Why I Left Goldman And Index Ventures At 30 - Now I've Raised $1B in Venture Capital I Ophelia Brown

0:00Maybe a European doesn't articulate their ambition in the same way that an American might. It doesn't mean they don't have it. That is Ophelia Brown. After a short stint at Goldman Sachs, Ophelia joined Index Ventures, where she spent a lot of time in the US working on early investments in Robinhood and Supercell. Later on, Ophelia built her own fund, Blossom Capital, and made herself a name with investments in unicorns such as Checkout, Moonpay and Pigment. The question is, do you want it more than anyone else to go and be their partner? which means are you going to work harder than anyone else to get in front of them?

0:33I don't take no for an answer. There is no lengths that I won't go to and I am a terrible loser. So that is just not an option. So by the end of this episode, you will know how to build your own fund, how to raise$1 billion before you're 32 and most importantly, how to turn a philosophy degree into a successful investment career. That is the Venture Lab podcast, and I'm your host, Luis.

1:02Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction. Ophelia, what do I need to know about you to understand the person that you are? And when I'm asking this question, I'm specifically trying to understand your earliest context and your experiences that had an impact on who you are today. uh really diving in with the deep questions to begin with and first of all thank you for for having me on this uh podcast and uh honored to be here diving back into my earliest experiences to give a bit of context I'm the youngest of three we were all uh all daughters uh to two parents we lived in Cambridge which was a town just north of London and I look in some respect in terms of how similar we are in the way that we've grown up and certainly in terms of professional careers and attitudes.

1:58And so looking back, I think certainly those earliest experiences were probably in the way that we were brought up and attitudes to education and attitudes to work. My parents took education very, very seriously. our primary school was actually I mean I want to say less than 50 meters off of our home so it was like very easy to walk to school but like we were really within that you know school environment regularly and Cambridge was obviously a university town but you know definitely drilled into you to be top of your class excelling in your grades trying to live to your full potential and that combined with um the fact that you really earned your way through life and that you really kind of strove to be your best in work both uh to kind of deliver your full potential but also in order to kind of uh be your make your own so uh actually had my first job when I was because uh well I tried washing uh car window screens for the friend when I was uh 11 my mom was like seriously unimpressed at that but I got my first proper job when I was 14 in the summer I went to work in the gap really got to understand customer service and uh you know early client relations through that and um I went from that French connection and um kind of kept kept in work and so it was kind of those I would say those kind of strong beliefs education and career kind of really were impressed on us very early on so I think that's some kind of the earliest formations in terms of kind of belief and attitude and then what I really realized about myself um kind of uh as I grew older and kind of developed a lot of passion and um figured out what I wanted to do myself was that I always had this kind of entrepreneurial bug I mean the first um idea I had for a business was being a restaurant owning DJ I was like 13 or 14 and I thought that I would cook in cook in the back and DJ front of house it was like a terrible idea and then uh I think that was the the kind of the pattern through my life it's that I always had terrible ideas I went from that to uh wanting to put um after a visit to China when I was in my 20s I thought that I would put Chinese sell Chinese train tickets online only realizing that obviously like a foreigner was never going to be able to build that business and when I was at business school I had an idea for a peer-to-peer car sharing startup that also wasn't quite fully fledged and it was realizing that I never quite had the ideas which was turned me to VC in the end.

4:54Yeah if we go back again like how did your how did your parents actually instill this drive and ambition in you? I think it was the way in which we were probably measured as in there was very much a belief that you know we were given the best education everything was available to us and we had to make the most of it and when it came to university you know that only the best universities would be acceptable and only ever being the best was acceptable in our household so I think it was just a very very kind of tough and like I mean grateful for it looking back but that was kind of the attitudes with which we were brought up I remember when I came out of university I had two offers to go into investment banking and I mean this was probably some of the best advice I was given at the time but um I had an offer from Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs I mean little did I know at that time what Lehman's fate was and I'd really enjoyed the kind of the uh the culture of Lehman and the people that I'd met but um obviously there was like the prestige of Goldman and I remember my dad saying to me you know you only go and work for the best you know you're only gonna go and be the best um and that kind of like sums it up in some way.

6:20So, yeah. And yeah, it's interesting that you put it forth because I wanted to ask this question, like you studied history and philosophy. And I think like one could say that they're not, there's not a direct link necessarily to investing. So what do you think, what advantages does your background in humanities bring you in venture capital? So I think that's one of the beauties of the British education system that you can really wait to learn business and what I think that was very powerful about learning classics which was philosophy and language and history is it was a real training of the mind and I certainly fell in love with the philosophy I mean logic I had this great professor and it just taught me how to argue really my husband always said he's Estonian and he always says Brits especially we just love to debate and especially in my family we could probably argue anything which way and so negotiation tactics definitely came from from some of those courses and then philosophy I was just very interested in and curious about you know consciousness and the mind and subjectivity and objectivity and I think that really just encapsulated how curious I am and how I'm kind of trying to always challenge what is acceptable or what is considered the status quo or what people just hold to be true.

7:52And very much, I was taught, you know, how to challenge all of those assumptions and presumptions and thinking. And I think that's very much what you do in venture as well, you know, and what entrepreneurs do on a daily basis is like, why does it have to be like this? Why can't it actually be like Y instead of X? and I have to ask this question Ophelia how do you get from studying philosophy to working at Goldman it was very clear in my mind that I wanted to go and get a business education after getting a humanities education so I knew I wanted to go to business school and in my mind there were two paths to get there I mean again this is very typical of the British education system at the time but if you went to walk talk to the career counselor at Oxford you were told you have three or four degrees you could do finance or consulting or you could um it's like three or four careers you could do finance consulting law or medicine basically were the ones that they would talk to you about and I thought well if I do consulting I can go to business school but then I'd have to return afterwards and pay my fees back um or I could go to banking and hope to earn enough that I could pay my own way through business school.

9:04That plan almost worked. But then I joined Goldman in 2008, which was definitely the worst time to join an investment bank. So the boom years of 2006, 2000, early 2007, I'd missed. And hilariously, I'll never forget this. Lots of people went into banking because obviously the pay was just so good. And there were known bonuses when it came to the end of the year. and my boss at the time when it came to bonus time bought£1 ,000 and he was like, just go and have a nice dinner. This wasn't quite what I was expecting, but sure, it works for me. I mean, it's 2008. I'm just very lucky to have a job at this point.

9:46Yeah, I was surprised as well that they were giving bonuses in 2008. And then your first experience in venture was at Index, right? And while you were there, you spent a lot of time in the U.S. as well with early investments in Robinhood, for instance. And I'm curious, what did the time in the U.S. teach you? Like, what were the main differences that you encountered to Europe or specifically the U.K.? So many things. I think, you know, I like to say that my venture training came from the U.S., Just everything in terms of how investors think about taking risk, how they think big, how they are there to help entrepreneurs build a technology company and really be true partners in every sense of the world.

10:34Trust them, underwrite them, give them the capital, then empower them. And through Robinhood and other investments, I mean, truly got to understand how world-class products and engineering teams are built and how people can dramatically think to change or transform industries and actually how long that journey is. You know, Vlad and Beji's journey didn't start in 2013 when we did the seed investment. It started much longer before when they were at Stanford together. but also having that bar of what a great entrepreneur looks like that was the bar with which I met entrepreneurs in Europe and that was extremely helpful so one of the first investments that I worked on at Index was our investment to Supercell and meeting Ilka when you know they were printing a million dollars a day with their two gaming apps and it was 90 people in this beautiful office in Hells Inky you know which is like the snow was up to your knees outside and like ironically their office was the old Nokia office and we went in and the first time that I met him and you know they had these these cells of people working and one of the PMs had just moved from Brazil to come and work there because she was like so passionate about what they were building and Ilka and that meeting I mean that just is imprinted in my brain and I remember Ilka showing a map on the wall that um was a uh was a map of the world and every time there was someone playing a game like the light would flash in the country that they were in and it's like someone in like the middle of you know the atlantic flashing away and so from you know meeting ilko and other extremely um successful entrepreneurs in europe like uh tarved or cristo building wise it was just so helpful to have the the bar of like okay this is what great looks like in sf these are what brilliant entrepreneurs do the very best but actually the caliber of talent is also on the rise in europe like these people also exist in europe and they also have the potential to build really big businesses and that's what i'm forever grateful for is to have the opportunity to experience both ecosystems yeah and and you mentioned that the role of the investor was quite different in the us from europe back then that they were much more like supportive and much more um part of the of the whole entrepreneurial process how do you see like like how do you see it today in europe do you think something changed or is it still the case i think we've definitely evolved a lot as an ecosystem in terms of i mean you can see it from the the basics of kind of the what is a normal term sheet and investment today um looks a lot more like what you experience or the terms that you could get in the valley and i think that's also compounded by the fact there are a lot more u.s firms investing over here and the entrepreneur has just got smarter about what market norm is.

13:31I still think, especially in a worse market, so post-21, you're starting to see kind of structure again from growth funds protecting their downside risk. I think that's more prevalent in Europe. Like the focus on the downside protection is definitely more prevalent in Europe. Like the focus on control is more prevalent. you know those things are a result of not being comfortable with the risk that you're taking we'll get back to this topic but i i wanted to to ask you that when you left local globe um you it's a very well-respected fund and you started blossom like how old were you back then

14:2031 yeah it was just before my 31st birthday so i was 30 yeah because it's a I'm asking this question because it's a very bold move. So I was wondering, why did you leave the safe environment of the renowned fund to start your own? Because also one thing you said in an interview is that everyone thought at the time that you called you crazy. I mean, that was certainly true. I think it comes back to that entrepreneurial instinct just being so natural. It's part of my character. I think when I was at Local Globe, having left Index and we were doing seed investing in Europe, I really got to understand what the opportunity was for a Series A investor in Europe.

15:05You know, you had the duopoly of Excel and Index in terms of just phenomenal funds that had repeated returns, vintage after vintage, and they had been here for 20 years. But still, most entrepreneurs wanted to raise from the West Coast and have the Sequoia Benchmark, et cetera, brand name. But those firms just weren't focused on doing early stage Series A in Europe. And I felt like there was a gap in the market. And the more that I thought about it and the more that I saw the opportunity, I was just compelled to do it myself. And, you know, some pivotal events that happened before kind of I decided to take the plunge.

15:45I remember Kieran at Blue Yard. I had a breakfast meeting with him in Munich, I want to say, in early 2016, just after he'd raised Blue Yard. And I was in awe of him that he'd just gone and raised a new fund. I mean, it basically didn't happen in Europe. I think there was Simon and Toby who are now a mosaic. And I wasn't so close to their story, but I had heard of what they were doing. And then there was Local Globe and there was Blue Yard. and that and you know being at index and constantly listening to Neil Reimer's story of how he got started with the firm and like you know what he had achieved there there were just and I think this is uh true of you know how entrepreneurship accelerates in any ecosystem is if you have more examples of someone did it then you're more inclined to take that risk yourself I think about that a lot in terms of you know we think of the hundreds of unicorns now that have been built out of Europe and the more that founders are leaving universities or their well-paid tech jobs and they see that someone took a risk and then they built revolution or clarity you know you're you're compelled to to try the same and I think that was very much for me too I kind of saw saw other people were doing and it was possible and my husband actually had also just gone and raised to fund and i was like wow fundraising looks really painful i don't know

17:15and um yeah i i had to go for it though and um fortunately i was so naive about fundraising um once i was in it i just couldn't look back yeah and when when you started blossom you you had a very clear profile so it was only series a and then five investments a year and always as lead and I think mostly also aiming for 20 % ownership, right? Like why? Like why those criteria? So it started with the premise that Europe was obviously a growing ecosystem. There was opportunity here, but it certainly wasn't the size of the valley. I mean, we weren't going to claim that dozens of unicorns or bigger were going to be built a year in Europe.

18:05So it was like, okay, Europe is a finite ecosystem. It's going to grow like 5 % a year in terms of opportunity. But really what matters is finding those very special companies that are going to be global leaders and really change the world. And we just want to be the best partners we can be to those founders and to hopefully own as much of those businesses as possible. So we came to the view that we thought that the right number, both in terms of what the total addressable number of series A's were what percentage of those we thought were going to be the outliers and what percentage of those that we would find and win and it felt like five was the right number also thinking about what is the service that we can deliver to them like it was very much in the model that we wanted to spend as much time with these founders as possible and kind of earn our right as their partner and investor and so it couldn't be more than five and so each fund in the end has ended up being 14, 15 companies.

19:04It's really concentrated versus your traditional venture fund, which is 30, 40 companies. And yeah, ownership is important to us to make sure that every company in the fund matters. If you have such a selected amount of investments that you make, is the due diligence process, does it look differently than if you have like, let's say, spread 40 bets for each fund? we spend a significant amount of time with a small number of companies each year we're not looking for volume we're not trying to see every single deal in the market and we are just looking to win what we love and so the diligence process for entrepreneurs one tends to be pretty quick in terms of if you come with a prepared mind you know exactly what you want to drill into and what you want to get answers to.

19:58It very much prioritizes the relationship with the entrepreneur. So we always say, you know, we don't want to spend time kind of going through the numbers with you in person. Like we don't want to come with an exhausted list of questions. Like let's focus on building the relationship and figuring out how we can help you and whether we're the right partner and we can be a good partner to you. We can do all the desktop stuff our side, but we promise to not take up too much of your time, be a valuable partner, even in the diligence process and kind of prove to you that we can be a good partner long term.

20:28Sounds amazing. From 2018 to 2022, you raised, I think, nearly$1 billion. Yeah, it seems like you know a thing or two about fundraising. So I wanted to ask if anyone who's listening is currently raising a fund, what would you say is the most important thing that no one really tells you about and that you can't find online? oh would you only limit me to one thing okay give us give me two i think especially when it comes to lps and they have such a long-term horizon in the way that they think you know they're not thinking in one year two year they're thinking in decades in terms of their portfolio and you know very much want to prioritize the relationship very much will just take their time like it's hard to push a timeline on them when they have a wealth of you know opportunities in front of them especially when you're an emerging manager like how do you get them to focus on you um and so being creative and kind of assertive with your timeline that ultimately needs to work but also recognizing that you have to work with them to make it happen um i think that's one thing that's very important and the second is the number of touch points I mentioned my husband raised a fund but his advice to me was you know it was eight meetings per LP to convert them and I managed to do five meetings per LP to convert them but you know the first meeting they don't take you seriously they're like you probably won't come back the second meeting they're probably actually trying to understand what you do third meeting you've got to prove that you've done some of the stuff that you said you would do and then fourth meeting when they finally ask you for like an lpa which note when you know that they're finally taking you seriously so i made the mistake of thinking that everyone asking for the data room definitely meant they were going to commit i remember we we brought on an advisor at the time a lovely woman called tatiana chapova she was she came for an lp and i was i think two months into the process and we had a breakfast in london i was like i've got 75 million committed like all in the data room like all done this is going to be such an easy issue like two months later i mean all the lps that had asked for the data room had passed and like no interest it was the complete opposite of you know vc kind of we only take the data room if we're actually interested in what but the the key marker for me was like when the lp asked for the lpa that's when they were serious five to eight meetings sounds insane to me before before committing and and you you're very well known for winning competitive deals how do you do this like where's this coming from i believe it's wanting it more than anyone else and i think that is there's a lot of truth to that to deal making you know um the no the companies and founders are out there right they're all building their businesses the question is do you want it more than anyone else to go and be their partner which means are you going to work harder than anyone else to get in front of them and then are you going to work harder than anyone else to be there to win them and convince them that you're going to be the best partner to them and I think that's always been true to my personality it's like I don't take no for an answer there is no lengths you know that I won't go to and I am a terrible loser so that is just not an option um but i think you know it's really being passionate about what we do and believing in our model and wanting to work and partner with the very best and prove that we can be good partners to them so kind of like besides your track record let's say like what arguments do you bring forth that resonate most with uh founders i think that's changed over time I mean certainly in fund one it was much more we're just going to work harder than anyone else like we had some track record but you know compared to the the multi-stage firms and always you know when we got into competitive situations it was do I take the brand name and the multi-stage firm who's going to put me on the map or do I take an emerging manager who's just committed to me who you know I mean something to their uh to their fund and they're just going to work harder for me and that was always the debate that we found ourselves in and um we just won on the on the latter that we would just work harder we had networks that were comparable to the multi-stage firms like we worked very hard to keep our network both in Europe and the US which is super important but ultimately we were going to show up and we were going to be there regularly and they knew that they were getting myself and among the partners of Blossom and we were committed to that and I think all of our actions in the process left them no doubt so that was kind of the beginning stages and then as we evolved to fund two and fund three and we started to build Blossom's track record and not only the track record in terms of the success that we had seen for these companies past our partnership at series a but also you know the references from the founders firsthand of this is the experience this is what it's like to work with Blossom and you could hear from owen at times which you know recently reached billion um dollar status this year or eleanor for pigment which is you know another french unicorn that we were partnered at series a or guillem at checkout last valued at 40 billion and one of the world's largest fintech businesses like they will all happily pick up the phone to talk about their experience at blossom and that's what i am so appreciative of now you know we're in a competitive situation i only need to text eleanor or guillem and say can you please just pick up the phone to talk to this founder, to tell them what it's like.

26:19And, you know, they've never let me down. Yeah. Well, that's amazing. I actually experienced myself that they're very supportive because I spoke to a few people that you work with for a while. And one thing they said was, I mean, besides that you're a very serious runner, they also mentioned that you put your network to work better than any other investor. And how do you do this? like what do they mean by that i think i've always loved making connections and i've always understood kind of you know either paying it forward or giving someone something of value and so the ability to connect people and like bring people together i find that powerful it's a powerful it's the power of relationships you know vce is a relationship business i actually i I despise this virtual interaction.

27:13You know, I prioritize very much spending time with people in person and I am energized by those conversations. And so if I can bring someone to know someone and it's going to result in something great, that energizes me for sure. I remember when I was an associate at Index, I used to, this was novel at the time in European ecosystem back in like 2014 2015 it's certainly not novel anymore but we would have these like founder dinners um at my house and it was you know eight to 12 people and it was mainly founders or a couple of investors and certainly there are stories of i met that person and then they invested in me like two years later i met that person we started the company together and it's just like it's so cool to create those connections.

28:04Yeah. Yeah, it's a topic I'm personally very interested in. So when you need a favor from a person that is not in your network, but you know, but there's someone who is in your network that knows this person, how do you go about it? I think two ways. I think if there's an easy, warm connection and someone can make an introduction for me, happy to ask them. and if it's not so warm i'm very happy to go direct and you know there i remember certain memes about you know the ability of bcs congratulating themselves for their ability to write an email and i think there's some truth to that um that you know that you have to use the the power of language and words to convince one someone but um a friend also gave me some good advice some years ago was like you can't just ask for the intros all the time you know you can't be that person just being like can you intro me to x can you intro me to x you also have to give something back um and i'm very conscious on that like if i take up someone's time how do i repay them yeah because i'm always wondering if the first step is trying to understand what the other person is looking for and then just like first probably providing value to them so that they are maybe more open or inclined to also um reciprocate that i mean certainly with founders when we reach chat cold we spend a lot of time in terms of okay what stage are they building at you know what are the problems that they're thinking about that where we could be relevant or what's in their hiring page like who are they looking to hire do we know anyone in our network we can send in without even having spoken to the founder to show that you're you understand that you know you're asking something of them and you want to bring something of value immediately yeah exactly and then um when the deal is done so when you um backed a founder what is your way to provide as much value as possible to them.

29:53So we created this model of how we wanted to support founders from the very beginning. And the view was that, you know, at Series A, when things are moving so fast and so dynamically, and you're starting to invest more capital, inevitably, you know, some things are going to go really, really right, and some things are going to break and go wrong. And it's how quickly you can identify what's broken and fix it and course correct, that it doesn't become symptomatic and it doesn't cause any more issue than it should and so we really wanted to prioritize the frequency of interaction with the founder so we committed to being with them in person at least once a month and to you know we have regular dialogue all in between on whatsapp etc but those sessions are never reporting sessions so we we don't want to come out and just be did slides about kind of how everyone can present slides with kpis that going up to the right like that's not going to help anyone but to have in our um to have an agreement in terms of what are the kpis that we're actually looking at and we can like monitor those async we don't need to have a meeting to discuss that but when we're together in person let's talk about the strategic topics that are actually going to make or break the business in the next 12 18 months so most of those topics end up being around growth hiring kind of internationalization kind of new strategy your product, et cetera.

31:11But I'd say growth and hiring are the two main areas that we spend most of our time with founders. And one of your colleagues that I spoke with said that when you're spending time with founders, you're always pushing them to be their best selves. I think, I mean, that's a very great skill, but how do you do this?

31:36i think it's challenging them or helping them to see what might be possible like have you thought about this or why couldn't that be possible or if you did this would it unlock that so try and think kind of i think the beauty of being an investor is you're never in the day-to-day of the operations and sometimes when you're like headstand in the weeds you don't have the ability to look up and think ah okay like actually that is possible and I think that's the the opportunity for investors to be that sounding board or that you kind of thinker with them to have the the kind of macro perspective to be able to accelerate in their trajectory right exactly yeah um I would also love to talk with you a bit about the European startup ecosystem.

32:30We briefly touched upon it already because I also know that it's a topic you have been vocal about before and it's also something I dedicate the podcast towards. And as you mentioned, you have spent quite some time in the Valley. And how do you think that's, because you mentioned before risk tolerance, but also how does the culture differ between the US and Europe, particularly in terms of talent and founder mindset? In terms of founder mindset, I think it's pretty equitable. I mean, obviously, there are countries in Europe where, I mean, if you're building in the US, you can definitely just think about local market for most industries, right, for at least the first five years.

33:07And there are a lot of countries in Europe where you can't think about local market. But I would say that was probably more of relevance of five, 10 years ago. You know, anyone building a B2B business today and wants to build the best product is already thinking about how I sign those best customers in the US. and especially with AI, you know, all of those customers are out on the West Coast. I think that when it comes to product engineering design talent in Europe, and it's the same in the US in early stage, you know, people stay with their networks. I would often say that, you know, the first 10, 15 hires, if you really can do that all through network.

33:48And obviously, you know, the strength of Stanford and engineering, et cetera, it's very possible to do that quite quickly. What you end up seeing in Europe is that those networks tend to be quite local. So if you're building in Paris, for example, you'll hire people that you either went to school, to university with, or someone that you worked with at a startup, and those are how those clusters are built. I think products and engineering tends to be much more loyal in Europe, partly because maybe you don't have the wealth of opportunity of how you can go and trade your equity like you can in the US.

34:22But certainly I think that the longevity of an engineer's career in SF with one company is much shorter than it is in Europe. Just people just stay around longer. And I think that's why a lot of European founders choose to keep product and engineering at home because they have the network. They build great culture here. And then they put GTM in the US. I think it's pretty challenging for a European founder to go and hire out cold NSF with no network. Not to say you can't do it, it's just more challenging. Many people in Europe are saying that European founders need to level up their ambition to be able to compete with U.S.

35:01companies. But you have a different take on that, I read, that you said what it actually needs are investors that could match the risk tolerance of U.S. investors. So I'm wondering who's the problem in the European ecosystem? Is it the investors or the founders? So I certainly think the ecosystem has evolved a lot since I originally made that claim. And what I don't like about these arguments is it talks of averages, you know, like you can't group all European investors and you can't group all European founders. and clearly Europe has very ambitious talent that are capable of building you know transformational world-leading global category leaders sometimes what I think people don't appreciate is that maybe a European doesn't articulate their ambition in the same way that American might it doesn't mean they don't have it and I think that's one of the powerful things about being an investor on the ground and having grown up here and really understanding the cultural nuances in every country is that you might hear ambition in just a different way and I think it's incredibly important to have it and some certainly something that we we look for in entrepreneurs that we back um but it might just sound different to the U.S.

36:24Yeah I can imagine there's a different uh different way of self-perception and communication I would say

36:33and in in general like i think um the venture landscape is changing like we're seeing for instance like many large funds that are turning into rias and also ai native companies are growing at a much faster pace than what we've seen before which i think poses the question like if investors still want to sacrifice liquidity so i'm wondering what do you think are the the factors um at play kind of force this change and how do you see the venture industry evolving i think the model is very much evolving because obviously it's been around for such a long time now that you know you have such vastly different players you have you know at the early stage you have everything from you know the micro vc fund the solo gp the angel turn gp and then you have the much more established funds like the multi-stage firms where you know having different strategies moving more into p in some ways like uh looking for a different returns profile and that's great because i think there was a post on linkedin the other day in a product market fit of investors and founders like founders are going to choose what kind of fund that they want to work based on their needs.

37:48And so I think having healthy competition and the ability for founders to select is a great thing. What do you think about the timeframe of the returns? Like will LPs or other investors still be interested to sacrifice their liquidity over 10 years when there's like those kind of like super fast scaling companies? i mean even if the i mean the ai company is super fast getting today we don't necessarily know when the exit is going to be for them i think a lot more entrepreneurs are in favor of staying private longer it's certainly something that has changed over the last decade i think we're the lowest point for ipos but i believe you know where there comes structural change or friction in the system And that also creates opportunity.

38:40Is going public going to be the way that liquidity is accessed? Or is there going to be something else? You know, what it looks like 10 years from now, I don't know that just going public with the only way that institutions get liquidity. What is what is the one thing that invested like used to be very important for investors, but which will not play a very big role in the future? Oh, that's a great question. I mean, I think we've seen this over time, and this is quite European answer for sure, is the importance of the CV has certainly started going out the window. I mean, it's better if you dropped out of university than you went to university.

39:24And kind of your credentials, I think, matter far, far less, because obviously your ability to build product and kind of demonstrate what you're capable of today is far more important. and how will you as Blossom adapt to that? And also like on a larger scale, like what are your next steps? And also probably most importantly, like what are you most excited about? I mean, in terms of what we're excited about, we're living through one of the biggest changes in terms of technology at the moment, going from pure SaaS software to AI native and agentic AI and what this means for how companies are going to buy software and what role agents are going to play, how we're going to build and how far are we from the single person unicorn and what is the need for an investor in a single unicorn world?

40:21I think that's one of the amazing things about Venture is, I mean, I can finally say that I now feel somewhat old in the industry and that I've almost been doing this 15 years and I've definitely been doing it most of my career. and I feel like I could have just started yesterday as in and this kind of I guess does full circle to our discussion here is you know constantly challenge what you know just because you knew something to be true five years ago or 10 years ago does not mean it's true in today's world and I think AI is certainly causing a lot of investors to question kind of is what I knew applicable here and will i make the mistake of thinking i knew what was true um and that keeps you incredibly humble i think it means the learning curve like never stops and i think the internal dialogue is like insanely busy right now yeah i think that's a great that's a great way to to end the conversation um we we also have a closing tradition on this podcast which is called um the open letter and you can address a one sentence letter to a specific person so a group of people so for instance your younger self or to future entrepreneurs or like to your competitors for instance and what who would it be and what would you say i would send it to all potential founders who are thinking about building and i would say take the plunge make the jump and believe in yourself.

42:00Thank you so much, Ophelia. I was thinking if I had to name one thing that really stood out to me, I think it's your independent way of thinking and especially also the high conviction actions that follow from it. And you mentioned it in our conversation. I think it's very rare and I really admire it. So yeah, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you. I really enjoyed it.