Fund of funds: origins, evolution and deep dive with Michael Kim | E1890

27:45And so it really is sort of that philosophical approach that you have. And I think maybe David Swenson at Yale, he was the longtime CEO there, he has over 50 % of his endowment in private funds, both private equity and venture. And I think of that, I think 30 % is venture, which is astronomically high compared to any other endowment. And they have phenomenal results. So Yale is special because they historically have been able to get access to the best and highest alpha kind of venture funds. Whereas a newer entrant to venture, again, they can just check the box off. And also, I'm not trying to gloss over fund of funds.

28:28Fund of funds also provides that access. Like if someone wants early stage exposure, some seed stage exposure, we are actually the perfect vehicle to do that. let's talk a little bit about beta in the early stage space why combinator i guess is and tech stars were the two funds that maybe tried to scale this up in a major way their returns uh as well are kind of returning to the average uh historically or can can when you're investing in four or five hundred startups a year like those companies i firms i think peaked at can they actually return alpha or is it more the industry looks at and goes yeah that's that's a great way to get the beta exposure to the space and you know maybe there's an outside chance of alpha occurring that's a really good observation you know i think when you have hundreds of companies a year and you own six percent seven percent that's actually a pretty good starting point but ultimately you're an index of high quality companies and then you apply the power law so most of them won't return capital or just be one X's.

29:32But if you can catch on to one of those two sort of outliers, you know, like an Airbnb, you know, you can have, or Stripe, you can have phenomenal returns. And I think that's what institutional LPs are going in eyes wide open saying, okay, YC is very high quality. They have amazing screening, but ultimately it's an index with an option for a potential outlier. And they've done very well. And, you know, Gary Tan, is an amazing leader of them. Yeah, it seems to me like this is a great strategy. One I've kind of studied a bit, which is, hey, you know, once you get to 100 investments a year, which is what we're at 100 new ones a year, we have to make a decision, oh, do we go to 200 300 400?

30:17Well, only if you can maintain quality, right? And so if you see the quality stop start dipping off, well, then you don't want to go to that 200, you know, you want to stay at 100. And so this is the thing, you know, in my fourth fund, I become super vigilant about it's just looking at the 100th person we invest in a year, the 99th. Did we fill a seat? Or did we make a thoughtful decision? You know, and I think that's where I watched maybe some other funds that tried to get to scale, whether it was 500 or tech stars or whatever, not disparaging anybody. But I did see companies that maybe we said no to in that early stage, you know, wind up in some other programs.

30:52And I just thought, wow, this is what you have to be realistic about is of the application pool. Are you keeping it to, in our case, we've kept it to 50 basis points. So one in 200 applicants get accepted into our programs. I think YC is, I think Gary said it's 1.25 right now. And so you really, you know, just being hyper vigilant in order to have, hey, well, we got the beta because we, like you said, you keyed on it. Are you a high quality index or a low quality index? That's, I think, super key. But then that optionality, I mean, if the funder in hits Airbnb or Stripe, bingo. If it doesn't, well, then maybe you got the beta.

31:29So there's beta with an option of alpha, kind of like a pretty perfect package, I think. Yeah. Not to talk about our own book, but fundamentally with a fund of funds, you are getting a lot of companies. So in each one of our fund of funds, we probably have a thousand companies. And overall, we have 4 ,000 portfolio companies. 130 of them are unicorns. Maybe in reality, it's like half of that or two thirds of that. But what I think is impressive, and it's a real testament to our fund managers, is that those unicorns in our portfolio, they were all from the seed stage. They weren't entered at a late stage valuation.

32:08This is when the companies are getting going, initial product market fit, and our fund managers are working with them. And the founders are phenomenal, and they've become something very valuable. So with the fund of funds, you do have also that sort of index. But what I would say is, and this gets back to your alpha beta observation. In our own portfolio, we have seed funds, and we have pre-seed funds. And I don't go advertising this to our LPs or to our fund managers, but I think of our seed funds as the market beta, high quality market beta for seed funds, which in my mind means that they have a higher probability of getting the three to five X.

32:49But I think our pre-seed managers actually have a higher probability of being five to 10 X. So if you balance it right, and we in general try to get exposure equally to both seed and pre-seed funds, you know, market beta 3x, the alpha from the pre-seed funds 5x, you know, that generally gets us to our 4x. And historically, you know, our funds are generally 3 to 5x, our first two funds are. So it's work. And diligencing, it's a lot of work. And diligencing fund managers, critically important. I remember a decade ago, somebody said to me, you know, how many unicorns you have? I said, I've got seven.

33:28How many investments have you done? And I said, I think I'm at 125, 25 150 or whatever and said oh i have got 15 and i said oh what are the 15 he looked at me he had just like four or five of the same ones i had i said oh i don't remember you investing in that he's like i bought secondary shares yeah i said well when did you buy your secondary shares he goes i just bought them this year i said well they're already a unicorn he's like yeah he goes but you know my lps don't know that and i just put it on my i got 15 logos you have seven i have twice as many unicorns as you and i said oh my lord you could literally game the system i could go buy spacex andro whatever is the hot company of the moment on the secondary market put the logo on my website or wherever crunchbase pitchbook and maybe people don't know uh but real lps thoughtful lps you are actually looking when did that bet get placed yeah you know valuation yeah totally right now startups have to do more with much less it's rough out there folks we all know that.

34:26It's been a tough 2023, 2024. It's going to be a grind as well. So if you need great tech talent, but you don't have the time to interview dozens of candidates, you need to check out Lemon.io. Lemon.io has thousands of on-demand developers to choose from. And these devs are vetted, experienced, result-oriented, and they charge competitive rates. Great developers can be incredibly hard to find. We all know that. And when you do find them, it can be hard to integrate them into your team. Lemon.io handles all of that for you. Startups choose Lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with three or more years of experience and strong portfolios.

35:01In fact, only 1 % of candidates who apply get in. And if something ever goes wrong, Lemon.io will get you a replacement ASAP. And a bunch of my launch founders have worked with Lemon.io and had great experiences. So you should go to Lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And twist listeners get 15 % off their first four weeks. stop burning money, hire developers smarter, visit lemon.io slash twist. To your question about diligence, the primary focus for us, and let me set the stage here in that we view each of our fund managers as a collect as a specific unique network.

35:42And so at Sundana, we view our portfolio managers as a collection of networks. And, you know, I think it's important because if you're a fund manager, how are you going to win a deal? Let's say you're a seed fund manager, you're competing for a hot deal, something that a lot of people are also putting in term sheets for. Why are you going to win? Is it your domain expertise? Is it your network? Are you a good person? Does the founder really want to work with you? And I'm talking specifically about where our fund managers are writing the largest checks. So, you know, smaller funds, they can slide in with a$250 ,000,$500 ,000 check.

36:18I'm talking about more like$2 to$3 million checks. Why would the founder pick you? And so, as I mentioned, domain expertise networks, maybe you're a great guy to hang out with. Those are reasons that a founder may pick you. But ultimately, they are entrusting you with their baby. And so you have to come through on actually providing value. And I know that's been a fin meme for such a long time with VCs. How can I add value? How can I help you? Well, we actually asked that question. So as part of our diligence, which the bulk of it is to talk to founders, we will ask them, how has this person helped you post investment?

36:58How does that contrast to the other investors that you have on the cap table? Because you might have multi-stage firms, you might have individuals, you might have a super angel like Elad Gill or solo GP like Elad or Lockie. Each of them bring a different thing to the table. So what we try to understand is, what is the fund manager that we're looking at? What do they bring to the table? And is it legit? Do they just talk the game? Are they actually rolling up their sleeves and helping them? And so I think for founders, it behooves them also to do diligence and actually talk to founders of other portfolio companies and say, Hey, how did Jason help you?

37:39Is he responsive? Does he even respond to your texts? that little thing actually is very reflective of how a fund manager operates. And if you're a founder and you're stressing out about a major issue, whether I should hire a product manager or, you know, should we launch this feature now? How do we tweak our product roadmap? You kind of want to know now you don't want to wait a week because the guy is in Aspen or some, some place on safari. Silent retreat for 10 days. Yeah. Not helpful to be on a silent retreat when a founder needs advice. Yeah. Yeah. It also goes back to your original, one of your original questions, which is if they're making so much management fee, how much hustle do they have left?

38:22And I've seen cases for sure where founders have, or GPs have made, you know, life-changing money and they've kind of started taking it easy. It almost becomes a lifestyle thing for them. But to the credit of some of our other fund managers, I would say they are amongst the hardest working. They're the most humble. And I'll give you two examples. Manu Kumar at Canine Venture, pre-seed fund. He's made a lot of money because he's been a very, very successful investor. But he is amongst our hardest working fund managers. It's his nature. He's a PhD in CS. He loves tinkering. He loves working with very early stage companies.

39:03Another guy, Eric Ranala at Mucker, they've made life-changing money through their funds. Oh, by the way, their first fund was$12 million. They returned 19x in cash because of their investment in honey. And he could take it easy. He could go out and raise$500 million funds. He hasn't done that. He stuck to his knitting. He showed discipline. Very humble guy. We love him. We love Manu. And those are examples of where people - Yeah, Manu, great guy. I know him from the early days. He was always super hardworking and everywhere. And you have to be able to differentiate. You didn't dive into the point about the networks, but you did dive into the value add.

39:40Oh, yeah. The value add, I understand, super easy to figure that out. You just talk to the founders. Hey, was there an instance where they helped you post investment? And I always tell the founders, up to you to tell us, hey, how can we be helpful? And we'll be there for you. And if you need us to get out of the way, we can get out of the way too. you know and we try to set up massive lines of communication what i found is like if you open up massive lines of communication and you check in with people and you stay positive then they're going to be willing to share with you so we have a slack room for everybody we have their sms we have their email right we have them in our database we have a primary contact at the firm we got a secondary contact with her we run events we try to have them show up for stuff uh you know we'll do a webinar about an issue that's pressing in the industry just so they have like lots of touch points with us just ways to you know open up to us and i always tell them at some point things are going to blow up and when things get the gnarliest that's when i can be the most helpful because i've seen the most gnarly crazy stuff you would not imagine i've seen companies like on the precipice of insanity call me then because you know i've seen it all and here's my phone number and when you just give them your phone number and say call me anytime weekends nights it's all good i pick up the phone i'm a normal human being for sure or i'll text you back And when we say we want to be the lead investor, that actually is getting to what we think of ourselves as we're not just the largest check or amongst the largest checks.

41:06It's really how we work with our fund managers. So we do a lot of the same things that you described. We have a Slack channel. We're emailing. We're on the phone constantly with our fund managers. Our goal is that they will call us at 11 p.m. when they have a big issue that they want to work through. And we try to be very responsive. But also, getting back on -

41:54And you're like, wow, this is as proprietary and pure of a source of startups as possible. Like people listen to All In and like, yeah, I have a startup. I'm in this weird location you never heard of. And this is the first time we've ever talked to a venture capitalist. It's really weird. So how do you determine the networks, the overlapping, the not overlapping? I'm very curious about that. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned different universities and geographies. I'd also for sure add different companies, right? So just to give an example, we recognized that we didn't have anyone from the Stripe network.

42:23And so we were looking for someone who was credible, who was going to raise a fund. We went with this guy, Dita Van Lomen. He's a Dutch-American guy here in San Francisco. He raised the$15 million fund. We anchored it with three. He was employee 27, I think, at Stripe. And he also was the first head of Stripe International. So a lot of operating experience. And so that's something that we thought was very unique to our networks. Lockie Groom is someone who I like a lot. And unfortunately for us, he was raising multi-stage firms. But we actually brought Lockie on as a member of our advisory board.

42:57And from time to time, I get texts from him saying, hey, you ought to talk to this guy. Or I'll text him and say, what do you think of this gal? And he'll be very responsive with that. So a collection of networks, that's how I think about what we've created. The other element, Jason, I think that's important to recognize is that networks have a shelf life. And so what I mean by that is when you look at some of the data about fund one being the best performing fund and then subsequent funds decline over time, the easy answer is, oh, yeah, they just got bigger. They started off with a$10 million fund.

43:34Now they're managing a$300 million fund. Yeah. So, of course, the returns are going to be worse. But I think also an element of networks and the dynamic here is that if you're raising a fund one, you are going to go after the low-hanging fruit in your networks. And in fact, that's why LPs are betting on you because you have this network. You kind of exhaust that by fund two or three. And so fund managers have to be always building their reputation, their market position, and creating new networks. It's a dynamic thing. We don't just sit around and think, oh, yeah, this is a Stripe guy or Uber guy.

44:11Those networks over time evaporate or get weaker, or you've already harvested for all the low-hanging fruit that was available. You could also say that, quite frankly, about domain expertise. Yeah. Right? You could be a great product manager at Google. You might have great insight into, say, software infrastructure or whatever product. And that's what you're selling yourself. And that's the value prop of your fund. like I have this network, the Google network, I have this deep domain expertise, I built all these products. That domain expertise evaporates probably faster than networks, right? Absolutely.

44:47What I learned, people are like, what do you know about running startups? And it's like, yeah, you know what? I've been an investor now for 10 years. I have now become disconnected in some ways from starting a company from zero to one. But then in another way, because I'm sitting with founders and I ask them thoughtful questions, what's working at your company, what's not, you then become a super router of information. So, you know, I'm shocked now by this incredible trend of efficiency in the market. I think we should maybe talk a little bit as we wrap up here about just the market today, because the two trends I'm seeing that are just absolutely giving me hope and make me super motivated to do more investments and spend more time with startups today than in my, I guess, now going into my 11th, 12th year of investing, is that they're so efficient.

45:38And I'm watching them build global companies so fast. The Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb global playbook is really well known now. And then the ability to do more with less that we saw with cloud computing or WeWork, abstracting, office space, ad networks. Co-pilot. AI is going to help this, especially around software development. Maybe we double click on what startups will look like 2024 going forward in your mind and what you think the game on the field is, especially as it relates to when is a great opportunity to invest in companies and then how much capital are these companies going to need?

46:17How many people are they going to need to hit various milestones? 10 million, 25 million, 100 million in revenue. It's an awesome question. So let me start off by giving you some statistics from some metrics from our data. Today, this median seed round in our portfolio is$4 million on 14. The median pre-seed round is$1.5 million on seven pre, eight and a half posts. The really interesting statistics around this is that the average age of a company, by the time they go raise their seed round, is now two years. Wow. Ten years ago, it was like three months. Yes. You started with your seed round, yeah.

46:56Yeah. A related stat around that is that 75 % of our portfolio companies that have raised the seed round have revenue when they raise their seed round. And 10 years ago, it was less than 20%. And so, bottom line, companies are more mature. They have initial product market fit in the form of actual revenue. And I'd say that revenue is probably$100K to$400K, ARR. Yeah. Just use that as a metric. That is just such an extraordinary point to just pause on. What a radically different world it is just a decade later. I remember when we started, it was zero revenue, or maybe like one or two customers who are trialing the product, and you were raising your money to kind of get this product to revenue.

47:40It's so often now that I'm meeting companies doing their pre-seed seed round, and they're like, yeah, we got 17 people. We figured out a way to bootstrap this to the first 10k a month in revenue, 20k a month in revenue, with people coming to our accelerator, with 25k a month in revenue. They haven't raised any money. Maybe they did a friends and family round. and they raised$100K or something. It is incredible how quickly people can get to not zero to one in terms of product market fit, but zero to one customer, zero to 10 customers. It's extraordinary. For sure. If you look at all the news stories about venture financings, I think those are kind of ridiculous because they're always these sort of catastrophic doom and gloom stories like, oh yeah, venture is down 70%, but they're using 2021 as a high watermark.

48:25Yes. The answer is yeah. I mean, 2021 and early 22 were outlier years. Actually, in our data, if you look at the CAGR from valuations and round sizes across our 10 plus years of data, it's like 7%, 8%. And that would suggest that today, the 4 on 14, the 1.5 on 7, that's actually where it should be. So I think we're actually back to normal. And here's the other interesting, I think, observation, which is seed rounds have been persistent now at 4 million. A couple of years ago, pre-21, there were three on nines. Today, there are four on four teets. So then the question is, why is it still 4 million?

49:11And I think part of it is because these companies are more mature. They actually have the initial product market fit. They're going through the sales motion. And they're starting to get that down. So the punchline here is seed is the new Series A. Absolutely. And the special thing that we told our LPs at our annual meeting is that pre-seed is the new seed. Pre-seed is the new seed. There's a lot of implications for that. What are those? That pre-seed is the new seed. So a pre-seed stage company is basically a founder with a PowerPoint. They don't have product market fit. They don't have anything.

49:48Our pre-seed funds are smaller. They're about$50 million in size. They're getting much more ownership for smaller checks. And so the conclusion from one piece of analysis that we did, we looked at the mortality rates of our pre-seed portfolio fund managers and the mortality rates of our seed fund managers. It's identical. It's 9%. And so if you're writing a$600K check to get 10 % at a pre-seed stage company or a million and a half to get that same 10 % at a seed stage company. And yet the mortality rate is identical. That suggests to us that pre-seed stage investing actually does not engender much higher risk.

50:30With that insight, we made the case to our LPs in December at our annual meeting that we are going to focus even more on pre-seed funds. And so the question I think at the high level that you're asking is, what does 2024 look like and beyond? I think seed stage investing will still be the larger, now perhaps more incumbent seed funds competing to write a$3 million check into a$4 million round. But they also have multi-stage firms with active programs, with formal programs competing against them. And so seed stage investing is super competitive. There are fewer pre-seed funds, so it's less competitive, perhaps a little bit more collaborative.

51:09It's more work. I can tell you that. It's a lot more work. I was about to get to that. Yeah. So our pre-seed managers actually spend a lot of time with people who are still at companies. And they are working with them after work to figure out, is there an idea here? Is there something that we can iterate on? And then they'll actually work with these people, say at a Google or a Databricks and say, yes, this actually will work. I will fund you. So that person quits after three months of iterating. And then our pre-seed manager comes in, gets 10 % to 15 % of that company for a relatively small check.

51:48That is the beauty. But that also means, exactly to your point, it's a lot harder work. You're just getting deal flow from all your friends. everyone's pitching your inbox your pipeline is full the pipeline for pre-seed managers they have to create themselves they're manifesting it yeah yes it's an order of magnitude harder yeah i did this experiment this founder university 12 week pre-accelerator because so many of the people coming to us for people like you're describing hey one of us is full-time the other two are still working at uber or doordash or wherever google right and we kind of got a prototype and we We actually got one person using it, a friend of ours and some CFO at some other company wanted this piece of software.

52:30We're testing it with them. And we're wondering, should we incorporate? Should we get a cap table going? And we're like, yeah, you should. Yeah, let's talk about it. And about half the people in the program who we accept, we have 2 ,000 applicants, we accept 200, half of them are not yet incorporated. And we're like, would you like 25 or 100K to get this party started? Would that help you get off the fence? And it turns out 60 % of people ask us for that kind of a check size. And we're like, okay, if that's the check size you want right now, you don't want to go out and do 20 meetings and try to raise 500 or a million.

53:04We're more than happy to give you 25, 50, a hundred K just to get the party started as long as we can invest a little bit more later. And so, yeah, it's, it's, I'm super excited about this space. Jason, I'm wondering what the demographics of people like that are. And I'm not necessarily specific to what you're seeing, but just in general, because number one, it's a major leap for a person to leave a cushy job and start a company. And so that, to me, suggests either that they're relatively young or they've already made enough dough that they can take that risk. It's sort of that little layer. It literally is that.

53:37You'll have people who are in school or just entering the workplace, either have their first job or they're doing consulting, or it's somebody who's been at it for 10 years. They've made it, they, you know, they have, they own their house, they're paying their mortgage, they're in their thirties or forties. And, you know, there's this really interesting trend. And when I came into the industry, everybody's like, oh yeah, you know, it's the Zuckerberg quitting Harvard that creates the huge company. And it turns out that's not actually the case in my experience. It's the third time founder like Travis, Elon, et cetera, Mark Pincus, whoever it is, Evan Williams.

54:11They had two or three companies under their belt. they're in their 30s or 40s they have their nest egg and they're swinging for the fences now they got a really good idea they've got a talent pool they can tap so their first five employees are picked from their top 25 employees of all time who are like yeah i'll go on another adventure with you travis cloud kitchens yeah let's do it you know and you just watch the alumni from one company go to another and yeah it kind of bifurcates exactly as you're saying there's like people right out of school they're coming out of waterloo they're you know going to school at night or they're finishing up their degree.

54:43They've been doing consulting. They worked at one startup. It failed. Boom. And they're ready to get going. So I really feel like those kids that are young adults, I should say, have nothing to lose. The only valuable asset they have aside from their horsepower, their brain is their time. And so if you're a young person post-college, is it better to go and climb up the Google ladder or actually jump in and start companies? And And there are good reasons that you may actually want to get the training, get some actual domain expertise before you launch a company. So it's not all black and white.

55:20There's not like a line in the sand. One of the great things is that the ladder has been pulled up in a lot of those companies who are sitting here in the early part of 2024, Microsoft, Google, everybody all of a sudden doing, you know, what I call the gentleman's layoff. The gentleman's riff where it's like, oh, yeah, no, we just reorganized, but we got rid of 15 % of the people. Oh, we did performance reviews. we got rid of 8 % of the bottom 8 % of performers. This is still happening. So the efficiency that we're seeing in startups is happening at big companies. They're cutting, and then they're not adding people.

55:49And when they do add people, by the way, yeah, they're adding people in India. They're adding people in their Latin American office. They're adding people in their Portugal office, their Canadian office. It may not be the Silicon Valley, you know, elites, as they were called, you know, and the Ivy League elites or the developer elites. So where are those people go? If they can't get a gig, start a company. which I think is part of the great moment in time we're in. You know, this is what I love about a down market. You know, it's sad to see people lose their jobs. But it's inspiring to see those same people who got laid off and who are, you know, got a little chip on their shoulder, or you don't want me?

56:25Okay, maybe I'll make something myself. Maybe I'll be the next Google, maybe. So on that point, I think coming out of a recession or a downturn in the economy, or certainly a non-ZERP kind of era. I think this is pretty well known, but post Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September of 2008, within the next nine months, Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, all those companies were started. And it was not because, well, it was certainly not because it was a good time to start a company, but it's because those founders were actually, it kind of filtered out the type of founders. These founders, as you know best, with Travis, for example, they would walk through walls to get it done.

57:04And so what you actually saw in say 2021 at the peak was a lot of tourist founders. My friend started a company, so I'm going to start a company. Or in the fund world, we actually saw a lot of tourist fund managers. They're like, hey, my friend just raised a$10 million seed fund. I'm going to do that too. And I think now a lot of them have actually been flushed out. So that's why I'm saying it's a return on normalcy. Valuations, people know where the entry points should be from public markets on down. And, you know, so I think the playing field is set and people are ready to go on the offense.

57:39We went from the ridiculous cappuccino to a nice flat white, you know, all that foam on the top of that cappuccino, you know, when it got ridiculous, people were like having the foam wars in the cappuccino world. And you're like, there's about four ounces in here and about eight ounces in height of cappuccino foam. Right. All that gets blown off in a bad market. And then you're just drinking, you know, uh, the good stuff, the good stuff, the actual liquid here. And, uh, yeah, I think it's a great time for the market. Listen, Michael, you're so candid and you got so many great insights with all that great data.

58:09Really appreciate you. And thanks. We'll see you all next time on The Pod. Bye-bye. Hey, everybody. I talked to a lot of founders here on This Week in Startups and as an investor, and they tell me the same thing over and over again. They want two things from me, more FaceTime and money. They want me to invest in their companies and they want to spend time together. So we've been working here on a new meetup program. We call it Founder Fridays. And Founder Fridays are an event by founders for founders. This is an event that is hosted in cities by people like you. If you're listening to This Week in Startups, you're a founder.

58:45So what are you going to do at Founder Fridays? You're going to get together with other founders in your community. It could be four or five of you. It could be maybe up to 30 of you in a location. Pick a cafe. Pick a co-working space. I like to go to a great Mexican joint or maybe a dim sum restaurant. You know, you can do shared food, have a couple of cocktails, maybe you do it on a Friday, you get together and you host it. Now, why is it important for founders to get together? Shouldn't you be at home just focusing? Shouldn't you be in the office just focusing on your startup? Well, if you get together with other founders, true founders who are in the arena building like you are, you're going to get a lot of value from that because you can trade notes with that other founder about what's working at your startup and what's not working.

59:27The truth is, if you're facing a problem, there are hundreds of founders out there who have probably solved it already. And instead of you banging your head against the wall, when you sit there and you talk to three or four founders, you're having some dim sum, you're splitting a quesadilla, some fajitas. Somebody's going to say, oh, you know what? I had that same human resources problem. Oh, I had that same technical problem. Oh, I had that same marketing problem. And they might tell you about a tool or a service that'll solve that problem for you. This happens over and over and over again when I do Founder Fridays with our portfolio companies.

59:57Now we're going to give you that same experience, but here's what I need you to do. I need you to host this in your city. So you're going to go to thisweekinstartups.com slash meetups. That's it. And you'll see a landing page where you can sign up and you can say, I want to host in my city. Now your city may already be hosting, so you can just join that person. And what if you go to this event and you learn some go-to market strategy that 10Xs your growth? That might unlock funding. Or you might be talking to somebody and they say, hey, I'm a marketplace too. I'm not a competitive marketplace.

1:00:25Your marketplace is for used cars. My marketplace places for hairstylists, whatever your jam is, whatever you're working on, but they give you some technique that you didn't know about to increase your supply side or get more demand in your marketplace, and you 10x your business. I see this happen all the time, and founders are like mutants, right? And I'm like Professor X here. I'm trying to put on Cerebro and find all the founder mutants in the world, and then have you get together and do your own little meetup. And here's what you're not going to have to deal with. You're not going to have to deal with a bunch of service providers trying to sell you software or services.

1:00:57And you're not going to have to sit through a bunch of passive speakers you can listen to This Week in Startups and get the greatest speakers in the world on your own time. And you're not going to have to pay for a ticket to a conference or get on a plane or fly somewhere. No, this is about having an intimate experience with five, 10, maybe two dozen other founders in your city. Please go to thisweekinstartups.com slash meetups if you are a founder. This is for founders by founders only. If you are not a founder, this event is not for you. You can start your own meetup for lawyers, accountants, recruiters.

1:01:31This is for founders by founders. We vet everybody to make sure you're a founder. And if you host it, it's a non-commercial event. Our first Founder Friday will start on February 2nd. So please mark your calendars. And we're going to do these on a rolling basis. You can join an existing meetup if it's already occurring in your city, or you and one or two other founders can start your own. We're using a wonderful piece of software that we've invested in called River. You can sign up for a River account just by going to thisweekinstartups.com slash meetups. We've already got hosts and attendees lined up in San Francisco, New York City, Toronto, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, London, and even in India.

1:02:10So this is your chance to connect. And if you didn't hear your city name, you can start your city. go to thisweekinstartups.com slash meetups.