20VC: Why Founder Mode is Dangerous & Could Encourage Bad Behaviour | Why Fundraising is a Waste of Time & OKRs are BS | Why Angel Investing is Bad for Founders to Do and the VC Model is on it's Last Legs with Zach Perret @ Plaid

20:54It doesn't mean that that practice is universally applicable. I also think that building a philosophy of Brian Chesky, who's one of the most amazing leaders, everyone can learn a lot from Brian, but not all of us are Brian. I totally agree. I'm a frabblesom to this blog post on reserve utilization and the importance of reserves in our East -Age Port -Foday is recently. He said, basically, everyone needs to know how you can use them to effectively strive to DPI. And it's like, yes, if you're a brilliant picker, like Fred Wilson is, if he was legitimately one of the best investors in the last two decades, but most people are not very good pickers and concentrate capital into the wrong companies.

21:29What other things are very common beliefs, which many agree with in Silicon Valley echo circles that you're like, I don't agree with that. I do think that a lot of the advice given, quote unquote, is really applicable narrowly and not broadly. Every founder needs to, for the big, important things, make a decision on their own of what really works, and then be willing to go back I can remake those decisions time and time again. I will say, I think that for 80 % of the things in a company, you can literally just copy what's been done before and 20 % of the things you need to be unique and spend all your effort and being really, really unique.

22:01But there are some of these things, I'll take three simple sales. One of the most common early stage things that people will tell small companies is you need to go higher of VP of sales. If you're an enterprise company, if you're able to do founder driven sales, like I think that's actually totally wrong. For me, I didn't want higher VP of sales for a long time. I hired this group of these amazing young people that would just help me do sales. I was driving sales and they were around me making it more efficient. They were going to show my emails, all the stuff I was ever seeing. That scale was for quite a long time, way longer than it should have.

22:30But in doing that, I learned way more about our customers and way more about how to build a great product for our customers than it could have in any other way. And so don't hide the VP of sales early if you don't want to. If you don't think that's right for you, OK, there's another one. OK, there's a built for manufacturing. We don't manufacture software. We're not running an assembly line to create software. Goals are important. But like do it your own way don't just read the indie Grove book and try to apply this thing that worked for Intel to your business if It doesn't actually fit to your business.

22:57It's speed single most important thing for companies going from zero to one No being right is and then speed what does that mean? It being strategically right on the problem that you're solving and then acting with big stream execution speed Yeah, so one of our company values is move fast But you have to be careful when to apply move fast like once you found product market fit But move fast, that's absolutely the right thing to do. Before you have product market fit, sure maybe you should move quickly through ideas, but also like spending the time to think about what the right thing is, like gathering the signals, gathering the data, understanding what you need to do, like be right and then move fast.

23:33Ryan and Flite's probably told me very wise, I think he said, velocity is the most important thing, it's speed in a given direction. And I'm like, that's a good one. Well, speed, it's, vice is correct, speed in a given direction, the direction also should be right. Like it should be the correct direction. Do you feel that we've got in a manufacturing line on venture funding companies? What I mean by that is it feels like so many founders get on this production line of, I'm going to hit a million in ARR and then I'm going to raise my A and then I'm going to hit 5 million and raise my B and then 20 and it just feels a little bit overmanufactured and almost forgetting the fact that we build products for customers who give us money.

24:12My take is great entrepreneurs are going to apply their unique lens to what they do. We have this weird philosophy. I think that raising money is a big waste of time. So we try to raise money as infrequently as we possibly can within the plot. So we go two and a half, three years between funding rounds. And in the early days, some people would call us and be like, oh, is the company dead? Because you haven't raised in the last 12 months. And we're like, no, like revenue is growing. Everything looks great. No, we just want to raise money. How do you think about that, though? Because if you want to raise money every three years, say, for example, you're going to have to raise a chunky round.

24:41You're going to have to either take a lot of dilution, or you're going to have to have a really inflated price. How did you think about that? We kind of did what felt natural for the company and what felt right for us. My dig is like money is a resource. When you need the resource, you should go get the resource. And you should do it, yes, of course, in the most efficient way that you possibly can. But for a certain amount of time, we just didn't need the resource. We weren't spending a ton or like our business was profitable in the early days. Like not intentionally just happened to be. And so we're like, well, we don't need the money resource.

25:08Like money is not the tool that we need to use in order to solve the next challenge. Then later it became the tool. So we want to raise more money. There's a brilliant statement always be raising. Do you disagree with that? Yeah. That seems like I would have wasted a lot of time. What was the hardest funding round? Our seed round was horrible. Why? Oh my gosh, we have this crazy story. I don't think I've told this publicly. We started out first building a consumer app. So this was kind of post -200 financial crisis. There's this movement called Occupy Wall Street. And it was like people moved tense in and lived in Wall Street and the big takeaway from everyone was consumers are really frustrated with financial services.

25:40They don't think that the banks are building the products they want. So being 23 -year -old entrepreneurs, we said out and said, we're going to go build a better budgeting tool for consumers, because that's going to help consumers live a better financial life. So we had this whole story for a year, we're built a bunch of the details failed, and then we pivoted to build this infrastructure piece, which was basically the back end to our previous product. And that was actually a really good idea. But when we were trying to raise for people, like everybody said no to us, we actually lined up this early funding round.

26:07It's 500K funding round at a $2 million valuation. and the lead investor for this funding round like backed out and it is investing like $100 ,000 or something that and then the rest of the funding run fell apart. And we were out of money. We were basically dead as a company. And so we went to all the investors that had been planning to invest in. We were like, hey, look, the lead has backed out. We still love to take your money, but the lead is gone and we just want to be transparent about it. We don't want to be a surprise. So we did it and everybody walked away from that except for these three people all named Justin and they invested a collective 60K.

26:38I mean, company, but it kept us alive. It invested 60K to maybe $2 .5 million valuation. That was the lifeline we needed to sustain until we could get to some customers that were actually using it. We had a late stage contract with Venmo. Then there was maybe like six or eight months later that we went back and raised the seed round. It was value that $11 or $12 million. So it could actually a good step up. Did you think you were gonna die? Yeah, but I mean, we hadn't paid ourselves in six months at that point. We were like, whatever. At that point, we're going to actually run out of money. My co -founder was living on a friend's couch.

27:11I'd moved in with my girlfriend because I couldn't pay rent anywhere. I had a moderate amount of credit card debt, which I don't advise to any other founders. But we thought we were going to debt, but we also had nothing to lose. So you just keep going. How did you think about secondaries and money as you progress through the company? Again, I don't want to be at a one -sided journey, as first as founder. like for me making a little bit of money really enabled me to think differently. And I actually super pro secondaries for founders. How do you think about it and did it change your minds at it too?

27:43When we did the sale to visa that ultimately didn't go through, we raised a funding round afterwards. One of the most complex things to do in that funding round was I wanted to try to max the number of people that could participate in the secondary. We couldn't get to 100 % of employees. We got to like the large majority of the employees that were able to participate in that secondary. That was hugely meaningful to me, hugely meaningful to the team on the other side. Keep in mind, we'd said, hey, we're selling the company for $5 billion. Then we said it was the team. Well, let me finish the whole story.

28:12First it was like, we're selling company for $5 billion. Then we got the end of a year and everyone was like, oh, okay. People don't spend the money practically, but they spend the money in their hat. They do. And then on the. Exactly. And look, who might have said that they shouldn't get mentally locked in on a thing? Like we said, we're going to sell the company for this amount of money. This is a very legitimate buyer. Like there was real cash coming in. And I told them there was a risk. But you know, you spend money in your head. Then we had to get to the end of the transaction and we walk away.

28:42And I was like, this is going to be better for the company in the long term. But all of a sudden they couldn't spend money. There's a very different aspect of liquidity that was real for them. And then we said, like, we're going to go raise money and we hope that we're going to let you participate in a secondary. And like that was like a pretty hard thing to say, but I also couldn't, I didn't want to guarantee anything, because I couldn't. Then we got the secondary, then we did as much. Did they respond badly to that? Some of them did, yeah. But not selfishly, just people playing by a house, for example.

29:07Then we do the next round, which was a big step evaluation. And we let people sell us, as kind of, we wanted to create a rational amount of sale, we let them sell as much as we could rationally. But like, you wasn't this full amount. And instead of buying a house, maybe you, something larger than a car, but less than a house, but chunk of what they could sell was the whole thing. That I think was a hard thing for them, good outcome, because they could see the light of the future and the growth of the cloud and so on and so forth, but definitely a hard whiplashy thing. But I think that was really great that we let our employees participate there.

29:41And as we were able to do more signers in the future, really focusing on the team is that would be the goal. Are you pleased that you raised a 13 .4 billion dollar valuation? That's a good question. The true value of a private company is impossible to tell. The true value of a private company is what someone is willing to pay to buy an incremental share of that company. That's why you see valuations being all over the place with private companies. In a lot of instances, I wish we had a real -time market market because that would make it much simpler to do things like like compensating employees and doing acquisitions and so and so forth.

30:19The reality is we raised money in the situation and in the environment that we were in at the time. Puzz values have gone down since then. Frankly, the value of the company has gone down since then. And by the way, as a founder, your job is to raise money and die in some cases as little as possible. Yeah. So there's a fiduciary thing that pushes you towards the raise at max valuation and then the investors that invest be darned. My view is different. I feel a deeper responsibility to the investors in the invested in the plan. I want every one of them to make a lot of money on plan. That means that my expectations for the company are really, really high.

30:52I know I have to get back to a high hurdle rate that we've had in the past. Now, I believe that we'll do it. I believe it'll take some time, but I believe that we'll do it. The underlying fundamentals of the business look way better now than they did whenever I invested, but the reality is that the multiples have changed. You know, we're in a long journey. I've got work to do. We've got to make sure that invested and if we're lucky enough that the investors continue to hold through that entire period, like I really believe they'll be able to do it, but that takes patience. Did it enable you to do things that you couldn't do earlier?

31:21Yeah, exactly. Because that's the only thing that is cool. Like Instagram and Facebook, everyone's like, oh, what a mistake. I can't comment on Instagram and Facebook. The structure that we set up with Visa was that we were running as independent entity. We had access to all the tools internally. I was the CEO of the independent company and we could run as fast as we wanted to and the direction that we wanted to and we got a boatload of funding to go do it. That's not the worst setup. up now I like the independent path better. No answer is. I listen to it. I talk to you. It was a hard question.

31:48When we look at M &A more broadly, you know, I'm an investor, we think about liquidity now and we'll never. And there is no fucking liquidity. There's no liquidity for LPs that choked up to their neck with lack of liquidity. And I look at M &A first and it's just completely shut. Is that a fair representation? And do you think M &A is completely shut one? What do you think it will lead to it opening? So far as I can tell, I think the large MNA transactions are mostly getting deeply investigated and often them blocked by the regulators. That political environment will change eventually. We did see some of these odd, like, aqua -higher, large AI acquisitions, which have been fascinating, but I don't think that works with a company that has tons of contracts that they actually want to transfer over to the acquired company.

32:31I can't predict the future, but I do think that it's pretty hard to do a large MNA right now. On IPOs, another form of liquidity. How do you think about IPO markets today? It's something again that as a late stage value you always have to be in love and await too. How do you think about IPO markets today? The viability and the excitedness and the value of an IPO changes a lot for a lot of founders. Look in the long term, we said this before, in the long arc, we would like to be a public company. We're not in any specific rush to do so. And generally, I think of an IPO as a meaningful, important milestone and a fundraising event.

33:02When you need the capital, when you need the milestone, when being public is really useful to the company, then you should go do it. But now it would be inherently unattractive time for you to go public. Yeah, it would be for a variety of reasons. I'm sure that'll change in the next, I don't know how long. But are you going to be in the early days of your world? I would say companies, I'm not going to hear as I said this, but companies of your profile should go public, should take the head on valuation, and they will grow into great companies in public markets. Well, I definitely believe that we'll grow into a great company, if we're not there already.

33:31And they would love to have that increased trigger that being a public company brings. I think that's actually probably a really useful thing for companies. Certainly, all the public CEOs that I've talked to, or many of the public CEOs, I shouldn't say all because that's not true. But many of the public CEOs that I've talked to said, like, you know, the rigor is a really good thing. It's helpful, so and so forth. But on the flip side, you know, it is a milestone and it is a very useful tool for us to do at some point in the future, but that day is not today. And that day will hopefully be a good deal.

33:56Someone said a great statement to me the other day. They said, they have the highest things in life and not iron or gold, but unmade decisions. What unmade decision weighs on your mind most? Philistophically, I have a very high -partisist driven decision making model, which is you ask me a question, I have an answer. It's not a deeply held answer always, but I always start with a starting point. Within the company we push this really hard, so if there's a decision to be made, there's always a strong end of what the decision is. I'm not sure I have a specific unmade decision. Does that not get you in trouble with your wife?

34:26All the time. Yeah, it gets me in trouble with my wife, because she's like, why are you so confident in this thing that you've never thought about? I'm like, I'm not confident. And I think you were playing to ask this question later, which is like, what's the question that no one ever asked you that they really should? For me, the question that no one ever asked me is how confident are you and how much do you care? So if you ask me, hey, what's the answer? Red or blue? Red. How confident are you? Zero percent confident. How much do you care? Not at all. Like those three need to go strong. Okay.

34:50So I'm exactly the same as you, but someone said to me, why is he the other day? You forget Harry is the weight of your words. And you said that with real confidence. And the team just went with it because of that. And I'm like, oh shit. And so do you worry that actually your words carry a lot of weight? And because you do say things with great confidence, it's like, shit, that said that. I mean, let's do that. Yeah, I do worry about that. That's why I wish people would ask me the question, how confident are you and how much do you care? What's your biggest floor as a CEO? One of my biggest flaws as a leader is, I'm not great at recognition of progress if the outcome is not excellence.

35:27Let's say we have some problem with the company and currently we're operating at two out of ten going from a two out of ten to a four out Ten you've just made something twice as good my CEO tells me the seller time He's like you got to celebrate that if that is good progress And yes, you can say there's another horizon that we got to go to but you got to celebrate going from a two to a four out of ten Sometimes that matters quite a lot personally. I am like never never okay celebrating that because my answer is like that's a four out of ten It's like like, we're still horrible. And objectively, that is the correct answer if we stay a 4 out of 10.

35:58But oftentimes, the trajectory is you go from 2 out of 10 to a 4 out of 10 to a 6 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10 and then eventually you get to a 10 out of 10. Like finding a way to celebrate those like interim milestones that are not yet perfect, it's been really hard. And it definitely discourages people within the company, giving the internal praise of, hey, like you made progress there. Like let me cheer you on and like be the cheerleader to help you go from 4 out of 10 to a 6 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10. That's really hard. I do feel strongly that you should never celebrate something that just factually isn't good.

36:28If we're delivering something at a 4 to 10, that is factually bad. We should not be celebrating that we're delivering a 4 to 10, but we should celebrate the progress that we're making and the trajectory that we're on. Finding a way to support the team through that terrible to good, to great process. I do think in the early days people don't talk about manufacturing wins, which is often that it's just not much to celebrate. It just doesn't look that great. And I think your job as a CEO is to manufacture almost fake or small wins and to alleviate them into bigger wins just to carry teams through a bit stagnant times.

37:00You know, I was talking to an entrepreneur friend of mine who had a deep respect and they said, you know, we said a big hairy audition school. And then within that, we asked the team, what's the first thing you can celebrate because it means that you're on track to achieve a big hairy audition school? The big hairy audition school, I've always done. The what's the first thing you can celebrate question? I've never done and I love it It's a huge on that so now you can ask the team what's the first milestone that you can achieve and prove that you're going in that direction And then actually doing a celebration around it.

37:27I used to run my since when I was you know young and I had good knees But always you always break down by five miles just the next five miles just that if you look at what do you celebrate the five miles when you get to them Absolutely, I would have a jelly bean Jelly beans jelly bean just get that Or just an I'd actually varied up with a Lucas A don't Martin or whatever that is, but I think that's really important What trait do you have that you're a little bit ashamed of but it's also contributed to your success? I'm very independent, like very self -sufficient. The downside of this is comes from a childhood of a bunch of weirdness that I won't go into now, but people find it very hard to get to know me.

38:08They find it very hard to read me now within the company So I try to be more, I try to tell people what I'm thinking. I try to let my face be expressive, which is not, it isn't naturally, usually just smile, no matter what I'm thinking. But people find it very hard to get to know me, very hard to read me, very hard to empathize with me. On the flip side of that, it allows me to live in my own universe for decision -making or big thinking. So my favorite times are sitting on your plane. No one needs to talk to me. I can just sit there and think, I put my headphones in, I don't play anything, so I'm just going to play static.

38:40And they sit there and think and I have a notebook and a race to step down. And like this, like, it kind of self -sufficiency isolation, I find it gives me clarity in a place that otherwise I might not have. Do you enjoy your own comfort? They will own like company. Oh, yeah, of course. Not many do. I feel very fortunate though. Okay, final one for you to a quick fire. Becoming a father is an incredibly seismic moment in one's life. How did becoming a father change you as a person, one, and as a leader, two? It's a good question. And everybody says that having a kid teaches you time management, teaches you prioritization, teaches you coaching, I believe that all that stuff is really true.

39:16For me, the biggest change was personal. It just increases your capacity to love and recognize other people. My favorite thing about having a daughter is, yes, getting to love her and love the snuggles and all of the things that she does. But it was actually seeing my wife become a mother and seeing the change that brought about in her and seeing her capacity change and that recognition of someone who you've known for so long, you think you know super well and then you just see this totally new aspect. You know, it made me think differently about, you know, what are the underlying aspects that other people in my life might have and how might they change every time and being more open and accepting of that.

39:48What is the XAST -T today? That's a very hard question. I think we all land in the bigger, faster, more, like the relentless pursuit of doing more and so far. I fall into that trap absolutely as well. For me, it's like excellence, which is like, it doesn't have to be bigger. There's nothing to be fast driven, but it's like whatever we do, it has to be great. I care about the craft of interview and we don't have to do more shows or that show or whatever, but they have to be really good shows. And whatever we produce, it has to be great. Is it internally driven or is it externally driven? Do you have a threshold?

40:21That was a good one, that was not a good one. Or if you found a better interviewer than you, if everybody in the world was a better interviewer than you, even though you were so objectively really good, would that be okay? No. Yeah, exactly. So much of mine is driven through it, so I don't know. Competitive. Yeah, what's the right way to approach competition? I don't know. I love it though It's like drives me in my day when I see a competitor do something that I think we should have done I think self competition is the answer to that at least for me at some point like now I care very little about what our competitors do if we're not as good as we could be that starts to become a real challenge for me Can I just ask one on on the investing side sure?

40:57It's like you have the fun now miss you for me. Yes. Yeah, so This might be spice, but you raise money for a plan and you are a brilliant CEO in that respect. And then you decide, I'm going to invest. I'm like, if you're an angel investing, game on. You do whatever you want. So your money, go for it. But if you're raising money from other people and then spending time investing their money, to me, I'm like, is that not a distraction to the core and to the investors that you've had invested in a plan? And actually, that's not how it should be. How would you respond to people who believe that? So that's a good framing and I appreciate the spice.

41:36Going back to one of the themes that we've had throughout this conversation, you have to examine the specific rationale and reason. For me, as Plaid got bigger, I got sucked later in later stage. I was spending time with the gigantic banks, I was spending time with the gigantic companies. I found that Plaid was in sometimes losing some of the founder mentality. It was losing some of the fine grain detention that I needed to pay to the early stage market. In 2016, I started angel investing just because I wanted a reason to go talk to these companies And I did a bunch of it. I had reasons to go talk to founders, had reasons to engage with them deeply.

42:09It kept me fresh. It built a great network. I learned things that I brought into how we developed products at PLAD. I met amazing people who ended up hiring and it's created this really virtual cycle. Angel investing actually, I think, is very distracting to founders. The reason for it is it's personally on you. People want to talk to you all the time. You don't have a system for it. You haven't built infrastructure. You have no leverage. And so for me, a good friend and I sat down and she said, hey, I'm going to go be a full -time VC, but I really want to start a fund. I said, this angel investing stuff is interesting because I learned a lot, but it doesn't have that much meaning and it takes too much of my time.

42:44And so we decided to partner together. And she kind of decided to go raise a fund. We partnered, we did it together. And that became the first mischief fund. Since then, there are two other amazing entrepreneurs. and we've created this fun structure that I have max leverage. They run it full time, three full time people, and me who does it a few years weak, but I get to spend time talking to entrepreneurs, helping them through sticky situations. And the amazing thing for me is like, I talked about sending emails and people responding. Like the wisdom and the value of Silicon Valley, and I say Silicon Valley and like air quotes here, because it's not about being in the place, that enabled me to be an entrepreneur.

43:20That taught me everything that I know. And I think there's a value in paying it forward. and so what oftentimes happens is, you know, we have these WhatsApp threads with the founders and the last some questions and we hear a question enough, I'll go down and write a blog post and the blog post that I write will oftentimes be something I'll just distribute them flat. Like, hey, how do we think, like I have a blog post on atomic teams? Like, how do we think about atomic teams? Why do they matter? Like, why are they useful? How do we think about applying an immune product innovation? So I'll share that with them flat.

43:45I'll share that with all the founders. And like, sometimes we'll even do a Q &A which will record and then we'll have this artifact. And so for me, it makes me a better entrepreneur to go deep on these key topics that I recognize. It prompts me to actually teach things to the company in an important way. And then it creates this amazing kind of pay -it -forward mentality with the founders of Inter. So I think the average returns have to come down because the amount of capital is going up and the amount of amazing companies is not necessarily going up at the same pace. I agree completely, but we've moved from like a boutique industry to as Doug Leone equals it to like a commoditized asset class.

44:17Yeah, so the question is the VC product kind of played out. I think it's kind of played out. Yeah Do you think VCs add value a few in what way has the VC moved the needle for plant? There have been a few one of them was transformational where VC came in and said we'd around those falling apart for Very unrelated reasons they came in said look we're gonna We're gonna stand behind this we're actually gonna be more money to higher valuation And it's gonna like meaningfully change the trajectory of the company because there was some some risk on the round that that kind of came up mid -round and they were like, no, we believe so, so deeply in the company.

44:47And so like that decision to invest at the right time made a huge difference. Who was that? They'll love it. That was any A. Like they, I think the world of them and like the way that they handled that situation was truly incredible. That's awesome. They'll love that. That's good promotion. This is not who waterways. That'll be thrilled. They're not. Rikying. Amazing. Ravi, the smile. I spoke to him before. Actually, yeah. He said you're a dick. I swear. I don't think he's ever said that word was less. Yeah, and he's way too nice. That was just me. but we'll cut out that last sentence from me and then he'll just be pissed.

45:17Listen, I want to do a quick fires at I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts, sounds OK? Yeah. What book written before 1965, would you most recommend? Ah, man, too many. The wealth of nations? What's the most contrarian or unall -sox advice for founders, listening? Most of the stuff that the VC's tell you don't do it. That's not to say, like, totally ignore them or like telling their own private. What's the most dangerous trope that VC's often say? The OKR stuff, like putting OKR in a business way too early is totally wrong. Putting revenue metrics on a company before they've achieved product market fit totally wrong.

45:48Like encouraging founders to like, I mean, this was addressed in the founder mode post that we talked about. But encouraging people to like hire great execs and then like let them have space. Totally wrong. Don't like micro -many is them too much, but like stay close. You need to stay in the details. You need to understand what's going on. What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months? So many things. We were talking about experience. It's like I've just been proven time and time again that hiring for experience in certain pockets where deep industry expertise matters is really, really important.

46:16And so that's been like, it just really in my face a couple times. What technology or advancement is most underrated? The last time I had this like, oh my gosh, the internet, this is the way that technology is going to go. Like there been a few of them recently, like trying the meta -ray bands, it's like, oh my gosh, like this is a thing that's gonna happen. Like I'm dealing with some of the AI stuff that's been fascinating. Like one of the first ones I had was like, shop pay where I showed up to this website and it had all my information I just clicked by. And it was like, ah, that's how the internet's supposed to work.

46:43And I think that that innovation is underrated. Like everyone's like cloned it now and like, you know, PayPal's done it and stripped it. Like everyone's like built the same thing. But the first time I saw that, like they had this, this incredible advantage, relatively the rest of the market. So it was very cool. If I ask you in five years time, where would you be exceptional for the plan to be and why would be a fail? What would the answer be? If anyone can get credit, a great asset to credit based on the data that they have with them in their head, your transaction history is so forth, you have the ability to link that based on the data you have in your head.

47:14That would be a huge unlock. I think if financial fraud, which right now, at least in the US, is growing at an increasing rate, if we can have it either flat or growing at a decreasing rate minimally, ideally declining, that would be huge. And so I think we can very realistically do that. And I think if it's a one -tap experience to apply for alone, that's the threshold that we have, that's the target that we have. It's like, I want to apply for alone, click Apply, do a Face ID, great, your application is spent. That's the goal. Zach, thank you so much for putting up with my variations and moving around schedules.

47:51You've been fantastic, and I've so enjoyed this, man. It's been super fun. Thank you for having me.

48:01I have to say that was such a special one for me to do. We first did our first episode together seven years ago, so to have the chance to do that in person was just fantastic. If you want to watch the full episode you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20 VC, that's 20VC. But before we leave you today, I'd like to introduce you to one of my favorite brands, Atio. Atio is the next generation of CRM. Setting up Atio takes less than a minute, and in seconds of syncing your email and calendar, you'll see all your relationships in one place, all in rich with valuable data. Atio also lets you build zapier style automations, gives you powerful reports and works perfectly for any go -to -market motion from PLG to sales -led.

48:39Atio is designed for the next era of companies like yours, and companies like yours shouldn't have to deal with inflexible, one -size -fits -all CRMs. Join industry leaders like 11 Labs, replicate, modal and more to scale your start -up beyond the next level. Head to atio .com slash 2 .0 VC and you'll get 15 % off your first year. That's atti .com slash 20 VC. And talking about incredible companies, I want to talk to you about a new venture fund making waves by taking a very different approach. It's a public venture fund anyone can invest in, not just institutions and accredited investors. The Fundraise Innovation Fund is democratizing venture capital, which could have big consequences for the industry.

49:21The fund is already off to a good start with $100 million into some of the largest most in -demand AI and data infrastructure companies, companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Databricks. Check out the Innovation Fund's impressive list of investments for yourself by visiting Fundrise .com slash 20VC. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risk charges and expanses. This and other information can be found in the Innovation Fund's prospectus at fundrise .com slash innovation. This is a paid sponsorship. And finally, let me tell you about UI Path. What do Henry Ford and AI have in common?

50:00Neither could change the world without automation. In the future, there will be two types of businesses, those that have automated and those that wish they had. UI Paths new AI agents don't just follow rules. They think, make decisions and work alongside the world's most powerful software robots already trusted by over 10 ,000 businesses if a genetic automation sounds new. Just think of UI paths as your more growth, not more overhead platform or your happier customers happier employees platform. Whatever you want AI to do for your business, a genetic automation with UI path will make it happen.

50:34Try UI paths new AI agents for free at uipath .com. The future of automation is both a genetic and robotic. Don't get left behind. As always, I so appreciate your tuning into the show and stay tuned for an incredible 20 growth on Friday with Antoine Lennel, head of growth at Revolut.