And how should we think about, you know, products aside, how can we implement AI tools into internal operations so that we can boost productivity, we can enhance efficiency, and then we then stay on top of sort of the stats, the data, and we can genuinely see productivity improvements in, for example, engineering throughput into customer support across different products.

33:48And, you know, at every board, you know, every month, it's an important focus for us, and I get the chance to sit on the boards and to participate and listen in on these conversations at C-suite level and just to stay on track of also what competitors are doing. So I think it's all very sort of firsthand experience and it's something that's happening across literally every port co within HG. And I think one, another interesting element and helpful element is that because we have such a narrow focus across verticals within B2B software, there's a lot of cross-learning and sharing of things we learn from one project or one product development that could be easily shared amongst other similar portfolio companies.

34:49and that speaks to the previous sort of snowball and flywheel effect I was talking about earlier from being such a specialist in the tech world. So, yeah, I think that's something that HG is super sort of forefront on just in terms of pushing out constantly on AI deployment and innovations. Yeah, totally. And I think one thing I also wanted to highlight from what you just said is that I think it's quite a unique position for you and I to be in boardrooms, like in these conversations that are not just like executing a plan, but it's like creating the plan and like, okay, like, what do we want to do?

35:30And so continuing to develop that sense of, you know, both that homework plus the judgment of like, okay, where should we go next, both personally, but then also like totally applicable for, you know, participating in on these or sitting in maybe at this point. Yeah. In these board meetings. I think like that's something that I don't think I obviously that's part of working at a PE firm. But I don't think before I joined, I realized like that's actually a big part of what we're supposed to be learning. And so I think that's like a very unique position that I think you're right. Like we should all be totally taking advantage of and testing ourselves and kind of where our instincts are going and see what the management teams think as well.

36:18So, yeah, super interesting. And I think, I mean, in IB, you don't, well, it's rare to get that level of operational insight and exposure, especially at this stage. Yes, totally. I think definitely one of the peers of PE is just having that insight into how companies actually operate and how C-suite level discussions take place. and there's always so many different levels of debates and discussions and especially when it's at that large cap level where you have multi-geography companies with multi-product layers, different customer bases. It's often not as straightforward as you might think when it comes to rethinking your product roadmap and launches.

37:04There's always a lot of nuances and dynamics to evaluate. So it's definitely not straightforward, but that's what makes it interesting. Yeah, totally. Well, that brings us to the closing call, which is our last rapid fire segment for you. So I'm just going to get into it. So first, what is the best book that you've read this year? It is called The Women by Kristen Hanna, I believe. I read this earlier this year and it was such a good book. It was a fantastic novel about a group of young women serving as nurses in the Vietnam War. And it was just like a very inspiring story about those women overcoming hardships in the war and post the war.

37:54And it's just a lot of great lessons about resilience, bravery and friendships. Highly recommend. I love that. Yeah. Second, what is your go-to karaoke song? Ah, Blank Space by Taylor Swift. Easy answer. Love, love. Katie is a diehard Swifty. I am a top Swifty. I'm in the Spotify's, I think, 0.1 % or 0.01 % every year. Still, yeah, still not in the top. It's a big denominator. So that's impressive. Exactly. So there's still a lot of people before me, But I've been a fan for a very long time, like 15 plus years. Wow. Wow. Honorable. All right. And the last question for you, what did 10-year-old Katie want to do when she grew up?

38:49And how far off were you? I was thinking back. And at 10, I wanted to be a lot of things. I think it was doctor, teacher, actress, presenter. So nothing remotely close to finance. I think I could see you in any of those roles. What about you, Liz? What were your ambitions at that age? Oh, man. Ambition and I aren't super familiar with each other. No. Come on. I think 10 year old Liz honestly I also kind of flip-flopped one of the most prominent ones that I remember though this is probably from when I was way younger but I really wanted to be a baker and I remember and it was I quote the reason is quote so that I could eat all the cookies that I wanted wow that's a very she had a dream she had a dream and a vision I support that how How about your baking skill now?

39:52You know, I kind of, I didn't actually follow through with that dream very well. So I don't bake a ton. I'm, I don't know. I think cookies and everything, to me, they like look really good in cartoons. Like I think they illustrate really well. And I think I just watched a lot of cartoons growing up and I was like, that's what I want. But I don't know. I don't think the reality lives up quite, quite to what I wanted. I'm sure you're understanding yourself. I'm sure your cookies that you bake are superb. Yes, next time we get together, we'll bake cookies and we'll make gochujang pasta. It's on my list to see in Chicago sometimes.

40:32Oh, yay. I can't wait. I can't wait. All right, well, that's it for today. And I really appreciate you coming on again, Katie. I'll see you soon. I promise. This was so fun. Thank you so much for having me. It's my great pleasure.