20VC: a16z Raises $10BN in New Funds | Mercor Raises $350M at a $10BN Valuation | OpenAI Restructuring: Who Wins and Who Loses | Why IRR is a BS Metric and Three Ways to Win in VC Today

24:04That is a lot more carry. That is a lot nicer offices, which founders do get wowed by. Like it or not, they get wowed by it. That is a lot more events to host where you can have serendipity. There are a lot more things, I think, that scale and AUM buys that do increase your time. One of my favorite expressions is from the Russian Red Army, which is quantity has a quality all its own. In other words, when you want to take Berlin, at some point what you do is you just get 2 million people willing to die and you march them forward, right? And, you know, Andreessen Hurts is the Red Army of the venture industry.

24:37Now they've got the$10 billion and they're going to march it forward. But it's not, of course, it's$10 billion. It's$10 billion of 30 % carry and$10 billion of 2 % fees and$10 billion of all this. but when you break apart the funds i really don't think sequoia having 200 million is that different than what harry has and i don't think a one and a half billion for their ai app funds i think it's only twice as scale so i just don't think like air cover it's an excuse you have to work twice as hard as they do that sounds right you should have to work about twice as hard but it's not as it's not really 10 million and a billion right from a when you break the funds up right i agree with that, you do have to work twice as hard.

25:15As a comment, the definition of a good strategy is if you have a strategy that doesn't allow you to have to work that hard, right? And therefore, by definition, having 10 billion is a good strategy. I mean, I think the interesting thing, and we said this before, but my bigger heart is the only people for whom this might be a net negative is the LP investors. And we don't know that yet. Maybe it'll be a wildly successful strategy, in which case it will run the table. Or maybe it'll be modestly successful, in which case in five or seven years, the LPs will start going, hey, you know that late stage fund?

25:45It gives me a good return, but it's 12, 13 percent. And maybe I can get that in the markets now that there's more IPOs. Maybe we should just throttle back our allocation. We love the early stage stuff, some version of that. But until something like that happens, for every other player in the market, having 10 billion is better than not having 10 billion. So that's what the game is. I do also think for everyone listening, they don't often understand the stapling that is required to be in these funds, which is if you're an LP and you want to be in the early stage fund, you will often, very often with top tier brands, have to put in two times that into another fund to get that$1 in the other.

26:19And you don't get your pick of which fund. Very often you have to be across all of them. Yes. And when you see that, you realize that intuitively, leaders of venture firms understand the concept of bundling at their core, right? Bundling and rent extraction is fully understood. Jason, you said about this company, McCore, I think it was. I think it might be a 20 VC company, to be fair. But they announced yesterday they've raised$350 million at a$10 billion valuation led by the person who led their last round at$2 billion only eight months ago, which is Felicis. Now, this company has gone to 500 million in revenue faster than anyone else I believe in history.

27:02I think it was 17 months. Also, again, this is not biased. I hate freaking biased shows. I sometimes listen to them. A lot of people say it's not real revenue. It's GMV. I wanted to hear, how did you guys feel about this round? The speed of revenue acceleration, if it's real revenue? I want your thoughts. I mean, it is quote unquote real revenue. They ship things, they get paid. Gap requires you to book it as revenue, maybe step back and give people some context. What they do is they provide humans with specialist knowledge, and their customers are the large foundation model companies. And what they do is they bring this human talent to bear to help the foundation model companies train the models by providing human feedback.

27:46People would have heard RLHF, reinforcement learning through human feedback. These are the humans that do that. So if I'm open AI and I want to, quote, teach my latest model how to do advanced math. What I need is a whole bunch of doctorates and PhDs who understand math that are available to post questions to the model, judge model questions, give feedback on which answer is correct, which answer is not. So by giving this human feedback, I think of it as you pound the model into submission where it eventually says, OK, I've learned this shit by adjusting the weights. That's what's going on here, right?

28:21We think of this all as happening in NVIDIA GPU chips. There's an astonishing amount of human training that is required to make these models work. So that's kind of the market these guys are playing into, right? Scale AI, which was partially acquired by Meta, is in the same board market. These guys have done, Merkur has done an amazing job because five years ago, as Jason said, I love the expression, five years ago, we were labeling cats, right? And you had people often overseas charged with labeling cats and not getting a lot of money. I think Merkur realized that the market today is not labeling cats.

28:54It's, in fact, answering complex physics questions, math questions, bio questions, because the models know how to label cats now. And what they need to do is the outer edges of human knowledge. So it's a very different set of humans that you need. And Merkur did an amazing job of assembling all these kind of high-end folks and making that product available to the model companies to do it. That's kind of what they do. And in that context, the growth quote isn't surprising. Because if you think about it, these model companies have grown faster than any company in human history. They're spending$300,$400 billion on compute.

29:27They're probably spending$3,$4 billion on RLHF. And they were spending zero or five years ago. It's an explosive growth market. So, you know, it didn't happen in a vacuum. This happened because our customers want their stuff. I actually obviously spent quite a lot of time in the market, which will surprise you already to hear that I've been thinking about markets more deeply. But it all started with, like, talent acquisition. If you got the talent and could provide it, fantastic, we'll pay you. That's pillar one. Pillar two is get the talent number one. Now we want data acquisition, which is you provide it to us, not we extract it, you provide it to us, and then you measure the quality of it too.

30:03That's the second pillar. And now we're adding the third pillar, which is the implementation layer, which is we now expect you to not only do those first two, but we expect you to implement it efficiently and make sure our models get off the ground more effectively. And with that, you also see increased pricing and the willingness to spend much, much more from the model providers. The other thing I will say is you have concentration of buyer unlike any other industry. Two buyers are 50 % plus of every one of these labeling providers' revenue. So there is real revenue concentration there. It's high-quality customers, but you do have that dynamic as well.

30:39Agreed. And that was well put because it makes it an interesting question from an investing perspective. perspective on the one hand there's nothing better than a customer who's well-funded we just agreed they're well-funded who's got an urgent and compelling need to get a bunch of stuff done that you can help them with and wants you to grow with them and what you're saying is you're exactly right open ai and all these people five years ago they had simple requests the more the complexity goes up the more you meet that complexity as a vendor and merker has done that in spades the more revenue going to give you so they're going to be shoveling money because you're solving their problems they got a lot of shit to be solving.

31:11They don't need to be thinking about this. Mr. Merker, if you can make this go away and get me, you know, 500 doctors and this data and this answer and integrate it to our system, I will pay you money because money I have in spades, time I don't got. For sure. But I've got to imagine you guys, and especially Harry would know better than me. I don't think it's stress. It may not be stress-free. I have a portfolio company that was doing a vaguely similar attached to a large AI business model where the contract was growing to eight figures. That renewal was stressful AF. Once you get to eight figures, okay, I know these guys have more money and time than engineers, but there's a point where you turn around and you say, maybe we should do a little, you know, open eyes building its own chips.

31:53I'm not saying this happened at Mercur or scale. I'm just saying Harry's point of having to radically go up the value chain is both revenue, but more stress because I don't think anyone's just shoveling money at DataDog and Merkur without even thinking about the margins. Jason, I totally agree. And that's what makes your venture fun and challenging is that you look at the checklist and you have one enormous positive, great big honking market growing like a weed, you're exploding. And then you got two negatives. The first is your margin profile is not amazing because the gross revenue is 500 million, but you give 70 % of it to the doctors and the mathematicians who are doing whatever it is, some percentage, I'm not going to speculate.

32:30And then the second fact you have against you is massive customer concentration. And at some point, they're going to say, I'm giving you$200 billion, which means you're making 30 % on that$60 million. Hell, maybe you do it for$40. You prefer to be open AI and have 800 million customers than to be Merkur and have two. When you look at those positives and negative, what you say to yourself is, this is fundamentally a bet that the AI CapEx train will keep running for two or three or four more years. If the AI CapEx train slows down and like, is that enough? is two to three years enough to justify 10 billion?

33:02You're right, Jason. At least three to five years. In other words, that it's a permanent new thing at growth because OpenAI is not going to focus on getting efficient until it's dealt with hyper-growth. So as long as it's not getting efficient, you probably can lean in. If it slows down, then the positives, which is the growth rate, goes away, and then all the negatives come back to bite you. So if you were to say to a public or a hedge fund guy, find me a bet that had the maximum exposure to hyper AI CapEx growth. This would be right up there with NVIDIA as a, yeah, I like this risk, man. If you're doing this at 10 billion, what are you underwriting it to?

33:37What does that math look like? I mean, as we're going to discuss later, you should be writing anything to a 3x. So you've got to be 30 billion to make it worth you wild. I'm just doing the math in my head. Even at 5x revenues, my God, that's 6 billion. You're underwriting a lot of training data. You know, that's the sobering thing. In the short term, though, in the short term, if they're at$500 million at$10 billion, growing at an unprecedented rate, we're all ignoring gross margins in 2025, 20. It's only 20 times revenue. It doesn't seem, this is where actually we're seeing revenue compression, right?

34:10Which we talked about with Cliff and others. He doesn't like the revenue compression at Canva, right? Where this 20X ARR, was your last deal lower than that, Harry and Rory? Higher or lower than 20X ARR the last deal you did? It was higher. And Jason, you're exactly right. I actually said something else that was really insightful. Your comment is there's two modes of thinking about an investment. And I think it's really insightful, Jason. There's one more that says, pencil me out the next five years. How do I think end state? What market do I have? And therefore, what return are you underwriting?

34:40And I think if you assume five times revenue and you want to be at 3x, you're underwriting 30 billion, which means 6 billion in trading revenue, which makes a man pause. On the other hand, you can say it's growing 5x, and if the multiple just stays context and it grows 5x for another year, I'll be 5x up. In fact, that's just what happened on the last round. It was at 2 billion, I don't know, at 100 million, and now it's at 10 billion at 500 million. The near-end revenue traction is saying to everyone, as long as this keeps happening, you can grow it quickly. Because watch, you look back now, because we're talking about, is it worth 10 billion?

35:15But go back, give them credit. You now look at the$2 billion that somebody paid six, seven months ago, and you're like, oh my God, that seems cheap, because you're like,$500 million already. So when high growth happens, it's tempting, and it often pays to lean into that growth. And yeah, you very quickly, just like I think the Antropic round at$67 billion earlier this year, now looks dirt cheap. If the hyper growth comes at the size of growth we're dealing with now, which is not, to your point, Jason, trouble, trouble, double, double. I don't know what the is this, but fipple, fipple, deco, deco?

35:48I don't know, right? If you grow 5 or 7x, you can grow into almost anything. So this whole thing, top to bottom, is one big-ass bet on AI CapEx hypergrowth. And as long as it keeps happening, I don't want to quote Chuck Prince, but we all know the quote. No, we don't. Oh, you're young then, Harry. Chuck Prince famously said in 2007 at Citigroup, some version of, as long as the band keeps playing, then you got to stay on the floor and keep dancing. And it turns out you should have sat down and not danced anymore, obviously, given the way 2008 happened. But in other words, it's the quote of when things are working, everyone just tends to lean in.

36:25Well, when things are working, everyone just tends to lean in, baby. Ramp is a fundraising machine. They raise every few months. Reports that they're raising a new round at a$30 billion valuation, reportedly. What are they doing with all the money? Do they need it? And is this a game of customer acquisition and brand? Do we just do rounds now to continuously stay relevant to Jason's point? We talked about this a few weeks ago on the last raise, and I have nothing to say that I feel like I just had these comments. It does appear to be a combination of insane demand for the stock, an ability to use that to create this aura of inevitability.

37:04And to some extent, as I remind you, this is more than most companies. is this is one where constant growth requires lots of capital because you're in a capital advancing business. So you probably have every dollar you add of revenue takes$5 of capital because you've got to finance purchases because you're effectively recreating Amex. So it may well be, I haven't seen the numbers, that there's a larger demand for capital here than the average deal. I'm sure they can leverage some of that. But if you're going to a billion dollars, you probably have a$5 billion balance sheet. I remember doing the math at one point in time.

37:37So if someone's lending you$4 billion of that, they're probably going to want a$1 billion equity cushion. To me, going from$23 billion to$30 billion, I don't even consider it an up round. It's not enough. Let's say I was a seed investor. I've probably had a token of dilution. So let's imagine I'm down to 2%, which would be great. I have a$400 million position at the last round, right? Now it's worth$480 million with dilution after this next round. I mean, it's a lot, but it's not doubling my position like a classic round is. these little rounds, 22, 25, 30, and then maybe not at ramp, but with a lot of AI companies, a lot of dilution or a lot of others, right?

38:14You could see 10 % annual dilution in these companies or more. You might go from 22 to 30 and have the same price per share. It's possible, right? I just don't really care about these micro step-ups that look great. You're like 30 billion. Well, if the last round was at 10, impressive, right? If the last round's at three, like Mercur, very impressive. Here I'm like, meh. That's cute, but I'm pushing back just a little. Another spin on what you're saying is, with the exception of the new AI companies, that probably is the kind of IRR you should expect to get in a mature, grown private company. One of my insights over the last, I mean, sometimes I just realize the obvious, is that there's really early and late stage venture.

38:55And then there's venture for companies that already could comfortably be public. And I think we need a different word for that. It's not even late stage. It's private as public. Ramp could just as easily be a mid-cap stock at this point in time, public, right? And you don't expect mid-cap stocks to gap up 3x in a year. You expect the overall market will go up by 11. The best companies grow 30%, 40 % year on year. So I look at this and I go, there's no reason to assume that the return to the stock should be different just because it's held in a different corporate structure. The company is the company independent of its public or private.

39:29So I think, and the reason I mention such pedantic lent is I think as you think about these super late growth fund things, the return they will realistically get absent the AI lift is some version of what was the small cap, high growth, public market return. So for those guys, because you're going in, Jason, correctly, with your venture a rule of thumb. And even on a late, let's call it a late stage company, a company doing 50 million, going 100 million, it should be that 2, 3x step up, financing event to financing event. When you're doing a billion dollars, you're near profitable, you should be public, you're going to see this kind of step, these much smaller percentage step ups, because you really are a different asset class.

40:11You're public stocks hiding in private, which is why the Stripes most recent change was from 91 to 110. It's the same kind of thing. But you just said we were still underwriting. Harry asked you what we're underwriting to. You said at least 3X. So if I'm going to write a 3X and I did the last round at ramp at 23, meh, like it's not really getting me to my 3X. No, listen, you are, dare I say it, confusing on your pronouns. You said we're underwriting or you're underwriting to a 3X. I'm trying to underwrite to a 3X. If you're running money doing companies at 30 billion prey, you're probably not on writing to an overall 3x on your phone.

40:46Now, you might get the most iconic company of its generation, OpenAI will give you a 10x, but I don't think you are on the writing to a 3x when you're doing ultra late stage billion dollar revenue runway,$30 billion valuations. You're definitely not on the writing to a 30 % IRR. So this is what you get. Again, going back to there's no reason to assume that just because the companies are still private versus public, that you should get more return than you would have gotten if they're public. I'm with you. My only meta point is, and Harry's made this, Harry's made this in the early days, like the massive dilution at Anthropic and others, right?

41:22I'm just less excited. I found that things that move the needle for my little portfolio, some of these headline rounds don't always do it. Like it's not always that simple, right? It could be years have gone by. There could be a massive increases to the round, massive dilution. You might have forgotten that the last round was was pretty high too back in 2021 like you might even be flatter down it looks great but like i just they're not always as sexy for the irr or the markup as you might expect that's all i i totally agree that's because you're busy trying to turn you know 10 million into 100 million or 200 million but there's someone else out there who is very happy to turn a billion into two billion very happy indeed and it's going to make more money than you just to make it even sadder dude Way more money.

42:06And trying to keep your IR above 40 % is not easy. Later in life of the fund, it gets really hard, right? Great. And for those guys, a different game. So yeah, the aha is the two biggest changes of the last three to five years have been the advent of what's happening in AI and the transformation of the late stage and IPO marketplace to this ultra, ultra late stage where companies are way beyond the IPO threshold and still private. Those are the big two changes in the game. I completely agree. And on the second, I go back to actually Jason's point on the modest size of the Andreessen funds. Because when you take the$6 billion growth fund, minus fees, you're at 4.8.

42:47You've got$2 ,200 million checks. It's not that much. It actually feels very reasonable in terms of size. To their credit in that chart that went around, they did do a good job of recycling. They did an excellent job of recycling. And recycling is good. So we can assume they get the full six out, but fair point. It's not a lot of checks. David George is very, very good. I'm always impressed by him. I want to move to spray and pray. There's different models of venture. You can be concentrated or you can be spray and pray. Spray and pray, for those that don't know, is obviously having a broadly diversified portfolio, investing in lots of different companies rather than few with more money.

43:23There's always a question of does spray and pray work? There was some data released by Carter. What did the data say? And how do we think about spray and pray today? I disagree. I read the data. I also read, Jason, the blog post on Sastr. I think your characterization of spray and pray is wrong, to be very direct. I think the data was awesome. Let's stop back with the comment. The Carter data was awesome and very pleasing. What I told people for listeners is they looked at all 547 2018 Series B investments, and then they did a histogram of where they come out in less than a 1x, 1 to a 2x. Oh, that was Series B.

44:02So 547, and then 18 % of them greater than a 5X, about 10 % of them greater than a 10X. And one deal, FIGMAT, we turned 100X. That's a pretty sizable chunk of information, what's it telling you? I found it really interesting because, in fact, we typically do A's and B's. And I was very happy, actually, by the way. It was exactly what the distribution for our fund model, we think, has to be, which is 30%. They were actually 35. We would have said 30, less than 1X. We do wider buckets. 1 to 5X, 50%. They broke that into two buckets and greater than a 5x, 20%. So the distributions on 547 deals match pretty much what we're saying, right?

44:40So the interesting thing is if you hit those three buckets correctly, the blended return, I know it from our fund model, is 3.7x growth, 3x net to the LP, right? So if you look at that business, if you look at all those things and you get enough slots in the buckets, right? In each of the buckets, the good buckets, the 5x bucket and the 10x bucket, you end up with a 3x net to the LP. The first piece of good news is, if you do it right, the return was available to you. The interesting thing is, to your point, is the right strategy spray and pay? That's why I was jumping back on it. I don't think that's what it said.

45:13I mean, I think it says you got to pick very carefully because obviously, if you do a lot of deals, but I mean, looking at the same data, Jason picked on the negative, which is two-thirds of all deals are less than a 2x, which means they just don't help. Correct, Jason? That was the point you met in the blog. Yes. And what it says is picking is so important. But did it say that? I know your bug didn't set up, but I'm saying I think the data says that. But here's the thing. First of all, you're right. I mean, to me, the data was shocking to someone that is a concentrated investor, because this is scary risk for me.

45:45But it did blend out to 3x net. Plenty good, right? So you're right. But at Series B, everyone thinks they're a great picker, don't they? This isn't pre-seed. Everyone's a great picker at Series B, right? Does everyone have the same logarithmic distribution across these deals? No, they probably don't. I'd say three things. Everyone thinks they're a great picker. Not everyone is a great picker. But the third sentence is you have to be a great picker to win. There's two strategies. You can face with this opportunity set of 547 Series Bs in one year, right? It's a very clear data point, right? If you're not a good picker, you will end up with more.

46:24Remember, to Jason's, Jason's did a different set of buckets, but his buckets are more scary. He said two-thirds of all these deals are less than 2x. And that's on average. If you skew instead of 66%, if you skew 75%, 80 % in that less than 2x bucket, your math doesn't work. And it's not that hard to be that bad because on average, it's 66 % is my point. It requires a fair amount of discipline and picking to pull this off. I don't think the spray and pay strategy would work here. It might work at seed. I'm not as familiar with seed. But here, the cost of spraying just gets too high. The only way it does, and I can see Harry doing his I don't agree face, is I think there's actually three approaches.

47:02There's picking, there's spraying, and then the third one, which is someone big like Andreessen can do, which is optioning. You can spray if you're just doing options. But if you spray and that's the only way you make your money, the probability of being wrong is just too high. So that's exactly what I was going to say, which is actually in reference to an amazing graph that was released a month or so ago about seed bets by multi-stage firms and Andreessen did 72 seed bets compared to score in number two at 27 and exactly to your point there Rory you said you can't win without being a great picker I'm not saying Andreessen I'm not great pickers I'm not saying anything against them but you can if you have 72 option bets agreed there are three strategies there's spraying picking and optioning and because because the beauty about when you can option you can afford to spray more.

47:49Optioning allows you to spray more, right? You're exactly right. No, I think it's super clear at every stage. And again, it goes back to structurally. I mean, once upon a time, you thought seed was all about option value and anything beyond that wasn't. Because we're dealing with gargantuan sums of money, it is now plausible that for some people, A's and B's are partially options. And really, if you're going to deploy 200 million in the growth round, you don't want to be totally slipshod at the A and the B, but you can think of it as more option value, right? And that's absolutely a superpower that a wall of money gives you.

48:23I can't afford to do that because most of my money goes in on my initial round. At most, 50%, 60 % comes in follow-ons. I can't afford to be wrong on two-thirds of my money to be right on one-third. That's not going to make me a dollar. Does the ever-expanding outcome scenarios that we're seeing today, before$30 billion was an insane valuation for a company, now we're kind of like, meh, with ramp 10 billion with macaw and we're not blown away by the outcome sizes are getting so much bigger does that not favor a spray strategy because all that you need to do if you're early is just get into the winners who cares not who cares but 500k or 2 million it doesn't matter spray the 500ks because the only thing that matters is macaw and ramp and everyone are in yours no because what you're doing is you're taking a plausible theory and extrapolate and you know and extrapolate it to the point where it no longer holds true.

49:19You can spray as much as your bankroll will allow you. The more bankroll you have to build up option value, well, step back. You could be talking about two things, Harry, and you've got to break them apart. Are you saying simply spray because I'm not going to make my money on follow-ons, but it's the seed argument. I have to be in the very best deal, and I have to cover wide versus concentrated to do that. That's one thread. And then the separate thread would be how much easier is the is the spray constraint if I also have option value at the back end? And that's easier. There's no doubt. Let's agree the following.

49:51The more option value you have at the back end because you have a 10 trillion dollar fund, the easier it is to spray because you can amortize the cost of the losses over the one winner. Provided you get to stick 500 billion in the winner, the rest is noise. But if you're a seed fund and you're David Tisch today, and he won't mind me calling him out, he explicitly does respectfully spray and pray. He does 50 plus companies plus plus in a portfolio with low ownership. But my word, he is in some of the biggest companies, including LAMP, consistently. Again, but going back to the Carter data, what I like about Carter is it's actual data, not words.

50:28There were 547 Series Bs in 2018. I'm going to guess graduation rate, probably that implies 800 A's. That probably implies 1 ,600 seeds. So even what you are pejoratively calling, quote unquote, spray and pray, is doing 50 deals out of 1 ,600. There's still a huge element of picking involved in that. The only people on the planet who have a structural business where they can de-emphasize picking because they can write checks, option checks at scale is Y Combinator because they have a structured advantage in terms of their economics. They are the only people who've built a mass production seed business.

51:07But for everyone else, if you're trying to pick even 50 and there's 1 ,600 places, and we know that at the B, only 500 of them get to the B, there are 1 ,100 places to put that money that doesn't work out. You can always say, it'll always be true that if you pick the single largest outlier in any vintage, like if one of those deals was Figma where the B made 100, So probably the A made, I can tell about 200. And the C, probably 400 or 500. I don't know, right? Of that order, the numbers are available, 300, right? Even if it's 300, if you did an index and did every deal, you made a 300x and you did all 1 ,600 deals equally, it's only a 0.2 return.

51:47Do you understand me? If you put a dollar into everything, your Figma check doesn't, quote unquote, return the fund if you did the whole industry. Now, maybe an open AI would. Maybe there is one deal so big that it would literally return the vintage such that if you just bought the entire vintage, you're good. That probably happens maybe once every decade or two. Most of the time, even at the seed stage, you can't just say it's praying, is my point. There's an element of picking up and down the stack. I get that. I mean, it's funny. The Jason headline, only one in three deals double investors' money per car to deal.

52:23It's so sobering. It's like it makes you remember how much of this business is disappointment. You remember your deals. You remember your 10Xs and your 15Xs and your 20Xs. And you just forget. You just. And I think actually the best investors. Do you become numb to it, Rory? I don't. I get all sad. I'm a bit lame. I had a shit outcome this morning and I'm really upset by it. Yeah, you get vested. I had the worst, which is a company gets bought by another company and you get stock at some insanely high price. I mean, it's just the worst. That's not the worst. No, the worst, let me do it. The worst is you're on the board, you try and sell the company, it doesn't close.

53:05You're on the hook for shutdown costs and you have to wire 300 or 400 grand just to pay severance costs, which you should do as a board member and you're probably legally obliged to do and then write that money off straight away because you waited too long. That's the worst. Wow, I thought my day was bad. That's perspective for you, kids. That's why I just do everything on a safe. I have no rights, no visibility, no financial statements, no understanding of anything. But if it goes south, I could just ghost them. Are you serious though, Jason? What? No. About just doing everything on a safe? No, but the safe does have some comforts.

53:42I do like the post money cap as a seed investor. I don't have to worry about the pool or other things. And I like the fact that it's a medium commitment. I don't always love being the only guy in the cap table, the only director. The safe is like, listen, I'm only sort of committing, guys. Good luck to you. If it goes great, I'll invest some more. If it doesn't, I'll write cheery responses to your monthly updates. But you didn't ask me to get married and commit, so I'm not committed. You think I'm joking, but the stuff Rory talks about is awful, right? This end-of-life stuff or a decade of a struggling company where you're on the board.

54:18I'll take the safe over that because the commitment is low. back. If you're going to raise on in Saturday on a safe, she can't expect too much. Speaking of commitment and marriage, I'm really intrigued to hear your thoughts on this one, Jason, because you've said like, oh, I encourage founders to sell. I encourage founders to sell when the offer comes in. So there's no regrets. So there's no regrets. Synthesia, one of the hottest, fastest growing AI companies, in out 150 million in ARR, reportedly turned down a$3 billion offer from Adobe to be acquired and they're going to be raising a new round at well north of three billion following this.

54:54Jason, if you were on the board, would you have told them sell for three billion? Yeah, I would have told them to sell. Yes. And I'm not saying it's the right decision, but one, he's been at it for a while. Like Synthesia is one of these stories like Replit and Vercel that like blew up with AI, but it's a journey, right? And there's competition and it's a while. And I would tell him to take it unless you're a hundred percent sure you're going to build a$20 billion public company,$10 billion public company. And if you are, do it. But I like to stress the test, right? So I'm not saying that's the right thing to do, but I want to be the guy that gives that advice.

55:2810 or 20, because that's two different outcomes. Even 10 is not really worth it for a founder. It is worth it for the VCs. Excel gets another play, right? Here's the issue, right? Three to 10 for Excel, huge difference, right? So let's say they own 15 % out of a what? $450 million fund? Who knows? Let's make it up, right? So instead of a 1x fund returner, it could be a 2 or 3x. You make that bet as a VC all day long, right? For the founder, let's say he owns 10%. What the hell is the difference? There's no difference. We've had billionaires on ours. You've had billionaires, Harry. I don't think Jeff Lawson would be living a better life with half the money or twice the money.

56:01It's the same dude. So there is a weird disconnect between 3 and 10 here for VCs versus founders, because 1x your fund and 3x, that's a lot more carry. So I would say with an Excel and Index, you're absolutely right. They'll absolutely take the risk for another turn because they have the luxury of doing so they don't need to return cash to lps in the same way that maybe other managers do if you are not a tier one gp though you will want to provide dpi to your investors i don't believe that i don't believe that i don't see it i've asked my lps i've asked a few others if you're a strong manager okay if you have a track record and their goal is not a 3x seed fund but if they really want 5x or north out of you they get the game is you got to keep playing another card no matter what they say i i've asked my lp and i I guess it's a small set.

56:43Do you want more money back? Right. Even ask my most conservative LP, like a university endowment that is small, right? That has stress. I asked, well, would you want your money back? I mean, with the gain, they're like, no, we're just telling you we're really worried about it. Like we really want DPI, but we don't want it. We want you to play another card. So I think if you tell them I seeded into Synthasia and we've got a chance to 3X it, they're going to tell you to go for it. We're going to trust the fund manager's discretion here. I just don't know that there's this massive DPI pressure if you have a hot hand.

57:12I think there's DPI pressure if you have a mediocre hand, in which case, so what? Because it's not enough DPI. What the hell's the... This is the other thing on X. What's the hell's the point of returning 0.2 % of 20 % of your fund? Hooray, I got an exit today. I returned 21 % of my fund. Like, that ain't the full job, friends. So the first question really should be, it's actually what Jason said, is, Victor, you know, I admire Synthesia enormously as a company. We tried to contact them. They didn't get back to me. They got the deal done. I'm so disappointed. We have another investment in the space.

57:41I love the space. I admire Syntesia a ton. And the first question is, how do you feel about the business? And you threw out a statistic there. They said they were at$100 million in ARR when they took the Adobe money in April. If they really have gone from$100 to$150 in less than six months, then I can make this conversation really quick. There's no way they should sell because that thing's exploding. It's a good point. And it probably is. That probably, that sounds, I don't think that's Sony baloney. That sounds right to me. Even if not, even if they got, you know, doubling kind of growth, it just feels like a good category.

58:12That's the reason we made it on an investment space. We like the category. We like, you know, I think there's runway there for that kind of human interface to compute. I always tell the CEO, now would be a really good time for you, A, to look into your own heart and see how you feel. And if there's something about the business that's really worrying you and you haven't told us, now would be a good time to share. And sometimes stuff comes out, right? The other reason I tell CEOs this, I would tell Victor to sell at$3 billion. And it's okay if he says no. I would do it because I wanted to be the guy.

58:42Even if it wasn't in my direct interest as a gambler, I want to be the guy that has that conversation with him. There's another thing that's under-discussed, and I've had this conversation twice with founders in the last 12 to 18 months in similar situations, is are you really an IPO guy? There was one where I love everything about this company. I love the founders. I love everything. There's nothing negative. And I told them to take the offer, even though I didn't want them to as an investor. I told them to take the offer because they said, are you sure you're such a great set of founders? But I don't know if today I see you living the what these public companies CEO life.

59:13Like, I just don't see it. The way you have to do it, the constraints, the stress. I just don't think that's what you want to do. So I think you should take the deal because I don't know if it's Synthesia or Synthesia Prime. You're going to get another offer like this before the IPO. That's the thing. You have to assume it's IPO or bust. Then you're going to bring in an outside CEO or you're going to, it's just a mess. So that's the question I have. Do you, can you really run a, do you really want to run a public company for real? That's an excellent question, Jason. Genuinely, that is really an excellent question.

59:42Cause you're right at 3 billion, there's not going to be a ton of people coming into view offering five. You either got to become cashflow positive and settle down and just become the Collison brothers and compound private forever to the universal befellement, or you got to go public. And the fact, by the way, that it is perceived by so many CEOs as a pain in the butt is, in my view, the thing about being public that has to change. Because what you're doing is you're allowing this thing to get in the way of people's entrepreneurial ambitions. I think you're right that it's a pain, and I think it's a shame that it's a pain, and I hope it changes.

1:00:14I mean, I was at this Dreamforce Benioff dinner. It was great. And I saw maybe 10 public company B2B CEOs that we know that have all been on Harry's show. And Rory's invested in some of them. And it was great, and it was fun. I got some hugs. Believe it or not, I don't give the hugs, but I like to get them. But man, the stress on those guys, you could just smell it out of the pores, you know, the stress and the weight of being a public. It's so heavy today. We could see it when we'd had Jeff Lawson on and Cliff didn't have any of it at Canva. He didn't have any of the weight. It's crushing. I have Mike Cannon Brooks on the show from Atlassian.

1:00:47Yeah. Some crushing weight there too. I saw it. Some crushing weight I saw on that one, right? You saw it, right? The weight of being the unreasonable man. His co-founder calls him the unreasonable man, the guy who wills things into existence and the weight of that you could see on his face. And when I look at the ramp and the Mercura and the stripes, like these are epic companies, right? But I don't see that weight yet. I'm not saying it's not, it's the hardest job in the world. Don't get me wrong. Right. But I don't see the deep crow's feet and like, you know, Aaron Levy going from, from going gray at 28 or whatever.

1:01:18I just don't see that level of anvil level, wily coyote weight on their heads yet. That'll go to something about Anduril and capital efficiency. Rory, I just have to ask you, you said there about like, hey, we tried to get in contact with Synthesia, they didn't get in touch. I've learned over time, if you want to be in Anduril, the next best thing is just to pay the higher price for Anduril, not to try and be in the next one. You said you've got another play in the space why not just be in synthesia and do you not think this market takes the way most markets do in terms of composition and the winner accrues the most value i do i think we're it's a broad way we have a very different product it's kind of real-time interactivity versus um asynchronous avatar so there's a big difference in terms of the interactions company called tavis so basically instead of pre-recording an avatar saying something i have an hour of time you actually have real-time interactivity with the avatar.

1:02:12At a high level, it's the same conceptual trend, but I agree. We looked at a Sintesa wannabe at the time. I'm not going to mention the name, and we decided Sintesa is one. You're not in the business of doing modest number twos. Agreed. You're playing the broad trend in a related but different market. I agree. You never want to do the number one wouldn't have me. I couldn't get into them, or they just raised a round. You are to pay up for the later round. I made that mistake in 2013. I won't mention the two companies, but we had missed the rounds that were the typical scale round for company A.

1:02:42We actually had a chance with a lot of networking and to do a very late stage round in company A, or we could do a more normal scale round in company B in exactly the same market, the two most head-to-head companies I've ever done. We did B. We got a 2X. We didn't do A. We left a 15X on the table. Literally, every time we discussed this in the off-site, One of my partners, I love them dearly. The canonical example has become that decision. And I'm like, am I going to hear about this till I die, people? I know I got that one wrong, but they're right. They're right to mention it. That was a, you thunk through, exactly.

1:03:18You never want to do the way behind, exact same category, number two, if they're way behind. This is too hard. I remember the week I got that learning. I can tell you where exactly where I was when I took those two phone calls. Okay. We can do andural capital efficiency. We can do Amazon layoffs. We can do Amazon Cloud Wars or Oracle debt. You choose. I feel bad for Roomba, but you choose. You want to do Roomba? Kind of it, because this whole talk is about how everything's up and to the right. Poor Roomba gets an offer from Amazon to buy them for$1.7 billion, blocked by antitrust. They raised$200 million of debt to finance the gap, and now it's all spent and they're probably going to go bankrupt.

1:03:58This is why maybe take the Synthesia offer. owning maybe a half dozen Roombas over the years. It's a tough, it's a tough end to a founder journey, isn't it? Do you sue the government in that case? No, I think in the UK, it's called crown immune. It's hard. In the UK, you have crown immunity where literally governments are protected from incredibly dumb acts because of the government. I think over here, we have more rights, but still, and I'm winging it here now. And I can't remember that they actually, if the DOJ blocks something, an antitrust count, you can, you can take them to court and people, And those DOJ decisions have been overturned.

1:04:33I can't remember in this case, did they take it to court or did they just decide to fold? And if you decided to fold, then you probably can't sue because you had a statutory remedy and you chose not to take it. Again, zooming out for people, the story here is I Rumba had a deal to be sold to Amazon and the FTC led by Lena Kahn chose to block that deal because I think Benedict Evans said in his place, because of an insipid monopoly in the house vacuum cleaner marketplace. very tongue-in-cheek, right? It was an absurd decision at the time. It only got more absurd since because, unfortunately, the poor company, which is a consumer hardware business with all the gross margin profile that requires, struggled on a standalone basis, and you right now faces the risk of going bust.

1:05:16It's a horrible and unfair outcome for which the government and Lena Kahn and the FTC is entirely responsible based on an outdated, stupid, and foolish paper and a foolish belief about how things work. It's also another, I mean, there's the whole, how the antitrust killed the company. It's the edge of no politics rule, right? But not past it. It's also a reminder that like, when you go into the M &A offer, the Synthesia, sometimes you'll get, like the acquirer will pay a multiple that only sort of kind of makes sense, a revenue multiple that makes sense for them, but you couldn't get. And so, you know, when you get one of these deals, it's tragic, it died, but you got to take it.

1:05:53I don't know if you're Synthesia, you're looking at dylan and figma going god do i want to put myself in that potential 18 month waiting period by which time i'll be 400 million in revenue being acquired for 3 billion no exactly how you said it it's you think you're getting this great multiple of oh they're paying me 30 times revenue but the damn thing's going to close in 18 months by which time you might be down to 10 times and it's just not going to feel that much like i don't think wiz has closed yet i could be wrong I think it was early 20s. That's the crazy one that hasn't closed. It's crazy, right?

1:06:24If you think about it, everyone's like, yeah, you got a two and a half X in six months. No, you didn't. You got a two and a half X in two years, right? And this prolonged antitrust process really is kind of sand in the gears for a lot of these M &A decisions. And at the margin, probably pushes people to push up. Either A, push on, or B, in the case of the crazy deals, when the acquirer only wants the people, then they do the Silicon Valley aqua hire routine. But, you know, when you're buying the vacuum cleaner company, you want the freaking vacuums. That duration period, though, is also why I think it's our responsibility as early stage managers to be much more proactive in secondary markets because we get cash back way sooner.

1:07:02And the age old thing of a 4x fund over 17 years is the same as a 2.5x fund over 10. And duration matters and time matters. And IRR is king. It's not the only king. Because look, in this very show, Jason was going, oh, it's only a 30 % IRR ramp from the 22 billion to 30 billion. From an IRR perspective, that looks amazing. So I don't think IRR matters. I actually think, for the record, I think the correct formulation of the optimization function is the maximization of multiple subject to a constraint on a minimum IRR. Just to be a total geek here. Basically, you should know what your target IRR is.

1:07:39And let's just say it's 25%. Let's just say, right? You want to maximize the multiple, provided you don't dip below 25. That's actually what you're trying to do, right? So, for example, a 30 % IRR in one year isn't as good as a 25 % IRR for four years. But if you hold on too long and that 25 starts dipping to 19, 18, 17, then you've gone to a different place. That is the rule. Because in the end, you want the maximum amount of capital to invest. because you are held accountable at the investor level at the IRR basis because at some point they're looking at you, they're looking at the public markets and they're saying risk adjusted.

1:08:13I need me my 20%. So it is the constraint because it's what prevents money from coming down the spigot to you. But you're actually trying to maximize your multiple. So the shit is hitting the fan at Amazon before we do agree or disagree. 10 % largest layoffs in history, 10 % of white collar that is, falling behind in cloud wars from 50 % of cloud revenues in 2018 to 38 % today. Raymond James sees Amazon's AI cloud share falling to 7%. Then we had the outage, billions of damage. This was a bad fortnight. You know what, maybe it's not fair, but what I was thinking is contrast this with Sergey Brin coming back to Google, everything else happening.

1:08:54Maybe it was a tough time for your founder to leave and go to Miami. Maybe it seemed like a very stable time to do a transition, right? I mean, Jeff Bezos, long time as CEO, but maybe stepping down just before AI hit was suboptimal for Amazon. Yes, or maybe it was brilliant for Jeff because maybe - He's off the hook. Because you're implying in that, had he stayed, all these bad things wouldn't have happened. And it's plausible just given his world top two or three entrepreneurial achievement of the last three decades. But it's just worth pointing out what the two big problems they have are. The first problem is in their retail business, they overinvested for COVID, and now they're trying to replace people with robotics because the technology is there.

1:09:38And that's just something that had to be done. That's just more of the same. And in cloud, it's less that their core AWS business has folded up. It's like all the new compute, which is 10x and 20x larger in terms of demand for these customers is AI-related compute, and you've neither built something compelling standalone, nor have you partnered, except, to be fair, a little bit went on Tropic. You didn't make a meaningful partnership, and you haven't found a way to get some of that compute. But he had four years. Andrew Jassy took over in July 5th, 2021. Bezos checked out right at the peak of the last era, when products were frozen in time for a decade, when AWS was the same product for a year.

1:10:20So are most of the companies we invested in, all three of us in 2021. They were the same products as 2015. It was the great time to go to Miami because nothing was changing in the world. It was just stock prices were going up in revenue, but the products were the same. So why wouldn't you retire? There's not going to be any change. Punched out at the top. No, it gets an A++ for market timing. No, I think he gets an F. Oh God. If he sold his company, you get an A+. That's true. Yeah, like my last deal, sales loft, December 2021, you know, two and a half billion. That was the last deal of the era.

1:10:52You know, Kyle and team get an A plus for timing. This is not the same. I want to congratulate Kyle. Exactly. This is not. This is not the same. This is punching out of 2021 and not punching back in like Sergey. Cynical comment here. You're right. But when you've got a couple hundred billion dollars, my guess is you're not maximizing money. You're maxing psychic pain and joy. My guess is his psychic joy in the last three or four years doing what he's been doing has been significantly higher than the psychic pain that would have been involved in realizing you've never done a big acquisition in your life.

1:11:22You've got to do a huge corporate deal in AI to matter. And B, all those people you hired in 21 trying to do the right thing for COVID and expand, you all got to lay them off. I think Bezos would lay off half his company and in a fortnight it was the right thing. I don't think you even care. Well, he'll have that chance. I mean, Chegg had to bring in poor Dan Rosenwig out of retirement to rerun Chegg. After laying off 80 % of the company, they had to bring him back. They got to bring Bezos back. I think, and to be fair, one thing we shouldn't do here, and you saw a lot of it with Google too, is that you don't want to overcompensate.

1:11:54I mean, if you look at the two, if you kind of, there's a bunch of bad news in one day, and it is bad, right? But a lot going on in the last, right? But again, going back to your position in retail is broadly good. You know, I think you've become a little schlocky in terms of the shopping experience. But you have dominance because of your distribution. And you're doubling down on that. You're reinvesting in robotics. You're cutting costs. And Amazon wins in their retail business because they can deliver shit faster than anyone else on the planet pretty much anywhere. And you're doubling down on that.

1:12:23So that's like a win. You're right. On the compute business, on the AWS business, your problem is you're not relevant in the new world. So just knuckle down and figure that out. To be fair, of the three hyperscalers in the pre-AI world, if you look at it, Google was able to be relevant because they had their own model. Microsoft went and rented a model from OpenAI, and now the contract's nearly up. And they did it to make a lot of capital gain, but they didn't actually, in my view, really develop something compelling that they own from it. And you did nothing. So you lose. You need to do something.

1:12:55They got a set of problems on the AWS side. they have to get ai relevant without frankly doing what article i fear is doing which is taking on a whole bunch of subpar economic transactions they do have a good slog of anthropic not as much as google who i think owns 14 but i don't google own 14 of anthropic google yes google win yeah i mean again we should be promoting all these cop dev guys they're doing great unbelievable guys we're gonna do agree or disagree okay i got three statements rory you love this hide your excitement it's too much it's getting shit out of your ass i hate it no oh i know when the previous hour and a half wasn't i did i do research harry that's the difference between us oh dear it's a very fair point i can't disagree with this okay first one i would rather own brax at 13 than ramp at 30 ramp is at a billion in revenue brax is at 700 they're both around the break even to moving profitable phase.

1:13:53And you've given me all the information except the only information I need, which is what's the growth rate? Brex said 50%. They just said they're going 50 % now. I don't know what ramp is. This is where my cognitive bias, I'm going to go for Brex because it's lower. I can't help myself. I cannot help myself. I can't help myself. I don't have that much money to invest. If you gave me a great deal at 100, if you gave me ramp at 100 million and Brex at 30 or 40, I'm still going to do Brex probably. I could assign a homework assignment that would make this It's actually an interesting discussion.

1:14:22Watch. We have all the data points we need. We have the relative size, the valuation, and the growth rate of Brex at 50%. The correct question is, what growth rate should Ramp have such that you're indifferent between those two prices? If Ramp is at 100, you probably want Ramp. If Ramp is at 50, you definitely want Brex. It's actually the fundamental question I would argue in all of venture is, how much extra do you pay for how much extra growth? If you could buy ramp at whatever it is, 700 million, 50 % growing at 13, break even, and ramp 1 billion at 30 billion, there is an equilibrium growth rate that would make you indifferent between those two prices.

1:15:02And it's actually because it's actually a very fun exercise because it actually is the core problem you face over and over again in venture, which is how much extra do you pay for 70 % growth over 60, over 50? You pay almost two to two and a half times the revenue multiple. How much more growth would you want from that? This is your job on the show, Rory. You got to tell me. Yeah, no, it's hard to think and talk at the same time. Keep going. You weren't relying on us for analysis, were you, Rory? It's a shock hour. Yeah, I was. Keep going. Okay. Andreessen deserves the prize for best performing mega platform of the last 12 months.

1:15:37Discuss. They're going to get the prize no matter what I say. It doesn't matter. They're getting the 10 billion. That's prize enough for those guys. They'll be fine. I've been impressed by them. I've invested with them across the board. And I think one thing that people often say about Andreessen with absolute respect to them is they have so many people and that almost suggests that they can't all be good. They have so many people. So like, whatever. I have worked across the board with the different partners. They are as good as the partners at smaller firms with three to five partners. And they have been fantastic.

1:16:05I'm a big bull on Andreessen now where I was not before. I agree. They've been operationally excellent. I mean, what they did is my, I've been thinking about what they brought to the venture business from 2007, 8 on is they went into it solving the problem from the founder back with operational excellence. And on that, they've delivered in spades. They figured out what the founder wants. They've aggregated and delivered to him. The return profile of that has been excellent. I mean, I've seen the numbers. They've been excellent. And the question, that was the question. And they pulled it off. And that's why I think it's smart the way they have.

1:16:41I mean, obviously, they've just lost. I can never pronounce the German name, Andre, but very impressive. I've heard him speak. He's going to do his own thing. Yeah. I mean, super talented guy. I heard him speak. I'm very impressed. They have a constant share. And I was thinking even that's OK because they have a platform that transcends. They'll find other good people. They'll have they have the little pockets to play with. So they can, you know, they can give you your little infa world. They can give you Chris's crypto world. Everybody can have their thing. It's just like investment banks where, you know, you're the second co-head of North America.

1:17:08Like, everyone's got a great title, and Mark and Ben sit at the top, and life is good. It's a well-functioning scale machine. And the take 15 years ago was venture couldn't scale. And it's TBD how far it can scale, but they've scaled it far more than anyone else would have thought 10 years ago. When we sit and look at Series A, we don't sit and be frightened by Index or Excel or the big European players. We sit and be frightened of Andreessen coming into Europe. They're the ones who beat you. Okay, good to know. You want to be in the top two choices for a founder at your stage. That's when you win in venture.

1:17:42It'd be nice if you're in every stage and every deal, right? And I think Andreessen has elements of that today. A top two choice in so many stages from so many types of founders. YC has that in a sliver as do others. If you're not, man, it's just a different game than when you're a top two choice. It's just a different game. That's what you want. So I agree with you. There's only two people can be in the top two, right? Final one of all the could be public, but are private late stage companies. I would rather be a shareholder today in Anderil, the hottest at 50. Agree or disagree? And if disagree, which would you rather?

1:18:18I'd prefer to be an angel because I actually think the mission is great. Let's start with that. I give them huge credit for stepping up to defense in 2017 when a lot of people wouldn't. what they're doing is good for defense, good for the country, and hopefully going to make them a lot of money. I don't know if 50 times revenue for a defense contractor is as good a bet as 20 times revenue for an entropic or an open AI, where you've got myriads of customers, where in Anderle's case, you're dealing with the dysfunction of the government as the major customer. But just from a genuine comment, I think the people who did that early should be incredibly proud of what they've done.

1:18:58And they've moved the needle in a very, very hard market. And they've pulled it off because maybe it's not worth 50 right now, but they've bullied their way into being a prime and they win. So that's cool. No, one, not interested in the company personally, just personally, at this point in life, I just want to do things I'm interested in to a fault, not interested in building weapons and stuff like that. Just not my vibe. Two, I don't go to enough parties in SF because if I did, and this sounds facetious, but you know I'm joking. I'm never really joking. Fully joking is where it is. There's no better brag at a party than Andrew that you did it, right?

1:19:31It's the ultimate founders fund brag. It's just the ultimate brag. You know, one of the psychic benefits of investing is bragging, right? At many levels, there's different types of bragging. There's bragging because I have a sense of worth in my life that I don't. I'm bragging because I wrote a tiny check, but I'm validated in my soulless job. There's so many levels of validation, but I just don't go to enough of those parties since 2020. But if I did, I'd want to have that one on my chips to talk about at parties, but I don't care. And I'm not into bombs and weapons. So I'm out on this one. The amount of self-knowledge embodied in that last two minutes from Jason is just stunning.

1:20:08I mean, the therapy is clearly working, dude. It's just called being happier. I think it's actually called getting older and wiser. I love it. Listen, guys, on that incredibly hearty note, thank you. This has been fantastic and I've loved it. All right. Rock and roll. Thank you, Harry. Thank you, Rory. Thank you. But before we leave you today, now most people who get scammed never talk about it. And if it can happen to tech savvy professionals, CEOs and investors, it can happen to anyone. But the problem isn't just losing money. It's that today's scams, they're built differently for a very new world.

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1:23:01fin is the number one ai agent for customer service resolving up to 93 of customer queries automatically there is no other agent that can do that not 93 of customer queries okay no other agent can do that so why choose fin fin is the best performing ai agent for cs fin doesn't just answer questions it takes actions it automates the most complex customer queries like refunds transaction disputes, technical troubleshooting with speed and reliability. I wish my team was speedy and reliable. Beats every competitor in every head-to-head bake-off. Completely configurable and code optional setup. My word.

1:23:40I mean, the benefits just go on and on. It's easy and efficient implementation. It works on any help desk with no tedious migration needs. It's trusted by over 6 ,000 customer service leaders, including top AI companies like Anthropic, Lovable, Synthesia, Clay, Vanta. So if you're ready to transform your customer service team, scale your support, and give team members time to focus on the really high-level strategic work, learn more about FIN at fin.ai forward slash 20VC.