Flipping the script on how tech startups are built with Amir Barsoum

So most people think that startups begin with founders, a visionary, a dream, a pitch deck. But what if that's the wrong way around? What if a smarter way is to find or start with the problem and then find the right person to solve it? And that's exactly what our today's guest does. He doesn't wait for great founders. He starts with an idea, a solution to a problem, and only then finds the right experts to turn it into a company. Hey, what's going on everyone? I'm Mike Sirius and this is Mastering Tech Growth. Every week we chat with industry leaders to bring you no-fluff tips on how to grow. If you enjoy the show, please make me a favor or do me a favor, hit that subscribe button And do send me your biggest growth challenges at masteringtechgrowth.com. I'd love to know what keeps you up at night. Joining me today is Amir Barsoom. Amir founded Fazita, the largest healthcare platform in the MENA region. He as well is a founder and a managing partner of Invitro Capital, an AI-focused venture studio that's flipping the script on how tech startups are built. What makes Invitro different is this: they find messy problems in overlooked industries, build the company in-house, and then recruit deep experts to become founder-CEOs. This is a total rethinking of the general venture model, and today Amir is going to walk us through how it works, why most people get it wrong, and what it takes to build scalable AI-powered company from scratch. Welcome, Amir.

Thank you very much, Mike, for having me. And thank you for the very clear intro. I think you have explained it most probably better than I will. So thanks for that.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm glad you enjoyed it. So we'd love to kick off with this, Amir. Question is, when I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

So when you say mastering tech growth, it always comes to my mind, are we building the products that our customers are going to pick? or are we gonna shove it in their throats, uh, by crazy marketing and sales dollars, uh, to use it? So I think, okay, are we building really exciting and attractive products that they're gonna sell easily, um, or, or it's gonna be muscular, uh, muscular act pushing it, uh, in the market? That's usually what comes to my mind.

I, I love how you put it, muscular pushing act or shoving down the throat of people. So are we saying that even bad ideas can can get marketed to the point where you're actually getting sellers?

I think sales and marketing is a very, very important pillar, what we call distribution in today's world. And I think it's very, very important. But the real, the real growth happens from referrals. The real growth happens when you sit down in a coffee shop with your friend telling them, oh my God, I use this product and it's amazing. So you want people when they buy your product and they're gonna buy it by sales and marketing, but when they use it, they start talking about it and that's the real growth. So that's how we think about it.

Okay. So two approaches. Effectively, you're saying the best one is that you actually have a solution to a problem and you're having people's willingness to pay for that. Like, that's the best way we go forward, or that's what comes to your mind when you think about mastering tech growth?

Completely. 100%. You know, one of the things that we do is we build products, we identify very clear pain, and we start talking to our clients and customers or the potential ones about this pain. We start building products and then we give it to them and we tell them, what do you think? Are you willing to pay or buy it? And the team that is using that is not, say, the marketing team. We don't try very beautiful emails where We don't build very beautiful websites. We're actually going super dummy to these potential clients, and we're using mainly product people and the ones who are behind building this product. And if we end up getting 10 to 20 paying clients, that's when we look at it like, okay, the pain is now proven and the solution it seems to be something acceptable. And usually the solution is honestly underbuilt. It's not a solution that you can really go shout about it in the market. And then we say, okay, now we have sold this product, let's build it. So we go take a step back and we tell these 10 paying clients we are going to build the product together. And when we build it, we usually give them a very strong credit in the future because they are the early ones and we build with them. So we go tell them what what do you think about that? Oh, add this, remove this, this doesn't solve the problem, this solves the problem. And we go back and forth, back and forth, and until these 10 paying clients, they say, oh my God, we love it, let's move to the next step. Okay. And that's when we say this is ready for distribution.

This is a very nice process. I want to say like stepping stones going from, from, you know, -1 to 0, from, and then from 0 to more. So you mentioned clear pain points and you're having conversations and you mentioned super dummy approach. Just give us more insight what that actually means in practice.

I think this term that I'm gonna use now, I think it has been used million times before, the hypothesis-driven startup or hypothesis-driven innovation. We have a hypothesis.

Yeah.

Um, and this hypothesis could come from one of three areas. Either comes from research. We do research and analysis on a particular industry, and then we identify a pain. So a hypothesis about the pain, or someone who's an insider from the industry, um, and approaches us and say, oh my God, this is a clear pain in this industry. Or a visionary person in the team who's moving around and say, oh, I can see this is a real pain that we should solve. So it's hypothesis. You take this hypothesis, write it down, Um, and then you start meeting the clients who are relevant to this hypothesis. And we have a very interesting way that we ask them, what are your biggest two pains? If our pain that we have identified is 70%, uh, in, in an unaided manner, uh, came up as one of these two pains, unaided. So I'm not gonna tell you, you have a problem in cost management of your healthcare professionals. I'm not gonna tell you that. I'm gonna ask an open-ended question. What are your biggest problems? And if you tell me, um, out of the two, 70% of the times it's actually, uh, the pain that you're talking about, then it's a pain.

70%.

Now that's a pain.

Okay, so, so you ask questions and 7 times out of 10 they need to hit your hypothesis, and then you go like, okay, that's validated.

Which is in reality it's 7 out of 20 because I give you two pains.

Okay. Okay, right.

So out of that, I asked 10 people, uh, the— each one of them would give you 2 pains or 2 problems they're facing in their market. So I, I collect 20 pains or 20 problems, um, and out of those, I want to get 7 out of the 20, which is basically 7 out of the 10 people I identified this— have identified this pain.

How do you call it? How do you get the people? I mean, like, how do you target? You just go on LinkedIn and you go like, okay, uh, hypothesis around ideal customer persona, and you just reach Like, do you like a cold outreach or do you have, uh, you know, maybe a different process for that?

So we're, we're Venture Studio and Venture Builder, right?

Yeah.

The first company was like that. The second company was our current customer from the previous Portico or from the Portico number one and some LinkedIn. The third, more and more from the previous Portico's customers and some, some outreach. And now we are at the company number five. So I would say 80% is from referrals, network, previous customers, and 20% is this outreach. We always say we always need new ones. So there is no positive bias to tell us we love you guys.

So yes, exactly. Yeah.

So we don't want to get what we call the fake positive results. So we always get at least 20% people we have never talked to before.

Yeah, I get you. Well, on the, on that, I have this quote from CB Insights: 35% of startups fail because there is no market need, often because the founder doesn't deeply understand the problem they are trying to solve. Effectively, what that is saying is that a lot of founders just go after a hypothesis without actually validating if they're solving an existing problem and especially if someone is willing to pay for that problem. So in your approach where you flip the switch, right, you go like, hey, we have a problem, we have hypothesis, we're first going to validate it, and then we're going to find the person to sort of build that out for us. What type of results are you seeing, you know, compared to that other approach where people just build stuff first?

So the, the I think it really depends on what you're building. Let's assume we're 10 years ago and we're thinking of building OpenAI. Um, I think it's hypothesis-driven approach that you cannot test unless you have a very, very superior product. Uh, because if you test the superior product, it's not going to work. If the product is not superior, it's not going to work. It doesn't mean that the market wouldn't need it. Uh, so there's type of companies that you need to build superior product, but I think these companies go the venture capital path. They should not go to the venture studio or even the bootstrapping path. But then there are other companies where the problem is there. And I kind of believe the bigger problem is whether your solution will fix the problem or not. Because the problem, it's rarely in my, in my world, when you say that there's a problem and you go test it, it's usually a problem. But the question is, is the solution solving the problem or not? And what we have seen is we've tried 6 companies. 4 of them did fascinatingly well and 2 flopped, didn't work out. We— I think the pain was there, but I think the solution didn't work. The solution didn't click. The solution wasn't relevant to the needs of the customer. One of them is a recruitment platform. It didn't work and it's absolutely fine. One of them was operating in the B2B brokerage space, companies selling to each other. I think the solution didn't work rather than the identification of the pain. And I will tell you why the solution doesn't work. The solution doesn't work if the solution is too foreign to your customers of how to use it. Like, it's too foreign. We're not ready to do these kind of things at this stage. Or if the solution is not monumentally different than what they're doing today. So I will give you an example. If somebody comes and tells me, I'm using SDRs to generate leads, and then somebody comes and says, I'm going to give you an AI SDRs, but then the price point is 20% different, productivity is maybe 10% plus or minus, I don't think that's going to work. People are not going to change, and clients are not going to change, including myself. If I'm client to others, I'm not going to change the way I'm doing business unless there is a monumental difference, um, in the impact and the cost. I would say both of them.

So monumental, let's define that monumental. Like, how much do you actually need of that change to, to, to qualify as monumental? Is that like double, triple, more times?

I think anything that's less than 50% cost reduction, or which is in another way 2x productivity or outcome, I think it's, it's, it doesn't have, it doesn't have a play.

Yeah. Okay. So effectively we're saying that validating, uh, problem space or pain points is actually not that difficult and likely what we're building out has some type of validated hypothesis, but where we see people or startups tripping is actually delivering a solution in such a way that it has that, as you put it, monumental impact. So it actually sticks and people are ready to buy into it and onboard it and change, well, their ways of doing business.

That's exactly the case. Yeah, that's exactly the case.

So how, like, how do you guys, does the founder insights, so if we go to the next step, right? So let's say you're going after the idea, you're building a product, now you need that deep level expert, right? So you're looking for that founder to put into that business. Is it possible that, you know, the founder just doesn't have enough knowledge and that's why the product doesn't come up out as good? It's like, what would be the reason of not reaching that monumental impact as a product?

You know, when I started Visita, for example, I can't do everything. I need money. I need money to have somebody who would help me in sales, somebody would help me in product, somebody would help me in engineering, somebody would help me in marketing. I need cash. So you go and raise venture capital money and you start deploying this capital by hiring these great people who are gonna help you. Hopefully. And then that this group of people are supposed to start helping each other go and get clients and have these conversations. And here I think it's the dilemma. One, you, you get caught up by the PR announcement that I have raised $5 million, I've raised $50 million, and I've raised $100 million, and this becomes a target, unintentional or intentional. Two, it's not one person who's doing the job, it's actually 5. Now we have different opinions, different thought process, and it becomes, you know, you're creating unintentional bureaucracy despite the team is very, very small. And the third issue that we used to see is we are— the clarity just goes away a bit because the CEO has spent his entire time trying to fundraise, and now he has somebody he needs to talk to and tell him how things are going after I did the fundraising. And then I go to the team and it starts— it becomes very, very challenging process. And, and the thing of what we are thinking about is we're gonna avail resources and we're gonna, we're gonna hire somebody. Sometimes we call them an operating partner, sometimes he's a founding CEO, depends how he want to take his role. And we tell him, you're— you do whatever you want, pull the resources that you need, no time pressure. And no exposure pressure. I think the biggest issue is the exposure pressure. When I go and say I'm the founder— I'm the founder, CEO of startup XYZ, I have a very strong bias to make my hypothesis work. But if I am pre the step and I haven't been exposed, I'm under an umbrella and I can play around with an idea, one idea, two idea, three, I have actually a strong bias to only move forward with an idea that I think is very strong.

I see.

Because there's no push. You see the difference? So I think that is the very big difference in, in, in how we think about it. And by the way, we did this mistake. We did the mistake. We basically said, you know what, I'm gonna get this guy. We really like him. He's a founder CEO and we're gonna tell him you're not hired on Invitro Capital. You are hired on Startup. X and the problem happened. The two companies that we've mistaken in, that's exactly what happened. This, this company's flopped. And when we did it the other way around, they played around with the concept. They are not at the exposure risk. They always, they don't want to push forward unless there is something that's very, very powerful. And that's what happened.

So that's a learn from failure type of situation. So that's a very, very great advice coming from, from the field. To our listeners. So thanks for sharing that one. Um, can you, um, can you define—

and Mike, yep, sorry, I want to add something if you, if you don't mind. Um, it's not only learning from the failure, it is, it, it is I have no ticking clock and no exposure point that allows me to fine-tune every single piece, change here and there, up and down, left and right, until I find the place that works very well, rather than I'm gonna push, push, push because I've already done fundraising, I've already put my name on the company, I've already been— I'm now out and I have no chance not to keep it. So yeah, just a little bit of a— which is building on the, on the, on the, on the failure, of course. But it's really more about the— there is no pressure to push forward something that is undercooked. That makes sense.

I think there's this saying which says working on your business instead of working in your business. I always feel like if there's a business as usual operation pressure to perform, you want it or not, you get sucked to operate in the business as a CEO. And your role should be a little bit at the distance. Like you have to have some space to actually think well strategically about what you're doing. And once you get sucked into these operations because of that pressure to perform or hit some targets on revenues or whatnot, you sort of lose that sight of actually seeing.

I agree.

Is it the best way to do things, right? So you sort of, you're fixing that, right? And that's why the model is now a lot more successful, which is great. Is it possible? I mean, define a founder CEO, Amir. It's like I have a couple of examples where a very, very well-positioned startup in 2018 was performing very, very well because we were first to market with a good solution. We have very little competition. So we were doing very well. And then of course, market, you know, as it does, it started showing a lot more competition because people started filling the gaps. And at that point, things were not going that well. And then one of the founders effectively went like, "I'm a CEO, I want to be CEO," but he wasn't a CEO and it just didn't go anywhere. So my question is effectively, is it possible that you hire someone as a founder CEO, but they don't really end up being a good operator and that becomes the reason of why it flops?

There is no doubt about that. And so we build for profitability. We are eyeing companies and we build companies that in 3 years' time, they're going to be cash flow positive. We want to build real businesses. We don't want to build businesses that are going to pay back in 10 years' time. We want a business that will pay back in 3 to 4 years' time.

And that's like non-negotiable, Amir? Like, either you make it—

Absolutely non-negotiable. Okay. And we have a very strict timeline for that, that we kill companies if they don't follow the— if they're not achieving these milestones. And when we kill companies, doesn't mean that we let go of the team. We actually recycle the team into another one that we don't think that this is gonna achieve the milestone. And if you put a strong talent with a strong relevant experience. In this mindset, you're gonna evolve into becoming a CEO. The problem with the tech world is that the fundamentals of running a company changes because you are, you wanna exit a billion dollar. And if you want to exit the billion dollar, you need to be growing like crazy. Growing like crazy means burning like crazy. Burning like crazy, which is a mistake that I have fallen into, by the way. Burning like crazy makes you stop acting like a CEO and you start acting— you do two things. What is the P&L of a company? It's revenues, cost, and then the outcome is revenues minus cost. Okay, you basically start looking at revenues and not cost, and basically you are a half CEO. And when the time comes, and can you look at both, it's over. You have— this talent has been doing it in the wrong way, and he doesn't know how to manage this in another way. He doesn't know how to get a, a smaller office. He doesn't know how to hire people without giving them, uh, 50% above market salaries. He doesn't know, um, how to, um not to live, not in the media of the PR, you know, I've raised $50 million, he doesn't know how to do that, and then you're grounding them to reality, and they just don't know how to be grounded in reality, so that's one issue that I think the Venture Studio model is fixing, but there's another part, which is what you're talking about, still, despite all of that, you can find somebody who's not a good operator, and we have defined a good operator, we have 7 pieces, I don't know if I remember them all, but some of these pieces are the following, one, A good operator or a good CEO is either sales or engineer. Anything else for us is a waste of time and waste of effort and waste of money. Uh, you need to be sales or an engineer. And if I would choose, I would choose the sales guy because the sales guy will go to the market with the hypothesis of the pain, then the hypothesis of the solution, build this relation, come back to his team and build build it out. So this is a very big thing. So I think that's one. Two, their capacity to hire a very strong second man or second woman or second player in their organization who is very strong, who can actually have a conversation, say no, and not get intimidated by that. I think it's a very big factor of how you are, you can be a great operator. The third, I'm not gonna go through the seventh, I'm just gonna say the third, is really, really resourceful. When the team comes in and say, we have a problem, he basically puts on his gadgets and go to the field to fix the problem. He gets his hands dirty. He is not a person who tells you what to do, he's a person who would do it so that his team can follow. And I think that's a very big trait, which usually makes people coming from corporate need to go through the unlearn process before the learning process.

I love how you put it, unlearn process before the learning process. And I experienced the same thing when you're coming from enterprise environments and you suddenly go like, well, you know, I was working with like so many people for this billion type of business. I'm sure I can run a startup with 5 people or 10 people. And then you come in, it's just different room. It's a different ballgame. Different things matter. So you mentioned growth. Well, I put a note growth at all costs because when you were talking about being a half CEO where you just concentrated on growth and selling and selling, what came to my mind is like 2020-ish market where we had just huge valuations across the market and everyone was just growth at all costs. It was just grow, grow, grow. And then interest rates suddenly changed and people remember and that margins exist and, and then it should just get killed. Like half of the businesses just went under because overleveraged debt and stuff like that, right? So we're drifting a little bit, but I love you mentioning these negotiables because I had that question, like, what makes a good operator? And do you guys have non-negotiables when you, when you sort of look at the founder to, to, to take on your ideas? So you mentioned 7, you gave us 3, um, These are all very, very excellent. Can I actually ask why you prefer sales? Is it only because they can just sell and get the revenue or is there some other reasons?

I think sales is the capacity to build bridges with your clients and your customers. And this is the bridge where information will flow through. I always think there's engineering here. There is customer here, and there's the bridge, which is the guy who's doing this, what you call it, what I call it sales or call it relationship building.

Okay.

And then information will flow. I take the information from the customer, give it to my engineer in a very crisp approach, concise and crystal clear style.

Okay.

Take the product that was built and give it to the customer and tell him, try to use that. You keep doing this 10 times, 20 times, 30 times. And then you would end up having something that is very powerful and you can go to the market with. That's not only the engineering side, but then after a time there is the pricing. What pricing works, what pricing doesn't work. Also the messaging. I tried it yesterday and I'm gonna try it to a different thing tomorrow. You, these are the kind of things, these are the kind of playbooks that you need to say, you know, I did the product, I did the pricing, I did the messaging, I did the channel that they're gonna reach out my customers, who's gonna test all of this. I think it's a salesperson, um, who is capable of having conversations, um, building relation, opening the doors, going through the door, sitting down on the chair, having this conversation, taking it back to the engineer and doing, uh, and building this.

Okay, I get you. I, I as well, I'm not arguing. I, I fully believe that sales as a function, or even if we don't put the label as sales, someone who can build relationships which effectively is a big element to sales because it is ultimately about a relationship. People buy from people, right? They don't buy from logos. So you build those relationships, which just opens the door to so many things from having conversations to closing deals. And you mentioned engineers as a second. So that's very interesting to me. Why engineers? And are we talking about engineers who do things hands-on, like we're talking like car engineers, or are we talking more about like software engineers who like write code and build like online products, or it doesn't matter?

So, uh, so I think it's not second. I think they are equal to each other.

Equal to each other. Yeah.

But if I— but I would say the two most important players in the company is sales and engineering. And engineering, I mean software development if the company is building technology product.

Yep.

If the company is building distribution product, then you need an operations guy. But let's call it the technical guy, the guy who would deliver will give you the product, right? If the company is doing healthcare, then he's the physician, right? It's just the product that you're going to build and ship it to the market. They're equal. The only difference is responsibility. The one who is doing the sales is the one who's going to do the project management because the other one is caught up in building this product. So that's the way we think about it. And I think, okay, you I think the software development is in our context here is what I meant by engineering. So the software engineer, software development engineer who one is up to date, excited about the product he's building and he's very strong in his technical skills that allows him to build whatever the sales side is aiming to build, but also capable of having conversations about how about we don't build this piece, we build it this way, it's going to give us significantly better outcome than this way. So again, there is this skill set of understanding the problem and the technicalities that's needed to build the product to solve this problem.

Okay, I love that. So what— let's say we have our founder CEO, you know, he's either or her sales or engineering. So they will need to have as well a good skill, talent, sort of attraction skills to hire their right hand, which probably will be again either sales or engineering depending on the first one, right? So you'll have your sort of like CXO or founder level. So what type of operational support you guys usually provide as a venture studio to that initial team? It's like where most gaps statistically speaking are once you get the founder. Setup?

So we, we provide them with— so think about a company. Company needs the back office operations. It needs the HR, the payroll, the, um, the work and comp, the insurances, the offices, the recruitment muscles, the finance, the legal, all of these pieces. So we, we provide all of that. Uh, and then there is the second one, which I think is the most important piece. Is access to strong base of clients and customers that you can actually start with and build the outreach and the concept, access to other founders and operators in the organization that could give you referrals and connections in different pieces. So really, we work as a team despite we're different portfolio companies. The company now is— so a lot of our companies are actually cross-selling clients to each other. So that's the second part. The third part is, I would call it optional. You can use our performance marketing expertise, the centralized expertise, the SEO centralized expertise, content leadership if you want. If you don't, your call. We want them to build it and think of it the way they want to do it. We give these resources, it's kind of pull if you need or you don't. SDR, base of sales that helps in lead gen. So we have like a list of 8 services, they can pull in whatever they want to pull in. Usually they pull them all in in the very beginning, and then while they're moving with time, they say, you know what, I want to do this in a very different way. I was like, be our guest.

So how does that relationship work, Amir? What is the setup? Is that you become a partner, which they still need to pay from the revenue they're getting with the startup? Or is it just— or is this like no cost? You just go like, look, you are now under umbrella on Invitro Capital, so you just go do your thing and, you know, here's all the resource or process help you can get, and they just sort of go get that.

So what the most important thing is, I want them to think as full CEOs, not half CEOs. So I tell them, you focus on the revenues, but also every resource you're going to pull will have a cost. Of course, I want you to look at the cost from a virtual P&L. I'm not going to ask you to pay for it, but it's a P&L that I wanted to see. What are you doing to your P&L? And we have something called Data Room. Every company has its Data Room, which basically shows on a daily basis is how much we have generated today, how much we spend to generate this, and what's our burn or what's our net cash flow positive. And we do it on a cash basis, Data Room. And the idea is to see how you can— if you multiply this by 100, well, it's going to be widely successful, or actually it's still going to be in the red.

Yeah.

And what do we need to fix based on that? So in mindset, we charge them at cost. Exactly what the customer will do. But do they pay for it? No, they don't. But virtually, that's how we operate it.

So with the data room, do you guys have any potential like AI predictive analytics going like, oh, you're going and trending to the right side or you're on the right path? Or look, if you continue doing this, like that's not sustainable business model.

We, we don't, we don't have predictable analytics. We have, we are building our own tool now. Today we are working with a very simple straight tools. We collect data from different sources and we have a usually a young junior data person that collect them, put them on an Excel. And this is our data room. Now we are converting this Excel into an AI product. And by the way, that could end up being company number 5.

Yeah. Let's talk about AI.

That's how we operate.

Yeah.

That's how we operate. That's how we think about it.

Well, that's how Amazon did it as well, isn't it? Like any internal things they needed, they just made it into a service eventually and sold it. Yeah. So let's talk about AI, Amir. So you guys are AI heavy. You look a lot into AI. So what's exciting to you right now? Like when you look at the market, what type of if you can disclose what type of hypotheses you guys chasing, what you believe market needs right now when it comes to AI.

So I think the biggest evolution that's going to happen in the coming 10 years is changing the jobs of today that is done by humans to make it basically executed and done by AI. And I do not envision this leading to unemployment. I'm actually envisioning this is the growth of the market size. Before, we used to increase the market size by basically adding software and creating some efficiencies. And I think this is going to be accelerated by 10, 20x. Instead of having one person who's making 40 phone calls as a customer care, he's gonna be moving to a team lead and he's gonna be managing 40 AI agents to be doing that. And you will end up growing the market and enhancing the productivity significantly by doing that. So the reality is really what, what you can move from being done by humans to be done by, by AI solutions. And that would increase productivity dramatically, reduce cost dramatically, and also increase the quality of jobs in the market. So instead of you're doing the repetitive, um, unorchestrated jobs, the jobs that are more repetitive, that doesn't have a lot of sophistication, is that you're going to be managing AI agents is going to be doing that. And hence you are actually availing very different type of quality of jobs, which is what we have been seeing in the last— and again, in the different evolutions, um, of the previous generations. I think that's what's coming into the, into the coming generation. That is what excites us a lot. I'll just give you an example. Legal. Think about legal. You could go back and forth, uh, with a legal attorney again 70, 80 times to produce and maybe 20 times to produce a contract that is fantastic contract to use. And you're going to pay crazy amount of dollars. Is there a, is there a world that we're seeing this will be done by AI agents and then the legal attorney would have a look at the end of that so the legal attorney can do way more number of contracts. And, and on the other side, per contract, the pay is dramatically lower. We're definitely seeing this going to happen very, very soon. And you can apply this on different jobs and different functions. And even the physical things, I think robots will come in, which is also part of the things that we are looking into now.

I love you calling that out, and I share that vision very strongly as well. Where I spend majority of my time is what is called agentic automation. And effectively, you have just automation workflows, and that's not new. Automation was with us for like, uh, 2 decades now. Uh, but what became very, very cool is that in your automation workflows, you know, you can add AI agent and you can train that agent, uh, to make decisions for you. It's not— I mean, you can put a general like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, any of the big LLMs to make these decisions for you, but you can as well take a LLM and train on your own information and your own data. So the decisions they will be making will not be, uh, with potential of hallucination. They gonna be making decisions on your information. And they do make those decisions, which again advances your automation workflows to the next level. So suddenly, you know, you have thinking in your workflows where before that it was just, uh, you know, like almost like a binary execution of the workflows where now you're adding some brains. And in the very beginning, you talked about formulating hypotheses. So what I have and how we prepare two episodes and how we look at trends is that this is a fully automated workflow with the Genting AI unit is that we follow what people talk on Reddit. So we follow, you know, entrepreneur subreddit and some others ones, and we see what type of topics people are posting. So we take the comments as well. And all that workflow effectively has a Genting AI to spit out good topics. And then once we have good topics, we actually go to LinkedIn to find people to talk about that. And that's just all, you know, fully automated and it just spits out me like a report I can manually look at. So that's very awesome. And you mentioned as well sales call. So I did the test on that and I actually took all my guests, I put their phone numbers and instead of having an AI chatbot, which you, you know, everybody has AI chatbots, it's very easy to plug and play right now. You just take the same AI chatbot. But what they say back, you put it through voice, you put it through AI voice, and then you just make a phone call and allow people to have a chat with chatbots, right? So you can do the same for sales. It didn't really work that well, if I'm being honest. I feel like there's a couple of steps to actually get these agents to the point where they can actually close deals on a phone call. But we are getting on the show a cold caller expert who's going to sort of talk about this topic a little bit more. But it's very, very exciting how As you rightfully put it, people will become orchestrators of these AI agents. Or they're like digital assistants or digital coworkers or digital colleagues. It's a very, very exciting picture. So from that perspective, Amir, how you—

A comment on this.

Yeah, go.

You know, we have been living in a world which in my very, very simple terms, when you were using to build technology, before, I call it the if conditional technology where you basically say, let's assume I'm building a customer care agent. In the previous world, I'm going to tell them if the client tells you I have a problem and blah, blah, blah, send them to the support, the second level support. If the client says do, do that. It's an if conditional kind of thing. So it depends on the number of if conditions and how they are orchestrated together. You can actually build an efficient one. And for that, it has very, very strong limitations. And that was the previous world. So we never really created AI agents. And then today you don't tell the agent the if conditional. You actually tell the agent, learn from how we responded before and think towards this outcome. So you start telling it, this is the outcome I want you to achieve in the call. These are the parameters that I want to respect and go have fun. That has changed the world dramatically because all of a sudden My agent can handle implicitly millions of if-conditional, and he can actually think pretty much like us. There is some hallucination, but guess what? We ourselves hallucinate. We ourselves get angry on the phones. We may not pick up the phone because we needed to go to the restroom, or I'm coughing so I can't take the phone, or I'm sick. That is the evolution that's coming our way. And I think the person who used to do the call, the call, he has immense expertise that we need him to manage these AI agents. Otherwise, who gonna do that? You need this person. So you kind of upgraded the quality of the job of humans and you've given the very repetitive thing to, to AI agents. So I, I think honestly it's gonna be, it's, we're gonna see things that 2 years ago would have thought of it as science fiction, I think we're going to see it as reality.

Yeah, it's very exciting vision. And I think the quality of services will go up simply because of the human error, you know, removal, which is one of the bigger promises of agentic AI. And we actually have had a founder and CEO of a of a very big call center in United States called Regal. And he was like, look, I'm going to tell you that people will prefer AI agents for support than humans. And I was like, hmm, I'm not sure. Like if I'm talking with like Amazon support right now, I actually don't like its AI agent because I don't feel like it knows what I'm saying and I just want a human to look at it. And he was saying, it's just a matter of time. Just give it a couple more years and they will do such a— so much better job and so much quicker that we'll not have these wait queues, you know, you like in the line 6 to 8 and stuff like that. So it's very— yeah, very cool to see where we're going to go. So now I have this question, Amir. When you look at the hypothesis and you look for these new things to build out, I'm sure you have some type of decision checklist or prism how you look at the problem space and you go like, you know what, this is good for AI, or you know what, this is not really good for AI as a case to sort of resolve and build business upon?

So I will say something, and I think it's— I think there's a lot of hype on AI, but I still think looking at what things could be done, I could even think that still until today it's underhyped. I don't think there is anything you should look at and say this is not supposed to be done by AI. It's a very wide blanket technology, very wide blanket technology that can accommodate and it's not gonna work alone. AI still needs the front end and you build, but it's the brain that you are deploying, and anything in technology, there is some piece of AI should be used or deployed. Otherwise, you're missing massively. There's very little I would say AI should not be deployed at. And I think of AI from a technology perspective. You use AI to develop, which is the AI coder and AI development tools. And there is also AI as the brain of your software, not of the development. You build AI because it's the brain and it's going to build you the product and the solution itself. And I think between both of them, there is— I would say you're going to touch every single piece of the tech that you're going to build. It's going to work in ranking algorithm. It's going to work in matching. It's going to work in bookings. It's going to work in prediction. It's going to work in data analytics. It's going it's going to work in presentation, it's going to work in communication. It's— there's very little things that you wouldn't see AI acting on and or playing a very significant and transformational impact on what we are seeing today and on what used to say yesterday.

Okay, so you're effectively saying you don't dismiss any use cases as a potential to get solved by AI. Okay.

No.

What about something which depends on a lot of data simply from the cost perspective?

So I, I alone, I don't think it's going to be enough. There's, there's a lot of things that needs to be handled and done by that. And data in it particularly is actually the feeder to, to build a great AI product, right? So you structure the data in a way that it feeds your AI agents or your, or your different tools that you're using so that you can end up actually having smarter, better decision-making agents. I think we're gonna— it's, it's very, very relevant. Uh, cost management of AI and whether this would end up being very expensive or not, it's— we are yet to see. We are, we are, we are living in the world of, of a, of a race for the energy and the cost of energy production. And I think the— with time, the more we fix that, the more the AI and the use cases at the large, large grand scheme of things will, will go dramatically down. Uh, but, but I'm very— I have an immense belief that this is the direction we're going to. And if somebody is building for today's cost, he is going to be missing out. We should be building for tomorrow's cost, and I think tomorrow's cost would be significantly lower.

Oh, I love how you put that. Don't build for today's cost, build for tomorrow's cost, because AI cost or AI cost, but the cloud computing cost to actually run your training modules will significantly go down.

Go down.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, they will. I mean, honestly, everything goes down eventually, right? Like technology cost, it grows exponentially in its capabilities and the cost actually goes exponentially down in its cost. We have seen that over and over again. That's a very nice shout. I wasn't thinking like this. I mean, yeah, you just made my mind go places. I love that. All right. So, so we have the cases. We're not dismissing any cases. So I want to pick as well how you guys do in, in in vitro with, uh, exit planning. So let's say you, you start something, you know, you got from -1 to 0. So you, you confirmed the hypothesis, you got your founding team, things are going quite well. Maybe you're building something, you know, in AI space. So that's very nice. Exciting. At that point in time, do you think about exits? You know, you, you have that non-negotiable, uh, 3 years being profitable. What about exits?

So we, we, we build for profitability, and when we are profitable, that's when we start thinking about what kind of exit options we have. I think we have 3 types of exit options in what we're looking at, either It's a company that we want to hold and we don't want to exit, where most probably for anyone who has co-invested with us, we— and wants to exit, we're gonna do capital restructuring. And there's one company that we have, we are going through this, and towards the end of this year, we're going to exit our investors, uh, who have, uh, on an average, they made 8x in 3 years. Um, um, so capital restructuring is one thing. To exit to— and by the way, I'm doing it in a scaled, scale-up manner. So this is the first type. The second type is to exit to private equity because we are profitable and we build companies that are quite sizable but not crazily overvalued. It's actually very, very reasonably valued. It's a fantastic partner and fantastic feeder to private equity firms. Who are in turn are also seeing significant decline in the potential candidate of companies that they can buy. They have a lot of dry powder and they're looking for players like us. So that's the second player. Or third, which is the largest and usually the most, the best returning capital, is to sell to a strategic And these are the three pieces that we are looking at. If you are going to exit, play portico by portico. So I think that's what's in our mind.

Okay. Can you talk a little bit about capital restructuring? That just— once you mentioned, I just remembered this horror story where we had such a bastardized capital table that no one wanted to touch it. Like we literally had issues raising money for Series A because of mistakes done during bootstrapping phase. It had like 46 people in the cap table, you know, from 0.2 to like 1%. It was terribly done. So you mentioned that one. So how do you actually go about solving that problem? How do you restructure your cap table?

So first of all, our cap table would never have this. Our cap table usually have an SPV. Or a vehicle where if anybody wants to invest with us, they go into this SPV or this vehicle. So it ends up being one person at the cap table.

Okay.

And the SPV is managed by somebody who was the one who sits on the board. So we never have the long list of investors in these cap tables. Capital restructuring or cap table restructuring— capital restructuring is you basically go— or leveraging, you take a debt because this company is making money and all the, all the banking sectors and the lenders are willing to give you money. We take the money to buy back shares from current shareholders. So I'm gonna raise— I'm gonna take debt of $5 million or $10 million so I can buy shares from the current shareholders. And you pay this debt over the time because you are profitable entity, which is something that has nothing to do with the venture. Like, but if you think about it, the real world, that is the day-in, day-out operations. Uh, the only thing is that tech companies, they don't think of getting into cash flow positive, so this option for secondary exit doesn't happen. But that's how we, how we think about it.

Yeah, as a founder, you don't really think about these things, right? People get excited about just launching, uh, businesses They get excited about getting their idea to the world and then they sell it a couple of times and it's very exciting. But the picture of being successful business is so huge that when you think about, you know, founder and business operator, there's so much you need to know to actually compete alone against the whole market. It's insane amount of knowledge and skill that you need to have. But being a partner with such a, you know, venture studio like Invitro is just so much you take away from their plate so they can just focus on just getting the product better. I love that.

And it's, and it's, if you think about the statistics of it.

Yeah.

The number we are, the, the whole premise is instead of trying to be in the 0.0001% of the successful stories of the world, we'll give you the chance to be part of the 20% probability successful story and the yield is fantastic. Rather than losing every single thing aiming to be— to sell for $10 billion, how about you just exit making $30, $40 million because the company have exited at $150 or $200. Achievable target, no crazy risk, building real businesses. And you own your own decision. I think that's how we think about it.

Yeah, I love that. When you have this conversation with young founders, especially the ones which, you know, just sort of entering the game, they always have reservation of giving out equity and they always like, oh, you know, like, oh, if I give 10%, I'm only left with 90. Well, I mean, 100% of zero is still zero, right? And 1% of something which is $100 million, you know, that's $1 million, right? Right.

So it's like, and we don't get founders who have ideas. We build the companies first and then we go and tell Mike, would you like to join us to lead the company that we have built? That's the way we operate.

Yeah. Which is always exciting. I mean, maybe it sounds like a job proposition, but then if you dig into it, if there's equity on the table, if there's, you know, some other incentive, you know, suddenly you just become business operator. That's, you just jumped levels, right? Exactly, exactly, right? Yeah.

And we're very, very generous with this equity. So we're very generous with the equity of a hired CEO, and we call them founder CEO.

So we—

and we usually don't get the very, very young ones. We actually get the experienced ones who have been in the market for 10 to 15 years, have managed teams, and they know how to manage P&Ls, and they are very relevant to this industry. They look at what we are building and say, oh my God, I can see this. It's happening. It's very relevant. And that's how we build it from there.

That's very nice. It's a great module. I love that. And I know our listeners listening right now going like, how do you apply? Like, just tell me where I need to send my CV. You know, I want to be part of your backlog of potential founders, CEOs. How do you source these? Like, what was the process?

Send to jobs@invitrocapital.com. Go to my LinkedIn profile, send to me. I'm crazy responsive to anybody who wants to have conversations or send to info@invitrocapital.com. So we're very responsive. Our team likes the people who approach us cold. I love the cold approach. It makes me feel that they're doing their job and doing their homework. Just some cold emails come in writing our spelling wrong or basically misplacing the name of the company. If you do these things, we're not gonna respond. But if you have a thoughtful process, you understand what we offer, you tell us in concise manner why we should be thinking of you, you'll find us very, very responsive.

So that's exactly—

Info@InvitroCapital, jobs@InvitroCapital, or send to our LinkedIn profiles, we'll will always be very responsive.

We'll put this in the show notes as well, Amir. I just sort of, you know, dropped this. I was like, you know what, I will send my CV to you. I will send it tomorrow. I'll go like, look, this is what I want to do, Amir, right? All right, let's do a rapid questions round. So it's quick questions. Effectively, it's questions which I love to hear your opinion upon, which don't fully go with the topic of the theme, but I still want to sort of pick your brains, right? So what's the first sign you picked a wrong founder for a validated idea. It's like, how do you know you made a poor choice when it comes to founders?

Very contrarian. If he leaves the office at 5 PM.

If they leave the office at 5 PM. So effectively we're saying, what are we saying? Explain that. Leaves office 5 PM.

I'm saying that hard work, hard work beats smart work left, right, and center. A single time.

Right. I don't think that's contrarian. I mean, yeah, okay, we have some opinions. I like smart people. Yeah.

I like smart people, but I want to partner with hardworking people.

Yeah.

Because if you work hard for some time, you're going to become smart.

Yeah.

That's, that's basically how it works. Brain, brain is like our muscles. Just put them to work out, go and do workout. You're going to become powerful. And I think brains needs a lot of hard work. I think hard work would make it much smarter. I think anyone who joins building companies and he thinks it's an 8-hour job, I think it's an absolutely wrong hire.

Okay. So if someone looks at effectively at that opportunity you just gave them to be a founder CEO for a, for a validated idea which has huge potential and they treat it as a job. And they just clock in, clock out, that's a wrong founder CEO.

We usually, we usually, yeah, we would usually proceed to, yeah, we don't think this is the right match.

Yeah. Culturally unfit. You're not a culture fit.

I think actually, I think you're not a culture fit, but most importantly, you're gonna fail and you're gonna take us with you down. Yeah. Nobody builds his own business or build company from ground. And by the way, it's not only about the founder. Every single person who works in Invitro Capital, we tell them this is not an 8-hour job. This is not a job you're going to get equity in something that has been validated. We're expecting you to build this with, with your heart and excitement, and you need to have the mindset of putting the hard work. And I think it's— there's almost like if they don't want to do that, it's fair and it's respectful. It's just not for them.

Yeah, I get that. And you have some, you know, work-life type of balance situations. And, you know, I've seen some books as well. I never read these books myself where they talk about 2 hours, 4 hours type of week and do work. I just sort of had like a glimpse and chat with some people advertising, you know, for such a lifestyle. And I subscribe to the, you know, to the hard work type of domain. You know, maybe, maybe it's a workaholic perspective, but I as well, I don't believe that you can achieve a lot by putting less time in it, right?

And I think if you're, I think, I think those who talk about the 4-hour, 6-hour days or the 4-day week, whatever, I think it's fantastic advertisement because people want to hear that.

Yeah.

And they say, yes, these employers are bad and whatever, but we all know that this is, I think this is like.

Yeah.

The second thing, if you enjoy what you're doing, you wouldn't have the feeling that it's work-life balance. It's a work-life integration, which I've read in one of the people's posts, I think 2-3 days ago. I think it's work and life are interlinked. If you are unhappy at your work, you're not gonna be happy at home, you're not gonna be happy with your friends, and the other way around. And after working 2-3 years, people at work become your friends. And I think there's— enjoy what you're doing. You wouldn't feel that you're working if you're not enjoying what you're doing. Anyhow, this is also another sign that it's not for you.

Yeah, it's going to be a pain if you don't enjoy working. And then you see those titles and you want to move away from pain, which effectively is only two— it's only two big motivations we have as a human, right? Is moving away from pain or moving towards the pleasure. So, you know, you see someone saying you can be you know, rich and have Lamborghinis with 4 hours a week, of course you're gonna click on it. Like, you're gonna buy that book, you'll read it. But yeah, I did— yeah, don't subscribe to it as well. I'm still to see a person, um, achieving a lot with such module, right? And when I say a lot, it's like going from -1 to 0, right? So right now you're at the point you don't have millions, you don't have any passive income, so you don't have luxury to sort of sit on your ass. Like, your time equals the money you make. I never seen people in that area doing like 2 hours and somehow becoming millionaires. I, I, I did see people that have a couple in my network where they reached a point where they have, you know, passive income from like dividends and as well royalties and things like that where they can allow themselves to think more and do less. But then as well, they have like bunch of virtual assistants which do the job for them. So they're just leveraging, you know, the money to buy the time, right? But ultimately there's still someone doing the work. Like it's just so not possible, right? Without doing the work. Okay, cool. Uh, what's a very common mistake people make when they try to follow the Venture Studio model you have seen?

Is that they build their companies and they go pitch it to venture capital firms. I think this is a very unique type of Venture Studio. And I think if anyone who wants to work for a company that thinks that venture studio is going to accelerate the seed stage, then he needs to be very picky about that. The venture studio does that. A company like Invitro Capital, we build companies for profitability and hence it's not designed to the typical venture capital kind of deal making. I think this is something we have seen and we are educating the market about. That we're building for profitability, we're building for building businesses that are sustainable, not businesses where their job is to keep on financing and fundraising.

Okay, I love that. What's one repeatable system every early stage startup should have by month 3? I actually showed 2, by month 3. So one quarter in, what type of system should you have?

As a type of a software to use?

No, it's just like repeatable automated type of workflow, which potentially says that, you know, you're doing well, cold outreach, lead generation, support, or whatever, in your view?

I think, yeah, I think in month 3, every, every company, every person in the company should have a methodology to do at least 3 to 5 outreach every single day.

Okay. So we're saying basically—

I'm not talking about salespeople.

Yeah.

Yeah. Have a process that people gather every 3 months, sit down, sorry, after 3 months, they gather every 2, 3 weeks, sit down together and say, how many outreach have done? How many outreach have done? How many outreach have done? What happened there? People do the outreach themselves with their own hands.

Yeah.

And it's not dependent on any person. Everybody in the organization should do that. Everybody.

I love that. So we're basically saying, make sure you're having conversations with the market in a nutshell.

Yes.

Okay, cool. What does a studio-ready founder look like on day one?

Um, a studio-ready founder is exactly the same thing as, um, so it's, it's a founder plus one year. It's usually we save the first, or plus two years. We're basically saying, I want you to come in willing to roll up your sleeve, uh, go to the market, continue building the great product, building bridges, uh, and I think the mindset that I'm going to, to basically look at life in day by day, it's not even weeks. In this day, what did I achieve? And next day, what did I achieve? Third day, whatever. It's really the— this is the hyper mode because we get the founders and the CEOs at the moment when we say this is ready to go to the market and go build client base as fast as you can. Okay, so it's the mindset.

So it's sort of like, uh, competitive bias towards action type of personality, just like a go-getter, right?

Like a go-getter and the winner mindset.

Yeah.

And would never take no for an answer and keep pushing this product, but also have the mindset of reiterating the process, reiterating the product so that it makes the go-to-market easier and easier and easier.

Okay. It's excellent. What's one question every founder should ask before applying AI? To their workflows.

Why I haven't done this one year ago? What mistake I have done? That makes me wait all of this time.

I love that. What did I learn from not doing this yesterday?

Exactly.

I love that one. What should every startup have in place before talking to strategic acquirers?

I'll say something very interesting here in my view. They need to be in a place that they don't need to talk to the strategic acquirers. Okay, build a company that you don't need to talk to. If you go there while you're burning cash, God be with you. If you're going there in a very strong position, you're growing, they should be willing and excited to talk to you. Both cases happens, both case end up actually in succeeding. If you are not burning cash and growing, that is the place you should go to talk to strategic acquirers.

Okay. So we're saying basically be in a position where, where cards are in your hands, because that's likely going to lead to a much better negotiation for you otherwise.

Yeah. And don't play poker. It's not, it's not like you playing the smart, the smart dude in the room. It's not going to work. Strategic acquirers are slow. The people that you are talking to are employees, even if they're very senior. There is no time rush that they need to deliver on. Yeah, you are— if you are the one who have the time rush, you have lost. I mean, go with optionalities.

Exactly. Have options. 100%. Yeah, I felt— I mean, yeah, we raised a couple of times from a position of weakness. It's just terrible. I mean, you don't get what you want. It just feels shit as well because you're getting just You know, it's— yeah, it's just not great. All right, what's one mindset shift that helps non-founders become successful startup CEOs?

I think we talked about it. I'm— by the way, I'm crazy about the hard— about the hard work thing. I'm crazy about it.

So we should be crazy about it.

Like, if I'm vocal about it and I'm not shying away from being vocal about it, I think do not ever touch this world unless you're willing to put 10, 12 hours a day. Just don't. It's not, it's gonna be, it's gonna be misery. This is the reality. And it's not the 8 to become 9. No, it is a lot of work, a lot of work, uh, because if you— and it's not, it's not by this, it's not like you should do that. It's, that's what happens. Um, you don't have enough resources to hire every hire you need. You are always underhired, you're always understaffed, and accordingly you're always overworked. Um, And if you are really enjoying what you're doing, growing in a healthy P&L mindset, you will never be in a place where it's a disastrous situation. You will, you will always manage and hire a little bit less than what's needed, but you're always supposed to be understaffed until the company knows who to hire, how to hire. Just to give you an idea, if you hire 3 or 4 people in the same month, You don't know how to train them. You don't know how to onboard them. It's going to be chaos. It's going to be a mess and it's all going to go back to your laps. So it is a very hardworking environment, especially in the first 3 to 4 years.

Yeah, I love, I love you calling that out. I mean, people chase business ownership, entrepreneurship for wrong reasons. It's usually a dream of some type of like having more money. Or having more time or some type, some type of freedom or something like that, which is literally opposite. It's like if you want to have that, you're probably going to be better being employee at a safe position. If you want to have—

somebody tells me I want to be my own boss. Yeah, I, I laugh and I say, oh my God, you're gonna have every customer now is gonna be your boss. Yeah, you're gonna be tortured in this new world. Just, it's not for you if you think that you want to be your own boss. That's not the, that's not the right thing to do. Yeah, uh, it's, uh, it's really about being carried by the vision and making a dent in the world, um, and excited about what you do day in, day out. I think that's what makes you keep pushing.

Okay, so to answer that question of mindset shift from non-founders to become startup CEOs is that it's probably just work ethics, right? Just be, just be ready to to do some work. All right, what simple way to pressure test if a startup idea is worth building inside a studio model? Pressure test, not like, you know, like just very, very quickly, like iterate fast type of situation.

Put on a very quick mindset. Can you deliver profitability in 3 years? Look at how many customers I'm getting, how much I need to spend. Yeah, in 3 years, does this make, does this make sense or not? If it does, then it's fantastic for us, and we we would look into it. If it's not, then it's not for us. It's for venture capital, which is nothing wrong about that, but it's just not for us.

What's one habit you look for in someone before turning them into a founder? Let me guess, hardworking.

No, no, that's it. I said that I want to find readers or I want them to read and I want them to have exposure about the world that's not only related to their business. I want to talk politics with them. I want to talk about why they didn't, why they're taking the trees off the street. I think great leaders have a view about the world. I always like to see them engaging in views about the world that is not carried views.

It's views.

It's like you have a way to see the world in a different pattern and a different style. It's just not— you're not just moving with the herd. I think these are very, very good leaders, and that only happens by reading and and taking notice. You notice things.

Effectively have a point of view. Have your own personal point of view on things. Have an opinion. Be able to express that opinion, even if it's contrary and controversial. Still have a point of view. Don't, don't just be a sheep, I want to say, but that sounds bad. But don't be like—

don't be part of the herd and just move with everybody. Yeah.

I get that one. All right, what a system you rely internally on to kill bad ideas quickly?

I think that the biggest, biggest of them is we, we ask ourselves this very strong questions: how deep is the problem? And then we go back to the 70% answer that we said in the very beginning. How deep is the problem? The problem is deep, we, we're gonna spend some time to find solutions. If the problem is not really deep, like everybody's aching about it, every customer is thinking about it, it's we're gonna, we're gonna kill this.

Okay.

So that's, that's a big, that's a very, very big component. And two, we really like the boring industries. I don't like to operate in places where everybody is looking at it. So if I see a place that is very crowded, which is even if the problem is deep, I think it's just, it's going to be very competitive and we don't like these spaces.

Yeah, I think that's overlooked as well. You know, when people think about business ownership and We had a couple of chats with people who buy businesses rather than build businesses, which I feel is a good module as well. Instead of sort of going from that challenges of getting something from zero to something, you just go in and buy a cash flow and then you just do technical transformation, let's say, if they under-leverage it with tech and get them into better margins. We had that conversation and a lot of them go like, I always look into boring industries because no one wants to be there. So it's just better cost, easier competing market. And then if you go after markets where everyone wants to be, it's a shiny one like AI, it's just going to be very difficult. You're going to be competing with very strong operators and very clever people. You're just sort of putting yourself in the worst position, effectively.

But, but, but I think AI is going to be everywhere. It's going to be in the restaurants in front of me. It's going to be in the gas station. It's going to be in a coffee shop. It's going to be in home repair. It's going to be in healthcare. It's going to be everywhere. I think where you're going to, where you're going to deploy this technology is, is what we are also thinking about. If you're going to deploy this technology in, uh, in an industry where everybody is looking at, I think it doesn't matter. And I will give you a caveat how we look at it. If, if we talk about recruitment, I understand recruitment, Mike understands recruitment, most of the people that you're going to ask them understand recruitment. But if you're going to tell me I'm going to focus on the recruitment of nurses, now we start talking. I'm going to start looking at recruitment of nurse practitioners for psychiatric, now I would, I would tell you, okay, tell me more. That is something we should look at, which is really getting into a level of expertise that it's not generic expertise and it's not generic knowledge of the market. And I think that makes it boring because it is not— nobody gonna talk about, um, somebody who's doing nurse practitioner or psychiatric nurse practitioner recruitment in the, in the main, in the main newspapers and in the main media channels, at least in the coming 2 to 3 years. But it's— this is the industry that we think, oh, this is fascinating industry that we want to get into.

I love that. It's a great one. All right. Well, that was excellent, Amir. Thank you for all the insights. Thank you for not holding with your answers. You gave us lots of nuggets over here. I'm sure our listeners are enjoying this. So if they would want to continue your conversation with you and potentially some listening can go like, oh, I really want to be part of your backlog. You sort of gave us a little bit of details, but let's just sort of summarize it. Where do they go? They find you and how do they get in reach with you?

Find me on— follow me on LinkedIn and text me.

Yep.

And text me DMs on LinkedIn. Send to our info@invitrocapital, jobs@invitrocapital. I'm not— I'm responsive more on LinkedIn than on my personal email, on my email, because the email gets Crazy, crazy, crazy stuff. But, but I would say these are the best, best ways to reach us.

Okay. So here we have, folks, we have LinkedIn and an email. I've seen as well you're on X. You're not, you're not doing DMs on X. So LinkedIn is still better.

Oh, X. I'm also very active on X. No, DM me on X. Of course. Very, very active on X. Yeah.

So we'll have—

I became, I became very active on X. That's why I'm I'm just new, new active person on X. But yes.

Okay. We'll have the socials in the show notes. People tuning in live, just find Amir on LinkedIn or just wait until the episode goes live. For everyone else, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button. If you have someone in your network you believe should benefit from this conversation, especially maybe they're raising money right now, maybe they raised money before, before, maybe they're not aware of the Venture Studios model, please share that episode with them. It's packed with real good level tactical advice. And as always guys, until the next time, see you online.