Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #96: a16z's College Alternative, Running From the Luxury Bus, Is the Music About to Stop?

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Episode #96: a16z's College Alternative, Running From the Luxury Bus, Is the Music About to Stop? · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  I think right now what we're playing is this gigantic game of musical chairs.
• 0:04
  And I think there's a set of firms who essentially have their hand on the chair, and
• 0:09
  they're just like, well, no, whatever the music stops, I already have a chair.
• 0:12
  I think the real danger of musical chairs is if you don't have your hand in a chair, you're at
• 0:16
  risk.
• 0:17
  But I think there's a set of firms in our industry who have a chair.
• 0:20
  And no matter how this turns out, they're gonna remain in business because of their brand,
• 0:24
  because of their performance, because of their relationships with LPs for other reasons.
• 0:28
  And I think that's very different.
• 0:30
  I think then you can be like, we're just gonna go full maxi, and we're just gonna keep dancing
• 0:34
  because we don't need to be ahead of the music stopping.
• 0:37
  It's the week of September 21.
• 0:39
  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:44
  Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
• 0:46
  I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
• 0:50
  be talking with the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past week.
• 0:55
  Our first piece comes from The Wall Street Journal written by Catherine Ridley and also
• 1:00
  probably a million other threads that you saw on social media.
• 1:03
  This piece in particular is titled The Tech Elite is Funding an Alternative to College.
• 1:08
  Andreessen Horowitz is putting $35,000,000 behind the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, an
• 1:14
  unaccredited two year program in San Francisco for students aged 16 to 22, led by Udemy
• 1:19
  cofounder Gagan Biani with Anthropic, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, and OpenAI signed on as founding
• 1:26
  partners, offering compute, software, and access to their offices.
• 1:30
  The pitch is essentially, don't drop out to start a company.
• 1:33
  Come do school with us instead.
• 1:35
  With up to 80% of students' time spent on project based learning, like building an AI
• 1:40
  model or shipping a product, plus co ops with those partners who've joined on, the founding
• 1:45
  class starts a tuition free one year program in fall of twenty twenty seven, and the full two
• 1:51
  year version pending regulatory approval will carry tuition in line with elite private
• 1:57
  universities.
• 1:59
  There was so much chatter on this in the past twenty four hours.
• 2:01
  Yeah.
• 2:02
  And skeptics like Brown University's John Friedman pointed out that proven track records
• 2:06
  and learning alongside people whose paths look nothing like yours still matter.
• 2:10
  But Eric Thornburg framed the logic plainly from his point of view, quote, venture is the
• 2:15
  discovery and cultivation of talent.
• 2:17
  And that's what universities are too.
• 2:19
  Obviously, wanted to pause for your thoughts and reactions to the news and just the trend of
• 2:22
  education shift changing more broadly.
• 2:24
  I think this is gonna be an interesting experiment.
• 2:26
  I think the history of VCs trying to disrupt education has been difficult, particularly for
• 2:33
  folks who've tried to come in and tech enable everything.
• 2:37
  The the track record of those ventures hasn't been great.
• 2:40
  In some cases, the things they pioneered or tried out ended up making their way into other
• 2:45
  institutions.
• 2:46
  And so, I don't know, I went down the rabbit hole of the Montessori school thing in the New
• 2:52
  York Times.
• 2:53
  And I think education is one other than health care I I I might argue education is even more
• 2:57
  sensitive issue for families than Yeah.
• 2:59
  Health care.
• 3:00
  I think this school has one thing going for it that most of the other attempts at education
• 3:05
  reform or, like, new models haven't had.
• 3:08
  I think before people were like, yeah.
• 3:09
  I'm maybe dissatisfied with the status quo, but the status quo still feels like the most safe,
• 3:14
  predictable, reliable way to become a successful person.
• 3:17
  And I think with a lot of the AI doomerism and a lot of the, I think, not just doomerism,
• 3:23
  justified skepticism or questions about what does this mean for humanity and education,
• 3:27
  there's a window to try things that are more radical both within the system and outside of
• 3:32
  it.
• 3:33
  And I think in some ways, my hope for this school is that I talk to a lot of younger folks
• 3:38
  who they prefer project based learning.
• 3:40
  They like being hands on.
• 3:42
  They learn by doing, not learn by being lectured to or talked to.
• 3:46
  They wanna, like, get their hands dirty.
• 3:47
  Not every student, but I think for students who learn that way, this could be a really great
• 3:51
  opportunity to get that hand.
• 3:52
  And I I think that's a that's a message that's percolating its way through higher education
• 3:56
  more broadly.
• 3:57
  I think anytime Andreessen Horowitz puts their name on something, it's going to attract
• 4:01
  attention.
• 4:01
  It's gonna attract attention both from their fans and from their haters.
• 4:04
  It's interesting that we're in campus, and I think that team is, in my opinion, doing
• 4:09
  amazing work to make on ramps to higher education affordable and accessible for people
• 4:14
  who couldn't do it before in a way that doesn't leave them saddled with debt.
• 4:18
  And I personally like models where you don't have to destroy the existing ecosystem.
• 4:24
  So for me, the big experiment will be how much does the can I call it the BAA or the BHA?
• 4:30
  HAA.
• 4:31
  The HAA.
• 4:32
  I gotta get the the acronym right.
• 4:34
  How much will this school color inside the lines?
• 4:36
  And I think things like accreditation are important.
• 4:38
  And how much will they play within the regulatory norms of education?
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  And how much will they behave more like a startup and break things?
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  And I think in education, sometimes the point of experiments isn't to build new institutions.
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  It's to move existing institutions in new directions by showing them new ways that things
• 4:55
  could be done.
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  And I think there's absolutely an audience.
• 4:58
  The audience for this might be mostly people in nine four x x x and one zero x x x zip codes.
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  But for a first couple of cohorts, I'm sure they'll learn something, and I hope that
• 5:07
  students who want different educational pathways have more high quality options.
• 5:13
  That's what I was thinking of is I don't necessarily think for the first cohorts, it's
• 5:16
  gonna be people who've never thought about dropping out before.
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  I know that there is some discourse in the threads of like, this is gonna encourage
• 5:23
  students to drop.
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  I'm like, I think the people who are gonna join this were always thinking about it, and this
• 5:27
  will be a great opportunity for them to go try it out, and there's such great funding behind
• 5:32
  this that they should, if that's what they're thinking of.
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  And now they have an opportunity to do it.
• 5:35
  It will be interesting to see that first cohort of people who I'm thinking about the person who
• 5:39
  is not from coastal ZIP codes, who maybe is like a first gen university goer, who hears
• 5:45
  about the school through their own web surfing and is like, could this be for me?
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  And it's not inside of the tech bubble.
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  When that shifts, I think that'll be a, like, a strong indication of other universities should
• 5:55
  take note.
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  Or I think about the person who's like, hey.
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  I'm the only entrepreneurial tech oriented person in my small town.
• 6:01
  Yeah.
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  And all of the, like, local inputs I'm getting aren't giving me the encouragement that I want.
• 6:07
  It's but it's inch I mean, you and I were talking earlier.
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  I think about the Thiel fellows I've met or I think about the people I've met through the
• 6:13
  folks at fifteen seventeen Fund.
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  There are really talented people for whom traditional education is just not the right
• 6:20
  frame.
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  And I'm glad that there are pathways for those folks to become successful.
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  You know, we have Thiel Fellows in our portfolio, and a couple of them I was like,
• 6:27
  yeah, can't envision you as a college student.
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  I don't think that would have been the right move for you.
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  But I don't know that that's the right move for everybody.
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  My hope is that we have more options for people whose pathways look different, but that those
• 6:38
  options are high quality.
• 6:40
  Talking about education more broadly, where do you think this trickles down in terms of entry
• 6:45
  level?
• 6:46
  Like, how young could you go to kind of change the way that education looks?
• 6:50
  I think we're talking about it so much at the higher education level.
• 6:53
  What's the appetite, do you feel like, to come earlier and earlier to reenergize what that
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  looks like?
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  I think you said it before, probably health education are some of the most important family
• 7:01
  decisions that people would make for their kids.
• 7:03
  At what point do you, as like a parent, do you as a family start being more open to
• 7:08
  untraditional ways of that?
• 7:10
  Earlier on, when it's just you're a parent and you have a young child, you have full control
• 7:13
  over what that looks like, Higher education is the first decision, I think, that kids can act
• 7:17
  like adults and make their own decisions from most
• 7:18
  of I think probably, like, somewhere around late middle school, high school.
• 7:22
  I Yeah.
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  I have a I have a kid.
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  I think there's two things.
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  The older your kid gets, the better you understand who they are.
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  And I think the longer these institutions are around, the better you understand what happens
• 7:32
  to the people.
• 7:32
  It's like every time a startup founder in our portfolio is like, got accepted to this
• 7:36
  accelerator.
• 7:36
  I'm like, great.
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  Tell me what happened to the last three batches of companies that went through it.
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  They're like, what do you mean?
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  I'm like, well, you're gonna end up statistically, you're gonna end up wherever
• 7:43
  they ended But if you like the outcomes of the last three batches of that accelerator, it's
• 7:47
  maybe worth doing if you're just like, oh, I don't admire or want to be like any of those
• 7:51
  companies.
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  I'm like, well, then don't join their club.
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  And I have a feeling that, like, that will be the same thing here.
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  As these alternative pathways become better understood and people say, oh, you can do x y z
• 8:01
  thing.
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  You can then push earlier because people will say, oh, if I like opt out and give them this
• 8:05
  alternative track, I kinda know where this ends.
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  Right now, we don't know where this ends.
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  Everything is like opportunity cost too.
• 8:11
  Yeah.
• 8:11
  Sort of like, you can do this or you can do this.
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  I'm honestly super interested to see what people decide with a broader menu of options.
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  Like, I like seeing that.
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  I think it's also it has nothing to do with it, but I think it's also just like the Nicole
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  Hannah Jones thing in the New York Times about school trip.
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  I think there are people who are like, I am willing to run educational experiments with my
• 8:32
  family, but those experiments need to be well constructed.
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  And I have to be willing to accept the risk that I'm part of an experiment, where by the
• 8:41
  time I find out the outcome, I must live with the outcome.
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  It's a one way door.
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  I can't go back in time and go on a different branch.
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  And I do think there are people who are already spending a lot of time in wealthy families,
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  spending a lot of time and money constructing these types of experiences for their children
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  outside of what they get at school.
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  And if they could find a school that provided those as part of the core curriculum, I think
• 9:03
  there's not and you you need what?
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  Like, a 100 families to make this work or a 100 kids?
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  So I think there's probably a 100 kids out there who would say, I'm willing to bet that
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  this will be a more impactful transformative experience for me than traditional education.
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  And depending on their family circumstances, it might be like the floor on the outcome of my
• 9:17
  life is already quite good.
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  So if this ends up being the equivalent of a gap year
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  I was gonna do it anyways.
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  I was gonna do it anyway or or a detour for a person who's already likely to be successful.
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  I wonder if this also, like, signals an increased appetite for venture capitalists to,
• 9:31
  like, rethink.
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  You know, education goes through these cycles.
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  Everyone's like, we should put money into education.
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  Like, oh, you can't get any money out the other end.
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  And I think maybe this will be a signal that there's renewed interest in investing in this
• 9:41
  category.
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  Well, our next read this week was a short post on Ex I'm Signal making the case that right now
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  may be the both the worst and best time to start a company.
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  The opportunity surface is essentially infinite because AI keeps collapsing the cost of
• 9:55
  building, experimenting, and entering new markets.
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  The catch is that the durability of any individual advantage collapsing even faster,
• 10:02
  and anything obviously valuable gets copied, bundled, or commoditized before you can even
• 10:07
  blink, making it harder the big players are shipping super fast too.
• 10:10
  The post said, quote, founders are running downhill while meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and the
• 10:17
  rest are driving behind them even faster in a giant luxury bus with the high beams turned on
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  to the max.
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  Pairing this together with our conversation last week about Dario's recent memo as it
• 10:31
  pertains to being an AI application layer founder.
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  Do you think it's starting to become more of a suboptimal time to be a founder now than ever?
• 10:38
  I have been thinking about a lot of the themes in this post for a while.
• 10:42
  And one of the things I've concluded is this search for the universal moat, Exanti.
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  It was even in the before times, the pre AI times, they were hard to identify.
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  But I think oftentimes, once you get into a business, you start to learn, oh, the moat is
• 10:56
  our customer service, or it's like we fit a distribution channel.
• 10:59
  And I think if you're on the outside looking in, you're like, why would I start a software
• 11:03
  company ever?
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  Everybody has the same tools.
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  Everybody has the same and we've gone through everything.
• 11:08
  Taste is a moat.
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  Effort's a moat.
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  Nine nine six is a moat.
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  Now we're we've gone through all of the I think what I've concluded is, I think if you put 10
• 11:17
  people in the same room and gave them the same tools and describe the problem, their life
• 11:20
  experiences and their perception of what's important, and you came back in a year, I bet
• 11:25
  you those companies would all look quite which doesn't make the choosing the right one at day
• 11:30
  zero exercise any easier.
• 11:32
  But I do think we have companies that I'm like, well, what's the difference between you and
• 11:35
  that company?
• 11:36
  They're like, well, here's what we believe and here's what they believe.
• 11:37
  I'm like, oh, those are pretty actually, pretty profoundly different beliefs about what your
• 11:41
  customer actually cares about and how to solve the problem.
• 11:44
  And, you're competing for the same customer dollar, but you're attacking it really, really
• 11:48
  differently.
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  And I've been surprised at how different companies even in the same category can look
• 11:53
  and feel.
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  And so I think it can feel like from the outside looking in, like, why even bother
• 11:57
  starting a company?
• 11:59
  Everybody can copy everything feature wise.
• 12:01
  And I'm like, yeah.
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  But that doesn't mean that they'll put the same level of effort.
• 12:04
  It doesn't mean that they, like, will put the same level of priority.
• 12:07
  It's always been the case that, like, if you're building a consumer, Meta could copy what you
• 12:10
  were doing.
• 12:10
  They copied stories.
• 12:12
  It didn't kill Snapchat.
• 12:13
  It hurts Snapchat, for sure.
• 12:14
  It didn't kill Snapchat.
• 12:15
  And so, I don't know, I think, to me, it's a good reminder.
• 12:18
  If you're gonna start a company, you have to be wildly insane enough to believe that, like, you
• 12:22
  can win.
• 12:23
  And I think AI has meant that for the first year, you're probably gonna wade into a pool
• 12:28
  that feels very crowded of other people bouncing around, talking about doing things.
• 12:32
  I think the other funny thing is this idea that everything should quote unquote just like work
• 12:36
  immediately has dramatically shortened entrepreneurial attention spans.
• 12:40
  And so I think for some people, Mike, if you're willing to work with this for a year, some
• 12:43
  chunk of the people you're competing with today are gonna quit.
• 12:46
  They're gonna not get instant traction, and they're gonna go look for something else that
• 12:50
  that feels like it's hotter.
• 12:51
  Oh, instinct and town are hot.
• 12:53
  Quick.
• 12:53
  I'm gonna go pivot into personal AI systems.
• 12:55
  I'm like, well, you're too late.
• 12:56
  And then when they realize that that's too hard, they'll find something else that feels
• 12:59
  hot.
• 12:59
  And so they'll be being willing to work on a problem over time.
• 13:03
  I think in a year, you'll look up and be like, oh, wow.
• 13:04
  There actually aren't that many people who hung around and kept playing.
• 13:07
  I mean, a relatively, like, small number of people, but you have to believe that when you
• 13:11
  start.
• 13:11
  And balance at the same time of knowing when to iterate.
• 13:14
  I was just talking to somebody else on the phone.
• 13:16
  We had talked previously about a company that we'd, like, demoed as, like, a team.
• 13:19
  And I was like, where are they right now?
• 13:21
  And he was like, they've really pivoted.
• 13:22
  They've gone in this direction.
• 13:23
  They're now, like, a network connector.
• 13:25
  And I was like, wow.
• 13:26
  As credit as that market is, it's deeply impressive that people still continue to find
• 13:31
  opportunities of, I'm gonna take a shot at this.
• 13:33
  I'm gonna take a shot at this.
• 13:34
  And I find in this environment, knowing when to do that strategically versus when to hold on to
• 13:39
  what your original idea was is quite fascinating to watch unfold.
• 13:42
  It does come down to how passionate about the area that you initially came in to disrupt are
• 13:47
  you?
• 13:48
  And are you willing to pop your head up to know when the time is to make a move?
• 13:52
  That feels really center of the conversation today, but has always been inherent to venture
• 13:56
  and startups of knowing that there are gonna be competitors behind your back and just knowing
• 14:00
  when to shift is Yeah.
• 14:01
  So, like, that's always been part of the game.
• 14:03
  But now it just feels so much easier to start something and get it going.
• 14:07
  Whereas previously, you really had to think deeply about what the risks would look like
• 14:10
  before jumping I
• 14:11
  also on Friday, I had a long talk with one of our portfolio companies who sent me this, like,
• 14:15
  crazy update.
• 14:15
  They'd been working on a problem, and and they had, like, one or two customers.
• 14:19
  But, like, it just it wasn't a bad idea.
• 14:21
  It wasn't a great idea.
• 14:22
  It was, an okay idea.
• 14:23
  And he sent me an update, I was like, wait a minute.
• 14:25
  You have a customer now.
• 14:26
  We're in their first project.
• 14:28
  That first project, it's bigger than the combination of all of your ARR for the last two
• 14:32
  years.
• 14:33
  He's like, yeah.
• 14:34
  Well well, I don't wanna give away what this company does, but it's broadly in the AI data
• 14:39
  licensing hygiene space.
• 14:40
  And he was just like, oh, while we were chipping away at this problem, we started
• 14:45
  noticing this, like, adjacent problem.
• 14:47
  The people that we talked to about our core problem are like, I don't have that problem.
• 14:50
  But you have no problem.
• 14:51
  I do have that problem.
• 14:52
  So we just decided to take two people from the company and work on this other problem.
• 14:56
  And he's like, how much of our energy should we put on the new problem?
• 14:59
  Like, a 100.
• 15:00
  Yeah.
• 15:01
  You got a percent of it.
• 15:02
  And it's fascinating because I don't think there's any way he would have reasoned his way.
• 15:06
  And this is I think the thing that I have come to really appreciate in this environment.
• 15:09
  I don't think there's any way he would have reasoned his way to this problem from scratch.
• 15:13
  Like not something you would have sat down and said, oh, this is a problem.
• 15:17
  And had they not worked on this adjacent problem, they wouldn't have a running head
• 15:21
  start on how to solve it.
• 15:23
  There is a certain amount of being in the right zip code of a good idea.
• 15:27
  And I think it is also important more than ever in this environment to just accept the person
• 15:32
  I'm backing, the thing they're doing, they're probably will will stick to something that's
• 15:35
  similar.
• 15:36
  It will probably not be the exact same thing.
• 15:41
  And luck timing, truly timing.
• 15:44
  One of our founder, she has really, like, grown dramatically, this contract that she's landed
• 15:49
  with one of her customers over the past handful of months, and it's it's wonderful for the
• 15:54
  business.
• 15:54
  And a large reason why she's winning it, of course, is because the product's working and
• 15:57
  it's resonating.
• 15:58
  But there's a champion on the customer side who is like, this is single handedly the most
• 16:03
  important thing to me.
• 16:04
  That's it.
• 16:05
  If that
• 16:05
  person didn't work there, if that person worked at a different company or took a different job,
• 16:11
  this conversation would look very different.
• 16:13
  And so, like, that's part of it that sometimes you can't control.
• 16:17
  And I think, like
• 16:18
  Yeah.
• 16:18
  Honesty around that is quite real.
• 16:20
  And we I keep on saying this to the founder of, oh gosh.
• 16:23
  We gotta find
• 16:24
  Another one of those.
• 16:25
  Let's say her name's Abby.
• 16:26
  Like, need to find an Abby at every single customer.
• 16:29
  And the answer could be, like, maybe they don't exist.
• 16:31
  But then you have to be, how can I communicate what they think is valuable to all the other
• 16:35
  companies?
• 16:36
  And you can just use it as a case study to be, like, this does work and resonate.
• 16:39
  A lot of it is, like, luck and timing of finding that hidden gem within your customer of
• 16:42
  unlocking that and then capitalizing on it quickly.
• 16:44
  Well, our last piece this week is a post on X from Venky Ganesan of Menlo Ventures titled,
• 16:50
  When the Music is Playing, Venky opens with Chuck Prince's infamous 2007 line as the
• 16:56
  previous CEO of Citigroup.
• 16:58
  Quote, as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance.
• 17:03
  Obviously, there's a lot of different threads of how you can interpret this quote if you know
• 17:06
  how it all spun out for him.
• 17:08
  But he called this the most disorienting period in venture he can remember.
• 17:12
  With some portfolio companies growing faster than anything he's seen, while teams with no
• 17:16
  product raise billions at ten to fifty billion valuations.
• 17:20
  He uses George Soros' idea of reflexivity to explain it.
• 17:24
  In AI, valuation has stopped being an output of the metrics and has become the metric.
• 17:29
  Where nobody is discounting cash flows, they are discounting the last round.
• 17:34
  He then splits the dance floor into two groups, early investors playing with house money and
• 17:38
  late investors writing huge checks at a FOMO, which is exactly why nobody can talk anyone
• 17:43
  else off the dance floor.
• 17:44
  His takeaway is that the winners of the next decade will treat position sizing and portfolio
• 17:49
  construction as seriously as sourcing because you can be right about the company and still be
• 17:53
  wrong about the price by a factor of 10.
• 17:56
  He closes with the line, quote, the music will stop.
• 17:59
  It always does.
• 18:00
  Dance if you must, but know where the chairs are.
• 18:04
  I wanna talk about the piece around he believes portfolio construction and coming in is really
• 18:09
  important, but we've talked about this a lot internally.
• 18:12
  Who is actually going to grade everyone for the performances at the end of this?
• 18:15
  And have we seen this happen in a similar fashion in previous bubbles?
• 18:19
  It just feels like everyone is getting everyone gets rewarded for showing up to the dance and
• 18:23
  being a part of it.
• 18:23
  I think this is the second week in a row where someone has made a reference to the GFC, and
• 18:28
  I'm like, I don't know if that
• 18:29
  It's my favorite.
• 18:30
  Maybe a great thing.
• 18:31
  Whether it was Dario talking about embedded regulators in financial services or check
• 18:36
  prints, was like, it's worth noting that, like, the mortgage backed securities crisis, barring
• 18:41
  a government bailout, there would be no more Citibank.
• 18:43
  So I don't know if that's the best analogy in terms of outcome.
• 18:47
  The quote captures the tension in venture right now.
• 18:50
  And I've I've talked to our team about this.
• 18:51
  I don't talk about this outside of our team as much, but I I will share it here.
• 18:54
  I think it depends on fundamentally, do you believe that there's a corrective grading force
• 18:58
  in venture?
• 18:59
  And what do I mean by corrective grading force?
• 19:01
  A corrective grading force is an entity or set of entities that will punish people for bad
• 19:06
  behavior.
• 19:07
  Now if you go back to the GFC, the government bailed out a bunch of banks.
• 19:11
  As far as I know, relatively few people went to jail, but a lot of people, like, it was pretty
• 19:16
  hard to get back into the financial services industry if you were a highly prominent person
• 19:20
  who was associated with with that stuff.
• 19:22
  But they also made a lot of money along the way, and nobody clawed back.
• 19:25
  As far as I can tell, went back in time and clawed back all those mortgage backed
• 19:28
  securities related bonuses.
• 19:29
  The real question in adventure is like, well, what's the penalty for dancing?
• 19:33
  And I think the chairs analogy is a good one because I think there are some people who have
• 19:38
  if you think about it maybe not as a what's that game, you know, where you go around and
• 19:43
  you take the
• 19:43
  Musical chairs.
• 19:44
  Musical chairs.
• 19:45
  I think right now what we're playing is this gigantic game of musical chairs.
• 19:50
  And I think there's a set of firms who are essentially have their hand on the chair and
• 19:55
  they're just like, well, no, whenever the music stops, I already have a chair.
• 19:58
  And in the context of adventure, I think it dramatically changes your behavior.
• 20:02
  You're like, my firm's longevity is probably not tied to the performance of this investment
• 20:08
  cycle.
• 20:08
  For one of two reasons.
• 20:09
  You could be like Venky and Menlov, like, we are in the company.
• 20:12
  We are in the company in a significant way.
• 20:15
  And this being in the company and having our next fund done means that we have, like, gotten
• 20:21
  ourselves a lease on life for at least probably two to three fund cycles.
• 20:25
  And in your analogy for musical chairs, guarantees me a chair.
• 20:28
  I got a chair.
• 20:29
  I got a chair, and I I got a chair.
• 20:30
  I'm fine.
• 20:31
  There are other firms where they're like, our brand is such that even if we're not in all of
• 20:35
  the quote unquote companies, our brand is such that we will purse and this was what happened
• 20:41
  in 2021.
• 20:42
  You know, the we overdid it on SaaS, and people overpaid for a lot of companies.
• 20:46
  And I think the real danger in musical chairs is if you don't have your hand on a chair,
• 20:51
  you're at risk.
• 20:51
  Because when the music stops, your lack of a chair could come from many reasons.
• 20:55
  One could be performance.
• 20:56
  LPs could be like, hey.
• 20:57
  You just didn't you didn't achieve what we needed performance wise.
• 21:00
  Another reason the chair could go away is that the people who gave you money have no more
• 21:03
  money.
• 21:04
  And that they're just like, you did nothing wrong other than the people who support you.
• 21:07
  Their situation was precarious.
• 21:09
  But I think there's a set of firms in our industry who have a chair.
• 21:13
  And no matter how this turns out, they're gonna remain in business because of their brand,
• 21:17
  because of their performance, because of their relationships with LPs for other reasons.
• 21:21
  And I think that's very different.
• 21:22
  I think then you can be like, we're just gonna go full maxi, and we're just gonna keep dancing
• 21:26
  because, like, we don't need to be ahead of the music stopping.
• 21:29
  We we are confident that our our destiny is not tied to the outcome of this cycle.
• 21:34
  Then So the real challenge is figuring out or being honest with yourself.
• 21:37
  If you're a fund manager, do you have a designated chair
• 21:40
  Yeah.
• 21:40
  Yet.
• 21:40
  If you if you don't know if you don't know that you have a chair, you don't have a chair.
• 21:44
  Exactly.
• 21:44
  It's like that again, it's the haves and have We talk about it a lot in startup founder land.
• 21:48
  It's the same thing here.
• 21:49
  If you don't know what bucket you are, you're in the have nots.
• 21:52
  And that's just like a very honest conversation you have to have with yourself.
• 21:54
  And think things can change very, very, very quickly.
• 21:58
  Well, we are out of time.
• 21:59
  Thank you, Charles, for jumping in.
• 22:00
  Thank you to our listeners as well.
• 22:02
  Please like and subscribe, and we'll talk with you all soon.
• 22:05
  Thank you.
• 22:05
  Yep.
• 22:05
  Bye.
• 22:06
  Thank you.
• 22:06
  Bye.