Shane Wilson - Citta Capital

Welcome to another VC Wisdom pod. We have Shane Wilson with us today. He's investing in early-stage B2B AI, deep tech, and robotics companies at Sitta Capital. Shane was on a Spark Tank of mine. We like his brain and his comments. He also has a Substack, which I got to read. I appreciate your thoughts, Shane. Definitely a left-leaning thinker, whatever that means. So welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Hey Charles, uh, excited to be here. Um, yes, uh, so solid intro. I'm, uh, I invest with a fund called Citicapital, early stage B2B AI, deep tech, robotics. I kind of think of us like nerdy generalists, you know, when, when, uh, you know, you're kind of looking at all the opportunities for VC right now, the generalist part is B2B AI, right? There's just so many things right now you can— you have to be paying attention there if you're, if you're going to be doing your job, um, you know, allocating people's money. Um, and then the nerdy part is this more kind of deep tech robotics. So on one side of the house, we're just looking at incredible velocity, uh, you know, we're talking about things like what's your GTM motion, ICPs, how are you advertising, what are the different channels. And then we put our nerdy caps on and we start looking at things like semiconductor chips, um, different hard tech that's going to space. We're doing a lot more reading white papers, talking to professors, um, and kind of, you know, kind of doing the academic part too. So, um, as an investor, that's kind of how I split my brain. And then as I was just telling Charles at the top of the call here, um, I'm doing a fair amount of operating with our companies too, which is something that's really exciting. So my background kind of getting to VC, I'm an operator first. So got out of undergrad, I worked go-to-market marketing for early-stage startups and ideas for about 10 years. So for me, I really love those kind of place where like, we got an idea, we don't have a brand, we need to figure out our product. And did very well at a couple different companies, then went to business school and landed at Sitta. So now it's kind of rewarding to be able to do my new job, which is the investing, while also doing some of my old job, which is a lot of the operating. So I think it's a— I, I feel like I've got both feet in the startup world, but they're very much on different sides of that, that investing operating line right now.

Fascinating, uh, profile and what I'm reading about you. How did you start it, uh, in life? I see Audible here, so you started in enterprise sales, it seemed. General Assembly as well. And even before that, you were a football player, right? So tell me a bit more about your upbringing.

Yeah, yeah. So football was kind of my first career. Um, so as a college football player, um, I went to a school called Colgate in upstate New New York, which is a small liberal arts school, but we played Division I football. So it's a little bit strange in that you're like in this tiny little village in upstate New York, and then there's a pretty good-sized football stadium and a bunch of big guys, and you have to come and play football in the snow. So I was one of those guys for 4 years. Um, I was never in conversation or on the trajectory to go play professional football, and I was like very, you know, I knew that as I came in as a freshman, and so I really kind of leaned in to the university academic experience a little bit more. Liberal arts school, I was able to do things like get my degree in history but take theater classes and music classes and really kind of be an all-around thinker by the time I graduated. Um, but graduation came around and I spent most of my time in a football helmet, and I had this kind of like, uh, you know, buffet-style academic career where I was eating a little bit of everything. And so just kind of landed in sales. You know, I wanted to live in New York City, and it seemed like it was the best way for me to monetize on things like language skills, social skills, etc. And it turned out to be a really great fit. So General Assembly is where the career started. And what was cool about General Assembly at the time was like, we were very much like a VC darling. You know, it was like this time when that we were— I should say General Assembly, if people aren't familiar with it, it was kind of the first mover in coding boot camps. We moved on from coding to do basically all kind of like tech career post-secondary skills. So we taught classes in data science, UX design, digital marketing, etc. But what was so cool about working there is even though my job was to sell, the perk was I could take as many classes as I wanted. So along the way, I learned to code a little bit. I learned what data scientists were doing, but not like became a data scientist, an algorithm developer, did some product, did some UX. And I think it just kind of gave me a perspective and a skill set to understand what was happening in the startup scene at the moment. And so my job was always to sell, but kind of not being afraid to get a little bit more technical than other sales colleagues, I think was kind of always my MO. So went from General Assembly, got recruited to help launch a product at Amazon. Didn't love being at a big company. Um, at the time I was working out in Newark, New Jersey, which, you know, I'm from New Jersey, so I'm not going to rag on New Jersey, but I wanted to live in New York at the time. And after a year, got an opportunity to go back to startup land, work with a seed stage company that was doing, uh, basically we could just say they were doing data science in 2017, 2018. I worked with a bunch of quantitative hedge funds, etc. Um, was with that company for 5 years, helped them get through the pandemic. It was a period where we went from about $3 million to $23 million in revenue. We went from 15 to 115 employees, and we put ourselves in the LinkedIn top 50 startup list. So that was kind of the pre-MBA career, um, always kind of just moving a little bit closer to the idea, and, and wherever possible, to kind of not just be a seller but be someone who kind of was also doing some, you know, comfortable having some of those technical conversations.

And how did you end up in the VC world with a guy that chose so many disciplines? Is that like your finality? Does it check all of your boxes just to evaluate so many opportunities, great ideas, great founders?

Yeah, yeah, great question. So, um, you know, as kind of the pandemic was winding down, you know, it was a pretty intense period of work, and like, frankly, I burned out. You know, I was managing a ton of people and it was tough. And I had this moment where I said, like, you know, what do I want to do I do with the rest of my career. And I did some inventory and I found out, like, I do— I love deals, you know. I love kind of putting things together, figuring out what's going to work, making something that didn't exist before. And what I recognized was working at an individual startup and selling a product, those deals were only ever going to be so big. And the people that were really playing in the big deal space were doing this at a company level. And so I said, how would I do that and where would I kind of land, um, in that space? And, uh, you know, talk to some people who are in like M&A, talk to some people who are kind of more traditional private equity, and it's like, okay, they're buying and selling companies, but it's not like— I don't, I don't have too much to bring to like a home services operation, you know. I can figure it out, but you know, it's not, not things like, uh, you know, how do we apply data science at an enterprise level. Um, some things that had some experience. And, uh, you know, it came to M&A, like, those people, they work incredibly hard, they can really make amazing models, and, and they are super, super smart-driven people. But I was just like, I like talking to people more than I like working in spreadsheets. And so VC came into focus. And, you know, I recognized, like, look, I've got an operator's background to kind of know what it's like to be in those startups, but I really should bolt on some more, some more finance skills. And so I said, you know, the right move for me is I'm going to go business school. So I took 2 years out of the workforce, went to full-time business school, um, really spent my classroom time on finance, and then outside the classroom, everything I could do to be working with startups and VCs. So, you know, that was 2023 when I went into business school. So it's kind of been 3 years of just developing the skills, building the network, meeting the people, um, and You know, in terms of like an end terminal goal, like, I think it might be. You know, I'm still— I'm 34 years old, so it's tough to say like what the next 30 years exactly are going to look like. But the context switching of like just every morning, like, you speak with 4 brilliant, uh, 4 brilliant founders who are totally dedicated to what they're doing. They're going to teach you why this is really essential, and you have to kind of walk in with this It's almost like an element of like childlike wonder, like teach me something amazing and blow my mind. Like, that's every morning. That part's really exciting. And, you know, as you kind of get closer to the deal and working together, the partnership really comes into focus. And, you know, now you're kind of putting on your operator's hat and saying, you know, this founder is really great at X, not so good at Y, how can I help them with Y? And that part becomes really rewarding too. So, um, yeah, I mean, Charles, it's been 3 years, been 3 years that I've been on the journey. It feels like it's a long haul, but we could always be surprised by some new opportunities down the line.

And do you want to own your own fund soon or one day?

Good question. Um, I think that, yeah, you know, being a, you know, a GP and having my own fund is more attractive than kind of being another partner at a mega fund. Um, Yeah, there's something kind of nice about being small and doing a little bit of all of it. Like, I think it goes back to that, like, liberal arts background where I enjoyed kind of going to the university buffet and taking a little bit of everything. Being at the small shop means that you're running the outreach, you're, you're running the initial call, you're doing diligence, you're sitting on the board. And so, you know, maybe I can't reach thousands of companies, and I won't have a brand that, like, opens doors for me around the globe, but for the people that I do work with, I'm really going to know them and be able to really help out. So at this juncture, I'd say yeah, that's something that's pretty attractive to me.

And the founders, the 4 founders that you get in the morning, uh, your deal flow, where does it come from? Is it inbound? Is it outbound? How do you make sure that you're speaking to top founders and top ideas and that they're all worth your time?

Yeah, so it's been definitely a developing process. You know, I think, um, my background in sales means that I'm definitely, you know, I lean into outbound. And, you know, as a fund that doesn't have, you know, we're not A16Z, we're not Sequoia, we have to knock on your door. Um, you know, some people, you know, people are not knocking on our doors all day. So outbound is a big part of it. And I think now that I've been the better part of a year with SitEv, I've just really kind of evolved and gotten better and have been kind of adding layers onto onto the process. And so, you know, first things first, I just started going to every event I could that was like a pitch event or, you know, seed stage startup thing here in San Francisco. And it was good to meet people, it was good to get exposed, but real talk, a lot of those events are not the right place for your time. There are people who are, you know, like, it's, it's good to be a member of the community and it's good to help people out, but oftentimes I felt like I was giving more than I was getting out of those. So, you know, I still do a fair amount of going to events, but I try to be much more curated and I don't go to them explicitly for sourcing. I go to them more to kind of network, meet, get some new ideas, see if I can help some people out. But that's not kind of the primary channel. You know, the next place where things actually were quite productive for us was just being really active with different accelerators and staying on top of those lists. You know, there are some mega accelerators out there like Plug and Play. If you just work at Plug and Play lists every week, you will have a good volume of things to look at. But, you know, outside of that, there's probably 10 or 15 different, you know, accelerators between the big flashy names like Y Combinator all the way down to like university-specific accelerators, which are a really great base, or I shouldn't say base, they're like a really great layer at the top of your funnel. So we still do that. I built a lot of agentic systems to help reduce the human time and really get value out of those. But that's a great base and I'd recommend every VC just get on those lists. It's great low-hanging fruit. But now they've been here like 9, 10 months kind of working this, met some people. I'm getting more opportunities to kind of go on stage, you know, get invited up to be the speaker at the event, you know, go to these different conferences, etc. And that's kind of the new layer. That, you know, I think it serves two purposes. It brings a lot of people to us. So now all of a sudden people do knock on my door, but it's just really big for brand building for the fund itself to kind of be out there, talk about what it means to be a nerdy generalist in front of a room of 100 founders, tell them how, you know, we think on robotics there's kind of these big sexy things, but actually sometimes it's the unsexy robots that are the really good investments. So it's a great forcing function to kind of help me refine my ideas and a really good kind of added benefit for our brand to get on those stages. So that's kind of how we've evolved to kind of keep our deal flow going.

Yeah, let's explore a couple of your takes that I read on Substack. Well, the first one, yeah, let's explore the unsexy robot thing. So yeah, there's been these big companies, I think there's like Figure and this other one that looked like an Apple product or whatever, there's Optimus, right? So you're not so bullish on humanoids themselves more on ugly function-completing robots that start in a specific niche?

Yes. So, um, yeah, let me see if I can— you know, one, humanoids are cool, but I can't tell you, like, I was just at a Robot Fight Club. I don't know if you've seen these videos that are coming out of San Francisco right now, but like, you can go—

yeah, one of my clients, Cosmic Brain, Anto.

Nice, nice. Um, yeah, I mean, like, look, it's a cool event, people love it, and there's a ton of excitement around robots, which is, which is a great thing. It's like Miss, Miss, plot, plot, plot, punching the air. Like, that's kind of what it looks like, right? Um, and the reality of all these robots is like, you know, I'm watching them like pick something up and put it in the wrong place, and it's like, okay, there's a little bit of hubris that comes in kind of the humanoid idea. Like, oh well, we build the world for us, we should to robots to look like us? Eh, you know, I think if you take this from a biomechanical standpoint, the human is like such an outlier in terms of evolution. And like our body type evolved to like keep a very heavy head above the grass line. And it's done a ton of weird things. Like the reason that our back is an S-shape is to kind of maintain that center of gravity. And it's why by the time we turn like 30-ish years old, your back starts to hurt, right? Like the human is not this apex form. It may just kind of have been a mistake in the way that evolution works. So like, from a biomechanics standpoint, I have some big questions on like, why do we need things to step? There are a lot of great wheels and tracks that are way more simple mechanically that can help us kind of reduce the engineering burden. So that's one knock on humanoids. Um, but when I think about investing and, you know, what gets really exciting, there's kind of like two vectors here. That start to make like a kind of like your classic VC 2x2. Um, one is like context switching and how difficult the tasks are. So for example, I should say there's context switching and then there's like how much our willingness to pay for these skills. And so I, I don't know if this is going to be backwards or not, but my kind of bad quadrant down here, high context switching, low labor costs, is something like a household robot. So if you think about a house cleaner, a human house cleaner probably has 8 or 9 tools as they go through your house between a duster, a mop, a broom, spray bottle, napkin. Every one of those things is a distinct skill that you need to teach a robot. And the other challenge is that that human house cleaner is probably somewhere between $15 and $20 and they are excellent at what they do. So for a robot to outperform labor in this quadrant, They have to be capable of doing a ton of context switching. They have to do it for really cheap. In this quadrant up here where it's low context switching but high labor, think of things like pipefitter. This person is going and they are turning bolts left and right all day. They're a union job. They're getting paid probably almost $200 an hour to do it. There's a bunch of safety, and that's why we need to make sure that the humans who do this have extensive safety training. We don't need to worry about the robots as much when it comes, you know, when it comes to safety. Um, you know, uh, underwater welding, right? Super dangerous. It's one specific task, but if we can kind of take the human out of that, um, there's a really good reward for it. So I think that there's a lot of founders who are kind of getting excited by the challenge of engineering in these spaces. But if we think about this as investors, like How is this thing going to pencil and who's going to pay for it? Getting up into this quadrant is where things really kind of get exciting. And those robots, they don't tend to have complex vision systems. They don't tend to have arms and legs. They may look like, you know, very different machine-type things, but they can be incredibly effective, incredibly valuable right now. And it's not a 15 to 20 year payback period on them. So yeah, I like boring robots.

I'm not sure why, but I thought about that robot that fixes pipeline leaks, not just underwater, but like over water, like in Mexico, you know, like people poke holes in pipeline and to get gas out of it. So like a robot, a drone probably that could like patch it and fix it because it's soon as there's a hole, there's like millions lost per hour. Um, the humanoid argument, it's intriguing, right? Um, the first thought my brain had was like, I would need to work with one of these robots or have them around me to truly understand if their shape matters, because if the thing takes a lot of, uh, square space, right, like it would be cumbersome, I would step on it. I mean, we already have these cleaning robots, right? Uh, they're not cumbersome. But they take a very small space. And I think this matters from, from ground up. And then the second obvious thing is just like adoption, right? I don't think it matters that much that humans want to adopt human shape. I think it's probably the opposite. I think a bunch of us find it creepy, right? Like for a robot to have our same shape but not interact like us. So that would be another one. But then also it's like the a Tesla argument. So you have a car, you have hardware, and then the software updates, it gets better and better with time, the more data it has. And I guess to have higher quality data or similar data than us humans perceive, we need to have some kind of humanoid shape to see where the eyes goes. And, you know, I think there's an argument to be made that if it's like it in a similar shape and form to us, it would understand the laws of physics faster and more coherently in a less alien way. Uh, what do you think about that?

Yeah, I mean, you know, as you're kind of talking through that, when you kind of bring Tesla into focus, I think it's important to kind of call out one of my priors as I evaluate this space, which is just kind of who we are and where we kind of sit in the food chain of innovation right now. We're a $100 million emerging manager. Investing in a fund. One, we have to find robots that are going to return within our first fund such that we can go and raise the next one, and we've got to prove that we're good investors. Right now, Tesla has proven themselves— or I shouldn't say, you know, Musk Co. has proven itself over so many times that funding isn't an issue. They have virtually a limitless amount of funds to go out and build the coolest things, and their timeline is incredibly long. So like, that is great. Like, go out and build Optimus. Like, I'm sure you can get there and it's going to be pretty amazing and there's going to be like a huge TAM unlock when they can do it. But with a $100 million fund, am I going to be able to invest in even the model layer that's going to allow for that 3D motion space of two arms, two legs, and a head? Probably not, not realistic with, with the kind of checks that we're able to write. So I shouldn't say that it's like no on humanoids for everyone. I should say like It's no on humanoids for SITA right now. You know, if we get in, if somebody wants to cut us a $15 billion check to go compete with A16z, like, hey, I'm going to adjust these, I'm going to adjust these investment preferences real quick.

There you go. Couple of your other theses. I've read the RAMP one, $22 billion. Is it worth it? What's your take on RAMP?

Yeah, so this one was kind of a while back, um, so I gotta do some, some memory here. But, you know, I think Ramp is a case—

3 months ago or 6 months ago?

6 months. Yeah, so if I remember, as I kind of looked into Ramp, um, I'm not a user, not a buyer, I just kind of looked at this from like, uh, where they were kind of on a valuation standpoint. Um, I think this is a startup that might be selling $2 bills for a dollar. Um, you know, to kind of glibly get it across, you know, what I, what I recognized is, you know, Ramp raised kind of a huge valuation based off kind of being this AI B2B finance platform. And all the reviews that I read said those are all basically prototypes. There's like some features there, but, you know, really what we buy Ramp for is the credit card. And the credit card has some great features like a, you know, and actually I should kind of back up the tracks a little bit. So I spent some time with the fintech while I was in business school and learned a little bit about credit cards. Now Visa and MasterCard, they are a great bet because they own the infrastructure of payments. If you do a credit card, say it's your, you know, your local community bank issues a credit card, every transaction that goes through, they pay a percentage fee to Visa or MasterCard to use their payment rails. Something like 3.5%. So let's say the credit card fee is 5%. I think that's what it was for Ramp. They're not Visa, they're not MasterCard. So, you know, of that 5% that you're paying them, 3.5% goes to, goes to Visa or MasterCard, and then they give their users 1.5% cash back. So their revenue is insane, right? They're doing 5% of this massive, um, massive, massive number, but from that read, it seems like the profits are practically zero. So, you know, if I'm going to go out to market and I want to grow very quickly, like, this is like the first chapter of Uber playbook. Give some— somebody something that's like free or less than free, and they're going to use really quickly. That was kind of my read on Ramp from the outside looking in, and I didn't have access to a data room, I didn't talk to customers, I didn't talk to the management. Management team. This was really just kind of reading, you know, the Fortune articles, looking at some things on PitchBook. But it felt to me like this is a classic case of a company that's basically using, you know, venture dollars to scale growth without kind of like a real defensible value capture yet. They may get there, you know, it may be after the next round or so that then they start kind of charging proper rents for what they're doing. But at the current valuations, etc., I think this was one where we could really kind of blame this on some dislocation in the private markets, that there are kind of fewer, you know, funds are flowing into these mega funds that have to deploy really big checks into good companies. So a pretty good company like Ramp comes around, it's a safe bet to cut off a $500 million slab into. And so they were kind of the right company at the right time for that funding, but From my outside looking in, I think that they may be giving away something for nothing.

Yeah, I just know they invest tons in, uh, podcasts, right? And they have to see— they seem to have an outmeasured budget for, for the podcast. They sponsor Acquired Podcast.

Do you want me to give them a plug? No, Ramp's great. We should totally get them on.

I should have them as sponsor of Spark saying they sponsor Founders Podcast, they found— they sponsor Acquired. Uh, they're pretty good. What's your thesis behind that news? Newsletter, just like express your thoughts out there to get more deal flow, more LPs in your direction?

Um, so I don't have one right now, so I guess that's kind of like a good, good, uh, you know, demonstration. I'll say that it hasn't moved me off to kind of get to doing it. Um, you know, I, I have been a more active consumer of newsletters in the past since I've kind of taken on some more operating stuff. That kind of time when I would usually read newsletters is now usually reading Slacks and email updates. Um, look, if you can manage distribution like that directly to an audience, it's pretty valuable. You can find a way to monetize it. Um, to do that well takes a significant amount of effort. You are basically writing a personalized magazine every morning. And the nature of content now, like, if I read something and I'm halfway down the page and I recognize it feels like it's AI slop, I unsubscribe from your newsletter. So it's one of these things, Charles, where it's like, I think it's a solid tool. You got to put in the effort, you got to be really good at it. People who tend to be really good at it, it's like their main job, you know. They're a podcaster or content creator that is working day in, day out to make a really good newsletter. So I think some of it for me is like, I haven't done it because I respect the craft and I just know I don't have enough wherewithal to really make that a consistent value driver for my audience on a daily basis.

I read, uh, on your LinkedIn, you're a musician, right? Like, how does music intertwine, uh, with VC— your VC job? Is it, uh, jazz band analogy slash musician keeping the rhythm, finding who does what and how well? Uh, yet, like, how does that intertwine with, uh, what you do at— what you do at night? What VS, what you do that day?

Yeah, so, um, when I, I should say I'm not as, not as good or active a musician as I used to be. I just moved in this apartment, set up my guitars, my piano, so it's getting a little bit better, not a better space for it. But, um, there's one thing kind of like philosophically I'd say that kind of works for a VC, and then practically how to just kind of get through the day. So, um, I think it is very easy for VCs to kind of, um, you know, it's a, it's a runaway ego job, right? You talk to VCs a lot, and we love to hear ourselves think. We've got a practically open feedback loop where it's like 10 years before any of our things come back right or wrong. And, you know, people gave us $100 million plus to deploy. We think like, you know, we know something and everybody should really listen. And I think like I think in a lot of ways, this kind of like VCs work to like create this power dynamic where they're talking down to founders. And I think that is fundamentally wrong. Getting back to this artist point, I think it's really critical when you come into the room with the founder to kind of have that like musician walking into a jam session kind of attitude. And that like, hey, I could come in here and tell you that your thing sucks and it's wrong. And all these things are going to go bad, etc., you know, in an attempt to kind of take down your valuation. But startup founders don't need that. The world is there to kind of beat them down. And like, your real job is to come in, see what's good, help them accentuate that, and kind of build or play something around them that makes that sound even better. And that's like a real mindset thing that, you know, and there are times that I, I definitely don't live up to that ideal, but I do think that's how you should enter the conversation with a founder. A founder is essentially a creative. Founder is an artist. When an artist lets you in on their process, you have to be really respectful. So that's the philosophical part of music. Um, you know, the practical part, like, there are some days where you go like 6 back-to-back calls, you know, in between you're like jumping into spreadsheets your brain's just getting really tired. And like, if you can just kind of go and take like 10 minutes and tap into flow state, it really recharges you in a big way. So I think that's kind of the more practical thing. That's why everything is set up behind me, so that, you know, when I get tired, I can just kind of spin around, clean my brain a little bit, and get back to it.

And what does your day-to-day look like? Do you have other routines to put you in the zone?

Yeah, um, I do. So I've kind of just become like more aware of when my like high activity and like, you know, when the day works for me. Um, so, you know, uh, I'm an early morning guy these days. I don't love it, but my wife has kind of made me into one. So I'm up at 6 AM, I'm in the gym by 6:30, and this is just kind of like the right way to kind burn off some of that energy. Like, back to kind of my career started as an athlete, like, there's some kind of like inbound hyperactivity. Like, my body feels good, then my mind feels good. And so first hour, hour and a half of the day, um, is dedicated to that. Um, you know, come in, and then I find that like 8:00 AM or so is when I am just like mega productive. So this is when I'm going to knock down emails and Slacks, and if I have to make a bunch of edits, and I can probably run full steam for about 3 hours there. Um, I like to talk to people after I'm done with that. Around 2 PM is when I need to take some sort of break. I gotta go for a walk. I'm just not that great between 2 and 3 PM. Um, 3 to 5, we get some kind of good, good work time back. Take some time to make dinner. I think like this is kind of a good grounding experience for me. And then, uh, creativity comes to me late, which is kind of tough now that I'm becoming a 6 AM person, but like the best idea, the best writing, like, that's a 10 AM to 2 AM— or excuse me, 10 PM to 2 AM thing for me. And so, um, you know, I'm hoping my chronotype shifts a little bit earlier so I can both, you know, do my early morning wake-ups and my late night, uh, my late night thinking. But, you know, it's less about fighting that and it's more about finding a way to kind of integrate with that, because I think that's just the hardware that I was given.

What about your— one of your missions to help, uh, Latino entrepreneurs immigrate in the US and work? I guess, like, where does that mission come from?

Yeah, so I connected with an organization called the Open Door in New York, New Jersey. This was back when I was in the East Coast, and, um, I was an English speaker, or an English teacher, I should say, and I worked with a classroom full of people from Latin America. And there were, you know, kind of the— there's definitely like a higher-minded why, but the practical why was I wanted to get my Spanish better. And like, there was actually no better experience than being in a classroom with people from, you know, Northern South America, like your Colombians and your Venezuelans and, you know, people from the Caribbean, people from Mexico. And you recognize that like accents are different, pace of speaking is different, and Really one of the dumbest things from my education as a child is though I grew up in the United States, all of my Spanish teachers trained in Madrid. So when I go to Spain, I understand everything almost perfectly. And I have like, I guess we would say like a Castilian accent or something, but in this kind of Latin American polyglot, like we're totally unprepared for it. So anyway, you know, I'll say like I got into this with some personal goals to like bring up my skills. I definitely got that. Um, but while I was doing this and kind of working with folks, um, you know, maybe they're fresh off the boat, you know, they don't speak much English, um, to see how just equipping people with like basic phrases, you know, like, hey, you can, you know, like when someone says have a nice day, it's just a greeting, you know, it's, it's, you, you people are getting stuck, you know, stuck up on that, then they won't, uh, you know, engage and have a conversation. Um, you know, the first thing you see is there's some confidence, they're able to kind of be and integrate and be members of the community. But as I got to know my students better, it just became so abundantly clear to me how important the immigrant experience is to being American. You know, I was, I was born here and it was a couple generations before, you know, my family came over, but people who sacrifice so much to get here and then they land and many times it's a very, you know, unfriendly welcome. We're wrong as Americans to be doing that. That, that much I feel really strongly on. And I understand the politics of the day. Uh, you know, a lot of people may, may think differently or may have some reasons or, you know, be— been told some things about that. But the American experience is essentially an immigrant's experience. And for today's American economy, you know, if you start to speak Spanish and you try to seek out Spanish-speaking, you recognize how much of our economy is run by Latino immigrants, and they deserve a say in their communities. They deserve the skills to kind of level up and kind of help their families have the experience that my family eventually did. So it started off as a, I just want to get better at speaking Spanish, and it became, um, you know, I recognized there was something kind of higher there, um, that is still kind of really important to me.

And I would understand why someone with a very limited worldview, someone that has not traveled, that lived in a small town and have been the opposite of nomadic would think the opposite, right?

They—

and it's not just in the US, it's like, it's in full world. Anyone that has not got a diversified life experience are very narrow-minded, and getting them out of their comfort zone is, is always hard. And what's surprising to me is that yet, like, when you realize that most of the US is still this, and most probably of Canada, and even most of Mexico. But most humans haven't really got outside of themselves on this planet Earth. And you add like one last explosive ingredient on the mix, it's social media. Social media is not the real world. It's not getting outside and exploring and, and seeing the various shades and colors of the world. It's not the real experience. It's a It's an alien experience that Zuckerberg pulling the string designed for you to spend time on his platform, right? And that's what most people get, and that's an incendiary mix, right? Because then you, you will get content that will feed your low educationism, uh, which is like incendiary, like, oh, these guys are stealing my job, right? But Don't you realize that these folks are also paying taxes and feeding ecosystems? Like, basic Economy 101. It's very hard to— for one to win and the other to lose in capitalism, generally speaking. Um, but yeah, don't get me started. Yeah, what do you think about that?

Yeah, I will, I will comment. I'll, I'll lean in a little bit more, but I'll say like, one, nativism is kind of an easy political trope that like has just kind of been recycled. We could probably go all the way back to ancient Greece, you know. Oh yeah, people are coming in that are taking our stuff. It's a very easy political agenda to sell. So we're just kind of in one of these moments many times before, tribalism, so on and so forth. Um, it's an easy way to score some votes. So that's part of it. Um, you know, when I was in school most recently, we had an economist who said, you know, um, the winners in immigration are almost always the company— they're always the countries that accept people. And, you know, we can look at the United States, it tends to be the children of immigrants that are some of the most productive people in society.

Yeah, check Indian Americans in Silicon Valley, for example. It's like so obvious. Jews also, Jews are extremely productive.

Yeah, so, you know, like, one, there's just like a kind of a nearsightedness You know, to kind of get a little more timely with it, we are looking at a demographic crisis globally. We don't talk about this kind of silver tsunami enough. When we look at societies like Japan, to an extent China, you know, the US is kind of trending there as well. Immigration is an opportunity to really kind of buck the trend of demographic collapse. We are absolutely facing that as a society. So people should be serious about that. So I'm all pro You know, to be balanced and to just kind of call out one thing, you know, this actually came from the same economist who's saying, like, net-net, accepting countries are always winners. The wobble here is the communities that take in immigrants in their first months, years do tend to shoulder an excessive cost. So if you live in a border town in Texas, there's a solid chance that your elementary school is overcapacity. And you're not getting sufficient support from the federal and state government because it's really the state and the country that are going to benefit from those generations down the line. So there is a part of kind of like spreading this around a little bit better that with effective U.S. immigration policy where we can say like, hey, if you want to come to the U.S., we'll help you find the communities that can support you. That's really where I'd like to see an active government and kind of solving an immigration problem. Home versus trying to build walls and tell people no. But there is something to be said if you live in one of those communities and you, you know, your property taxes are responsible for putting everyone through school, you may be paying an unfair bill for the future benefit of all of us. But ultimately, we should be finding ways to make that bill more fair because I think it's, it's really good for our country in the long term.

Yeah, and I mean, I'm No experts in this, but I can also picture that there's organisms that are forging at the border of, I don't know, uh, LATAM, ex-LATAM immigrants that made it to the other side that want to help people get there as well. So I'm pretty sure that is forming, but that also is, uh, probably butting heads with like ICE people at the border. And yeah, that must be a a dystopia at the border. Uh, yeah, but I'd be keen to investigate more on that topic. Shane, where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, so Substack's where I spend most of my time these days. Um, so I think I'm at Shane Wilson 98, um, over there. So Substack, um, I almost always use my LinkedIn as my channel to support my, my, my, uh, Substack. So, uh, find me there, um, Shane Wilson, Citi Capital. I'm the only Shane Wilson at Citta Capital. You'll find us, and that's C-I-T-T-A, um, like it is down in my name. So that's a place where you're always going to kind of see me promote stuff. Um, Substack's where I do my thinking. I'm not an Instagram, Twitter guy, um, so I'm a little bit harder there. Um, but hey, if you want to talk, especially if you're a founder, you want to kind of, uh, you know, see if there's an opportunity here to work together, drop me a DM on LinkedIn. I'm going to ask for your deck as a first move. But I'd say, yeah, Charles, LinkedIn, Substack, those are my spots. Oh, Shane and Charles