20VC: Corgi Insurance: The Most Intense Workplace Culture in America: 7 Days Per Week, Founder Sleeps in Office, Corgi Cafe Open 24 Hours a Day, 60% of First 30 Employees Have Corgi Tattoos | The Journey from $0 to $2.6BN Valuation in Just 2 Years

18:32Harry Stebbings:And she said, huh, I just saw a job application. and I was like, well, I'm sure it's not related. It's a San Francisco company. She's a lawyer in London. And she was like, no, no, it's the same one. Cafe expansion head. And I was like, that seems eerily similar to Corgi's role. And I was like, maybe it is. Talk to me. You have 24-7 Corgi Cafe. Why? You're an insurance company. Yeah, so when we rented out our building in San Francisco, we needed to get signage on the side of the building and it was zoned or something. So when we got our primary floor, we were forced to take over the retail space.

19:10And it was like this empty barbershop. It was like really dungy. Like, you know, I'd been out of business for probably a couple of years. We moved in and, you know, everything was fine. And, you know, we have the sign on the side of the building. Great. But I'd walk in every day and I'd see this like empty barbershop. And it would just piss me off because like I'm paying for that. But like there's nothing in it. Like it's a waste of, you know, it's a waste of everything. At the same time, a huge complaint I have with San Francisco. Everything closes really early. like it's a big problem, especially in the financial district where offices and there's a lot of really great startups that want to like push themselves hard, but you cannot find a cafe.

19:44You can't even find a place to eat past like six, 7 p.m. most days. Like things just are, it's a ridiculous situation. Clearly most restaurants don't have a growth mindset. The other issue that I think we wanted to address is that for people that are serious about technology, about building things, about starting things, there's not actually, even in San Francisco, which is supposedly the center of technology for the world, You know, there's not a lot of places where people can actually, who are serious about that, can come together, have a place where they can basically work hard. Yeah, we decided to just kind of impromptu.

20:14It wasn't like a big planned out thing. Open up a 24-7 cafe. Caught on a lot more than we thought it would. Now it's always full. There's people signing term sheets and getting deals done.

20:24Harry Stebbings:How much money did it take to start a cafe? We spent under$100 ,000 opening it. Spent under$100 ,000 opening it. Yeah. Has it been successful? I mean, it's always full. If you go there, you can go there at 3 a.m. And I'd recommend writing term sheets to everyone there because they're working hard. I can't tell you, it's probably like over 20 people have told me like, oh, like I submitted my YC app and like the Corgi Cafe and I got in or something along those lines. Or I signed a term sheet there. You should do Corgi Ventures, which operates from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. And it's like those founders that are there.

20:56Yeah. I mean, the problem is if anything becomes a measure of success, it ceases to be a good measure once the alpha disappears very quickly.

21:05Harry Stebbings:I totally get you. Does it make money? We lose money on the cafe with sponsorships because our drinks are sponsored and shout out to our drink sponsors. You have like Brexpressos. Yeah, Brexpresso. We have Deal. We have a couple of them. What do Deal sponsor? It's the Deal Speed. It's a smoothie. Oh, I like that. Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. Deal love Deal Speed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So with that, I think we're probably slightly profitable if i was an investor i'd say nico i love you dude i love the energy this is a fucking distraction yeah they hated it at first why why are you doing a cafe expansion how you sound exactly like our investors i got i got a ton of calls and texts that said that before it opened oh no no no no no i did no no i've learned that you don't get any credit until it's working criticizing a founder so i just don't you know what i do dude i'm here for you well done our Our investors didn't get the memo.

21:58So I heard plenty of that.

22:00Harry Stebbings:But dude, why are you doing it? I get it in SF, cool. You're opening in London. Yeah. I mean, we have an office in London. I think I'm very bullish London, actually. Why are you bullish London? I think the talent is exceptional, both British talent and European. And I think, you know, there's very few places in the world where if you tell someone like pretty much anywhere to move to, they're like very happy to do so. I think San Francisco is one of those places. I think New York's one of those places, although I don't think that good companies tend to be in New York. And because of that, I think that there's certain exceptional qualities that London has.

22:32And given the whole visa situation in the United States, I think there's actually a phenomenal opportunity for London to become a center of AI and a center of tech. So we opened a London office before we opened a New York office. We're very long London. Do you find it much cheaper to hire in London? It's a little bit cheaper. I think maybe we're paying above market, but we're not paying that much. The thing is, if you're working for a salary working at Corgi, you're doing something wrong. If you're super hyped about your cash comp, then probably -

23:01Harry Stebbings:Are you more generous than others on equity? Because you understand that you are asking for more of someone's life being seven days old. Yeah. We're generous with top-offs. After people are working, we give more equity based upon performance. That's where we're generous, more than the initial equity that people sign on. Okay. So it's like accelerators on milestones hit. Yeah, I mean, it's a little more ad hoc than that, but yeah, something like that. We said about distractions. A lot of founders angel invest. How do you think about founders actively angel investing? I don't angel invest. I think it's a distraction.

23:32It doesn't feel like it's core to winning. Have you sold secondaries? No, I haven't sold any secondaries. People are always trying to buy them, but I've yet to sell a single secondary. Why is that? Because our equity is going up, or maybe I shouldn't say that, But I believe our equity is going up and I'm voting with my feet. If I have the, in my opinion, the scarcest asset that I could have any meaningful influence over. And I think that we're going to keep doing well and keep kicking ass. You know, why would I sell that? Like, I don't really have a.

24:02Harry Stebbings:You don't have huge rent to pay. That's for sure. That's true. Despite the bullishness on London, you're still super bullish on SF. Yeah, I love San Francisco. Why is the amount of great talent building in SF, is it just there's nothing else to do there? That might be part of it, which is maybe a bit of a problem that London has. Things are actually open later in London and there's more people about too many pubs. That might be a problem. It's a lot of pubs. There are a lot of pubs. Do you drink? No, I don't drink. But I think San Francisco is a special place because particularly with people in the US, if you want to do something big with your life and you're not really quite sure where to go to, San Francisco is an end destination where if you're a bit nerdy and if you love technology, you love programming, you love these slightly unpopular topics, it's a place where you can actually find your people oftentimes and where you'll find yourself moving to.

24:59And I think that that's a special quality. It's almost like a spiritual quality. Everyone's in an exile or something. And I think that that's something that's very unique. That's why New York is not a good place to have a company at all. The people that move their companies to New York do so because they want to date. That's the only real reason why they do. Same with Miami or all of these other places. If you're hardcore about startups and you're American, then I think you should go to San Francisco. Oftentimes, I mean, there's super great other cities. I do like Chicago, and we have an office in Dallas.

25:33That's really great too. And if you're hardcore about startups outside of the United States, I think London is second to none as well. Although you got to avoid the pubs.

25:43Harry Stebbings:The pubs are really getting it. I get you. We've spoken a lot about everything from chefs to signage on buildings, to Corgi Cafe, to work ethic. You're a little bit younger than me, but I do reflect on how I've built the company. When you reflect on what you did that you wish you hadn't done. What was the biggest? I don't dwell on mistakes. I think... How very Marc Andreessen of you. Yeah, I think I look more at the victories than the losses because I think there's more to learn from the victories. And if you can kind of emulate the things that have worked really well again and again. There's a brilliant commencement speech by Matthew McConaughey at the University of Texas or University of Houston.

26:24Harry Stebbings:He says, you know, study success and the importance of lessons from success. If I would have then flip it and say, what success have you studied and what do you learn from it? What would you say that is? I think that you need to look at the greats. And the greats are oftentimes outside of the context of startups. Like, you know, people like there's obvious like famous startup founders. But I think that looking at everyone from Alexander the Great to Napoleon to, you know, so on and so forth is also very informative. If you want to like change the world, if you want to do something important and you don't want to just be like a memetic copy of everyone else or you want to be class president or something, that's fine.

27:02But if you want to actually do something big, then I think that being a student of the greats is great. The important thing, I think, is probably not copying them. You should have your own style. But being a student of history is probably a pretty positive thing.

27:14Harry Stebbings:If I were to ask you, what's Corgi's culture in one word? What would you say it is? We have a culture of winning. Winning. That's it. That's it. Maybe in the past I would have answered like ex-founder, like hackers, like other things. But I think all that's actually kind of fake and we just like winning. How big is the team? Maybe a bit over 100 now. Can you maintain the intensity that you have today when you're at 1 ,000 people? Yeah, easy. Really? I think so. Why has no one else been able to do it? So naturally, there's roles, I think, that creep in. A lawyer or an accountant are not going to work in the same way that a software engineer might.

27:53And that's just a fact of life. So, okay. So if they don't want to work quite as hard, then you just need to hire more of them for the same work output, which is okay. It's just like a return on investment calculation. The only reason I can think of is, you know, there's some point in which you need to take the off ramp of being super hardcore and you need to accept maybe lower growth, but less volatility. I personally, at least at the current stage I'm at, don't mind volatility is something that I think can produce alpha in a lot of ways.

28:21Harry Stebbings:What would you say to people who say that you're exclusionary in the work culture and that parents couldn't do what you want? I mean, we have plenty of parents that work at Corgi. So life's about tradeoffs and sacrifices. I think Corgi is a great place to work if you want a sense of community and camaraderie with the people you work with. If you want to have friends in the workplace, the social life attached to your workplace. If you want your work to be additive to your life as opposed to separate. That applies whether you're married, whether you have kids, don't have kids. Some of our best people have a lot of children.

28:49But if you want to clock in and then just check out of work, then respectfully, there's infinite other jobs you can get. And that's OK. You know, Corgi's not for everyone.

28:59Harry Stebbings:Do you care about the backlash that you get when you speak about this? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I get a lot of backlash. The death threats and the DMs, you know, people think I'm nuts. Do you care? Not really. No, I don't know. I mean, I... Have you ever cared? Yeah. I don't know. I think when you're a young person, particularly, I think, young men don't have that much support within society. And I think it's something, of course, that weighs on people, particularly if you don't have a lot of external validation or credibility yet. Credibility is something that is hard to get, which goes back to the crisis of legitimacy that I think is core to startups.

29:36Harry Stebbings:Do you think you're legitimate yet? I know that sounds strange. I mean, so we're more regular than a bank and we make a lot of revenue. and have raised money. I don't think we're quite legit yet. I think we're getting there. I think you're legitimate when you're in that you don't get fired for buying IBM. And I would, in my context as a fund, if you're Andreessen or you name these big, large platforms, you don't get fired as an LP for doing Andreessen. Right. Like period. Yeah, that's probably exactly right. The thing is, in the fund context, Andreessen or Kleiner or even Sequoia back in the day, at some point they were just a couple guys in some shitty room that like didn't really know like what they were doing and were making it up as they went along and they were probably pointing not probably they certainly were pointing at other people and saying oh one day we'll be legit like them and the institutional lps will take us seriously there's always you know more legit right you can go go from pension funds to university endowments to to the government you know that's the ultimate form of legitimacy probably because the government can just take people's money.

30:40Harry Stebbings:What are your lessons on paying people? So what I've learned, for example, is that when people ask for more money, they tend to be very good. When they ask for more title, they tend to be very bad. Any lessons on salaries, benchmarking, comp? Low cash comp is something good, generally speaking. Who ends up doing extremely well? If people are doing well, you need to just give them more equity, especially, and make it so that if they're doing a very simple return on investment calculation, that the highest EV thing they can do is work in their current role. And if you can't provide that upside, there's no reason for them to continue working super hard, and they should be doing something else, whether that's working for someone else or starting their own thing or whatever.

31:26I think separate from the comp and the simple EV calculation is that you need to actually be solving big problems. And if you're not solving big problems, then no matter how much you pay people, you're not going to retain them if they're actually good. You can probably split, like, with any organization, the team into three. You can have people that are, like, really good, people that are kind of fungible and, like, mediocre, and then people that are bad. And I think getting rid of the bad very quickly is important, even if it makes a lot of noise.

31:52Harry Stebbings:Do you keep the mediocre? I wouldn't put it like that, but, you know, I think in any organization there's people that, you know, you wouldn't be devastated if they left. The question I always ask is, knowing what you know now, would you hire them again? it's the most important question. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people where the answer might be yes, but you're not going to be sobbing and punching the wall if they're no longer with you. Fundraising is a big part of your job as a CEO. You recently raised, I think, 1.5? Yeah, 1.3. 1.3 from TCV. Love TCV, love John Doran, spoke to him before the show.

32:26Harry Stebbings:What are your single biggest lessons on fundraising, having raised now across pre-regulated, post-regulated, revenue scaling very fast. What are the most non-obvious lessons you have from raising several hundred million dollars? You know, I don't know if I'm actually an expert there or anything like that. Do you think you're a good fundraiser? I think I'm all right at it. I've had to do it for years now. So I think if you have to do anything for years. What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started? Yeah, when I started, my pitch was not very good. Like I remember my first pitch.

32:55Who was it to? Probably first round capital was my first pitch. Way back Back in the day, the very first VC I ever talked to was at Google Ventures. But yeah, I mean, my first pitch for Corgi, I think, was maybe first round capital. I remember I took a red eye the night before. My eyes were actually red. I looked like I was high or something. I was so nervous because we had to get$5 million and we had 24 hours. I flew back Thursday night. I was like, oh, we'll get the money to you in a couple of days. You know how the banks are. It'll take some time to transfer the money. So I started pitching Friday.

33:26We had Saturday, Sunday, and had to get the money by Monday. and you know I think the pitch was not was not very good honestly it was I think it was a lot of like like just trust me I wasn't telling them the name of the insurance carrier because I was afraid they'd like call them and ruin it the first set of pitches I did weren't that good and you were raising two on ten we were raising uh five on uh 28 with that one and that was 2024 so that wasn't wasn't super easy that was recently it was like two years ago yeah what was the best

33:55Harry Stebbings:VC meeting you had? The worst are when it's like super structured and when they start asking me like BS about like our like balance sheet or like, you know, they get in the nitty gritty. I'm not that type of guy. I think that the best ones tend to be when someone is like very like growth minded or product minded. We just get to vibe about like where we're going and like how we're going to win. So what was the best VC meeting that didn't invest? I've had plenty of great ones that didn't invest. I'm not going to put them on the spot because they might invest later on. ah okay what was the worst oh i've had some really bad have you had some really bad i've had some i've had people like especially the first round like the early stage investors are disrespectful i've had people driving i've had people flossing their teeth on the meeting like chowing down food like like barbecue ribs or something where it's like getting all over their face i've i've seen it all what do you say i mean please finish flossing it's okay like yeah i had one on a facetime where the guy was like hitting his vape and i thought he was asleep because he just had eyes closed, like leaning against the wall.

34:54I've had some like crazy pitches, particularly at the early stage.

34:58Harry Stebbings:What are your biggest advice to founders on price? Price is a difficult one. Yeah, I think price, Brian Chesky told me one time to never take the highest price, and I've taken that to heart. So we never take the highest price ever. That's just a good rule of thumb. Like we always go with like the second or third highest price. I don't do a lot of negotiating on price. I just kind of see where the market's at. And then if something seems reasonable, I just stick with it. And we could raise all of our rounds at higher prices, but we never do. How long does it take to raise rounds for you normally?

35:27A couple of days at most. If you're in the market for a long time, it's a bad thing. Maybe it's a good thing for your valuation or for the amount of money you're raising or funds you're raising from. But I think it's a bad thing for the company because you start to optimize for selling equity instead of selling your goods and services. Fundraising is super distracting. It's not quite as bad as audits after you like get the term sheet but like it is pretty distracting couple of days at most i hear

35:52Harry Stebbings:you i'm on the other side of that deal and i'm like dude i'm with you you don't want to do it i don't want to be in a fundraise process with you either but i do want to get to know you and i do want you to know me well vcs always say that but the thing is they could put in the work to get to know you but they never do and i think that i don't so again this is interesting because like we're totally on the other side of the table we fucking try and you know what we get thanks so much for your email we're heads down yeah well what the fuck i'm heads down you know because if you if you're working on an important deal that's going to like double your your revenue the last thing you want to do is meet with some vc i get it but then help me understand you know what an investor told me one time actually he said good companies get deals done at first i was mad i was kind of pissed to hear that.

36:40It was like a backhanded, it wasn't even a compliment, I guess, it was just an insult. He was implying that we weren't a good company because we weren't getting deals done. I've actually taken it to heart because I think it's true. Good companies do get deals done. Since then, we've shifted our approach and we've started getting deals done. We've stopped being such absolutists and we move with haste, time kills all deals. As a company, we get deals done. That's the key. I think that a venture capital firm, it's a lot of things. It's a brand, a lifestyle business. But one thing is certainly as a company, good companies get deals done.

37:13And I think that applies to venture capital firms too. Some deals are made in times of crisis. I think the venture deals that I respect most of all are the ones that I hear about from my funds where their company was not doing well at all. And a VC came in and saved them. And the amount of gratitude I think that founders have for something like that is extreme. The amount of courage it takes to do something where the company might be contentious or controversial, or the metrics might be going in the wrong direction, not the right direction. That type of behavior, I think, is hard. And I think doing the hard thing in venture is rare, unfortunately.

37:48Harry Stebbings:But genuinely, then, you would rather do a deal with someone you don't really know if it's in a few days? One thing I know about them is they can get deals done quickly. Sure. So they can also be assholes. That's true. And I've had plenty of bad investors in my life. bad investors much worse than no investor and it's hard to get rid of them. But the thing is, if you're doing well and if you're pricing your company cheap and if you go out to market, you can get a deal done very quickly. It's just the fact. Why would you waste time? Do you think you price your company cheaply? Yeah. We price all our deals cheaply.

38:20Harry Stebbings:Why? I mean, people might not think that when they see our stuff posted, but I think every round that we raise, we could raise at a higher valuation. I'm very sure of that. Are you not doing a disservice to your existing investors by not? I don't think so. They all got good deals too. You know, if we were a public company, we'd probably be worth less because the public markets don't know how to evaluate high growth or potential. Talk to me about that. Look at the financial services companies on the public markets. They're all terrible. They all don't grow, but they're good. So are they mispriced or are they actually accurately priced because they don't grow and they have poor margins?

38:51Harry Stebbings:Some of them have good margins. You know, they make money. Private markets feel to me like they're a vehicle for valuing growth, whereas public markets feel like they're a vehicle for valuing cash flow. In the past, we'd call dividend stocks. Maybe that's not so favorable if you're looking for asymmetric upside and are an investor because you don't have access to private deals as much. But certainly from a company perspective... Do you not think at some point all companies are embodiment of their future free cash flow? That is what a company valuation is? No, I don't think so. Maybe at some terminal point from a theoretical perspective, but brand is worth something and identity is worth something.

39:32Why do you buy a Rolex watch instead of a Chinese copy of a Rolex watch? They might be the same materials or the same whatever, both tell the time.

39:41Harry Stebbings:If I give you unlimited money, what would you do that you're not doing today? So for example, I'd be on the side of an F1 car. I would be opening Japan. If you had unlimited money, I think you'd have, you know, bigger things to do than be on the side of an F1 car. But there's a lot of things I'd love to do. I think within the context of Corgi, every single super, super regulated financial institution type, where right now it's run on fax machines and with boomers, we'd like to have those, not waste people's time and charge less fees and make everything a little more protected and a little more efficient and a little more profitable.

40:20I think outside of that context, I'm a techno-optimist. I believe very strongly in the power of technology to make the world a better place across a wide variety of industry sectors. Corgi is a bet mostly on the most regulated sectors, but there's very few problems that technology can't solve. And probably there's a lot of areas that are exciting, like in medicine and mental health. There's crises in a lot of concurrent areas where I think technology can make things a lot better.

40:46Harry Stebbings:What role do we not have today that you think we will have and be very commonplace in five years' time? I don't know if it's like a role in particular, but I think that actually AI makes sales and marketing much more important than it was in the past. In the past, I think if you had a really rock solid, like super hardcore engineering and product team, you could come out with something that would just like blow everyone away. It'd be faster, it'd be better. Now you can make something faster and better. If you don't have people to sell it or to market it or to tell people that it exists, it's not really worth the whole lot.

41:19There's like organic network effects around, particularly B2B product launches just don't really exist in the same way that they used to.

41:26Harry Stebbings:Do you think traditional B2B marketing is good? I think traditional B2B sales is good. I think marketing is awful. Why? There's a lot that B2B could learn from consumer. The conferences are not it. I'm not a fan of going and hanging out with a bunch of sweaty people in a room. I don't really like that. I think that consumer companies have perfected marketing and B2B companies have perfected sales, much like in a company where you have like a dominant product, how that kind of becomes the company. And like, it's hard to like really care that much about auxiliary revenue streams. As an industry, if you're selling B2B products, like you're going to get very good at sales and marketing will tend to be an afterthought in most instances.

42:06Harry Stebbings:I do want to move into a quick fire where I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yeah, sure. So I think changing one's mind is important. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? There's a lot I've changed my mind on. I've grown to value experience a lot more. In the past, I've probably made certain statements around boomers being slow and bad. I've definitely undervalued people that have been doing something for a long time because a lot of times there's these little nuances or edge cases. When you do something for a long time, you pick up.

42:41And maybe you're not as fast or as efficient or as able to use the latest tools. But there's an extraordinary amount of knowledge that lives in kind of the older generations, especially the retiring ones. And I think it's a big problem in that there's trillions of dollars to make getting that knowledge out and putting it inside of computers that can think and talk. I don't think I viewed those problems in that lens. I think I just considered old people using fax machines moving at two miles per hour to be like something uniformly bad. But now I see that there's value in their knowledge.

43:12Harry Stebbings:Who do you not have on the board that you would most like to have on the board? I don't like boards. Why? I believe in executive decision making. You know, our board's great and yada, yada, yada, all the disclaimers. But I think you just need to be able to decide and you need to be able to do things. You think Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg are caring what their board thinks or their board, you know, you think that they're like, all right, guys, let's huddle up. Let's like make a decision. Like every committee decision, I think, is like BS. Like sometimes you need to be able to take an unpopular stance and you just need to be able to plant your flag in the ground.

43:43There is a board to check the box. I think so, a little bit. Like, it's, you know, a little theatrical. I guess it's good to make sure you're not, like, a scam or, like, doing, like, blatantly illegal stuff. But if management is, like, unethical or unscrupulous enough to scam people or do illegal stuff, then they're going to do it anyways, probably, with or without a board, and that's a management problem.

44:02Harry Stebbings:You can buy OpenAI or Anthropic today, both at the same price,$900. Which one do you choose? Yeah, I'm going to get in trouble for this probably, but I guess the disclaimer is this might be a stated preference versus a revealed preference, given that we spend maybe like $400 ,000 per month on Anthropic and$0 on OpenAI at the moment. But I think that spiritually, OpenAI is, I guess, a little more pure because they kind of created this idea of an AI lab as a company, dating all the way back to YC research. And Anthropic is a result of employees that didn't like the management or the direction. There were complaints about profit and ethics and all this other stuff.

44:42And the EA movement and all of that. I think when your origins are that impure, it's a little hard to overtake the king. And right now, Anthropic, frankly speaking, has been out executing OpenAI. Their product's much better. We use the best product in every category, at least from an enterprise or workflow automation perspective. Anthropic's better, so OpenAI needs to lock in.

45:07Harry Stebbings:How easy is it for you to switch back? I don't think it'd be that hard. Although all of the labs are always trying to make us signed contracts. And if they give us a big enough discount on tokens, then we'd consider it. What is no one talking about that you're spending more and more time thinking about? To me, there's good companies and there's everyone else. I think the number of good companies is very small. And a good company wants to win is like world historic will be talked about in like 100 years. Those companies, there's just not many of them because people don't want to win. They don't want to put in the work.

45:38They don't want to, and that's okay. Like it's okay to be average and part of the mediocre masses or whatever. That's all right. But I think that the cultural or internal kind of character of the companies that are good companies is something that's not appreciated enough. From a metaphysical level, there's a really big difference between Andrel and like Anthropic, right? Those are like super different companies. I think both of those could be good companies. But I don't think people really understand the philosophy behind the management teams that they're investing in.

46:09Harry Stebbings:Who do you think is the most underappreciated CEO today? When you look at your style, who most aligns to your style? My style is my own style. I try to just do me. I think there's plenty of super underappreciated CEOs. that one area where more than venture-backed companies, what I would love to see more of are venture funds speaking out about these sort of important topics. And I know startup founders love to clown on VCs for chiming in about topics that they might not know a lot about. But I think that venture funds are actually in, despite the fact that they need to raise from LPs and LPs can crack the whip or whatever, I think that venture funds are in a really strong position to influence the way that the startup ecosystem looks because they're setting the incentives and incentives often drive behavior.

46:59One thing I would love to see are the CEOs or the people that are running venture funds actually take a more active stance in aligning their deployed capital with the changes that they'd like to see in the world. And to me, that's perhaps a more important issue than any particular company's CEO or management team, broadly speaking.

47:17Harry Stebbings:Would you blame VCs for the dramatic increase we've seen in fraud, especially around ARR. We put so much emphasis on zero to 100 million in X amount of time. No wonder founders lie. I mean, a lot of the issues with fraud we've seen are downstream of credentialism or that quest for legitimacy in a lot of ways. I'm not going to speak about specific frauds, but I'm sure some come to mind that kind of check those boxes. I think VCs are partially responsible, but as a venture investor, after you invest in a company, there's very little you can do. So if the management is unscrupulous, is going to be scamming people or the product doesn't actually work or whatever, then I don't think you're really responsible for that management team committing fraud.

48:00I think on the extreme, you have, if you go back in time a couple of years, a lot of the crypto investors would encourage company founders to take on quite a lot of personal liability, including criminal liability in many cases. And basically they'd be arbitraging that and pumping the tokens or whatever. In hindsight, I guess that was the wrong type of tokens to work on. And I think in those cases, probably venture investors bear more responsibility. I think that people blaming YC or whatever for some of their companies being frauds is probably not directionally correct, because it's not like any venture fund really wants to invest in a fraud.

48:35And people that are doing these things, they're very good at wrapping it up and disguising it in such a way that it will pass muster, especially if a round is moving quick, which most good companies' rounds do.

48:47Harry Stebbings:Who was your first believer with Corgi? It was probably Jared Friedman from YC. Yeah, there's been times where he was our only believer. You know, everyone else is a doubter, is a naysayer. But Jared's always been there for us. Would you do YC again? Yeah, I'd do it again. Final thing for you. What are you most excited for when you look forward to the next 10 years? What are you like, this I can't wait for? You know, it's a little hard to say because if you ask that 10 years ago, the technology that people were really excited about didn't exist yet. It was only late 2022 that people actually started getting with ChatGPT 3.5 that large language models were obviously very important and very exciting.

49:23Like within the next 10 years, technology will solve a lot of problems. Perhaps it'll create some too, but I think it'll solve a lot more than it creates. I think that there's certain areas where venture investing hasn't worked before, where there could be like category defining outcomes and where there could be new kind of industries where smart people are actually interested in going into. Like biology is one that comes to mind. I really strongly believe that, you know, we're going to probably see more like chat GPT moments maybe a couple of years from now that that will really shake things up.

49:55Harry Stebbings:Dude, I have to say it's been so wonderful having you on the show. As I said at the beginning, some of my most unpopular beliefs you align with completely. And so it's nice to have a kindred friend. Thank you so much for joining me today, man. Thanks for having me. But before we leave you today, so what if your gym was already home? Well, why not? Probably be a lot fitter and actually better than the gym you're driving to. Sounds pretty good, to be honest. Well, that's AMP, a beautiful wall-mounted smart gym that brings strength training, HIIT, Pilates, mobility, and yoga into one incredible system.

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