E33: Consumer Social, Marketplaces, and Becoming a Better Investor with James Currier

26:56They might start companies. They might always be looking for companies. They'll do a survey, Battery, Bessemer, USV. These companies look for the inflections. They look for the theses that they want to follow. And that's a great way to go. There are other firms like NFX for the last three years where we are just responding to the inbound. Got it. The door is swinging in so much that every day is just a treadmill to try to respond appropriately to great founders who want to talk with us. and I think the same thing would be true for the other firms, but they just have a culture of spending more time thinking it through and coming up with their own theses versus us where we look at a company, we look at a team, and then we see what theses are around it and whether we can attach good theses to it in that moment when we found the team.

27:47So – Oh, go ahead. And one's a little more academic and one's just a little more sort of off the cuff. Right, and so what I'm hearing, I'll just play it back, is like in this case, you know, because you've built a culture externally where, you know, founders who are like, maybe a lot more innovative know that they would have an ear, know that they would have an ear at NFX. Yeah. You know, you would just say you collect data points, because all of your door is open because you're sort of listening for those trends. Yeah, that's right. That's right. We just meet with so many more companies than these series A firms who have the staff.

28:25So look, Once you get to be a series A firm and you've got a$600,$800 billion fund, then you have enough management fee to hire enough people so that you have enough people's hours to actually do the thinking in advance. with us because we've only got four partners and we're doing seed and we're doing it across. So we're doing biotech, we're doing security, we're doing marketplace, we're consumer. Because we're across so many things and we're at seed, that means that there's tens of hundreds of thousands of companies that could come in our door. And so we're just changing after that flow and then forming the theses as we go.

29:02Right. And that kind of goes back to your point in the beginning, right? Which is like, where do you thrive as people? You want to be closer to which part, right? Right, right. And, you know, look, I think, and both of them obviously work. Both approaches absolutely can work, right? USB, Bessemer, Battery, very, very successful. And then other companies that just take the best idea that comes in the door, like Benchmark or us, can be extremely successful as well. So either way, it depends on how you like to roll. right that's helpful thank you yeah also games i want to talk about marketplaces do you think most you know consumer marketplaces are pretty saturated right now like and are you looking mostly b2b or where are we right now in terms of marketplace you obviously you know have invested in written about marketplaces for a very long time now yeah how do you think about this no i don't i think that there's always going to be new marketplaces i think there's there's always new needs there's always a new take like you could you could slice ebay up in six different ways today and create new marketplaces if you were talented enough.

30:05Marketplaces are just really difficult businesses to run. They're difficult planes to fly. And you just have to be really good and you have to be willing to be patient. It takes four years before it really starts to roll in many cases. And then it's really, really rolling by year seven and then by year 12. Poshmark, for instance, is going to go public finally nine or 10 years in and they've killed it. And they're nine or 10 years in. And it was not an easy road. The first six years was not an easy road. So I think there's plenty more to do. Plenty, plenty more on the B2C marketplace side. Are there ones that you've done in the last year or two, just as an example of how you evaluate, because I'm sure you've said no to hundreds, how you evaluate them or what criteria is most important in terms of getting you to a yes?

30:52You've got to have figured out a scalable way to cost effectively get the side of the marketplace that's hard to get. You know, in most marketplaces, if you get the supply, the demand will show up. Or if you get the demand, the supply will show up. Not all of them, but most of them. And so in those cases, you've got to figure out which side is harder. And when I talk to a founder who says, we're killing it on the supply side, I'm like, but it's a demand side marketplace, man. I don't care about the supply side. You shouldn't either. The fact that you haven't figured out that you shouldn't care about it tells me that you don't understand your business yet.

31:26And when you come back to me and say, OK, I figured out supply. It doesn't matter. What matters is this, and this is how we're trying to crack it. I'm like, oh, now you're backable because at least you're focused on the right problem, even though you haven't fixed it yet. You at least are thinking about it properly. So that's the main thing with the marketplace is which side is harder, and then is there an inexpensive way to scale it up? And sometimes that could be Facebook. Facebook is a very scalable platform. Or Google, those can be scalable channels. They just have to be cost-effective, and it's really hard to make them cost-effective these days.

31:56One other space that you've thought a lot about and written about recently as part of your broader tribal network effects piece is around universities and education more broadly. One, maybe you can define tribal network effects. And then I'm curious to just get your take on if you were going to compete, try to disrupt higher education or create a competitor, what approach you might look for either in creating or investing in one? Yeah, sure. So the tribal network effects that we've just written about, sort of the 15th network effect on the map, is basically the idea that we're all familiar with from school, which is once you've attached your identity to a group of people, when that group does well or that word, that brand does well, you do well.

32:41So I went to Princeton. So every time someone says, well, Princeton founder, just raised$10 million. You're like, yeah, all right. That means that there's some little bit of benefit for me that that person, because I've attached my identity to that thing. Like I'm helping Facebook with their network effect because I'm on Facebook, let's say. But if someone says Facebook sucks, I'm like, yeah, it does suck. I don't defend it. But once you've created a tribal network effect and someone says, well, Princeton sucks, I'm like, no, it doesn't. I'll defend it. And so you actually defend the integrity of the value of the network because that value accrues to you in a way that is more social.

33:18It's not on wires and chips. It's more social. It's in the language. It's in how we all interact with each other. And so getting that tribal network effect going is very valuable for the people in the tribe. And, you know, it's hard to do, honestly. And so if you were trying to take on education, you would just figure out something that wouldn't require a building and all that expense to create a travel network effect and to get people actually sharing information. And I think you're doing a great job of that, Eric. You've studied this well enough, and that's what you're doing with OnDeck. I think it's spot on.

33:55Thank you. I'm curious how you think about your network effects approach as you think about different verticals that you've invested in that maybe you got up to speed on quickly, like you guys have gone deep on bio. How do you recommend other generalist investors here sort of getting up to speed on new categories and then sort of how have you applied your unique investor approach? Yeah, it takes it takes somewhere between, you know, four to 24 months to get up to speed on a new category. And bio, it takes probably eight to 10 years. Health care takes about six to eight years. So I would not encourage people who are not health care people to try to take on health care, honestly, because I did that.

34:37And it took me about eight or 10 years to know enough to be dangerous in health care. You know, when I started a company, I raised$68 million for GIF from Venrock and from Johnson & Johnson and GE and all the people in the healthcare industry. And it was a long, hard road and a lot of mistakes and a lot of learning. And the same thing with bio. Like, we've gotten into bio because we know that bio is like the next thing, right? Like, the last 25 years, because the Internet has been great for software, and software will continue to be better than other types of businesses, for sure. but it's not going to be as good as it was probably because we're just, you know, it's like railroads, right?

35:16It was good to build a railroad between 1830 and 1870. But if you're building a railroad in 1880, it's like, you know, steel is expensive. People have unionized. You're doing a small spur out of Atlanta. You know, there's just not a lot left. The juice is kind of gone. And at some point that will happen with software. It's not, not soon, but it'll, it'll start to happen. Whereas biotech, we're just getting going. With synthetic biology and computational biology, I don't know if you just saw the news this morning, Google Fold or whatever, you know, it's unbelievable, like what the AI is able to do around that.

35:50So, but none of us in the firm are bio experts. We don't have PhDs in biotech. So, we have leveraged people outside the firm so far to help us with those investments and done so very successfully. But it wasn't that we became experts. We literally depend on other people. And so I would suggest that for anybody looking to get into sectors like video gaming. If you haven't been in video gaming for four or five years, it's a really hard sector to invest in. I don't know what percentage of our total investments are in gaming, but it's like 18 % of our total fund. It's like Gigging and I both ran gaming companies for years and years and years.

36:30And so it just takes years of going, oh, yeah, I tried that and that sucked. I tried that and that sucked too. So, you know, because most things break, most things don't work. And so finding the things that are more likely to work, you know, it takes a while. Totally. And I would say this, I think that the question is actually more powerful than you might imagine, because if you look at great investors, it's not typical that they just invest in a lot of random ideas. Typically, they've chosen a sector that's really good for the next 10 years, like people who picked SaaS in 2001 or 2000, right?

37:05And invested in Salesforce and then in all the other SaaS companies afterwards, like Emergence, right? Like Emergence picked SaaS 16 years ago and they've done great. And they just stick to it because it's big enough and it's focused enough and they know what they're looking at. Every person who comes in that front door, they know exactly what they're looking at. They know the metrics thing. So I would encourage people to think really carefully about which sector you focus on. Yeah, that's a nice segue into Lucas's question. Lucas, can you hop on? Yeah. I guess basically my question was, hey, James, my question was, given how crowded the industry has gotten compared to a few years ago, how do you think about the market for generalist investors today?

37:45What do the next five years look like in your opinion? I guess a tweet I saw that I think about a lot is the funds that get started thinking that the market today is going to look like the market from 2014 to 2019 are really going to struggle. How do you think about that? Totally. I think, look, the big picture is that all investment classes are losing alpha. The bond market, stock market, even the hedge funds, they're like the alpha, the profits of the hedge funds are coming down as more and more competition comes in and these markets become more and more efficient. And the place where it is going to come last is to the early stage venture capital market because it's so nascent and it's so random, right?

38:30It's so random as to what ends up being big. And so you're seeing more and more money chase alpha, if you will, by coming into our area. And you're seeing companies that you invest in seven post and then four months later, they raise a 50 post. Nothing's changed except that now the money sees them and the money wants them. And that's going to really suppress returns in our sector. However, all that has to happen is our sector needs to give better returns than all the other sectors, and the money will continue to flow into the sector until it evens out. And that's what's happening. And so I think it's going to get more competitive.

39:09I think the valuations, excuse me, the returns are going to drop. I also think that the returns for the best funds are going to go up because it's largely a signaling game, and the best founders want to signal with the best investors. And so you're going to get this haves and have-nots. And then, so if you're an angel investor, I would just do the SV model, SV angel model, which is just invest in hundreds of them and then get a few that go a thousand extra money and then you're good to go. I guess as a quick follow-up to that, to what extent do you let like general macro factors play into your fund strategy and how you think about your place in the seed market?

39:47You know, do you not at all? Not at all. I know what my personality is and I know Pete's personality and Gigi's personality. We're born to do a certain thing. And if it's like a bad time to be a seed investor for the next 10 years, we'll still outperform all the other seed funds. So I don't care. We'll still get to keep doing it. We'll still make an impact. We'll still produce software. We'll still produce content. We'll still educate. We'll still have fun. We'll, you know, we'll still make a difference. And we all are going to have too much money anyway. Everyone on this call is going to have too much money anyway.

40:17Right. I mean, all you're struggling for is like your own self-respect at this point. You're not struggling for money. Right. And you can buy food. You can get a car. You can get a back rub once a month for 100 bucks. Like you're I mean, the difference between you and a billionaire is like negligible from a lifestyle perspective, a health perspective, an access perspective, an intellectual perspective. You know, the access to joy, the access to love, the access to all the things that are meaningful. The difference between you and a billionaire is negligible already. So now you're just struggling for your ego.

40:46So if you can get that in check, you just go have some fun, make an impact and make great things happen. So I wouldn't I wouldn't overthink it. I would I would learn who you are, learn who you like to hang out with. And the rest of it will take care of itself. Preach.

41:05Seriously, don't overthink it. You know, there's no best place to be. You're already already lucky. Yeah. To have the health, to be an American, to have access to this community. You're already among the point one, not even the one. You're in the point one. Yeah. Now you're playing for impact. The money will come. The money will come. Look, I have friends who failed and failed and failed and failed. And then I have a friend recently who took a job. He finally gave up. And he took a job. And he's going to make$300 million in two years. Wow. Just because he got lucky. Eventually, the network played out.

41:41You are in the network. You're in the right town. I don't know where you live, but the network plays out, Lucas. You're in the right digital town. You're in the right digital town. And everything's moving digital in the world. And everyone in the world wants to be us because we're just sitting in the right spot. It's not that we did anything better than anyone. We're just lucky. We were attracted to this. We liked this. We met the right person at the right time who said something, and now we're in our network. Go read your life on network effects, right? That article I wrote last year, that just tells the whole story.

42:12So I wouldn't overthink it. Just keep being great at what you do and love it. It'll show. And then the money will hit you. What's this guy going to do with$300 million? What can you possibly do with$300 million? You can make a bigger Burning Man thing. Okay. But he's going to do nothing. He can give it away. What, he's going to give it to his kids and fuck them up? Ruin their lives? so look the the lucky bus will hit you at some point stop worrying about that it might hit you in your 50s it doesn't really matter no this is awesome thank you james there was this article about in new york times if you haven't seen it james i'll send it to you about the kids of capitalists turned socialist uh it was it was funny um james a few more things i want to ask you about uh one is um i'm gonna ask you about anti-portfolio in a second but two companies that I don't think you're invested in that I could have seen you being an investor in one is lunch club and the other is golden I'm golden wikipedia competitor for those who don't know and lunch club uh the sort of you know tinder for networking except you know evolved in a post covid world I'm curious if you looked at either of them for potential investment or what your perspective uh was or is on on either of those opportunities because they're they're interesting yeah I mean look look those those founders are great founders and those efforts are both good social efforts, community user generated content efforts.

43:35They're strong. I looked at both of them. They could both be like Pinterest. They could just be billion dollar companies in a few years. I have no idea. So I don't have much insightful to say. It's like you kind of take your bet, you take your guess, but I could be as wrong as the next guy is right. I wouldn't, you know, if you want me to explain why I invested in a company, that's much more positive. I haven't invested in a company. Warmly. I guess most things don't work. If someone says, I'm really smart because I didn't invest in them and it didn't work, tell them the fuck off. Most things don't work.

44:12Totally. Let's talk about Warmly. Max actually had to go a few minutes ago, but he's in this cohort. Here's what you saw, besides Max being great and the team being great, what was the market opportunity with Warmly or the thesis behind that bet? Yeah, I mean, look, customer success and sales is still shitty. and you've got a co-founding team of four ex-Googlers or whatever that are just sharp as hell and iterate quickly and have the ear of all their customers and they're going to figure it out. That's the thesis. It's just a great team and a big-ass market and they're thinking about things really differently than most people are and good things come out of that.

44:54That was the thesis there. Pretty simple. You know, a lot of people come to me with HR software. You know, these people have no power. They have no budget. They have no cadence. They have no urgency. It's always a nice to have, not a need to have. You know, the only need to have is workday. And the workday is workday. And so in HR, it's just really hard to build big companies in HR. There are some, but not many. Whereas in sales and customer success, you should be able to build many, many$4,$8,$12 billion companies. What about other enterprise buyers like, you know, marketing tech or other sort of, you know, sub enterprise sectors?

45:34Yeah. Enterprise tech is, you know, third. It's kind of it works, but there's so many companies doing it that it's much it's a much more thickly occupied space. There's something playful about a lot of marketing companies that makes them more attractive than the blood and guts of customer success and sales. So you just end up with a lot more competition there. But I would say sales and customer success and then engineering, software, and then marketing and then HR. Have you done anything in the creator space yet or how is your thesis evolving there? Yeah, I mean, look, so much of what we all do is in the creator space if you think about it.

46:17Yeah, we're just doing one investment now that we haven't closed yet that's in the creator space. the problem has been for the last 10 years, a lot of people have been building software for freelancers. And that has proven challenging. The creator space, we invested in some companies that were doing videographers and some doing photographers and some doing event planners. So we invested in a bunch of different companies like that. Again, somewhat challenging to really build a big company until you build a horizontal platform. And so we've looked at a ton and gotten close to a lot because it's a big market.

46:54Things are changing fast. The way we work is changing. All those trends are spot on, but it's proven difficult to get too much of a network effect going in that space. And so we haven't been too disappointed with most of the passes. And I think some of the companies that have been successful, we just never saw. We've been around for three years we didn't see them four years ago when they got going and now they're they're big or whatever but yeah we like that space um but it again that those types of companies are close to social media right i mean right it's the founders have to be very adept at language and community and emotion it takes a very special founder to get one of those things going it's not a spreadsheet business yeah like go back to marketplaces for a second how do you differentiate between or how do you evaluate differently, you know, vertical versus horizontal or what's your sort of framework there?

47:48I always want horizontals because the horizontals get bigger and the verticals, you know, you really have to see how that vertical can then start to bleed into other verticals. And sometimes you can see it and sometimes you can't. So I generally like horizontals. Yeah. When you're evaluating, what's important to you when evaluating B2B marketplaces? The B2B marketplaces are a lot harder than B2C because the people in your marketplace are fighting you. Whereas the B2C marketplace, they're not fighting you. They just want the convenience and the selection. They're not fighting you for margin. They're not fighting you for financing terms.

48:24They're not bringing their bank to compete with their loan that you're attaching to the transaction. Your customers are much more savvy in B2B. And so that for 20 years has proven really difficult. We've been investing in the last three years again in B2B marketplaces and we'll continue to do so. I actually think it's going to get hotter. But you've got to figure out a way where there's actually a win for somebody. Because mostly, most of these marketplaces say, there are these transactions happening. Now we're going to digitize them. I don't generally think that that has worked in the last 20 years.

48:55What I've seen is there are transactions that are not happening because there isn't enough software being applied to the problem. If we applied software, could we create new transactions that weren't taking place at all before? And that's typically a good place to mentally start because now you're going to put people into business who weren't in the business before. So they're just happy to be there. They're just happy to be getting some revenue. So they're not going to start out fighting you. They're going to let you do your thing for three or four years and get up to liquidity before they start fighting you.

49:26And that'll give you a much better chance in many cases. The other thing we've seen is that often moving into an area where there's a lot of brokerages or brokers and just doing the brokerage better with more software faster, you can start to take a lot of market share and get a lot of momentum. And then you can explore how much of this market can be replaced with software and how much needs to stay brokers. And in a lot of these things like insurance or in real estate transactions or in used manufacturing goods, we just don't know how far the software and how quickly the software will eat into the whole industry so that you can then flip it into a marketplace away from the broker model.

50:09But that's kind of the big experiment going on with a number of companies right now. I mean, tens and tens of them, actually. James, a quick follow-up on that. And you may have just answered it in that last part, but earlier, about a minute ago, you said you guys are really excited about B2B marketplaces and you think they're going to just keep getting hotter. Is that because of what you just mentioned as it relates to the software kind of eating into the brokerage model? Yeah, I think that is going on. And I just think that it's kind of stupid, but everyone who works at these B2B companies is on Facebook.

50:40They're on eBay. And then they come to work and they're like, really, really? And so now that everybody's gotten comfortable with those interfaces on the B2C side for the last five or six years. And now that the 70-year-old old owner has turned these things over to their 46-year-old son or daughter, and she's sitting there saying, I'm not going to keep doing it like dad did. I'm going to do it the modern way. I at least want to be a modern firm. I want to use more software. So they're leaning into it emotionally, as well as saying, I can actually grow more if I use this software. So I think they're looking for opportunities with software.

51:18And I think those that don't use the software will then be left behind. But before we couldn't get any of the gazelles to break out of the pack. The pack was all moving together. But now you're getting some younger folks who are starting to break off and actually use the software. And they're going to get such advantage, hopefully, that everyone has to come along with them. And you're going to like a can opener in these industries. Now, the fundamental challenge about B2B is that most of the margin that exists in B2B, because most things in B2B are commodities. Plastic tubing is plastic tubing.

51:51Cement is cement. Because you can multi-source almost anything in B2B, the only margin that's left is in the relationship. I'm going to take care of you, Darla. You know, I always come in, you know, I always come through for you, Darla. You know, when you had that squeeze around Christmas last year, I was there for you, right? And that's where the margin comes. And so that's why B2B has been so resistant is because once you make it really transparent and you take away those relationships, all the margin goes away for most of the people. And so nobody wants the software even near them. They can smell the end of their company coming.

52:27And so everyone just turns a cold eye to it and drags their feet and then you run out of money, right? Your venture capital dries up before you can actually get the liquidity. We saw that for a decade. Just a couple more spaces and then I'll have someone else ask a question. I'm curious how you think about – The sun has gone down, Eric. The sun set over the bed. We got you for eight more minutes, James. Healthcare and fitness. On fitness, you've invested in FitMob. I'm curious if you think an approach like that or a marketplace for trainers or an approach like FutureFit will work or how you viewed the fitness space.

53:05Are you unlikely to make a bet there? And then Consumer, you've done, I think, is Impossible or Solve. Maybe it's not Impossible. I forget what it's called. Something Health. Incredible Health. Yes, yes. How have you approached those two spaces? So we are very unlikely to make a fitness marketplace bet. I would say that every week we see three business plans for fitness marketplace. And, in fact, it's so bad at this point that we want to actually build a website just for business ideas you shouldn't start. And that before you start a company, you should come to this website and look at all the categories you should not start a business in.

53:46And the number one one would be a fitness marketplace. It would be right at the top of the website. Because the chain is a churn? Like, I don't know, there's a million reasons. The ESP is too low. The churn is too high. The CAC is too high. The number of competitors is too high. The number of substitutes is too high. It's like everything's wrong with the market. Right. And I'm sure there's going to be a breakout and whatever. And then James was wrong. I remember he said in 2020 that it would never work. Anyway, I guess it's more accurate to say we don't feel as if we can pick of the 1600 entrance in 2020 to that market, which the winner is going to be.

54:22That's, I think, the fair way to say it. I'm sure there'll be a winner and it'll be glorious, but it won't be pickable until it's already won. So those markets tend to be series B investments. Like you wait until something wins and then you just stick 20 million at 140 and you get your six times return. That's a great series B investment. Those types of markets aren't great seed investments. But James, it's different this time. That's what I get every time. It's different. And then on the healthcare side, you have to be very careful with healthcare, particularly around software. It's an industry like education that resists software for various reasons, many, many reasons.

55:00There have been almost as much money invested. There might be more money invested in healthcare software than was ever returned in the whole sector. It might be a net negative returning sector. I don't know. We'd have to be close. If you take out Livongo, it's definitely a net negative sector. So you have to be pretty careful. And I think a company like Solve, which is doing basically MindBody for emergency, for urgent care clinics. That makes sense. It's, you know, it's workflow software for these small businesses, basically, just like with MindBody. It can be a really good business. But it's not really health care per se.

55:37It's more about scheduling and checking on insurance and stuff like that. And then Incredible Health is a company that's helping to place nurses in hospitals. And that's just like any of these placement companies. It's just they've picked a vertical and they've had to figure out the nuances of the healthcare vertical. But it doesn't touch insurance. It doesn't touch Medicare. It's literally just you've got a business. You need to hire someone. You pay us six grand every time we hire someone for you, just like so many other companies that are doing pretty well in that recruiting space. among friends uh tell us what else would be on that that website of business ideas avoid pursuing or investing in save us time save us money our loyalty like i'm gonna do live performance ticketing i'm gonna do bands i'm gonna do uh international travel i'm gonna you know it's like all the things that are like fun like so people have these they're they're 28 they're 34 and they have this fantasy that they're going to build a billion dollar company while doing the thing they love you know whereas the people who are making money are people like max lefshin was like i'm going to do financing for all the stuff you buy at walmart like boom let's go public in four years you know or i'm going to do financing for b2b marketplaces so So that we, you know, do these are the types of businesses that get big, not, you know.

57:08Look, the time to do fun businesses that became billion dollar businesses, that was like 2000 to 2009. It's over now. Sorry, you missed it. It happened for like nine years. It's done now. I'm kidding, but. Yeah, I pursued a music startup in 2012 for three years. So I have the scars to prove it. Exactly. Shah Rose, want to close us up? But my question is more tactical. You touched on this earlier, like, hey, there's only four of us, but we also see a ton of companies and we're in a lot of verticals. So like, what's the point in which you feel like, hey, I've seen enough in this space and I'm ready to go and make an investment?

57:49Or is it some other moment? But I'm curious, like, given your funnel is so wide, both on verticals and on the stage, How do you manage if you don't have more people? It's a great question. And I think the answer is not great. I think the answer is we just try to use our best judgment. And since we've been building companies and investing for two decades, our judgment has just been honed more and more over time. We've made so many investments that didn't work out and we're close to the founders why they weren't working out. And we learned what the failure modes were. And then we made investments that did work out and we were close to the fund.

58:29We saw what the things were. And just after so many rinse, wash and repeat type things, you just get a sense of it. So I don't know that there's anything more than that. sometimes we like the idea and we don't think the team is great. And then we justify to ourselves saying, but markets win. And you can have a mediocre team and a great market is going to do better than a great team in a bad market. And a great team in a great market is when you get these outsized returns. And so we're always trying to play that off because you rarely get a great team in a great market. Or you rarely know if it's a great market.

59:07You rarely know if it's a great team. You just have to use your best judgment. And so I think that we play off a number of factors and we try to bring to our discussions, which take place mostly on Facebook Messenger and then partly on Monday meetings. We don't pitch the partnership. We don't come to the partnership and say, I want to do this deal and I'm going to try to convince you of this. We don't have that culture. We say, here's an interesting company. And I'm wrestling with it because I really like it for these reasons. I don't like it for these reasons. And then someone will say, oh, don't worry about that.

59:43That's not a con. So I think you try to make better decisions by turning things over with your partners. And even if you're an angel or a solo capitalist or whatever, find people who are like your BFFs, right? And just roll things around with them, people you trust. Because I think through the extroverting, through the talking, you tend to hone in on the right answer. You start to sense your own discomfort. You start to sense your own enthusiasm. And then ultimately, over time, you have to be honest with yourself if you're making the same mistake over and over again. Like one mistake that I made over and over again was investing in people I loved hanging out with.

1:00:21And in some cases, like Manish Chander with Poshmark or whatever, that ended up being just the right thing to do, or Otis Chandler from Goodreads or whatever. But in many other cases, it really led me to just getting to zero real quick on that investment because I was reacting to my affinity to the person, not my affinity to their talent in this market, and not my affinity to this market or to this approach. And so I wasn't using my intellect enough. That's a great place to wrap. James, thank you so much for being generous with your time and having a great conversation with us. Everybody give a round of applause for James for joining us today.

1:01:01Great to see you guys. Thank you for the time as well. Go get them. Go make the world a better place.

1:01:10Turpentine VC is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen and Econ 102. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in the Apple store or rate us on Spotify.