Delian Asparouhov: Varda’s Space Factories & Founders Fund

25:33And now they basically avoid it. They either like run on the center of it or they stick on the outside until they get to Cape Canaveral. And then once they're below it, they come onto the coast. And so it was cool. Just like, even as a practical passenger, you like slightly feel the effect. So it means that New York to Miami flight is like two minutes longer, whatever. It doesn't matter. The grand scheme of things probably good for the country that we can launch rockets, but it's cool to see them start to adapt that stuff. We're obviously hopeful that that's what happens with reentry, where it becomes so common that, hey, there's just these flight corridors where it's not meant for planes anymore.

26:00It's meant for spacecraft coming in for space. We're not there yet, but clearly we did it on launch, and so I'm hoping that happens in space. There's clearly, you know, Brendan Carr, the new FCC commissioner, is talking about how to make this easier for space companies, given that a lot of space companies will actually go to Germany because you can actually get a license from the German regulator of spectrum, and that is valid in the United States. That's probably a broken state of the world to be in. You know, you probably don't want American space companies having to go to Germany to, you know, sort of get their like spectrum approvals.

26:27And then I honestly don't know too much about, you know, sort of NOAA. But, yeah, I think these things are progressing in the right direction. Probably this new administration helps some of the pressures, you know, with all these things. I think it kind of, you know, only happens where it's like you can talk about this stuff in theory. We're like, you know, FAA had these like reentry regulations and they were like modern in theory. But in practice, it didn't matter until like VARTA went through them and in some ways got beat up by them. And then we could go back and say, hey, like, here are ways that we would improve them that we think still allow the FAA to prioritize public safety, but also, like, you know, make it a little more streamlined.

26:57And so Brewe actually wrote up, you know, my co-founder wrote up an op-ed in Payload Space, you know, I forget, maybe it was like two, three months ago about, like, how he would architect, you know, the regulations. And we got some really positive feedback from the FAA on that about how they're thinking about actually significantly incorporating a lot of his feedback into the next-gen, you know, sort of version of these reentry regulations. So, yeah, you can't always just wait for the president to do this stuff for you. You got to go fight the fight yourself. And the best way to do that is just go and try and do these activities.

27:23Now, I do agree with the sort of Peter General philosophy of part of why a lot of innovation got steered into digital world, AI, et cetera, is because we have overregulated the physical world to the point where the cost of capital and the amount that it takes me to build a company like this is just way more than an AI company, although they have to deploy all their chips and everything. But still, software companies don't have to deal with the FAA, putting them on hold for eight months. During those eight months, I had employees. We had Bern. We had an office. That's got to come out of somewhere.

27:51It mostly ends up coming out of the fact that we need to fundraise more and be more dilutive. And that means fewer returns for our shareholders. And so hardware is definitely hard, and we're probably making it unnecessarily hard on ourselves in this country. And that's a huge disservice to our ability to innovate in the real world. You've been particularly outspoken against defense funding and government contracts. Could you share more about that? Well, let's see. I haven't been an outspoken critic of, you know, sort of I do think we need to increase defense spending. I've definitely been somewhat of a critic of the amount of venture dollars going into defense tech and that probably being overweighted relative to what the sector can deliver and into a much broader set of logos than probably actually sort of makes sense.

28:37It's kind of reflecting on this today where I think Q1 this year was probably the largest deployment into sort of defense tech companies that we've basically ever seen. And at the same time, you're also seeing the House and the Senate pass a continuing resolution for the year. That basically means that they're freezing their 2024 sort of budgets for the full year of 2025. So that means no net new ads. That means any of the prior programs that were net new that were growing now have to stay flat. And so what does that mostly mean? It's hugely beneficial to the incumbents because it basically lets them say, hey, those new things that you were funding in prior years that basically got frozen for a year, those things aren't going to come in time for Taiwan anyways.

29:15Just ditch those. Come work with us instead. I do think you're starting to get a little bit of some sour taste in some of everything from the congressmen to sort of generals that are starting to see, hey, Silicon Valley is a little bit claiming a little too much credit relative to what they've actually delivered for us. and why are all these guys funding billions of dollars into things that kind of look like science fair projects? So, yeah, I do think that it feels a little unrealistic, but it's not to say that companies like Andrel will do phenomenally well. But people have to remember, there's not going to be five Andrels.

29:49There's probably going to be an Andrel. There may be a number two. That's probably about it in that sphere of next-generation Defense Prime. Are there going to be things that are like, take a Hadrian that is a supplier to an Andrel? um yeah sure that's like you know kind of a different category uh but the things that are going head to hand against them as like a next generation defense prime that feels like a pretty crazy over rotation and then you know i think it's obviously exciting to see that like you know in the grand scheme of things i do think that the trump administration has put together a really phenomenal team to address the deficiencies that we have around next generation hypersonic vehicles nuclear weapons modernization you know upping our shipbuilding capacity um and they're obviously already starting to use it execute on that and some of which is a you know huge set of opportunities for the defense tech industry.

30:34But it's also no guarantee that that doesn't just go to a lot of the traditional defense primes as well. Are you concerned at all for any of these early stage companies or do you think they shouldn't exist? Well, I don't think it's an or. I think it can be an and. I'm both so concerned for them and I don't think that they should necessarily exist. There being bubbles in venture is a feature, not a bug, in that it is both the way that you can significantly lower the cost of capitals for the leaders of those, you know, sort of fields, right? I'm not sure that open AI would be where it is if not for the AI bubble, because it allows them to deploy the level of capital they've had.

31:08You know, same thing with Andrel. It was very contrarian for a long time, but I'm also sure that Trey is pretty happy that his cost of capital is probably like, you know, the lowest that it's ever been on a relative basis because there's so many people that are so interested in defense tech. And so that almost certainly will propel Andrel even further forward, which leads to the long tail returns that make LPs happy, that justify the entire venture ecosystem that we all live in that then makes a bunch of lemmings create future bubbles. But the downside, you know, also bubbles is it, you know, is very easy to fall in the trap of, you know, let me spray and pray to everything that is relevant to the bubble and hope that I have great returns when it turns out all that really matters are the, you know, one or two long tail winners.

31:44And so, yeah, I do think that a significant number of the logos that are talked about today and the, you know, sort of top 50 in this field. Yeah. You know, 47 of those are going to be companies that are completely irrelevant 15 years from today. What matters both as an investor and a founder is, have you invested in those top three? And as a founder, are you in those top three? We have a particular angle that we've taken here. I'm not trying to be just a next generation space defense prime. The next generation space defense prime is SpaceX. They're the largest space defense prime. They have the largest contracts in that field.

32:19They are the long tail winner. but I do think that as we're building our vision of what we think our long tail outcome is around space factories are there things on the margins that we can go and tackle that we think are pretty unique and are material not so material that we're the size of an androal or SpaceX on that alone but big enough that it's a nice stepping stone on the path to building our grander vision of space factories versus there are some people that are building their companies in a way where their only option is to build something that is the size of a SpaceX or androal in the defense industry and I'm not sure that they have an appropriate path to getting there.

32:52The power law lives on. The power law lives on. And as I like to remind people, a venture capitalist really has two jobs. It is to buy equities and it is to sell equities. And people sometimes forget the second part of the job. It's just so fun, though. Why not? Buying is very fun. I also like selling. Yeah, that is good. So shifting over to the Hill and Valley Forum. So we recently had Christian Garrett on the pod. He covered this a little bit, but I'd love to hear from you. How did this idea initially start and how's it going to how's it going to go down this year? Yeah. So Christian and Jacob had a conversation.

33:28I want to say it was like July, August 21. They're like, hey, we should do something around this field of like bring Silicon Valley leaders together with, you know, sort of defense tech and, you know, elected officials. And they both were like, you know, who should work on us with this work on us with this work with us on this is, you know, so Delian. and so they sort of pinged me a couple days later we got together and I was like yeah let's do this we can organize a small dinner to start see how this goes original dinner was supposed to be like 30-40 people ballooned into like 100 got a ton of really great feedback from it let's run it back and let's do it bigger, better, better ran it back like six months later got even bigger, better, more elected officials why?

34:05What was the energy around it? I think it was just like it's one of these things where it's like it just kind of felt like a moment in time that you know we just happened to capture the tailwinds of where there was obviously a lot of people that were sort of working with Capitol Hill before us starting this, right? Obviously, you know, groups like SpaceX, Palantir, and all that had been around for a very long time. But it felt like in 2021 was the first time where it was now a much broader set beyond just that. And there were more and more people coming to the table and more and more investors that were interested in this.

34:32And so it felt like the momentum and interest, both from Silicon Valley wanting to engage with DC, but then also DOD and elected officials wanting to engage more Silicon Valley, just were these like pre-existing trends that kind of made it together at the right time. And so we've continued to run it on an annual basis each time. I think we've improved the quality of that sort of event and everything from who's speaking to who's attending. This year, we have speakers like Yensen Huang from NVIDIA, Alex Karp from Palantir, Brian from Anderle, Keith from KV, Josh Kushner from Thrive. It's a really phenomenal set of tech speakers.

35:08And then we're going to be talking more about our political speakers over the course of the next month or so. I think, again, a part of why you're seeing, in some ways, I think the best event that we've put on yet is, again, because of this trend towards a bit more of unification and synergies between the two worlds. Again, it's not to say that the vast majority of the DOD budget in 2020, sort of four and five, is going to go to incumbent defense primes. But there's definitely Silicon Valley companies that are over-promising their capabilities and under-delivering. But in the grand scheme of things, I think there are still significant elected officials and DOD leaders that recognize that what an andrel is delivering on CCA, what a Hadrian is delivering on the metal that they're cutting, the fact that we're landing capsules from space and testing hypersonic equipment and actually doing it in our two-for-two.

35:57There's also some promise and some light at the end of the tunnel as well. What are the biggest challenges for this year? Well, I think it comes back to what I talked about, which is at the end of the day, none of these companies make sense unless they're making revenues those revenues ultimately have to come through budgets from the dod those budgets have to be approved by congress you know the president you know sort of congress you know have both said that we are freezing those budgetary levels now dod is allowed to do some uh reprioritization and reallocation of that it still has to reflect what you know sort of congress and the president you told them to prioritize but that's gonna be a real challenge for a lot of companies there are a lot of companies that almost certainly had you know appropriations requests in for fiscal year 25 that now have got zeroed out.

36:38And so you're having to navigate that. And so, yeah, I think whenever you see that there's a huge mismatch between investor expectations and the inflow of capital, and then the end customer, which ultimately is the federal government, and their signaling, there's probably something that is a little wrong there. And so the fact that you're seeing the most insane pricing that I've ever seen for defense tech deals, while Congress is literally saying, like, we are not giving people more revenue this year. People got to think about that a little bit. But yeah, that's right. That's probably by far the biggest challenge.

37:08And then probably the multi-year challenge is like at the end of the day, there's only so many times you can like pitch on the promise of technology. It's gotta like deliver something for the end warfighter, right? And honestly, very few of these companies outside of literally just Andrel and like Palantir have actually delivered on capabilities that are meaningful for the warfighter and SpaceX. Yeah, other than those three, there isn't really like a like unicorn VC backed company that like has actually delivered things at scale for the warfighter that doesn't really exist. There's been a lot of positivity and at least a movement between Silicon Valley and DC, not just in space and defense, but across the board.

37:44I want to know from your perspective, is this hype or is this real? Is there really like a synergy happening between Silicon Valley and Washington DC, or is this more of just headlines? Well, the barbarians have stormed the castle some amount, but it's also, you know, sort of subsets of the barbarians in that, you know, if you obviously look at a lot of their talking points, I'm not sure that J.D. or Trump were particularly pleased with, you know, sort of big tax actions over the past, you know, sort of eight years in terms of, you know, sort of censorship, you know, you know, election influence influencing, you know, what was allowed to go viral versus not.

38:18And so I don't think that it is this default, happy, hunky dory sort of relationship. I think you may see antitrust actions that were, you know, sort of just as punitive in the Biden regime towards tech happening in the Trump regime towards big tech. And so that's not necessarily user default good. So yeah, I do think there is a little bit of like a rosy picture right now, both in like defense and aerospace, but also more broadly in terms of like, oh, like there's a bunch of tech leaders now in, you know, sort of the hill. And yeah, that means that they're going to do things that are great for tech.

38:47And I don't think that is necessarily default the case. If you both study what their talking points are, if you look at the policies that they're sort of putting out, it is not like default good for Silicon Valley, like, you know jd vance you have to remember like you know is definitely prioritizing like the like working man in ohio and so like these like super high like china canada and like you know you know mexico tariffs definitely also impact a lot of like silicon valley's like portfolio companies and so um yeah i guess yeah i don't i i don't think it's a just like you know this is default good across the board um and i wouldn't even say that's necessarily something that i disagree with either like i think you know they have some points on why they're doing a lot of these things um and then even also on their approach so far to fiscal policy I'm definitely a proponent of Secretary Besant's talking points around we may need a little bit of a detox period from government spending and that may involve some shakiness in the public equities, that means shakiness in companies' abilities to IPO that means shakiness in VCs' abilities to deliver returns to LPs, which then means shakiness in LPs' interest in backing VCs and so that's also not necessarily hunky-dory either So, yeah, I've tried to sort of put out some caution lights to some of our sort of founders that are maybe having overly rosy pictures on what the next couple of years of capital markets looks like.

40:03And I think people should be ready for a little bit of sort of rockiness as we sort of transition from still filtering out the crazy quantitative easing that should happen under the Biden administration in the first year or two. In terms of venture capital, congratulations. You've made it six years at Founders Fund. Big deal. um what are your biggest learnings oh man um let's see i've made a lot of mistakes um maybe the learning is like the mistakes aren't really the things that matter it's leaning into the good um you know i'm reminded of the power law in that you know basically you know ramp plus sword drive everything and you know the rest of everything that i've worked on is effectively a rounding error in comparison.

40:50I think I, you know, have learned that the constraints that working on something like Varda provides, I think actually make me better at venture because it really forces you to focus on only the like two, three, four decisions a year that you really make that matter and really just focusing only on those rather than a bunch of other, you know, sort of activity that isn't really going to, you know, sort of lead to the long tail outcomes.

41:18I think I've definitely learned that my best edge is when a company has both a product and engineering edge, but also that still has to show up as a distribution edge. I think there's a handful of mistakes that I made in 2021 where I just over-rotated. I'm like, oh, this is going to be great engineering, and so it'll work out. And it's not to say that I'm the right investor for something that's pure network effects. I don't think I'm the best person at a write those. But when there is some decent enough distribution or solid enough such that the product engineering really does give you a great edge, I think that's kind of plus assessing founder personality, founder market fit, their resilience and grit.

41:54I think that is sort of my sweet spot, and I should just continue to focus on that. Maybe the other lesson is, while I think I am best at, you know, sort of seed in A, you know, I do probably need to start to push a little bit outside of my comfort zone in that when you're at the scale of the capital that we're, you know, sort of pulling and managing, it is really valuable to have those early relationships, right? Leading the seed and the A of ramp is what gives us, you know, sort of the right to win on, you know, a lot of the future rounds and allocation, even just doing pro rata in those rounds.

42:24But at the same time, you know, a bunch of$1 million dollar seeds you know are you know sort of hard to use to influence the you know outcome of a billion dollar fund um and so i don't know is it like you know tangible example of this um uh you know sort of recently led the charge in a series b that we're leading from founders fund that's a sort of 36 million dollar but net new check for us so it's not a portfolio company that we're doubling down into um that for me in terms of process and size of check is the largest that I've ever led the diligence on for a net new to the portfolio company versus obviously with Ramp, we've doubled down with$100 plus million checks, but very different than something where you're entering into it for the first time.

43:05And if you do the math on that, it's like five or six X in that is super meaningful for the fund versus even the best seeds don't always 150 X. And so in some ways, IRR definitely really matters, but there is some amount of cash on cash returns that really matters, especially as you're starting to see the sort of venture ecosystem get constrained to a smaller set of players and companies staying private for longer and longer, which is naturally leading to, even for the best funds that are, I think, very disciplined like we are, our AUM is steadily growing over time. And if AUM grows, but your average check size does not, then by default, in order to be meaningful for the fund, your IRR really has to grow like crazy.

43:52And that's honestly kind of difficult to do in today's environment. What is your average check size and pricing? It's generally grown over time, partially due to some of these realizations. Probably my mean check size is probably like seven or eight million, but the median is probably three or two.

44:19Probably both the mean and the median probably need to go up over the next five years in order for me to adapt to today's environment. I probably need to do things that aren't just aerospace, defense, tax, etc. That's the only thing that I've been doing over the past few years, but I've definitely been heavily biased towards that. That trend, there's just not that many interesting seed rounds to do anymore because a lot of the winners have been picked. I need to figure out what that next trend that I can identify that's going to be really important five years from today that, you know, can start doing seed runs into today.

44:47You ended up leading more rounds in the last four months than the last three years. It's true. So what happened there?

44:55Well, you know, part of it sometimes I think it's just chance where, you know, you just happen to stumble across it, you know, a set of really good founders, all that happened to come to you at the same time. You know, a part of it is that I think some really high quality founders chose to over raise in the depths of, you know, sort of 21 and 22 as things were heading into the bear market and then chose to stay off the market for an extended period of time. And that was what we sort of chose to do at Varda as well, where we sort of hunkered down and decided to avoid the capital markets for a while.

45:21And so I do think if somebody was out in fundraising in the true bear environment, it was because they didn't plan their capital well enough or respond to capital markets sort of well enough. And so I do think there's something about like the average quality of founder that was raising in Q4 24 was just higher than Q4 23. And then, you know, part of it was, yeah, just the handful of things that I got involved in were just fields that I knew really, really well, had been studying for an extended period of time. And so just when the right founder and the right product and the thing that they were working on came to me, it was just very easy to get to conviction on even relatively large checks.

45:54So it was only three rounds, but those three rounds ended up sort of comprising on the order of something like$45 million, which for me is the equivalent of previously what I'd sort of been primarily responsible for. Obviously, I still collaborated on all these with a lot of my team members or colleagues at FF. but is the equivalent of what I'd previously done over the course of a two-year or even three-year period. Could you share some of the companies that you've invested in? Unfortunately, that past quarter of stuff, nothing's been announced yet. No, not those. In general, I'd love to know more about your portfolio.

46:28Oh, sure. I feel like your investing story is kind of under the radar because Varda takes up so much of the spotlight. Yeah, yeah. Explain and also list out every single company you've ever invested in. Well, I'll start from the top down in terms of FMV is probably the easiest way. Ramp by far is the sort of largest by FMV and total dollars into the company. Obviously, one that I had to collaborate with a lot of colleagues on. Keith was heavily involved, obviously, in the later stages. My colleague and general partner, Napoleon, does a lot of growth investing, was heavily involved. but definitely one that I helped navigate through the firm and sourced into the firm and helped negotiate the seed in Series A.

47:12That was one where we had been thinking about it as a thesis internally at Founders Fund and had really gotten to know the CTO cream there. I think he just presented, although I typically am not doing pure software investments, it's one where the combination of software plus regulations, complex coordination felt a little different than an enterprise CRM tool, let's say. And I really felt like, you know, sort of Kareem and Eric from their prior Paribus experience with their first company just had such a chip on their shoulder from that, but also had the perfect background to go and build a corporate card, you know, sort of company, but that wasn't just built around like points and a champagne campaign, but instead was built around what a CFO ultimately cares about, which is sort of saving time and money.

47:52And I thought it was actually, you know, it sounds very simple, but it was a surprisingly very unique angle. And, you know, it was at the time quite contrary, given that the incumbent was seen as a multi-billion dollar company that was off into the races. It didn't seem like there was an angle to unseat them. Obviously, now it's been totally unseated, and Ramp is the clear winner in the category. But that was something that, again, came down to fundamental product engineering being better, and they were good enough at distribution, let's say. And I think you've gotten also look at their now Saquon Barkley ad.

48:20They're sort of crushing it. They're killing it. At distribution. But they were not so good at distribution for a long time. And recently hit a$13 billion valuation in the secondary markets. Above the high watermark of any of their peak Zerbera valuations. It shows that they've really built up a healthy business. I feel really grateful to have been involved there. The second by FMV is a company called Sword Health. Originally led the Series A from Coastal Ventures, 5 on 25 post. And then doubled down and joined the board. And then doubled down from Founders Fund when I shipped it over to there.

48:50That one, sort of similar thing. It was a market that I bleed a lot in. I dislocated my shoulder when I was younger and gone to a brick and mortar physical therapist that was super archaic, clearly something that you could solve with some sensors, AI, software. There were some pre-existing incumbents that at the time, again, were unicorns, but I thought didn't really have great product. Met Sword and the team, read through their clinical papers. They clearly had a differentiated product. You actually saw it show up in differentiated clinical outcomes. They were just good enough in distribution that I thought they could figure it out.

49:16And yeah, lo and behold, here we are, six years later, company, I think the most recent announcement was at$3 billion, but yeah, they've done even higher, let's say, recently. Oh, okay. And, you know, they have, from that prior, you know, sort of unicorn incumbent that was thought of as the pre-existing winner, I think we've stolen like 15 Fortune 500 clients at this point, you know, sort of from them. And so, you know, and it all comes down to the fact that like, again, just like the CFO cares about saving time and money, the CMO also mostly cares about better clinical outcomes and saving money.

49:46And they do that far better than anybody else. And so the company's growing like crazy. It's profitable. They've got multiple product lines. And so I think they're going to be one of the very few health tech companies that actually does well. And it's funny because there's whole funds and partners that dedicate their whole lives and portfolio to health tech. And I just focus on the one that actually mattered and invested in that one. And kind of the same thing in fintech. And then after that, it's a smattering of mid-stage companies. Varda, Hadrian, and a few others. But yeah, those are kind of the major outcomes.

50:19Everything else that I've done is sort of, let's say, below unicorn status and sort of earlier. But I think, you know, delivering two from seed slash A to, you know, a pretty large outcome is, I think, not bad for an early stage investor six and a half years in, given that like, unlike growth investors that maybe start at unicorn stage and then they just see the unicorn scale. You know, my average entry price into those two was 25 post. And so getting to, you know, four plus billion takes some time. You tweeted out that seed investing is a bad setup for a full VC job. Are you hinting that VC is just a hobby?

50:56I think that it is a better, you'll perform better if it's a hobby. So take that as you wish. I think that there's very few companies per year that matter. There's obviously people that take the strategy of like they lead like, you know, 40 plus seeds and spray and pray every year. And that can definitely generate some level of returns. but I'm not sure it's the best use of strategy. And if you do VC full time, it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you're investing into a top percentile founder because if you go out and meet with a thousand founders and you choose the top 10 and invest with them, okay, yes, you're investing into the top percentile.

51:35But if you were actually to survey the whole planet and realize that all that really matters is the.001 percentile, you'd probably realize that actually like only one of those thousand email with mattered. And so my goal is ideally only meet with, you know, 30 founders per year, but make sure that one of those 30 is that, you know, sort of 0.001%, you know, sort of founder. Um, and I think it's honestly, and I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm sure that like, there are going to be years where I miss that because I'm not willing and able to meet the thousand. Um, but I generally think that you're much better off just meeting the 30, you know, sort of per year and instead spending the rest of the time, um, showing why you can even be a useful partner because when one of those 30 comes up, if they're really good, they have a multitude of offers.

52:14Take Chris at Hadrian. I think there was like seven seed round offers. And a part of why he took mine was because I was the only other person that was like in the trenches building a company and was not sort of a journalist sitting on Twitter all day tweeting. And I think that was what he valued in that offer. And so I think if you look at the post-call 2015 timeframe, the people that make it onto the Midas list, which while an imperfect list is maybe the closest we have to an objective ranking function of vcs um the you know sort of uh uh the only ones that have made it down to the you know sort of top 100 in the post 2015 time frame that early stage investors are only people that have had significant operational backgrounds like pre-2015 for sure you have people like bill gurley etc show up but post 2015 there's basically nobody without operational background which i see as the founder market signaling that hey you know we want people on board that again aren't just journalists or you know sort of hedge fund um you know you know background types uh we want people that are actually other builders.

53:07And so the extreme version of this is you're seeing the Dylan Fields of the world lead series A's. Man, if you're an adventure investor and you're competing in Dylan Field, it's like, do you want the guy that built the$17 billion company? Or do you want the guy that wrote a couple essays on Medium? It's like, probably the guy that built the$17 billion company is probably going to be a little more useful for you when you call him at 9 p.m. with an emergency. As we close out, I want to reflect on your fatherhood, your new journey into fatherhood. So how has this changed how you view the world and your perspective and what are the biggest lessons you've had?

53:43Let's see. Well, I think it gives you a deeper appreciation for sort of investment into the future and having a really sort of long-term approach to building both your personal and contributing to the global future because you think about what is the world that my children will grow up in. Maybe on Jupiter. Maybe on Jupiter where they get super jacked. And then I think on a personal basis, it just sort of really changes how you think about prioritization. I think when I'm in the office, I'm just hyper, hyper focused on work because any minute that I'm here, I'm taking away from being with my kid.

54:15I better have a really good justification for that. Definitely obviously changes your personal life in a ton of ways. Probably used to do a work or social dinner like four or five times a week. Now, the exception is if you're two in a week, and that's honestly pretty rare. Most of the time, it's like one, if not zero, most of the time. It's a different phase and chapter in life, but thrilled to be in it. I'm somebody that grew up in an Eastern European household where my parents had kids quite young and family and the prioritization of that was always very top of mind. I always had this goal as a kid of wanting my first kid at 30.

54:54and, you know, my 30th birthday was November 30th, 2023, and he popped out December 5th. So it was like five days late, but, you know, sort of close enough. But, yeah, it was sort of greatest joy that, you know, one can experience and, you know, really grateful to be a father, and fingers crossed he stays sort of healthy, and I get to, you know, sort of share as many years as possible on this planet Earth with him. Amazing. That's so sweet. That's a great note to end on. Well, thank you, Delian. always wonderful to have you on never know what you're going to say but we love it every time yeah thanks for thanks for having me molly