Sequoia & Union Square Returns, the Post-AI Labor Market, and the Return of SF? | E1907

0:00That framework, I think, um, that Elon came up with was elegantly simple, yet very complex. And then he executed on it very definitely. As you can see because he's shipping more product with 15 % of the people. And some people were saying, oh, no, Twitter is going to die. You know, the website is not going to work. The team is not there. How can they operate? They were rooting for it not to work. Exactly. Blue checkmark people. It works just. And so that's inspired a whole generation of founders to think, hey, I could operate this company with a fraction of my team. This Week in Startups is brought to you by OpenPhone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere.

0:43Get 20 % off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. Get started for free and get a$1 ,000 startup credit at coda.io slash twist. Welcome back to this week's Liquidity Podcast. With me today, I have Eric Thornberg, co-founder of OnDeck and Village Global, and now founder of media company Turpentine. Next, we have Guy Perlmutter, founder and CEO of Grids Capital, a deep tech VC fund, and author of Present Future.

1:31And of course, we have Jason Calacanis from The Launch Fund. I'm your moderator, David Weisberg, co-founder of 10x Capital. Today, we have three topics on the docket. VC returns have been leaked, including returns from Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures. VCs may be sacrificing returns in order to return cash back to their investors, also known as limited partners. And we now have bear signs for the startup employment market. We'll end with the latest three investments from each of our guests. Let's dive right in. Hot off the press, UTIMCO, the University of Texas endowment, which currently sits at$65 billion under management, was forced to disclose their VC returns due to a public records request by blogger Eric Newcomer.

2:17While many top branded VC firms did not have the returns one would expect, one firm that stood out was Union Square. Union Square is sitting on a sensational 9.14x cash on cash return for UTEMCO across nine funds, with founder Fred Wilson telling newcomer that there's a lot left in every other fund than the 2004 vintage, meaning that these returns will likely go up. Guy, as a limited partner, tell me about VC returns over the past three decades. So what happened over the past 30 years in VC is basically we have created a market that started with about$30 billion back in the 90s. And now it's anywhere between$300 and$400 billion globally.

3:00The US is about half of that, maybe a little more. Over time, the secretive attitude that GPs have had towards their own performance has been a constant. So it's very hard to get accurate data when it comes to performance of the venture capital world. But it is very fair to say that over time, we have seen returns that will go anywhere between 1.8 and 3.2x. That would be like a big chunk of the returns over a broad interval of time. However, the tricky thing with VC is that the difference between top quartile and bottom quartile, top 5 % and bottom 5 % is just gigantic, could become 10x, 40x, 60x, you can basically pick your number.

3:52And the other thing that I believe is quite important, especially for the time we're living in now, is that those vintages that started at the tail end of very severe crisis like NASDAQ, the dot-com bubble back in the late 1990s, or the financial crisis of the late 2008-2009, those vintages, on average, they outperformed. So at the end of the day, if you are an investor, you should first and foremost try to stick to an investment program because every vintage has a story. But if you want to be picky about when you want to dip your toe in the market, I guess the tail end of crisis is probably historically at least a very, very good time for you to start doing some VC investing.

4:43Jason, you started Angel Investing in the mid-2000s at Sequoia. how have your returns have your returns been counter cyclical meaning that if you invest in the bear market your returns have have been significantly better than the opposite yeah so there's two things to take from this chart um and people need to understand this because especially journalists because they don't understand something called the j curve um so if we pull up this chart one more time uh all the way on the left you have union square ventures 2004 2005 vintage right do you see that there the second hash mark and then if you go all the way to the right uh and we were to look uh for a union square fund or thrive capital partners eight is a 2022 fund right so you see that they're down what this shows is you have a bunch of them that are down there well those are funds that were just started deploying of course they're down There's no time for the those investments to get marked up.

5:41And then in the middle, you see a bunch of ones that are flat, right? The 2020 to 2022, they might be flat. And then, you know, smaller returns on the IRR. And then all the left, you have the fully returned funds. So you can't judge these things until you get to year seven, eight, nine, 10. So realistically, if it's 2022, this data runs to and it's 2023. Now, 2022 minus seven, eight years, you start looking at the 2015 funds, which is maybe 10 funds in and you start to get a realistic idea. These rest of these funds are still baking. And I think that's probably why Fred Wilson gave that caveat.

6:18um so that's just number one thing to think of is you really can only judge the ones on the left and what i see there is well it looks like everybody um it looks like they've done spectacularly if you were to just take from 2017 uh that dark blue line to the left those first you know 12 funds or so they're all 20 irr 40 irr you got a couple here sure that are 10 irr um you know uh but still pretty fantastic so this just tells you what a great vintage you know it's been since the 2008 financial crisis that's my number one takeaway from this and of course you know when you double click if you have the second chart if you pull that up on fred wilson and union square ventures specifically uh what you'll see is the cash on cash return right column four those first three funds 2004 2008 2012 they've had time to bake right man something happened in 2012 fund that they hit 22x i think that's the twitter fund i'm gonna guess and some other names in there and that just shows the power law you know if you're the he did the series a in um twitter i remember when evan williams was asking me uh and some palace century that deal was between sequoia and union square um uh that series a of twitter uh and i had you know talked about it with actually evan williams which one to pick and he went with union square um i had advocated both i thought i told him to split the round between the two like uh google and then you see the later ones you know have less um upside in them so it really is about time and fred wilson's been a spectacular investor for a long time and they always kept their funds at a small size too.

8:01So we don't have the fund size here of each of these. But my understanding is 200, I bet you those are 200$300 million funds of which the University of Texas, it looks like they put 20 million 25 million at each fund. So they were probably 10 % of each fund, which might have been their upper limit. So anyway, that's my analysis of this. You had another question, but I thought I would go with the question I wanted to answer. Absolutely. You mentioned the dispersion between top quartile and everybody else in the variance, I think few asset classes in the world have this kind of variance, where over 10 years in the same time period, something could go up 10x and something could go up 1.5x.

8:37How do you build a portfolio, your fund of funds, how do you build a portfolio of managers that continues to return? So ultimately, when we try to the fund the funds part of our portfolio, basically, we try to ask ourselves, you know, very simple question, if I were an entrepreneur, would I want to have money from that particular GP? Because I think this is the key to build a healthy portfolio, you want to be with GPs that are, you know, the first picks for every top entrepreneur out there. And in our world, in the deep tech world, that's a relatively short list. There are a lot of sector specialists, there are lots of generalists.

9:16But at the end of the day, what you want to do is you want to make sure that in your portfolio, you are taking the managers that will be able to attract the best entrepreneurs of that particular vintage of those particular subject matters that they are trying to invest in. One thing I just want to mention on top of Jason's point earlier is that some firms get lucky and have one big winner that returns nearly everything. But USV has many winners. It's not like they caught a Facebook or NVIDIA and they've held it. They've got, you mentioned Twitter, but Etsy and Tumblr and Coinbase and Mongo and Lending Club and Zynga.

9:54Their hit rate is phenomenal. Yeah, Mongo is a big one. That's that's probably one of the big ones here. Tumblr was a billion, right? Etsy was probably a billion. So those, you know, still great if the series a, but I think Mongo and Twitter are the big outliers, right? Yeah. And then Coinbase, uh, yeah. Depending on when you sold, because my understanding was they liquidated their position, right? I think that was also like another question mark is when do I think Fred's philosophy has always been to just immediately sell everything. We're distributing immediately. His philosophy, as far as I understand it, is a mixed position, which is a third, a third, a third.

10:36So sell a third once it's reached some threshold, hold a third irrespective of price, and then sell or hold the last third around lockup expiration based on your thoughts on valuation. So they definitely sold a bunch of IPO, which probably turned out to be a good decision and held some. And I think this was his reaction to his experience riding in the dotcom bubble, where they rode up a bunch of the winners and then rode them down as well. And so this strategy of hold some, sell some is sort of a regret minimization strategy, where at the very least, you return some to LPs, you make sure they're happy, but then you also get to keep some for later.

11:17So it's a strategy where if the company does great, you're a little regretful because you could have held on to it. But if the company falls down 90 % after IPO, you think you're a genius because you've at least distributed some. Juggling multiple devices and apps to run your business is a mess. OpenPhone is here to make it simple by simplifying your business communications with one easy to use app. Open Phone has rethought every detail of what a modern business phone should be. And here's the magic. It works through a beautiful, elegant app on your phone, or you can just use it on your desktop, making it super easy to get a business phone number for your entire team.

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12:32But Twist listeners get an extra 20 % off any plan for the first six months at openphone.com slash twist. And if you have existing numbers with other services, no problem. Open phone is going to port them over easy peasy lemon squeezy no extra cost head over to openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get 20 % off. Guy as an LP as a fund of fund that's in a bunch of GPs. Do you want your GPs just always swinging for the fences or do you want them to take some money off the table? So what I want really is that there's a very clear policy on how you're going to deal with exits that's for me is more important because the one thing that I think investors hate, not maybe as much as losing money, but right up there are surprises, right?

13:14Inconsistencies, you want to make sure that you're dealing with someone, and you actually can understand where they're coming from. So as long as there's a very clear policy, okay, this is how we do it. It's like the third, third, third policy, or we immediately sell everything or whatever. That's what you want to hear from our perspective, every single position that we own, that has cross the 3x mark after we compare entry cost versus market cost, it's out the door. We will do that every time. We did that and felt like schmucks a couple of times because then the market continued to go up. And then as Eric said, we felt like geniuses a couple of times because everything went south and we were looking really good.

13:57So I think consistency is key here. And I think it's important for every single GP to have a very clear policy on how they will deal with success with an exit and how they will compensate the LPs when that happens. Can I follow up to that in terms of how do you think about consistency across the board for your managers? Because sometimes the facts on the ground change and they may say, oh, you know, it was a great time, like, we allocated a certain amount for follow-on investments, but these prices are going up too high and such we think we should, you know, move more dollars to first checks? Is that a type of change that you like your managers to make?

14:33Or do you like your managers to say, hey, here's what you invested in, I executed on it, and we'll reevaluate for the next fund? And I think it's a great question because at the end of the day, what we do investing is a blend of art and science, right? And whatever percentage of art or science you're going to use, it's kind of up to each and every one. There are a few managers that are much more quantitative driven, a little more dogmatic. Others are a little more flexible, But again, to my earlier point, as long as they don't drift too much out of the style they have, some managers, I would not be surprised if they came back and said, you know, we do believe that we should have a little more leeway here because of X, Y, and Z, as long as it's for the greater good, the great good of the portfolio, that's okay.

15:16But what I really don't like to see is when a manager that is typically very quantitatively driven kind of drift into a more qualitative, subjective approach. That's where you start to worry because you don't see them performing to the best of their own abilities, if that makes sense. Great analogy for this, David, is like when you play poker, you'll see somebody run up their stack playing a very disciplined strategy. you know they're playing tight they're playing a great range of cards they're letting go of things when they feel like it's not right they're going all in when they think they got you know when they know they've got the strongest hand or most likely have the strongest hand and then they win a bunch of pots they go up five x and then they start playing every hand and they totally change their game they get loosey-goosey because their chip stack is so high that's where you get yourself in trouble this is why i think you know as a fund manager i think i've learned going into my second decade is you really have to write these policies down and then go back to them and then have a team where they hold you accountable to them so my team holds me accountable to a lot of our investing and i was looking at a cpg company and i had said you know listen no more cpg companies but this one had come through a friend of mine who built one of the largest cpg brands ever and i was like okay this is an exception here and i explained to the team why we're going to make an exception here and perhaps you know go into this we didn't wind up doing it but you know those are that's where it's super important to gi's point have a philosophy be thoughtful about it hold yourself accountable our philosophy is pretty simple we'll sell 10 percent two or three times on the way up if we're investing at companies you know at two to twenty million dollar valuations and it gets to 500 million a billion two billion you know as seed investors we want to start pairing our position and then deploying into more pre-seed and seed-stage startup, which only makes sense, right?

17:11Our window is slightly different. It's a little bit earlier than Fred's. And so, yeah, you would start selling a little bit earlier. But be thoughtful is the key, I think, in all of this. Yeah, I agree on that. I think it makes sense to sell 15 % to 20 % if it's really meaningful to the fund, especially if you're an emerging manager trying to put numbers on the board. And even if it's still 10Xs from there, you still get 80 % or so of the upside. Next up, January employment numbers are out and it's not looking good. According to Carta, January 2024 was the first month since February 2023 where the amount of people laid off exceeded the number of people who quit.

17:49This helps shed light on unease in the startup ecosystem among employees. The increase in quitting shows that employees are reluctant to quit and find new positions at other companies. jason what do you think of this data and is this a temporary setback or a new normal for startups with the advent of ai well we're certainly going to find out i think you know the pendulum swings um you know both ways and for over a decade silicon valley has coddled um elite programmers salespeople product managers etc we all live here we all see it we've all been on the other side been on boards of companies and seen somebody come in with a request this person's got an offer from uber airbnb and google and you know we have our hot growing startup that just raised 10 million we want to get it in the sweepstakes and i would be like is there another person who could do this job who doesn't live in silicon valley who doesn't cost 500 000 because maybe we could hire three people at 150 each and save 50k and it'd be 10 cheaper and they would do more work and you could have them working 24 hours a day or whatever you know in aggregate and you know a lot of times people didn't buy into that you know alternate philosophy now we're seeing the opposite now people are saying when they're running startups i'm sure eric you see this in a lot of your contemporaries and early stage startups how do i get uh how do i hire people offshore how do i not hire somebody for this position and automate it and so i wrote a piece earlier this year called my add framework and i've been working on this for a couple years internally at my companies but i told everyone in the company you know every quarter look at everything you did for the weeks you know in the 12 weeks in that quarter and ask yourself what can be automated what can be deprecated what can be delegated and we are now on that journey of automating stuff delegating stuff deprecating stuff and my hope is we can stay a 21 person firm but be 10 percent five percent more efficient every month which means that's the equivalent of you know doubling the size of the team every year without actually adding headcount and that is a very that little mark there where the yellow uh of the laid off leaves the crosses the left by choice is a very significant moment in time i think that's cross what did you call it the uh death cross it's a death cross because listen if you are at one of those big companies and you see this on tiktok with young people who are at these companies who are holding on for dear life that you know geez i've got this incredible pay baggage i've got these incredible rsus i hope i don't get laid off by discord on monday oh i got laid off and they just do another tick tock or whatever i think a lot of those folks are realizing that they may have experienced their peak employment package at 30 at 35 and that they may just be they're going to get paid less for the next 10 years and it may take them time to beat that um high watermark that they experienced um and ai is definitely part of this this is two things one what elon did cutting and showing everybody that he could run twitter with 15 of the people and then zuckerberg following him like zuckerberg tends to do and then uh you know he follows a lot of other entrepreneurs kind of copies them uh or you know spiegel from snapchat you know elon whatever but he does it better sometimes well he's a memetic machine i mean i think that's like he's like a perfect photocopier i mean um and so then you look at this the cross um you know ai is definitely part of this i think people are looking at customer support customer success sales and just saying yeah we can get rid of the top 20 the bottom 20 percent and then just use tools to make the top 80 percent 20 better no problem easy peasy lemon squeezy and jason you were at twitter now x with with elon uh shortly after the acquisition a lot of people know that how he cut the employees but how did it actually work on a granular basis how how was he able to you know keep so much of the infrastructure and company running with so little staff i will say what he said publicly because i don't want to speak out of school and my involvement has been over over overstated uh you know it's just a friend of mine and i hung out with him for the first month so i don't want to overstate it um you know there there was already a plan in place everybody knows this to cut 25 of the team so there was a plan in place that twitter was going execute anyway and then there was elon's plan and so um i think you know he he had a really interesting moment me david sacks and elon were there and elon just said who is who kicks ass at their job like who is incredible at their job and then who is essential those two things and then david's you know kind of repeated it back to him and we were kind of grokking it and i just went up to a whiteboard and I drew four quadrants and I just put exceptional, average, essential, non-essential.

22:39And you look at those four quadrants. Well, if somebody's not great at their job and they're not essential, it's a pretty easy decision, right? And I think that's what Zuckerberg did. That's what Google did. Everybody's done that now. That's a really easy quadrant, right? Then you've got the quadrant essential and exceptional. Well, that's an easy quadrant too. You're keeping them. So then you've got just two quadrants that people would fall into. exceptional, but you know, maybe they're not essential, right? So they're exceptional at their job, but they're not essential. They haven't been deployed to the proper place.

23:10So you got a sniper and they don't have a sniper's rifle. So that person should probably be redeployed into an essential position. And then you have somebody just not good at their job, but they're doing something essential. And okay, yeah, maybe you can keep them around until you can automate it or whatever. So it just that framework, I think that Elon came up with was elegantly simple, yet very complex. And then he executed on it very definitely, as you can see, because he's shipping more product with 15 % of the people. And people at the time thought that or people, you know, some people were saying, Oh, no, Twitter is going to die.

23:44You know, the website's not going to work that the team is not there. How can they operate for it not to work? Exactly. And And it works just... And so that's inspired a whole generation of founders to think, I could operate this company with a fraction of my team. There's this phrase, first-time founders care about product. Second-time founders care more about distribution. Similarly, first-time founders care a lot about how much money you raised, how big your team is. And second-time founders are trying to raise as little as possible sometimes, times or as much as they need and they're trying to do it with as few people as possible yeah right it used to be a status symbol how many employees you had you know people oh how many people work there and oh it's 60 people oh wow you have 60 people eric how many people oh i have 120 oh eric's company's twice as good exactly so very perverse thinking and then also the benefits you gave people that was the most pernicious pernicious thing of this last cycle was oh yeah no no we we have dry cleaning we have 20 time we've got neiman ranch steaks i remember when i went to google for the first time you know this is 15 20 years ago and had neiman ranch steaks and i was like i can get a neiman ranch steak here i'm like how much is it and they were like it's free dummy beginning of the end now it's high status is instagram you know 12 people whatsapp you know in the teens um or mid-journey you know 200 million dollars revenue boots bootstrap company Yeah, no outside funding valued at$10 billion.

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26:27When is that going to happen? What is your guess in terms of when the first one person unicorn will be started? It may be already out there, and they just don't want to tell us because they don't want the world to know right it's it's perfectly possible there's this thing that i believe is going to be very well known in the very near future and some of us have already heard about that read about it but there this guy this economist back in the 19th century a guy named jevons uh william jevons i think and he was observing the world through the lens of someone who was experiencing the first industrial revolution right and he saw that coal became this uh incredibly inexpensive good because now people had mastered coal the you know the steam engine and so on and so forth and logic dictated that okay now it's so efficiently used that people will not need it uh because the efficiency has reached new heights and what happened was just the opposite right there was this incredible demand for coal and for that new source of innovation.

27:35And what he wrote, which was proven through like for 150 years, is that when something a good resource, any sort of special talent becomes widely available and much more inexpensive, the market will create demand, the market will create new uses. And what we're witnessing right now is the creation of very efficient intelligence, right? Inexpensive and efficient intelligence. It's what I think Sam Altman referred to as the marginal cost of intelligence dropping dramatically. So what I believe is going to happen is instead of people going into a shortage of labor, maybe in the short term, we'll definitely see careers ending and new paths being created.

28:22But on the long run, I think we're going to see more demand for human labor in different types of expertises, different types of areas and fields. And this, I think, will open all those possibilities for companies that are going to be managed by just a handful of people and that are going to be doing some incredible stuff. And there probably was a billion dollar company already. My friend Phil Kaplan's company, DistroKid. You know, he's pretty famous for creating these small companies. companies um and i don't know if it was a company one but pretty close to it i do think it won't be one i think in that betting pool i would bet it's going to be like a three-person company because it's kind of boring to work alone um i don't think people want to work alone but it's possible um it's just not probable but what you're talking about also is the induced demand right g if you build you know an extra lane on a highway and they did this in la over and over again and um they they just kept adding lanes to the 405 and every time they added a lane more people from the valley would commute to santa monica to get dinner or to go work there or to go to the beach and then all of a sudden it's the 405 and the 10 exchange are backed up people would then see the 405 and 10 exchange and they would not get on the highway and um when i was living in brentwood they wanted to take the beautiful median when i lived in brentwood in la david had this gorgeous median and then they had the sunset part and then they were going to take away the sidewalks on sunset and add a lane where that and i said i went to the council meeting and i gave my presentation because i lived on sunset boulevard and i said if they if you let them do this to this five block stretch you take away this lane the next thing they're going to do is look at the median on san vicente the gorgeous median that is part of our culture and they're going to take two lanes away and just leave a thin strip there and it will destroy and we're going to destroy our neighborhood for people commuting and i got the most rousing round of applause because i just i explained the concept of induced traffic that's my story of winning i literally squashed the expansion of sunset boulevard to an extra lane i said you know it's already four six makes it kind of like a highway doesn't it and they're not going to stop at six.

30:40Eric, you're very deep in AI, both through your funds and through your previous personal investments. What's your take on this? So I think the greater threat short term to people losing their jobs is less from AI and more from what Jason mentioned earlier, offshoring. The threat to me hiring a US employee, whether an assistant or engineer, It's not going to be replaced with an AI agent any time immediately soon, but it's going to be replaced by the startup Athena that I use my assistant or the startup squad that I have an outsourced engineer operating in at a fraction of the cost. So short term, I don't think the technology is good enough to wholesale replace key employees, though I think offshoring is a concern for them, for those employees.

31:35that said at some time scale I think there will be a threat I think that we like to imagine this sort of co-pilot for everything AI that makes us better this idea that it's the human plus the AI that beats the AI in chess and that was something that was true for a minute but over time the AI gets so good that it actually doesn't need the human anymore and defeats the human in chess now there are going to be certain areas where we're just going to want people to do them, even if they do them worse. You can imagine certain fields in healthcare where you just want to be, you want to talk to a human or work with a human, even if they can't, can't sort of operate as effectively.

32:20And there are going to be other areas that are just going to be so regulated, even if people don't want them, we're just going to ensure that there are humans in the loop there. So I was with Vinod Khosla earlier today, and he said that 80 % of 80 % of all jobs in the future will be sort of replaced by AI. But the productivity gains will be so vast that we will, whether it's some combination of UBI or some government works programs, we will have some redistributionary effect that will take care of the remaining people who are working not because they have to, but because they want to. So I think it really depends on on what time scale we're looking at.

33:04But in the in the short term, I don't really see a threat. But in the long term, I do. What do you think impact this has on LPs? In VC in general, if companies need less capital, there's less opportunity to buy shares, the founders keep more of their shares? Do you think this ever has an existential risk for, you know making vc smaller and a more intimate pursuit again i think at the end of the day what we're going to see as we have seen before is the creation of absolutely new careers and new paths and here let's imagine for a second that this scenario that vinod mentioned uh turns out to you know to become true uh all of a sudden we're going to see you know a bunch of uh new funds that are going to be pitching ideas or enterprises that have nothing to do with any of the previous subject matters that we were interested in, right?

33:57I remember reading an article a few years ago about the advent of the comparison between the advent of AI and the Excel spreadsheet, right? So, there was this great article in the, I think it was the journal, and it said that there were a bunch of jobs that almost disappeared after Excel showed up, like bookkeepers and stuff. But then auditors and financial managers and managers as a new category of labor just skyrocketed, right? So I think that even today, if you look five years back and we think about the prompt engineer role, we're going to look at each other and say, what the hell is that, right?

34:41And now people talk about it like it's the most normal thing in the world, someone who will be proficiently in building prompts for an LLM. And I think we're going to continue to see that. I don't see that as a static movement. So I think there will be opportunities, maybe and hopefully smaller funds are going to be created because maybe the opportunity set may be a little tighter. but i would be very very surprised if we come into a world where the opportunity set is not larger it's actually smaller because i think that's where we're heading to we're expanding the horizon of opportunities for us kind of like that version of the world to be honest one analogy is actually crypto if you look at crypto a lot of these protocols do not need hundreds of millions and if you look at vc it's been a bundling of resources whether you're sitting on the board, you're giving advice, you're giving money, you're giving brand and signal.

35:34In crypto, that's been unbundled. So you have somebody that's a kingmaker that will lend their name to a project that will make introduction to a couple exchanges. And there, they're basically taking a much lower fee. So instead of taking 20 % of around or 10 % of around, they're taking 1 % to 2 % of advisory. So we might see some companies that are not as capital, that are much more capital efficient in the VC, in the startup ecosystem, look for people that could give that advice and that brand, that signal, and do it for a much lower cost. Yeah, if only those crypto projects had ever shipped a product.

36:14Still waiting on some of them. Although your guy, Eric, who's doing Farcaster, that seems like a real product. Yeah, Farcaster's taking off. It's a decentralized or it's a crypto Twitter where the idea is developers can build on top of it and trust that they won't get rugged like they were, you know, back in the day of Twitter. And Facebook. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so it's really taking off. Yeah. Awesome. Shout out to him. Okay, listen, I got a lot on my plate. Got to do a couple of podcasts. I got Founding University, Launch Accelerator and all my personal life and, you know, things I want to do.

36:54So there's just a lot, but I'm able to manage it all with an amazing piece of software called Coda. Coda is the all-in-one platform that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps. Here's an example. We use Coda to run the Founder University. Every week, we ask all of our founders to submit a progress update, and then all of that goes into Coda as a database, and then we can sort through all of those weekly updates and look for trends. And Coda also allows us to send automated reminders to all those founders to send in their updates. And then we track week over week growth by generating charts.