Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #27: Shopify's "Leaked" CEO Memo, Tourist Founders, Senior Partners Leaving Established Firms

Transcript

Episode #27: Shopify's "Leaked" CEO Memo, Tourist Founders, Senior Partners Leaving Established Firms · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  Have an AI fever, and at some point, the fever will break, and people will wake up and say,
• 0:03
  wait a minute.
• 0:04
  There are other things interesting other than just AI.
• 0:06
  I just hope none of these people who cynically lean into this theme find themselves having
• 0:10
  raised money to build a business they're not interested in building.
• 0:13
  It's the week of April 7.
• 0:15
  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:22
  Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
• 0:24
  I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
• 0:29
  be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
• 0:34
  week.
• 0:35
  Topic number one, earlier this week, Shopify CEO, Tobias Letka, shared an internal memo
• 0:41
  publicly via X preempting what he assumed would be a leak.
• 0:44
  In the note, Toby laid out a clear vision for how Shopify must evolve in the age of AI,
• 0:50
  emphasizing that reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation across the entire company.
• 0:56
  He described Shopify as being in a red queen race, a nod to Alice in Wonderland, where one
• 1:02
  must run just to stay in place.
• 1:04
  So to maintain its edge, the company must not only move fast, but learn and adapt together
• 1:10
  with AI from his point of view as a central multiplier.
• 1:13
  He called out six key mandates in his memo, and a few were pretty simple.
• 1:17
  AI usage is a fundamental expectation.
• 1:19
  Priority prototypes need to incorporate AI.
• 1:22
  But there were a few that it was clear would make the run as a leaked memo on X, one of
• 1:27
  which being AI usage will now be part of performance and peer review processes.
• 1:31
  So how well can you prompt, contextualize, and apply these tools?
• 1:35
  And headcount requests must include justification for why AI can't get the job
• 1:40
  done.
• 1:40
  So I felt less surprised by the call to action for using AI across teams and companies, but I
• 1:45
  did feel like baking that into peer and performance reviews is a pretty bold approach.
• 1:50
  I think that a majority of Americans have yet to use AI in their normal day to day life, and
• 1:55
  I would actually go out on a limb to say most people who use it are claiming to use it more
• 1:59
  than they actually do.
• 2:01
  So it's hard to imagine that those same individuals are trying to bring AI learnings
• 2:05
  into their work if they barely know how to tinker around with it in their day to day life,
• 2:09
  but I guess that is the point.
• 2:11
  So I wanted to have your take on this, obviously.
• 2:14
  Yeah.
• 2:15
  I think in this day and age, any CEO driven or drafted internal comms is always for external.
• 2:22
  Shopify is too big of a company to have any expectation whatsoever that you could write
• 2:27
  something like that and it wouldn't leak.
• 2:28
  And the Shopify management team is smart.
• 2:31
  And I think for me, this is Klarna two point o.
• 2:33
  And I think part of being a public company CEO is you have one extra constituency you don't
• 2:39
  have as a private company, and that's your public market shareholders.
• 2:42
  And if I were sitting in the seat at Shopify, my biggest fear would be, well, what if
• 2:46
  everyone thinks that AI is some existential threat to my ecommerce infrastructure business?
• 2:52
  Putting aside tariffs and everything happening in global macro, what if people don't think
• 2:56
  we're taking AI seriously?
• 2:58
  What's one way to make people convinced that we're taking AI seriously is to write an
• 3:03
  internal memo and then publish it and tell people, this is what I've told my team we need
• 3:07
  to do.
• 3:08
  I am taking this seriously.
• 3:09
  I think what you said, Mia, is really true.
• 3:11
  Like, I've taken a fair amount of classes and projects on how to get more out of AI.
• 3:16
  When I was at Google, there used to be some study that's like the average search query was
• 3:19
  an impossibly short number of words.
• 3:21
  And I was like, oh, my conclusion is most people don't know how to use search engines to
• 3:25
  get the answers they want.
• 3:26
  They type in little bits and fragments and then hunt and peck.
• 3:29
  And when I look at the prompts that a lot of people I work on projects with, I'm like, that
• 3:33
  prompt is way too short.
• 3:35
  It's way too generic.
• 3:36
  You don't actually know how to talk to an LLM to get it to do what you want it to do.
• 3:41
  And I think you're right.
• 3:42
  I think there are people who use ChatGPT or use Claude or use DeepSeek or Perplexity.
• 3:48
  I'm not sure that they're even really scratching the surface.
• 3:51
  So when I read this memo, was like, great.
• 3:53
  What are you gonna do to make sure that everybody's had an equal fair opportunity to
• 3:57
  learn how AI works?
• 3:58
  Are you gonna help people feel and what's the expect what does it mean to use it all the
• 4:03
  time?
• 4:03
  How am I supposed to evaluate how good you are, Mia, at using AI in your data?
• 4:08
  Some of these things, I was like, these don't even sound practical described.
• 4:11
  There might be more to them behind the scenes.
• 4:13
  I took this as a message to the industry that Shopify is not gonna allow an AI based
• 4:19
  ecommerce infrastructure company to sneak up and steal their lunch and that they're on the
• 4:24
  job.
• 4:24
  But I I do think when these new technology waves come out, I think you have to give people
• 4:29
  the opportunity to learn how they work.
• 4:31
  Like, for example, if you're in finance at Shopify, should you be uploading Shopify
• 4:36
  internal data to ChatGPT to get results, to generate graphs, to do analytical work?
• 4:41
  If you're in HR at Shopify, should you be uploading site?
• 4:44
  I'm sure there's more to this behind the scenes, but I think we've, in two short years,
• 4:49
  have gone from a world where I think most companies said, we're gonna an AI department or
• 4:53
  we're gonna have some AI experts.
• 4:54
  We're gonna build things that other people are gonna use to now.
• 4:56
  It's like, nope.
• 4:57
  Everybody's gotta use it.
• 4:58
  So I think it's a really clear statement.
• 5:00
  I'll be curious to see a year from now when somebody says, I wonder what happened with that
• 5:04
  Shopify memo.
• 5:05
  Or in six months on Business Insider, interviews five Shopify employees about how
• 5:09
  they use it.
• 5:10
  I'm very curious to see, but I assume the message for that was startup companies who
• 5:14
  thought in their pitch, hey.
• 5:16
  We're gonna, like, out AI Shopify and public market investors who might be concerned that
• 5:20
  Shopify isn't taking AI sufficiently serious.
• 5:23
  Yeah.
• 5:24
  It's fascinating.
• 5:24
  I have friends who work at, like, those customer success roles within large public tech
• 5:29
  companies.
• 5:30
  Mhmm.
• 5:30
  And when I talk to them about kind of, like, the Klarna experience that's been floated
• 5:34
  around of like SDRs or any sort of AI that's driving those capabilities, they'll say like,
• 5:39
  we have that in the back house too.
• 5:41
  It's just really bad.
• 5:42
  So if I spend time using it, I wasted hours of my time.
• 5:46
  And to be fair, they're like, I'm not paid enough to wanna tinker around and
• 5:49
  contextualize.
• 5:50
  But it goes back to this circular kind of argument of, I guess that's the point from
• 5:54
  their perspective of, I wanna weed you out or show the public that I will weed you out Yeah.
• 5:59
  Of the company if you aren't.
• 6:00
  So my last question for this one is, what are your suggestions for those people of how to get
• 6:05
  started?
• 6:06
  I think the weird thing is, in some ways, the big tech industry, we we're sort of talking out
• 6:11
  of two sides of our mouth.
• 6:12
  We're like, people are using AI tools and they're producing all this marketing slop
• 6:17
  that's terrible.
• 6:18
  This is bad.
• 6:18
  But if you're a marketer who's not using AI, you're falling behind them.
• 6:22
  But if you just criticize the output as being slop, you wouldn't incentivize a marketer to
• 6:27
  produce slop.
• 6:29
  And I think we're like, oh, job applicants are, quote, unquote, cheating by using AI on their
• 6:34
  interviews, but we expect you to use Cursor or Replit when you get here.
• 6:37
  And I'm like, but what which is it?
• 6:39
  Is it like a superpower or is it cheating?
• 6:42
  And so I think we haven't really sorted out.
• 6:44
  And I think the conclusion I've reached is like, I don't want people using AI on me, but I
• 6:48
  wanna be able to use it on other people.
• 6:49
  It's like this weapon.
• 6:50
  It's I'm an employer.
• 6:51
  I don't want you using AI to cheat.
• 6:52
  I wanna know if you're actually good at your job.
• 6:53
  And then once you get here, wanna use as much AI as possible to make you as productive as
• 6:57
  possible.
• 6:58
  And as a consumer, I'm like, I don't want poorly drafted emails written by bad AI Yeah.
• 7:03
  Randomly in my inbox.
• 7:04
  But I also am able to use AI to make the emails I send to other people sound better, more
• 7:08
  succinct.
• 7:08
  We have to resolve this contradiction.
• 7:10
  And I think it's a contradiction because we're still sorting out what this technology means
• 7:15
  and what role it's gonna play in the way that we work long term.
• 7:17
  Well, I foresee a lot of large, lengthy white papers made from deep research about random
• 7:22
  things throughout the company.
• 7:24
  To get these surfaced, our next topic is a brief but really direct Substack post by
• 7:29
  Shriram Krishnan reflecting on the emergence of what he calls tourist founders in the latest AI
• 7:35
  wave.
• 7:35
  So the post calls out a real phenomenon that while this AI moment has created a lot of
• 7:39
  hungry visionary builders, it's possibly also drawn in folks who are more so chasing the
• 7:44
  hype.
• 7:44
  These are founders who may be treating fundraising as the goal rather than a milestone
• 7:48
  in building something valuable.
• 7:50
  He noted a trend that's something I felt deeply, seeing really lofty seed targets, so 8
• 7:56
  to 15,000,000 for first time teams, only to emerge maybe a couple months later, piecing
• 8:01
  together a 2 to $3,000,000 round.
• 8:03
  And while this dynamic isn't new, the pace and excitement around AI really is amplifying it.
• 8:08
  So I largely agree with everything that was said in his post.
• 8:11
  I've been trying to put towards a feeling that I've had for a while, which is just because you
• 8:16
  can build something with AI doesn't necessarily mean the world needs it today.
• 8:21
  Yeah.
• 8:21
  What I appreciated about his take is that he moves beyond the philosophical checkpoint and
• 8:26
  instead focuses on the practical reality that founders probably won't ask themselves.
• 8:30
  That question especially because they're seeing so much money deployed in this space at the
• 8:34
  pace that it is.
• 8:35
  So it becomes our job as VCs to vet challenge and raise the bar.
• 8:40
  But my question is, in this market, how hard will it be to hold investors to that standard?
• 8:45
  I think we sometimes forget as investors that we're generating signal by the decisions that
• 8:51
  we make, and it would be a crime for founders to not pay attention to VC behavior.
• 8:57
  And I think if I were starting a business today and I looked around, I'm like, gee, these VC
• 9:01
  people seem very animated about AI.
• 9:03
  It seems to be the place where all of the money and attention is.
• 9:07
  So if I wanna raise money and I wanna get attention, I should probably find a way to
• 9:11
  drape myself in the AI banner because that seems to be what VC is based on their action,
• 9:16
  their writing, the things they're funding, where I'm reading about the big rounds, that's
• 9:20
  where all the action is.
• 9:21
  And so why wouldn't I wanna be where the action is?
• 9:23
  Won't that make life easier?
• 9:24
  And I'm like, well, life is sometimes easier if you go to everyone else's, but the table stakes
• 9:29
  and the competition is so much higher.
• 9:30
  And I certainly have met people where I'm like, wait a minute.
• 9:33
  Weren't you building a crypto company a year ago when I saw you?
• 9:36
  Or weren't you building some Web three thing and like, nope.
• 9:39
  Now it's AI.
• 9:39
  And I think the job of a venture capitalist has always been to figure out who's really
• 9:44
  motivated, who has a real hunger and passion and insight to build something.
• 9:47
  And every wave theme cycle I've been a part of has had tourists.
• 9:52
  We had tourists in '99.
• 9:53
  We had tourists in mobile.
• 9:54
  We had tourists in crypto.
• 9:56
  I think this is, like, a part of our job is to try to suss out signal from noise and people
• 10:01
  who are serious versus people who just bought a .ai domain.
• 10:04
  And, you know, Mimi, I've been incredibly harsh on this thing.
• 10:07
  I think there's way more opportunism than Sriram even suggests.
• 10:11
  And Sriram and the Curti Jackson team are great.
• 10:13
  I hope he continues to write.
• 10:14
  I like his, like, pithy short posts.
• 10:15
  But I I think this has gotten harder because in other cycles, the main thing has been a big
• 10:21
  part of everything, but not everything, if that makes sense.
• 10:24
  So, like, during mobile, mobile was maybe 50% of mindshare for VCs who cared, but not a %.
• 10:29
  I think there's lot of firms where AI is a hundred percent of the mindshare still.
• 10:31
  So I think this is exacerbating this opportunism because I think founders have
• 10:35
  rightly concluded, if I don't have an AI story as part of my pitch, there are whole swaths of
• 10:40
  VCs who will say, either I don't get it or you're not interesting.
• 10:44
  So we've created this turbocharged dynamic where if you don't have an AI story, I think
• 10:48
  it's really hard to get VC attention.
• 10:50
  And I think there'll be a lot that will come out in the next two to three years after folks
• 10:54
  who continue to raise really fast rounds at prices that are a bit high for teams that maybe
• 10:59
  haven't figured out exactly what they're building.
• 11:02
  It will be hard to raise that subsequent round.
• 11:04
  And I think for a large majority of the companies, just because at that moment, we will
• 11:09
  have hopefully learned a little bit and maybe the bar has raised.
• 11:12
  Again, I empathize with the founders, and I get it why you would want to.
• 11:15
  If you see why see 80% of their companies in their last round was AI based.
• 11:19
  But to your point, I've seen a lot of great founders who maybe were building in spaces that
• 11:23
  are, like, non vogue, so health care, consumer.
• 11:26
  And they're like, oh, in my pitches, I just find myself.
• 11:29
  I have to have some sort of AI angle.
• 11:31
  And for that, I would say AI is truly table stakes.
• 11:34
  It's something that we've talked about a lot.
• 11:35
  But to change your entire pitch should kind of reach a threshold to raise upon it could be
• 11:40
  very shortsighted.
• 11:41
  So, again, not a new dynamic, but one that I feel like is really exacerbated in this moment.
• 11:46
  And I think it's worth remembering that, like, raising a lot of money at a high valuation just
• 11:51
  raises expectations.
• 11:52
  It raises what you have to achieve to be successful.
• 11:57
  It's hard.
• 11:57
  It's really, really hard.
• 11:58
  And so I think the people who are celebrating today, these big rounds, the day after the
• 12:02
  announcement, they gotta get back to work and build a company that's worth at least as much
• 12:06
  as they were valued at when they raised that last round.
• 12:08
  Right.
• 12:08
  Any suggestions, I guess, for those founders who are feeling like they have to pivot into a
• 12:13
  broader AI story or they're feeling like their story isn't taking?
• 12:16
  How can they kind of stick out in this space?
• 12:18
  And maybe it's like they just have to look a little bit harder for the right investor match,
• 12:21
  but how do you kind of differentiate yourself to make sure that you're not a tourist founder?
• 12:25
  I do think one advantage of this maybe over rotation on AI is that it causes everyone to
• 12:31
  say, is there slash should there be an AI angle to my business?
• 12:34
  And in some cases, I think the answer is like, yeah.
• 12:36
  Like, founders haven't thought about how to integrate that technology.
• 12:39
  Also, think if you decide the answer is no, I would hope that that thought process forces you
• 12:43
  to get clear on why the answer is no.
• 12:46
  And I think there's value in clarity.
• 12:48
  I think there's value in being able to say, we made a conscious decision not to go all in and
• 12:52
  not to center the company on AI, and I feel good about that.
• 12:55
  So I think at some point, all of these fevers break.
• 12:58
  And we have an AI fever, and at some point, the fever will break, and people will wake up and
• 13:01
  say, wait a minute.
• 13:02
  There are other things interesting other than just AI.
• 13:05
  I just hope none of these people who cynically lean into this theme find themselves having
• 13:08
  raised money to build a business they're not interested in building.
• 13:11
  Yeah.
• 13:11
  And also have surrounded themselves by investors who truly invested because they
• 13:15
  believed in them as opposed to wanting to jump in on the hype.
• 13:17
  Well, our last topic is a piece from CNBC by Ernst Ding Hsu spotlighting a growing trend
• 13:23
  across venture capital that over the past year, a significant number of high profile GPs and
• 13:28
  senior partners have quietly exited some of the most established VC firms.
• 13:32
  So while some of these moves are framed as retirements or success milestones to build
• 13:36
  their own firms, other departures are hinting at a broader structural shift industry.
• 13:41
  One of which is as large legacy venture funds increasingly resemble asset managers more than
• 13:47
  pure play venture firms, many senior partners find themselves wanting to return back to their
• 13:51
  early stage roots, especially as deploying true early stage capital becomes harder in the
• 13:56
  context of a fun bloat.
• 13:57
  On the other side, others are possibly being pushed out for perf reasons as we are facing
• 14:03
  the other side of the venture market after folks rush to deploy throughout the ZERP era.
• 14:07
  Charles, know you wrote a post about why investors could possibly be leaving VC firms a
• 14:11
  while back.
• 14:12
  So wanted to ask if you had anything else here to add.
• 14:15
  So I I I generally think most people who leave venture firms, it's usually about some mix of
• 14:21
  strategy drift at the place where they work, a desire to have something that better reflects
• 14:25
  them, and then, like, money.
• 14:26
  I think sometimes the money piece is overrated.
• 14:28
  Being a venture capitalist is a pretty lucrative job.
• 14:31
  Could you always make more money?
• 14:32
  Yeah.
• 14:32
  But I think oftentimes, usually, it's about something that's happening internal firm.
• 14:35
  And I think one of the biggest things that has surprised me, but not surprised me at the same
• 14:40
  time, is the ability of people who are at some of these large platform firms to leave and
• 14:47
  launch initial funds that are probably an order of magnitude larger than what your typical you
• 14:53
  know, if your typical emerging manager is gonna raise a 10 to $25,000,000 debut fund, these GPs
• 14:59
  that leave these more established, highly regarded funds, if you're, like, mid senior to
• 15:03
  senior, you're gonna raise a debut fund that's, let's call it, a hundred million ish per GP.
• 15:07
  That's really different experience.
• 15:09
  And, you know, raising a hundred million dollar fund to start, that gives you two, two and a
• 15:13
  half million dollars a year in management fees, which also means your experience as a first
• 15:16
  time fund manager is gonna be different.
• 15:17
  You could you could have two partners at a hundred million dollar fund.
• 15:19
  You could also have some help.
• 15:21
  You could have a controller.
• 15:22
  You could have people taking over some of the, like, day to day work.
• 15:25
  You could have an associate.
• 15:26
  You you could have a real firm.
• 15:27
  That's very different than an emerging manager who raises a $10,000,000 fund and can't even
• 15:31
  usually pay himself or herself.
• 15:32
  But I think it's very hard to figure out why people left in this business unless you have
• 15:37
  access to that firm.
• 15:38
  And I think we're gonna continue to see departures in this business because there are
• 15:43
  some people who've made a lot of money and are gonna say, this isn't as fun as it used to be.
• 15:47
  Wonder some people will say, I don't see how I'm gonna make any money with the bets that
• 15:51
  we've made.
• 15:51
  So what's the point?
• 15:52
  If you think about what happens at most big institutional firms, power gets concentrated at
• 15:57
  the top, and you get this upper out dynamic like investment banking or law.
• 16:01
  And we haven't had that in venture as much.
• 16:03
  I think we're moving in that direction.
• 16:05
  As these firms get bigger and they're hiring more people, they they won't all make partner
• 16:09
  or capital p partner, we'll say.
• 16:11
  They won't all make capital p partner.
• 16:12
  And even the ones who do may or may not have access to the management company or the real
• 16:18
  guts of the business.
• 16:19
  And I think we're gonna continue to see departures.
• 16:21
  And I think there are also some people paradoxically who would like to move on, but
• 16:25
  they have not yet solved for succession.
• 16:27
  And so they are probably working longer than they had planned on a firm that they created or
• 16:32
  managed.
• 16:32
  That's one of the cruel ironies of twenty to twenty to twenty twenty one.
• 16:36
  There's not a lot of great performance data that's gonna come out of that era.
• 16:40
  So if you're hoping to turn your firm over to people who made a lot of investing decisions in
• 16:46
  that window, you might have questions about, well, how much of their performance was the
• 16:50
  companies they chose, and how much of it was, like, the mania of that era, and what do I do
• 16:55
  with this data?
• 16:56
  And it might have just added three to four more years to your evaluation window for these
• 17:00
  people before you can determine whether you're ready to turn the firm over to them.
• 17:03
  I used to think within venture, you could probably make, I don't know, two, three pops to
• 17:08
  different funds, and then you kind of have to decide to stay or maybe venture isn't the place
• 17:13
  that you should be in.
• 17:14
  But do you think that's changing?
• 17:16
  Do you think people are gonna be staying at places longer to have a longer evaluation
• 17:20
  period, or do you think they're gonna have more hops in and out adventure roles?
• 17:24
  I think we're gonna see a dynamic that looks like more hops.
• 17:28
  I think people in venture have gotten savvier about career development, and I think people
• 17:32
  are gonna get to firms and say, I'm doing well here, but I feel blocked.
• 17:35
  There's somebody ahead of me, someone in front of me.
• 17:38
  There's no room in the partnership, but I can move over to this other firm where I see a role
• 17:42
  for myself and I see a path to growth.
• 17:44
  I think as long as we are creating new venture firms, that is gonna be the pressure release
• 17:48
  valve for a lot of these people.
• 17:49
  They're gonna say, hey.
• 17:50
  I worked at such and such firm for a while.
• 17:52
  I got about as far as I'm gonna get.
• 17:53
  I could either stay here for another six years and hope I break through, or I could jump over
• 17:58
  to this new firm, take a little bit more firm risk.
• 18:00
  But look.
• 18:01
  If you join one of these new spin out venture firms, I don't think you're taking that much
• 18:04
  firm risk.
• 18:04
  They're gonna raise enough money to give it a real go for one and probably two funds.
• 18:09
  So that gives you five to six years to work hard and show good results before you have to
• 18:14
  worry about the existential, well, what if this doesn't work out question.
• 18:17
  I do think at the most junior levels, you will see more people moving in and out of venture.
• 18:20
  People doing an associate stint, either deciding they don't like it or not finding a
• 18:23
  great way to move up and going back and working and operating, which is how venture used to
• 18:26
  work back in the late nineties.
• 18:28
  Like, you would hire these smart people.
• 18:29
  They'd work for you, they'd go work for a start up company, or they'd work for a public
• 18:33
  company.
• 18:33
  And then maybe they'd made their way back to venture, or maybe they wouldn't.
• 18:35
  My last question for this one is the article does call out what's the impact for portfolio
• 18:39
  companies, of which they see these senior partners come in and come out of their
• 18:42
  positions.
• 18:44
  And I think there was this resounding, it depends how much it impacts you.
• 18:47
  Either, yes, they've been very involved and it's painful to see them leave, or that person
• 18:51
  wasn't an operator at all, so it wasn't that helpful at all.
• 18:54
  So what are founders to make of all the movement?
• 18:56
  I asked this question of a friend of mine who's a growth stage investor.
• 19:00
  He's like, when we leave, it doesn't really matter that much.
• 19:03
  He's like, we're all hey.
• 19:04
  As he said, we're all the same at growth.
• 19:05
  I was like, no.
• 19:06
  You're not.
• 19:06
  You're you're all individual stuff like but I think what he meant was most growth investors
• 19:09
  care about the same things and have the same lens on business, and it tends to be relatively
• 19:13
  financial, operational, and KPI driven.
• 19:16
  I think it's less about the relationship with the management.
• 19:18
  What I've seen that tends to be most disruptive is when your series a lead leaves.
• 19:22
  As much as I think seed investors are institutional and we are, usually when you get
• 19:25
  a series a investor on board, it changes the way the company operates, and that's usually
• 19:30
  the first really significant infusion of capital into the business.
• 19:33
  And those people tend to care as much about the founder and his or her makeup as they do about,
• 19:38
  like, the business and the KPIs.
• 19:40
  And when those people leave a lot of institutional knowledge about the company and
• 19:44
  the founder walks out the door, and so I think that tends to be far more disruptive than when
• 19:49
  a late stage investor leaves.
• 19:51
  And I've got portfolio companies where we're on our third person for a given fund.
• 19:55
  And that third person is like, I'm here.
• 19:56
  I'm trying to do the best I can.
• 19:58
  I wasn't here in the boardroom for four years before trying to figure it out.
• 20:01
  Well, we are all out of time for today.
• 20:02
  Thank you, Charles, for joining in.
• 20:04
  Thank you for everyone who's stopping by.
• 20:05
  Please like and subscribe, and we will talk to you all next week.
• 20:08
  Thank you.
• 20:09
  Bye.