20VC: Why Small Funds Outperform Large Funds & AUM is a Vanity Metric | Why 99% of Investments in AI Startups Will Go To Zero | Being a "Traction First" VC & Investing Lessons from Investing in Canva and Missing Figma with Nikhil Basu-Trivedi

24:53What's your question to ask? Yeah, so oftentimes if I'm really digging in and really excited about something, I'll say something like, hey, let's just pretend that this is our first board meeting right now that we just invested in the company. What's the main challenge topic or discussion topic that you want to have in our first board meeting right now? The spirit of that question is just assessing like, are they clear -ride in their thinking right now about what's happening in the business? And can they articulate that? Usually you want what they say to be the most important thing that's also on your mind to prioritize and figure out in this phase, and you want some level of transparency and vulnerability around the answer.

25:28But I find that that question and the answer you get tells you be quite a bit. Do you know what I find in commonality of the best founders? Often I find you know, not so great ones actually will kind of shield themselves, but the really great founders will say, oh, Nick, oh, there are so many challenges. Where do we start? Yes. We've got one, two, three, four, and you're like, oh, yes, it's very consistent with what I've seen as well. Again, that ability to be confident in what is actually looking, but also confident in what's not looking yet, and clear -eyed and self -aware about it, is I think a characteristic of many of the great ones.

26:00I spoke to a communal friend of ours before the show, speaking of confidence and vulnerability, and they said, the challenge I have with Nicholas, he is one of the great ones. He just doesn't believe it yet, and he kind of feels like he should be someone maybe they he has to be sometimes. Do you think that's fair? I think there's certainly some truth to it. I think there's an insecurity that comes from not yet having delivered in distributions, many, many multiples of what I've invested, and an insecurity that comes from having started a firm that has so much to prove, everything to prove. An anxiousness that I'll have until, you know, we've many times overreturned our first fund.

26:42But I also think that who I am more than I've ever known, I'm able to authentically be myself. I think I've sort of been able to find my voices a writer over the last three, four years of trying to do the newsletter. And so my hope is that footwork is an embodiment of sort of who my partner Mike and I are and that we express ourselves fully, authentically, through the investments we make and how we conduct ourselves as a firm. I was going to ask kind of who you think you are, but it's actually a shit question because no one can actually answer that. But it's like, what actually makes you happy?

27:13And it could be anything. But like, Yeah, one of my close friends asked me this the other day. What just that genuine you need to be, too, so. So, this two that come to mind the first is, I've just always loved those first meetings with founders. I live for the couple every year that just blow me away and that sucked me in. I've had a bunch of those now in my career, but I just love that. As a venture investor, you have to love that thrill. At least I believe in my life. Do you find with those great ones, it's immediately obvious that it's great. Oh, I've gone back and forth so much on this, right?

27:43because it's sometimes that's in my mind. Yeah, this is what decision -making and judgment's all about. I do think consistent thing for me is, and I've gone back to try to study this, like if I'm thinking about it that evening, if I'm reaching out to people to sort of suss it out better, and I'm just researching on my own about it hours after the first meeting, there's something there that I should pay attention to. And conversely, if I haven't done anything about it two days later, that's probably not a fit. Maybe it goes on to be really special, but I actually haven't had that many of those where I didn't really think anything of it.

28:16I didn't follow up on any interest in it after a couple days and it turned out to be a massive company. And so I certainly reflect a lot on that. Do you and minecraft do agree to get a deal done? We don't. One of us has to absolutely love the company. The other can like it, not love it, or dislike it. The other can't hate it. If you think about the one through four voting scale, where one is strongly unsupportive and four strongly supportive. three is supportive and two is unsupportive. One of us has to be a four. One of us has to be strongly supportive to make an investment. Sure. The other cannot be a one, strongly unsupportive.

28:50I do know about this. And the reason I don't is because I think in any situation, I just generally, and I'm speaking as I have a friend who, is it bluntly an associate at a different firm, and they kind of have a similar scale. They said always do a two, just always do two, or a three. Either one you're like, well, I didn't say no. I'm a supportive, isn't really. Yeah. And so it should just be four and one four and one. Yeah, fair enough. I mean, I do believe I am my wrong I believe that there can be a place in the middle So for example, I've rarely been a one on anything in my venture career But where I have been I felt like there's actual downside risk to the firm potentially with making this investment or There's just something really off about it and therefore I feel very strongly we shouldn't do it But I've just liked a lot of companies I've been at two and a lot of stuff where others have been forced where I'm really glad that we did it and And conversely, I've been very glad for myself that I've been a four and strongly supportive and other folks have been a two because they didn't think it made sense, but they didn't hate it so much that they wanted to block it or say there's no way we should do it.

29:52So that's the way I think about it. I think you have to be intellectually honest, obviously, about in the ones that you put as twos that turned out that you were really pleased to have done. What did you not see? Yeah, I think because of my bias towards companies that have some signs that they're working, some of the signs of product market fit. The ones that most stand out there are ones that didn't have that, where at Shasta, for example, we made a decision to invest in something that was pre -product, but that actually turned out to work. Probably the other ones that I can think of at the top of my head is ones where we stretch on price to do it.

30:26I liked it, didn't love it, but then I didn't like the price, and so I was netted out as a two. Do you find it hard that like, okay, so you vote to your unsportive, but you're not like there's nothing super, super unspoiled. But then given the size of our teams, you will probably have to work on it quite extensively, if you do. Yeah, and then 10 years working on a deal, a lot of freaking time, when I come to you, we're unsupported on. Yeah. For Mike and me, it is very easy for us to disagree, but very seriously commit. Every investment that we make at Footwork is, so obviously at Footwork Investment, we actually don't even do attribution at the firm.

31:02We've never talked about which are Mike's investments versus my investments. We've done some kind of crazy and wacky things. I mean, this is the nicest way. It's not a bit of BS, so in a way that by one person says that someone bought and so everyone's like, well, that's Nickyles, well, that's Mike. Well, look, we actually, for the first year after we invest, both go to all the board meetings together. We both do the work. We have a short bit. We have a short bit. That's why I was about saying it is weird and wacky and non -traditional. And of course, it doesn't scale, but it's been really important for us in the first couple years of building the firm to operate in this way, because we think that's the purest form of teamwork.

31:36Like every venture film talks about, we look as a team, but very few I think actually show up as a team, and we've tried to do that from the earliest days. Both of us being on the tech spreads with all of our founders, and both of us showing up to those board meetings in year one is reflective of that commitment to actually work together, because we think we have complementary skills that founders can benefit from that, and we really don't want to think about any of the decisions we make as individual decisions. What are the most dysfunctional breakdowns of investment decision -making processes within partnerships?

32:06You see the venture landscape in a unique way, especially even the fact you're not in one of the large firms now. What are the ways that they break down in terms of decision -making? Look, there are partnerships where decisions are made based on the ability of individuals to sell internally. There's some folks that are just naturally more gifted to sell the deal to their partners. and there's political points back and forth on the voting system. That's a terrible way to make decisions. I think there's a lot of stuff that can bleed out from that selling process. I think also in general, it's sort of intellectual dishonesty that unfortunately a lot of partnerships have.

32:43Those are the things that I would cite that lead to dysfunction. Speaking of kind of the ability to sell internally, it makes me think of Jason Lemkin, he says to me the other day, there's often advice like, don't do a deal for a year. when you join someone new or you join venture, you know, that total bullshit. Like if you have a hot hand, say you come out of a great company and you're a long -line outlet super strong, whatever that is, do deals. How do you feel about the don't do a deal for a year, advice that often people get? I come back to the mantra, which is exceptional companies deserve exceptions.

33:13So our entire job is to find the companies that are outliers and to invest in those companies. If you really believe in your bones that some things are outlier, you should be trying to make that investment. I think it's as simple as that. As you were spoken about kind of disfunctions within venture partnerships, can we extrapolating that? There's also the LP relationship. Before we talk about kind of disfunctions there, and in many of your RPs, I think we probably share some. How did you select the LPs that you work with for work? Three things that we thought about when we raised our first fund, and we actually ranked LPs based on these three dimensions.

33:46And they were one, what's just the quality of the relationship with the people? We really tried to prioritize people who we built relationships with, who we really liked as humans. Second, we thought a lot about are these people who've seen what world class looks like and will they push us to be world class? And third, we thought about the mission values of the institutions themselves and whether they were institutions that we are really excited to make money for and be partners with. And so those were the three dimensions that we prioritize. We assigned like a one through five rank on each of those.

34:18And then at a macro level, we were really lucky in our first fund. We had about 450 million of commitments for 150 million dollar fund. And we ended up raising 175 million. But what we thought about as we were constructing the full LP base was just having a little bit of diversity across both check size and type of LP. And so we wanted a nice mix of LPs where there were a few at the 20 to 30 million dollar level out of 175, a bunch at sort of the 10 to 20 million dollar level, a bunch at the 5 to 10 million dollar level. So 20 to the 10th. high concentration in a 175 fund. How do you think about concentration limits that you will come to with?

34:53We don't have a single LP who's more than 20 % of our fund. We don't want one to three LPs having the majority of our fund and having therefore outsized control in our thinking or decision making in some way. And so we have that. And in terms of like types of LPs, we have obviously those corporates, those pension funds, those fund of funds, that's high net worth family offices, all the different types. How did you think about that? And do you agree with the common wisdom of when Diamond funds that they're so stable? Yeah, so we wanted some diversity and I think we have about 15 institutional LPs.

35:27We have 16 university endowments, three other foundations. So we're a little bit weighted towards endowments and foundations, but we have a bunch of fund of funds and we have a couple family offices as well. And so we like that mix because while the endowments are great names and they are long term oriented, there's still some level of risk of having an entire endowment -based LP base because they may all have the same denominator effect issues at the same time. They also perhaps tend to be more aligned than what they care about. And so we, in general, like the diversity, and that's what we prioritized.

36:01To what extent are LP's sheep? And what I mean by that, I mean, like you have some blue -chip, blue -chip endowment name, so I'm sure we both know, and people who can really follow when they do it. Yeah, look, I think that there's, especially in a first fund, there's a handful of LPs around the world, at least that I know of and have met, who are truly independent thinking, who will truly raise their hand and say, we're willing to do a first -time fund, and we're willing to be the first commitment, or the first big commitment. That group of LPs is very small. It's probably a 10 LPs, 15. Our biggest LPs are not LPs in my pre -fun.

36:36They took a chance without having known Mike making me for a very long period of time. We have a bunch that are LPs from my prime firm, but not interestingly the very largest ones. A lot of people get the advice of get your rank first and really solidify the base around that. You agree with that. Well, what we tried to do is we had a bunch of our friends who's proactively said to us we wanna commit to investing the firm, and we went out to a broad group of LPs at the beginning in a first wave, sort of set of friendly conversations to get feedback on our story, to practice, this and we had one institution that we've known for a long time who said we'd love to do it.

37:10They didn't actually say what the check size would be and it ended up being a small check, but it's really impactful to have one institution that's known you for a while. It's a well -known institution, say yes. Then we did try to prioritize the larger institutions, the group of 10 to 15 that I referenced, that would do a larger check in a first -time fund because that's a small N. That's the right group to see if we can get anyone to do it out of. Yeah, I always think that I find some that's so focused on getting the anchor in this slide I always say like get the GPs who they most respect as your LPs and hopefully they your friends are ready Yeah, so get them in his friendies and then leverage them for the intro Yeah, and then you can also leverage that check and so it's like not only did Nikhil make the intro He's also investing.

37:52It's like yeah, oh wow. We had two slides in our fun one fundraising deck Which actually we barely got to present we only had it properly designed in February of 2021 by then we already had the whole fun committed. But in that deck, the last two slides, one board members that we've served alongside, both Mike and me, people who we've literally been in the board room with, that was a subtle way to say, like, here's all the people you can call as references, and you probably know a bunch of these people. And then the next slide off that was, here are all the people who've inbound said that they want to invest in the fund.

38:22And that was a bunch of founders that we worked with, a bunch of GPs that we've worked with at other firms. Honestly, we never asked any of those folks or any individuals if they want to do invest in footwork, we just let them say that they want to invest. And when they did, we put them on that slide again as a way to just have a very easy way to reference us for our piece. I actually have an Astar LPs who ended up seeing that deck if those two pages resonated, but I suspect that they did. What do you think LPs, you know, we obviously sit in the venture landscape, see a lot more of transparency, BCWC is very clear, like Founder's What do you think we see that LPs do not see in the venture landscape about how VCs operate?

39:01There's a difference in hunger and energy and drive that some managers have that others don't. It's sort of what we look for in the companies that we invest in. Of course, if it's a manager like you, for example, that really has a unique spin, a unique story, and as an end of one on different dimensions, it's easy to see that. Because you can put it on a page. It's time to constanate. You can touch it as well. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, it's sector focused in this area. And I believe in that area, great. It's like super easy to check the boxes on some funds like that. And don't get me wrong.

39:33There's incredible funds that are like that, right? But I think a lot of this business is the human side. I don't think that that's going to change. Assessing a person, individual GPs, real commitment to doing this, their level of driving hunger, their ability, of course, to improve themselves and learn their ability to source and make investment decisions into win and help companies. It's actually hard to get to the bottom of that, just as it is hard to get to the bottom of how great a founder is for us in our jobs as VCs. And so you think our peas don't do that well? I don't think that they spend enough cycles on it, but I actually think some of the great ones do.

40:07And of course, I'm biased here. We had LPs who did 30, 40 references that we heard about on us, each. We were heavily scrutinized on us as people, because so much of our strategy is really just about Mike and me in our ability to make decisions in the partnership that we have. That's where we found LP GP Fit with our LP's. Is the folks who really dug in on us as people and how we make decisions. You mentioned seeing, picking, winning, helping and asking. If you were to say, you're best and you're worst. What would you say? My worst right now that I feel is on the sourcing side. You know, I think when you're a duo investing at C1NA as a generalist firm, it's impossible to see everything you want to see.

40:49And I think it's hard to, when you have started a firm, you have other responsibilities to be able to purely focus on sourcing companies. We do counter audits and Catherine and Rachel who are our operations folks at Footwork. Actually send both Mike and me every week. What does our counter audit look like for this week that's just passed and what does it look like for the upcoming week? And the single metric that we're focused on there is are we spending more than 50 % of our time on meeting new companies and sourcing new investments. I firmly believe you have to spend the majority of your time on those things to be able to find the next great one.

41:22And the beauty of our business is the next one can be the one. Right? The next one can be the one that changes everything and the directory of the firm. Do you buy the platform value ads services, generation that we saw? Look, I think there's a handful of firms that have done it well, but every firm getting ahead of talent and... What is your answer? You just break down ahead of talent, what? There's a great example. but if you were hiring a head of developer relations and a company comes to a head of talent, that is a fundamentally different hire to ACMO. What you need to be able to discern between, they are not gonna be the same, they're not gonna be the same network.

41:55So at the end of the day, they're writing a JD and working the process with a great, and it's a muscle that the great companies build themselves. Again, I do think there are a handful of firms that have platform offerings that have moved the needle. But most of those platform offerings are about scaling the firm themselves versus about actually scaling companies and really helping companies get to the next level. I want to do a quick fire. You learn a lot from your biggest hits and your biggest misses. When you think about that, what would you say is your biggest hit other than Canva? Yeah. What would you say is your biggest hit?

42:29And how did that change your mindset on what good investing is? I actually think my biggest hit, at least as I can best predict it, is an art canvard on a dollar gains perspective and on an IRR basis as well. It's coming to call the Farmers' Dog, which is in the pet food space. A subscription service for fresh pet food. It's doing fabulously well. Two things. First, that some of the best businesses are incredibly simple. They're simple to understand. They're actually simple to build, but they're based on unique insights. I think that that's going to be the story of the Farmers' Dog once the story fully gets out.

43:03And the second is the pet category is a fabulous category. There are some markets where the tailwinds are just so strong in multiple different ways that there's a lot of opportunity for incredible enterprise value and I think that that's the case for the Farms dog. That's the winner. What about a miss and what did you learn from that? The first one that comes to mind that I've been fucked up a few times over the last year is Figma. You know, I spent time with Dylan Field in the very early days. I was actually one of the early interviewers for the Teal Fellowship program, which she was in. And I remember going on walks with him in Palo Alto and a little bit like you actually, he was mature for his age.

43:40Now, I'm trying to think back to our first meetings and San Francisco and London. Dylan was really mature in a bunch of different ways. Like the way he was thinking about the need for perfecting the product before getting it out there, the opportunity to go after sketch and others that were in that market already, but also just on life -related stuff. Like I remember asking him, I'm asking me about my relationship with my then girlfriend, now wife, and just how we make decisions together, and how we communicate, and what's good about our communication, what's poor in our communication. All sorts of stuff like that, where I think he was about 20 years old at the time, maybe even younger than that.

44:14I don't think I've still seen anyone at that age be able to think about those things in sort of work and personal life at the level he was thinking about. I've reflected on that a bunch of times because I wish I could have been in both Cannes and Facts. Why did you know? This comes back to my bias around wanting to see some early signs of product market fit before investing and Figma did not have a launched product before its first couple of incharounds So I give the folks that did those rounds. I think John Lillie, Graylark and Danny Rimer at index if I'm not mistaken I give them a ton of credit They saw the specialness I think in Dylan and in that market opportunity And we're willing to wait because there are a couple of years where I was like That's right, and then release something.

44:54They will do it and then be patient enough. And I think there are multiple rounds, I think I talked to John Lillie Graylock about this. Multiple rounds that John was involved in before the product even launched, which is incredible. Hats off to Dylan, hats off to those early backers. You said about your wonderful partner, and you have to touch on Fatherhood. It's such a special, but also significant change to life. There's so many ways I can think, I think the biggest one that I'd love to understand is, if you could advise yourself one thing, and cool yourself up the night before your wife gave birth.

45:24What would you tell yourself? Well, first I would say, you think you have a bunch of control over your life and you kind of do have a bunch of control over your life right now, but tomorrow you suddenly are not going to have a bunch of control over your life. All these things are going to be out of your control as a parent. You can't control exactly who your kid is. You can't control how they're going to behave in certain places and dimensions of life. You think you have the perfect child care setup, but stuff's going to go wrong. You're gonna have to keep adjusting your schedule. And so you have to embrace the lack of control and the surprise That is gonna come from all of this experience.

46:00The joy of parenthood is in the Randomness and surprises of it. And so it's still something that I'm comprehending But was that that's a feeling you're a very structured person. It's challenging to embrace randomness in spontaneity and change your plans Absolutely, and yet it's an incredible gift too. You know, we all get to live this life once, and so having that has been one of the great joys of having a kid. How does it change your relationship with your wife? Yeah, it certainly makes things harder on a bunch of dimensions. The clichés thing that people say, which is you just have less time for each other, is absolutely true.

46:36But I also think it gives us purpose. like we have this unified person who we're thinking about and co -parenting and co -working on. It's also strengthened our partnership in a lot of different ways. It's given clarity to kind of what matters. Do you think it changes the type of investor you are, companies you like to invest in, where you like to operate as an investor? It does in the sense that my time obviously matters more than ever, and that's only going to continue being the case in my life, And so I have to believe in my bones when we make an investment decision. This is something I really want to spend time on.

47:14It perhaps used to be much more just about the capital and the economics. And now it's about that end time, because time is such a precious commodity. I have a lot of conversations with people about this, and they say, I will actually wish I had children sooner. They say, that pose, do you wish you had children sooner? I don't think so. I think I was 32 when we had our daughter, Sharia. and I got a lot done in my 20s. Can you work as hard as a parent? This is what I worry about. Why that you're able to, you know me now pretty well. I just pounded at my desk a lot. Yeah, you can't do that when you're a parent.

47:49No, and I believe the answer is no. It has not been the case for me. I want to preserve that window, for example, from 5 .30 to 7 .30 p .m. every day, every day that I can, because that's a really special window to do dinner time, bath, bedtime. time. I also spend time with her in the mornings because my wife works starting pretty early east coast hours. I'm typically the one who takes our daughter to Montessori in the mornings. It just means that I have to spend my 730 to 10 pm window working every day. That's the only way I found to be able to make up for some of those lost hours on work. Now the flip side is I think I have to be present in those windows with her.

48:26So I hope that it does something better for my brain when I'm actually focusing on work that I can be slightly more efficient, but I was also pretty efficient before. So I think overall I am less productive. Good, I'm glad it's not just my worries. I want to do it. I want to do a quick fire around my friends. So I say short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts, that's done okay. Okay. So what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? AI is being a very, very interesting category to I honestly don't know if there's great AI first opportunities for us at Footwork to invest in and that's because of just the that insane hype cycle around it at the moment.

49:02We over -rotated once again, very, very quickly towards excitement here, but as I've thought through the venture investments here, I don't think that there's a lot of AI first, AI -enabled companies that are gonna be for us in this phase. And yet I do believe that there's been, to expensive and there's just so much competitive noise. And there's also so much that, for example, on the large language model world, that the LLMs themselves will serve as a use case versus an application layer on top of those LLMs. I've heard there are several companies now that have grown rapidly in ARR and have now started declining in ARR as retention actually starts to affect these businesses because there's churn from folks who just try out products both on top of these LLMs because they're interested in the novelty of them, but then churn away.

49:50And there's also just the reality that as chat GPT itself gets better in leveraging GPT -4 and other models, as an example, it serves those use cases that some of the applications that are on top of chat GPT and GPT -4 have tried to serve. I think people are forgetting novelty enterprise buying, which is like there's a lot of AI companies that say you have Walmart, McDonald's, Porsche, and it's like you need two people in their design team testing it out with the 10K. And that is not the same as enterprise wide roll outs. Totally. What would you most like to change about the world of venture? People talking about AUM as a metric.

50:22I think AUM is the stupidest thing to talk about as a venture firm, because back to what we were talking about earlier, small funds outperform larger funds. You really shouldn't be talking about how much capital you've raised. I'm okay with people talking about how much capital they've returned and how much enterprise value they've created. I just think talking about the aggregate size of all the funds that you've raised is a complete vanity metric. I think the enterprise value of like PortfordiCom is his total bullshit, though, too. So I could invest in the Figma and the series E. Fair enough.

50:51And then it's like, we've created $35 billion. $100, you know, come on, you put in 500K in the, I've seen some of it. You know what I mean though. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think dollars returned. That's the thing that matters the most. What was your biggest investing mistake between 2020 and 2022 in the last cycle? Doing our pro rata in companies that quickly raised another round at a huge step up from where we first invested because fundamentally there was very little de -risked. And we saw this happen where a company had raised a series A from us and two months later they did a series, this is a real example, two months later they did a series B at a 7X, six to seven X markup.

51:32And we did our full perada. And that becomes a very big position for you without that much being de -risked from the initial round. And that then deserves now. We do. Yeah. Why? A couple things. One is obviously there's going to be some cases where an entrepreneur is going to need a little bit of extra support to get to the next round. You know, of course, some of those may not be the right decision to make, but some of those I do think will be. The other thing is that I think in a world where you have bridges that lead anywhere. I've had a couple in my career, yeah. But I think the other reason is, especially as a newer firm, you wanna be able to say that we can support the company in that next round.

52:05I do think there's validity to that, in especially today's market where capital isn't as free, where folks who are leading the next round may be looking at whether the insiders are gonna do their ProRato or not as a signal. And so we like to do our ProRato on the next round following ours, and then we pay back. I think about our total fund, our total fund size is about 175 million, right? We think we'll make about 20 investments out of that fund, an average, a check of four to five million dollars. So it's called it sort of 80 to a hundred million dollars on initial investments, and the rest is for follow -ons.

52:30So it's still... So it's 30 to 40 for follow -on. That's right. So it's still, and hopefully we have recycling as well, but it's still weighted towards initial checks. But we do think there's value in having a little bit reserved. I just feel that reserves actually fundamentally challenging dollars to the because you're most often dirty called interaction. And I look at mine and some of the fastest spikes and not the sustainable value creating companies. Do you see what I mean? But logically you would concentrate capital towards those. They are absolute bangers in the moment. Look, it's where we started our particular conversation, which is the decisions that I regret in that 2020 to 22 era were those pro -radiant decisions.

53:07And I think we've got to be a lot more disciplined on those moving forward, which less well -known firm GIMOSR respects. All named to, USB doesn't get the credit that it deserves. It should be in that pantheon of greatness that sort of Sequoia and benchmark are typically put in. Yeah, it's just being on the East Coast. I think so. And I think it's because I never forget, for example, when Coinbase went public, every investor was on CNBC or blog post about it, whether they were on the board or just a tiny investor in the company or whatever relation to that. I use it. I use it exactly. And yet you heard absolutely nothing from Fred Wilson on that day.

53:44Absolutely nothing from USB on that day. From the guy who writes a daily blog, it's great. From the guy who writes a daily blog, from the person in the firm that led the series around, you heard absolutely nothing. And I was just floored by that and I just loved it. And so I just respect the hell out of those guys. And I do think they are one of the most collaborative and team -based firms, if not the most out there, which is, as you know, north stuff for Mike and me at footwork. I'll say another that I think is less well known, which is IA Ventures. And I was going to say IA. Yeah, Jesse Beirutti, who's one of the 2GPs now with Brad and IA was fellow intern with me at Insight.

54:19And so we've known each other since we were 20 years old. And he's just incredibly thoughtful. And the thing I love about them is very few people know about them. They do very little on the external brand front, but they have crushed it. And I think they know what they are good at. They know what is their type of deal as well. Yes, they know their tastes. They know their taste. They know their taste and they have great taste. And they've kept discipline on everything. And as you know, they have done, obviously, well, from a return standpoint. Rogers now retired. Exactly. And you could see the data I think from...

54:50You know when a fund's done well and the manager then returns with, I'm managing my own money. Well done. Yeah. A basketball member you sat on a ball with and why them? No, interesting. I'll put one that I miss right now working with, which is Vassan under Arjun at Excel. Vassan and I were also in sight together in the summer of 2010. He left soon thereafter to join Excel, so he's been there, I think, for about 12, 13 years now. He led the seed round in Frame I -O. We did the series A with them at Jaster, and so I got to work with Vass and found a memory in the team there. I pick Vass because I think he's not that well -known, but he's got a great portfolio.

55:28a frame I always acquired by Adobe for $1 .3 billion a couple years ago. A segment was another one that he did. But as a board member, he just asked really thoughtful questions. He sticks to just what's most important to prioritize as a company. And in my peer group, in sort of our generation, although you're younger than me and I'm younger than VAS, I still think of us as sort of the same generation. I think he's one of the best and probably hasn't gotten the credit he deserves for that. You can have dinner with anyone dead or alive, who do you choose? Two of my heroes wrote a book together and so they have a ton of chemistry and that's Sir Alex Ferguson, the longtime manager of Manchester United and Sir Michael Maritz, the longtime partner at Sequoia and I think what would be special about dinner with both of them, I've actually had dinner with Sir Michael but sadly you've never met Sir Alex.

56:13I think what would be special about dinner with both of them is the chemistry they would have in that dinner. The fact that they are my two heroes and two of my favorite subjects would make that so much fun. Final one, footwork in five years time or ten years time you can choose, but you said AEM is not the metric we should be measuring, most firms are with scale. What does footwork look like in the ten year frame? We perhaps add one or two equal general partners to our group who are refounders and co -owners of the firm with Mike and me, but most importantly we've been able to already work with a handful of really special founders and companies where we've been their lead series A or seed partner.

56:51And again, that probably in five to 10 years is not going to show up with distributions and DPI, but hopefully it shows up in just the fundamental nature of a couple of the companies that we work with. And their scale and revenue, their business fundamentals, the impact that they're having on markets and on hopefully creating categories. Mike got to work with a woman named Katrina Lake, the founder and stitchwicks from five people to 10 ,000 people and from zero revenue to a couple billion in revenue. And we hope that we get to work with a handful of Katrina's, of Melanie Pukins, from Canvass, of Jonathan Reggis from The Founders Dogs.

57:25We hope to work with a handful of those folks over the next 10 years. Necula, I love this. It's so much nicer to do it in person. I've so enjoyed this chat, so thank you so much for joining me. This is awesome, man. Thanks for having me. I absolutely love that show with Necula. It really is special when you have like a seven -year relationship like that and then still being friends. So appreciate all that he's done for me in the support he's shown for me over the years. But before we leave you today, you know all those mind -numbing tedious tasks that seemingly take up half your day, will code is here with their new AI powered work assistant that helps you and your team not just finish tasks, but make progress.

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