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23:29You're ecstatic they did that. But as Jason points out, if there's no governor on that, eventually you're going to hit the moment where you spend 600 bucks to save 500 bucks. What's going on right now is how do people get to grips with that? Yeah, let me just, I sort of hit, but let me just give you a simple, even if it's very basic, I know some folks will make fun of me that watch this, right? Or listen to it, but it took me a while. Now I'm all in on Claude Design. It got really good. Okay. It took me for a while when it launched. I wasn't sure if it was a play feature. I love it now. I think it's gotten better.

23:56But as folks said, and it took me a while to get it, it consumes more tokens than anything else I do. It is massive. And so yesterday for my first message, I'm like five minutes in. It's like, you got to wait till 3 p.m., Jason. You got to wait till 3 p.m. to use your credits. And that's to do one, basically redesign one page in essence, because it uses so many. What I would love to do Instead, imagine this. Here's my entire website for any product, okay? It's 100 pages, whatever it is. Every night, come up with better versions. Every night. So I'll wake up in the morning and I'll doom click through your ideas from my website and I'll pick the two or three of the 100 that are better.

24:32Instead of burning, like think about it. I burned through my tokens in 20 minutes building one page. How many tokens would it create for every night to redo 100, right? Help me with the math, Rory. It's a lot of, it's orders of magnitude more tokens, right? I think literally every product person, every designer could do that and consume 100x tokens they do now easily without even blinking. Agreed. Does it change your Figma usage? I don't think so. But what I think, not to go down a rat hole, what I do think Claude Design, if they keep investing in it like they have, and we can figure out the massive token consumption, is that you can get further without a designer.

25:09or you can get further with half a designer or an outsource designer or something because you can build your whole design schema and build people. You're going to make fun of it. You can still smell a design, a claw design app. You can see the elements, but you can get pretty damn far. It's pretty smart on the product side of how to do it. And so it doesn't mean you don't need a designer, but it may mean that we don't need that crappy designer anymore to get us to a V1, right? There's just no need to have it. So does that harm Figma? No, but I think in the age of AI, every time you start losing the bottom of your market, as a CEO, I'd be nervous.

25:47It won't show up in that quarter's numbers because it's the bottom of the market. It's the ankle biters. You've already gone up market. Figma's tracking million dollar deals. Who the hell cares to the low end one seat deal it lost to Claude Design. But over time, those ankle biters move up the leg. They're the piranhas. They need to take over the knees and the thighs. and pretty soon you retain the big customers, but you've lost a portion of your funnel, right? If you lose the bottom, you lost a portion of your funnel. They don't all wait and say, you know what? I'll graduate to Figma when I'm bigger.

26:18And this is where Salesforce is at risk. People like, I love Salesforce who run it headless, but the next generation of folks may not graduate to Salesforce because they never started there. They started agentically. They may never graduate there. If I'm a CEO, I'm at risk that folks won't graduate into anymore. Workflow tools are at risk that even if just 10%, 20 % less folks graduate into, it leads to a death spiral of slow growth. That's why, you know, for public companies, the only thing that really matters to me is are they growing net new logos 15 % or more a year? If they are, they'll figure it out, right?

26:48If you're growing your net new customers 15, even 20 % a year, but as soon as it falls, man, I mean, you can raise price every year, but it only takes you so far. So Ramley answers, it does worry me, but it's not a threat to this sort of enterprise Figma play at all. But if I are building a startup today, that's right, start. Roy, what point did you think was more interesting that I didn't mention or glossed over? No, actually, it wasn't a point they made. It's just things you find yourself puzzling on as you think about the market. I'm just looking at the level of traction on these companies right now, which has just been astonishing, right?

27:18I mean, the entropic explosion to what now might be 50 billion from 9 billion at the start of the year. You know, I saw the semi-analysis breakdown. And yeah, two or three billion of that is quote-unquote clawed code. But the real truth is, I think, a huge portion of the API part is code as well. And I've just been wondering, when something's growing that quickly, momentum, I always say, what could cause it to change? And I think that there's really only two things, is that one is mass competition, which we've been talking about. And if everybody dive-bombed the price and it went down by a factor of two or three, yeah, it's 70%.

27:53The low-end token pricing you're seeing here. Is that likely? I don't know. I don't know if that's going to happen. So then if the momentum continues, what's the constraint? And one of the things you figure out in all these very late stage growth investing is in the end, the time is the criteria. And what has that just been? You start to look at the dollars being spent here relative to the size of software engineering. And it's pretty huge. Remember we talked about, is it going to be 20 % of software engineering? And to Jason's thing, everyone goes, oh, 30 million developers, it's all fine. If you go to the BLS, which I did last weekend, there are only 1.8 million developers in the United States, of which only 200 ,000 of them work in software companies.

28:33Another 600 ,000 work in tech companies, HP, IBM, and a million of them work in literally JP Morgan, B of A. That's a total spend. Median wage is about 140K for that role. It's a total spend of around$250 billion dollars. And if most of this open AI and Entropic enterprise, if a large percentage of that is software, they really are close to 20 % already. They already hit it. Part of me says, oh my God, what's happening? Because there hasn't been 20 % of layouts of these companies. My point is this, it's a huge number relative to the total software coding spend in the US. And I'll freely admit, I don't have a conclusion from that.

29:12I'm looking at it going, hmm, is it ex-US revenue? I read the semi-analysis stuff. I don't think it is. I think a lot of it is in the US. So there's some purchasing in the US for use and overseas, but it's an astonishingly high number relative even to the biggest number you can think of, which is the wage that's being spent on software engineering. It'll be interesting to see how that shapes out in the next 12 months. It is a great analysis because it is definitely a bare case that no matter how great these tools are, we may soon hit the ceiling in terms of how much companies just on an absolute sense are willing to spend here.

29:44You can't spend more revenue than you take in. And that's if you have 100 % gross margins, right? There are just physical limits. Even if you reallocate budget to IT, there are just limits. You're right, Jason. And I almost don't like to posit it because one of my rules of thumb is this. I always joke. Simplistically put, Newton's laws of motion are true. Things in motion stay in motion. Things growing at 10x year on year might decline to 8x or 6x or 4x, but they don't come to a grinding stop. And the amazing thing is when you're growing at 10x, even 6x next year and 4x year after that is a huge number.

30:18I mean, if you're at 50, 60 bill this year in gap revenue and you 6x next year, that's 300 million, billion. That's more than the total wage spend on software development, right? So you look at it and go, one of two things is going to happen in the next year. Either this thing decelerates faster than anything you've ever seen deaccelerate. And I don't think that's option A. Option B, to Jason's point, a whole bunch of CFOs are literally going, we used to spend$4 million on tech, all of it in salaries, and now we spend$8 million on tech, $4 million on salaries. WTF, we got to do something. So it's just, as I say, no conclusion.

30:52I'm just, things I'm thinking about in July 15th. It'll be interesting to see. And you're right, there are, I mean, it may well be that the prize for becoming the fastest growing company in human history is you may hit TAM faster than any other company in human recorded history. And it'll be interesting to see. You may have hit the limits of how much money there is in the till. Well, you know, there's just one other vector just to add it up for fun. And again, I don't mock me if folks want to. There's how much can we spend on engineering? And then there's another math you can do. Okay. Every piece of software is becoming agentic very, very rapidly.

31:24Okay. So what's software spend? A trillion and a half? You have better at the numbers. A trillion plus or minus, yeah. A trillion. So I think we're coming to the rough conclusion that folks may tolerate, say a 10 % gross margin spend on AI. Let's just assume that for a minute, right? That's another 140 billion that can go to Anthropic and Friends, right? So that's significantly more than the math you just did, but it itself has a ceiling, right? It can't be all of the 1.4 trillion. 10 % feels about right today. There's 140%. All the software spend is gonna put 10 % of their top line into tokens.

31:57First of all, I totally agree. Because I mean, you asked that question a while back and I got the answer wrong because I was an idiot in that process, right? which is how much does it cost to run my little sales and marketing agent? And it was way less than you thought. And the reason this is relevant here is this. It turns out that outside of coding, most of the token costs for a Gentic software outside of coding are manageable. To your point, they're 10%. They're not 50. So you're right, Jason, is that if the software industry is doing a billion in other kind of non-coding stuff, sorry, a trillion, that's another 100 billion right there.

32:28You're right. Like Salesforce could comfortably pay 10 % of its revenue for tokens from someone, they're not going to pay 40 because they only have 22 % operating money. But that's$100 billion of revenue that's almost accessible now. And I mean, it's all going agentic, right? So that, I need someone smarter than me, but that could be a huge, I don't know what percent of Anthropics fuel is, but it's a lot, that$100 billion. No, you're right. There's really three buckets. There's the coding bucket, you're right. Then there's the agentic 10 % software tax, just like Amazon took a tax on software 10 years ago.

32:59Everyone's going to run on Amazon, give me 7%. Now you're right. Everyone's going to run using LLMs. Give me 10%. That's 100 billion more. And then the last thing you start talking is, does co-work replace the knowledge worker at 20 bucks like Microsoft Office? But you're right. I mean, the big picture, and I'm still wrestling true and trying to look at those numbers, and I'll report back. But you're definitely at the stage where you're talking big ass numbers well to everyone else's numbers. And we'll see. Is that movement into legal biosciences, not just an appreciation of the fact that they are potentially hitting time ceiling limits in where they are already?

33:31There's no evidence that they are, even though logically, again, because I don't want someone to say, hey, all the traction momentum seems to say they're not. I just look at the actual market and I go, huh. I personally think on the medical side, I think, oddly enough, I don't know if that's as much as I think the founders of Anthropi, just like the founder of DeepMind, is very much motivated on the medical side by the desire to. Everyone always references their world where cancer is cured when they're talking about their LLM. And so I think actually people's interest in doing life science is one third TAM expansion and two thirds.

34:06Shit, I'm putting everyone out of a job. The least I can do is keep them alive. I want to do good because I want to have meaning. It's a search for meaning, you know, starting with DeepMind and going from there. I mean, if you don't think the other founders wish they had a Nobel Prize like DeepMind, like Demetri, you're crazy. That must be good. That must feel good. Jason's going to get a Nobel Peace Prize for his work. Everyone's not going to get a Nobel Prize. He has worked with his companies. But Jason should. Yeah, exactly. Impact portfolio. I'm waiting just to get an offer, a decent offer, any offer from Anthropic.

34:36I haven't gotten a single one. No one's offered to bring me in as a chief anything. It's a joke. What would your price be, Jason? $200. Wow. After tax, it's not worth it otherwise. Plus, I don't really want to work for the man. So that'd be the end. If I really wanted to do it, $200 would be the minimum. I still strongly need to say to you, Jason, that based on my understanding of the entropic org structure, you in fact don't work for the man, you work for the woman. Right? Daniela runs everything. Yeah, it's a gender neutral term, I would say. Gotcha. So take the job and - 200, there we go. We have a price.

35:09Plus there's risk. I might not work out for five years there. There's a small chance I don't take. Jay, there's no other way of saying this without being hurtful. I don't think you'll pass the personality test. I mean, I know I wouldn't, but they're doing good, carry all that stuff. I think I think you just flunk out. Yeah, but some people think I'm a little driven, Rory, even at this point in my career. Yeah, you're driven, but they filter out for cynicism. You just won't make it true. You're just not idealistic enough. Look, I haven't gotten the offer. So empirically, you're correct, right? I've done 63 of these podcasts.

35:41I've written 10 ,000 blog posts. I haven't gotten one offer from Anthropic. It's just not coming, is it? It's age discrimination. You're right. The infrastructure that powers foundation models, SK Hynix, NASDAQ listing. You want to go there, Rory? Great. I mean, I'm nervous to suggest a topic these days, Jason, because he just scowls and I'm like, oh, fuck. No, no, no. I thought that, look. It's a winner. Obviously, the stuff everyone knows, there are three memory companies. They have been a huge beneficiary of the AI CapEx boom in the last year. Those stock, SK Hynix is up 6x. Two of the three are based in Korea, Samsung and SK Hynix.

36:23Micron is based in Idaho. Go America. And the truth is, it's an oligopoly. They've made out like bandits. And it's actually very hard to buy stocks in Korea, which is why even today, interestingly enough, after the ADR is traded in the US stock exchange, it's still trading at a 20 % premium to the same stock in Korea, because it's just hard for an American to open a brokerage account in Korea by the Korean thing. So I think it's just good that these guys are accessing the capital markets. And so for everyone to know, SK Hynix, NASDAQ listing, lodged ever by a foreign company, had a great reaction, popped 13 % at close of day.

37:00And then back down. And then, I mean, I had a very difficult day, I think, yesterday and last couple of days, right? Yeah, it would be tempting to go to some kind of, oh my God, the AI CapEx bubble is busting. And at some point it will. But I actually think a lot of that, there's a lot of weird technical stuff going on there because no surprise, the two memory companies dominate the Korean stock market. The two companies, Samsung and Hynix, are 60 % of the stock market and roughly 120 % of the GDP in terms of market cap. They're just huge. They're highly volatile. There's lots of retail action in Korea.

37:34So there's just a lot of intraday volatility in the Korean stock exchange. It's called kind of crazy casino-level wealth there, right? So even though the stocks moved down in the last couple of days, it's not as clear, is it fundamentally, oh, DRAM's correction, or is it just weird kind of trading shit? But I think on the DRAM thing, I mean, the fun bet there is I don't have an opinion on it, but those three companies are all trading at five to eight PEs. In other words, dirt cheap and one cents and any kind of screen. And that's the bull case. And this is going to last. And the bear case is these have traditionally been capital cyclical businesses.

38:08And the minute more capacity comes online, prices have gone up 6x in the last year, which is why operating margins have gone from negative in 23 to like 70%, the most profitable companies on the planet. Samsung is the most profitable company on the planet right now, and they're going to go back down. So that's the kind of pro and con. I think it'll last a little longer than the typical cycle, but in the end, I mean, at some point it does correct. You're not going to have the memory makers earning 70 % net margins, not gross margins, net margins forever. Maybe, Rory, you'll challenge the connection.

38:40I thought it was interesting that IBM this week, pretty old tech company, right? I think founded in the 1800s or something like that. I mean, And they had a huge miss, stock crashed 20%. And some of it, listen, is probably an excuse. We have to make up excuses as CEOs when we have a huge miss, but they blamed memory. They said memory is taking so much of the CIO's budget. There is such a scramble to buy memory before it goes over up. They weren't buying our mainframes or our servers or anything from us. Like CIOs went into a panic to buy memory before it would get even more expensive. And I'm sure it's an excuse, but I'm sure there's a germ of truth that that money's got to come from somewhere, right?

39:16And IBM said it came out of us. I think you're right, Jason. I actually don't. I think there's more than a German. Look, money has to come from somewhere. And if you're spending a lot on LLMs, and then if you're spending and you're having to spend even more on your memory needs because the LLMs themselves are bidding up the price of memory, you don't want to be the last item on the purchase order list on the last day of the quarter. Because I'm sure there's a CFO sitting there going, what can we cut? Because we only have a finite capex budget this quarter. And it's what you said also about what's going to happen to the marginal SaaS vendor.

39:45It's not that they're going to vibe quote of the way. It's as much as, you know, guys, we have a tech budget of$10 million. And last year, we spent$100 ,000 in AI. This year, we're spending$3 million. So we need$2.9 million in savings. And it turns out we don't need five productivity apps. You'll love Teams when you get to know it. And maybe we'll stick with what we have, too, rather than buy that module from you. So yeah, I mean, and IBM did tumble pretty drastically today. I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent, Rory, because you said, oh, there's a world outside of this like AI. Me and Jason were messaging earlier this week about Jason Calacanis' syndicate or investing activity where he basically said, hey, due to popular demand, I'm moving where we'll be investing from very early to later stage growth opportunities in some of the big names.

40:30Is this symbolic of where the venture market is at today and a sign of the times? Jason, given it was us talking about it, why don't we start with you? I just thought it was interesting for him to say that because actually, you know, Jason's got some pretty good investments. He does a lot of investments, right? So he's got some pretty good ones. I thought the message would be we're adding an annex fund, right? Or we're going to do a little bit more here. But to say that he has put so much energy over decades into creating an alternative path to do massive number of syndicated investments to apparently tilting all into growth is in a niche.

41:08It's a huge sign of the times. It's a huge sign of times rather than than easing into it. But completely switching when you've got multiple billion dollar winners that you have material ownership in is to me, it's a big deal. Right. I mean, seats for suckers, as we've known for 60 something weeks. This is the, this is the other than YC dumping early stage, that would be a real sign, right? YC issuing a, uh, going on threads and telling everybody we're only doing growth rounds that that would, that would rock the world. But I thought it was at least a sign of the times everything's up. And when everything can exit North of 20 billion, I, even me, like I have an investment with a hundred million dollar position that took me years and years and years to get to right now.

41:47And then just watching a growth round where someone comes in and invests a hundred million, Like, why did I bother? All the drama, all the years, being the only guy at the board meeting when someone just drops a$100 million check, if that can grow an order of magnitude, what's the point of being the guy any earlier than there, right? No existential point. Because you love the craft. I don't love the craft. Who the hell loves the craft? David Frankel. I interviewed him yesterday. He does love, that man loves the craft. He loves the craft so much. Yeah, yeah. Replace me with him on this pod. that man will be doing deals from the old folks home, right?

42:22And he'll be getting good ones. And he'll be getting good ones. I would give that my money. I love David. So do I. Please, that was me defending his love of the craft. Yeah, loves the craft. I was like, I feel like he loves the craft. But to give it good framing, I hear you. But this whole idea of, you know, venture early versus venture late. Yeah, that's really the question. How do you think about that? Right. And, you know, the trite answer I could give. And you know, I always like to leave the snarky, tried answer is generally when something looks easy in investing is precisely the time you shouldn't do it.

42:54And late stage looks very easy right now. So that's kind of the natural contrarian in me. But I think really what's going on, Harry, is there's three different things you have to think about, right? And I put them on it. One is there's this big secular trend in private company financings, which is, as we said, the early stage business hasn't got that much bigger in the last two decades. But on top of that, a 5x bigger late stage business has emerged as companies, A, haven't gone public as much, and B, in the case of something like opening Iron Tropic, just became bigger quicker. So there's been this new business for late stage on top.

43:27And there's no doubt, looking back 15 years, if you said you can enter the one business that's been around for 30 years and has 200 very good competitors, or you can enter this new business which didn't exist before and has relatively few competitors, all other things being equal, that late stage opportunity in 2005 from then on look in retrospect look like the easiest place to play so there's definitely this kind of secular trend and you look like i'm not even getting on to two or three but you're shaking your head already harry no no i i totally get it i i've had a lot of cynical kind of respectfully older people talk to me about this and i'm not suggesting that's you by the way i'm cynical at wilder than you harry so you are but it's okay yeah and they're always like oh i've seen this every cycle i see this every stop i'm going to push right back in your face because i I actually made a secular comment.

44:15I'm going to make a cyclical comment in a second. I made a secular comment, which is really precise here. I'm actually agreeing with you, Harry. I'm saying the secular trend is this category didn't exist, and now it will exist across cycles. This new business called No One Inventure, when I started, forget 94, even in 2004, was writing$100 million late-stage checks, and now it's a thing. It is a new class of financial product, private$100 million checks in companies already worth a billion dollars. It's a new thing. So I'm not doing the old guy. It's just cyclical. I'm actually going to do that in a second.

44:51But right now, I'm saying, in retrospect, it actually is a whole new category of venture. It's not replacing baby venture. It's kind of adding a whole new category on top. And the world needs that category because these companies aren't public. So the altimeters, the thrives, the recent late stage part of the business, all those guys have replaced what would have been public companies. So that's kind of not cynical. Now, the cynical comment I'll make is on top of a secular change, you do also have a cyclical thing. And there's no doubt that the closer you are to the public markets, the more the cyclical thing happens, which is there's times when the late stage business looks amazing and there's times when it looks crap.

45:29And it's really very much dictated to by change plus the public markets. So I actually think the secular part is more important than the cyclical part. You just got to be aware of the cyclical stuff. In 2022, turns out was a great time to write checks. 2020, not so much. I mean, the people who did that kind of cheap round and ramp in 2022, they're feeling pretty damn smart. So no, I mean, it's just, but there's no doubt at the height, it gets tough. The thing that I do see is just, I don't think we've ever seen the secondary market be as liquid and mature as it is today in terms of ability to get out of great named high growth companies like we can today.

46:08In all of my top names, I can get out of them today with ease. And every single day I have buyers for them. I've never seen such a liquid secondary market. So the why now is always really important. Outcome scenarios are bigger than ever. The speed of those scenarios happening are faster than ever in a lot of cases. Your curse is 60 billion exodus in four years. And then along the way, you have the chance to have secondaries far more liquid than ever. There are meaningful changes to the ecosystem, which make now today significantly better than prior cycles. I agree. It's worth pointing out, just to be precise, that that's not a stay private for longer comment, which sometimes people say, because in fact, these companies haven't been around a long time.

46:49You're right. And it's a different phenomenon is that you're now having companies go zero to billions of dollars in value creation in five years. So it's not a state. They don't have time. I mean, people say, look, SpaceX stayed private a long time. OpenAI hasn't had time to get its systems together yet, right? They're not public because they're staying private for longer. They're public because Jesus, five years ago, they were doing nothing, right? So I agree with you. There's these new class of businesses. There's a small number of winners. And if there's 4 ,000 early stage companies and only 40 of them matter, and you want to matter, and you miss them at the early stage, there's no doubt that sticking some money in the later stage is one way to play the game.

47:27Yeah, where you can also move more money. So yes, I thought it was entirely logical from Jason. I think it's exactly what he should be doing, to be honest. I think the third comment, though, is I remember I said there's three things. There's the structural stuff, which I would put your comment on new bigger companies in that structural bucket. There's the cyclical risk because late stage business is always about valuation risk because that's the only risk there is. But I do think you called it the craft. And that's why I do think the odd thing about the private markets, unlike the public markets where hedge funds can be selling tech stocks today and buying the Indonesian bat tomorrow, right?

48:00They're all liquid. I think what private markets is, if your comparative advantage, if David Frankl's comparative advantage, which I believe it is, is to be an awesome first check-in investor, it's not clear how you monetize that by putting money in companies at 20 billion pre. If you think your advantage is your stock picker, then maybe you can do both. But for example, it would be insane of Y Combinator to say we're giving up early stage and only doing late because they have a position in that market that's irreplaceable. So I do think there is an institutional factor to this. If you've spent a lot of time doing X, it's actually quite hard to say, now I'm going to switch to something totally different.

48:36I mean, good luck, Jason, if you can pull it off, but it's not a layup. And there's a lot of people for whom they're so good at doing X that trying to do Y would be a mistake, even if Y, on average, a better return profile. I agree. I lied to that. Paul Graham sparked some fire on Twitter last night because he posted about a YC company that apologized for only having 36 % month-for-month growth because they were fundraising. And he got lots of plauders. And I thought it was just symbolic of the, it really depends who says it. Because when I say shit like that, I get in so much trouble for saying it.

49:09And then Paul Graham and YC, it was like, yeah, marvelous. YC company is new. Well, no one's scared of you, Harry. That's the difference. You can't say anything about PG, right? the cost is too high. That's it. Yeah. And listen, I mean, one of the most successful investors of all time, right? Wildly successful beyond what anybody realizes, directionally correct earlier than everybody else. And his portfolio is unmatched. So he has earned the right for everyone to follow what he says. He's earned it. He might be the GOAT, even though he's not described as the GOAT. He probably is the GOAT. I mean, who picks up more nine-figure and 10-figure checks off the floor than Paul Graham?

49:44Nobody, right? He deserves it, right? But you have to be careful if you disagree. You do have to be a little careful. First of all, two comments. One is on the tweet. I saw that. I thought it was kind of more tongue in cheek comment. I think people over fucking, they're overthinking it. I saw the tweet and I thought it was a kind of a cute tweet. Hey, my company apologized because they're only going 36 percent because they were fundraising. It was a little bit of a humble brag. It was kind of funny, but it's like boasting about your kids, not boasting about yourself. It was not worth any emotional energy whatsoever.

50:12So the fact that all these people are commenting on it, they just need to get a life. I think to Jason, to your point, and this actually gets back to the structural comment, I think Paul Raymond White commenter is the GOAT, but it's less because it's better than being a good investor. He's actually put himself in a position where he doesn't have to be an amazing investor. He has a machine and a business that makes him win. Factual comment. He's been able to delegate the entire task of picking to others. He doesn't pick them. He doesn't sit through 5 ,000 pitches to here. He actually had an idea, which is help make more companies possible.

50:48And he manifested that in a business that works. He owns a business, not an investing thing. And it would be better to own a business than be a great stock picker. It's the best business ever because you can drive around England, going to bookshops in small country towns, sending fun tweets, while at the same time, as you say, setting yourself up to pick$100 million checks off the floor 10 years later when your startups that other people have picked on your behalf go public because you have a lock on that market. Work of genius. It's an N of one business. Well, every five or seven years, you do have to accrue to Sam Altman or Gary Tan to run it.

51:21Other than that, yeah. Yeah. You have seven to 10 people at general partner level picking deals, and then you pick the best one. Again, it's a work of genius. By the way, the carry premiums that they charge are incredible too. People don't know or discuss them enough. Unpressed and 40, 50 % in cases. 40, 50%. My LPs would kill me. Take it or leave it. You want access? It's 50%. And what I like about it is, to be clear, I mean, the original idea was to help startups. So I know that it's kind of one of those things that I believe to be true, which is, oddly enough, as a person who's very much invested in mind, some of the hugest fortunes are made by people whose motivations aren't, oh, I'm going to be a great investor.

51:59It's someone who's just, I want to do this thing because the world needs this thing and it'd be fun and I obviously want to make some money this is an idea and it turns out to be a great idea turns out nine people in the first class was only the beginning right it's just like me it was never about money it was about the craft of the podcast yeah yes harry you can't even get through the sentence without smirking anyway enough about me let's talk about me let's flip the mic around again literally i'm nervous we'll have a topic because rory's face is like very real time What about Phoebe Gates? Fear drama?

52:34No. Okay. Clearly no. I didn't like the criticism. I might be wrong. So let's just provide some context. Phoebe Gates, Bill Gates's daughter, and her co-founder were in the news very critically for Asenshi. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but their product, Phoebe, was injecting their code in to take attribution when it probably shouldn't have been attributed to them in terms of online e-commerce sales. That's the story. Taking credit where they shouldn't have done. Well, look, listen, I could be wrong, okay? But doing basically what everyone in your industry does, doing scammy affiliate marketing when it's basically part of your thing.

53:12I mean, startups cut corners, right? It's not, this isn't Delvesque, but everyone cuts a corner. When everyone in your industry is slightly faking credit for affiliate fees, including Honey when after PayPal bought it and it's standard course, it's not that I don't want to be critical. It's just, it doesn't rise to the level of outrage in me. And the whole area of affiliate marketing is scamming on top of scamming on top of scamming on top of dark, dark codes, impossible to cancel subscriptions, putting stuff in your purchase box or your checkout that you didn't even intend to buy, right? Oh, how did I buy seven subscriptions to Outlook 365?

53:48Thank you very much, GoDaddy. I don't think GoDaddy could exist if it hadn't perfected getting you to stick stuff when you buy a domain name you never knew. I got so many Outlook 360 subscriptions on GoDaddy domains. I don't even know how to shut them off, guys. Yeah, I got to contact someone, but I need my pin code. And everyone has a different pin code at GoDaddy. Like, I don't remember my pin code from a domain I bought 11 years ago, but I'm paying Outlook 360$9.95 a month forever for that domain, right? So when GoDaddy does that, I just can't get that outrage. And it's not like Phoebe's the director of marketing.

54:18I mean, she's running the company, right? The team did it. I'm just, I feel like we got bigger things to be outraged about. And they walked it back and we move on. I can go with that. Naughty, naughty, shouldn't have done, stop doing it. Yet another startup slightly misbehaves. I'm kind of with Jason. It's not a date. You shouldn't do it. It's well, move on. Well, Liz, I'll tell you the related questions for fun. Harry, you can cut me off if you want. For investing for startups is if everybody does it, is it okay? I'll give you an example. Almost every AI agentic GTM provider is buying data sources that they probably shouldn't be buying.

54:50Almost every startup that is doing GTM, they are buying, whether it's a cleansed Chinese data center. They are taking your, like, you can't be that good with data if you're getting it the legitimate way. Okay. And every startup is, and no, it wasn't me. I used it through an API, but if you're doing something where LinkedIn is going to sue you when you get bigger others, it's not cool, but every startup is doing it. Is it okay guys, if like we're cutting corners, but when we're bigger, we'll cut back. What if everybody's doing it? What if everybody's doing affiliate marketing? What if everybody's using sketchy data sources, you know, and B2B it's, You know, I've always said no to those, but sometimes they get big.

55:24But I do think in the era of greed, when the outcomes are so big, it's hard to tell a founder to do no when it's standard in the industry. When you look at, you know, there's just so many examples, and I know it's extreme, but even when you look at Polymarket et al., like that was some sketchy stuff and like pretty good returns on paper, right? And to Harry's point, I probably could sell my Polymarket stock if I had any, right? Or Calci stock. I probably could have sold it even if everybody's doing it. You know, I will confess, when you started this conversation, I was like, no, you shouldn't do it because, you know, I can make the distinction.

55:56I understand between just, again, for context, folks, it's illegal to scrape LinkedIn and most people don't do it. But there are companies that aggregate information from a number of sources, including LinkedIn, and many reputable companies buy from those companies. So it's like I don't do bad things, but I know a person who's done bad things and I give them money. So that's the example you're using. So, Jason, so yeah, part of me wanted to say, no, you're wrong, because I think the cookie stuffing that Fia has alleged to have done is more intentful and more within your own volition than buying from someone who themselves have done something wrong, so have a little bit of distance.

56:30So I could argue the toss with you. But when you started talking, I realized so many breakthroughs rely on a little bit of pushing the boundaries. I mean, Uber did with taxi regulation. Airbnb did with regulation. You're right. Polymarket did in terms of how they're regulated. So I'm actually going to get off my high horse and say you actually won that round. Is that I mean, the interesting thing is and actually as another reminder, both on Tropic and OpenAI, I did in terms of how they trained information. And generally, my observation is all those chickens come home to roost and you end up paying the tax.

57:00You know, you end up getting caught with it. But if you succeed, it's all OK. I'm going to do my trip down history. There's the Elizabethan quote, treason does not succeed. but what's the reason? If it does succeed, no one calls it treason. When you succeed as Uber, you just get what you did legalized. When you succeed as Airbnb, you get what you did legalized. So yes, there are examples of that. I still think cookie stuffing is a little bit unlikely to get over that line, Jason, but fair point. There's a fair amount of ethical gray areas. But going back to where we started with Apple, there are gray areas and then there are areas that you step over at your pearl.

57:37And I think that that maybe would be my nuanced comment. Rory, do you just have like a bunch of these quotes percolating in your head i got so much noise in my head harry it's terrifying but that's between me like a quote on treason being normalized like we call this reading but your generation's given up oh dude i didn't read anything longer than a tweet i know signs on it i think we should do this stuff at the end like the carter stuff the constellation and zoom info stuff i think some interesting stuff there okay let's totally do it let's start with the Carter stuff. The top 5 % of seed rounds hit$200 million valuation.

58:12Roy, why don't you take us away there? Look, I thought it was just Carter's super interesting. And, you know, they made a comment is that, you know, you look at the seed, all seed pricing has gone up, but there's a small percentage that are 200 million pre and, you know, what's going on. And I think really, when you break it down, and I think Ben Braverman had a good tweet on this is that there's a couple of consensus bet areas where people are willing and to some extent have to bet aggressively in terms of dollar size out of the gate. And that's why the prices are high. I mean, all these Neil labs, if it's going to take you$300 million to get something done, there's no point raising$20 at$20 pre.

58:50You're just not going to get there. So there's a bunch of those deals where it's$200 million on$200 million. So the dilution, maybe it's even more than that, the dilution might be 20 % or more, but The check size is 200 million plus, right? And the pre-money is a billion. So that's one category, the neolab. And then the other category is the kind of agentic inference, known big market, maybe a little bit capital intensive, not quite like building a neolab, but building out the AI infrastructure where, again, there's a belief that there's a wall of money around the spend there that you can access.

59:24And so people are just willing to write bigger checks. So yeah, it totally makes sense. I mean, the point he was making in the Carter tweet was it's not the norm. You know, ordinary pricing has gone up 10%, 20%, but top decile pricing has gone up 6x or something like that. And that's really just a function of there are a class of bet that frankly didn't exist five years ago. There weren't. I mean, Deedee has that great list of 60 plus neolabs. I mean, six years ago, there were none except OpenAI. That bet didn't exist. and the inference bet are some of the other kind of heavy dollar bets. Five years ago, people weren't doing those.

59:59Look, I have, for what it's worth, I have a slightly different and maybe less interesting take on it. There's one thing that's new here, but the one thing that's old, like in this Carter thing, the large funds, and this was like the one and only board I was ever on with John Doerr, when they want to really get ownership, if they have the money, they'll do it. And in the old days, it was, we'll do the seed in the A at the same time. That's how we'll get our 20%. And so it's the same today. It's not like you can raise$100 million seat if you have nothing. You may not need revenue, but if you see an S tier team and it's in the right space and you want to hit your number, your 20 % ownership, and your fund is in billions, the math just makes sense.

1:00:35It's a bet. It's just a bet. And this has been true, like since I started investing, even that happens, like all the top YC companies, like, okay, only sell 6%, only sell 8%. But if someone wants to come in and do two and a half rounds, then you can sell it to Mark and friends, right? That's how you get the big ownership out of YC is you do two rounds, right? And it's not new. It's just the outcomes have changed it. But I don't know that it's capital needs is the main driver. I think it's part of it, but we don't give startups mass evaluations just because they need the capital. Although sometimes you have to to solve it, right?

1:01:09I did this in my first startup. I needed 10 million to start and I got to do it at three pre. It was great. It was great. Thank you very much. I hated VCs for so many years after when I gave them a five and a half X return in 12 months and no one showed up to the closing dinner and they bought 80 % of my seed. Thank you very much. But I think it's just to hit my target when the outcomes can be huge. I don't think it's more complicated. And if you have a three, four multi-billion dollar fund, the math pencils out. I think it's smart there to say like it's kind of the combining multiple rounds into one.

1:01:37And I think the other way to look at that is the rise of tranche rounds where you see who have often been cited as doing one at 50 and then the majority come in at 500. But even that isn't new. is just exacerbated by AI. It's not brand new. These things are not brand new, right? They've just become normal is what's changed. Instead of for potential outliers, this behavior has become normal for potential outliers. And there's just more potential outliers. Yeah, because just keying off a comment you made is that you don't have to give them a high price just because it needs a lot of capital. And that was actually very wise.

1:02:07I was reflecting on that because we used to do two decades ago, a fair amount of biotech where you knew going in, it would take a hundred million, but you're exactly right. Well, what happened is the price would still be low, which is tough on the entrepreneur, because the investors would frequently commit up front and then launch it. So they're signing up for the 100. The price is low, maybe stepped up for the later one, because they were saying, I'm taking the risk. So I have to get the ownership. What's happening in some of these Neolabs cases, the combination of the capital need is there, but because the demand from the big funds is greater than the supply of entrepreneurs, and because the perception, rightly or not, is that the outcomes are so huge, The supply-demand equation allows the entrepreneur to just get a valuation that, you know, 10 years ago, if you were funding a biotech or a semiconductor company where the capital lead was$100 million, you would be getting a 20 on 20 and a tranched agreement for$80 million more.

1:02:58And you'd be down to 7%, 10 % ownership by the time you did your big round. I think you're right. It's that at least a good portion of this, technology is now doing capital-intensive deals again. And they're doing it on terms that are way more favorable to the entrepreneur than you would see it in the past. and they're doing that for one reason. They have the money and there's a perception that the existing stuff does work well enough to be worth the risk. I mean, we'll see. I'm not sure if you saw but a very hot round got announced today which was Chai Discovery. $400 million at a$3.8 billion valuation led by Index, Kleiner, Sequoia, Dimension.

1:03:32I mean, listen, in terms of dilution, good round for founders there. Not too late for 10 from 20 VC. You can always squeeze that one in on top. No comment. no i mean genuine comment here that that category and we'll avoid the specifics it's just i don't want it's super interesting but it will be interesting to see how much those companies end up being like an llm and a language model and how much they end up being like a biotech company which is a very different trajectory we can revisit that another day do you know i think it's actually really interesting it's like blast radius from rounds and what i mean by that is isomorphic was incredibly oversubscribed to the tune of 8 to 10x.

1:04:13The majority of people did not get anything at all when they wanted huge amounts. That then causes a blast radius where I'm not saying it's second best by any means, but there's a lot of interest in Chai. And then it means there's a lot of interest in another company, Latent Labs in London. It is a blast radius from a very hot deal, which was originally isomorphic. It's one reason, honestly, sometimes to not announce to deal at all. I've seen this a lot. I mean, just don't do it. I think there's a lot of reasons. The most in my career today, there are the most reasons to not announce, if you can get away with it, to not announce a hot round, right?

1:04:47If you've already got enough going on to attract talent, right, for recruiting, especially if you're not selling directly to tech buyers, right, to the ex-folks, I say don't announce it, man. Just brings out the daggers, funds your competitors, creates issues. You just become a target, right? And so that press release better be worth it because it's like a Dorito or a Pringle. It's gone the next day, right? Better be worth it. If no one's heard of you, do it. It's also interesting to thrive in chai. I'm like, wait a minute. I thought you just led isomorphic. Different partners, Harry. Different partners.

1:05:16And we've got paper walls right between them. They're thin. We can hear the other side, but it is a wall. I think the overlap in terms of competitive risk is fairly low, especially if you're not on the board. So actually that's one argument for, I think it's totally fine to invest in both. Let me make another, which goes back to Harry's late stage thing. One of the bigger odds I've had is this. In the early stage, when you're on the board, you can't invest in two competitors. In the late stage, structurally, you have to. Because if you believe that the late stage is the replacement for what was the public markets for kind of high-growth companies, Fidelity Growth would have invested in Open AI and Entropic.

1:05:52They're not on the board of either. They want to make the secular bet. So I think the companies that are replacing them in the late stage private markets are going to do roughly the same thing. Now, ironically, you're right. They said that they wouldn't invest in Anthropic when they invested in OpenAI. So it is odd. But generally thinking, I think it actually is not a problem if you have limited information rights to be invested as a pure late stage investor, non-board member in multiple companies in the same broad thematic area. It's not our business, but. I will say one thing that's changed over the years too, more recently is Perry has even more data.

1:06:22He can challenge me on it. But in my experience, for these smaller late stage investors, they get nothing from the company. Nothing. So let's say I'm a founder. You could ask me, like, let's say whatever fund invested in my competitor, but they're only 80 % competitor to Rory's partner, 20 or 40, right? This might really bother me at the seed stage. If I like their brand and I'm going to give them nothing, they're going to learn literally less than a Google search, let alone an anthropic deep dive. Maybe I just literally don't care. And maybe I even like to usurp that investor from my competitor, right?

1:06:54So in the old days, you ask, and I still think you ask the founder. I hope you ask the founder, but you can position in the way they're getting nothing, right? The founder might like it. I mean, you never know. Maybe the latter part I got a little bit backwards, but my point is there's just like no effing disclosure now. It's like doing an angel list investment from the old days. Like you don't hear for, you might not hear anybody from five years. Congratulations, Harry. Here's your two and a half X check. The round on TechCrunch looked like a massive exit. It's two and a half X, but here's your money.

1:07:22Thanks for being a part of it. Thanks for the mention on 20VC, by the way, very helpful a year ago. Dude, I'd love that. Normally, it's more 0.2x, but yeah, thanks. Point taken, though. I think there's really three categories of investor. There's passive early angels. I don't have an opinion on that. It's not my business. It's kind of A and B where we play where you're taking a board. So if you absolutely can't do competitive deals, and then there is this new market in the last 15 years, the late stage replacement for public companies, where I think you can because you are replicating in economic terms what used to be NASDAQ small cap marketplace, and there was no prohibition on cross-investing.

1:07:57So it's inefficient to create one. We're going to discuss a final topic, which could be in the same realm in some respects. I actually really wanted to do this, which we mentioned last week, Bending Spoons, their IPO, very successful, and needing the B2B version of that. Constellation buys Touch Bistro. I'm sure no one's heard of it. 70 million ARR toast competitor, not growing. They bought a 70 million ARR company for$70 million. How do we think about this? Is this the future of pre-AI SaaS? I just had the Wix founder on the show. 2.1 billion in revenue, 2.1 billion market cap. The TouchBestor thing, first of all, is it is your destiny if on top of a slow-growth company, you also put a whole bunch of leverage.

1:08:43And, you know, they did a round with, I think, Omers in 19 at 600 million pre. But then they took money from Francisco Partners, which in the form of debt. when they missed that debt was converted to senior equity. And my guess is the company was running out of money. The senior equity, which had seniority, had put in 100 and they could get all the money back in a sale and no one else had any incentive to put money in. So the aha here is slow growth businesses with clean cap tables, they probably could have done better. They probably could have kept going. Maybe they could have made that 7140.

1:09:17It's never going to be transformative. But if you have a slow-growing company, and on top of that, you have a big-ass wall of debt, then yes, this could be your future. I read that case a couple of days ago, and I'm like, it's just the real dangers of adding a big slug of venture debt on top of a slow-growing business. You just end up trapped. You put your equity at risk. And you end up with a cap table, which is very misaligned. You end up with a bunch of people who are at the top of the cap table, just looking out for themselves, doing their job of minding their money. And they're like, I've lent you 100 million.

1:09:45I want my 100 million back. And one level down, they're like, I've got 200 million in equity in here unless I get to 300 million. And the first 100 million is senior to me, so I have nothing to play for. So yeah, that's the aha here. I think so. For what it's worth, I thought it was modestly interesting because, yeah, structurally, they took on way too much debt. There's going to be a lot more of these stories coming in the coming years. I really don't want to talk to them, but I just hate debt now. I hate it. I hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it. I used to be a fan, but people take on too much.

1:10:14And certainly don't do debt instead of an equity round, that's the sucker bet, right? It's just, you better be the hottest thing on planet earth or it's going to kill you. It took me a while to see it. But I think more interestingly, and it's not a huge point, because all the equity holders were basically wiped out, right, in the conversion, right? I think Omer's made 2 million on its 100 million. It became a clean look at a stalled unicorn at scale. There weren't egos in it. There weren't 2021 markups to maintain. There weren't even founder drama to deal with. What is it worth to just get out of this thing?

1:10:45And it was worth 1x. And so I think it's almost a clean look because too many of these situations just aren't clean or obscured, right? It's a clean look of what's 8%, 6 % growth with deteriorating market share at 70 million ARR where you're not reigning cash worth. It's worth 1x. And that's the brutal lesson to founders. Like if you don't want to be worth 1x, like do something before it's too late, man. The other thing I just look for is Like, was it still founder led? Like, was the CEO still a founder? And no, founder stepped away March 2021. I mean, that's part of why it got in the position, right?

1:11:18But it also makes the deal possible, right? If the founders have a veto, you know, 1x may not be exciting when there's nothing, when it doesn't clear the preference stack. It may not have been tried, but I agree. This is, I mean, look, I don't want to pick on them. Stuff happens. I've had deals fail too, but this is the laundry list of everything that can go wrong. It's the slow growth, non-wildly exciting business, misaligned cap table. You've already made the CEO change. You've got no move left. This is the low end of the outcomes, which segues to the buyer constellation, right? Because you mentioned the context of bending spoons.

1:11:54We had a good discussion on that last time. It's like, you know, you got bending spoons buying consumer businesses, trading at 12 times. You got constellation buying B2B businesses, trading at three times. But as Jason pointed out, we said it last time, there's more disruption in the B2B space. And these pre-AI companies might not have the durability of revenue that Bending Spoons does. I still think the difference between 12x and 3x for two roll-ups is just a little much. And by the way, one thought I had since then is one of the biggest advantage Bending Spoons might have is there's only one buyer of consumer assets, and there's a ton of buyers of B2B assets.

1:12:28So they probably get the pick of the litter. You know, in a way that there's 100 PE firms that want to buy your shitty B2B company, but no one was touching consumer assets. So I think a little bit they're getting the premium for being the only player in that town. But on the B2B side, the interesting question, now let me put it back at you, Jason. Do you think at 3x run rate revenues for a Constellation, which is a buy, roll, cash low business, buying pre-AI business, do you think that's a good bet? Or do you think that's fairly valued, they're cheap, going to zero from here? How do you think about that?

1:13:01Again, I don't want to pick on Touch Bistro. But I think in the agentic world, they can't be turned around unless you have an incredible new bending spoons-esque leader that wants to do it. They have sticky revenue, right? Anything with POS has sticky revenue because it's work. But it is terminal in the AI age. And so it's nothing new. This is just a crisp case study. Do you think? I agree. Touch Bistro is a given. But the interesting thing is can Constellation, like at 3x revenues, it's probably, I don't know, 20, but it's probably trading at 12, 13x cash flow. Salesforce is below 10x forecast cash flow.

1:13:36Now, these guys are really forecasting these kind of companies don't last 10 years is what they're effectively saying. I don't think they do. You don't. Interesting. That's a big hole. I think when the renewals come, they all just die like Marketo. They're just all going to die. Interesting. If you don't have the new revenue, you really are toast. I think, listen, it's just one because I'm close to it for fun. I was also one of the first 10 customers. I'm just watching Marketo, which Adobe bought, just because I've used it as a case study, but now I'm connected to so many folks there. It is going to zero, but it is one of the slowest decays you can get, right?

1:14:06Because moving off a marketing automation system in the enterprise is very slow, but it is without question going to zero. There are no net new logos and everyone hates it. And they just raised prices again on us 20 % while deprecating the API. So we're finally leaving. Salesforce did an LLM lift. It took one day to leave. It used to be a year. Now it's one day. So I just think all of these ones are, and I don't know what Constellation does with them if they're in terminal decay. I mean, I guess if you have 40 % free cashflow, it's just a spreadsheet, but the terminal decay is accelerating faster than I would have thought when we started this podcast for sure.

1:14:40That's the sentence. And that's helpful. You're right then. It may well be it's priced correctly because the fact is all these rollups had terminal decay in the future, but your comment is correct. If the speed of terminal decay accelerates, then you're right. Then the spreadsheet blows up. Interesting. I'm going to look at those numbers again. Sorry, literally, while we were recording, final one, I think. And it may not be one for a discussion or a continuation of what we discussed before about Nenlo and their fund size. But Greylock announced that they have raised their newest fund, Greylock 18.

1:15:10Greylock 18. Phenomenal fund throughout vintages and really unparalleled track across so many different years. But a$1.5 billion fund. I thought similar to the Manlo style could have raised much more very disciplined choice on one and a half billion given size of partnership. When was the last fundraise? Two and a half years ago. I guess that's disciplined then. No, this is a really disciplined firm, again, with a broad bunch of partners on a capital per partner basis. Well, look, it still would be nice to get into carry mode faster. As great as a mega fund is, all things being equal, it's a little longer to get those carry checks.

1:15:46And to state the obvious, those are different things. Are you optimizing for the office? Are you optimizing for the carry check? Let's be clear. I want to say this. The billion dollar plus funds have been able to make it work in this market because there's been places to put the money, going right back to it. So I'm not going to be a skeptic. You can't deny a fact. As Senator Moynihan said, you can have different opinions, but you have to have the same facts. So far, those big ass funds have worked given the market we've been in. But Jason's right. All other things have been equal. If you know you can raise pretty much indefinitely because you have a track record of 50 years of success and you don't want to play in the super late stage business where you have to write$200 million checks, then slightly smaller funds raise regularly increases the probability of a carry distribution on it before you've got grandchildren.

1:16:32on. Yeah, I don't know if it's, it might be disciplined and I'm sure they have plenty of annex funds and SBVs and SS and triple layered, quadruple layered sources of capital to tap into, but they say disciplined. Listen, if you can raise infinite capital and you don't have a massive partnership, I want to deploy it in 18 months. What's the amount of money I can deploy with my proper reserve models at 18 months and then just raise another fund? Like, is that disciplined or is that just how you should run your business? I mean, I would say two and a half years used, I mean, two and a half to three years would be more of the standard, but yes.

1:17:00No, man, I want to, what can I deploy? I do think you don't make the most money if you wait three years to deploy your fund. You make the most money if you can thoughtfully deploy it in 18 months, right? And then get going on the next fund. You're better at the math than me, but. Yeah, as they say, that word thoughtfully is very, as the LLNs would say, it's very load-bearing in that sentence, Jason. Well, I just, just to Perry's point, I just don't think that this is, what was the term you used, disciplined, Harry? This is one of these things we manufacture, like how wonderful it is Benchmark has a flat partnership.

1:17:27I mean, who cares? It's not disciplined. It's optimized to make the most money. It's not disciplined. The guys at Greylock didn't sit back and say, you know, we could make twice as much money, three times as much money with a bigger fund. But we'd like to we'd like to make half as much money as our goal for the next fund. Right. It's just nicer for everybody if we make less money. Right. You can you can be Andreessen. You can be Lightspeed. You can be GC. You can be Thrive where you are building a multi multi billion dollar platform. or you can be a Maritech, a Greylock, a Manlo, where you are maybe not building that platform to IPO.

1:18:00You're still raising in the case of... But I think the truth is, it goes back to that memory, we're talking about the three things, the secular, the secular and the crap. I think you should raise the money that allows you to pursue your business, provided your business is still strategically relevant. And you shouldn't raise the amount of money that's dictated by what other people are doing, except to the extent that perceptions change. And I think that's what they're doing. They're saying to do a different business, if you decided, I want to be in that late stage multi-platform thing, then you raise$5 billion.

1:18:26If you want to be in the predominantly early stage, but with the ability to follow on a rare occasions, then you raise the$1 to$2 billion that the manuals of this world, the great luxury world have done. More than that, I think the real point for this, to something Jason said, I think is correct. You use positive words like discipline, but the real test should be when you're as the GP alone, you should say, what are we good at? What's going to maximize the probability of us succeeding and minimize the probability of blowing up the franchise by getting it wrong? And if that's the meaning of the word discipline, then yes, it's disciplined.

1:18:57It's also, as Jason points out, to some extent, it should be what's disciplined for the LP should also be long-term maximizing for the GP. It's the Goldman Sachs rule. I want to be long-term greedy. And the part of being long-term greedy is preserving the franchise. And it's worth noting, just to make a point in passing, that two of the names you cited there in terms of the long... Actually, two of the names you cited, Greylock and Menlo, both celebrated their 50th anniversary plus. They've survived three very tough cycles. And, you know, just some of the other firms haven't really been through that same level of downturn.

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