20VC: Are LPs Open For Business? What Does it Take to Raise a Fund Today? How Has What LPs Want to See in Fund Investments Changed? Why Do LP Incentive Mechanisms Need to Change? Which Funds Will be Hit Hardest with Beezer Clarkson @ Sapphire Partners

21:33Is it endowments and foundations? Is it a certain type? I think I used to have a less nuanced view on that. And you would think, yes, pick a wonderful endowment that is a great name and is a great portfolio. You'd say if they invested, obviously it's a great fund. But you have to understand why it works in their portfolio versus our portfolio. And so it's not necessarily playing the same role and do you have to dig a little deeper and say, well, who are they and why are they doing this? Right. You buy that? I love you, but I'm like, I know so many where it's like, oh, Yale, oh, acts are invested.

22:04Oh, shh. Correct. No, no, it's a thing. I'm not saying it's not a thing. We just do our own work and want to have our own opinions. A lot of the other LPs are doing ventures to the earlier conversation against a myriad of things they're doing. And they don't, with some exceptions, have huge teams. So you people have to pick ways of making decisions and if they know if they co -invest with whatever endowment or foundation frequently they probably know them as people. Like there's definitely folks that refer us deals that we co -invest with and you're like, oh, I know how they process, I know how they think.

22:31That at least gives me some level of understanding versus somebody who, when you call them and you say, why do you invest in this fund and they say, oh, I'm only here for the direct deals. I don't care about the return as much or it's not that it doesn't matter. They're not doing it for the fund return. They're trying to write a 30 or $50 million direct check, we may like the same fun, but we're liking it for different reasons. What's the separator between those that are able to make it from emerging manager fund one to like blue chip institutions come on fund two, this is actually happening. There is so there is the whole myth or not myth of the persistency bias adventure, right?

23:04When you're with 20 VC, if you get these wonderful companies, other entrepreneurs will be like, oh, Harry's a great investor. He's got these wonderful other entrepreneurs that I know, these great companies that I know and so they'll bring you Dealflow. And then LPs see that and they say, oh, Harry has this great Dealflow. It might not be proprietary. Dealflow but it's proprietary access. And then the LPs want to join the party. And they come and then that gives you capital to keep going and running your business. And even though everyone always has a caveat of past performance does not guarantee future, there does seem to be, and there's been a zillion people studying this.

23:34So I can't quote them all, but trying to figure out, is there a persistency bias in returns? Again, people have disputed it. People believe in it. You have to pick your side of the table, but enough people invest believing that once you get that flywheel going, the best entrepreneurs coming to you, that they will persist. And that's why the LPs then also want to work with the same managers and that. So you just need to sort of figure out a way to get that going. And it takes a little bit of time. I mean, it's not going to happen. It's not that it can't. It's just very hard to do in your first fun cycle because it's just not enough time.

24:03The biggest thing that I see with that mindset on the stick to the quality of success is that we've I've worked prognosis with Sequoia and found a son before, and when I think about Brian singing when I'm Pat Grady, they're not worried at all about it going to zero, but they are very worried about upside maximization. And I think you get that uncapped upside lack of fear of downside through immense success. When you don't have that immense success, you're much more worried about getting fired, so to speak. Well you just talked about the attitude around power a lot much better than I did, and yes, I don't disagree with you.

24:32I remember I used to work at DFJ many years ago, and somebody's had his perspective on Tim Draper, they just said he sees fear very differently than the average person. He's the risk master. He's the risk master. And he just, but it was a really nice framing of your point about how do you take risk? And what's your appetite for risk and how do you think about it? And it's, yes, when you're swinging for the fences, you going back to what I said before, it is incredibly hard to be an early stage fund that has outperformance without a couple fund returners. You have to shoot for outperformance. You can't be like, oh, my tam's five and I'm going to get all of it.

25:02like those that might work in private equity and might work at growth stage, it does not work if you're trying to drive for out performance in your fund. Do you have to have ownership to have up performance? Oh, it's such a good topic. You can do it. You can certainly do it on a smaller fund. You have to then have a very high hit rate or those should say this way, the companies that exit have to exit even bigger vis -a -vis your fund size. So a lot of those funds that have the small benefits. We say it's small fund size, we're saying. 40, 45. We've yet to run the math and see a fund that's gone over 50 million that doesn't have to start having some trade -off between ownership and AUM.

25:35Again, you can get a coinbase in your fund and then, yeah, it moves the dial even if you have a $100 million fund, right? But now she doesn't think my point is that now she doesn't think you can make $50 billion exit. Well, if you have a $50 billion, sure, but if you have a $10 billion, which is a big thing, you're locked up. And actually you put a hundred K check -in at a 20 -mil pre, like it is today. You'll be 0 .5 % on entry. You'll be 0 .25 % on exit. I don't disagree. We run, I know this sounds so boring. Investing in a fund is art and science, and the science part cleans the deck very. But the art is very hard on the people, right?

26:10That's a people business. You have to go and spend time. But on the math of it, we just enter a rate of series A fund or a three X and C to a five X, and you just look at what the numbers line up at. And you say, okay, so given your ownership and giving the AOM, what needs to be true to return the fund one time and half a time. and then you say, okay, let's say the number is two billion. How many two billion dollar exits do you think you're going to get in your fund? And you can tell me what you think. And then, again, history's not always the same. But you look at this and you say, okay, to your point, you go back and you look at some very strong performing funds and you say how many did they have and what was the percentage of their companies.

26:42And you apply that math and again, like the future could be different. But you realize just how hard it is. It's really hard. Should we be more honest with our peers about our performance and our performance? I think often managers are a little bit like, you know, That's finding that way. I think there are ways of saying it that LPs can understand. We have managers who are very good at showing us, like, hey, here's the ones that we have questions on. They could turn it around. You never know. Here's the metrics. You just go to the metrics and you talk about it, what's going on with the teams, and you know where they're at.

27:10And venture is a risk business. Like, you don't go into early stage and expect every company to work. And one of the weird things about the market from the last 2020 to 2022, we did not, as an industry, have the loss ratios, even probably back earlier, that one would expect an venture. Like, you just had all these companies getting funded so they could continue to try and then it even became more relevant actually for the GPs to be able to talk about what was going on the company. And now there's, it's clear if product market fits been hit or if companies have just a ton of money and might spend time trying to find it.

27:38Do you think Eric Pady's right to say that this will be the biggest count on the average between TVPI and DPI? The only other time that would be equivalent would be about 99, 2000 and I don't know if there is the volume of funds in the market then, so an absolute number of things is probably right. It's entirely possible. So the question then is how much of the LPs value that but it's like you know I meet a lot of LPs in the walk around Hype Park and they always say to me, I just don't know what I'm saying on Hype. How do you advise me? I know what I say to them but I'm intrigued to hear first what you say to them.

28:07How do you advise LPs on how do you value your books given the ambiguity? Well I know a lot of LPs that will ask their managers and then go back home and take another 20 to 25 % off the top because there's things that nobody knows and then sometimes you're just we're just all wrong and something turns around like AI happens and some companies become rocket ships because they manage to do something with AI that works in the market and other companies not. The AI intelligence software is just so changed the market and what people are looking for that their companies now seem out of date and it was really strong but the customers aren't buying the same way because the product doesn't compete is affectable.

28:42Do you find that there's a differing level of transparency around book value across managers? Well everybody shares it but if what you're asking is do people value their companies differently? Yes. If you're an LP that has an existing book of venture business and you've got over different times, you will 100 % see that people will value their companies differently. Do you communicate that to the managers who are overvalued in their portfolios? Well, overvalues a relative term. I mean, I think if they ask the question, I think one of the things that GPs forget is that they can ask the LP's what they think.

29:11You'll learn incredibly interesting information like, no, if you're a colleague, they might not. I do know, I do know the I know, they might not, but I'm saying like you could ask to LPs and say, are you seeing these companies being held differently? And I would like to think the LPs would end. If so, don't tell me. Don't tell me. Well, and then I heard stories and this is the story. So put under the rumor and here say bucket, but that last year, the end of 2022 when the audors were getting involved, they were telling GPs to talk to each other to try to figure out how to value things. Because if you weren't close enough to a public comp, you had to value it off of like the last raise, which is a logical method, but if a company had raised three times in 2021 and was, you know, a hundred X multiple on revenue, and the company hadn't grown that much, it raises a lot of questions.

29:55There's an as you know, we get the track record from every GP before they come on the show at the disparity in numbers. This is enormous. We have one last week, which was a six billion dollar company in one book, and then it was sold for about 300 the next week. So let me ask you a question. Was it a seed manager or a series A manager that had the highest holding? It was a series B manager. Oh, okay. That disputes my theory because a lot of times seed managers they only might have information rights by the time a series BRC comes up so they might not have all the information that someone in the boardroom had.

30:23I know the series be mounted. I think it was delaying the notification of that overpayment of the price. Well, let me tell you another thing. LPs, I'm get paid on DPI, so I'm get paid on TVPI. Meaning that how they're holding their portfolio is relevant to how they are viewed not just for their personal paycheck but how they might be measured by an external US news and world report. And other things, there's a whole push pull in the market. It's not completely skewed in incentives. Yes. Should that not change? Potentially, but I'm not sure what the magic wand will be that'll change that. That seems so ineffective to me as an efficient weighing mechanism.

30:56Why would, what is the thing? Well, back in the old days of venture, TVPI didn't rock it up in one year as quickly as it is now. So a lot of these systems were put in place when things were a little bit more prosaic and how they managed along. TVPI used to be a pretty decent signal, not perfect. To see what DPI was coming. That, I would think, to the Eric Paley's point, got a little broken recently, because it was just very hard. If your company has raised three times in a year and is now worth 10 billion and you're a 50 million seed fund, that's a huge change, right? And up and down, and so there was a number of LPs that were telling their managers, just don't mark it up, or mark it up a little bit, like be really conservative, but it's hard to then argue to the auditors.

31:35you can't market to the last round if it was like two months ago because the otters will say typically they'll like use the most recent last rounds in the last six months. Especially if it's a very legitimate top tier farm. Totally. My most benevolent answer is a lot of these things were probably put in place when TVPI and DPI were not so dissimilar and so these things made more sense and now we're just the last few years made it look really just a lot more confused. Any other big misalignments that that's a really cool one. I think depending on who you are as an LP the fun size can and drives a misalignment, right?

32:05To your point about much larger funds and what they're trying to do and how they're trying to create returns and financial stability. But that also comes with, and this has been discussed on Twitter at Nazium. If it comes with a lot of management fee, and if you were able to work in a fund and make millions of dollars per year in management fee, that's very different from an LP who needs the money back to fund whatever it is they're trying to fund with it. Do you care about fees? Honestly, I hate the discussion on fees. So I got to hate the discussion on GP comments, It's like, you know, respect for as many billion and founders of funds.

32:34They can put in a lot more money than me. Doesn't mean that more committed than I am. It's ridiculous. I agree. I think there's no one -size -fits -all. And I definitely think for emerging managers, the management fee and the GP commit need to be looked at in the business case. Like, what are they using it for? We've had some funds in our program where I'm a little worried they can't pay their rent. Because you're like, there's no way this management fee can pay for it. So it doesn't surprise me when smaller funds have a 2 .5 management fee because you just have fewer dollars. What you typically as an LP like to see is as you layer the funds, the fees come down or you stop pulling fees on some vehicles.

33:04But again, it's always in the context of what it's the fun trying to do, how many people are there, what are the costs structure. And true point about GP commit, yes, it has been an unnecessary barrier to entry for too many. I think you and me have a different view of what funds size you need to do a seed fund today. But I think if you're leading seed rounds today, you can't have less than 100 million dollars. I agree, but then you need to be leading and getting what we're seeing is leading and getting low 10 to 11 to 12 % ownership. A thousand percent agree. But many people raise bigger funds and have 5 % ownership.

33:36You end up with the like, well then now you need this very large access which I wish everyone gets. Like there's no button, there's no shortage of wishing this works. But it just historically you're like, well you're going to have an incredible batting average. And again we want that to be true, that would be lovely. History would argue that's very unlikely. Okay. I'm just getting ripped apart for the deployment timelines. I think there's been many conversations with LPs suggesting GP slow their role. If a fund came to you in the beginning and said we're going to do an annual raise, I know some funds who say this and the LPs understand it and they sign up for it and they understand it.

34:06Yeah, so I see that happening. I see a lot of other funds saying, you know, this is going to be a two to four year raise or the LPs are like, hey, would like to see a bit more traction in your companies. Could you delay your fund raising or just slow it down and see what happens. Give it another six months, like getting through this market to our earlier conversation is not going to be necessarily easy and seeing how it rolls. I think those conversations are happening. You don't get fired for buying IBM. I'm using Cristuvos' line, so I was wanting to get credit when I'm stealing some of the credit.

34:33No, it was not going to sing like that. We did every day. No, he talks about is someone sort of investing the capital that they're really a manager of or a you sort of an employee of a firm. And you need to manage the business, so it's not saying they're not making thoughtful decisions, but it's a different viewpoint. If you're like, oh, I'm going to be here for three years. Do you know the average CIO is like a five -year tenure? I actually thought there were like 15 years, but no a friend of mine was like oh no It's three to five years. I'm not picking on those individuals But I'm saying if you're then in the stack and you're working for a firm and you're deploying capitals and LP You're taking you might be taking a different risk appetite Then if you're someone who's like hey listen We're gonna go find the next amazing fund and we're gonna be with them for a long time and this is a very different Entality do you find it hard not doing any managers new fund when you have to not doing new fund and you've been in and price funds.

35:17Oh, it's very hard. How do you have that discussion? It's delicate. We should have good reasons to start with. That is like the first principles of it. And then you share your thinking. You say, here's what needs to be true for us to come back. And we want to come back. We've shown people TVPI charts and say, we have to choose based on productivity. And it's not that we don't believe in you. It's just taking longer. Or some people graduate out of our program because they get launched, for example, right? So we'll do merging and establish. but if you're going to go on and raise a 1 .5 billion dollar fund or something that's outside of our program Yeah, I mean we think that's great that they've grown up and done that but that's not in our program Final one in terms of feedback to the GPs on distributions by the to holder that sell I think we've been lied to for a generation where it's like leaning and leaning and the best strategically Lanned out over time.

36:02Is there a distribution from our peas who were saying managers? You didn't take anything off the table in the good times I don't know if they're saying this to their GPs, but you hear a lot of people having concerns that they're now going to ride the TVPI all the way back down. To your point, you can manufacture some distributions, right? Like you can find if a company's not working, I think managers are now. I'm having more conversations with more managers who are like, hey, we're just going to try to find some soft landing for these companies. It's just not going to work. Which we've been expecting for years to my point about loss ratio.

36:32So that doesn't orderly surprise us, but you're not going to 3x your fund that way, right? You'll retain more than zero, but it'll kind of creates fodder on the bottom. You can't force a company to go public. But when you have a chance to sell secondaries, when you have a chance to distribute... I really do think these conversations are happening either with the GPs or amongst the LPs. I hear people talking about it. And just to understand why the manager did or didn't, and is that, is there a cogent reason? Whatever that reason is that makes sense. Like there is definitely times when there are small floats, and if you sell, it could be detrimental to the company.

37:03There were other times where it sort of gets at the, are you a fiduciary in the kind of way that I want to be associated and people will make choices. And then there are always going to be some managers that have that kind of L .P. pull that people will just keep working with. I think that list is getting smaller. And I think the names are switching around. Which names are the hottest? Well, I'm going to give a shout out. Pitchbook just did a new ranking for the, for based on, I'm not sure what Metro said pulled it. It was like capital calls versus distributions. And I don't know how they knew this, but you and Square had the first and the third spot.

37:30So shout out to them. I think founders fund having a moment in the sun and then just index consistency of TPI. Yes. Right. We're going to do a quick fire round. Okay. So what others not know that you know to be true? Okay. I'm going to kind of take a sideways answer to this. I have always really just great to me when people say somethings can't be done. I hate being told something's not possible and that you can't do it just because it just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean you can't do it. It just means it's harder. You are a case in point on this, right? I mean, what you've been taking to the market with the intermix of media and venture hasn't been done before people have tried in different respects but haven't nailed it the way you have it.

38:06I'm sure millions of people told you it couldn't be done. It just takes hard work. What would you change about the world of LPs? I wish LPA was better. That's such a small little way. LPA was better. It's so hard to read. It's so complicated. It's so not useful. As well as we had told to understand how our relationship works and it's just big legal pile of documents. But I think some of these things just end up being log jams in the ecosystem and the point That's just not the point. If you get to that place, it's a big mess anyways. What was the change in the world of managers, most? The great managers understand this.

38:34Who they are as an investor and how they build their firm is so specific to them. And then you have to have that. I really do think there has to be that interplay of the two of them for it to become a great firm. And I think a lot of people don't realize that. And they think it's just an easy business to pop up. And it can be. But then that's a smaller business. And it's not necessarily going to become a long enduring firm. You use a pop -up that I just think everyone miss on the sounds just how long this is. Everyone says 10 years. It's not 10 years. It's like 15 -20. And that's just one fun.

39:06Yeah. Let's be clear, that's one fun. Yeah, yeah. I find it actually that mind -boggling that people, I mean, if you want to have a pop -up business, do something direct because even then it's not sure. Like a job can be four or five years and you can try different things, right? With the wake conversation, equity structures work. But it becoming a GP, like, yeah, it is. You assume you're not doing off -angelist and it's not a small endeavor if you're trying to bring in other people and other LPs It's a very wide financial services business. What's the biggest manager? Miss you found oh this kills me so I passed on the initialized fund one because we had just launched yes I know I know it was bad but the reason I know I know no trust me I know but we were series A and we were looking for 75 to 200 million dollar fund sizes and they were sub 10 and see, so it was outside of scope.

39:55But I mean, it was outside of scope, so it's a way, outside of scope. It was early, so doing a couple of things, being super exceptions early on. But to the point of, I'm gonna quote, Nikhil from your last podcast with him from footwork, exceptions should be made for exceptional people. And yes, to this day that's always sticks in my head. What's the strongest belief you had which turned out to be wrong? We've definitely tested a bunch of hypotheses and different things, and I keep going back to this, but it's so clear and early stage, if you're not taking a big swing for the fence, which doesn't mean saying taking ridiculous, I haven't thought about it, right?

40:26But you just have a lot of people that think that they can do smaller investments. Like, I call the growth equity mindset in a smaller earlier fund, which probably can work in some scenarios and it works for some LPs that want to do direct investments. I just don't think that's where you can get the long -term performance. If you're going to see the sub -50 million all the fund, what's a good performance? If it's seed, we're going to try to underwrite to a 5X. Because people throw out big numbers. You often hear that, you know, I'm definitely going to be a 10X. If you know how freaking hard it is to a 10X, I thought there's so many fewer of those than people thought I appreciate because TVPI looked bonkers the last few years people thought it looked different but I think maybe this is the value of being old I mean I've been playing adventure in some former and other since 2000 and I was doing emerging markets in 94 for project finance And I can tell you it is hard Who is most consistent dpi returns?

41:13Oh, you'd have to pull into so many different books But I think the numbers will tell you if you ask different LPs if you can get three or four funds in a row with strong dpi that is world class. Usually there's a fund or two which has a tougher time. Like no surprise, 2021 might be a tough thing to do. Someone's told me that LPs invest for a banger of a fund, a math fund, an arrow out is going to be a dog fund. That's not true, because there's sometimes things just mess. But if there's consistency elsewhere, there's consistency of theme, consistency of thinking, consistency of team, just going back and asking different LPs and their portfolios, it's very hard to have three or four funds in a row that'll be called a three And unless you really fuck up, do you still have three funds?

41:50Does that rule still hold true? Would you think people are much more fun life underpending? Oh, to our conversation before, institutional LPs, this is why they don't make a lot of new bets every year, is because they're looking for managers that think they can be with a multiple fund cycles. But I can tell you if you want me to digress into graduation rates. We've been looking at data going back to 1995. I was shocked at the breakage. The breakage between Fund 1 and Fund 2 is not every year, but average is out to about 50%. Well, again, because we've got the law of large numbers coming in at Fund1, there's so many smaller funds.

42:20And the reason for that is because the small fund alps, often many individuals, don't scale into institutions. Yeah, sometimes people don't realize if I'm making a personal commitment every two or three years, that can be expensive and you might not understand that. It could be that GP themselves don't really want to do it. What was also sort of heartbreaking was the Fund1 to Fund4 on average. Again, these are averages. Some years are better. Some years are worse. It's 17%. So it's not a slam dunk, but even if you get to that doesn't surprise me as much Doesn't surprise me as much what we think is also interesting is just if you play at one fund one to fund Eight the numbers are terrible because you've got such a large breakage in the early years But even if you get to a fund for there's still pretty significant breakage going on to other years because then performance Can be seen once the board's a figure reason for funds to not make it do you think from fund one to fund 14 breakage and partnership right down or performance.

43:11Back in the day, you had three years between funds. You're talking about a decade of investing. So I think performance would be able to be being seen and then tied into that as like strategy and all those things. And then I think team, it's very, very hard to do this because you know and documents it. But you could see we ran the numbers on funds that from every year, who was the one that has gone on to raise the most vehicles, core vehicles, not all the other layer. They went multi -strategy. We didn't track all that. A .O. shocked the fun sizes didn't balloon as much as I thought they would because the dollars were going into these other growth vehicles.

43:40But you see these funds that got to, you know, fund 4, 5, 6, and then never raised another fund, it would have to be some combination of team and track record. Maybe you did so while you didn't want to keep going, there's a positive side of that, which is it's good. Roger, I remember. I think we should celebrate more as an industry. That's amazing. It's fantastic and it's great. I mean, to a point about it's 15 years per fund. I mean, this is like a body of work for 30, 40 years. There's that is a long time to do one job. People should be allowed to stop. Do LPs mind opportunity funds? I think you have to ask each one's.

44:10I'm always surprised at the different view points around the room on any given opportunity fund. I know some people that do it to try to get into the core fund, Segway and they used to be, oh, the other thing we're seeing this market is people are unstepling their funds because a number of LPs felt dragged into it to the point of I want to support you. I'm not so excited about this other vehicle, but I want to support you so I'll write a smaller check. But yes, I think it's a combination of things and I think that's also why fun 4 to 7 has the same challenges and people also You have to bring up the next generation and people management if you're doing deals Who in the firm is also thinking about people management and people training and all these things come into play that is much more about Managing a firm than just investing but you need to do both if you're gonna be that kind of long -term Will we see unstaped and continue do you think I was suspect for at least the next 12 months to the extent that people feel pressure to raise they're going to try to be more LP aligned and if folks don't want to do it, there's a couple in the market now Susa very publicly tweeted about changing.

45:08It's not an opportunity fun per se but changing out there I think they had two funds another having three. They're raising independently. So folks are looking at it and talking about it It's the new normal. Is this return to old? I think this feels a bit more traditional venture which doesn't feel terrible to me I think the industry is still healthy. I think it's going to the world is going through a bit of a rough patch so this is not a fun time. I think we're bumping along the bottom. I think it should start coming up at some point. No, I don't know if Jason's rights, the back half of 24 or your right is 2025.

45:37At some point it will come back up. That's broken clock like me. Can we write twice a time a day? Well, this is a Birkenstockskin public. Maybe Jason's right. I love my works. I do have to say they're very comfortable. There we go. Can you talk to me about the news with Calc? As we mentioned it before and it's been discussed in obviously the media recently. What does that mean? And what changes? Yes. So we were very excited. We announced this about two weeks ago that we've taken over the early stage venture fund mandate for CalSTRS And what this means so for folks that aren't familiar with CalSTRS are the world's largest Educator pension fund in the world which is pretty cool And they've been to their credit running an emerging manager Program now for decades and back in the day when they started it was a mix of private equity some health care some venture and going Forward they now picked us to work with them on the early stage venture fund and the pivoted to focus on specialized managers and where they're venture specialist, which means we now are going to take their money, which we're very grateful for them trusting us with and deploy it into US early stage venture funds, emerging.

46:35So that's funds one through three, which then adds additive to our existing programs. So the answer is yes, we're deploying more. Ten years time for Biza. What would you like that? You obviously just launched Calcester's new program as well. Doing this? No, this is my, this is, I know it's helped. There's more than ever. Yes. Why? So I started a sapphire 12 years ago. I know and I always thought this is what I wanted to do But then when you get into the doing of it. No, this is like my life's work If you said me what else do you want to do? I used to kind of think I wanted to be secretary of state That is so never ever ever have anything retoss that I doubt when I was about 24 That's great in the movies.

47:10I thought Mal and I'll whatever edit out the names I thought it was a fascinating position for the US government But now no like that was said that was like my college and I was like what could I be and then I was like no Oh, this is definitely about the private world. I love it. I love being an LP. I love working with early stage managers, the emerging and the established. I think what people don't know about us is we first had a cool and then he was 2016. And it was a 10 PM in London. And I remember I was still living at home with my family. And you needed to cause like half an hour for an intro cool.

47:36And I remember that cool landed at like 1 -1 -15. And I was like, I really enjoyed that cool. That was a great cool. And we've been friends ever since, which is like eight in seven years. I know. I love it. I was young. You were. for you are younger. Look as much younger. We've been really younger eight years ago. You're a friendship and I love doing this. Oh, thank you for your friendship and thank you for having me. As I said, that one was so much fun, Stu. I loved having Beeser in the studio. It made such a difference to it in person. If you'd like to see the episode in full, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC.

48:08But before we leave each day, I've always been a big history man and so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley is one of the most active firms in advising in both early and late -stage financings, handling more than 1600 private financings every year with an equal split of investor and company clients. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm, representing VC -backed companies going public, head over to Cooley .com and also check out CooleyGo .com, Cooley's award -winning free legal resource for entrepreneurs and then HMC or Harvard Management Company.

48:49They're constantly seeking out the next generation of truly great investors and entrepreneurs. HMC has managed Harvard Universities in Daumen for nearly 50 years and was one of the first institutional investors in venture capital. They're experiencing long -term investment horizon, making them ideal partners to get world -changing ideas on a path to viability and success, they work as a true partner, providing insightful perspectives to help managers succeed. I personally found the pleasure of working with the HMC team and can say that they're truly exceptional partners and just great great people to work with.

49:21Whether you're launching your first fund or your fifth, HMC welcomes the opportunity to partner with both developing and established managers. Have an idea you want to share with the team, just send it to ventureathmc .harvard .edu. you. As always I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for a very special episode coming on Friday at first of its kind and I cannot wait to hear your thoughts.