20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP

24:04Here's a Google sheet with a bunch of LinkedIn links. Good luck. That's not recruiting. And so at the GP, when we do recruiting, we do the first thing. We engage with a founder. We understand their needs. We have a person who maybe was the lead tech recruiter at Facebook for six years or was part of building stripes, you know, engineering teams two through end, and come and sit with that founder and understand their roadmap and then understand how they're aligning that roadmap with their hiring needs. And then we go out and we build the context, we build the funnel, we bring those people through and we manage that process and to end.

24:39And that accelerates that process, it increases the quality of it. And we can do that because our business model means that that work is a revenue center for the firm rather than a cost center, because we are an equity for doing that work rather than paying for that out of fee as sort of some differentiating factor in terms of how we offer the service. A couple of questions for you. Number one, how do you scale that? You know, it's early in the GPs life cycle. If we project out three to five years and there's 60 to 80 companies say, and just how does that quality scale over time? I think the first answer is our goal is not to scale.

25:11Our goal is to maximize quality of service delivery and impact on a smaller number of super high quality companies. And we've looked at how the business can deliver that even as the portfolio scales, because you're right that over time that portfolio scales. And so every engagement we work with a founder, we partner with them to understand their needs. We have a written statement of work that we collaborate with them on. That statement of work describes what we will do. It describes the time that it'll take for us to do that. And then the amount of equity they will earn when we deliver success against that statement of work.

25:43And those statements of work tend to be somewhere between six and 15 months long. They work across recruiting products and engineering and go to market. The founders can pick and choose where they need the help, or if they don't need to help at all, we can just invest capital and they can come back to us at some point when they want to engage. But when the statement of work is delivered, then that engagement is over. And if they want to continue with ongoing recruiting support, we need a new statement of work. And that's a new investment for us. And we evaluate that against every other investment that we could make with that same resource.

26:14Number one, I had Jason Lemkin and Sam Lesson on the round table show, Ruth Sainte. and they both said, the best founders, they don't need you. If a Sam Lassen said, if a founder says I need you, I'm like, get out. Not for me. Do you think that's fair or do you think that's actually not the way it is? I mean, I think nothing against Sam, but they probably don't need him, right? That's the thing. Right? I hear, you know, if someone says the best founders don't need help, what I hear them saying is the best founders don't need my help. And that's probably true, in most cases, when a VC says it. But I think that if you look at the best founders, they are constantly accessing the very best sources of advice, guidance, and hands -on support and help to build their companies to achieve their goals and get to their North Star as fast as they can and as a high quality as they possibly can.

27:05Every single one, they all have a trusted group of people, they all have folks that they bring into their company who do unbelievable work. Every great founder has that support and so every great founder needs help. They just don't need it from VCs. Now again, it's why the 20 product 20 sales and 20 growth is realization that I'm unlikely to be able to help something, but I should be able to offer a catalog of amazing operators who can help something, but having that awareness that is probably not me. And I think that's right. And I would imagine that success, let's say, 20 product, 20 growth, 20 sales are successful.

27:38Your founders are accessing those people. They have a conversation. They get some advice. They find it to be impactful. They go back to that same person. and they build a relationship. And before you know it, that person who you had on 20 product is now an advisor for that founder compensated with equity. I mean, actually we have 20 sales funds and they then, that's great. They earn the right, they earn the right onto a locked cap table with their expertise and their advice. They can capture the most valuable asset in the startup ecosystem, which is equity in that company because that, whether they do it through capital or advice, and I would imagine some of them will do both.

28:13The challenge that I have now is, yes, better product from us, better service, better quality, but when Andreessen puts, and I'm not picking on Andreessen, but when a big multi stage fan puts 5 on 25 or 6 on 40 on the table for a pre -seater a seed round, I get it, Finn, you're great, and I want to work with you, but 3 on 15 versus 5 or 6 on 30 or 40. My job is to capitalize my business, and that can enable me to do X and Y. How How do we play in a wild light? No, I think there's a lot of belly aching about the markets broken, the megafines are coming down. Maybe I think differently about this because I was fortunate enough to have the experience of winning against those firms in the past with lower prices and smaller rounds.

28:59And so when I hear people say that, I think you have a product problem. And if you can't convince a founder, partnering with you is what's best for their business. In the face of your competition, you need to do something different. And I hear people say, oh, it means I'm not going to chase the best founders. I'm not going to chase the hottest opportunities. I don't have a chance to win those things. And I think you're hamstringing yourself when you think that way. If you really believe in your product and you really believe what you're doing, you have to test that in competition with the very best funds, the largest funds.

29:29And they have a structural advantage. I agree. Their cost of capital is lower than yours. They can write a $5 million check and not think about it. And that's a larger percentage of my fund of your fund. makes it hard, but hard doesn't mean you can't win. You can find the founders that resonate with what you're doing. They recognize that the difference in delusion is something that they can make up for with progress. And the most experienced ones with the clearest vision will make that choice. And we've seen that so far with the GP, you know, we've made 19 early stage investments. 14 or 15 have been competitive and often competitive with large funds.

30:02And we are not the highest price. We're not winning on price. I think we're winning because we're offering something different. Do you notice the commonality in the founders that do choose you over the multi -stage funds? What I see as an example is I see more mature second -time founders choose me or my friends over multi -stage funds with the awareness that the brand actually doesn't deliver the higher, the customer, the help needed, and there's more maturity. I find first -time founders more. But they just succumb to the brand names. We do the general partnership product tends to appeal to more experienced founders.

30:40Folks who are a little deeper into their careers, they've either started a company before or they've worked in industry for longer so they've seen more. They understand how hard it is to hire an amazing person, the critical nature of that DNA early in a company's life, and all of the opportunity that that can open up, they understand what it means to have a world -class technology and product organization in the first year of operation. And what that means, not just for their product, but also for their ability to recruit down the line, their ability to sign up customers earlier in the life of the company to learn from the market much sooner because you can touch that market with something that they can appreciate and understand.

31:15The very best founders are those that they have the maturity to have that North Star. They have the maturity to understand their critical needs to get there and they're willing to do whatever it takes to sort of have those cheat codes along the way. Do you have to encourage founders to take your services. And what I mean by that is I speak to a lot of people with platforms, venture platforms, and they say, honestly, you'd be surprised by how few founders actually take us up on the services that we had. We don't. When Dan and I were designing the firm, one of the core things was that it would be an unbundled offering, because we trust the founders to know their critical needs and we want them to be able to choose where we have a unique product that gives them a specific advantage over the rest of the market and where we don't.

31:58of the 19 investments we've made, 15 of them have done services, four of them haven't, but of the four that haven't. Two of them have already come back six, nine months into the partnership and asked to engage with the services team around specific challenges that they're facing. Are you more or less excited about seed today than you have been in prior years? So I think the market obviously went through a peak in Valley, then we watched that occur. But I didn't know it's true of Valley. I think that seed has been immune to any macro cycle. You've seen the migration of large multisage funds move earlier.

32:30The prices remain really just as high. It's the only places remained untouched. Untouchable until they need to raise their next round. I think that's the value. I know it's the best of value I've ever seen. I've ever seen it. Agreed. But then A is the place to be. Maybe, although I think that would seed, knowing that it's more competitive, knowing that the capital of the next round is harder to come by, I think that just raises the bar on how much of a standout you need to be as a founder and as a company. It elevates that urgency around execution and delivery. And I feel like the early stage with a lot of what's happening in the market is actually pretty interesting.

33:03If you start chasing people up the ladder, five on 50, 10 on 40, we see these rounds, and there's also something with raising too much capital at a certain point where it doesn't make sense for the company. And I think there's adverse effects in terms of the culture at the business if you raise too much. But I find I'm excited about seed and finding the companies that it will be building durable businesses over the next couple of years. Speaking of finding the companies, there's founders, there's markets, there's traction, and there's market timing. If you were to rank them one through four, one being most important, four being least important to you in your investment decision making process, how would you rank them?

33:41Founder, market itself, traction, and the market timing. I think founders are first. And the reason I say that is because the ability of a founder to surprise and to shock you with the way they view a market The opportunity that they identify that no one else has seen the ability to execute against that like that is why I Do this is to meet those people and so if I can't align my business model my returns with the thing that brings me joy in In the work I struggle and then second if you're investing at a stage where traction can exist I think that early doesn't have to be at scale, but that passion or engagement of a user base is something that is often overlooked because like the end is too small You know you have hundreds of people that are that are spending hours or revisiting this thing on a daily basis versus tens of thousands, but I think those early signals should not be ignored But I think when you're investing before there's a product like often what we call formation stage is sort of that true seed pre -seed seed, not the $7 million seed when you've already raised two and you have a product and market, etc.

34:45I think then it's about the market timing. And what I mean by that market timing versus market is the ability to get that early traction. What is it that says now is the time that you're going to be able to find those first ten hundred thousand, ten thousand users, you're going to be able to sell in. There's a problem that exists that you can solve. What is it about the market timing? and it suggests that you can get that early traction. I know it was Peter Fenn or somebody else kind of like, you earn the right to make $10 million in ARR by making a million dollars in ARR. And once you make 10, then you earn the right to make a hundred.

35:18And once you make a hundred, you can make a billion. I mean, it's sort of this idea. And I think for early stage investors, it matters much less that there's a billion dollar opportunity in a market. There's a tam that you can back your way into that suggests that there's tens of billions to be captured. And it's much more important that the person can earn a dollar. and only spend 25 cents to do so. Can I push your thinking? We go invested before and it was in emerging economies or emerging markets. And what I learned and my takeaway from that was, no matter how good the entrepreneur is, fuck it.

35:52Sorry, if the market is so challenged, which emerging markets are right now, they're great businesses and emerging markets, which we'll never raise, because all you ask cash is golf for anywhere in the majority of emerging markets, you're fucked. And so, actually, for me, is number one, above found, a founders can surprise you, it doesn't matter if your market's destroyed. I agree. I think market structure, so what you're talking about with emerging market is market structure and all of the friction that comes from a less either regulated or mature developed market, that's accurate. When I think of market, I think is Uber about owning the black car market, the taxi cab market, or the auto market, or the delivery of all things and transportation market.

36:39I think when you get stuck thinking through that and working through the hundred reasons why owning the black car market isn't worth it, then you miss. Travis would figure out Uber X, you know, and I think in that, what when I say market timing is this is a team, Garrett and Travis, they are going to earn a dollar letting me press a button and take a black car somewhere in San Francisco. Ivan and Notion is going to figure out how to create a digital tool that is as elegant as a blank piece of paper and a pen so that you can create online and in doing so he's going to create value. There's no there's no market there.

37:16It's not a note -taking tool. If you convince yourself there's a note -taking tool, then you're not interested in that because ever note wasn't great and you go down the list, right? When you sort of say there's a vision here and then there's the ability this market timing means people want this tool to Enable them to express their creativity in some way. They want to do these different things Then you allow that founder back to sort of choosing founders to guide that company, you know within that opportunity set Do you think the founder I also lay on this one? Do you think the founder needs to know what that next chapter is.

37:49Does Travis when he starts Uber need to know that it's gonna go beyond the chauffeurs in an explicit way? I often feel that you know you just have to be playing the game to turn over the next card. So many of the things that I've done I had no strategy to do until I saw the opportunity. You know you have to be playing the game to see the next play. No it's a great question I've experienced both. I think that in the first case whether it's Travis needing to know that there's UberX or it's Ivan needing to know that there's going to be integrations with segment and other things and it's going to become the central data of knowledge repository for a company.

38:24I don't think so. I think they need to be passionate about the core product they're building, but they need to know that they want and will find more than just that. They need to understand that this is the the foundation of something that then there will be another act. I've also had the experience with multiple founders where in the first conversation you sit down with them and they understand their business in three acts and they lay it out and then they go after that. And so I think you can have both, but the key thing is in both cases the founders know there's more, they know they want more than the core thing they're doing.

38:56And they also have a deep appreciation for getting the first act right. You know when it comes to founder detection, everyone also makes mistakes. The question that I have is when you review the mistakes that you've made, what did you not see that later became true or what did you see that actually wasn't there? You know, if I reflect on my own as an example, I fall for the brilliant salesperson. The one who is incredibly smooth and articulate and can present that three chapters, but their operational execution ability is not as good as actually their sales ability and then they fall. What would you say your founder detection errors have been?

39:32I'm a believer that spikes is what matters. So someone's strongest talent is the thing that you should be focused on. But I think that there are things like the example you just gave. the salesperson who can lay out the three acts, but operationally they can't execute sort of to get on stage in the first place Right, that's the challenge and I think in that case the quality of that founder the value they will create is a multiplication problem Not an addition problem and so if you have a zero anywhere in a multiplication problem The value is zero and I think that my mistakes with founders have been missing the Consequences of a weakness and being overwhelmed with the strength of a spike and not realizing how they won't even be able to apply that spike because they lack something else that will mitigate that strength.

40:15I think that's been the weakness. I think I haven't been overwhelmed with someone where I misperceive their strengths as much as I think sort of misunderstanding the impact of a potential weakness. You mentioned some of the big wins that the first round have had. I think you learn a lot from the hits. What do you say your biggest hit is? And when you reflect and do a post -mortem, how did it change how you invest? When I started investing, I was a product person. You know, I built sneakers and video games. And so my early investments, if I look at them, they were products that I thought should exist.

40:49From being a product person, you build up a sort of schizophrenia where you can take on the personality of the customer and have empathy and understand their priorities and needs and then you could imagine a product that would meet those needs and would resonate. And I think I did a lot of that, bank simple, birch box, even blue apron, I think were those things. The work I did with Notion, I think, was really foundational in understanding the product is a piece of what you're doing, but that understanding the ways that that product drives distribution, the power of software platforms versus just an application, and the sense of a product that can grow with the user and deepen that attachment over time and sort of lock in, I guess you would call it.

41:32I learned many of those things from Ivan Akshay, watching them build that business, helping them recruit people to join that business and seeing it scale. Leaning into things that become system of record for an important job to be done, that lesson kind of came through to me in that first understanding of why notion was so special. Can you help me on something, Fen, which is, I'm bad when it comes to what I kind of called Continuous Thoughts, which is essentially when you have a hit in a certain area, you think that area is just continuously a great area to be in. It might be, but it also might be a great founder, a special market timing, a special distribution strategy.

42:12Likewise, you lose money in an area and you go, pfff, calm in money there, it's shit. Neither are right. There's always nuance and you have to bring plasticity to every new deal. How do you bring plasticity with big losses and big wins? It's very important to view every company to the extent you can as its own thing. There are certainly lessons that flow across their similarities. You know, God knows we heard so many pitches that were the Uber of X. People trying to play on that exact thing you're talking about. But I think that the challenge with rules, they can distort your vision. And you have to decide, is that corrective or is it blurring?

42:50You know, are you seeing more clearly or are you missing something? The thing to do is to ask yourself, why would this rule not apply? Why is this inappropriate in this case? So for example, we were talking about early first round, so stop of mind. So Modcloth was a fashion company, their e -commerce fashion. And there was a belief that the reason that company was working when it was working is that the founder was deep in the vintage clothing space and deeply understood it. She was a buyer, she got all those things. And so the first time we met, we'll be Parker. Those guys didn't have design sense.

43:21And like, there was no style person on that team. But the truth is that the glasses had to look good, but that wasn't the point. What they had figured out was something entirely different around supply chain and go to market and sort of this D to C motion. Evaluating their team against the need for someone who had worked at Laxatica in design was the wrong thing to do. And so I think when you have a big win, it's very easy to say, I want to see something else that looks like this. So I want a founder like Ivan who comes out of design and you know is quirky in some ways and adgenious in most ways and product obsessed and wants to build tools and that's the way to build systems of record for for every facet of business.

44:04But then you realize that that worked for him in a very particular way and that there's no other company that's built like that and that most other tools or systems of record are created by people with different mindsets and other ways of thinking. Same with the losses, right? There's the emerging market stuff and there's other things but I think like I would look at that one and say, what were the positives? What part of that decision was actually accurate? Rather than, okay, maybe the overriding lesson is all emerging markets are no good and you just don't invest in emerging markets. And that's a fine lesson that work you owe yourself is to try to find the positive or the thing you got right in the mistake.

44:40And it could be that there's not that the lesson actually is, don't invest in emerging markets, don't invest in these, you know, logistically, like low margin businesses. is that's a great lesson and one that you could stick to and probably would be a benefit to the portfolio overall because I do think that there is a reason that most large venture outcomes are software only. There's something powerful in high margin zero marginal cost growth businesses. I say to my mother on walks on Sunday two things I say margins maximum number one and I say the opportunity cost of capital is real which is like even if you can make money selling software to restaurants, it's so frickin hard that actually there are easier places with higher upside to put that money.

45:25Yes, you will have a limited number of companies in your portfolio. One of the things I'm happiest about with the general partnership model is it's not a coverage model. Like we are very intentional about building a more concentrated portfolio. We need to find 30 amazing early stage companies. We don't need to be in every amazing early stage company. So, he's quite a lot though, if you actually think about it, over three a period, you're doing 10 a year. How many investing partners are there? So, we have Dan and I, and then we have Dan on our team. But the key with us is that the whole team is involved in the process of investing from sourcing to picking, winning, supporting.

46:04Everyone on our team plays a role, and they play a role by bringing their expertise to that. So, if we look at our top of funnel, right, you look at the kind of the sources. 50 % of the things we see are sourced by the team because they are very senior. They have incredible networks. People trust them. When their friends are starting companies, they come to them and they say, I'm thinking of starting a company who should I talk to? And they understand what we look for. They understand the types of companies that are interesting, and they surface those things, you know, to us as a team. Then they're involved along the way.

46:33So if we say one of the things that we think about with the founder is how will they build their team? as we think about crafting a statement of work and deciding that we could partner with someone, we engage the member of the talent team to talk with that founder around their needs, how they think about sequencing, and how they think about success and recruiting. On the engineering side, we do the same thing. We deeply understand the way people are approaching their technology with their building, and in a way that I think goes well beyond what I've done in the past. We sit with an engineer in a meeting with a technical founder and have a conversation about the business, about the product they're building, and about how they're building it.

47:12And for me, the ability to be immersed in that conversation, and to learn the language that the founder is speaking in that context is unbelievable. It's like, if you wanna learn Spanish, you would also learn to surf and do that in Costa Rica. You wouldn't take a Burlitz class or put something in your headphones and listen to it. I think I'd just get Jessica. Yeah, there you are, exactly. You can keep her up to reach. We cannot. But I think the traditional process of understanding what a founder is doing technically is as a VC that's not technical, you sit in that room, you do your best to understand.

47:45You reach out to someone who is technical, you provide some bastardized description of what that founder is doing. That person is probably polite to you and sort of pretends they understand, but then says, well, maybe just connect me with them and I'll talk to him and I'll get you my feedback. Then they do that. And then the feedback comes back and it's again a game of telephone. And then you're making a decision because some engineer that you know said it's either good or bad, right? Whereas what we get to do is sit in the room with the founder. The engineer is asking questions not to evaluate what they're doing, but to understand it to know whether we can help, and to understand it to know where the holes might be, and where the challenges are, and do the challenges that we identify align with the challenges that the founder is seeing.

48:22And in doing that, it's just a much deeper process. And I think we involved a team in that. Totally brand and wear bomb. But I was on this long run and staying, and I was listening to this motivational speeches, I do on long runs, and they said that very few people truly understand what happiness is to them. I know it's weird, dude, but I just really like you and I'm just really intrigued to hear your thoughts on this and I'm so loving you. What is happiness to you? I think I've been in a couple ways. So I can imagine moments in life that would define happiness, holding your child for the first time, your wedding night, your 20th anniversary of that wedding.

48:56For me, one, and this is strange, but you'll like this. For me, a moment that I know I will be happy and I'll know I've lived a good life is if on my Deathbed I'm looking up at my current wife and daughter and they're smiling at me and everything's okay That's success and that means that they have been supported by me in the right ways It means I have lived with integrity. I've honored them and and they're there for me at the very end You know, and that's whatever it is 60 -70 years from now, hopefully, but so I frame it that way day -to -day I think happiness comes from the ability to have impact on Individuals that you respect and I think sometimes it comes back to you I got an email this morning that I was I was sort of sitting here thinking about what am I gonna say to Harry and I got an email A friend wrote me and said he was at a wedding with another friend the mutual friend of ours He he is a seven -month -old child and he was telling this mutual friend You know, I feel so fulfilled and joyful like I feel a joy that I never felt before and our mutual friend said to him I talked to Finn when I had my first child and he told me, you know, everyone talks to you about, oh, you can't, your life isn't your own anymore.

49:59And like, you can't go out and you just see your friends and, you know, all these things. You can't work as much as you want and all this. And he said that what I told him when he told me that was that, yeah, you have a child and it's way less happiness way more joy. That's what it is. You have less happiness moment to moment. You have more joy in these moments that are just beyond your holding a child. There's there's something about that. Just so I understand what is less happiness and more joy, I mean, I'm happiness being the freedom to do what you want, happiness being, you know, you're out with friends, you go for a run when you feel like it, these things, versus changing what do you call them, nappies, and you know, being up in the middle of the night, and so forth.

50:32But even when you're unhappy because you're up in the middle of the night, and you have a big meeting the next day, and you need to get sleep, and the baby's crying, there's a moment when the baby stops crying, and the fact that you were there holding her when that happened is joy, and it's different. You're still unhappy that you're awake, but there's joy there. And so anyway, but for me, those moments when people say things like that to me, that makes me happy. Like I went to dormant fun, had a 10 year anniversary. And there was hundreds of people there. It's an amazing community. But when I was there, I was talking to people, some of whom I met 10 years ago, nine, eight, seven, five, four, like I met them across this time.

51:06And they I met them at a time in their life when they were in college, they were figuring out their future, they were graduating. And no fewer than 75 people said to me, Hey, you probably don't remember you said this, But you said this thing and it changed the way I thought about the job to take the timing of leaving one and joining another The way to navigate some negotiation or some hard time in my, you know, professional career and it was so gratifying to me to know that those little moments that make me happy giving my thoughts Helping someone work through a challenge really listening like truly listening to them helping them discover that answer That's always inside them.

51:43It's always there bring it out and getting very very good at doing that. Do it for founders around strategy, do it for friends, around personal situations, but just getting very good at listening and bringing out that person's best answer to whatever challenge they're facing and then supporting them in going after that. That brings me happiness and it leads to a moment of people saying thanks and reflecting on that which is joyful. This is my friend, I could told you all day. Can we do a quick fire round? Absolutely. Tell me, copy founding my mom with Dan. Yeah, so as I was talking about the venture capital business model being broken.

52:14Dan was the person who had the courage to do something about it in 2018, and he stepped away from Greylock and he started a business called Sweat Equity Ventures that offered service and exchange for equity. He believed that you could unbundle venture capital from venture services and he convinced Reid Hoffman to invest in the company. He went out and did the work. He earned equity and amazing companies. That equity is now the portfolio that reused the sole LP in. And along the way, I had so much respect for that. We overlapped on a couple boards. And in those board meetings, the founder would move from telling the board what they thought to saying some version of, well, Dan says, and then he would say the answer.

52:49And so I had always wanted to find a way to work with him. And so what I left, first round I announced publicly I was ready to build again. And Dan was like the second person to reach out. He's the Michael Jordan of recruiting. And he started talking to me about how he could add capital to his model, not about how I could join him in the business. And through that conversation over 14 months, it was amazing because we could just be totally transparent with each other about our goals, our vision for what venture capital should be, the way we wanted to practice. And it turned out that those were completely aligned.

53:17And we were able to build a firm, raise a fund that supported his service for equity model, but also added the capital that the founders needed to build their businesses. What is the day -stay routine I had I had to ask this one? I don't always stick to it, right? You have your aspiration, then you have your actual life. So that's caveat with that. But I tried to get up early, try to do some reading, try to exercise, make breakfast, and sit with my daughter, a driver to school, drop her off, we have great conversations on the way. Although she's in seventh grade now, so she wants to work carpooling a little bit, and now she wants to take the bus.

53:48I'm afraid I'm gonna lose. I'm gonna lose those morning conversations, but when I see morning conversation with her work, till, you know, four or five depends. Pick her up from school if I can, take her to sports if I can, spend time on family, dinner, and then go back to work, and then try to get six, seven hours of sleep, and do it again. There's obviously times where you have to do, you know, you're doing dinners, I think a night out, two nights out a week for work is appropriate. I have a date night every week with my wife. We have date night. I think that's critical. You ask about parenting.

54:15I have so much. So much changes when you have a child, but the biggest thing that changes is the person that you love most in the world. Now there's a third person in the room. And each of you loves that person. Maybe more than you love each other. And you have to make space for your adult relationship to continue when you have the child in the way. But the daily routine kind of keeps me balanced on those values. You mentioned your beautiful relationship with your daughter to that. Taking the question we all thought about vancia, if you could cool yourself up the night before your wife gave birth, what would you advise yourself knowing all the idea now?

54:47There's a consistency in prioritizing your family that really matters. The reason it matters is because what children need, they need something to push on and they need to know they're safe in doing that. And so consistency creates those boundaries and you set them appropriately. you can make it a practice to truly listen to your child and then give them whatever it is you think they need Which is very different than what they ask for but give them what you think they need and if you do that consistently and to the best of your ability I think you'd be a fantastic parent a CPO ice hat on the show the other day said children are like he's is you listen to that Problems and then you can provide them that solution Yeah, I think yeah, it's a distinction between what they asked for and what they need is very important Absolutely.

55:28What would you be like to change about the world event? There's been this push to scale. It's eroded the product, the venture, broadly, the craft approach. Whether you're doing that the way Chris and Jordan are doing it a pace, where they do it, or you're doing it the way we're doing it, where in exchange for equity we deliver a very senior person, who works in a one -to -one relationship. But I would love to see a return to the one -to -one relationships that build the best companies. Tell me, which last while nine -fone team most respite? So many. I mean, I just mentioned pace. I think they're Chris and Jordan are wonderful.

55:59I think what Dave Fonsonod is doing with HF zero is pretty fascinating. It's these houses, he brings people in, residential program, he's got a real nose for talent, and he's doing some amazing things there. I think Maritek doesn't get talked about enough. Max and Alex, they're just unbelievable in their thinking and so much respect for their focus and what they do. And then my friend Molly at Dormaum Fund, I think, is doing amazing work with that community. And I think if you look at the alumni from Dormaum Fund and where they've gone on, you can sort of see the quality of the people that she's engaged with and how that community is continuing to form.

56:29You can have dinner with one person that are alive. If you stop plus, then why? Build Bowerman and Filne. Founders of Nike, what they built, their partnership, the way they understood each other's strengths, weaknesses, how they work together, what they created is just stunning. My long -term professional goal would be to be on the Nike board. How much do you run a week, and will you pre -impose to walk out in each room? So running anywhere from 40 to 60 miles, I've got to the point now where I can go out and run anywhere from five to 10 without You know, it's sort of indifferent, just depends on how long I have.

57:01I tend to drink a bunch of water before I go. I didn't work out in the morning, so I don't eat that much before. And then afterwards, I just have a normal breakfast. I don't get into the shakes and proteins and all this. I think if you eat real food and you eat in a balanced way, I think you can be pretty healthy. I totally agree with you. 40 to 60's a lot. And I do now the same. Five days a week, you do 10 miles a day. Shit, I'm like, I end up doing like a long one on the weekend, which covers a bit of it. Although, and I also recently have mixed in a mix in a bunch of cycling, it's sort of like, rather than miles, I think of it in hours.

57:34So, for me, exercise is the meditation. Like, I like to exercise on my own. And so, the hours, meaning if I can get 60 to 120 minutes a day, I feel much, much, much better than if I get 30 to 45 minutes. Final one. If 10 years out, I said she's success with the GP and with Finn. What would you say that would be if everything goes right or does that look like? So I think if everything goes right for the general partnership We will become an institution that matters in venture capital when we invest in a company People will say congratulations. They will not and understand why it makes sense because we will have a taste That's understood in the market for a certain type of founder a certain type of company and a certain way of working We will have achieved our north star which is to be the place that's known to create the best opportunities for the most talented people in Silicon Valley, whether that's a builder on our team, someone that we place into one of our companies, or a founder that we partner with.

58:32I mean, creating the very best opportunities for the most talented people, and doing that on a repeated basis is sort of the North Star for the firm, and the fuel that will serve us as we travel over the next ten years. Then I said at the beginning that we can have friendships like this is really the biggest joy of doing what I do. I think I got a little bit lost again when I focused on the outputs of shows, and that she realized the joy is in the doing and the building of the relationships and not the titles or everything that comes with it. And it really is friendships like this that make me so appreciate what I do.

59:02So thank you for all you do for the ecosystem, but you know, for your support for me. And I've loved it. Yeah, and it's been great. Great to talk to you always. And yeah, there's a focusing on the process. That's the key and find happiness and joy in that and everything else will work out. I mean, I just love that discussion. I also really love the elements on parenting there, some really unique elements in terms of less happiness and more joy. I haven't heard that one before. If you want to see more from us, of course you can on YouTube by searching for 20VC, that's 2 -0VC. But before we leave you today, this episode is brought to you by Tegas, the go -to research destination for bold investing.

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