Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #38: First Round Capital Reflections and How Fundraising and Seeking an Acquisition Opportunity Are Mutually Exclusive

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Episode #38: First Round Capital Reflections and How Fundraising and Seeking an Acquisition Opportunity Are Mutually Exclusive · The Learning Corner by Precursor

• 0:00
  As Josh and Jeff mentioned, the average venture firm is not a good investment.
• 0:03
  The real question is show me that you have a history of being able to find outlier
• 0:07
  companies, whether I've heard of those companies or not.
• 0:10
  It's the week of June 23.
• 0:12
  Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
• 0:20
  Welcome to The Learning Corner by Precursor.
• 0:22
  I'm Mia Foranum, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
• 0:27
  be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our teens' attention over the past
• 0:32
  week.
• 0:32
  Our first piece is episode eight from the relatively new podcast, Uncapped, hosted by
• 0:37
  Jack Altman, where he interviews First Round Capital's Josh Hovleman, and reflects on how
• 0:42
  Venture has evolved from a boutique high craft discipline into a fragmented ecosystem.
• 0:47
  There's a lot to dive into here.
• 0:49
  Josh's Blackstone vacation adventure, harvesting your winners in bubble times, and
• 0:54
  continuously creating value as a fund manager by operating like a company and constantly
• 0:59
  seeking learning opportunities.
• 1:01
  Josh and Jack spoke a lot about the SOPA capital that is relevancy Yeah.
• 1:06
  As an investor and how it can earn you access to harder deals and meetings with larger LPs or
• 1:12
  investors.
• 1:12
  This relevancy is often fueled by firm wide marketing efforts and broader branding and
• 1:17
  medium.
• 1:18
  Relevancy is one of those really squishy terms in venture because the beauty and the curse of
• 1:24
  the private markets is that you, as a venture fund, can selectively choose what to share with
• 1:28
  the world and shape your brand.
• 1:30
  So how do you think about striking the balance when it comes to chasing relevancy?
• 1:35
  And from an investor's perspective, how much weight should we actually place on it?
• 1:38
  I thought the podcast was super good.
• 1:40
  I went back and listened to it a second time.
• 1:42
  I think this relevance thing is really interesting, and sometimes it'll be in meetings
• 1:45
  with people like, oh, well, they're just buying logos.
• 1:48
  They invested in this hot company really late just to have the logo.
• 1:50
  But what if logo buying works?
• 1:52
  What if being able to say, I'm an investor in OpenAI?
• 1:54
  What if a naive person says, well, who cares if you bought in some crazy high valuation of your
• 1:59
  seed fund?
• 2:00
  You can say, I'm an investor in OpenAI.
• 2:02
  And I think a lot of founders, I think, logically, oh, I want to take money from the
• 2:06
  people who are already invested in the very best companies.
• 2:09
  Because a, those people have good picking ability.
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  They have a good brand halo.
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  Maybe they can introduce me to that company.
• 2:15
  So I think there is some logic in buying logos.
• 2:17
  And I think it's also important to remember, you know, when I started venture twenty five
• 2:21
  years ago, there was not as much supply of capital.
• 2:25
  I don't think venture firms had to work as hard to differentiate themselves and be chosen.
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  Now, as the podcast mentioned, there's I think Josh mentioned 10,000 venture firms, 20,000
• 2:34
  check writers.
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  Anything you could do to stand out and be chosen to be top of mind.
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  I think one of the fun things for us is via well over 250 active companies.
• 2:42
  50 of whom are fundraising at any point in time.
• 2:44
  I get to see who they wanna meet.
• 2:46
  And who they wanna meet is usually not a function of what firms have the highest IRR
• 2:50
  TVPI.
• 2:51
  And it's usually like, oh, person produced the piece of content that I read about my market,
• 2:55
  and I like them.
• 2:56
  Or this firm shows up in all of these searches that I do for being an investor in a bunch of
• 3:00
  categories that I care about.
• 3:02
  And I think with private market, the founder has to choose you.
• 3:05
  So anything you can do to increase the odds that you'll be chosen.
• 3:08
  And as Josh mentioned in the podcast, volume is another way to be adjusted.
• 3:12
  If you are everywhere, if you're in all of the right rooms, if you're seeing all the most
• 3:16
  interesting companies, you'll bubble up.
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  And it's not surprising to me that oftentimes, the firms that founders are most interested in
• 3:22
  meeting are generally the firms that have the highest brand perception, whether they're
• 3:26
  aggressively self marketing or not.
• 3:28
  Yeah.
• 3:28
  And I think there's also a set of firms, as Josh mentioned, like Altos and others, that
• 3:32
  have fantastic performance and are less focused on that.
• 3:35
  But I do think for some of the big firms, one way to create relevance in a lot of content,
• 3:39
  have a ton of partners out there, be down the street, have a ton of people meeting with
• 3:43
  founders, and sort of feel under present.
• 3:45
  There's so many directions I wanna go after But one thing back to the logo chasing, and it just
• 3:50
  came up because I had a conversation with an LP friend of mine, and she mentioned how it's so
• 3:55
  common for first time buns to put so much effort into portfolio construction and start,
• 4:00
  like, cherry picking specific logos that almost fit outside their thesis that just showcase
• 4:04
  they can get into competitive deal.
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  But the LP mentioned that's not your thesis.
• 4:08
  And I think even Josh and Jack spent that Yeah.
• 4:10
  It's fascinating that funds that wanna raise, I don't their sixth, seventh, eighth fund.
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  If they completely shifted the side of the fund, they're raising on a track record from a
• 4:19
  model that they no longer operate out of.
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  I thought that was a really subtle but important point, which is that there are funds
• 4:24
  that are raising multibillion dollar new funds to do entirely different activities, but
• 4:28
  leveraging prime brokers from an earlier era.
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  I also just like Josh talking about his vision for I didn't necessarily have 50 people.
• 4:34
  Yeah.
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  But just his vision for, hey.
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  How do you if you're a boutique practitioner?
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  How do you remain true to what you wanna build in a world where everybody around you is
• 4:42
  raising more capital?
• 4:42
  Yeah.
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  And one thing he actually talked about was the presence of a non investing partner.
• 4:48
  I think they talked about was such a large reason why they've been able to keep the brand
• 4:52
  enduring as it is within first round.
• 4:54
  What are your thoughts on that?
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  The one thing I will think is that I've heard Josh talk about this at length.
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  This most firms don't think about their decision making processes in common.
• 5:03
  And if you thought about your decision making processes in you would spend a lot more time
• 5:07
  and care thinking about, well, how do we actually make decisions?
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  And I'd argue in venture, decision making is the product.
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  Your portfolio is the sum total of the things that you saw, the things that you chose to
• 5:17
  invest in.
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  And I think what he outlined, I don't think that will work for me.
• 5:21
  Yeah.
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  Like, it's a little bit more rigor, and we don't have as many decision makers at the firm.
• 5:25
  But I think a lot about, on our end, what is our product?
• 5:27
  And I think I'm happiest with our decision making processes.
• 5:30
  Individuals following their own intuition.
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  And we write small enough checks to early stage companies that there isn't a lot of metadata to
• 5:37
  analyze.
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  But I think it was Jack who said, if most VCs looked at the way that their own firms are run
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  and you have portfolio companies that were run that way, you'd be horrified.
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  Because being an adventure fund for most funds is lengthy discussions and discourse and
• 5:49
  butting heads, which is all really wonderful insights you can draw, but then it's not
• 5:52
  recorded.
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  I said devil's thinking on that because I think people would be interested to know within
• 5:56
  precursor, how do we think about postmortems or reflections on inflection point for our
• 6:01
  companies?
• 6:02
  He said, basically, memory is a crappy way to try to keep track of things.
• 6:05
  And I agree with you.
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  The one thing I realized probably a few years ago was people would ask me, what did you think
• 6:09
  of that company we invested?
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  Inevitably, I had some rosy, overly optimistic view of how perfect the company was when we
• 6:15
  invested.
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  And I was like, well, the only way I can think of to solve this hindsight bias is to actually
• 6:20
  capture your thoughts in the moment.
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  So now we have a whole process of, like, how do we capture at the time of wire?
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  What do we think is gonna happen?
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  We do more as a documentation documentation of what we think about the founders, and I find
• 6:31
  that you capture that in real time as the only way to be honest.
• 6:33
  Yeah.
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  And then periodically, you wanna update your thinking.
• 6:36
  So six months, I go, alright.
• 6:37
  I've been working with this company for six months.
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  They've had a time to take the money we gave them and turn it into some insights.
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  How effective has this company been?
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  And we ask the same or a very similar set of questions again.
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  Ever means it's been revealing to see, were there things that I saw and or was worried
• 6:50
  about before we invested that have already shown up?
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  And conversely, were there things that was worried about that appeared not to be a
• 6:55
  problem?
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  Yeah.
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  It one of the things that I find is really great about our process, the ability to be
• 7:00
  honest about where we think our companies are.
• 7:02
  Yeah.
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  Where I think a lot of fun don't wanna put in writing where they think the right positions
• 7:06
  are.
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  And I think it's a fear of where it could go or what if they're wrong.
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  And I think back to Jack and Josh's whole point, of if we could capture a lot of that
• 7:14
  information and learn from it, that's the most important part.
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  So it does help you crystallize memories in a more formalized way.
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  It also helps other people learn from other people.
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  They can
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  think, well, what did you think would happen?
• 7:23
  Oh, wow.
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  You know, we have the insurance this summer looking at a bunch of decisions we've made, and
• 7:27
  they weren't part of those.
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  So they can look at them as an outsider and say, well, these are the things you're worried
• 7:31
  about.
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  Why did you do this anyway?
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  And what happened?
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  One of my favorite comparisons in the entire episode was when they talked about the hot hand
• 7:38
  fallacy.
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  Yeah.
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  And talking about how ironically it doesn't apply to somebody like Steph Curry who has paid
• 7:45
  tens of millions of dollars because he had a high percentage hit rate on the shot that he
• 7:49
  takes.
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  It does very much apply to venture.
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  Most cases, Josh and Jack talked about how investors are actually rewarded on the shots
• 7:58
  that they take, not the shots that they actually bake.
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  How do you think about that and venture and get comfortable with that?
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  I'll never forget.
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  I met somebody, I won't say the firm, who was at a firm that is associated as a seed investor
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  with a bunch of really iconic companies.
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  And we were doing one of these dinners where you introduce yourself, and the person said,
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  we're investors at these three iconic companies and hundreds you've never of.
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  That's pretty much true.
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  And their whole brand is built on being associated with three really iconic companies.
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  And nobody penalizes, criticizes, or cares about those 99% of the investment.
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  And I find LPs and founders are often the same way.
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  They're like, what's the best company you're in?
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  Going back to this relevance thing, making a bunch of investment and being in market creates
• 8:39
  relevance.
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  And every now and then, I'll read some article.
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  They're like, I can't believe Andreessen or Sequoia invested in this stupid company.
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  It's so dumb.
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  And I'm like, does it doesn't matter.
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  Also, you're talking about it.
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  You're talking about it.
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  You're talking about it.
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  You care.
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  And if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter.
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  I think it's quite interesting.
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  Doesn't appear to be much of a long term penalty for being associated WeWork.
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  It didn't work out with a lot of money.
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  Kind of interesting.
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  It's not like investing in WeWork was some stain.
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  It means you got to see the deal.
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  You got to see the deal and you were part of one of the more iconic companies of that time.
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  Wouldn't make being a WeWork investor my whole personality, but there are people who make
• 9:14
  single investments, their whole personality and brand, and they they lean on that heavily.
• 9:18
  And my conclusion is there really is no substitute adventure for being associated with
• 9:23
  a winning company.
• 9:24
  It almost doesn't really matter when you've gotten them all.
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  Like, now, I think if you can think I'm an investor in OpenAI, sure people could say,
• 9:30
  well, when did you buy in?
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  Was it through SPV?
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  It almost doesn't really matter.
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  I don't know.
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  I think about this a lot.
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  The best LPs I meet tend to focus on what are you doing to get access to the truly spectral
• 9:41
  companies that matter, and do you have access to those?
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  And the LP that I meet that are less sophisticated and wanna talk more about, like,
• 9:48
  the average outcome data.
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  Like, what's the average graduation rate?
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  What's the well, this isn't as Josh and Jack mentioned, the average venture firm is not a
• 9:55
  good investment.
• 9:56
  The real question is show me that you have a history of being able to find outlier
• 10:00
  companies, whether I've heard of those companies.
• 10:02
  Or
• 10:02
  Yeah.
• 10:02
  I guess double clicking on that, how hard is that do?
• 10:06
  Because I can imagine there's the fundamental difference maybe of what LPs deemed to be high
• 10:10
  quality pre seed deal than what you think they are, especially when you're early on in the
• 10:14
  fund and always see our logos.
• 10:16
  One thing I think about is, for example, everyone talks about graduation rate.
• 10:19
  What if you had 10% graduation rate, but every company that graduated was a Decacorn?
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  I would rather have that than 50% graduation.
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  But a lot of LPs are like, oh, well, 10% graduation, that's low.
• 10:30
  Well, it's not low if you're looking for outliers.
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  It's not low if the graduates are exceptional companies.
• 10:35
  And sympathetic to the play of LPs, they're looking at a bunch of funds and they're gonna
• 10:39
  figure out, well, how do I evaluate this person?
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  Well, like, in the absence of being able to underwrite portfolios at the company level, if
• 10:45
  I told you, you have two choices.
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  This fund has 10% of its companies that get the series a.
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  This fund has 50% that get series a.
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  Knowing nothing about the underlying companies, you might say, give me the person who's 50.
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  But you wanna know more.
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  You wanna know more.
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  But like on the servers, you could be like, oh, show me the companies that have 50.
• 11:00
  Yeah.
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  Or oh, this person has 20 companies in common with entries that this person has two.
• 11:05
  But what if the two that this person has are the two that are most important, and the 20
• 11:10
  that this person has are the 20 that don't work?
• 11:12
  Right.
• 11:13
  You'd go, oh, on average, this person co invests with the best people.
• 11:16
  Yeah.
• 11:17
  But a lot of this business comes down to specifics, and I'm sympathetic to LPs who are
• 11:21
  trying to come up with these broad based heuristics.
• 11:23
  Yeah.
• 11:24
  They will fail you.
• 11:25
  They will fail you.
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  In the same way that as a VC, if you're like, a broad based heuristic about what I'm looking
• 11:29
  for at founders, it will help you until it fails you.
• 11:32
  Right.
• 11:32
  Now, it's a glaring flag if you're in all these deals with name brand funds and they're all the
• 11:37
  ones that didn't do well.
• 11:38
  Like, where were you for the deal that they did and why didn't they loop you in?
• 11:42
  Right.
• 11:42
  It always makes you ask the question, like, why am I seeing this?
• 11:45
  There's an old Mark Souther post that I send to people all the time, and it's called why am I
• 11:50
  so lucky?
• 11:50
  And there are times I'm like, hey.
• 11:53
  If one of those big firms invites you into a deal and you don't have a relationship with
• 11:57
  them, it's worth asking.
• 11:58
  Why wasn't I chosen?
• 11:59
  I love that a portion of our job is supporting our portfolio companies in any way that they
• 12:04
  need, especially to graduate subsequent rounds.
• 12:06
  But I do find myself a couple of times I can think of.
• 12:09
  When an investor that I don't have a close relationship sends me the note and says, this
• 12:12
  is a company that we've been getting a lot of inbound on and they're raising.
• 12:16
  And then I'm asking my question, why are you giving it to me if that's the case?
• 12:20
  And like I think about most similar companies who do get absolutely sworn by inbound requests
• 12:24
  from investors, they're actively telling us, please do not extend infros.
• 12:28
  And it's not to say there's a a good or bad scenario.
• 12:31
  It's just something to observe.
• 12:33
  Well, as you know, every quarter, we send out this email to a couple 100 of our closest
• 12:37
  friends, and we can see all of the intro requests quickly coalesce on a very small Yes.
• 12:43
  The 300 companies that are probably five, they get 75%.
• 12:46
  And most of them, I would say, the ones that have the least amount of information attached
• 12:49
  to them with description.
• 12:50
  It's it's always tell.
• 12:51
  Yes.
• 12:52
  It is interesting to me just to see, even within our own portfolio, the gravity of
• 12:56
  attention towards the things that people think are gonna work.
• 12:59
  We live in a world where I think in venture, money comes really late.
• 13:02
  So I think people are always looking for a proxy signal.
• 13:05
  Graduation rates are a proxy signal.
• 13:07
  Co investors are a proxy signal.
• 13:09
  Founder backgrounds are a proxy signal, but they're all proxy signals.
• 13:12
  They're not single in themselves.
• 13:14
  One last question here is they did talk about secondary briefly.
• 13:17
  But from the perspective of sometimes investors aren't as enthusiastic when their founder opts
• 13:22
  to take part in secondary, mostly because they feel like, I haven't got my money.
• 13:26
  Why do you?
• 13:27
  What is your perspective on that?
• 13:28
  I think there were two things about secondaries I thought about in that part of the episode.
• 13:31
  One is, you know, liquidity windows and venture are irregular.
• 13:35
  A lot of years, no money comes out.
• 13:36
  Then you get these broad aperture moments where you can sell everything Yeah.
• 13:40
  At the door shut.
• 13:41
  Said we don't make money in venture and equilibrium.
• 13:44
  I think about that a lot.
• 13:45
  And I think part of the reason companies are staying private for so long is the development
• 13:49
  of a mature secondaries market.
• 13:51
  And I think everybody right now has an incentives to have a healthy, mature secondary
• 13:56
  market.
• 13:56
  Secondary funds are like, this is great.
• 13:59
  Maybe before, kinda get people to sell them.
• 14:01
  There's this quality.
• 14:02
  I think a lot of VCs before would say, why would I do a secondary?
• 14:04
  This is one of my best companies.
• 14:06
  I'm gonna take it public.
• 14:07
  And now that doesn't happen as much.
• 14:08
  So you can stay private longer because there's more secondary capital, which means as a
• 14:12
  founder, you can get liquidity without going public.
• 14:15
  As an early stage venture fund like precursor, you can get liquidity either by selling to a
• 14:19
  secondary fund or to another buyer.
• 14:20
  Because I think all of these forces are conspiring to push They sort of go public date
• 14:24
  out for company much later.
• 14:26
  And then, you know, what's chicken and egg is that you need 3 to $500,000,000 in ARR to go
• 14:30
  public if that's really the bar, it seems to be the bar that just takes more.
• 14:33
  But some of the companies that are still private are well beyond.
• 14:36
  And so my belief is that it doesn't matter what I think about secondaries.
• 14:40
  They're gravity.
• 14:40
  They are just a part of the ecosystem now.
• 14:42
  Founders are going to take them.
• 14:44
  Funds are gonna be offered secondaries.
• 14:46
  This is a new feature adventure.
• 14:49
  And I think one of the most dangerous things you could do at any business is to be too
• 14:52
  nostalgic for the past.
• 14:54
  I don't think we're going back to a world where a company should not go public in seven or ten
• 14:57
  years, hold only business.
• 14:59
  But that also highlights, and they kinda joke about this, but it's true.
• 15:02
  Sometimes something that goes to eight will go to 80.
• 15:05
  And so I used to tell our LPs, especially in 2020, the conditional probability to get into a
• 15:09
  billion dollar valuation once you got to a $100,000,000 valuation at rate 20 was quite
• 15:13
  high.
• 15:13
  If you got to a 100, somebody was gonna probably get you a billion.
• 15:16
  So in that world, selling is busy.
• 15:18
  You know that there's a high probability there's another high mark coming.
• 15:22
  I think people laughed at OpenAI at this or maybe scoffed more than laughed.
• 15:26
  And thus far, every time you could buy OpenAI, you get a markup in twelve to eighteen months.
• 15:32
  Going off to our next topic, Rohit Madal, an early stage startup investor and cofounder of
• 15:37
  Stilt, wrote a LinkedIn post sharing a common but really difficult dilemma some founders
• 15:41
  face.
• 15:42
  What do you do when you're at 1,500,000.0 in ARR with six months of runway?
• 15:46
  Do you raise a down round, or do you seek an acquisition?
• 15:50
  Rohit argues that both processes are demanding and mutually exclusive.
• 15:54
  He encourages founders to honestly assess their energy and conviction before choosing a path.
• 15:59
  If you wanna choose m and a, you'll need at least two serious fires.
• 16:02
  If you wanna raise, you'll need to be transparent and fully commit.
• 16:05
  Either way, going in half in can destroy that optionality.
• 16:08
  So he says that fundraising and m and a are both full time jobs.
• 16:11
  How have you been able to kind of advise founders when they brought up some of these
• 16:15
  issues?
• 16:16
  I think most founders think I can do both.
• 16:18
  You could, probably not well.
• 16:19
  Yeah.
• 16:20
  So one thing I ask, and this is very timely because in q one of this year, I wrote to our
• 16:25
  LP and said, I think this is gonna be a big year of what I call the great realization.
• 16:29
  We're gonna have a ton of companies that and realization is a double entendre.
• 16:33
  They will realize their fate, and also we will realize the position.
• 16:36
  There's be a bunch of companies that wake up and say, I've been doing this for five years.
• 16:39
  We've achieved some level of success.
• 16:41
  We are clearly not open AI or anthropic or cursor.
• 16:44
  We're not a breakout.
• 16:45
  What are we do?
• 16:46
  And your options are, like, get profitable and continue to grind it out.
• 16:49
  Sell the company and partner with somebody else or maybe wind it down and return some capital.
• 16:53
  I think for most of those companies, they're just not interesting enough to the series a
• 16:57
  market to really fundraise.
• 16:59
  When I find this, you know, one of our LPs last week was like, why don't we get more of these
• 17:03
  companies to sell?
• 17:04
  We could try to make somebody sell.
• 17:05
  I haven't found that to be effective.
• 17:07
  Oftentimes, what I see happen is people try to do both and then go all in on fundraising and
• 17:12
  say, well, if I can't fundraise, then I'll sell the business.
• 17:14
  And then they come in with two months of runway, and I go, okay.
• 17:17
  We can try to sell the company.
• 17:18
  Who are we gonna sell it to?
• 17:19
  They're like, I was hoping you could tell me without Okay.
• 17:22
  Who do you know?
• 17:23
  Right.
• 17:23
  And they're like, well, I have a friend at Google.
• 17:26
  I'm like
• 17:26
  Don't we
• 17:27
  all?
• 17:27
  Don't we up.
• 17:28
  Literally no.
• 17:29
  Yawn.
• 17:29
  And oftentimes, they tell them it's very hard to buy a stranger.
• 17:32
  Nobody knows your company.
• 17:33
  Nobody knows what you do.
• 17:35
  You're asking a lot of a product manager or court dev person who's got a busy agenda and
• 17:40
  their own priorities to stop and make time for a company where they have no connection, where
• 17:44
  it's gonna be a lot of their time and energy for not a lot of money.
• 17:47
  We have a lot of companies where I think in the end, they're like, jeez, I wish I had either
• 17:51
  started building relationships with potential buyers much earlier in our company's life
• 17:55
  cycle, or I wish all the time I wasted wasted trying to hail Mary fundraise.
• 17:59
  Like, this weekend, I talked to somebody.
• 18:01
  They have two months of runway, and they've got half of the round done, and they're like, we
• 18:05
  need cash.
• 18:06
  And I was like, I don't think anyone's gonna give you money in your current form.
• 18:10
  Too little runway.
• 18:11
  It's too hard of financing.
• 18:12
  I think you could cut your burn and give yourself four to six months to operate, and
• 18:17
  maybe then we could help you raise money with a lower burn.
• 18:20
  In your current form, the company is fundable.
• 18:23
  Yeah.
• 18:23
  And every year, I get more comfortable just telling people, I think your company's
• 18:27
  unfundable in its current form.
• 18:28
  Here are the things that would have to change in terms of growth rate spend for this company
• 18:32
  to be fundable, but right now, it's unfundable.
• 18:34
  And it's not a fun message to deliver.
• 18:36
  Is there an advantage of sharing these types of options and offerings to them earlier on in the
• 18:41
  journey when it's not relevant?
• 18:42
  Or do you only share what it's feeling like it's heading that direction?
• 18:46
  I think if you bring it up too early, some founders are like, oh, you don't believe in my
• 18:49
  company.
• 18:49
  Yeah.
• 18:50
  I'm
• 18:50
  like, what I said?
• 18:51
  Right.
• 18:52
  In other cases, you can bring it up, but what I found is I can tell a founder, hey.
• 18:56
  We have eighteen months of cash.
• 18:57
  We should make sure we have a relationship with the companies that could someday be partnership
• 19:01
  buyers.
• 19:01
  And and they're like, okay.
• 19:02
  And it's important, but it's not urgent.
• 19:05
  And urgent things crowded out, and then a year later, they're like, what's your relationship
• 19:09
  with OpenAI or Google or whatever?
• 19:11
  Like, well, the time to start building that was a little bit of I mean, kinds of little things.
• 19:15
  Getting to know people in the org.
• 19:16
  If you're going to a conference where they're gonna be there, finding this isn't this doesn't
• 19:20
  have to be us.
• 19:21
  This is getting to know them, building touchpoint, having them get to know you, you
• 19:25
  get to know them so that if there is something to be done, there's a relationship.
• 19:28
  Right.
• 19:28
  And they don't have to be along a journey while the is just being made the entire time.
• 19:32
  It's really just establishing a relationship.
• 19:34
  It doesn't have to be anything transactional.
• 19:35
  What doesn't work or what doesn't feel natural is when you're rushing to do it.
• 19:39
  Then it becomes stale and uncomfortable for everyone involved.
• 19:42
  And for most of these companies, it's just not worth it for the buyer to spend a lot of time
• 19:46
  and energy because it's a small transaction, and it's a headache.
• 19:50
  And so you don't wanna be a headache.
• 19:52
  Yeah.
• 19:52
  Well, we are all out of time today.
• 19:54
  Thank you, Charles, for joining us in hot New York City this week.
• 19:58
  Thank you our listeners for stopping by.
• 20:00
  Please like and subscribe, and we'll talk with you all next week.
• 20:03
  Thank you.