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16:07Carter Reum:I think the answer is some of both. And the great part about, you know, having diversity at M13 and diverse partners is that we have partners like our partner Latif, who I know you know, and Morgan, who are focused on what I'll call like the healthcare of the consumer healthcare AI, maybe me consumer healthcare, which is one of our pillars. I'm more interested in health and wellness and the example I just gave you, which is why we've been a part of brands like this longevity company we started called Lifeforce that we originally started with Tony Robbins, have a great team running it. I think it can do both, right?

16:40Carter Reum:There's still a place for physical products, there's still a place for people to go in bricks and mortar, but combined with technology, combined with the data sets, combined with the predictive analytics, I think it's really powerful. So you can't lose side of that.

16:53Courtney Reum:And I think what's exciting is take a fun two portfolio company like Form Health. It's one of the largest obesity management platforms in the country today. Like it was already in our portfolio. We saw the trends of GLP ones before they happened. But now a company like that gets even more exciting when you think about the AI of it all and the data sets of it. Now they can both expand the market, but they can, you know, scale much, much, much more efficiently using AI and the tools.

17:21Carter Reum:So yeah, because AI aside, there's basic things of life force or form or whatever it is, which is that trust, right? Brand loyalty. I've helped improve how you feel on a day-to-day basis. So like that engenders a lot of trust and there's a lot of things you can do with that to start to convert from maybe a physical product to something that's more software driven, something that's more one to many. And I think those are the things that are really interesting and emerging.

17:45Courtney Reum:To pull on the thread in that conversation a little bit more, how have you been helping out portfolio companies with this AI transformation shift? Are you seeing maybe not just incremental, but marginal impacts to their business? Either it's more efficiencies, their margins are increasing, they have much better product retention. What are you kind of seeing? Yeah, I mean, I think everybody these days is building an AI first company, right? at M13, we're going to spend over a million dollars building AI on dev, engineering, platform system, things like that.

18:16Carter Reum:And so we've already spent well more than a million since we started. It just wasn't called AI then, but we kind of called it this idea of like harnessing the collective brain of us, of our partners, of Evo and the network and a bunch of stuff we did, but it's evolved.

18:29Courtney Reum:Yeah. And I think, you know, when you think about M13, everyone is an operator by background. It's kind of crazy. We have 40 people and only one of those people has ever worked at a VC. So that's either crazy or it's by design. In our case, we think we learn from the best and do it our own way. And so, you know, I think when you think about an environment like this, having all former operators who can get in the weeds, right? We designed our platform with our, what we call our operating team, our propulsion team, very specifically to be able to fill in the gaps for these great founders, right?

19:03Courtney Reum:This idea is that as they're scaling, They can talk to our data team or our retention team or our brand team and things like that. And so I think, you know, we are just hyper obsessed with how do you build a better tech stack, right? In today's world of AI, you have to be doing everything, right? And we also obsess about, you know, we measure the burn multiples of all the companies we invest in because in today's day and age, you have to be more efficiently scaling. And so, you know, right now with a portfolio company, Pietra, that I'm on the board of with Founders Fund and Andreessen, I'm literally doing a 60-day AI sprint.

19:38Courtney Reum:I talk to them every single day. And, you know, I think that's the approach at M13. I think we're probably the rare VC that doesn't think, although we have 15 unicorns under our belt, that we just have some special superpowers and we invest in special people and then special things happen, right? We believe ideas are cheap, execution is dear. there are five or 10 companies going after every idea right now they're all well pedigreed they're all well funded and so we wake up every day and say look we just gotta out execute everyone we gotta get one percent better every day and if we can do that you know we can um be 37 times better by the end of the year and we are doing an internal review the other day and our portfolio companies have raised about 800 million dollars behind rounds we've led the last three years and they're raising those Series Bs about 30 % faster at about 25 % higher valuations than the median Series B.

20:34Courtney Reum:That means our hands-on approach is working. We're filling in the gaps, getting those companies up the J-curve, and just giving them a slightly better odds to create the next unicorn. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30 ,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S. Nearly 40 % of startups fail because they run out of cash. Rex is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, Rex is designed to help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all-in-one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account.

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21:58Courtney Reum:Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. I guess this is a really good segue. So Sorcery is proudly sponsored by Brex, the performance modern finance stack. No, Brex? Brex. Oh, okay. I thought you meant Roe, our fund two portfolio company that's high flying, but keep going. Brex is also high flying. Yeah, exactly. So they're all about performance. I'm really curious from your perspective with these companies, what are the key metrics you look for to determine their performance?

22:42Courtney Reum:Yeah, I think, you know, so when we invest in a company, then we get our propulsion team involved. And we basically do a two hour welcome kickoff with each of those companies. Right. And we say, we're just here to be your sixth man. If this were a basketball analogy, we know you already have a great team. We just want to fill in those gaps. And we're always identifying two or three key drivers that for the next three or the next six or the next nine months that we think we can help with and should be focused on to get the company to where they want to go. And so I think for every company, it's different.

23:13Courtney Reum:There are some universal ones like burn multiple, you know, monthly compounding growth rates, things like that. But I think every company, right, it might be, hey, go find 50 great brand logos to show, you know, that this is really resonating. with Pietra right now. We're tracking daily queries to see how many people are querying their AI and making sure that's up and to the right. And so I think, again, that's very much the M13. It is not one size fits all. It's jump in the trenches with these companies and figure out what they need to get to that next point.

23:48Carter Reum:I think it's important to just be super founder friendly. As Carter said, we were a bunch of founders who came together. So it's kind of for founders by founders. So we know what it's like. So we always start with what do we believe are the one or two most important things for the company for this next quarter or next year, irrespective of us. It's about them. And then it kind of trickles down to, hey, what are the two or three biggest KPIs or whatever word you want to use where M13 can be most impactful? Sometimes it could be hiring. Sometimes it could be mapping AI strategy. Sometimes it can be BD intros, whatever it is.

24:22Carter Reum:It all starts from what helps them the most? And then where can we add, you know, the most value based on our strengths?

24:27Courtney Reum:To your point, there's a really hot topic right now, and it'll probably continue into 2026. And that's talent, the war for talent, and also making sure that the teams have the right talent to execute. Because AI is like creating this insane learning curve that's leaving a lot behind. So how are you helping your teams with talent, whether it's, you know, retraining, uptraining, upscaling that kind of thing or just what to look for in their first hires i'm gonna let carter

24:56Carter Reum:answer that but i'll tell you a funny call i just had on a uh kind of a what was it on like a health ai company pre-launch certainly no mvp they couldn't even show me a demo they've already raised money at like 100 million valuation they had someone offer them money at like 188 I said, how can I understand this valuation? There's nothing here to look at yet. I mean, a nice deck. And his answer was, we'll go look at the page on our team because we just have the best team. So that will justify it and we'll win out really quickly. If he's right, maybe it does. But that is a tough thing to get behind investing a really impressive team page.

25:36Carter Reum:But truly, that's where they were at.

25:38Courtney Reum:Wow. Yeah, I mean, talent is always the driver, right? You can have a great idea, but it comes down to execution, and execution is done by a great team. And in today's environment, we're talking about technical AI talent, which is why you see these crazy aqua hires and things like that. You know, at M13, we have a five-person talent team. They're always obsessed with figuring out how to help our companies today more and more. It's kind of technical jobs, and it's not easy. You just got to go out there and compete and do the best we can. I think, you know, we don't tend to invest in things like the foundational models.

26:15Courtney Reum:A lot of the talent's flocking there. Different talent, though, is needed for some of these kind of other companies that are more infrastructure layer. But it is clearly our number one focus because it is what makes the execution look easy when you have a great team.

26:29Carter Reum:I mean, you can never spend too much time on it as a short answer. My wife just did a podcast with her new partner, Stephen Barlett, from Diary of a CEO. he said I mean a couple things he said really stuck with me but he claims you say talent's important and then I need to go look at your calendar and see how much time you're spending on it he claimed he himself is spending 50 percent of his time on his team and talent and it was just a wake-up call for me because I went yeah it's important to me I spend time you spend time on it we all do but I certainly don't spend 50 percent so it was a good uh good uh kick in the you know what to think about it and make sure you are spending that time

27:03Courtney Reum:And so how would you change from here?

27:05Carter Reum:I think it's what he said. The calendar reflects it. So I think it's everything from the people you are hiring, being more thorough. You know, I find that whether it's cursory references or just a world of, oh, this person was recommended, I think just going deeper with our internal hires because it has to start from the inside out. But when we're helping other companies, you know, hire and scale engineers, just really going, we can never do too much of it. And I think everyone's focused on it, but there's ways to be unique in where we look and how we look, especially for someone like M13, where I think we have really unique access to non-technical hires that are still really important for most of these companies, especially ones that have some kind of consumer element.

27:50Courtney Reum:Well, we're in a very, I guess, unique part of the technology industry because we're in L.A. And it's often overlooked a little bit. It's probably the most gorgeous place in the world. I think you guys would agree.

28:04Carter Reum:It's January, people, as we're sitting here, right? I know.

28:07Courtney Reum:It's January. I'm like telling my parents in Connecticut and they're like, I'm miserable again.

28:12Carter Reum:I'm like, you know, you can leave. We're from Chicago. So as I had to joke, we've had 20 something white Christmases, so we're good for a while. Yeah, it's good.

28:19Courtney Reum:You're good. You can always fly to it. But why did you choose LA for a venture firm and why are you still here? Yeah, I think at this point, you know, at M13, we have 40 people. We have offices in New York, LA and San Francisco. And so we really consider ourselves a national firm.

28:35Carter Reum:One of our partners who lives in Miami.

28:37Courtney Reum:Yep. And, but I think, you know, I remind people that in the last cycle, LA created about$450 billion of enterprise value. So there were, there have been a lot of great companies that have come out of LA. Having said that I think LA is taking a siesta right now, right? If I'm being intellectually honest, But the reason I use the term siesta is I think we're in the early innings of AI, right? So right now we're focused on the technological innovations that is, of course, going to come from San Francisco and maybe sometimes New York. But the second and the third ripples, when you think about 200 million people in the world identify as creators, and this is the epicenter of that, when you think about culture and media, and for sure that industry will be disrupted, the winners will not come out of San Francisco, they will come out of LA.

29:26Courtney Reum:so um i think we love having our roots here we also equally love having offices in new york and san francisco because they're hotbeds of right now um and we're hopeful that we start to see more innovative companies out of la but you know there are some innovative companies in la that

29:43Carter Reum:not everyone talks about yeah and i could talk about those in a second but this question i could literally do our whole our whole podcast answering my thoughts on this um but i think first off as Carter said, we want to be adaptive to where things are at. So I would say that however many years ago, I started to feel like people were saying San Francisco's dead. I would never would have said San Francisco's dead, but I think it would have plateaued or it had been. And then AI has changed that, which is great. It's kind of brought a certain, you know, talent center back to that. And that's great.

30:16Carter Reum:I think New York has done an incredible job of hopping on AI as kind of the secondary market. LA has probably been a little bit behind, but I think, lest we not forget, think of all the hype of someplace like Miami. I mean, the LA venture market is still 10X Miamis. It depends where people are moving and everything else, but apples to apples, that's probably the case. As Carter said, I think there's certain types of companies that will always be better suited to be here. And I think when we first moved here 15 years ago, the fundamental question was like, can you build big companies out of LA?

30:47Carter Reum:People were not even sure you could build venture scale companies out of here. So look what's happened in 15 years, whether it's the Elon type companies or things like that, or some of the great founders like Brian Lee, who's a good friend of ours and someone who we backed with his company Arena Club. But it's so that's all happened. And then I also think that it's just really important to realize it's hard to tell from statistics. But what I say is changes. Almost everybody that I know that's on the West Coast spends some time in LA, whether they pay taxes. here, whether they live here, how much they live here, that can all vary.

31:20Carter Reum:But there's a lot of big names, you know, in tech that spend time in here. And that's what's most important because there was a time when people were fishing in kind of that sea of sameness in San Francisco that's changed. But then everyone's coming down to LA to see what's new, see what's different, see this convergence of tech and media and consumer and creators. And that's all still very much there. So I think LA is just continuing to evolve. But we, as Carter said best, We love having our roots here, but there's a reason we just opened a proper San Francisco office. There's a reason now our New York office is, you know, equivalent to our LA office.

31:54Carter Reum:It's, you know, they're all interconnected.

31:56Courtney Reum:So the big tech billionaires of San Francisco are all shouting from the rooftops about this big billionaire tax bill. Okay. So apparently a trillion dollars has fled the state from wealth, right? So there's a trillion dollars of wealth leaving, going to Texas, going to Miami. I mean, is that something that you guys consider at all? Do you think that's going to have an impact? What are your thoughts?

32:18Carter Reum:I think, you know, without getting too political, I think it's easy for people who aren't billionaires and want everyone who is a billionaire to pay. Of course, no billionaire wants to pay that tax. But stepping back from that, right, California's economy, I think, is the fourth biggest in the world if it was its own country. People have left, but it's still huge. I think it's just trying to find the happy medium between we can't do something that makes all the talent leave forget the money it's the talent if everyone leaves and goes that's the problem talent wise but conversely I think you know there's just too much happening here for everyone to say like everyone's leaving California because that's not the case it's kind of my point earlier I think how people spend their time is a little more nomadic and a little more fluid but what's important is that people are building here and I don't see a change no matter what happens.

33:11Courtney Reum:I guess the good point is that SpaceX is apparently going to be having an IPO pretty soon with a trillion dollar wealth creation event. So we're just going to have more in the city. We're early investors, so we hope a trillion and a half. Come on, Molly, don't jinx us. We got to up that. Okay. How do you think that IPO will affect the ecosystem? Yeah, I think anytime you have a big IPO like that, right, it puts a lot of wealth in people's pockets. It allows people to go figure out what they want to do next. And so I think it will be fantastic for the ecosystem. Obviously at M13, we don't tend to invest in those industries as much.

33:46Courtney Reum:We tend to do companies like Prepared, our portfolio company that just exited that was using AI to disrupt 911 call centers. So we tend to invest in the software layers of some of these industries, but no doubt about it, it will be a big event. And I think we'll have very positive

34:03Carter Reum:ripples yeah and i also think again a while back uh ypo which is like the biggest kind of global ceo group probably a slightly older generation than people in their 20s are now joining but there are more ypo chapters in southern california than anywhere in the world so i think for a while it was like people there was this perception that okay we're building nice companies but they're not these rocket ships pun intended like a spacex but now those have happened and now you have people like uh like i mentioned earlier brian lee a very old friend of ours who we invest a lot with co-founded legal zoom that went on to be a huge success went public has changed hands a bunch of times uh did honest company with jessica alba when that was very much in the zeitgeist and now he has a company started with derrick jeter the uh ex-yankees legend called arena club that's been kind of under the radar but it's it's an incredible company and so you have people like brian who's now started three companies that could easily be unicorns out of LA.

34:59Carter Reum:And although impressive, I don't think he's the only one. And I think you look at these other exits, we talked about Ring, we have friends like Scopely, all those kinds of companies, besides just the SpaceX's, there's a deep bench now in LA of those kinds of companies.

35:12Courtney Reum:It is my mission to cover all of them.

35:15Carter Reum:We will have them all on this couch, Molly.

35:18Courtney Reum:All on this couch. All on this couch.

35:19Carter Reum:We'll have one big founder unicorn exit hunter day. Yes. Perfect.

35:24Courtney Reum:Well, going a little bit off of the, you know, the main tech road. So you're particularly very passionate about sports. Can you talk about how you got super deep into this to now being a professional athlete?

35:37Carter Reum:Well, I think, you know, Carter and I obviously grew up playing a lot of sports, playing a lot of sports together. I think there's so many good life lessons that come of sports that's been talked about a zillion times. But I do think it ingrains that sense of teamwork, the sense of competition, all that stuff. And I think it got to a point in my life where I didn't necessarily miss playing football, soccer, as I missed just being competitive, competitive with myself, competitive with other people. And so, yeah, about a year and a half ago, you know, I took a little a little vacation to, as I like to say, a lot of people take a vacation, go to Italy for two weeks in the summer.

36:13Carter Reum:I decided to spend a couple of weeks chasing around 22 year old Portuguese people half my age. And so kind of did this little little adventure that was an amazing experience. But I think, you know, for me, inspiration comes in so many different places. Like I couldn't tell you all the great life lessons I got from that and just being reminded this was a team that was on the verge of relegation. We ended up getting relegated, but it was probably the best locker room I've ever been in. And trust me, there were some learnings I took from a 22-year-old who didn't speak English that reminded me some either things I didn't know or had forgotten, you know, around M13.

36:48Carter Reum:And I think even zooming out from sports, it's what I said before. It's just a passion for like, I feel like we've been so lucky to have opportunities to experience things. and yes, we've worked really hard and everything else, but I love creating things where I can try to equalize that opportunity, right? Someone who might not have been able to afford some highfalutin longevity thing and now can we, like we're doing with our company Lifeforce, bring it to 10 % and eventually 10 % more and 10 % more. So I love kind of trying to do things around accessibility and give people that option to live a better, happier life and that's the whole point, right?

37:26Carter Reum:It's like do well by doing good.

37:27Courtney Reum:I'm going to ask what the lessons were. What were the lessons?

37:31Carter Reum:From the locker room?

37:32Courtney Reum:Yeah.

37:32Carter Reum:So many, but I think, as I said, it's that culture gets talked about so much, but it's this really hard thing to define. If you ask 10 people who are probably culture experts, they would have different definitions. But to see the culture of a team where people hadn't been paid in months, they're on the verge of getting relegated. Some people would get deported because they're on work visas, right? some people don't speak English yet I went to this team where people were confused if I was the new owner people were confused if hey I know we're not doing well but as a 45 year old player from America the best we can do at this point and they all treated me so well that like I can't our payroll was less than was was half of the next lowest team in the in the in the league and this is you know serious competition you could stream the games anywhere in the world it was league two of Portugal one of the 10 best leagues in the world and just being reminded that like this team outperformed just by actually sticking together now the end result wasn't exactly what we all wanted but in some ways they had no business being there and they had all the reasons to be down on themselves make it about themselves and they really didn't so it's just that basic stuff because when people ask me now what I learned from us working at Goldman Sachs Carter doesn't think I can go into a spreadsheet anymore or at least not make one myself I can at least audit it but honestly the biggest thing i take away because goldman sachs had less than 10 of the employees they now have but it's at goldman had this crazy palpable culture where i would have the person come by and you know clean clean the floor at like midnight when we're all there still working and somehow they embody that culture top to bottom hourly to salary to the ceo and that's the stuff that i think kind of endures in this role of ai wow are you still involved in

39:17Courtney Reum:sports are you guys making any investments around that space as a firm not not exactly but you know

39:22Carter Reum:there's a lot of money going into sports right now um mostly in the form of private equity and stuff and buying stakes in these teams so you never know what the future holds but i think it's more likely that we invest in some other infrastructure layer or some ai component that actually feeds into something with sports so totally open to kind of dovetailing into it but it's not one of our core

39:42Courtney Reum:theses we've only had 54 exits molly if we get to 102 then the answer might change we might be instead of investing in the infrastructure layer the team layer but you know we're we're speaking

39:53Carter Reum:of like the the up north i think like we're good friends with lots of different sports teams you take a team like the san francisco 49ers one of the most storied franchises on the field but the ownership group who's kind of all in our our age range have been good friends for a long time and they're smart enough to know that although important that's kind of the amuse-bouche these incredible athletes who go out there and do what they do they built one of if not the most technological stadium in the world at the time and they realized that we're sitting here in Silicon Valley there's so many other things we should do both to help our players on the field track them take measurements I mean you know this aura ring didn't exist 10 years ago so to do all that stuff but also use that as a jumping off point to be at the cutting edge given their unique place.

40:37Carter Reum:So it's friends like that who we love to stay close with trade notes and say, what are you seeing? Hey, one of our portfolio companies that you wouldn't think has an application to sports could really help with that. You know, that's what that we see.

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42:10Carter Reum:My biggest thing is as I've said this before is what I like to call net zero dead time so I would say there's a lot of things that work and there's a lot of things that we don't know if they work I cold plunge every morning I don't know if it works the studies are debatable but for me it feels better than a cup of coffee and I don't really drink coffee. When I do, my wife is nice enough to make it by putting in, you know, some colostrum and some creatine and everything else. So to me, coffee is just the conduit. But now I've started doing that as a good way to get some calories in the morning.

42:39Carter Reum:Um, you know, out here I have a cold plunge in sauna. So I love the contrast therapy. There's red lights, but, but the whole point is all like in the morning when you, when you wake up in LA, there's a lot of things I love talking about sports. They're on at the best times, right? A big American football game's on at 5 p.m. so I don't have to choose am I going to dinner or watching this game I can do it before I go to dinner but in the morning when you wake up in LA you are always chasing the day whether it's Midwest East Coast or abroad so you can't afford to get up and kind of have that you know two hours leisurely unless you get up at 4 a.m.

43:10Carter Reum:so I love getting up and standing on a vibrating plate with some red lights while I catch up on emails while I go through our company slack so that's the main thing that I do is do stuff while I'm doing other things and then I'm like if it does something great and if it doesn't, I didn't really lose out and I moved my body, which is probably the most important part.

43:27Courtney Reum:But I think according to the nail on the head, right? Wellness is the ultimate luxury right now, right? And it's all about the power of compounding. So whether it's red light or we have cryo in our house, you name it, infrared sauna, all the obvious things. How lucky is anybody who can have access to those things a block down the street or in their house because you just get to do them more often. And regardless of how effective each of those are they do compound and they do great things and i and i also think people

43:57Carter Reum:just lose sight of you can do all those things but those are like the sprinkles if you don't if you don't start by no one's perfect but generally sleeping well generally eating well and do some exercise whatever that means for you all the rest won't matter you know so it's like that and check your blood every now and then because as we say life force blood don't lie right so it's a good way to just don't lie you heard it here first the sorcery what do you have any favorites molly we should consider what's your do you have any well i love infrared saunas

44:26Courtney Reum:i just feel like it's like a squeegee it's like a body squeegee you just get totally wrung out yeah it's amazing and then i've been doing red lights a lot recently um what else do i like the cold plunges i can do every now and again if i'm in the right mental state yeah um because it affects women's bodies differently it's harder you don't have as much women don't have as much

44:46Carter Reum:muscle don't have as much mass overall it's some days when i'm cold i'm like i can't imagine what's like as a woman who weighs you know half as much yeah and then I think um what else have I been

44:57Courtney Reum:doing I mean I've been trying this stuff for forever I'm so obsessed with it so that's why I live in LA everyone's like you don't have the personality for LA you sound like a New Yorker and I'm like but I'm like very like health yeah soft at my core I love just the basic things go

45:13Carter Reum:out for a little morning walk get a few seconds of where it's January look at it yeah it's yeah It's all those things and it's just nice to have it, but it's like the red lights. Good to just stand in front of them while I'm doing sound. So I'm taking a conference call. I put a little red light by my desk and maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't, but it feels good.

45:34Courtney Reum:Psychologically it should. Carter, is there anything that you biohack with? I do cryo twice a day because we have a cryo chamber. Twice a day? Twice a day. It only takes two minutes. Isn't that like 1 ,200 calories you're burning? that i didn't i didn't think that was gonna be lost on you uh yeah i get to eat about 70 pounds of pasta what and wine and ice cream so yeah it's it's kind of life-changing and then similar to you infrared sauna red light bed pemf kind of all the good stuff but i just try to mix it up and uh just

46:06Carter Reum:try to be consistent but it's also like i was there was just an article i was quoted in for the information about those true age tests and i think the concept's good but the science just isn't there yet i've i've taken tests from all the same companies that i was 23 as my true age i think mine ranged from like about my age to like 20s and so if i told me i was 29 is very different than if it tells me i'm 43 you know and that's take your favorite number right yeah i take the uh the minimum median right mine said i think i was like 17 so i'm gonna go with that

46:40Courtney Reum:Yeah, go with him. Yeah. Okay, so Carter, last time I saw you, you had just gifted your wife a Gulfstream 450. I think this was a custom one. How are you, what are your, is this one of your other hobbies? Outfitting things and creating spas? Less about whatever that is, but my wife and I celebrate monthly anniversary. So needless to say, I have to come up with good gift giving every 30 days, which is a lot of pressure. You're really setting the bar for relationships. if you're yeah your next significant other just just tell them to follow follow my lead and and do all the same things i'll give them your number yeah exactly so no but i think like um one thing that i took away from that was uh how healthy your relationship is and how you guys really help each other and it's on a very deep and respectful level and i was really curious to learn what are the principles that keep your relationship together and like what what is the core of it yeah so So obviously my wife runs a billion dollar media company and, you know, part of our relationship, the foundation of it is just being great teammates.

47:44Courtney Reum:I think it goes back to exactly what Courtney was talking about being sports. We talk about being great teammates. We talk about being a little extra wind beneath each other's wings. You know, people talk about work life balance. I think that is something that is like trying to find a white rhino in the African safari. So we don't have work life balance. we just have work life combination she'll be talking to me about business and then we'll talk about our kids because we got a little three-year-old and a little two-year-old so but i think at the root of it it comes down to that mentality of being teammates and trying to figure out how to make each other better uh we were both uh very successful before we came together but how cool is it that we can come together and you know be be a little more successful The only rule in our house is that everyone needs to be a good human being.

48:36Courtney Reum:So we root it there. And then we go out and as we say, winners win. And that's what we wake up every day to do. Amazing. Well, on the topic of performance and kind of like life principles, I kind of think success is a measure of who you surround yourselves with and who are mentors to you, who you admire. So starting with Courtney, who are some people that you admire that you've learned a lot from throughout your life?

49:01Carter Reum:there's been so many and uh you know i think it probably took until my 30s that i really started to be like wow mentorship's really important maybe it wasn't called that maybe no one put on my radar so i don't know that i've had that many official mentors with a capital m but it's more just like people who influence you in ways that you realize consciously subconsciously i know my brother would say like starts with our our late father and definitely definitely my dad definitely my mom in different ways they both had amazing careers and I think just that proximity to them it is a proximity is power thing um I you know starting with when I worked at Goldman um I was part of the team and took Under Armour public I would certainly not say Kevin Plank was a mentor because he was too busy for that but he was like a mentor by osmosis because once a week for a couple years I would go down to Under Armour's headquarters and I learned just so much about culture and business and watching a guy who was only eight years older or something than I was go, wow, there's a lot of mentorship that happens from being around it and things like that.

50:05Carter Reum:So I just feel really lucky now that I think I have actually taken a couple of people. I said, will you be my mentor? And they're like, I'm like, it means like a once a quarter check in with this and that. And so it's just about how you set it up. But I still feel so lucky to just feel like whether it's organizations like YPO or certain people or certain parts of my life, I ask people to kind of be official and unofficial mentors. And it's just great to almost like have the accountability or to learn from the people who came before you.

50:33Courtney Reum:Yeah, I think more than anything these days, knowledge is power and the world is moving so quickly. So one thing we talk about is you don't need to be an expert in everything. You just need to know an expert in everything, right? And the way I talk about my brain is it's a weaker form of something like the Facebook algorithm. And I'm just constantly taking in data points, right? And when you think about the role of a VC, it's then, I always say, a data point is just a data point until they coalesce. And then it's the data point, right? And so it's just trying to take in as much data as possible, read as many articles, listen to as many podcasts like yours, and then just try to get to those and see those patterns forming quickly, right?

51:14Courtney Reum:And if you can do that, you can be two steps ahead in today's day and age.

51:17Carter Reum:I think it's also like, call it mentorship, but I also think the flip side is just staying super curious, right? I mean, I can live 10 lives and still have so many questions and so many places I want to visit and people I want to meet. So it's just nice to feel like you can still have beginner mindset with things and stay curious while starting to form like subject matter expertise on something like hopefully we'll do an M13.

51:38Courtney Reum:So Carter, who is yours? I really don't. Like Courtney said, he did the analogy best, which is I don't have many mentors with a capital N, but man, I learn from everyone. I learn every day from my wife. Our dad taught us so much. He was kind of a CEO of kind of boring industrial companies. And you would think the world that we live in is different, but, you know, management principles and leadership principles are just so, so similar. And then we're just lucky, right? Whether it's all day long, we're talking to fascinating founders all day long. We're talking to some of the biggest names in tech who are our investors who remain nameless today.

52:15Courtney Reum:And it's just those conversations. It might be a five minute conversation. It might be a 10 minute conversation, but it's just all those data points are so valuable. And so I always say the ultimate luxury in life is getting to do what you want with who you want. And we're very lucky we find ourselves in that position these days. You really drop great one liners consistently. I'm a big analogy guy and a big one liner guy, you know, keeps it simple. You should write a book. You already did it. that our last best-selling book, Shortcut Your Startup, Molly. I think that was all the information in my head.

52:50Courtney Reum:I need another decade of experience to see if I have chapters 13 through 26 to write again with Courtney.

52:57Carter Reum:This is a rare, he didn't even use one of my favorite lines from our book, which is that best entrepreneurs, you have to have a microscope in one eye and a telescope in the other. And that is always the challenge, staying focused on the minutiae and not missing the forest from the trees.

53:10Courtney Reum:Well, is there anything we didn't cover that you want to share with the world? No, this has just been fantastic. And we'd be remiss not to just congratulate you on all your success. You know, we surround ourselves with great people doing great things every day. And watching you from the sidelines has been an honor because you are, as we would say in my house, slaying the game, girl. Thank you very much. Well, Courtney, thank you so much for hosting us at your lovely home. It's beautiful. And Carter, thank you so much.

53:37Carter Reum:Thanks again. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks, Molly.

53:39Courtney Reum:Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, Sorcery.bc. where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.