Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #100: 300 Reads Later, Are VC Skills Obsolete?, Making Venture Exciting Again

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Episode #100: 300 Reads Later, Are VC Skills Obsolete?, Making Venture Exciting Again · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  I think over the last two years, if I were to say there's one meta theme, everybody's being
• 0:04
  squeezed into the same strategy.
• 0:06
  Whatever, like, beauty and heterogeneous venture activity there was, everybody's kind of
• 0:11
  being squeezed into the same set of trade.
• 0:15
  No one's forced to do anything, but I think everybody's responding to the pressure in the
• 0:21
  market.
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  And it's pushing everybody to kinda choose to do the same things essentially for the same
• 0:26
  reasons.
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  I don't think that's good for the business.
• 0:28
  Certainly not good for entrepreneurs unless you're in that white hot focus area that
• 0:32
  everybody cares about.
• 0:33
  It's the week of October 19.
• 0:35
  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:41
  Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
• 0:43
  I'm Mia Foranum, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
• 0:48
  be talking through the articles in Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
• 0:52
  week.
• 0:53
  This episode is gonna look a little different.
• 0:55
  It's actually our one hundredth episode, which is insane to say.
• 1:00
  We've been doing this for literally two years, which means like roughly 300 or so articles,
• 1:07
  Goodreads that we've featured since we started the podcast.
• 1:11
  So instead of the usual rundown, I wanted to turn the mic on Charles and ask him to reflect
• 1:17
  on his date of venture right now using all of the different themes that we've seen show up
• 1:22
  again and again on this show.
• 1:24
  I went back over the past week through every episode since we started and pulled the themes
• 1:30
  that showed up the most often.
• 1:32
  Some of them are basically on every single episode.
• 1:34
  First, AI rewriting how companies get built, staffed, and run, which was the single biggest
• 1:41
  threat and showed up in well over half of our episodes.
• 1:43
  Yeah.
• 1:44
  Second, you had the seed squeeze.
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  So talks around megafund concentration, the consensus capital machine, and the fact that
• 1:51
  the same check into the same exit now returns fraction of what it used to.
• 1:55
  Third theme was fund survival and firm building from the VCs or cockroaches narrative to
• 2:02
  teasers, data that fewer than half of fund ones ever raise a fund to.
• 2:06
  Fourth theme, founder and operator burnout, which went from kind of a side topic to neuro
• 2:13
  weekly feature in different conversations once AI agents had entered the picture.
• 2:18
  And then some rotating themes underneath these all included concepts like bubble versus
• 2:23
  balloon, taste and judgment as the real edge, the founder and VC relationship, which is
• 2:29
  changing, and Yeah.
• 2:30
  Liquidity and secondary, which we've been pushing on since day one of the podcast.
• 2:35
  So, Charles, hearing that list, does anything surprise you about talking about the most?
• 2:40
  Is there a theme that should have been bigger that was that was not?
• 2:43
  I went back and looked at some of our older episodes, and I think...
• 2:47
  Was I telling some of this over the weekend.
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  I felt like when we started, we were very near the peak of all of this.
• 2:53
  Mhmm.
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  And I think it was for me a failure of imagination that two years later, things could
• 2:58
  have gotten to the point where they are in terms of, like, enthusiasm, craziness, hype,
• 3:03
  excitement.
• 3:04
  I just think when we started the podcast, I didn't I didn't have an idea that we weren't in
• 3:09
  fact at the top, but that maybe we were at the midpoint of the journey to the top.
• 3:13
  And I think talking through these articles has helped me see that, like, these things can
• 3:17
  continue far longer than you think they can.
• 3:20
  And I think for me, the second and third order effects of, like, the mega fund concentration
• 3:25
  have been one theme.
• 3:27
  Then I went back, I was like, I think I think everyone understood, like, the first order
• 3:30
  effects.
• 3:31
  Wow.
• 3:31
  If all these funds have all the money, it's gonna be hard for other people to fundraise.
• 3:34
  I think two years ago, I didn't fully appreciate the extent to which it would also
• 3:37
  dictate what people feel like is investment worthy, especially in a world where one of the
• 3:42
  primary currencies for small funds is how many of your follow on rounds did the big funds do.
• 3:47
  Even though I talked to an LP, he was like, wow.
• 3:48
  We've looked at the, like, success rate of series a's led by these big funds.
• 3:54
  It's an argument against doing your pro rata when they come in to do the a.
• 3:57
  And I'm like, yet you still reward people for being able to say that.
• 4:01
  So I think if anything, one of the best things about our podcast is it forced me to,
• 4:04
  like,
• 4:05
  on a weekly basis, reexamine the way our business works.
• 4:07
  And I think it's changed a lot in the last two years.
• 4:10
  And I think, you know, two years ago, agents, in my opinion, weren't very good.
• 4:14
  There was a lot more conversation about...
• 4:17
  It's funny.
• 4:17
  There's a lot of conversations two and a half years ago about agentic commerce is coming, and
• 4:21
  it kinda didn't.
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  And now, only with, like, instinct in town and agent technology being better.
• 4:26
  So in some ways, I feel like the story that, hey, these things take a long time, they don't
• 4:29
  happen overnight, is
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  both
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  true
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  and
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  is happening faster than I have ever seen for any other technology cycle.
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  And it's this weird duality where things are happening faster than ever, but maybe not as
• 4:40
  fast as they need to in order to, like, meet everybody's needs.
• 4:43
  I'm also glad we just had this time capsule of what I think will go down as, like, one of the
• 4:47
  most interesting consequential two to three year periods.
• 4:50
  Yeah.
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  I mean, the only time I can think of that was potentially more consequential in venture in my
• 4:54
  career was, we'll call it, ninety six to 2001.
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  I also think it's been interesting to just look at the collection of not just articles, news
• 5:02
  pieces that you could have reported on or we could have talked about, but actual written
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  pieces that people in our ecosystem have written that we've been able to reflect on,
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  which is different.
• 5:10
  Mhmm.
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  Because then it is a forcing function for somebody to put out their own unique
• 5:14
  perspective.
• 5:15
  One of the things that I was thinking about was, over the last two years, have you found
• 5:19
  that people have more so rotated towards consensus thinking in their writing, and then
• 5:25
  in closed doors, been able to kind of share how they really think.
• 5:28
  Where do you feel like that has has landed?
• 5:31
  I also think it's been fun to find some new people to follow.
• 5:34
  Yeah.
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  And to find some new voices and to find some new points of view on both venture and tech
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  that maybe I hadn't considered before.
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  And I've really enjoyed reading other people's stuff.
• 5:45
  I also think this weird fracturing that's happened with x being its own chamber and
• 5:50
  LinkedIn being its own chamber and Substack being its own chamber.
• 5:54
  I also...
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  I feel like for most of my career in venture, everybody was kinda consuming the same stuff
• 5:59
  and hanging out in the same spaces.
• 6:01
  And in the last two years, it's felt very much like it's fractured.
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  The things you talk about and the things you care about are a function of, like, where you
• 6:07
  hang out online.
• 6:08
  And, you know, I would say...
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  I told someone, was like, hey.
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  If you're doing AI infra, you need to be on because that's where those conversations are
• 6:14
  happening.
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  And there are other categories, and, like, that's not the place where the densest
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  conversations in that category are happening.
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  So don't know.
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  I I think it's cool to see that.
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  And I also just think in the last year in particular, seeing some folks come come out and
• 6:26
  say, hey.
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  I'm gonna argue forcefully for a nonconsensus narrative.
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  I'm gonna argue for something different than just let's YOLO into the world's most expensive
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  AI.
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  And for companies, there are other ways to invest.
• 6:35
  Like, when I think we went through a...
• 6:36
  Maybe a year period, everyone's like, well, can I can I say that?
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  Can I write that?
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  And I think we've also watched how this trickles down and, like, venture has become
• 6:45
  kind of a media flywheel.
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  Like, I think that's a prerequisite of you start a fund now.
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  Like, I think that should be an arm of your business or an assumption that you will have
• 6:52
  it.
• 6:52
  I wanna move into one of our first kind of themes.
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  The big question that I had was, are the skills that made you good at this job still the ones
• 7:00
  that matter?
• 7:01
  One of the pieces that stuck with me the most was Alberto Romero's, you spend your whole life
• 7:04
  getting good at the wrong thing.
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  And it feels like the truest version of the question we've been circling around.
• 7:10
  Yeah.
• 7:10
  And we've obviously talked about this in the context of venture capital quite often.
• 7:14
  That's what we do on this podcast.
• 7:16
  But we had Sarah Guo arguing that relevant to case.
• 7:19
  You had Euclid making the case that domain judgment matters more as the typical become
• 7:23
  legible to everyone.
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  And Miraco pointing out that most firms calling themselves AI pilled are still at level one.
• 7:30
  And at the same time, a lot of what we praise on the show, power recognition, network, being
• 7:34
  early to a founder before anyone else cares, feels like it could be either more valuable or
• 7:39
  completely commoditized depending on how you slice it from where your point of view is.
• 7:43
  So, Charles, you've been doing this for so long, and the job has arguably changed, I would
• 7:47
  say, more in the last two years than probably in the past ten.
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  Are the skills and capabilities that made VC's good at this job so relevant in today's market?
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  What's still an edge?
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  What has been commoditized?
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  And what have you been learning from scratch?
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  I think
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  at its core, the job is still the same.
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  It's can you convince really great founders to take your money and take your money to the
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  exclusion of other people.
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  So I think on some levels, like, it's kind of the same job.
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  It's picking people and hoping that they pick you and being right.
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  I think the tactics you use are very different.
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  I think online presence...
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  It's funny.
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  You think like, okay, in a market where there are far more players than in the past, what
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  would you predict would would matter more?
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  You'd be like, oh, brand being top of mind.
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  I think that is way more important now than it used to be.
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  I think once upon a time when capital was scarce, simply having capital was an edge.
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  And founders would seek out firms, maybe not because they were the best firms, but because
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  those firms had money and those companies needed money, and the amount of choice you had
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  was limited.
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  So that's like one thing where I just think being sought out, and you can be sought out
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  because of your writing, you can be sought out because of your reputation with founders, you
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  can be sought after because you're associated with consequential companies.
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  There's a million reasons you can be chosen, but I think that's far more competitive than it
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  used to be.
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  And I think that's why you see firms spending more money on those activities than they used
• 9:01
  to.
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  On brand, if I were to double click on that, are there, like, specific architect of brand
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  that you feel like are resonating more now in today's
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  market
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  than in ten years prior?
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  I think it's really impressive what Sarah's done with conviction in a very short period of
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  time to build the firm.
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  And then I think you have individuals who've built meaningful brand presence for themselves
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  on Extra and other channels.
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  I think about Nicole Wischoff, like, there's a lot of people who've sort of meme themselves
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  into relevance, for lack of a better description.
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  I would say through just, like, a relentless commitment to creating content.
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  And I think for a long time, a lot of people go, creating content's beneath me.
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  And I'm like, well, founders and LPs both consume a lot of content.
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  How else are people supposed to get to know you and understand what you think about?
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  And not everybody has to do it the same way.
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  You don't have to be the loudest.
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  You don't have to be in every room on every podcast.
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  There's a lot of different ways to do it if you're thoughtful.
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  And there's people like Elad Gil who've been very successful who don't do a ton of that
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  stuff.
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  I do think there's a million ways to be the person that gets chosen, but I've never felt
• 9:58
  like that's more important than it is today.
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  Do you feel like showing up for founders continues to be something that is the leading
• 10:05
  thing that'll get a founder excited about you?
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  Or do you feel like that's just like an easier said than done than done thing that people
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  should just assume as part of the platform?
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  Where do you land there?
• 10:15
  I think we're seeing the kind of gradual unwinding or rethinking of something.
• 10:19
  You know, Andreessen doesn't have the centralized talent team they used to have.
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  I don't hear as many VC firms leading with platform and support.
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  You know, it's funny.
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  There's some founders I meet with.
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  What they honestly want is they want money.
• 10:31
  They wanna be left alone, but they also wanna know that you'll pick up the phone when they
• 10:34
  have an issue.
• 10:34
  But, like, on a...
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  On an ongoing basis Yeah.
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  They're like, I think I know what I'm doing.
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  Or I wanna have that intense one on one relationship with whoever's written me the
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  biggest check or whoever can be the most helpful.
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  But for the rest of you, kind of along for the ride.
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  And I think that's like a different that's like a different frame.
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  Or...
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  And this is kind of coming from Romero's piece, which was really about the psychological cost
• 10:55
  of your expertise becoming less valuable over time.
• 10:58
  Mean, know, rethink how do I ask for or describe the end state of what I want as
• 11:04
  opposed to kind of going through that iterative journey, which has changed with AI.
• 11:07
  For investors ten or fifteen years in, how do you tell the difference between a skill that is
• 11:12
  temporarily out of fashion and one that's completely obsolete?
• 11:16
  And we talk about this a lot in different versions of what updating your firmware, like
• 11:19
  knowing when to pivot, knowing when to stick to your guns.
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  So you can talk about it generally or even more specific.
• 11:25
  I think one area is really in how do you make money in this business?
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  And I would say most people who've been experienced are like, hey.
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  The way you make money is you raise a fund and you invest early and you hold for...
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  You hold till it goes public.
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  That was like the consensus business model.
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  And if I think about some of the people who've had big impacts on business, they've done it
• 11:46
  differently.
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  They've just said, well, why do I have to hold it to maturity?
• 11:48
  Why can't I sell it along the way?
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  Or what if I, instead of having fund, what if I just ripped SPVs?
• 11:54
  What if I just could get access to great companies mid late stage?
• 11:58
  I'll get liquidity faster.
• 11:59
  It's not a blind pool.
• 12:00
  LPs are gonna get exposure to exactly the companies they want.
• 12:03
  And a lot of people I know were just like, well, that's not how things are supposed to
• 12:07
  work.
• 12:08
  Well, if you're not open to the idea that things could work differently, you...
• 12:11
  You'd miss out on that opportunity.
• 12:12
  And we did a lot of SPVs in the beginning of our fund.
• 12:15
  I wish I'd kept doing it.
• 12:16
  The reason I stopped doing it was some our LPs are like, well, this kind of isn't how things
• 12:19
  are done.
• 12:20
  But it is now.
• 12:20
  And I was like, oh, wow.
• 12:21
  We were already living in the future and we just didn't realize it.
• 12:24
  And so I think even in the ways that you make money in venture, that has changed quite a bit.
• 12:28
  You you can make a lot of money right now investing in consensus growth stage companies
• 12:33
  that are working well, where the private market ceiling valuation is significantly higher than
• 12:39
  anything we've ever seen in the past.
• 12:40
  The question is, like, how strong is the tension of venture that you once knew ten years
• 12:46
  ago versus what the job requires today.
• 12:48
  And, like, can you separate being able to just do what's required in today's market, or do you
• 12:53
  wanna sit out?
• 12:54
  And I think, you know, we had firms that for a long time had...
• 12:57
  Including us, had held to a set of operating principles around fund size, check size,
• 13:01
  valuation.
• 13:02
  And I think a lot of people held out for a long period of time.
• 13:07
  It's funny.
• 13:07
  Capitulation is always a sign of one or two things.
• 13:10
  Capitulation always happens at the top where people are just like, I can't set this out any
• 13:14
  longer.
• 13:14
  It's really too hard.
• 13:15
  Whether I believe this makes sense or not, the things we've been doing, we have to update
• 13:20
  them.
• 13:20
  We have to increase our fund size.
• 13:21
  We have to get rid of any sense of valuation.
• 13:24
  We have to just go for it.
• 13:25
  That always happens when things have actually changed or at the top.
• 13:28
  And the problem is in the moment when you're trying to
• 13:30
  make these decisions,
• 13:31
  you don't know which is which.
• 13:34
  Am I being smart and updating my firmware and changing the way my firm operates now because
• 13:40
  the world really is different?
• 13:41
  Or am I throwing away my principles right at the moment of maximum tension, and will I
• 13:46
  regret it?
• 13:46
  The good news of the venture is if you if you raise the fund that's too big and it doesn't
• 13:49
  work out and you did it and you're a good brand, you could always go back.
• 13:53
  Similar to what you said in the beginning, I think if there's one thing, a 100 episodes
• 13:57
  gives us its complete record of what we thought was going to happen or refer to the ecosystem
• 14:02
  of people predicted.
• 14:03
  In July of last year, our friend Rob Goh told us CVCs need to evolve in order to survive.
• 14:09
  And then two months later, had Michael Rosenbaum countered that VCs are cockroaches
• 14:13
  and never actually go away.
• 14:14
  And this time last year, I thought that we were at the frenzy stage of the Perez cycle, and we
• 14:19
  spent the next five months reading Piacente's title, hey, there's a bubble, bubbles,
• 14:24
  balloons, and the AI wildfire is coming.
• 14:27
  We covered the code to stat that 52% of venture dollars went into 10 companies.
• 14:31
  We saw Cluely's 7,000,000 in ARR before their pivot.
• 14:35
  We saw Menlo putting secondaries into term sheets and Will Manadis arguing Venture would
• 14:40
  follow private equity into permanent capital.
• 14:42
  Some of that did play out.
• 14:44
  Some of it has not yet.
• 14:45
  The question here for you is, would it surprised you about Venture over the last two
• 14:49
  years that you would not have anticipated or that you would have swung the other way?
• 14:53
  Like, is there also a founder behavior or market behavior that you were sure was a phase
• 14:59
  and turned out to be a new baseline?
• 15:00
  I'm thinking about, I don't know, agentic burnout, sure, but also, like, nine nine six
• 15:04
  culture, young founders, all of the interest and hype around that.
• 15:07
  I feel like right now, it feels like nobody or very few people I've talked to have a really
• 15:13
  clear sense of how this is all gonna play out and where we're going.
• 15:17
  So people are running a ton of experiments with the hope that they're running the right ones, I
• 15:22
  think.
• 15:22
  I understand
• 15:23
  the, like, ethos of young founders.
• 15:25
  Oh, they're young.
• 15:26
  They're smart.
• 15:27
  This is a new technology wave.
• 15:28
  But we've we've run this play before.
• 15:31
  We've seen it.
• 15:32
  And I think what what ends up happening is sometimes you really do find these Wunderkind
• 15:36
  people who both have, like, great vision, high IQ, and are able to rise to the occasion of,
• 15:42
  like, managing people and building companies.
• 15:44
  In other cases, you're just like, wow.
• 15:45
  That was a really talented, really smart person, and I just funded a portion of their
• 15:49
  entrepreneurial education, And maybe they'll do better on the next one.
• 15:53
  And the first version of what you described, that's that's traditional venture.
• 15:56
  That's n of one founders.
• 15:57
  That's, like, why you get into the business regardless of age is you hope that you find the
• 16:01
  one that are generation entrepreneur.
• 16:03
  I think right now, because there's emerging technology similar to Internet, people are
• 16:07
  assuming that the people who should be funded are the ones who are young, hungry, hustling,
• 16:12
  putting aside anything else to to build, which I find really exciting.
• 16:16
  Like, I don't think there's any more exciting time to be an SF right now.
• 16:19
  Oh, yeah.
• 16:19
  It's, like, completely brought back just full on enthusiasm about building, which is
• 16:24
  incredible.
• 16:25
  The pricing of most of the deals that are aligned with that specific segment, I think, is
• 16:30
  a little...
• 16:30
  And you've said it, like, we've run this play before.
• 16:32
  So We have no idea.
• 16:34
  Won't know for for a year where things will go.
• 16:37
  I think the nine nine six culture one is another one that's interesting too, in that
• 16:42
  people have found one archetype to run a business.
• 16:44
  And if you're not subscribing to that, then you're in the permanent underclass.
• 16:48
  I've never heard so much doom and gloom from my friends who work at big tech companies that are
• 16:53
  not philanthropic and open AI about the disdain for their own jobs.
• 16:56
  And I don't know if any of that has, like, real credence.
• 16:59
  I think one thing I didn't anticipate either was what a bad job of narrative the business
• 17:06
  would do around AI.
• 17:07
  Yeah.
• 17:08
  And I think some of it's the stuff you mentioned, working in AI companies, the impact
• 17:12
  that AI is gonna have on society, data centers.
• 17:14
  It's almost like people were just to see...
• 17:16
  It's funny.
• 17:17
  I think when you're inside the machine, you're like, all of this stuff is great.
• 17:21
  Everybody should love it.
• 17:22
  Then you go outside of the machine and people are like, this is very scary.
• 17:25
  This is not good.
• 17:27
  This is not what I want.
• 17:29
  And the disconnect is huge.
• 17:30
  You know, I...
• 17:31
  Like, my mom came to town to visit me, she's like, I don't understand any of these
• 17:34
  billboards in your town.
• 17:36
  I was like, well, you're not the target.
• 17:38
  That's why you don't understand them.
• 17:39
  And I do think it's created this world where people in San Francisco who are using AI are
• 17:44
  either living in the future that we will all inhabit in three to five years or a weird weird
• 17:49
  branch of the future that only we're on that no one else will ever experience.
• 17:53
  And I think this to me is, like, the real question.
• 17:56
  It's like, San Francisco nine nine six obsessive AI usage thing.
• 18:00
  Is it like a vision under the future that we'll all live in, or is it a warning?
• 18:04
  And I don't know.
• 18:05
  Lastly, like, a lot of what we read this year kind of, like, admittedly had tired tone to it.
• 18:10
  Remember when Michael Dempsey argued that VC backed startups are
• 18:13
  low
• 18:13
  status now?
• 18:14
  You had Kyle Harrison called flop startups a natural extension of chasing a scalable model
• 18:19
  in an unscalable asset class.
• 18:21
  Even for optimistic pieces like Yoni's What Capital Wants, it came with a catch of showing
• 18:25
  credible path to 20,000,000,000 or just don't bother building at all.
• 18:29
  And yet, the whole premise of a pre series a fund is that the next great company is usually
• 18:33
  sitting somewhere.
• 18:34
  Nobody is looking in a category that's out of
• 18:37
  favor
• 18:37
  with a founder who doesn't fit the pattern.
• 18:39
  We've all seen the graphs on it.
• 18:41
  I mean, where do you feel like venture needs to go to regain some of that exciting optimism?
• 18:44
  What has to change about how capital founders and, like, firms all behave?
• 18:49
  There's two things I think about.
• 18:50
  Constantine Sequoia posted that thing that said, hey.
• 18:53
  Here's every year, here's what we've been excited about, and here's the companies that
• 18:57
  got created that mattered, and there's basically no relationship.
• 19:01
  We all know that, yet nobody's team's able to act on that.
• 19:04
  But I think it's getting harder to act on that, not easier, because there are fewer people who
• 19:09
  have the scale and resources to behave differently and to invest in and support
• 19:14
  companies that are doing different things.
• 19:16
  And so I think a lot about what that means for innovation and, like, what's gonna get funded.
• 19:20
  And, I mean, the other thing I think a lot about is I do think in some ways, cursor broke
• 19:24
  people's brains.
• 19:25
  And I think I didn't anticipate how quickly we would go from a billion dollar company being
• 19:31
  exciting to a billion dollar company being sufficient but not exciting, to a billion
• 19:35
  dollar company being neither sufficient nor exciting as an outcome.
• 19:40
  And I think if your goal is like, well, how do you find $10,000,000,000 companies from
• 19:44
  scratch?
• 19:45
  My cynical answer is maybe that's not possible or knowable.
• 19:48
  But we have a bunch of people who have firms where, like, that's just not an acceptable
• 19:51
  answer.
• 19:52
  They have to be able
• 19:53
  to
• 19:53
  find these companies.
• 19:55
  And they're competing with everyone else who's trying to find them, which pushes everybody to
• 19:58
  go earlier, which pushes everybody to then say, like, I have to have a theory or a thesis on
• 20:03
  how you spot these things at day one, even if that's, like, a low probability event.
• 20:07
  Do you think your perspective or thoughts around fund size being a strategy has changed
• 20:12
  in the last two years as well?
• 20:14
  I think it has a lot just because I think venture has collapsed into a single strategy,
• 20:18
  which is funding $20,000,000,000 plus outcomes.
• 20:21
  And now instead of the question being, like, how does your strategy produce good returns and
• 20:25
  where's your edge?
• 20:26
  Now I think the question is, like, does your strategy allow you to get access and exposure
• 20:31
  to the categories and companies that matter?
• 20:33
  And if you're a digital health fund and all the money's in defense tech, and that's where all
• 20:37
  the energy and action is, you're at a you're at a disadvantage.
• 20:40
  And, you know, if you're a small fund that cares about valuation and everything that's
• 20:44
  getting funded, whether it works or not, I mean, it's getting funded.
• 20:48
  It's expensive and out of scope for you.
• 20:50
  You've gotta make a decision.
• 20:51
  Do I stand pat?
• 20:52
  Do I, like, work on the things that make sense to me?
• 20:54
  Or do I, like, take the plunge?
• 20:56
  And I think over the last two years, if I were to say there's one meta theme, it's that
• 20:59
  everybody's being squeezed into the same strategy.
• 21:02
  Whatever, like, beauty and heterogeneous venture activity there was, everybody's kind of
• 21:08
  being squeezed into the same set of trades with the same...
• 21:13
  And I don't think it's good for the business.
• 21:15
  And I don't think anyone's doing it intentionally.
• 21:16
  I think everybody's just responding to the pressures that they feel.
• 21:20
  And those pressures are real.
• 21:21
  They're not imagined.
• 21:22
  That was gonna be my last one.
• 21:23
  It's like, do you have a one life sunroof venture in 2026 for someone reading in 2036?
• 21:27
  Imagine if you feel squeezed.
• 21:29
  Yeah.
• 21:29
  I think a lot of people...
• 21:30
  We were talking about this before we recorded.
• 21:32
  A lot of people are like, well, I'm forced to do this.
• 21:34
  I'm like, no one's forced to do anything, but I think everybody's responding to the pressure in
• 21:40
  the market, and it's pushing everybody to kinda choose to do the same things essentially for
• 21:44
  same reasons.
• 21:45
  I don't think that's good for the business.
• 21:48
  It's certainly not good for entrepreneurs unless you're in that white hot focus area that
• 21:51
  everybody cares about.
• 21:52
  Well, we are on time.
• 21:53
  Thank you, Charles, for a 100 episodes.
• 21:56
  Thank you to everyone who's listened since the very beginning and the folks in our network
• 22:00
  who've continued to serve for such great pieces that we get the pleasure of sharing on our
• 22:04
  podcast.
• 22:05
  So thank you so much.
• 22:06
  Please like and share.
• 22:07
  We will be back next week with another episode.
• 22:09
  We'll talk to you everyone soon.
• 22:10
  Bye.