255. Inside the Mind of a Lead Climate Tech Investor w/ Burhan Pisavadi | Head at UK PT1

0:00It is already mostly ruined. We can't see it yet, but we're going to start to see it happening. But all the previous tech shifts, whether it was in the cloud or the original internet bubble or whatever, they will all pale in comparison to what we're seeing now. That's Burhan. Head of UK, a VC fund, PT1. Invest half a mil to 4 million checks. Normally we lead rounds. And ultimately it's technology that is transforming the tangible real world around us. we can lead, that gives us an edge because in Europe, most funds don't.

0:32Amardeep Parmar:He breaks down their thesis and what they're looking for. Founders, take note. It's a one in 250 chance to go from us looking at your deck to getting an investment. Fund One did about 20 investments and the conversion rate was slightly better in Fund One and that was 4 ,000 companies we looked at. Being smart is just like the minimum hurdle. Is it an incremental change to a problem or is it Is it an actual change to a problem? If you're vertical in a market that's big, but not big enough for them to care about, then you have more defensibility. Bottom-up market sizing is the best way to go for sure.

1:09How has that changed everything you're looking at now?

1:10Amardeep Parmar:And what opportunities are opening up or exciting you? Ultimately, the top-tier founders actually care about that problem. And so they care about it, and that's why they're working so long, working so hard, working in a way that they're underpaid. They make it their life's mission to solve that issue.

1:30Amardeep Parmar:So let's start off with what's PT1's thesis? Yeah, so PT1, we're an early stage VC investing in hardware and software companies based in Europe. I don't like talking about stages because all the labels blur into one. So let's say we invest half a mil to 4 million checks. Normally we lead rounds and ultimately it's technology that is transforming the tangible real world around us. So infrastructure, industry, buildings, logistics, and your battery, all that jazz. So everyone says that they're transforming the world, right? Yeah. How do you differentiate between who's actually worth backing and who isn't?

2:09Amardeep Parmar:So I think the classic thing is, is it an incremental change to a problem? Or is it an actual change to a problem, right? And so, okay, let's talk, let's use an AI example. Because obviously AI is hot right now. we've got a portfolio company that is using ai to generate renders for architects which um and now why is this a 10x right uh back in the day you're a you're an architectural firm you you're doing a bid to say win the tender to build the shard and you're an architect you're used to dealing with floor plans and cad files and schematics and you kind of like can really visualize it but the people who are backing you or who would fund you they can't they want to see a picture ultimately right and that's what that's what they can resonate with what you would what currently happens is you you send your sketches to a consultancy they'll charge you 30 grand and in four weeks time you'll get a photorealistic render of say vashad and that is what you would then use to win a bid great um right it's a big big business people do it every single fancy building you've ever seen has had has come to this process ai can do that in 30 seconds right and so this is what i would call a 10x it actually disrupts an industry as opposed to making an existing one better in this example making it better means you go from four weeks to three and a half weeks right irrelevant so you've entered the ai earlier there right and i think this one interesting things of where it's complete shift but okay let's say it's made it 30 seconds now rather than four weeks, whatever it was before.

3:50Amardeep Parmar:But can somebody else just do the same thing? How do you look at that defensibility when the technology is shifting so rapidly? Yeah. So this is something which we're really discussing actively. And I think there's a few kind of differentiates some things to talk about. So if we zoom out, right, at a broader landscape view, AI has weakened defensibility for every single B2B SaaS startup. up so if you're selling any kind of software um ai and companies like lovable etc have made it very very very easy for a competitor to come out of the gate and do what you're doing um if we then pivot to talk about like if your product is an ai product so slightly different from the first example the issue is that the foundational models the open ais the anthropics and mistrels they can expand and kill your business because you're just a thin wrapper around them.

4:45If you kind of accept that as the status quo, then yeah, defensibility is a real issue. And then I think the things that we care about, one is how safe you are from OpenAI killing you. And for that, you have to go vertical, not horizontal. So if we imagine you've got your entire landscape here right if you are a horizontal wrapper around open ai as gpt5 comes out you're probably dead right if you're vertical in a market that's big but not big enough for them to care about then you have more defensibility because for example there's an ai company that is replacing receptionists in u.s healthcare clinics right open ai will never make a specific product that does that their models might get better and better at doing it but ultimately there are edge cases that they won't care about and someone can get value there so that's a very that's like part of the

5:43Amardeep Parmar:answer i can get much deeper but you tell me like don't forget go deeper okay so that's like the product level you made a progress now you've got to keep it yes sir um that's a product level view which is fine right then also a lot of startups come down to execution i can't remember who said and someone said to me recently that most startups die as a result of suicide as opposed to killing them. Either they mess up, the founders burn out, they run out of cash, whatever. And so defensibility now is the way the founder execution matters far, far more than it used to. And it always mattered, right?

6:20It was never like a non-entity, but it's gone from say 70 to 90 because what you had remaining which was your tech barrier has gone weaker and weaker and then there's other sort of things like switching costs and social proof and so on which are relevant but also when you're going this quickly it's hard to get there soon enough and so switching costs obviously like what is what is the cost to me to replace you with something else and for some products it's pretty minor so like zoom versus google meet like the cost to us to switch doesn't really make a difference but if it's say an enterprise erp like sales force it will take you 18 months if you're a big company and so that's where you really can start to win

7:06Amardeep Parmar:out as well so looking at that right right so you're saying about there's a step change of things happening at the moment yeah and obviously you were at ptbomb before ai became this whole new thing that is now so how has that changed everything you're looking at now and what opportunities are opening up or exciting you yeah so it's been really interesting because i think there's been a few transitions which and like a few noticeable phases that we've gone through and i mean to give it context i so gpt3 was the first open gpt beta that we could use that was on openai's website and that was like october 22 i was playing with a website that used gpt2 in like sort of like january february 22 so like the early beta and it was rubbish it was so so bad um and so the jump from two to three was insane and obviously when three came out i went viral and it went sort of around the worlds um really quickly and that was great but i think not many people realized them and it had value because three was still kind of still kind of crap uh it was game changing but it was hallucinating and it was confused and no context window and so on and then the models got better and better and better but also people started building tools around the models to help them get better as well um like the first ai agents was like i think someone was trying a thing called auto gpt that was like maybe like january 23 people were testing it out and that was like a load of code trying to make a recursive GPT instance and it was it was pretty bad I was running it but it was like people had the idea to do stuff like this um and as we can like zoom out right I think phase one was oh this is really cool it's kind of a gimmick right and phase two was oh I can now use this to help me write my emails and so on right and phase three was i can now replace huge amounts of white collar labor with this and then but i think the final phase is now i can automate and replace and so it's just final transition from okay i can make data extraction easy and then i can give out to somebody to type up versus the ai can extract it type it up and do it all in once in one time like single motion obviously zooming out like we're when i say ai in this context i'm referring to an lm like there's way more stuff beyond that but like lm is like the key thing we're looking at right now and you mentioned earlier as well so you invest no only in software but also hardware and that's by rev because a lot of vcs don't really look at hardware or at least a lot of hardware founders complain about no vcs don't look at hardware yeah so what makes you look at hardware too and see the opportunity there when a lot of VCs won't touch it.

10:03I think so from the early days of the fund, right, we realized that we needed hardware. If we talk about transforming the real assets and like the built world, bits can only do so much, right? Some VCs love the phrase like bits and atoms, bits referring to software and atoms to hardware. I think it's quite a good way of putting it, right? Like if we think about construction, construction is inefficient slow expensive dying so many issues in construction software can't really fix it right like it doesn't matter how good you are writing code you still need to lay a brick and so that's where hardware comes in oh heck like climate change right biggest issue probably for our lifetime what is software going to do but you can't optimize your way to net zero you have to actually build stuff so i think we realized from the get-go that hardware was key to actually meaningfully move any of these sectors as ai gets better and better and better also hardware is key because you are harder yeah it's more defensible right like the software barrier thanks to lullable et al is really thin hardware is still where you can have defensibility and yeah there are other issues around it and it's slower and more complex and requires a different skill set to appraise and more capex intensive and so on but i mean the biggest private company right now is what spacex hardware company um if you look at sort of a big unicorn rounds this year it's all things like angiol oils like defense rounds quantum systems etc all hardware like software is great but the biggest challenge is we have a hardware um when this hardware founders who

11:46Amardeep Parmar:there's been a few in this podcast complained about venture capitalists and investors not looking at them because they're hardware yeah what advice do you have as hardware founders to get that money because like you said the real deep tech stuff right that is going to have a market yeah but when you say like hardware that's maybe not as complicated what can they do then there's a concept called trl so tech readiness level and it's like how close you are to commercialize your tech and trl nine means you're good to go right um and basically for a hardware founder they'd have to diagnose their TRL very well be honest about that and then find the appropriate funding source at each stage of a journey because DC is good but only at certain bits of a journey and so if you're super early you want grant funding and nothing else right you want R &D grant funding from the university or from Innovate UK and the EIC whoever to help you devat to help you validate and de-risk secure solution.

12:43If you're later on, like say TRL 6, 7, at that point, or even like 4 or 5, maybe at that point, VC funding could work for you. But then it's very much, what does the funding accomplish, right? And also, you need a legit CFO. A lot of really smart hardware founders come at this from like a pure scientist brain point, or like an engineer brain point, which is fine you need that to build it and sell it but ultimately how you win in this field is by raising money at the right time and the right price and right cost of capital and you have to understand how to do that right if i look up the hardware companies in our portfolio that are doing well the ones that are growing the fastest have insanely good cfos who understand okay and it's all like to me it's you could say it's a bit boring but like it's key right like understanding okay what where's topco where's holding co who who raises what what what money goes between what what can i securitize what don't securitize and so on so like you that's the main thing and it's if you are a hardware founder and you want to build a unicorn or decacorn star company make sure you have someone on your side who can actually like help you figure out your capital stack and get you from zero to 10 products, site, facilities, whatever without diluting too much.

14:11That's the edge.

14:12Amardeep Parmar:So just to connect like obviously you're going to get a lot of people coming towards you wanting funding, right? How many pitches do you think you see a year? Or how many decks are you receiving? So we I can't remember the exact number but our conversion rate it's a one in 250 chance to go from us looking at your deck to getting an investment and so I think fund one did about 20 investments and the conversion rate was slightly better in fund one and that was 4 000 companies we looked at for fund two we broadened our aperture and so we're seeing more deals and also I think we've gotten like really strict when we want to see and so fun too the final is way tighter.

15:01Amardeep Parmar:Hello quick interruption to let you know a bit more about BayHQ. We're the community of high growth Asian heritage entrepreneurs operators and investors in the UK. You can join us totally free at thebayhq.com forward slash join. There you'll get our CEO structure in your inbox every week which is content events and opportunities. You You can also get access to a free startup fundamentals course by joining. Let's get back to the show. So can you go through the different stages of the funnel? So you obviously, I guess some people you don't even get their pitch deck, right? Because they just send a really crappy cold email.

15:41Amardeep Parmar:I'm going to even get to pitch deck phase. Yep. In that pitch deck, what do you want to see? High level, like why now? Like why is it the right time to invest in your company? What unlocks it? What's changed? Market. a lot of people over index on the market and do like really crappy tam tom some like concentric circles and it's all rubbish but just make a compelling argument as to why this could why this could make money and also how much money can it make and we call it bottom up and it's really simple right like if i know that someone is going to spend a tenner to buy an item from me and they'll only buy it once in their lifetime and there's 8 billion people the market is 80 billion it's that simple right um obviously it gets more nuanced slightly but bottom-up market sizing is the best way to go for sure and that is how you do it like don't do a mckinsey says this sector grows at 13 kaga like sore rubbish um so market sizing for sure team it's a big one like why are you the right team to build this and deliver this?

16:51And a lot of people over-index on, oh, I went to Cambridge and then I worked at Revolut. And I'm like, great, you're smart. But that's often the standard, right? The benchmark is quite high. And so sometimes we care less about your credentials and more about like what unique insights have you got that means you've seen something that everyone else is missing um how do we know that you're going to do this journey for 15 years because it's not an easy journey right um Figma which obviously IPO'd last week I think 13 years from idea to IPO so it's and that software hardware is even longer it is slow so lived experience characteristics like being smart is just like the minimum like hurdle right and i guess final thing which loads of founders kind of miss is why should i care about this problem and what you're actually solving um i think founders sometimes miss it because they're so heavily in the zone they just forget that other people don't have that context but like what why do i care about this and if you're not solving a problem like what why why do i even want to invest

18:06Amardeep Parmar:So one thing I find interesting, right, is that at the pre-seed level, so obviously you said you don't invest necessarily in stages, but at the early days, if you don't have data, you don't have revenue, you're investing in the team, right? Yep. When so many people, you said, we'll put in a team slide just a bunch of logos, which doesn't tell me anything, right? So you mentioned Revolut. One example from the podcast is a guy called Rim Shah. So I don't know if you know him, but he worked at Revolut. He's gone through YC now, but he used to be the product lead for financial crime at Revolut. He then built a company that has to do a financial crime.

18:42Amardeep Parmar:So it's a very clear, okay, I've worked at Revolut and I led this division and now I'm building something related to it. Whereas then somebody puts, oh, ex-Google. So it's like, what? I think about half a million people have worked at Google in the last 20 years. What does that mean? What did you do at Google? And again, somebody in the podcast, Satya Smith, so she used to be the director for the Google Maps. part so when she goes to build something if she was leading google maps she got okay she knows what she's talking about right i know people just missed out i said collecting logos doesn't really make any sense say you went to cambridge right cool what did you do at cambridge if you're now building say a deep tech company were you head of the deep tech society at cambridge like what's the relevance you've got make each point and they're relevant yeah and i feel like not enough people do that i don't know what your experience is there yeah i i think it does vary between sectors as well so like if i were a yc partner i would going through the applications you would see just a million logos right and it's all be like stanford and berkeley whatever i think because yc attracts like 20 year olds who want to start a company and have nothing else to do uh so there is like there's some variation but generally yeah a bad team slide has logos with no context and that's it and also like the logo is nice but like you said you need to elaborate on why is it why is it important uh and also like is it actually that meaningful um you know like in example you gave like if you led a division at google that's insane if you were a summer intern four years ago doesn't have the same signaling power so obviously let's say you somebody's You're pressure enough to get through the deck stage, right?

20:23Amardeep Parmar:What do you then do next? What's your next step that you have with the founders? Yeah. So high level deck first call, get to know them, try to understand the team, the ambition, the vision, so on. I will come back to this and we can zoom in on that. But say first call goes well, we'll discuss it internally among the investment team. People can raise red flags, questions, whatever. we'll kind of like talk about do we back the thesis and so on if it's still positive we'll discuss it sort of with the full pt1 team so have the partners come in and they'll be like i like this i don't like this and so on at that point if one of the partners likes it there'll be a full sort of team meeting so all of the founders from the startup the full pt1 investment team there'll be like a one hour and 90 minute session where they present we ask questions try and take it apart like debate discuss and so on that's normally the last milestone before we write a term sheet obviously in the background there's emails and questions and calls and so on but high level structure looks like that and you know you said the filter as you said about 250 to 1 at the moment yeah what percentage of that 250 would get to the first call and then to the placement team so if i were to like sketch our funnel out it would be like like that pretty much so the first call getting to first call i think about half of the 250 make it that far quite high yeah so like we as a caveat like we have like a top line of the funnel which is where all the people who are sending bad emails not relevant don't care they all get collected there so if we're looking at your deck it means that you're pre-vetted so like serious right sector right geography if you're a chilean company doing a series d in healthcare and you send us your deck like what the hell um so they don't get to that like we're like stage zero right um so that means our jump from one to two can be quite healthy because all the trash has been or trash non-relevance has been removed then from first call to like internal meeting I don't have the numbers off my head but from sort of memory call it like one in three potentially and then from there it gets even tighter so I think like if we discuss 10 deals in the investment team the partners might c2 and all that one might get to an ic um and all that like one in three might get an investment so like it tightens up very very quickly so in that first school you're having right yep can you tell almost straight away whether or not they're gonna get through to the next stage is it quite obvious quite quickly or is it really down to the why that like at the end of the call you're in two minds i think it depends like i think i've done sort of hundreds if not a thousand or so of these first calls now and so i've i've got a not quite a radar but i think like quite a gut feeling just from the interactions and um how they answer questions and how the founder relationship i can see and so on obviously they've invested that they've done even more of them right and I'm sure they've got like an even tighter like signaling process.

23:57Amardeep Parmar:Generally, you've got kind of like the business case merits, right? Which is when I ask them about the business case and what they're doing and the company and so on. But also you've got the founder traits and characteristics. And both of those are equally important for us to make a decision. If one of them is bad, we'll probably end the call there and then. Like I've had some calls where after five minutes, I'm sorry, it's not a fit. and we just end it um because you can tell me there's people in person afterwards and just like it's gonna sound awful i don't think so but i do so many of them i don't think i would know yeah um but sometimes you can sometimes you can tell immediately if the call extends that's good if you're if i enjoy the conversation um i think the founder is engaged and switched on and interesting and clearly they care about what they do that's pretty much like an auto pass to the first call because bear in mind to get to a first call a lot of the basic stuff has passed already like it's an interesting space it's growing well there's no obvious competitors we think the founders at least on paper seem legitimate so the first call is not calling it a vibe check makes it sound a bit too like insincere but it is part of it okay so when you get into ISE now right yeah obviously when you're going to the partners there's always this gap that i think is difficult people to understand right where they've had a call with you and then you're going to the rest of the team and you almost you're fighting the case for them right yeah because if you're presenting it to the team then that's also your reputation right yeah it's like okay can i if you're bringing lots of bad deals to the table then you're going to get judged by the rest of the team and it's the boy who cried wolf right yeah so how do you go about that and that relationship because i think a lot of founders don't really appreciate that enough that if somebody's putting inside a seat you've got to be really good friends with them because they're the ones who are putting their neck on the line for you too yeah well i i don't i wouldn't say it's about being friends with them because i don't need to be friends with people we invest in i think i would like to because the relationship is like 15 years start to finish and so it's important to be on good terms right but yeah i don't need to but i need to respect them um but yeah that's so for example whenever we have new analysts join the one piece of advice i give them is i would rather you bring no deals for six months than bring bad deals because you want to be noticed or you feel like you need your contribution to be seen and so there's that internal kind of point of view but also people work differently right like one of my colleagues he likes to bring deals which he's not sure of but he likes and so just to kind of like hear him about and discuss him internally and um more of like a collegiate style discussion whereas i'm the opposite i'm like i will not bring it unless i want to give my own money if not i want to discuss it so it's there's some internal nuances but generally yeah like if i am bringing a deal up to ic i'm putting my name on it it is my deal I'll be the point of contact post-investment I'm the one doing the portfolio stuff I'm on the board if we're taking a board seat you know like I I have to be convinced more than anyone else and talking about the board seats as well right how is that experience first time you did it it's almost quite intimidating so obviously you've been through that process but now you're on somebody's board and the responsibility that comes with that too right how do you manage that role I think the first time around it was the challenge of like you're trying to be too helpful or trying to you almost get in the way and I think like the point is being no ego just being there to listen to ask stupid questions and reflect on what's being said.

27:50like ultimately the board and early stage is a strategic mechanism and it's a useful way to reflect on last quarter next quarter and also to zoom out because you'll get this right like when you're heavily in the weeds you're so focused on operational stuff and day-to-day the big picture just like you forget about it right and so every day you're just cleaning out your inbox and you forget what the long-term goal actually is and the board is a helpful way just to reflect zoom out and discuss that and reframe it um and so i think what we kind of realize is like we are not the subject matter experts if i'm investing in a company and i know more than the founder it's a bad investment like 100 may need to be the experts we're just there to provide a reflective mechanism.

28:47Amardeep Parmar:And on that point as well, so looking at the value add now, right, is that for the hottest starters, I think a lot of people don't realise it's enough too, is that they get a pick of investors, right? And it's almost the flip, right? Is that for the companies which aren't clear, which haven't got good stories, if they are good companies, if they can't get a message across, they're chasing investors. But the ones who really have good pitch checks are able to articulate themselves well, can show a clear way they can make money for investors, then investors are fighting for them yeah and how do you try and win those deals as well right because that's part of the job is not just people pitching you but almost you pitching them to be like you should take us on as a partner yeah so it's it's something which we often discuss internally is to like how do we win the best founders and different funds have different approaches right if i were a mega fund i am valuation sensitive so i can just write a bigger check um we don't want to do that i don't think the math of that works out i think there's qbp implications and i i think that's not the approach we're going to go down for us it's um offering help and advice when needed uh i think being a sector-specific fund has its merits um one because we we do get the space to some extent and so if you are a generalist investor and you're on eight different boards in eight different sectors you will have to like context switch and you will ask the same question every time in a board meeting like remind me what's this market about um we don't have any of that which is i think founders sort of care about it just to an extent also i think many times we are competing for deals but before i joined vc when i was at a startup i was under the impression that like one investment meant one investor and in reality like is a lot more nuanced, right?

30:37And you may have like six investors doing one investment together. And so I think we try and take a collaborative style and say, hey, look, we would like to lead, but we can do half the lead. You come in, co-lead with us, and then we'll make room for like these three followers because we think they're legit. And so there is some like flexibility there. And also because we can lead, that gives us an edge because in Europe, most funds don't. And it makes it a bit easier as well. so looking at your own personal experience as well is that i'm a founder and you're and you're

31:11Amardeep Parmar:thinking you're going to lead the round right yep what is it that you think like you bring to the table in terms of that sector background too like how does that fit into things like what are you bringing or make someone to work with you again like i when i sell myself to founders well i don't actually sell myself right but i think when i'm the impression i put forward is that yes i work in the startup so i can empathize but i'm not there to say oh we did this therefore you must do that right all of that lived experience i just discount as irrelevant old archaic whatever i think empathy is a big thing um one is just being able to get shit done frankly like and i think founders respect that because their entire job is getting shit done uh there have been some times where like you want to get a board meeting in and you ask an investor and they ask their pa and two weeks later you still not got a board meeting in no one likes that right so i think it's just like be helpful try and have no ego like i try and be humble and just say hey i look i know nothing i'm just here to kind of like reflect and observe and advise if I can if not no stress and also like knowing the balance of like when to come in and when to back off no one wants like an overbearing investor who texts them every day and saying hey what's what's your revenue looking like nobody needs that right and so summary like don't be a dick uh but that's quite a hard skill in this field sometimes so looking at the sector side as well right so you're talking about how by being sector specific It means you understand the nuances of that industry.

32:53Amardeep Parmar:It means that founders are more likely to, I guess, get less frustrated with you, right? Where somebody who's more generalist, as you said, they might be asking the same questions. There might be things that they didn't quite understand. So for people in your sector, what are some of the nuances? What are some of the ways that by you working in that sector over time, you're looking at things in a different lens and a generalist investor might? Yeah. Well, I think the sectors we look at are pretty old school, right? I mean, let's talk about construction, which is something that we invest in. We think it's super interesting.

33:25I spoke to a global construction company, billions plus in revenue. They've done projects that you'd have heard of. And I spoke to one of the innovation teams about how they innovate and work as startups. And we were speaking about a startup that they loved. and this company had like about 100 global projects live at any one time of like sites live right and they were testing with startup on three out of 100 and i was like okay great like you love it you said you love it when are you rolling out all of them and they said in six years and i was like what the hell um right but it's stuff like this right people i think if you are a construction tech founder and you know you are selling to an industry that is very different and archaic and old school what you don't want is like an investor on your shoulder who just doesn't appreciate that and you're like why can't you do it um we've got a company uh where they are selling to people in construction and it's quite funny sometimes their potential customers just forget to come to zoom calls um because they just don't use zoom they don't have like they don't have an outlook diary right because they're always on site it's not a concept for them and so like and they spent like a month where they would book all of these calls and no one turned up and not out of malice it's just like it doesn't work that way right and again if you're there's a lot of these like industry specific nuances that people will miss so yeah so people building in like these boring industries what advice do you have for them yep so biggest one and like the core rule here is i would never invest in someone who picked an industry for bands like only ultimately the top tier founders actually care about that problem right and so they care about it and that's why they're working so long working so hard working in a way that they're underpaid and they are they make it their life's mission to solve that issue so that's like a base kind of rule but now let's say someone has worked in construction before and they're like this is shit i hate i need to fix it and then they really want to solve it i think advice is one like great the industries that are trickier to break into have way more value to extract sort of be like no one else is doing it and so you have way way way more control and see the industries that are more old school and typically more broken are also way way way more network based typically and so by already having a network and market not context and knowing the lingo you are way above any other founder who again sees a mckinsey report about construction productivity being stagnant and things oh i can fix it so like happy days don't be be inspired go out and do it message me online so you mentioned mentioned the mckinsey reports right yeah so you do your own reports too right yeah yeah yeah so obviously they're not like the mckinsey

36:42Amardeep Parmar:reports they're in detail in depth right but how do you keep like what's the pc1 doing to make sure you're cutting edge in that research phase yeah so i think a lot of it this is going to maybe sound a bit trite but a lot of these is like actually thinking about things always helps to think but it's hard though thinking is hard right and so we right now we're doing a report on robotics we'll publicly launch it in a month's time um we've got like an early access copy out now to some friends and this has been the culmination of months and months of work and because a it's a complex space that's changing every day.

37:25B, the big consultancies don't have a view because it's so small. They may have a general view on robotics and productivity, right? Fine. And that's a huge market. But the subsets, which are still like billion plus markets, they just don't really care about because it's not worth their while. This is going deep into it, right? It's speaking to the stakeholders, understanding the value chain, understanding the capital flows, understanding sort of where the money comes from. And by doing that, so we've spoken to startups, to our network, i.e. LPs in the space, people who are working there have tried to build their other VCs who like this space as well, just to make sure that we understand what's going on.

38:10And the final thing, right is like you have to have an opinion you can be very good at analyzing data but ultimately the point of analysis is to make a decision and so for our robotics so like view we're making the claim the the market will converge into two separate camps one camp is what we call the outcome providers they actually do stuff like laying bricks the other camp are providing the rails and the infrastructure they would make for example software that connects from a building model to site with lidar or something else and you know like betting the building blocks and the bet which we're making is that the outcomes camps will become unicorns quickly but they'll never get to that same scale as the rails camps but they will have a way harder journey and that will be a way more cutthroat journey so fun fact of the day not that fun but tech nation in the last report

39:12Amardeep Parmar:robotics is the fastest growing industry in the uk yeah by far so it's interesting like you said where it maybe doesn't get as much press as in other industries but it went from i think 100 million raised five years ago 10 years ago to now well over a billion so it's like accelerating quite quickly there yeah and recently i'm reading the reports because we're doing our own report too so what obviously you do is you read everybody else's reports work out what does a good report would look like yeah just before we go to quick five questions is there anything else with the industry that you think is really exciting right now that people should be thinking about paying attention to look like the right now obviously climate is the overarching theme right we've gone past 1.5 the planet is already mostly ruined um we can't see it yet but we're going to start see it happening also we've got inflation labor costs are going up the economy is stagnating also growing but not as well i think like there's a lot of negative stuff we see right but as a result of that now is the perfect time to innovate in complex sectors robotics can finally do stuff in construction which is like a huge milestone right ai is insane it's getting better every day there will be huge labor transitions from like ai automation now is the time to build and be excited about what we can build right i think if you look at all the previous tech shifts whether it was in the cloud or the original like internet bubble or whatever like they will all pale in comparison to what we're seeing now so like build stuff i'm glad there's a but there because like everyone's fucked yep this is the end of the world yep but build stuff build stuff yeah yeah fix it yeah that's the thing i guess entrepreneurship is all about problems right yeah and right now there's a lot of problems to join vix so yeah you're spoilt for choice of things to build yeah and like people are all final trillions into these problems right and i think it's a fallacy that the state and large corporations are the ones to resolve them um startups will play a big role and we're all here for it like pick a complex problem build something and you'll do well look at spacex again okay elon musk issues aside and which is a separate conversation like spacex is like the concept is kind of insane right but if you look at the graph of like number of space launches over time space is doing this and that's all down to spacex right and that's a problem which who would have thought like private capital and individuals can fix so going to quick five questions now then yep so first one who are three asians in britain you think you do incredible work i'd love to shut them up yep so shout out to two of my portfolio founders so lucky ahmed ceo co-founder of climate x they're building climate risk analysis off with the banks but really complex stuff startups killing it growing really well and i think will do insanely well in a space of matters another founder johnny sue ceo co-founder of ask vinnie they're a agentic ai management platform still under a year old number of units is growing every week and there's a real chance in a year's time they are one of the biggest managers in the world in terms of like properties they manage just from the rate at which they're growing and then finally Ibrahim Ferulo sort of someone I've worked with for eight years now doing some great stuff like running Mentu he's a senior another startup as well and doing lots of like general stuff to have a community.

42:53Amardeep Parmar:Awesome and if you want to find out about you and PT1 where they go to? PT1 website is nice and easy pt1.vc uh i sadly linkedin is my main platform which is shame because linkedin sucks but you'll find me on linkedin um just search pt1 and i'll be there you'll see me with a turtleneck looking very visionary um as all tech bros do and it's the only way that the audience could help you today if you obviously if you're building stuff come find me if you disagree anything I've said perfect I love discussing so like come find me call me wrong I'll buy you a coffee we can get into it like no issues there and yeah and also just if there are any founders who are who have worked in the built world and want to do stuff and are very afraid to take that step drop me a message we do precede happy to talk to you help you figure out if it's worth solving and we can take them there thank you for watching don't forget to subscribe see you next time.