Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / "Your Code Is Worthless" A Top VC Just Told Us Why | The Trillion-Dollar Founder Personality Type Nobody Talks About

Transcript

"Your Code Is Worthless" A Top VC Just Told Us Why | The Trillion-Dollar Founder Personality Type Nobody Talks About · AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

• 0:00
  Your code is worthless and a top venture capitalist just told me
• 0:03
  why. What if the smartest thing you
• 0:05
  could do as a founder is make yourself the dumbest person in
• 0:07
  the room? What if your biggest competitive
• 0:10
  advantage isn't your product, it's your personality?
• 0:12
  I talked to a guy who's seen thousands of startups.
• 0:15
  He said the best product doesn't always win, but the best
• 0:17
  execution does. One founder built a media
• 0:20
  company on LinkedIn, posting AI industry news three times during
• 0:24
  their investor meeting. His customer acquisition cost
• 0:27
  zero. Another built a cult following
• 0:29
  on Reddit and scale the telecom company on the backs of a
• 0:32
  community. Meanwhile 30 years CT OS are
• 0:35
  getting lapped by kids who've only ever coded with AI.
• 0:38
  Distribution is the new defensibility.
• 0:40
  Your personality is a go to market strategy.
• 0:43
  So if your code disappeared tomorrow or somebody just copied
• 0:46
  it, would your business still survive?
• 0:48
  Welcome to AI for founders. I'm Ryan Estes.
• 0:50
  That was Jim Ferry, managing director at Volition Capital, a
• 0:54
  growth equity fund that is backed by some of the most
• 0:56
  capital efficient companies in the game.
• 0:58
  If you're a founder between 1,000,000 and 10 million in
• 1:01
  revenue, trying to figure out what actually makes you fundable
• 1:04
  and durable in an AI world, this one's for you.
• 1:08
  The Playbook gym just dropped. We go deep.
• 1:10
  And if you like playbooks, we go deeper every week at AI for
• 1:13
  founders.co. That's our newsletter.
• 1:15
  Just the insights that actually move the needle for founders
• 1:17
  like you sign up and your future self.
• 1:19
  Well, thank you. And if this episode made you
• 1:21
  think, drop us a five star review.
• 1:24
  It's the highest ROI 2 seconds you'll spend a day and I'd
• 1:27
  really appreciate it. Jim, welcome to the show.
• 1:34
  Thank you so much for joining me.
• 1:35
  Yeah. Thanks, Ryan.
• 1:36
  Appreciate it. Absolutely.
• 1:38
  So let's dive right in. You have a company called
• 1:40
  Volition Capital and you make investments in startups and, and
• 1:44
  businesses. So we talk a lot about
• 1:48
  investment opportunities here, but we also talk a lot to start
• 1:51
  up founders who are looking for, for either venture capital or
• 1:55
  Angel investors or folks that are maybe on the fence.
• 1:57
  So maybe we can clear up some questions folks might have and,
• 2:01
  and kind of shed some light of where we're at as far as like,
• 2:04
  you know, April 2026. Why don't you give us a quick
• 2:07
  introduction to Volition? Yeah.
• 2:09
  So volition's a Series A or Series B growth equity fund.
• 2:13
  You can think about growth equity sitting somewhere in
• 2:15
  between kind of early stage venture and the later stage
• 2:18
  buyouts or PE funds. So we tend to invest in
• 2:20
  businesses that have found product market fit.
• 2:23
  Kind of the arbitrary line for that is having over 5 million
• 2:26
  plus revenue, Where we play is kind of 5 to 50 million in
• 2:30
  revenue type. Companies that are scaling well
• 2:34
  tend to be more capital efficient businesses.
• 2:36
  That doesn't necessarily mean that they're profitable, but
• 2:39
  it's not a kind of grow at all costs model.
• 2:43
  Even so people that are focused on unit economics, so many times
• 2:47
  you know, we're not following a traditional Siri or Silicon
• 2:51
  Valley kind of venture or kind of early stage VC I'd say.
• 2:57
  So we're, we're based in Boston. It's a little bit more of an
• 2:58
  East Coast mindset. We're still trying to have, you
• 3:01
  know, really big outcomes, but you know, doing it while
• 3:04
  minimizing dilution. So think about our check size in
• 3:07
  the 15 to 60 million range across really, you know, any
• 3:13
  type of technology business. Fun.
• 3:16
  Yeah, that sounds like a a good place for me if I was in the
• 3:19
  business. You know some of these guys the
• 3:21
  the seed stage is for the thick skinned and strong hearted.
• 3:25
  That's right. I think like C stage has a high
• 3:28
  loss ratio as you can imagine, but they have a couple huge
• 3:31
  winners that are going to carry a fund.
• 3:32
  So they go into a lot of investments knowing that just
• 3:36
  statistically a lot of these are not going to work out and
• 3:39
  they're going to return $0.00 in capital.
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  Growth has a little bit of a different loss ratio where ours
• 3:45
  is much lower because these businesses tend to be a little
• 3:47
  bit more established. So from an investment
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  perspective, it feels like a good risk reward profile, which
• 3:55
  is why I've kind of spent my career here.
• 3:58
  Amazing. You know, and I'm, I'm much more
• 4:00
  of a zero to one guy, you know, So I'm always interested in kind
• 4:03
  of the problems that founders are facing kind of at this
• 4:06
  $5,000,000 annual revenue mark, which really seems to be kind of
• 4:10
  that two to five place where there's kind of like a, a new
• 4:13
  set of problems. So how would you kind of
• 4:15
  describe problems at that stage? Yeah.
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  I've always kind of talked about the founder journey in three
• 4:21
  stages. The first one is building, which
• 4:23
  I put in that kind of 0 to 1. And then there's the growth
• 4:26
  stage. And then there's as they scale
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  they that the founder kind of becomes more of an operator.
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  So we tend to get involved kind of in between that build and
• 4:34
  growth phase. And you know, I think at that
• 4:38
  phase, you start to have to set up a legitimate processes inside
• 4:42
  the organization. The founder isn't going to have
• 4:46
  be able to have their hands on everything.
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  So you're going to hire a few people that you trust that can
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  take some things off of your plate.
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  But I'd say typically when we come in, these are scrappy
• 4:55
  founders first six to nine months.
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  We have a talent team here at Volition.
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  They help a lot of our portfolio companies with hiring world
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  class talent because everybody's wearing a lot of hats.
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  So I think a lot of the challenges are now become how do
• 5:09
  we set the business infrastructure up for scale and
• 5:15
  that's people, but it's also technology, especially in an AI
• 5:19
  driven world, you know, how do we make sure that there's not
• 5:23
  operating silos happening within the organization and that
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  everyone is pointed at the same North Star and to accomplish a
• 5:30
  three to five year vision. So that's where we just, I have
• 5:34
  the benefit of pattern recognition of sitting on a lot
• 5:36
  of boards and being an investor in a lot of companies over the
• 5:39
  years and talking to thousands of companies.
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  So can hopefully bring a perspective that maybe a founder
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  entrepreneur who's maybe worked at one or two companies before
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  starting their own may not have the benefit of seeing anything.
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  And and that's a pattern recognition.
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  It's another word for wisdom. You know, it is, I mean, that's
• 5:58
  the name of the game. Like we, I invest in people
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  probably more than I invest in businesses.
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  And you know, for me, it's about post investment, helping them
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  avoid some of the pitfalls I've seen other companies take and,
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  you know, taking best practices that we've seen and trying to
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  help them apply it to their business to set them up for
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  success. Amazing.
• 6:21
  And that's kind of what I wanted to ask you about too.
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  You know, having that, that position where you see a lot of
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  deals, you see a lot of companies, of course the
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  analysts are going to do their diligence and the the company
• 6:31
  has to be successful. But what are those attributes?
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  What are the attributes of the founder, maybe the the, the
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  deals you like to put together? What kind of threads these
• 6:41
  people together? Yeah, just if you put like the
• 6:45
  business aside and just think about the attributes of the
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  founder, I tend to invest a little bit with my gut.
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  Like you come out of a meeting and I'm like, man, I would back
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  that person no matter what they're doing and they just
• 6:56
  happen to be running this type of business that and I like that
• 6:59
  category. So I think one of the most
• 7:03
  valuable traits is a self-awareness trait of knowing
• 7:06
  what you don't know. The best founders are the ones
• 7:09
  that are like, I am very good at this, whatever that skill set
• 7:12
  is, but I could use some help at to hiring a world class leader
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  to help me on this side of the business.
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  And the ones that think that they can do everything.
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  No one can do everything, you know, Jack of all trades, master
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  of none. So I think it's the people that
• 7:27
  are trying to make themselves the dumbest person in the room
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  by hiring great talent around them.
• 7:31
  We kind of have a joke here where we're half getting that
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  there's five things that matter in an investment.
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  It's product, market management, management, management.
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  So we spend a lot of time getting to know the management
• 7:42
  team and making sure that we feel like, you know, no matter
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  what the the folks around the table are going to set us up for
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  success. And I've seen it many times,
• 7:50
  Worth the best product doesn't always win.
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  I think best best execution always wins.
• 7:56
  Quick side note for founders who are using AI to write content,
• 8:00
  you've probably noticed this. It's incredibly fast, but it
• 8:03
  doesn't really Dr. meaningful traffic.
• 8:05
  And honestly, that's because most AI generated content is
• 8:08
  just average. There's no real insight, no
• 8:11
  depth, no structure, missing things like internal linking,
• 8:14
  and Google's getting very good at filtering that out.
• 8:17
  So instead of trying to just prompt better, I actually came
• 8:20
  across something interesting called Neenah.
• 8:22
  It's a system that combines human strategy and review with
• 8:26
  AI writing to create high quality SEO optimized blog
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  content that's actually designed to rank and keep ranking.
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  What I like about it is that it's done for me.
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  Their team handles the topic strategy in the content review
• 8:39
  and data markups for Google and turns blog posts into actual
• 8:42
  long term traffic assets. So if you're a founder thinking
• 8:46
  seriously about organic growth, this is one of those things
• 8:49
  worth paying attention to. You can check it out at Try
• 8:52
  nina.co. That's TRYNIN a.cotrynina.co.
• 9:00
  What if you had a partnership manager working for your podcast
• 9:02
  full time, reaching out to brands, securing deals, handling
• 9:06
  all the back and forth while you just focused on making great
• 9:08
  content? That's Casey.
• 9:10
  Casey is the AI partnership agent from Howdy who actually
• 9:14
  goes out and gets your sponsors. Casey reaches out to brands on
• 9:17
  your behalf, works the conversation and lands the
• 9:19
  partnership. You make the show, Casey makes
• 9:22
  the money. And look, Casey doesn't sleep.
• 9:24
  She doesn't lose track of follow-ups since she never gets
• 9:27
  discouraged by a non reply. Casey's out there right now
• 9:30
  working for podcasters who figured this out before you did.
• 9:33
  The only question is whether your show has a Casey yet.
• 9:36
  So go meet casey@gethowdy.com. That's GETHOW. di.com takes a
• 9:43
  couple of minutes to get started and Casey gets to work
• 9:45
  immediately. That's gethowdy.com.
• 9:49
  Yeah, founders aren't necessarily known for being the
• 9:52
  best managers and probably where they're coming in to to meet
• 9:57
  with you. This is probably their their
• 9:59
  biggest pain point. You know, what kind of like what
• 10:02
  are you doing to help them and what, where are you seeing their
• 10:04
  their lack of skills as far as management goes?
• 10:08
  Yeah, I mean, I think every founder's unique and if they're
• 10:13
  more of a technical founder, I feel like they don't almost
• 10:16
  don't want to manage people. So that's the that's a common
• 10:19
  thread where even, you know, sometimes as a business scales,
• 10:22
  they're like, I don't want to be a CTO that's managing an
• 10:26
  organization of engineers. I want to be coding and that's
• 10:30
  fine. And some people are very self
• 10:33
  aware of that and you know, or maybe want to be an individual
• 10:36
  contributor on the, on the team to actually get their hands
• 10:39
  dirty and building products. They might hire another CTO
• 10:42
  externally or something. You know, I'd say there's been
• 10:46
  times when ACEO is very go to market focus.
• 10:51
  They are the lifeblood of the, the go to market and sales team.
• 10:56
  And maybe they, one of the founders just wants to be a
• 11:00
  salesperson. They don't want to be the CEO of
• 11:02
  the business. So I'd say it, it really varies.
• 11:07
  I think the best founding teams are the ones regardless of
• 11:11
  skill. It's more of a mindset.
• 11:13
  I love to see an optimist and a pessimist because I think they
• 11:16
  balance each other out and they tend to, you know, find the
• 11:20
  right decision somewhere in the middle between, you know, what's
• 11:23
  ingrained in their personalities.
• 11:25
  Yeah, there there. That is the classic dichotomy of
• 11:29
  Co founders. You know, you have extrovert,
• 11:31
  introvert, optimist, pessimist. These are obviously the the ends
• 11:36
  of the mean here, the technical, the the sales guy you know or
• 11:41
  gal for that for sure. And it's funny, like even that.
• 11:44
  So we took a look back at some of our, in our entire investment
• 11:47
  history and tried to draw based on, you know, 100 attributes,
• 11:52
  what is the commonality of our best outcomes?
• 11:55
  And surprisingly, there kind of isn't any.
• 11:59
  So, you know, we, we were hoping it's, oh, this is a silver
• 12:02
  bullet. Maybe that's not surprising to,
• 12:04
  to some of your listeners, but, you know, education almost
• 12:08
  didn't matter. We've had, you know, extreme,
• 12:11
  like some of our biggest exits are Ivy League educated founders
• 12:15
  and then founders that never went to college.
• 12:18
  You know, we, we thought age would be a big deterministic
• 12:21
  factor and we've had great outcomes from, you know, people
• 12:25
  that are in their young 20s and people that have been around the
• 12:28
  block and industry experts and that, you know, are 40 plus
• 12:31
  years old. So there's no silver bullet to
• 12:35
  this and no silver bullet to the attributes that the founder has
• 12:37
  and their strengths and weaknesses.
• 12:39
  So it is very hard to quantify. But as I mentioned, you invest
• 12:44
  with your gut and sometimes you just kind of feel it that
• 12:48
  someone has aspirations to build a big business and they're gonna
• 12:53
  let nothing get in their way. And that's the type of founder
• 12:56
  that I want it back. You need to think big to to to
• 12:59
  be big 100. Percent, you know, it may be
• 13:03
  some other green flags. What are some green flags?
• 13:06
  And you know, particularly maybe I'm thinking about like with
• 13:09
  just the the prevalence of where we're at with AI assisted
• 13:13
  engineering, call it vibe coding, you know, where you
• 13:17
  know, a CTOA really skilled CTO is becoming less valuable.
• 13:21
  Some might argue, you know, it. Does that kind of shade your
• 13:26
  judgement as far as leaning towards maybe founders that are
• 13:30
  more sales oriented or maybe have distribution baked into
• 13:33
  their own personality? Yeah, it's, it's a great
• 13:37
  question. We're seeing more and more
• 13:42
  businesses in this a world, to your point around distribution
• 13:46
  based on their personality that is less of the traditional, all
• 13:50
  right, I'm going to hire 3 sales reps and I know that each sales
• 13:52
  Rep brings in X amount of revenue and we're going to pay
• 13:55
  them this much. And that's how it's simple math
• 13:57
  as you scale. You know, I met a company the
• 14:00
  other day that has AI bots that posts a bunch of industry news
• 14:05
  on his LinkedIn and he's kind of become a media company of
• 14:10
  specific to his vertical just based on his LinkedIn industry
• 14:15
  news. And as I'm sitting there meeting
• 14:17
  him, he's like, yeah, I probably posted three times already as
• 14:20
  we're as we're sitting here in the meeting.
• 14:22
  And through that he can, he's almost has a $0.00 customer
• 14:27
  acquisition cost strategy because he's just using his own
• 14:31
  personality to to drive revenue and promote his products in
• 14:36
  between kind of posting about industry news.
• 14:38
  We have another portfolio of companies who's done that.
• 14:40
  Well, they were in essence a Reddit influencer, which people
• 14:43
  don't tend to think about as much for his given sector.
• 14:47
  It's a business called US Mobile and they've kind of grown on the
• 14:52
  backs of a Reddit community that's been really strong and
• 14:55
  active. So, you know, I think in this
• 14:58
  world, things in this AI driven world, things have changed a
• 15:01
  little bit. So the types of questions and
• 15:04
  the things that I'm looking for in Entrepreneur is a little
• 15:06
  different because things are moving so freaking fast.
• 15:10
  You know, where we are today is very different than where we
• 15:13
  were a month and six months ago. Even.
• 15:15
  So you want to feel like the people that you're backing are
• 15:20
  ahead of the curve and they're able to adopt to in this to how
• 15:24
  fast things are changing with AI.
• 15:28
  And to your point, it may not be that CTO that's been in the
• 15:31
  industry for 30 years. The people that are the best at
• 15:34
  utilizing AI tools and playing around with them are the are, I
• 15:40
  don't like to call them kids, but they are the kids that have
• 15:43
  grown up in, in this world where AI has existed over the last two
• 15:46
  years that that have been in college or so that so it's not
• 15:50
  always the CTO that has a preconceived notion of how, hey,
• 15:56
  this is how I've coded for the last 30 years.
• 15:58
  It's someone who's only learned how to code using AI that may be
• 16:02
  more valuable in the long run. Well, and I talked to a dozen
• 16:06
  founders a week and let me tell you, they're all CT OS now.
• 16:10
  Yeah, that's, I know. It's amazing.
• 16:13
  I think everyone has become a engineer now where that used to
• 16:18
  be a barrier. And when I think about, you
• 16:21
  know, the durability of the investments that we make in the
• 16:24
  long run, code used to be something that was defensible
• 16:28
  and it's kind of not now. So you need to think about what
• 16:32
  makes this business sustainable over the long run.
• 16:35
  And there's a lot of different, excuse me, a lot of different
• 16:38
  variations to that. It could be first party data, it
• 16:40
  could be distribution, it could be proprietary integrations
• 16:45
  through non public APIs with specific companies or something.
• 16:48
  But there's a lot of flavors to that.
• 16:50
  But I think a volition and at every investment firm, the key
• 16:54
  question right now is what is the durability of this in the
• 16:57
  long run? Yeah.
• 17:00
  Maybe personal question, how about you?
• 17:01
  What are you, what are you working on?
• 17:02
  What experiments you running with AI?
• 17:04
  What are you building? What little what little toys you
• 17:06
  got going on in the background? Yeah, it's a great question.
• 17:09
  So as a firm, our general philosophy is how we cannot
• 17:13
  invest in native AI businesses if we don't understand AI and
• 17:17
  know how to use it ourselves. So honestly, I, I, I think with
• 17:21
  us and who are operating somewhat of a regulated finance
• 17:25
  world and you know, some larger start-ups, I think a big barrier
• 17:30
  to AI adoption is compliance. If you're kind of a small start
• 17:34
  up, you may not have all the systems in place.
• 17:36
  And I think that's probably a, my, my, our, our head of
• 17:40
  compliance will hate, hate terms, but probably a good thing
• 17:43
  because they can experiment faster.
• 17:44
  There's not, who said they, they need to jump through.
• 17:46
  So for instance, like open Claw, we, we have separate laptops
• 17:51
  internally that we use that are kind of sandboxed from all of
• 17:55
  our other systems to set up open claw bots that help us in the
• 17:59
  sourcing front. So that's finding new companies.
• 18:01
  So our analysts, we, we have a lot of different both third
• 18:05
  party and 1st party systems that we've built to help all of our
• 18:09
  analysts kind of find interesting companies on a daily
• 18:13
  and weekly basis. And now they can show up and sit
• 18:16
  at their desk and we've created bots in that kind of sandbox
• 18:19
  environment that are serving up, hey, here's 50 potentially
• 18:23
  interesting companies that you should be looking at.
• 18:25
  You can kind of click through them and you know, once the
• 18:28
  compliance gets there, we'll integrate that with our CRM and
• 18:31
  so forth. But in the meantime, we've built
• 18:34
  an M, you know, a connection, a connection between our internal
• 18:40
  first party system with Claude. So everything that you used to
• 18:43
  click through and spend a lot of time there to find companies to,
• 18:48
  you know, 5, let's say we have 10 high priority companies in
• 18:52
  our pipeline. We've set up a artifact and
• 18:55
  system to force rank. Hey, these are the BC funds or
• 18:59
  angels or regional tech communities or accelerators that
• 19:01
  are invested in these in those ten companies.
• 19:04
  So we should be building a relationship there.
• 19:06
  So we're doing a lot of things that are just automating the
• 19:10
  day-to-day manual processes right now.
• 19:15
  I don't think that's that unique from anyone else, but it's been,
• 19:20
  I, I, I find it really fun, to be honest.
• 19:22
  It's like, it's almost like playing a video game.
• 19:25
  It, it's somewhat addicting once you kind of set some things up
• 19:28
  and, you know, set some agents up to do some cool stuff.
• 19:33
  Like, you know, every day I show up, I now have 3 tweets waiting
• 19:38
  to go. Based on my interests, I jot
• 19:40
  down some things in in my notion that it's connected to and it'll
• 19:45
  kind of marry that with any industry news.
• 19:49
  So we're doing a lot of fun things here and it's helping us
• 19:51
  learn to understand what are the possibilities for some of the
• 19:54
  companies we back. Yeah, how do you prompt your
• 19:57
  personal tweets? Like, how do you give it your
• 19:59
  that distinct Jim Ferry tone? Yeah, it's a work in progress,
• 20:04
  I'd say. So I first I had it analyze, you
• 20:07
  know, my my prior tweets to understand my tone, what I like
• 20:12
  to tweet about. And it's just kind of constant
• 20:15
  iteration of, hey, I would never actually say that.
• 20:17
  I would never use those terms. This is too professional.
• 20:21
  Now this one's too, you know, relaxed in nature.
• 20:25
  And so I'm trying to find that happy median.
• 20:28
  We're getting better, but still a little work to be done.
• 20:33
  Yeah, 100%. That's cool.
• 20:37
  So you're setting up open Claw to go source deal potential kind
• 20:40
  of like how are you setting a framework for that?
• 20:42
  Is there like a obviously there's a certain size company
• 20:45
  they have to be kind of like in a certain position in there with
• 20:49
  runway basically what parameters are you giving open claw to go
• 20:53
  out there and and look for for opportunities?
• 20:55
  Yeah, so we. There's financials, of course.
• 20:58
  There's a place where they are with the capital they've raised
• 21:02
  already. Are you using like pitch book to
• 21:04
  source information? Are you looking in a in media?
• 21:07
  Like how are you kind of finding new opportunities?
• 21:10
  Yup. So all of the above and we've
• 21:14
  actually encouraged our, what we don't want to do is to create
• 21:17
  one agent that every one of our analysts and all of our
• 21:20
  employees are using that's serving the same companies.
• 21:23
  So we've actually kind of shown all the analysts, hey, here's
• 21:26
  how, here's how to set this up, here's how to do it.
• 21:29
  And we want them to be creative to make sure that they're all
• 21:32
  getting a different flavor of company to make sure that we're
• 21:35
  seeing every possible company in the universe out there that
• 21:38
  could be interesting. What we do, what we have done
• 21:41
  is, you know, set it up in a way we're serving you, you know, 50
• 21:45
  companies when you come in on a in the morning and you're
• 21:49
  constantly training it. So you're saying this is
• 21:51
  interesting and you can put a little note here's why or this
• 21:57
  is not interesting and here's why or maybe this one have
• 21:59
  raised too much money. This is outside of our spec.
• 22:02
  We'll never invest in a company that's been backed by this fund
• 22:06
  because you know, they're a mega fund and if it was a good
• 22:08
  company, they're just going to fund it themselves.
• 22:10
  So all those little things, you know it, it's, it's the worst,
• 22:16
  the 1st at serving companies, the first time you set it up and
• 22:20
  it's getting better and better week by week and month ago.
• 22:24
  And it's it's a relationship building game.
• 22:26
  So you get a good prospect, they're coming in and you're
• 22:28
  like, yeah, this would be great. How do you start to initiate
• 22:30
  that relationship? Is that an e-mail?
• 22:32
  Is that a tweet? How are you kind of getting to
• 22:34
  know folks? So it's funny.
• 22:37
  So it's worth noting that you know, the traditional growth
• 22:40
  equity models kind of called the sourcing model.
• 22:42
  So there's a, we had a 15 analysts and associates here
• 22:45
  that reach out to founders. They probably have 20 calls on a
• 22:48
  weekly basis to kind of pre qualify leads and explain to
• 22:52
  them who volitionists, see if there's a good fit.
• 22:53
  And we discussed those in our pipeline meeting on Monday
• 22:56
  morning. Historically when I did the job,
• 23:00
  you know, over a decade ago of kind of pure sourcing as an
• 23:05
  analyst associate, it was a lot of e-mail and the response rates
• 23:08
  were pretty good. And then Salesloft came along
• 23:11
  and all these auto drip campaign emails and everybody's inboxes
• 23:15
  were flooded. And now AI has come along and
• 23:17
  all these crappy canned emails are now oddly specific.
• 23:21
  And we've kind of gone from like, oh, these super canned
• 23:24
  emails are now becoming so specific and so tailored and
• 23:27
  good that people now know that those are.
• 23:30
  Fake. AI emails that so it's almost
• 23:33
  finding this balance of personal not too specific where they
• 23:37
  think that ever know that you know this was a custom e-mail
• 23:41
  and someone actually wants to talk to me.
• 23:44
  Now I think inboxes are flooded. So we spend a lot of time
• 23:47
  reaching out to folks on LinkedIn.
• 23:49
  We are cognizant of the fact that with Co work and some other
• 23:54
  AI tools out there, LinkedIn inboxes are about to be flooded
• 23:57
  over the next, you know, coming months.
• 23:59
  So ultimately the best way to breakthrough to a hard to reach
• 24:03
  company or one that we think or know is good is through
• 24:06
  relationships. So we spend a lot of time
• 24:09
  networking and, you know, trying to back channel our way into
• 24:15
  into a company that we think is good that, you know, we come
• 24:19
  kind of the hard to reach companies that we have some type
• 24:22
  of signal on there or a hunch that we think it's pretty
• 24:25
  interesting, but are struggling to get in touch.
• 24:27
  And part of that is spending a lot of time on the road and
• 24:31
  meeting people face to face in a zoom driven world.
• 24:35
  You know, it's amazing how many founders I'll go meet face to
• 24:38
  face and they tell me I'm the first or second in person
• 24:41
  meeting that they've had and they get 20 emails a week from
• 24:43
  other venture growth equity funds.
• 24:46
  So I think that goes a long way. Sitting across the table from
• 24:50
  someone, I can tell you, I can't tell you how many conversations
• 24:53
  I've had with folks over the years over Zoom.
• 24:55
  And, you know, a week later, you might forget about that
• 24:58
  conversation. But if you sit down with
• 24:59
  someone, have coffee with them for 45 minutes, you tend to
• 25:02
  remember that more. Yeah.
• 25:04
  I agree. What about inbound versus
• 25:06
  outbound? Outbound's a big effort, but do
• 25:07
  you have a lot of people knocking on the door and maybe
• 25:09
  what percentage of those folks are well qualified?
• 25:14
  For the most part, the inbound leads tend to be because the
• 25:20
  this like, I'll take a step back this, this growth equity
• 25:22
  sourcing model has been around for 20 plus years now.
• 25:25
  There's like a lot of firms that did, it's not unique to
• 25:27
  volition, but so I think the best companies, a lot of us are
• 25:31
  using similar tools. We all know who some of the best
• 25:34
  companies are and you know, people talk or it gets around.
• 25:36
  So we're all trying to breakthrough, you know, to the
• 25:39
  same company. So if someone is coming inbound,
• 25:42
  it's either because they're unbelievably under the radar
• 25:45
  that no one knows about them, which is rare, or, you know, the
• 25:50
  quality probably isn't that great.
• 25:53
  Now I'm Speaking of saying, Hey, this is a founder direct inbound
• 25:57
  to us. What happens a lot is we get
• 26:00
  kind of a warm lead where someone say, hey, like someone
• 26:03
  in our network may reach out and say, hey, you know, I, I talked
• 26:06
  to this one. I think that this could be a
• 26:07
  really good one for you guys. So I'm going to introduce you
• 26:09
  that that happens a lot. And those tend to be a high
• 26:12
  quality. But I can only think of one time
• 26:15
  where I got a like a true founder inbound where I wound up
• 26:20
  investing in the business. You know, most of the time it's
• 26:23
  kind of through an intermediary or someone that knows them
• 26:25
  that's kind of making the connection.
• 26:27
  What's your feeling on like kind of like those under the radar
• 26:31
  businesses, which you know, now there's a kind of a lot of heat
• 26:34
  around, not even like pre AI companies, but like pre Internet
• 26:38
  companies, like ball bearing manufacturers.
• 26:41
  You know, I drive by these like industrial parks and I'm like,
• 26:44
  who's that? You know, it's like ABC
• 26:47
  construction or something like that.
• 26:48
  And they've been around for 50 years.
• 26:50
  Is there any interest from you guys on in like companies like
• 26:52
  that? So yes and no.
• 26:57
  So, So what I'll say about is like under the radar companies.
• 27:00
  So as I mentioned, we're we invest in purely tech companies.
• 27:03
  So we're not gonna invest in a ball bearing company.
• 27:05
  However, this thing should tell me anything.
• 27:07
  There's a lot of ways to make money.
• 27:09
  There's a lot of different types of businesses out there and you
• 27:14
  know, just getting to talk to thousands of companies on an
• 27:16
  annual basis kind of paints the picture of like man, there's a
• 27:18
  lot of ways to make money in a lot of different businesses.
• 27:21
  Historically, in a pre AI world, the best indicator for Austin R
• 27:29
  efforts to say a company is at a 5 million plus run rate was
• 27:33
  employee headcount. You need a certain amount of
• 27:35
  engineers, you have a certain amount of C level executives,
• 27:38
  certainly a lot of people customer success in sales.
• 27:40
  Once you kind of got to 25 to 30 employees, assuming that you're
• 27:45
  not burning a ton. So it's relative to kind of
• 27:47
  capital raised, you're probably nearing in that kind of like 3
• 27:51
  to 5 million plus run rate. So we that used to be like heavy
• 27:54
  reliance on employee count for as the number one indicator of
• 27:59
  stage of the business. I mean, we just had a, I'm sure
• 28:02
  you saw that there was like a two person company that you
• 28:05
  know, got acquired for over a billion dollars now with AI.
• 28:07
  So the head count is now not a relevant metric for for scale in
• 28:13
  an AI world. So it's almost like make sure
• 28:17
  we're boiling the ocean and talking to everyone.
• 28:19
  And if it's maybe too early, you know, we're checking back in,
• 28:25
  you know, six months to a year. So it is becoming, you know,
• 28:30
  somewhat harder in the fact that any company could be in our zone
• 28:34
  relative to headcount. But it's also becoming easier in
• 28:37
  a way that I think our Tam is expanding our addressable market
• 28:42
  opportunity because I think that there it is now easier to build
• 28:45
  a capital efficient business and get to 5 million plus run rate.
• 28:48
  Yeah. I'm trying to figure out how I
• 28:51
  can turn this ball bearing company into an AI company.
• 28:55
  Well, Albert's just went from a shoe company to an AI company,
• 28:58
  so maybe you need to figure it out.
• 29:00
  Yeah, they're gonna rent NVIDIA chips or something like that.
• 29:05
  I don't know what the strategy is, but the stock popped on it
• 29:08
  so I I doubt they're going to be the last one to to do this crazy
• 29:12
  pivot. It's like a it's like a when a
• 29:16
  what's his name from old Twitter?
• 29:17
  Just he, you know, bought 2 billion in like Bitcoin at its
• 29:21
  peak. Yeah.
• 29:24
  Hopefully not Hopefully. Not good.
• 29:26
  Yeah, I know there's a lot, a lot of chatter.
• 29:28
  This is the ultimate sign of a bubble.
• 29:30
  But we shall see. We.
• 29:32
  Shall see. Yeah, Nobody really knows.
• 29:34
  Again, there's just such an atmosphere of like excitement
• 29:37
  and kind of terror and like, what are we doing here, you
• 29:41
  know? Yeah, I mean, well, if you
• 29:43
  compare it back to the last big tech bubbleofthe.com bubble,
• 29:48
  when that when that burst, I mean, there was a lot of hype
• 29:51
  around start-ups that crazy valuations.
• 29:54
  But I think we can all sit here and say the Internet worked, it
• 29:57
  was transformational and there's been a lot of companies that did
• 30:00
  survive that and made a lot of money.
• 30:01
  And that's probably going to happen here.
• 30:03
  I think that there is probably a lot of AI companies that are
• 30:06
  just a wrapper on someone else's technology and maybe not super
• 30:11
  defensible in the long run. And those will probably suffer
• 30:15
  and never grow into the big valuations that they got early
• 30:17
  on. But there's going to be a lot of
• 30:19
  money made. And you know, even if you just
• 30:22
  compare it to when, you know, we went from license and
• 30:26
  maintenance to, you know, on Prem software to cloud hosted
• 30:30
  SAS, if you just kind of picked off every category winner of
• 30:35
  this is the best SAS company in every single category, you would
• 30:39
  have made a, you know, billions of dollars.
• 30:41
  I think that same strategy will hold today in an AI world where
• 30:45
  you're basically just saying, hey, what are the vertical
• 30:47
  categories that AI is going to disrupt?
• 30:51
  You know, kind of traditional incumbent SAS products that are
• 30:54
  not fast to adopt, adapt into an AI world and you're going to
• 30:57
  make a lot of money. So that's kind of how we're
• 31:00
  thinking about sourcing a little bit.
• 31:03
  I'm more of a early stage startup type investor, although
• 31:06
  I promised my wife I would no longer invest in startups, but I
• 31:10
  like to I I'm always looking for go to market in repeatable sales
• 31:14
  process as being kind of like an indicator of of opportunity.
• 31:17
  Now you, you guys are, you know, they already have traction.
• 31:20
  They've got product market fit, they're in a good place.
• 31:23
  So they've they've created sales processes that are effective.
• 31:27
  Are you seeing any commonalities between that?
• 31:29
  Like you mentioned, there's a Reddit influencer and you've got
• 31:32
  somebody who's driving pipe through LinkedIn.
• 31:36
  Is it really kind of checkerboard all over the place
• 31:39
  with different techniques and platforms or is there kind of
• 31:42
  things that are working really well right now?
• 31:46
  It is a little over the place and I think it depends on the
• 31:48
  industry or segment that they plan where you know, I'll, I'll
• 31:54
  give you like a, a couple of fun ones that were created that I've
• 31:58
  seen like in our portfolio. There is one business that you
• 32:01
  know reached a lot of scale and had a really big exit.
• 32:03
  And they used to, they were in the compliance space and they
• 32:05
  used to create a list of the top 100 people in supply chain
• 32:10
  compliance. And they made the list every
• 32:13
  year and they put all their top prospects on the list that they
• 32:17
  were trying to sell to. And, you know, then those few,
• 32:21
  they'd say, hey, they'd send them something in the mail, say,
• 32:23
  Congrats on making this list. Let us know if you want to do an
• 32:26
  interview or something. And that's a good way to, to
• 32:29
  have like a 30% plus conversion rate on those, on those people.
• 32:33
  So like, that's a really creative way that I've seen a
• 32:36
  lot of companies are now, you know, in our portfolio.
• 32:39
  There's another one that is basically scouring a bunch of
• 32:45
  both public and you know, third party data sources that they pay
• 32:50
  for. And AI is scraping that in a
• 32:52
  similar way that I talk about our our open club agents that
• 32:56
  are finding us leads, potentially A polition.
• 32:59
  And they're doing that and it's auto emailing all of them based
• 33:03
  on who that person that they're reaching out is something about
• 33:08
  their social media account that like tips them off something.
• 33:11
  So for example, if they see that someone is a dog lover, they're
• 33:15
  going to put a funny dog meme into the e-mail or something
• 33:18
  like that, something very unique that catches their eye.
• 33:22
  And that's worked really well for them.
• 33:23
  So it is all over the map. And you know, candidly, I think
• 33:28
  in a lot of companies that we invest in, they found product
• 33:31
  market fit, but a lot of it is founder LED sales for the most
• 33:33
  part. And we're coming in at a point
• 33:36
  when they're trying to transition into a more scalable
• 33:38
  approach of how do we build a repeatable process that's not
• 33:41
  just so reliant on the on the founder.
• 33:44
  Yeah. Totally.
• 33:45
  How about events? You know, a good buddy of mine
• 33:46
  is probably the number one AI go to market tool and he's going
• 33:50
  big on events. I just, I love the irony of
• 33:53
  that, you know, for his product, you know.
• 33:56
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, few portfolio company in
• 34:00
  mind that they live and die by events and they're at every
• 34:02
  single event and hosting cocktail hours.
• 34:04
  And I think that goes back kind of back to what I said earlier
• 34:06
  of how I spend a lot of my time on the roads just sitting across
• 34:10
  the table from someone hanging out, you know, grabbing dinner
• 34:13
  or coffee or a drink. I think is cannot be replaced by
• 34:16
  a, a Zoom or Google me. How do you choose events that
• 34:20
  you attend? So we as a firm try to make sure
• 34:30
  that we're at, we have like representation at basically
• 34:32
  every trade event that we that we can find.
• 34:35
  So that's everyone myself, all you know, down to the analysts
• 34:39
  and associates are all going to a lot of events.
• 34:43
  It tends for me, it tends to be ones where I can hang out for.
• 34:46
  I feel like the, the list that we go through has enough volume
• 34:49
  for me to have a packed two to three days.
• 34:53
  I candidly spend a lot less time, you know, hearing the
• 34:57
  keynote speakers in more time just meeting entrepreneurs and
• 35:01
  going to cocktail hours and so. Forth Yeah.
• 35:02
  So the value isn't necessarily like the the events themself.
• 35:06
  It's like pre scheduling meetings beforehand.
• 35:09
  What about having a booth? Do you like to attend as a guest
• 35:11
  or do you like to kind of set up shop?
• 35:15
  Well, we rarely have a booth, to be honest.
• 35:18
  I'm trying to, yeah. It's more about who was
• 35:22
  attending the event, less what the event is for, for us.
• 35:26
  And 'cause I think, you know, just if I go to an event and I
• 35:31
  meet with 20 companies, I probably learn more talking 30
• 35:35
  minutes with 20 companies than I do from like any speaker on
• 35:38
  stage at them who's giving a lecture.
• 35:41
  Just 'cause you get a feel for what is everyone doing, what's
• 35:44
  happening in this market. And you know, I also try to go
• 35:49
  if I, if I feel like there's gonna be a cohort of our
• 35:52
  portfolio companies at a specific event, that's a good
• 35:55
  way to, you know, kill two birds with one stone and I'll go meet
• 35:58
  a bunch of new companies while also hanging out with our
• 36:00
  portfolio companies. And if they're if our portfolio
• 36:03
  company is there, it probably means that that event is is good
• 36:06
  prospecting for other ones that that kind of fits the same mold.
• 36:10
  Yeah, how about kind of the off brand parties?
• 36:12
  You know, there's all all of the the big events.
• 36:16
  There's always like a spreadsheet of everything else
• 36:18
  that's kind of happening around. It's kind of tangentially
• 36:20
  related, but not officially part of that.
• 36:23
  How do you find that spreadsheet and why is it always the long
• 36:26
  haired guy with a beard? Yeah, that's a great question.
• 36:32
  But yeah, I found that like, to be honest, like the the last few
• 36:36
  big conferences that I've been to, I've found more success out
• 36:42
  of like a curated dinner with 15 or 20 people of making really
• 36:46
  good connections that I was invited to over the conference
• 36:50
  itself. And I think that that's because
• 36:53
  like I'm finding a lot of these conferences, especially if
• 36:55
  they're like a big industry trade show, they tend to be
• 36:57
  expensive. So there's a lot of start-ups
• 36:59
  who are like, I'm not going to spend $5000 on a pass or $25,000
• 37:03
  on a booth, but I'm going to go hang out at the hotel.
• 37:05
  Yeah. And I'm sure that the the event
• 37:08
  organizers hate hearing that. But so like a lot of the
• 37:10
  meetings that I'm having are happening around the event but
• 37:14
  outside of the actual conference Expo hall.
• 37:17
  Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm, I'm kind of
• 37:20
  drilling you here because I'm kind of psyching myself up to
• 37:22
  get back out and do events. I was, I was gonna, I was
• 37:25
  producing an after party for a conference in a couple of weeks
• 37:29
  and it kind of fell apart. But along those lines, it's
• 37:31
  like, you know, events, I struggle because a lot of times
• 37:35
  you have like clicks that they've been going to the same
• 37:37
  events forever, trying to break into that.
• 37:39
  But it's almost like you, you show up with a disco ball jacket
• 37:42
  and just create gravity so people come to you and be like,
• 37:45
  hey, what's going on, What's going on?
• 37:46
  And then kind of mix in, you know, I'm looking for strategies
• 37:50
  here. Yeah, I don't know, like I, I
• 37:53
  think you're right, by the way, like these conferences that have
• 37:56
  been going on for 10 plus years, like the the dinner I just
• 37:59
  mentioned that that that I went to recently, it's a dinner
• 38:02
  that's been going on for like 5 or 10 years.
• 38:03
  I kind of felt like the odd man in the room because most of the
• 38:05
  people have been going to that dinner for that many years.
• 38:08
  So, so, but it was like an awesome group of folks,
• 38:11
  investors, bankers, start-ups, late stage companies, and, you
• 38:16
  know, just networking with all of them is kind of where all
• 38:19
  that inbound deal flow comes. They're like, oh, you should
• 38:20
  check out this company. I'm a, I'm an advisor at this,
• 38:23
  you know, at this company that could be a good fit for you.
• 38:25
  And, you know, someone coming out of that is going to be an
• 38:28
  independent board member, another portfolio company of
• 38:30
  mine. So, you know, it's either you
• 38:33
  got to you got to do what you said and kind of be the the
• 38:37
  gravity or the force to pull everybody in or somehow weasel
• 38:39
  your way into these dinners or network events that have been
• 38:42
  going on for a while. Yeah, I'm going weasel because
• 38:44
  it's it's too much energy to try and be the magnet.
• 38:48
  You know what I mean? I can't be doing that.
• 38:50
  It is. They're in.
• 38:50
  Yeah, Yeah. Cool, Amazing.
• 38:54
  Since we're talking a little bit about personality here, you
• 38:56
  know, the the the, the trillion dollar companies now that kind
• 39:00
  of came out of Web 2 and cloud and all that.
• 39:02
  If you're talking about Sam Holtman and Elon and Zuckerberg,
• 39:06
  they all have kind of a similar personality kind of spectrum.
• 39:09
  Me maybe a little bit socially awkward.
• 39:11
  Is there a new personality of the next crop of kind of AI
• 39:15
  founders that you're seeing emerge?
• 39:19
  Yeah. I mean, listen, I have yet to
• 39:21
  invest in a trillion dollar company.
• 39:23
  So, but we're looking for them. But I almost feel like in order
• 39:30
  to be that trillion dollar company to your point, you
• 39:33
  almost have to be wired differently.
• 39:37
  I was gonna say diabolical. Diabolical is a is a good way to
• 39:42
  put it. I'm trying.
• 39:43
  I was trying to be politically correct, but yeah, so you got to
• 39:46
  be wired differently a little bit because I think, you know,
• 39:50
  there's a lot of founders along the way.
• 39:52
  If you're on the way to build a trillion dollar company and
• 39:54
  someone offers you, you know, to acquire your business for 10 or
• 39:58
  20 billion, they probably take that money and go sit on a beach
• 40:00
  for their so their life's like you have to be wired like Elon
• 40:03
  Musk is the, you know, I, I, I don't know the last time I
• 40:07
  checked, but obviously potentially the richest person
• 40:09
  in the world, depending on when this, when this podcast goes
• 40:12
  live and he still works, you know, works his butt off.
• 40:16
  And, you know, I actually think that is funny.
• 40:19
  Like it's something that we've gotten more comfortable with as
• 40:21
  volition's grown a little bit and our check sizes of increase.
• 40:25
  A bit like we've gotten a lot more comfortable with giving
• 40:27
  founders some portion of liquidity where before we used
• 40:30
  to think it would be demotivating for them.
• 40:32
  A lot of founders that we back are like less motivated by
• 40:36
  monetary gains and more motivated by just building a
• 40:40
  really big business that's going to outlast that.
• 40:43
  For a lot of them, it's their baby, it's their, it's, it's
• 40:45
  another child to them. So I think that that motivates a
• 40:50
  lot of people. But to answer your question,
• 40:52
  like what the original question, what is the psychology or
• 40:56
  personality of these people? I think they're tinkerers.
• 40:59
  People that are in their free time are instead of, you know,
• 41:03
  watching a movie, they're playing around with all these
• 41:08
  new AI tools and finding fun, creative ways to set their
• 41:12
  business apart. Or because things are moving so
• 41:15
  fast, you you can't take a day off.
• 41:17
  Like every time I feel like I go on Twitter in the morning, I'm
• 41:20
  like, I feel behind from the last 12 hours that I was
• 41:23
  sleeping on all the updates and AI, it's like anxiety ridden,
• 41:26
  but it's the people that are tinkering not only for their
• 41:30
  business, but just doing fun things so they can learn.
• 41:33
  And those are the people that are gonna be able to adapt and
• 41:37
  make sure that their business stays ahead of the curve instead
• 41:40
  of falling behind and in this fast moving AI world.
• 41:42
  Yeah, You know, the feeling of being behind is omnipresent with
• 41:46
  everybody. You're not alone with that,
• 41:49
  particularly with me too. But I found an antidote.
• 41:51
  You want to know what it is? It's a one to one ratio.
• 41:54
  For every minute you spend on X, just go over to Facebook and as
• 42:00
  far behind as you feel on X on Facebook you're like, Oh my God,
• 42:04
  I'm a God. Yeah, it's funny.
• 42:06
  So I, I had a founder who I would put in the, you know, top
• 42:12
  decile of AI adoption knowledge tinkering and just
• 42:18
  transformation of his business. And he constantly came to me
• 42:23
  being like, I feel like I'm behind.
• 42:24
  I feel like I'm behind. Like, what am I missing?
• 42:27
  And the answer is nothing. Like, I actually think you're
• 42:31
  ahead. And he, you know, went to this
• 42:36
  event where he was with a bunch of other entrepreneurs and he
• 42:39
  came back to me and he's like, it was the first time I realized
• 42:42
  I actually am ahead of other people 'cause they're asking me
• 42:45
  what I think are basic questions.
• 42:48
  So I, you know, no matter how advanced you are, I think
• 42:50
  everyone feels like they're behind.
• 42:52
  You're right. Well, if you go to
• 42:53
  aiforfounders.co right now, the hero section right on top, H1
• 42:58
  header, you are not behind. I am preaching this gospel and
• 43:03
  the reason you're not behind because if everybody's behind,
• 43:07
  then you're not behind. Yeah, and I'd also say that
• 43:12
  maybe maybe someone who is behind my parents are behind.
• 43:17
  It is not too late to catch up. You can you play around like
• 43:22
  it's the the best part about a lot of these AI tools is they're
• 43:25
  so intuitive to use because it's a chat functionality that
• 43:29
  everyone is already familiar with.
• 43:31
  So whenever I don't know how to do something or the first time I
• 43:34
  try to create a bot or set up open claw, it's just like, you
• 43:38
  know, I'm not, I do not have a technical or engineering
• 43:41
  background. Teach me this like I'm an eighth
• 43:43
  grader and it walks you through step by step.
• 43:46
  So plenty of time for anyone to learn.
• 43:48
  Well, and fun prompt, you know, because I'm, they're careful
• 43:52
  with their language, particularly anthropic.
• 43:53
  They say like talk to it with common language.
• 43:56
  I'm like common language. I was like, all right, so every
• 43:59
  once in a while I'll open, you know, my terminal and be like,
• 44:03
  do the thing I like the way I like it and just see what
• 44:05
  happens. It's like, what's it gonna do?
• 44:08
  I don't even know. It's kind of interesting.
• 44:10
  Yeah, well, I found that, yeah, one of the best tools is asking
• 44:16
  the LMS, what, like, what am I missing?
• 44:19
  It's hey, I, I'm talking to to you all day long, Claude, what
• 44:25
  are what is an agent that I can build to automate some of my
• 44:27
  daily workflows that maybe I haven't built yet or thought
• 44:30
  about. And it's pretty damn good at it.
• 44:32
  So I think people are are are are much more in tune with
• 44:37
  telling Claude tasks or whatever platform they're using instead
• 44:41
  of asking, hey, what should I be doing to automate my day-to-day
• 44:44
  work flows? Amazing, Jim, this has been
• 44:46
  awesome, man. I really appreciate what you do.
• 44:48
  I appreciate this conversation. You know, this, I think for a
• 44:53
  lot of folks, this is a game and that's what keeps them in.
• 44:57
  I, I, you know, I've had great pleasure of, you know,
• 44:59
  interviewing probably a dozen billies, you know, folks that
• 45:03
  had exited with a 500 or $500 million exit.
• 45:06
  And then they're talking to me about their new thing.
• 45:08
  And I always ask him, I'm just like, dude, why?
• 45:12
  Like, why don't you hang it up? Boat drinks, go fishing in the,
• 45:15
  you know, in the keys, Like, what's, what's the deal?
• 45:17
  And there's always a little kind of stutter, but it always comes
• 45:20
  down to they love the game, you know, and like when you, you get
• 45:24
  that taste of like giving something to somebody that they
• 45:27
  love and they pay for it. It's just, it's intoxicating and
• 45:31
  it's so fun. So you know, what you're doing,
• 45:33
  Volition is a huge part of that and just ends up being like, you
• 45:37
  know, massive gasoline on the fire for the, the hearts of
• 45:40
  these founders. So I, I appreciate your work.
• 45:45
  volitioncapital.com is where you can check out the fund.
• 45:49
  And Jim, where's the best place to for people to connect with
• 45:51
  you personally online? Yeah, my email's
• 45:55
  jim@volitioncapital.com. Pretty easy.
• 46:00
  And if you want to follow me on on X or Twitter, it's at Jim
• 46:06
  Ferry VC. Love it.
• 46:07
  And before we get out of here, I want to make sure we can plant
• 46:11
  SEO link for for a nonprofit that's near and dear to your
• 46:14
  heart. Tell us a little bit about
• 46:16
  jimmyfund.org. Yeah, so the Jimmy Fund is a big
• 46:23
  kind of nonprofit here in the Boston, MA area.
• 46:28
  It's all about, you know, raising money for cancer care
• 46:32
  and research at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
• 46:36
  A lot of it's focused on kind of pediatric cancer care and kind
• 46:39
  of near and dear to my heart. My grandfather was really
• 46:41
  involved with it, you know, as I was growing up.
• 46:44
  And so, yeah, it's a great organization.
• 46:47
  Amazing shout out to them jimmyfun.org.
• 46:50
  Links to all this will be in the show notes wherever you're
• 46:52
  listening to this, everybody. Thanks for listening.
• 46:54
  Jim. Thanks again for joining me.
• 46:57
  Thanks, Brian. Appreciate it.
• 46:59
  Every week I sit down and ask myself one question.
• 47:02
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