Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #55: Unsafe SAFEs, 15 Charts on the Future of VC, Big CPG Leveraging Gen AI, Sequoia Changes Guards

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Episode #55: Unsafe SAFEs, 15 Charts on the Future of VC, Big CPG Leveraging Gen AI, Sequoia Changes Guards · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  For early stage companies, there's always this tension around governance.
• 0:03
  I don't think most two person companies need a three hour monthly board meeting with minutes
• 0:09
  and attorneys.
• 0:10
  I also don't think no governance is the answer for most companies.
• 0:13
  The question is where do you wanna put that slider at any point in time?
• 0:17
  And what I find is the slider tends to be set closer to the preferences of the people who
• 0:22
  have power and leverage at the moment.
• 0:24
  It's the week of November 3.
• 0:26
  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:33
  Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
• 0:35
  I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by RGP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
• 0:40
  be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
• 0:45
  week.
• 0:46
  Our first piece is a post on x by Jason Lemkin sharing inside news that he watched three VCC
• 0:53
  deals this year where, quote, the founders just decided to keep the money for themselves and
• 0:59
  not build the product.
• 1:01
  Ultimately, Jason said that these were deals that had a lot of momentum and all were in the
• 1:06
  form of safes, where the founders took the position that they owed investors nothing as
• 1:11
  they never really had true converted equity due to the safeholder agreement.
• 1:16
  Jason ended the brief post saying that this is a reality of deals in the age of AI.
• 1:21
  Essentially, this truly dark side of explosive growth and hype in such concentrated period of
• 1:27
  time.
• 1:28
  So wanted to obviously hear your thoughts here, Charles.
• 1:31
  It reminded me I don't know.
• 1:34
  It was some time ago, there was a company called Toptal in the recruiting space that also
• 1:39
  people got their feathers ruffled because if I remember all the facts.
• 1:43
  Right?
• 1:43
  The CEO was like, hey.
• 1:44
  I'm just never gonna convert these safes.
• 1:46
  I'm not gonna raise the price around.
• 1:48
  And I always wondered this.
• 1:50
  You know, if you think about it, when SAFES first started, we used to do I mean, I feel old
• 1:53
  saying this to me.
• 1:54
  We used to do convertible notes.
• 1:56
  Yeah.
• 1:56
  And convertible notes had some good features, interest being one of them, like, you know,
• 2:01
  getting something for your money over time.
• 2:02
  But also convertible notes had a conversion date, which meant, hey, if at some point this
• 2:05
  hasn't converted, at least we have to have a conversation about what we're gonna do next.
• 2:10
  That conversation could be, let's just extend the notes.
• 2:13
  Let's just allow them to stay or let's convert them or hey, give me my money back.
• 2:17
  But there was a forcing function for that conversation that was time based.
• 2:21
  And I think for a lot of good reasons, I think YC said, look, these convertible notes, most
• 2:25
  people don't really want their money back.
• 2:27
  The convertible note is just sort of this instrument that is cheaper and faster than a
• 2:31
  priced equity round, and safe to make sense so long as you believe there will be a price round
• 2:36
  at some point in the future that will allow you to become an equity holder.
• 2:40
  But there are a couple scenarios you need to worry about.
• 2:42
  One is what if the company never raises a priced equity round and never exits?
• 2:48
  You end up with this, like, weird hybrid instrument.
• 2:50
  Or the more nefarious one is what if the founders take deliberate action to prevent or
• 2:54
  avoid ever converting because they don't want you to be a shareholder of the company or their
• 2:58
  control or governance provisions.
• 3:00
  And SAFEs don't really give you a lot of the traditional investor productions.
• 3:03
  Yes.
• 3:04
  You will get your money back in the event of a dissolution or wind down or distribution, but I
• 3:08
  think that it is just gonna be interesting to me to see what happens with these companies
• 3:11
  that rate and I don't know enough about the specific situations.
• 3:13
  Jason didn't go into the details.
• 3:15
  But I can imagine a what if you're a company, you raise 500 k on safes, you have some AI
• 3:20
  product that booms, you get to 10,000,000 in ARR, and you're like, don't wanna raise venture
• 3:24
  capital.
• 3:24
  So you got 10,000,000 in the bank.
• 3:26
  We don't have a new product.
• 3:27
  You know what I wanna do?
• 3:28
  I actually wanna dividend out this cash to common shareholders.
• 3:31
  And if you had a board or if you had preferred equity, like, some of the reasons that we did
• 3:36
  all this other stuff was for investor protections.
• 3:39
  In a world where everybody agrees that, like, the safe is an interim instrument that will be
• 3:43
  used until the company can get to a price round of that, everything works fine.
• 3:47
  When people start to think about safes as different and figure out, like, well, how can I
• 3:51
  use this to my advantage?
• 3:52
  There are many ways beyond the ones Jason mentioned that a founder could use safe survey.
• 3:56
  But for me, the so what is we're not going back.
• 3:59
  I don't think we're going back to a world where we use convertible notes.
• 4:02
  I don't think we're going back to a world unless someone can make the world's cheapest
• 4:06
  price round process, which I don't I don't think is gonna happen anytime soon even with
• 4:11
  standardized docs.
• 4:12
  I think this is part of the risk you take as an investor when you sign a safe is a belief that
• 4:17
  the founder has the right intentions about eventually having you become a shareholder
• 4:22
  because that's what most investors want.
• 4:24
  We talked internally yesterday about the difference between nefarious activities Mhmm.
• 4:29
  On behalf of the founder versus just being irresponsible with cash management.
• 4:35
  Yeah.
• 4:35
  It's a fine line when you think about it, but then when you're talking about specific
• 4:39
  examples, I feel like it was easy for me to compartmentalize, like, that's nefarious.
• 4:43
  That's irresponsible.
• 4:44
  Yeah.
• 4:44
  How do you, I guess, hedge where things could possibly head if you feel like you're already
• 4:49
  seeing inklings of similar types of behaviors in either spectrum?
• 4:53
  Think for early stage companies, there's always this tension around governance.
• 4:57
  I don't think most two person companies need a three hour monthly board meeting with minutes
• 5:03
  and attorneys.
• 5:04
  It's a gross misuse of time.
• 5:06
  I also don't think no governance is the answer for most companies unless the founders are
• 5:11
  incredibly experienced and can be trusted.
• 5:14
  And the question is where do you wanna put that slider at any point in time?
• 5:17
  And what I find is the slider tends to be set closer to the preferences of the people who
• 5:22
  have power and leverage at the moment.
• 5:24
  So in 2020, there was no governance because founders had all the power.
• 5:28
  Then in 2022, there was a lot more governance because investors were like, I just got burned
• 5:33
  on a bunch of 100 x ARR deals, and now I have the power because capital is hard to get.
• 5:39
  So I'm gonna be tighter on this stuff.
• 5:41
  I'm gonna require more of companies reporting and burn ratio and all the blog posts that we
• 5:45
  wrote that nobody listens to any.
• 5:47
  And now we're back in a moment where founders have power.
• 5:50
  And as I talked about to our team, I think there's a really big difference between
• 5:55
  ambitiously getting an office that's too big for you because you deep down believe you're
• 6:00
  gonna grow into it, and you wanna send a signal to candidates that we're a company that's going
• 6:04
  places and spending $50,000 on the corporate amex at Nobu taking all of your friends to
• 6:10
  dinner once a week for a year.
• 6:11
  Those two things to me are, like, categorically different uses of both of which you could argue
• 6:16
  are suboptimal, but one I think is coming from a place of putting the company first, and the
• 6:21
  other one is probably closer to self enrichment.
• 6:23
  Well, hopes that none of these deals fall within any of our friends' laps.
• 6:28
  Yes.
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  More to come there.
• 6:29
  Our next piece written by Ruben Dominguez on his Substack, The VC Corner, walks through 15
• 6:35
  charts that explain how tech and venture are changing in 2025.
• 6:39
  He shares 15 different graphics that show concepts like Chatuchi BT retention patterns,
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  VC career progression, and job opening rates mapped to foundational model launches.
• 6:49
  Ultimately, the piece is created to give a wide range of updates on the current state of
• 6:53
  venture through a more visual lens.
• 6:55
  I thought a lot of the charts were really interesting.
• 6:57
  The first one that jumped out to me was the Vibe Coding Growth heat map.
• 7:02
  It listed really well known developer tools like Lovable, Replit, Cursor, Cognition, and
• 7:08
  others on the vertical axis, and then mapped across a twelve week timeline and beyond for
• 7:13
  growth.
• 7:14
  And a couple callouts stood out.
• 7:15
  Base 44 saw 900% growth, but then cooled off within weeks.
• 7:21
  Lovable had a similar trajectory with more than 200% early growth, but then significant
• 7:25
  stagnation by week 16.
• 7:28
  The big takeaway was that developers in this category tend to test pay and then churn faster
• 7:33
  than almost any other space.
• 7:35
  So retention is really going to be the key differentiator for whoever wins here.
• 7:38
  Curious if you had any thoughts on that specific chart there.
• 7:42
  I was teaching yesterday, and we had a guest lecturer who one of our students asked her the
• 7:48
  same question.
• 7:48
  She said, we're always asking ourself, is this a sugar high business?
• 7:51
  And I think that's a good analogy.
• 7:53
  And right now, we're in this very weird moment in venture where privately every GP I know is
• 7:58
  we're not sure what the retention curves are gonna look like for these products, but it's
• 8:02
  asymmetric.
• 8:02
  If these retention curves turn out to be terrible, we will lose our money, but we will
• 8:07
  have invested in a hot company.
• 8:08
  If the retention curves turn out to be good, then we've got a winner on our hands.
• 8:12
  And the asymmetry of being in the winners is so great that a lot of people are like, the
• 8:16
  retention will be what it will be, and we'll find out what it is when we find out.
• 8:20
  In the meantime, let's go.
• 8:21
  And my experience, and it's anic data more than anything, is the coding tools seem to be a
• 8:27
  little bit stickier.
• 8:28
  And I think this intuitively makes sense, which is if you're a professional developer, my hunch
• 8:33
  is you are using an AI code assistant every day as part of your workflow, whether it's Cloud
• 8:38
  Code, whether it's Cursor, whether it's whatever tool you're using.
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  Whereas, my hunch is that the vibe coding app building things are more episodic, and that
• 8:47
  unless you're a product manager who's constantly building prototypes you know, I told
• 8:51
  somebody, it reminds me of, like, website builders.
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  You know, every time you get so, web pipe builders, we're gonna democratize it, and we're
• 8:58
  gonna make everyone able to make a website.
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  Most people don't need a website or they they have a plate.
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  They don't need to update it more than once a year.
• 9:04
  So a website builder creates more websites, but it doesn't necessarily create more valuable
• 9:08
  websites.
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  And so I wonder for some of these coding tools, the churn isn't a product issue.
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  It's just most people don't have an ongoing need to build stuff.
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  They built something because they wanted to learn the experience.
• 9:17
  They built something because it was fun, but they don't need it every day.
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  Whereas I use Cloud Desktop 100 I'm like a seven of seven daily active user because it's
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  something I use as part of my workflow all day long, multiple times per day.
• 9:31
  And I think we're gonna I think we're gonna and it's funny.
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  We learn this with mobile too.
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  Eventually, learn, hey.
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  There's certain apps where good usage is daily.
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  There are certain apps that are just episodic, and there's nothing you can do by, like, growth
• 9:43
  hacking or weird dark arts.
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  It's just that people only have so much need for this app.
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  And the question is when they need it, do they pick yours?
• 9:50
  Yeah.
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  I was at a demo day over the past year, and I was sitting with friends.
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  And we commented, I wanna try all these tools, but I don't wanna invest
• 10:01
  in
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  most And of I think that's the reality of for every wonderful developer tool that you see in
• 10:06
  the news that, like, raises at a mass evaluation, there are 20 of them that didn't
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  make it through because it was more episodic or maybe didn't even reach that episodic
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  inflection point at all and didn't have that heat in any way.
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  The second graph that I really liked was around VC career progression, which highlighted that
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  sixty five percent of junior VCs lead the industry within ten years and only twenty three
• 10:29
  percent make it to partner.
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  And while I know that some of that is obviously people being pushed out of the space because of
• 10:35
  performance, I've noticed a surprising number of peers that I know who have left or seriously
• 10:41
  considering leaving even when that path to partner is really available to them.
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  And I was talking about this with a really close friend who was in venture, then left,
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  went back to operating.
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  And we were talking about what this conundrum looks like, and the decision seems to come down
• 10:55
  to two key questions that we thought about.
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  One, am I at a fund that can attract capital long enough for me to make partner if I earn
• 11:03
  that spot?
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  And then the second question, which I feel like it's more pervasive, is do I respect and
• 11:09
  believe in my partners currently enough to actually want to be there long term from a
• 11:13
  quality of life standpoint?
• 11:15
  So I wanted to know if you had any thoughts on this one as well.
• 11:18
  I saw that chart and I was like, if you'd ask me what percentage, I would have said 10, not
• 11:23
  20 I would have said it's like much lower.
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  So that's a good thing, I think.
• 11:27
  I think when it comes to venture, I think we're still like a stone age business when it comes
• 11:31
  to succession, promotion, all these things.
• 11:34
  Part of this, I think, is we still have a surprising number of early stage firms that are
• 11:38
  on original leadership.
• 11:39
  And I think we will find out very soon who's good at you know, some of the bigger firms,
• 11:44
  Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, they've had to navigate leadership transitions.
• 11:49
  I mean, I think it's interesting.
• 11:50
  The second biggest firm in our industry, Andreessen Horowitz, has never had a
• 11:54
  significant leadership transition at the top.
• 11:55
  I don't think Mark or Ben have plans to stop doing what they do anytime soon.
• 12:00
  So that that's one thing.
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  And I think what I've learned is and I think about this a lot.
• 12:05
  If you're gonna run a venture firm, you have to do two things.
• 12:07
  You have to find really good people, and you have to figure out how to create space for
• 12:10
  them.
• 12:10
  And sometimes the space that people want is more than the space that's available.
• 12:15
  And sometimes people get to the top and they go, well, I don't wanna sit at that table.
• 12:19
  I want a different table.
• 12:20
  I wanna be somewhere else.
• 12:21
  I've been interested in, like, just the number of particular female GP friends of mine who've
• 12:26
  left the industry recently.
• 12:27
  Some to go to operating, some to go off and do their own venture firms, some just to take a
• 12:32
  break.
• 12:33
  And it's funny.
• 12:34
  The information feedback cycles in venture have gotten far more warped than when I started
• 12:38
  twenty years ago.
• 12:39
  Twenty years ago, like, companies went public.
• 12:41
  You kinda knew in five to seven years if you were pretty good.
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  Also, was less capital and there was less hype.
• 12:46
  So, yes, we had bubbles and, yes, companies got ahead of themselves, but not like today.
• 12:50
  Today, it's really like, I don't know how if I were, like, a an associate at a firm, I don't
• 12:54
  know how it would make sense of whether I'm doing a good job.
• 12:56
  What if I'm in a bunch of buzzy AI companies that are just buzzy but not good?
• 13:00
  Or conversely, what if I'm in a bunch of good companies that are compounding but nobody cares
• 13:03
  because they're not the thing du jour?
• 13:05
  And two years later when I leave, it's gonna turn out that, like, those companies were
• 13:10
  amazing and just nobody knew in the moment.
• 13:12
  And so I think this is a really big structural industry issue that we haven't really done a
• 13:18
  great job of training and developing the next generation of leaders.
• 13:22
  And I think that was fine when this was a cottage industry that didn't manage a lot of
• 13:26
  money.
• 13:27
  But I look at the amount of palace intrigue that happens at big PE firms and buyout shops
• 13:31
  where my friends were.
• 13:32
  Yeah.
• 13:32
  You could argue with political, and it's maybe not a pleasant process.
• 13:35
  But it seems to be pretty effective at figuring out who is the relatively small subset of
• 13:40
  people who are interested in and capable of running these complicated asset management
• 13:44
  firms that are like running big consultancies or law firms or you're running a big white
• 13:49
  collar knowledge workforce.
• 13:50
  I would bet a lot of money that the next ten years of promotion and talent management at
• 13:56
  Venture will look very different than the last forty.
• 13:58
  It just feels like a big reshift.
• 14:01
  And then lump that in with what's happening on, I think, lot of my more junior friends who sit
• 14:05
  at other funds who maybe were like one or two years into venture, look around at the current
• 14:09
  landscape with an AI and say, I actually wanna go in that right now because I can take the
• 14:14
  risk.
• 14:14
  I've got the time.
• 14:15
  I wanna run it this fast.
• 14:16
  I don't wanna spend it being third party.
• 14:18
  I wanna be out there building, and so I'm seeing people leave for that reason.
• 14:22
  A handful of them are top performers at their funds that I know that their firms so it's lots
• 14:26
  of things happening at once, and it's one thing that I know a lot of our friends have talked
• 14:29
  about is mentorship in venture is such a fascinating concept.
• 14:33
  I think some of the best mentors I've ever had have also been at the peer level at other
• 14:37
  funds.
• 14:38
  The only people who are living and experiencing venture in the same way you are are probably
• 14:41
  experiencing in today's world.
• 14:43
  People who were senior associates five years ago aren't facing what you are today.
• 14:48
  Our next topic is yet another public company announcing a massive investment in generative
• 14:52
  AI.
• 14:53
  Oreo maker Mondelez shared they are investing 40,000,000 into a tool that they have been
• 14:57
  developing alongside Publicis Group and Accenture to cut ad production costs of
• 15:02
  marketing content by up to 50%.
• 15:05
  Like many other CPG companies, in the wave of tariffs and shifting consumer budgets,
• 15:10
  marketing ad spend balloons and can eat a considerable amount of the bottom line for a
• 15:15
  company that relies on volume of eyeballs on their product via ads and media.
• 15:20
  They are going to start leveraging the tool to create social media for Chips Ahoy products and
• 15:24
  will start leveraging it for product pages on Amazon and Walmart this month.
• 15:29
  Similarly, competitors like Kraft and Coca Cola have also been public about their use of AI in
• 15:34
  advertising.
• 15:35
  In fact, Coke ran an AI created holiday ad last year that drew some criticism from consumers
• 15:43
  for lacking real emotion.
• 15:45
  I did actually watch this ad, and to me, it just felt more like a failure of solid
• 15:49
  storyboarding than an issue with the use of AI, though those probably aren't very connected.
• 15:55
  Is this just another case of a public company trying to signal innovation to shareholders, or
• 16:00
  from your perspective, does it reflect a genuine shift towards overhauling cost
• 16:03
  structures in prep for the future?
• 16:05
  I think it can be both.
• 16:07
  I think in the same way I I rolled a lot back in the February, it's like some companies are
• 16:12
  we're building a website.
• 16:13
  I'm like, well, good for you.
• 16:14
  You should have a presence on the Internet.
• 16:16
  You also shouldn't get a cookie for building a website.
• 16:18
  You should no pun intended, like, put Oreo.
• 16:19
  But you shouldn't get a cookie.
• 16:20
  That's just part of business.
• 16:21
  And I think we're still at the curve where I think companies, to some extent, wanna signal
• 16:25
  how forward thinking they are.
• 16:27
  In two years, people if you make this announcement, people are like, well, what were
• 16:30
  you doing for the last two years if you're just not announcing the age bonus?
• 16:33
  And I think it's interesting.
• 16:34
  You always get this cycle with big companies where when the individual products are
• 16:39
  immature, you go to your favorite consulting partner and have them help you build something
• 16:43
  that's bespoke, that meets your needs.
• 16:46
  And when I read it, I winced a little bit, which is not because the firms involved aren't
• 16:50
  good, but the history of these kind of things is always that they are an interim step toward
• 16:54
  a better future.
• 16:55
  And sometimes you have to take that interim step to get to the future.
• 16:58
  Everyone's like, oh, I wanna skip the, like, consultant, homegrown, in house thing.
• 17:02
  And I'm like, well, sometimes you don't get the luxury of skipping that.
• 17:05
  Yeah.
• 17:05
  You have to go through that to get to the other side because the thing you want doesn't exist
• 17:08
  yet.
• 17:09
  Well, that was my next question is Accenture is obviously a well known consulting firm.
• 17:12
  Most people think that it's one of the first businesses to be disrupted by AI consulting.
• 17:17
  But what I'm seeing is kind of the opposite.
• 17:19
  You'll see a big AI project announcement and insert your consulting firm here at the helm of
• 17:23
  it, and they're managing the large scale AI transformation projects across the multimillion
• 17:28
  dollar deployments across the world.
• 17:30
  And so the question is, how sustainable is this model of big consulting firms acting as a go to
• 17:35
  AI guides for companies, especially when the space itself is still early and evolving?
• 17:39
  And I've worked in consulting, so I let you know what the job is.
• 17:42
  I was in consulting, I would wanna be running all these projects too.
• 17:45
  I think whenever someone says so and so's job is gonna be taken by AI, I'm like I always ask
• 17:49
  myself, does this person actually understand what that job is?
• 17:52
  I think if you think the job of consulting is to produce strategy slide decks, you don't
• 17:57
  actually understand what consultants do inside of companies.
• 18:00
  And so if you're just like, oh, well, like, could produce this strategy slide deck with
• 18:03
  ChatGPT.
• 18:04
  Why do I need to hire McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture?
• 18:07
  You're not hiring them just for that.
• 18:09
  Hiring them to do a bunch of other things that are at the we we could we could have a long
• 18:12
  talk about political air cover.
• 18:14
  Sometimes you do need humans to help you manage change management for other humans.
• 18:19
  And as far as I can tell, there aren't really great AI tools that can do that yet.
• 18:22
  So I think we're gonna continue to find these ironies where people say, oh, AI is gonna
• 18:27
  destroy this category of work, and we're gonna turn out that it, like, actually increases the
• 18:31
  demand for it for some period of time.
• 18:33
  Last piece here is more of a news blast.
• 18:36
  Recent TechCrunch article by Marina Temkin announced that Roloff Bota, the senior steward
• 18:40
  of Sequoia, is stepping down as of Tuesday.
• 18:43
  So after serving in that top leadership role for three years, he'll be succeeded by Alfred
• 18:47
  Lin and Pat Grady.
• 18:48
  While Roloff has held senior roles at the firm over years overseeing the distribution of
• 18:53
  nearly 50,000,000,000 to its investors, he did formally step into the top seat during the
• 18:58
  venture market downturn in 2022 when portfolio valuations across Sequoia were being slashed.
• 19:03
  During his tenure, the firm wrote off nearly 200,000,000 due to the FTX collapse, which is
• 19:09
  kind of pennies, but still something to note.
• 19:11
  And amid geopolitical pressure spun off its China and India operations, Roloff himself has
• 19:17
  famously said, quote, we want the triumph of ideas, not the triumph of seniority, but this
• 19:22
  transition still signals a meaningful shift.
• 19:24
  It's a reminder that even some of the most iconic firms, they can fall out of favor and
• 19:28
  changes are often underway behind the scenes to prepare for the next chapter and protect a
• 19:32
  legacy.
• 19:32
  So we obviously don't work for Sequoia, but just felt like it was something that we should
• 19:35
  bubble up.
• 19:36
  In my entire venture career, they're the only firm I can think of that has always been
• 19:40
  relevant.
• 19:41
  There are other great firms like Kleiner that have had, you know, their ups and downs and
• 19:44
  leadership transitions, but Sequoia has always been relevant.
• 19:48
  And as someone who runs a firm, it's almost impossible for me to imagine how you have a
• 19:52
  firm that remains when I say relevant, I mean, in the top three list of names that any founder
• 19:58
  would want on their cap table.
• 19:59
  Regardless of company stage or strategy, to do that for fifty plus years is really hard, and
• 20:05
  you only do that if you've built an institution.
• 20:08
  And the other thing I'll say is this is like a general leadership principle.
• 20:12
  You don't get to choose the circumstances that are around you when you're a leader.
• 20:16
  It's the old I think someone told me, like, being the president is an inbox job.
• 20:20
  You wake up with your set of priorities, and then the world starts putting things in your
• 20:23
  inbox.
• 20:24
  And if I think about all of the the challenges that he's had to navigate, it's obviously the
• 20:28
  downturn, liquidity pressure.
• 20:30
  They restructured.
• 20:31
  Basically, it's more like geeky the plumbing of how Sequoia works as an entity in the way that
• 20:37
  capital gets allocated across the firm.
• 20:39
  You've had some partners with pretty loud political opinions, some of which have caused
• 20:44
  some amount of polarization, both within the firm, it sounds like, and and outside of it.
• 20:48
  And the FTX thing, I think, wasn't so much a financial hit, but more of a reputational hit.
• 20:54
  And I think that's a lot to deal with in three years.
• 20:56
  And knowing the people at Sequoia as I do, I'm really confident that they will remain on top
• 21:01
  and that the new stewards will do a great job.
• 21:04
  And to me, it's just a reminder of how hard it is to remain on top in this job.
• 21:08
  It's so hard to do, and they have a remarkable history of doing this.
• 21:13
  Well, we are all out of time today.
• 21:15
  Thank you, Charles, for stopping by.
• 21:17
  Thank you to all our new listeners and subscribers popping in.
• 21:21
  We will talk with you all next week.
• 21:23
  Please like and subscribe in the meantime.
• 21:24
  Thank you.
• 21:25
  Bye.