How Andreessen Horowitz Disrupted VC & What’s Coming Next

23:21Yeah, so rewind history a little bit. So it's actually pretty striking like this sort of decentralized media environment is that we're entering is not new. It's actually very old and it's and it's and it's correspondingly the centralized media environment we all grew up in is not the historical norm. And so basically the way that we think about centralized top down media today is basically an artifact of basically the period of the 1940s through you know essentially the 1970s. Like before the 1940s you didn't have top down media in the same way. If you go back to the 1930s or before, you had a much larger number of newspapers.

23:51You had a much larger number of radio stations. You had a much larger number of sort of fly -by -night publishing operations, pamphlets and so forth. And then if you go back even further, one of the most interesting things to study on this is just go back to the American Revolution, the time of the colonies in the 1760s through like the 1790s. And it basically, I've been reading some of this stuff recently, like basically the median environment of the colonial American era was a lot like today's social from the environment. You would have 15, 20, 30 little newspapers per city. They would be in like, they would occupy every micro slice net.

24:21You know, talking about echo chambers or whatever, like they they they they each have their little echo chamber. You know, the founding fathers would write all these columns and essay. They would fight things out by writing essays. And then they would publish the essays under pseudonyms. And you have these characters like Benjamin Franklin or I was in her Hamilton that would literally have like a dozen or two dozen pseudonyms at a time. They'd actually write, they'd actually get in fights with them. So they'd actually they'd have their pseudonyms actually fight with each other. Ben Franklin used to set off arguments against his different pseudonyms to really like, literally get out an issue and to drive newspaper sales.

24:49But really serious stuff also, like the Federalist papers, which were kind of the explanation of the new Constitution in 1789, Hamilton and Madamsson wrote those under pseudonyms. And so it's got idea of the internet a non is like, that's an old idea. And the idea of a pseudonym is an old idea. And the idea of self -publishing is an old idea. And the idea of basically these pitch smashmouth battles with very little centralized control over what people say. Like, you know, if you read about like how, you know, like Hamilton and Jefferson and then also Jefferson and Adams had these just like absolutely, they had their own basically pet newspapers and they was just like absolute level of smash mouth politics.

25:24Like I would say even more like extreme and interanged than even what we have today, which we people kind of can't believe. But like if you read about the election of 1800, like it was maybe, I think it was more extreme than certainly any election in my lifetime in terms of like what, you know, it's literally John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, like just like slandering polarization is the norm. Like really? Like on every conceivable front. Yeah. So like polar, you know, sort of as our, as our, you know, as they say, unfettered conversations with the norm and an imbony was the norm, you know, rumor, you know, skirless, you know, accusations with the norm, you know, pitch back, you know, sort of over to window being wide open was the norm.

25:57And so, and then just for people on read about this, there's the best book on this is called infamous scribblers, which was sort of the name for journalists in those days. And so, this has happened before. And so, anyway, so the point is, this sort of centralized media thing that we've been living in, that we grew up in, or people might age grew up in, like it's a historical aberration off the norm. And again, it's a consequence of technology changes, a consequence of this sort of mass publishing, mass media, mass radio, mass television, mass case paper kind of thing that only started in the 1940s.

26:28And then, correspondingly, therefore, Eric, to your question, and like everything that we think of as corporate branding as an artifact of just a specific point in time of the sort of in 1940s through call of the 1980s or something like the all of like brand marketing, corporate brands, corporate messaging, corporate crisis management, like all these playbooks that they teach at business school were very specific to a time and place that had a very small number of centralized media outlets with tremendous influence and control. But and therefore the corporate brand, like why does the corporate brand exist?

26:58Like why does a proctering gamble brand under any of these brands exist, it exists because if you have centralized media, information's going through this very narrow straw, right? There's very little bandwidth to get something on a TV. You're very little bandwidth to get something in the newspaper and therefore to get it to consumer's attention. And so you kind of had to wrap up everything about a company into like a single word and a single image. And then you would just through advertising, you would just pound that over and over and over again, trying to get people to remember it. But that's because that's all you could do.

27:24If you open everything up and everybody can publish and everybody can debate and everybody can be present and everybody can, you know, and then you have these, you know, individual influencers, you know, with 200 million followers and all this stuff. Like all of a sudden, you have this completely different method of communicating with an audience that can be much more based on personality, right? So authenticity, transparency, and then personality, right? That there can actually be a human being. And then it just happens like because your audience always consists of people, people relate much more to other people than they relate to a corporation, right?

27:57And so as an individual, am I going to feel a stronger emotional affinity to like a person who I follow or to some like disembodied corporation with an office tower in New York City. And if the communication bandwidth is there where I can interact with both of them, of course, I'm going to have a lot more affinity for the people. And so I think I'm sort of radical. And so I think the whole idea of like corporate brands is basically just like it just kind of, they're on their way out. Like it's just as a concept, it just doesn't make sense in the new media environment. And then correspondingly this site, you know, the insurance people use these days like influence from marketing and so forth.

28:28But the, the, your personal relationship is actually really, really interesting one. So, you know, sort of one to many personal relationships. You know, I just think so much of how it's gonna work in the future is this is based on, it's based on relationships with individuals. And obviously, you know, like this is happening, right? Everything I'm describing is what's happening in the entertainment industry and it's happening, you know, consumer brands and you've got, you know, Kim Kardashian with these, you know, with these multi -billion dollar businesses, you know, doing, being direct marketing online.

28:53You know, many people doing this, many politicians, you know, are now adapted to this. And so this is happening, but I just I still feel like it's it's it's underestimated. And if we project forward 10 years, you know, most people, most people are going to think about, most people are going to think about the people they relate to as opposed to the companies they relate to. It's very interesting how you bring that up, Mark, about that, you know, there were no kind of centralized media as a no corporate brands or corporate brands weren't the thing kind of pre 1940s because as a kid, I always was surprised that I knew more entrepreneurs from like pre -1940, so I knew Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and JP Morgan, but who are the entrepreneurs after that?

29:34And they weren't, they were just corporations, right? Like you didn't know actually who ran any of those things, you know, even the new companies at the time, but just, you know, it would leak out slowly and so forth, but it wasn't really a thing. And then now, you know, we're getting all these celebrity CEOs again are kind of that idea is reemerging, which is fascinating. Yeah, that's right. People kind of can't believe it, but like before like 1930, like either you like literally you would just go to the store or it was just like the corner store and then you would buy like, you know, a pan and they weren't branded like, you know, maybe it was like Joe's store, but it wasn't like it wasn't like it, you know, and so like the like consumer brands didn't exists in the modern sense.

30:18And then at the best point, like to the extent you knew any business it was at scale, it was, you know, businesses, you know, prior to like 1930, they were almost all made after their founders, you know, kind of for that reason, right? It was the form of the company. And so then it was actually this, you know, there's this whole school of psychology is actually I think it was Freud's son and law firm member correctly, Edward Bernays, who was sort of the father of public relations, you know, was the new field in the 1920s when radio and newspapers took off and centralized kind of media started to take off.

30:43And they sort of created this whole psychological theory of creating these sort of abstract brands for the reasons that I describe. But by the way, which is very linked to the methods also political propaganda that became kind of very successful in those days. But it is amazing to me as it's like there were hundreds of years before there were hundreds of years industrialization before that and modern economic activity before that where those things essentially didn't exist. And that's why I'm so confident in sort of pegging all this to technology shifts, which is the thing that shifted how we think about companies happen as a consequence of the shifts in communication technology.

31:19And then correspondingly, if the communication technology on wines, which is what's happening, then you're actually going to go back to the future. And yeah, and then of course, there's more data place to support that every day. And is this some of the US had internalized in 2009? Is that why you called the firm in Jason Harwitz when every other firm was going to something? big to me. Now that was a different thing. So what happened then, so when we were raising the money, and it was, you have to remember it's 2009, so it was a difficult year to raise venture capital. In fact, I think there were only two new funds raised that year there was ours and Kostla.

31:52So the biggest, the number one objection we got on the fund was, you guys are very successful entrepreneurs. What's going to stop you from going out and quitting doing this and just starting a company. And then we're gonna be left holding the bag and nobody's gonna be investing or watching our money. And we had no plan to do that. So we got the idea, well, one easy way around that is just name the firm after ourselves. And they'll know that we're gonna be tied to it forever. And we did that. And then I had the idea that since nobody could spell Andrews and Horowitz, we should have this A16T thing.

32:30And that was the name of the firm. And of course, immediately all the competitors said that we were ego maniacs and like narcissistically insane because we named the firm after ourselves, which we just ignored. Like, what can we do? You know, maybe we have a point. Yeah, it's kind of true. Well, the irony is that you're still running the firm, you know, 16 years later, still as active as you were, even beforehand, whereas a lot of other folks have retired. That is all true. Yeah, no, it worked. It did tie us to the firm. So yes, yeah, and and is it as simple as you know you guys have had you know billions and distributions.

33:13You don't obviously need to be doing this anymore. Is it as simple as hey, this is your baby? This is where you have the most fun. What's kept you going you know far after you guys you guys need to you're going at this pace? You know, look, I think that one the firm always had a mission. So it was never like the mission of injuries and hardwoods was never like, let's make a lot of money. That wasn't, you know, we, we actually both of us had, you know, enough money for a normal person, you know, to be happy in life before we started the firms. So that, that was never the thing. It was always, you know, could we make it much easier and better?

33:48Like could we make it both easier to build great companies and then with those, could we make those companies better? And then like what in the world would be that, And what possible activity could either of us have that would be more important than that because one thing, Mark, and I both share is that maybe this single best thing that you can do to improve the world is to build a company that delivers some product or something that improves the world. Like that is actually, that's the thing. It's actually better than has a better impact than any kind of activism or political activity or anything else is just like literally just making things and make the world better.

34:31And then, you know, kind of doing something larger than yourself where you bring a lot of people together to do that. And they all kind of grow and improve their lives through it. So, you know, what could be better than helping people do this single best human endeavor possible? Like, neither of us ever thought there was anything we wanted to do with our time that was better than that. And so there's no reason to stop. because we don't have any better ideas. I would say, you know, like this is the best idea. Mark told me he got the, there was a story about the Larry page. I think if I understand correctly, Larry page says, I see no better use of my money than giving it all to Elon Musk to build more tech companies.

35:13Yeah, so that it's a little bit of that, yeah, exactly. You know, as a philanthropic idea, for sure. One other idea I wanted to bring back to the idea of people's corporations is it's not only the CEO's, right? I see as building a cinematic universe, right? It's the CEO's, but it's also the surrounding... It's it's Christixin, it's Catherine Boyle, it's Martín Casado, it's Alex Rampel. You guys have done, you know, this is a phenomenal job of building stars and building a collection of people. Yeah, so, and I would say about that, you know, we're not really... We're not a company, we're kind of a firm.

35:50And, you know, those people who we were able to recruit in, like, very, like hyper -talented people, really it's just like the it's a platform for those people, you know, and we're two of them, but we're certainly, you know, not, you know, it's not that hierarchical in that sense is, you know, you probably observe since you've been here, like everybody is kind of doing their thing, but in a common context with a common culture and, you know, kind of a of mostly common set of investors and so forth. And so it's much more like a team. It functions more like a team than a normal kind of hierarchy, you know, in that sense.

36:36And you know, it's great, because we were able, like if you look at the top people, you know, if you look at Martin Casado and Christix and Alex Rampell and David Yulevich and so forth, like that team is better like IQ wise capability wise than the executive teams of Meta or Google or Apple or any of them. And it's just because you know, in a way they're all the boss and they all act like the boss and that works. But that's that's just kind of been like a nice outcome of of the platform. Talk about how you guys developed this this idea of platform because most most firms don't have that, didn't have that.

37:16Are you guys moved to this sort of almost federated model? Talk a little bit about how the evolution of the firm and how you guys figure that out or what that was like. Yeah, so it's pretty interesting. So one of the things, so that it came in two pieces. So the first thing was when we started the firm, the history adventure capital, like if you had done like a the back test on it, which you find is there were never ever more than 15 companies in a year that would ever make it to a hundred million dollars in revenue. Because, you know, the technology industry, that was like the general size of it.

37:53That's the the amount of new technology that the world could absorb, you know, in those days. But, you know, Mark had an idea which he wrote up in I think 2011 called Software Eating the World. And the idea behind that was, well, every company that was going to be worth anything was going to be a technology company because software was able to just to make anything so much better. And so there were going to be not 15 companies but 150 or 200 companies. Now the result of 15 companies meant the optimal venture capital firm was like six or eight people going after those 15 companies. You know, each one gets two and you've got them monopoly.

38:37So there was no need for it to ever be bigger. And as a result of that, the way they kind of set up their organizations were basically with something what I say is called shared economics, but also shared control. And that shared control made sense if you're going to be eight or 10 partners or six or 10 partners or whatever, because if you're not ever getting bigger than that, then you don't have to reorganize. You don't have to make difficult management decisions that people are going to disagree with. We knew, or like we thought software was going to eat the world, and we were going to need to be way bigger, way bigger than, you know, six or 10 partners.

39:20And so we were going to have to be able to reorganize, decompose the problem set up the organization in a way where very smart teams of people could work independently and address the different facets of the industry that needed to be addressed. You can see it with American dynamism and infrastructure and apps and crypto and bio and so forth. And so we never had shared control. We always had centralized control. And this is something we got that advice from, you know, her balance was super helpful in in a understanding why that would be important. And then, you know, also actually Mark's father -in -law, the late amazing John Ariaga, was like just very, very clear on like, if you're going to run something, you know, eventually there's going to be conflicts, like they're going to be these issues.

40:06And you've got to have control. And that's going to be important. You know, it's not important until it is important. And then it's the only thing that matters. And so, you know, with that control, we've been able to kind of reorganize, reimagine the firm and then go address every single kind of vertical where you need, like the people who know American dynamism, like to know that in depth, everything from like rare earth minerals to rockets to these kinds of things, there's no way those same six people are going to know everything about crypto. It's not even possible. Like these fields are too deep and not only the technology, but also the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem.

40:47And so you need separate teams to address these separate very large markets, whereas before you just needed a person on that, like you could have a person on crypto, it'd be fine or a person on AI, it would be fine. No, no, no, that's never going to work again. And so our ability to feel the whole team against that and restructure things and say, okay, you were doing consumer internet, like that's not going to be relevant in the next 10 years, and so forth. These kinds of things are very hard to do if you don't have control. And those two examples, crypto and American dynamism are also interesting because these are examples where you guys helped create the categories where I believe you, the first big venture firm to have dedicated crypto and AD practices.

41:29They're also creating a firm and you've created a firm that can be adaptive to new sort of Theses, new ideas, new trends and build firms against them. Yeah, and that was something, you know, like I just said at Mark kind of identified early on, you know, he, one of the things he used to say when we started the firm is venture capital as a young man's game. That's because what venture capital is, that was like one of the things he got out of the many conversations we had with him. He's like, and what he was really saying as a young person's game is, you know, the technology's always changing. And, you know, to learn, and the people who know the new technology and he best turn out to be often new people.

42:08And so to what you see in many venture capital firms is once whatever they exploited runs out, so they did network effects and consumer internet and they were amazing at that. But then when that stopped being the thing, they didn't get to the next thing. And we were able to get to the next, so one, we're always watching for the next thing. But then as soon as we see it, and we have such brilliant people, you know, critics and saw crypto and we're like, Chris, go get it. And you know, David, you know, it's actually saw Catherine Boyle who saw American dynamism in Catherine. It's like, like, this is a very important thing.

42:44And so we just go do it. And we can do it because we don't have to repurpose our old people. We can build a whole new team. We can change the organizational structure. I'll off in an of line conversation. We were talking about how some firms look the same as they did 30 years ago from a structure perspective and the world has changed and and firms need to change to meet those evolving needs. And this is one example where the stuff has gotten so much more complex. There's been this great complexification and so to your point, a generalist firm could have been able to cover the entire landscape.

43:24But now, no individual can to have deep knowledge on all the fields, you know, bio, crypto, all the fields we cover. And so that's one great example of how the world has changed and that leads to a need in venture firms to change as well. Are there other examples that come to mind around how the asset class has evolved or should have evolved to meet the needs of the world changing? Well, you know, it's probably changed more since we started the firm than it did in the whole history before them. And there's so many ways. So, you know, one of the things is right, like is Mark said earlier, angel investing kind of that became a real category.

44:06And then the public markets have become, I would say very difficult and dysfunctional to the extent that, you know, open AI just did a giant raise in the private markets, which I don't think they could have done in the public markets. So now like the fact that you can raise more money in the private markets and the public markets in one shot just speaks to the expansion of the private markets to deal with the fact that the public markets are just not a great environment anymore for companies. And so that changes venture capital because we're at the private market. So our market just got much more enormous.

44:45And then as you said, media change, how you go to market? We were the first ones to market a firm in venture capital. Market with markets did an amazing job of creating a brand for a firm that popped up out of nowhere. That had never happened before. But then the way you market it changed entirely as we just discussed. It's evolving. The world is changing really fast just in general. And now look, I think AI, just the way we worked, the way we operate as a firm is changing very fast due to AI and like what we can automate, you know, how big a reach, how many entrepreneurs we can know, all these things are very different now.

45:28Let's double click on the brand point because you guys in 2008, 2009, you came out and you were looting it to it earlier, but you made a lot of noise, right? You know, so people had different opinions, but everyone had an opinion. And you thought, deliberately, we're going to build a brand in a new way. that you guys at market and team, and you kind of crushed it. Talk about what that strategy was and what perception it was, and what was it like as you were building out the brand? Well, like, you know, as a conversation Mark and I had, and you know, Mark is kind of like, one of ways we understand each other.

46:00So, Mark has been said, you know, like I've been studying the history of venture capital, I've been trying to figure out why they don't do any marketing. And it turns out like the industrialists in venture capitalists, the Rothschilds, you know, JP markets and so forth were sometimes like funding both sides of a war. And so like any kind of publicity, you know, like might get them killed. And that just kind of carried through to modern venture capital. So that the original rationale for not doing it was no longer really valid. And they told themselves other things like we're very humble so we don't market in this kind of nonsense Which is always a rationalization for laziness So you said you know like what do you think should we market it and you know like sometimes when Mark asked a question like that And I already know what he thinks and I haven't thought about it that much I just go like yeah, of course like let's market it and that that was kind of that conversation and then you know He had the he had worked with market, you know prior at Ning and he thought super highly of her.

47:08And so what happened is, you know, he said, well, let's, you know, let's talk to market, let's see what we can do and so forth. And you know, we spoke to her and this was kind of a hilarious thing. And you have to remember that this is the days when like magazines were a big deal, which, you know, they're not so much anymore. And so when we launched the firm, she said to us, she said, do you want to be on the cover of Fortune or Forbes? And we were like, Fortune, of course. And that's exactly what happened. So that was the beginning of it. And you guys were able to recruit amazing people early on.

47:47Talk about what it was like to get one of the first big partners. Like, you know, you've got some partners like Chris have been here, over 12 years. What was it like in terms of how you thought about recruiting the early partners and landing them? I would say that's like kind of one of the things we got wrong in our thinking. Well, we got right and we got wrong. So like one of the things we got very right was the first person we hired was Scott Cooper who we knew like super well. I'd worked with three years and it was just like a brilliant like and really fundamental building the firm. He's recently joined the the admit the presidential administration in the White House, but He was just kind of invaluable and fantastic and he didn't want to join When we started the firm because he was worried we wouldn't be able to raise the fund So we raise the fund and then we hired him.

48:38He was employing number one Then the second idea that we had was to kind of only Founders or CEOs were allowed to be general partners and the reason for that was you know, a little bit what Mark said earlier, which is we were counter -programming what had happened in the industry where you had a lot of people who were smart but didn't understand founders. So we wanted everybody in the firm to understand founders, but that profile turned out to be not perfect in many ways. But we hired some really great people, you know, one of the early people's Peter Levine who still works with us now and so forth.

49:16And then, you know, we kind of started. The first thing we relaxed was, okay, maybe the company, you had to found a company or BCO, but it didn't have to be that great a company. Like the company did okay, then that was okay. And that kind of gave us permission, which was controversial at the time to hire Christix and. And one of the things Mark and I recognized early was Christyx and was a far better investor than either of us. And so that was like a little bit of an indication that maybe we were too rigid in our criteria and that sort of opened it up quite a bit. I wanna go back to one of the unique insights you had was going back to Mark's offers in the world peace was that there were going to be more winners and those winners were going to be much bigger.

50:00And there's a lot of implications that stem from that. You'll raise bigger funds. You'll have this decentralized team, or sort of federated model. You'll be able to invest in higher valuations if these companies are going to get bigger and bigger. And it feels like that was something that you guys saw relatively early that other firms or even later stage firms then sort of got on board with. Yeah, so the big thing on that is, you know, it's sort of this really important transformation that's happened in tech that sort of went kind of unremarked on as a pattern, although you started to see it kind of in the early 2010s, which is, you know, kind of up until roughly 2010, like if you make a list of all the big winners in tech over the preceding 60 years, they were basically all a form of a tool company, you know, so technology tools.

50:49So, you know, they would build personal computers or microchips or operating systems or databases or routers or web browsers or whatever. but fundamentally they were building components of a computer system. Then they would sell those tools to either consumers or businesses, and then the consumer business would figure out what to do with the tools. Then that had been the pattern. In fact, Ben will recall when we first started the firm, one of my early investing things was no articles, because you just look at that list and you're like, basically, the big winners have all been these big horizontal tech companies, building general -purpose tools that many other, many downstream industries pick up and use.

51:23but the big winners, like historically, if you had a tech startup that was focused on vertical, it just meant that you were a small tools company. A classic example. So classic example is I am a tech company and I want to be in the boutique hospitality industry. So therefore, I started a software company that makes booking software for bed and breakfast hotels. And such things existed, by the way, and they were just like very tiny companies. Fast forward to 2010, you had this like basically, and I think it's really the internet really started to work, broadband really kicked in, a bunch of things, a bunch of things kind of really catalyzed.

51:55And what you started to see was actually the vertical, the 10 companies wanted a vertical, started to get to be huge. And probably the first two of those that really made this clear for me were Uber and Airbnb, right? We're Airbnb. Okay, like how about we not only build the booking software for the bed and breakfast, but how about we run the entire service? Like how about we run the entire booking engine? How about we run the entire search engine? How about we do all all the transactions, how about we do all the customer service like the entire end -to -end experience. Or the same thing for Uber and Lyft, which is you could have a small boutique software company doing taxi dispatch software for taxi limo operators.

52:29Or you could build Uber Lyft and build actually build a giant transportation network with drivers and riders and money flowing through. And then more recently, you could company like Andrew, right? Our companies for many years have sold many parts of computers and software into the defense department into the defense contractors, but Paul Merlucky came along and said, let's just build a defense contractor. Like let's build a direct competitor to the big defense primes and actually build defense systems. Tesla, another one, right? Like, instead of building embedded whatever power management software for cars, how about just like build the car?

53:05Is basically, you keep going. But basically, like in the last 15 years, if you do that same list again, many or most of the big winners have been companies that have gone into vertical. But what they've done is they've gone in and they've tried to basically eat the entire vertical, right? They've provided an end -to -end experience with everything required to basically service that vertical, often indirect competition with the incumbents in that vertical, right? So, and the dual competes had to head with the existing defense primes. Uber competes, you know, competed head -to -head with attacks with limo operators, Airbnb famously, competed head -to -head with hotels.

53:35We've got extremely angry about that, right? And so, Netflix competed directly with cable channels, right, and movie theaters. And so, so basically it's just like, all right, you're going to have more and more of these companies that are going to use technology to go insert into an end market and then just try to go take that end market. Those companies, good news, those companies can get to be gigantic, right? Because if you crack the mother load, like Netflix has for example entertainment, you know, you can, or like Tesla has in cars, you can build a company that's maybe multiples in size, even of that entire industry earlier, you know, the way that existed before.

54:06or the challenges, those kinds of companies are much different than historical tech companies. Those are like full service. And so they're like much more complex, right? It's like a lot more moving parts on the operating side. They require a different kind of discipline of the part of the management team. You know, they're gonna be operating. In a lot of cases, they're operating in regulated industries, right? Where there's a completely different political dynamic. And by the way, they're going up against entrenched competitors, right? Who certainly have no intention of just turning the business over.

54:33And so I think in many ways, that's been the defining theme of the last 15 years in the valley is kind of the evolution from just tools companies to, you know, what we used to call full stack, like just do the whole thing. It's fascinating. The one knock against injuries that I've heard over the years is, hey, it's, you know, they think of their firm as a product or there's like a machine as if that's not, you know, a great thing. Like if a startup said, hey, we have no moat, you know, I'm just a smart guy. You should say, hey, that doesn't, doesn't feel super defensible. It doesn't feel like you've really built something of power.

55:03And yet, when people think about their venture firms, they sort of run them the opposite of ways that they want their startups to run. They really think about structural advantages, adorable advantages, or network effects, or all of these things that they want their startups to have. It's been an interesting contrast there. There's a kernel of truth in the critique. The kernel of the truth is, like, look, at the end of the day, it's an entrepreneur. You do, you do, like your PC, using your own personal touch and the reason for that is you're gonna have somebody on your board, right? Like, you're gonna have somebody on your board.

55:30You're gonna have somebody you call it for a moment when the world is caving in, you're gonna have somebody who you're dealing with. And that's gonna be, and it's gonna be, you're gonna be dealing with that person in high -tension situations. You're gonna wanna really rely on them. You're gonna want them to really know what they're talking about. You're gonna want them to have throw away in the industry. And so that does really matter. There is that personal relationship. And so I don't think what would work is just trying to not provide that, and instead just provide, as you said, just provide a machine.

55:59But what I think works incredibly well is to provide that and provide the machine. Well, and the team. So I think that I would say really distinguishes kind of what we do from what we experience is like we always had a person. And when we tried to reach through that person to the rest of the team, they were like, not my company, I'm not making that introduction, I'm not doing that. Whereas, you know, like almost on a daily basis, you know, we'll have a company who'll run into something and they'll go, oh wow, you know, Yeah, like you should talk to Joe Morrissey. He dealt with that sales issue over here.

56:35You should talk to Ben Like he knows how to like deal with a crisis like this. In fact, we just Had a woman this week, you know, where you know one of our partners. He's like, well, this seems like a bad crisis You know like bringing bringing the guy who like lived through all the crises and you know That's me and like I can really help in that because I I don't like to stand like What to do, but I understand what it feels like And so much of that kind of thing is having a deep understanding. And in the firm, we understand almost every situation you would be in. And there's somebody who's a great expert who will be there and like a flash, even if that's not the person on your board.

57:19And that that I think is probably the thing I'm most proud of in the organization is people always get their money's worth from that perspective. This is the big industry structural transformation thing that we think has taken place and we did and this is one where we did predict that we have been talking about it for a long time but I think it's really happened. Like it's really played out over the last 15 years and it's still playing out which is there's this pattern, there's this pattern in industries as they mature which is they often start with what you would call like basically a strategy that's kind of like being in the middle.

57:48So classic example using this is like retail in a retail shopping where once upon a time there over these things called department stores. You know, it's just names like Sears and J .C. Panney. And then you would go to the department store, and the thing about the department store is it would have a pretty good selection of products at a pretty good price. And growing up, that's where we would always go shopping. You know, by the time you hit the 80s and 90s, you know, basically the department store is stopped working. And you know, for the most part, they've gone under at this point. And what happened was they got replaced by competitors that were not in the middle, but were on the far end of one side of the other, of kind of the spectrum of strategies.

58:19That's why we call the outcome of the barbell. And so the department stores are placed by two sets of companies. So first of all, high scale, right? So high scale Amazon Walmart, right? Where what you get is like an incredible selection at an absolute fantastic prices, right? But it's a very, you know, to your point, like it's a very machine experience. It's a very, it's a very machine. It's a very, you know, it's a, you know, it's a high scale, you go to Walmart, like, you know, the shelves up at the ceiling and the whole thing, like, you know, it's this specific thing. But like that, like wiped out a huge part of the department stores.

58:47And then the other thing on the other side was basically specialist boutiques where for the thing that you care about the most, whether that's, you know, faster than a jewelry or consumer electronics or candles or whatever, right? Whenever is the thing that you can actually care about the most, you go to the boutique, right? And you say, yo, it's everybody, you go to the Gucci store, you know, to buy your scarf, you go to the Apple store, to buy your iPhone. And what the boutique offers is a very narrow selection at a very high price, but what you're getting is a very specialized experience. And in your point, you're often getting the personal touch, right?

59:16So you go into a, I don't know, you go into like a, you know, wrist -press boutique or something. And it's just like, it's just like grace. Like, wow, would you like some champagne? You know, we're going to the whole thing. Oh, let me get you a comfortable chair. It's like, you know, here's all the espresso. You know, it's just like the whole thing. Oh, you want to stay late. Great. Well, lock the doors. You can stay for another, you know, half hour and browse through everything. You just get this very, you know, you get this very, you know, kind of personal touch, you know, personal touch kind of experience.

59:38So what happened was the department store has just died because they didn't offer either one. They did not offer, they didn't offer scale and they didn't offer the boutique personal touch experience. And what you find if you look at the history of business is basically as industries professionalized and mature. Many of them go through this. And so what I'm describing also happened in advertising agencies, by the way, this is a big theme of the TV show Mad Men, because they were right in the middle of it. You know, if that's remember, there's a certain point in the show where they sell, you know, they're running this kind of mid -size ad agency, and then they actually sell it to McCann, which was one of the big scale players.

1:00:07And then they got frustrated there because it was this big machine. And so then they went and started their own boutique. And so it was kind of during that era. And then it's an ad agency, it's happened law firms. It happened with Hollywood telly. you just see Michael Ovid's catalyzed this when he was in Hollywood in the 70s and 80s. It happened in the financial, it happened in banks, it happened in investment banking, commercial banking, it happened in hedge funds, it happened in private equity. So we just like seen this pattern that this happens over and over again, but it hadn't happened in venture capital.

1:00:34And so when we entered the field basically what we observed was, you just basically have a, they're all department stores and the venture capital version of a $300, $400, $500 million fund, doing the sushi boat stretch, like sitting and waiting, by the way, no website, because like, oh, God forbid that you like, every time you're starting anybody or make yourself visible. And then you basically said, I said, and who wrote, and you basically wait for the deals to come through. And then it had run that way for a long time and so it was kind of this cartel, self -referential thing. And so it just kind of ran that way.

1:01:09And basically our bet when we went for scale and we went to build off the kind of teams that Ben described and sort of this machine that results from it. You know, the bet was basically, the death of the middle is going to happen, the barbell is going to play out. And so, there was going to be an opportunity for a handful of firms to go for high scale. But only a handful, right? Because what you get on the other side of this is you don't get 50 at high scale. You get a bunch, but like it's not that many. It's a scale economics kick in. And then what would happen on the other side is the rise of the seed investment, their angel investor and the seed investor.

1:01:41And of course, we had been part of that, right? we had been on that side of the barbell. And this was part of the transformation that had happened in venture, which is the original venture firms were, like the original venture firms in the 50, 60, 70s, they were first money in, right? They were the first check, right? A company like Intel or Apple. By the time the 80s and 90s rolled around, they were no longer the first money in. They were off in the second or third check after the angels and the seed investors. And so, we put two and two together and said, aha, what's going to happen is this field is going to bifurcate just like every other field, working for scale, and then we're going to encourage the seed investors.

1:02:11And I've been, you know, we've been very actively trying to invest and see investors and trying to help them and we're, you know, I was trying to be very friendly with them. And then basically the question, the structural question is posed is what's the point of having a department store, right? Of having a, having a sort of mid -size firm. And the answer is, by the way, there's no point. Like for the same reason, there's no point to department store. There's no point to the mid -size firm for the reason that Ben described, which is that, you know, they don't have any, they're not the first money in.

1:02:35They're not at scale and they don't have any depth. And so at the end of the day, there's really fundamentally no, no value proposition to the thing. If you have access to seed investors on the one side of the scale platforms on the other side. And I would say, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, we would say this and everybody would get mad, you know, because it sounds like we're predicting everybody's going to die. But like sitting here today, you know, this has really played out. And many of many of the midsize firms that I grew up with are gone. And in some cases, they're gone because they failed.

1:03:02But in a lot of cases, they're actually gone because they succeeded. You know, the partners made a lot of money. And then at some point, just the rationale for being in business started to fade away. And, you know, maybe they had to start working a little bit harder and that wasn't fun. And so they just kind of folded up shop. And then the LPs correspondingly have a daffodilist. And so if you talk to the LPs now, increasingly they are focusing capital either on the scale platforms or they're focusing capital into, this very specific kind of early stage seed angel strategy. And they're interested in funding the department to store equal one of the VCs has really faded.

1:03:31Anyway, so I view this as like, this is one of those things. This is a very natural evolution. This was destined to happen. It'll happen in many other industries in the future. you know, it's a process that plays out in response to customer demand, right? Because the customers of venture firms are the entrepreneurs in the one hand and the LPs in the other hand. And if they both want this change to happen, then it's going to happen. And so it's a very natural process. But you know, it's disconcerting to be on the wrong side of this. And it's an adaptation process for people to kind of figure out that this is happening.

1:03:59But I think that was pretty clear. Yeah, that's well said. And that's one example of how the asset class has evolved. let's get into other ones. I mean, one is that there's been, you know, as your thesis has played true, so far as the world has been more demand on the LP side to get into the space, much more money has put into the space, which means more venture capital firms, which means more competition. And of course, when supplies constrained, people are sort of competing on the axis of almost, these have the power and founders are clamoring to get into, to be on the conveyor belt, and they're you know, pretending not to care by, you know, not having websites, but when there's an explosion of adventure firms, now founders are the ones picking.

1:04:42And VC firms, you know, have to change their tune. You guys were early on to it, but it also changes sort of the types of LPs that want to be involved. And then, yeah, talk more about how the asset across has evolved from more capital flooding into the space or any other changes that emerged from it. Yeah, so look, as a couple of things. So first of all, our, our, we, we used to have this discussion with our friend Andy Rackleff, who's kind of the master of adventure. And as they say, co -founder of benchmark and then actually taught venture later at Stanford. And very analytical on the topic.

1:05:12Yeah, extremely thoughtful. And because we have this discussion with him of like, wow, money comes in and out of it. Money comes whipping in and out of adventure. And these dynamics really change. As they say in science field, who has hand in every relationship, somebody has hand, the upper hand. And is it the founders or the VCs? And we said, how do we think about this? And Andy made this very interesting observation. He said, basically, for as long as he had been in the field, I think, I mean, going back to, you know, back in a decade, you know, he said, basically, Venture has always been over overfunded as an asset class.

1:05:41There's really never been a time in which Venture has been underfunded. Maybe a little bit in the extreme crises, like, you know, maybe 2009 as an example, but like generally Venture has overfunded. He said, he has rough, I think he said at the time, his rough back in the envelope math is sort of roughly always overfunded by like a factor of four. You know, I think you, you know, maybe these cases like a factor of 40 or 400 or something. You know, the Sequoia guys are always famous for complaining. Anytime Sequoia is given an interview, they always talk about how it's just like way too much money and venture.

1:06:07As they're always trying to discourage people from doing an adventure. Yeah, I was trying to talk to LPs in the stop of the money flow, but because you know, more competition. But that is question is, okay, why is it always overfunded? And he said, basically, it's a consequence of the, you think about the broader financial landscape. So, you know, what are LPs? These LPs are large pools of institutional capital being invested for many reasons, but a lot of it ultimately is retirement funds. Their ultimate theme is one form or another retirement funds. So their large pools of capital that need to generate a certain level of return over the next 50 or 100 years to be able to pay for people's retirement.

1:06:44And in order to do that, they need to hit a certain level of return. And the nature of the modern economy is population declined. You have a lot more older people, a lot fewer younger people. and so you have this sort of fundamental issue, which is like how as a steward of institutional capital, how do you generate the long -term returns that you need in an environment in which actually that's actually not so easy? And so you invest in stocks and bonds and whatever, and you often still can't get the math depends on how you're not gonna hit your return target. And then there's this asset class called Venture Capital where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but when it works it blows the lights out.

1:07:17Like when Venture Capital works, it's the top performing asset class. And there are individual venture capital funds that have been just absolutely spectacular returns that have driven a lot of the return for an entire institutional portfolio. And so there's this, and the way I describe it is, venture capital is never the majority of the money in an institutional pool, but it's like the cherry on the top of the Sunday, it's the thing, that it's the small position of the thing, but if it works, it might make the entire formula work. And then you just look at how many pools of capital are there like that out there?

1:07:49How many LPs are there out there like that? of the answer is there's a lot. And then basically what happens is all the LPs basically read this once in book, which describes how to run these institutional capital pools, which is a great book. And they basically say, oh, Dave Swenson says you put X percent of venture capital. And but Dave Swenson says the key to it is you only invest in the top venture capital firms. Because venture capital is a feast or famine business and you only want to be in the top 10 percent tele firms. And then basically what they do is they go out and they talk to the firms and then they find out they basically can't get into most of the firms they want to invest in.

1:08:20and then they sort of develop a theory of how these other firms are actually of a top 10%. And you can actually pick that up because if you ask LPs who are their top, who do they think are the top 10 % firms, they often have very different lists. And I, you know, in part of it, it's a function of maybe they've sniffed something out and in part of it's just because like, they have to allocate the money and so they kind of convince themselves that there are sort of undiscovered gems out there. And so as a result, they just, they overfund the asset class. And then that, you know, it's just like too many LPs leads, right, too many LPs managing too much money, leads to too many VCs, leads to too many startups getting funded, which leads to the phenomenon that founders experience, which is I start a company and not only do I have three venture venture competitors, I have an F30, right?

1:09:00And it's like, you know, basically like what the hell? And so anyway, so Andy's point is like, look, like that's just an artifact of the world. Like we are the tail on a much larger dog and the dog is large scale institutional money flows. Like venture is a rounding error in the global financial system, but it's one that's just prone to be overfunded for very long periods of time. And what Andy said was until there's a new approach to investing these large pools of capital, like basically we should basically assume that this process persists over a long period of time. So I think it just is the case.

1:09:31Would it be better if the amount of money was equalized to what it should be relative to the opportunity set? I mean, for people like us, yes, that would be better. So in the world, I would be worse. I was going to say, yeah, so that's the other thing. It's like, if you had less money in the space, would entrepreneurs be able to take as many swings? No. Right. And and and you look, you know, should I have the arrogance to sit here and say that we're going to invest in all the great companies and that we're not going to say no to people who we ought to be funding. And obviously we we know we make that mistake all the time.

1:09:58And so like if you're going to have an asset class that is to be overfunded, like this probably is the one to overfund. Right. In other words, that there's a societal surplus of of all of the swings that entrepreneurs get to take that they wouldn't get to take if the sector was overfunded. And some of those work, right? Like and you have funders come out of nowhere and they raise money from no ABCs and like they end up building huge successful companies. And so on a societal basis, I actually think it's like it's like a form of dysfunction that maybe is not optimal financially, but like on a societal basis, I think it's probably not positive.

1:10:27Yeah, I mean like what could be better in terms of wasting money than taking money from people who have too much and giving it to people who want to change the world and make it a better place? I mean, it seems like a you know and our and our building a company to do so. But that seems like a pretty good idea. The other thing I'd add to that is venture capital is a little bit unique. From our point of view, in that it's the only asset class where the top managers tend to persist for decades. If you look at stocks or bonds or anything else, the pickers, because they're all picking against the same thing and they all have equal rights to invest in everything.

1:11:11It tends to like, there's some amount of randomness or whatever that puts somebody on top and then they're no longer on top the next decade and so forth. But in venture capital, the top firms often remain the top firms for a very, very long time. And the reason is the best entrepreneurs will only take money from the best venture capital firms. And so, you know, if this was the NFL draft, which I think is today, you know, And we'd have the number one draft pick every single year, despite already kind of having the best team. And so that doesn't matter if there's too much money. If you always get to pick first, you still can win very consistently.

1:11:48And that's sort of what happens. So it's a great system from our perspective. Good for the world. Good for us. We love it. Yeah. Some people will say things like, oh, there's too many founders or too many people want to be founders. as if it's like a already inefficient market, and there aren't people out there in the world who whom. That's a bit... Yeah, it's the best thing in the world for people to try. You know, to do something larger than yourself, and try and make the world a better place, and get people along the right with you, and everybody's got a great purpose, and they're all working hard.

1:12:20And maybe there's a great outcome for them in the world. Why wouldn't you want to fund as much of that as you can? I never understood the argument that there's too much venture capital. That's crazy. We can never be too much. When did you guys realize that you were entering the... Like when did you realize, hey, this is really working. Like what was sort of the biggest inflection point in AC and Z history of when you guys felt you reached that point? So like very early on, we realized we could win what we thought were very high quality A rounds from like our from top tier VCs and as soon as we could do that we were like oh we could be top tier we could definitely be top tier we thought you know in our original like kind of world domination plan we thought you know that was gonna take 10 years or whatever but it happened really early on like right in fun one.

1:13:19And by the time we got to fun three, it was in full effect. So it just happened much faster. And I like we're in a whole another world now than we were them. But we knew it was, it seemed like as soon as we could be, you know, in those days, Kleiner or benchmark was quite an ideal that that was a very clear indication that that we could be top tier. Yeah. And look, I think it was basically, you know, this is already the advice I'd give people not in not not how to compete in venture but how to compete in other in other spaces that are potentially right for transformation is really it's just two things we were able to do and I think two things one is just like having been a customer you just have a perspective on these things and so there there there is a real there is a real knowledge advantage if you've been a customer or something you really understanding the shortfalls and the opportunities so that's one one lens but you actually have you know you have to do that like I think that was a hell of a hard lesson that we We had to learn that way.

1:14:12It was. That was 15 years. 15 years. It was a lot of knowledge gathering. Yes. 15 years, 15 years of pain and glory. And then, yeah, look, the other thing is, you know, we've been talking about this the whole discussion, but the other thing is, you know, to take a structural view of the industry, right, which is like, you know, as we talked about before, but like, these industries are not, the structures are not permanent and timeless. Like, you know, just because things work a certain way today doesn't mean that's how they've always worked. In fact, almost certainly that's not the case. almost certainly the structure of any industry has changed a lot over time as circumstances have changed.

1:14:42And then therefore the structure of whatever industry is today is not going to be the same structure as going to have in 10 or 20 or 30 years. But incumbents, especially incumbents that no longer have their founders, incumbents are highly likely to underestimate the amount of structural change and they're going to have a hard time adapting to it. And so if you adopt a structural approach, you can kind of get a little bit of a crystal ball. And then combine that with the customer mindset, you can kind of look at a little bit of a crystal ball and say, okay, well, I'm going to, you know, it's going to kind of change this way.

1:15:07And then it's the gap between the way that the incumbents are currently doing it and the future way that it ought to work. I mean, that's where you have the insertion opportunity. There's a related quote to this Mark. In a New Yorker profile on you many years ago, there's this quote that says, Mark and Jason sometimes wonders if Naval Rava Kant is onto something, the founder of Angelus. He's asked Horowitz, what if we're the most evolved dinosaur and Naval is a bird? So this was in the Ben or we call this is in the heyday of angelist. And that's a good question. Yes. Well, so first of all, it's a question is totally ruined because we now know that the dinosaurs were birds.

1:15:45So the T -Rex is running around with feathers and a beak, which my 12 year old self was deeply disappointed by, you know, the Jurassic Park reboot is going to be very sad and depressing. But the specific point when I said that, whatever a decade ago, that'll recall it was when angelist was kind of, right in the, you know, basically, Agileist was aspiring to basically structurally replace venture the way that we were doing it by having it be a, you know, essentially a marketplace, an online marketplace approach. And so that, you know, that was one, you know, kind of disruptive opportunity. And you know, by the way, crowdfunding, you know, there's a bunch of these and, you know, there are cases where that's worked really well.

1:16:18So that, that's one form of structural change. The other form of structural change, of course, is like, okay, you know, AI, you know, which, which I wasn't, didn't have in mind a decade ago applying to venture, but, you know, today you certainly asked that question, which was like, all right, some of our guys, like, you know, you're sitting around and like doing all this analysis and you have all these smart people and they're doing all this modeling and all this, you know, research and so forth and like, you know, why, you know, why can't you just plug this into, you know, clawed or schedule Peter Gemini and have to tell you what to invest in.

1:16:43And so that, you know, I would say that's that's that's the new version of the question. Yeah. There was also crypto a few years ago or you know, I see, I was, I see, I was going to be disrupted. I mean, look, had ICO stayed legal, I mean, ICOs were outlawed basically, but had ICO stayed legal. You know, then you have, right, you're off to, you have just a totally different, you know, kind of way things happen. By the way, it turns out to Ben's point that the main thing that actually happened was the private markets grew up. And so, what actually happened, actually, I, you know, played the benefit of EC's just through happenstance, I think, in this particular case, which is it led firms like ours, raised much larger growth funds, and you know, playing even bigger and important role.

1:17:16But like there's absolutely no guarantee in life that the next structural change like that will work on our on our behalf. And so, you know, Ben, Ben will tell you, I'm always a little bit of an obsessive paranoid about, you know, what happens when the next change happens. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting. And, you know, I would just say, AI, like, I think it might eventually definitely be kind of better at us than picking. But I would just say that the great thing about venture capital is picking is a small part of the game. But two gets to pick is as important.

1:17:49And, you know, how much of that can be done with AI? And I think so much of what a venture capital firm is, what are its relationships with the world? And, you know, do you get that benefit? Because to build a company, you just end up needing a lot of relationships. And, and, you know, and that's, That's what I say like 90 % of the activity at the firm is. And then Eric, you may know Tyler Cohen has talked about there, you know, there is this long -term pattern that actually goes back literally, you know, 400, 500 years of, I think what he calls, projects select, projects selectors or project pickers, you know, so like, you know, the story's been told many times, but the origin of the concept of of of carry or carried interest in the venture capital private equity world is kind of how we get paid.

1:18:34It actually, you know, goes all the way back 400 years ago to the wailing industry. Right. How much wail can you carry? How much wail can you carry? And so what would happen is literally you would have these project pickers. You would have basically angel investors in wailing during expeditions. And a wailing expedition like in Moby Dick, it's like literally a ship and a captain and a crew and they're going to like go out and they're going to try to like go get a wail and bring it back. Right? And like, you know, it's like, I don't know. The early days of wailing it was like two thirds of the time the ship comes back.

1:19:02You know, the other third of the time the ship doesn't come back. Right? So high -res guy return occupation. And then so basically these guys who were the money, the capitol suppliers, and they would sit in these coffee houses or pubs. And then the captains would come in and pitch. And they pitch the project. And they say, I'm going to buy this ship, and I'm going to go to this spot. And this is me, my progeny. Here's someone that I staffed my crew. And then the project pickers, the financiers, had to decide whether to back the captain. And then if they did, they give the captain the money to go buy the ship and hire the crew.

1:19:31And then if the ship didn't come back, they lose all their money. But the ship came back with a whale. The carry, the carried interest was the 20 % of the whale that the captain and the crew got to keep. That was how they got paid. Right. And so, but like venture capital, like literally they're doing venture capital. You know, Queen Isabella did venture capital when chief finance, you know, Christopher Columbus, right? Exactly the same thing. You know, actually the Puritan founders of Merit. They had paid off like massively. It had some negative consequences or side effects, but It was a good investment.

1:20:02It was a very good venture bet. The original colonists, the original Puritan colonists, the Flimuth Rock, they actually spent 20 years actually exiled and the Netherlands, actually essentially raising venture capital, raising money to be able to buy land and come to the US and create new colonies. And so, and then we're also describing the process of what are called A &R people at record labels who pick new music. We're also describing book publishers, who pick new novelists. We're also describing movie studio executives who decide what moves get made. And so, you know, basically what Tyler says, I think is basically like anytime you have a part of the economy in which you have this entrepreneur going on a high risk, high return endeavor where it is far from clear what's going to work and there are many more aspirants to do that than there is money to fund them.

1:20:46And it's this like multifaceted, you know, kind of skill set that's required to do it. And, you know, and then by the way, funding them to Ben's point, you're not just funding them like you have to then actually work with them to help them actually execute the entire project. like that's art, like that's not science, that's art. Like we would like it to be science, but like it's art. And by the way, how do we know that it's art and science? Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation. Right? Like so the great VCs have a success record of getting, I don't know, two out of ten or something of the great companies of the decade.

1:21:22Right? And so like if like, and that was true of all these guys, all the legends that I mentioned earlier. And so, if it was a science, you could eventually have somebody who just like dials and then gets eight out of 10, but in the real world, it's not like that. You know, it's just, you're in the fluke business. And so there's this, and there's an intangibility to it. There's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology. By the way, a lot of it is psychological analysis, like who are these people? How do they react under pressure? How do you keep them from falling apart? How do you keep them going crazy?

1:21:52How do you keep from going crazy yourself? You know, you end up being a psychologist half the time. And so like it is possible. I don't want to be definitive. But like it's possible that that is quite literally timeless. And when, you know, when the AI is doing everything else, like that may be one of the last remaining fields that the people are still doing. Yeah, ever since I co -founded firm in 2016, I'm sure before that too, people were talking about how software was going to disrupt venture completely. And whether it was crypto or whether it was AI or something else. Well, the asset class has changed in a bunch of the ways that we described.

1:22:22It hasn't been sort of fundamentally disrupted in the same way that we think about disruptive innovation or the Clayton Christians in term perhaps as in other industries. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it could, but again, you know, again, like it could, but you know, we could be doing a podcast and you know next year and be like, oh, oh, health. Well, this is great to get some of the history of the firm in the future episodes. We'll talk about where we're going among other topics that Ben and Mark show is back. Mark Ben, thanks so much. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Welcome. Welcome, Eric. Yeah. Welcome, Eric.