Mistakes Founders Make When Pitching Investors with Delian Asparouhov

Foreign.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Could you give our audience a quick background on what you do at Founders Fund and a quick maybe 10 second background?

Sure, yeah. Early stage partner in Founders Fund. Primarily invest in seed series A and what I call more engineering based investments. So things that typically intersect with the world of like hardware plus software, like highly, you know, sort of regulated. So that's the way I like to invest. And then I'm also a co founder of Varda Space Industries that I started about three years ago.

And your background is actually quite unique. You were a founder turned investor going back to founder and that happens rarely, right? No one wants to continue chewing glass, but you decide to do that. What made you decide that you want to become a founder again?

Honestly, it's a perverse addiction to probably pain at the end of the day is probably what brought me back. But in particular I had this idea that I was passionate passion about around in space manufacturing that, you know, I really wanted to see come to life and the vision that I had around it, I just didn't see anybody quite working on it the right way. Like building a company is such a painful choice. I would have much preferred to make it as an investment and seriously pursued it originally as an investment thesis. Met with a ton of founders that were working in the space, but just didn't feel like I had found the right team. Anybody that was investable and so ultimately decided the only way I could do it was, you know, starting it myself. But sometimes I say that, you know, from the PTSD that I had for my first company and the failure of it, I felt like when I was proactively choosing to actually start Varda, I felt like I was literally putting my mouth around a double barreled shotgun and pulling the trigger and knowing what comes on the other side of that and still choosing to do so. It's been definitely a painful experience, but worth it given the problem set that we're working on.

So I remember listening to one of your podcasts and you mentioned that you thought about it maybe two or three times and the third time was when Keith Roboy took you up some mountain or you're hiking and then you kind of said, all right, I'm going to do it now. So how important do you think timing plays into starting a startup? Because a lot of founders are always, they have this idea and they. And it's always like an urge. So how do you think about that and what would you tell them?

Yeah, I mean, I think if you look in like the sort of history of Technology. There's been a lot of times where the right idea we started, but like the totally wrong time in some ways. Even Vard is a perfect example of this. There were in space manufacturing companies that were started in the 90s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and ultimately obviously all of those were just the wrong sort of starting point. And so I think a lot of, you know, being a founder is making sure that both obviously you have a right idea, that you are the right founder for that you're the sort of person that is built to be world class at solving and creating this particular vision, but that you're also starting it at the right time. And there are certain ideas that I think are more timeless, that are certain ideas that I think sort of less so. In particular with Varda, there was a set of, let's say, like technical cost curves that needed to be at a certain point in order to start it right. And I think there's a lot of things in the world that you can actually predict pretty accurately. If you look at everything from cost of launched orbit, let's say battery energy density, cost of solar power, these are things that basically almost perfectly follow mathematical curves. And so you can project out where they will be in the future. And typically with a business model, you can typically project what will make your business model work versus not. And so you just have to, in some ways, bide your time. And so while I had thought about the idea many times, all the prior ones I sort of had discounted because it felt like it was too early. But finally in that last time where it really resurfaced again with that conversation with Keith, that was that moment where I was like, man, I no longer have like, you know, before I was like, ah, wrong time. These founders aren't perfect. You know, maybe I'll invest in the future. And then it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, man, the people that are working on it aren't correct. But now the time is really right. And I really don't want to be sitting here three years from today and still have nobody, you know, in a world class way, pursuing this vision.

That's true for space, right? But what about for the average founder that wants to build? How do you think about market timing? What signal should they be looking for?

Yeah, I would still argue that even in the world of pure software enabled, let's say startups, there's still clear moments of timing. Let's take Uber is a perfect example. Having everybody in their pocket have a device that can communicate to the Internet and has gps clearly just fundamentally changes the way that you think about transportation in a city and being able to actually call a car. And so I think there is a moment in time there that was very appropriate for a business like that. And you could argue that the sort of mobile, let's say revolution caused a whole set of startups. AWS coming online because you no longer had to build data centers, enabled that blockchain technology obviously enabled a set of companies and that type of decentralization, obviously AI and GPT today maybe more enabling incumbents more so than upstarts. But I think in some ways a part of the job of being a founder is like you may have a particular passion area, but look for that spark where it's just so much easier to build a company when you're like truly riding a wave versus fighting against headwinds.

The second point you made on this podcast was finding your co founders. It's in fact very hard to find co founders, especially within crypto. As an example, I'll give you, there's a bunch of hackathons that happen where co founders date each other and they try to set up time to build with each other and it turns out more or less it doesn't work out. It may work out. It just depends on the right attributions. So how do you think about finding the right co founder? What did you do in your analysis to find the right co founder?

Yeah, even though we've had some success in the founders fund portfolio with some of these founder dating programs, like some of our top companies take Traba most recently as an example, they actually met through an on deck fellowship where they explicitly were both in this mode of they try and attract people that are sort of proto founders, maybe haven't quite settled on an idea or a co founder and they do do basically rapid founder dating. I tend to subscribe to a slightly different philosophy and maybe it comes down to, and I would argue there are areas in crypto that come down to this as well. Especially if you're taking on a problem that is deeply, deeply technical, that I think you can actually analyze a problem. And take what I call and borrow this from Keith, this sort of Hollywood style approach to building a company where in Hollywood it's not like they go out and ab test with the audience four different versions of the film with different lead characters. They have a casting director that looks at the script and determines, okay, for this particular action film we should do Tom Cruise because he's going to take a motorcycle and jump off a cliff. And you definitely want Tom Cruise in the motorcycle, not Tom Hanks. And it's very important to have the right person. And so when I looked at it, in some ways the script of Varda, there was a very obvious set of necessary skill sets and clear characters that I think would sort of play that back. And so when I was going out and looking for co founders, I basically had an explicit list of almost like 30 attributes of what I was looking for in a co founder.

And.

And when you narrowed it down, the number of people that actually like matched those attributes, there was like three in the world. So it wasn't this like broad dating. Let me go to a hackathon and I'll happen to stumble into somebody. It was very like sniper's approach. For every single role that we needed to fill for, called the first, like 10, 15 people at Varda, even beyond just the co founders, it was very obvious, like, here are the key core risks. Now, see, in some ways, the more ambitious technically a project that you take on that requires as diverse skill sets, the easier it is in some ways, take that sniper's approach. If you're doing something that's more like standard, you know, whatever front end software technology company, obviously there's a much wider set of people that might be able to basically help you burn down those initial core risks. And so in some ways in aerospace, it's at least a little easier because there's just such specific and broad sets of technical problems and very narrow talent pools that you can pull from.

Okay, so timing, market timing. We talked about finding your co founder. How do you manage the tough conversation around equity splits?

You know, I've only gone through this twice, really intimately, you know, with my first company, with my second company. So it's hard to say that I have like a strong framework. And in some ways I do think it is truly, you know, sort of case by case basis. I think what you need to optimize for are basically like two things. One, you need to find a deal that everybody's happy with basically in the moment. And two, that deal also needs to be ideally the thing that people are also going to be happy with three, four years, basically down the line. And I think at the end of the day, what you're trying to assess is who is the most critical at the company. How do we plan on decisions to be made in the future, and is it going to be fully equal? Is it going to be one person that ultimately the decision falls down to, and how are we expecting this company to function on a go forward basis in terms of, you know, equity that we're going to be giving to early employees. And how should the founders be related to that? Right. Are we starting off with a massive option pool or sort of smaller option pool? I think in some ways all of those negotiations come into one. I think Varda, I think it was in some ways easier in that it was obviously not going to be a purely equal equity split in that I was a chairman president, that was not going to be nearly as full time on the company relative to my co founder that absolutely needed to be the sort of CEO, co founder, you know, have a larger equity stake because he was also going to be recruiting a lot of the core, you know, sort of team, much more so, you know, than I was. And so in some ways there the answer felt obvious. I would say I find that it's typically intellectually lazy to just purely default to like an even, you know, equity split. I think there are rare instances where that makes sense. Maybe Airbnb is a perfect example where you have three co founders. I'm actually not 100% sure, but I would guess that their equity split was even and you still have basically all three founders still involved in the company, like, you know, almost 16 years later or whatever it is that I think is very rare. So I think you should do a decent job of actually determining what should the true power structure be. I think most people get lazy and just do it even, but realistically that is not likely. It is not likely that the power structure is going to be truly even between the co founders.

What were some of the biggest lessons you've learned as a founder over the past three years? Obviously you founded your first startup and then you went back to starting a startup again. And I feel like some is generalized, some may have changed. So I'm curious on your perspective of some of the biggest lessons you've learned.

Yeah, the first is definitely around talent. In that with my first company and a part of it was Maybe I was 19, MIT dropout, it's not like I had an infinite ability to recruit super top tier talent. Although credit to some young founders in our portfolio that I've seen even at a very young age with limited traction be able to attract top tier talent, but I at least was not able to. But now when I think about basically like a problem that I'm trying to solve, my first inclination and instinct is basically like, who is the person in the world that is going to be best basically solving this problem and how do we get them either as an advisor to the company or ideally, obviously sort of a full time employee. And so taking that sort of talent focused lens to every aspect of the sort of company building process, I think is maybe basically one of the biggest lessons learned. The second probably is just the willingness to do extreme levels of focus. I think with my first company it was too easy to focus on what felt urgent, but was not necessarily important. Versus I think at Varda, I've done a much better job of, you know, recognizing what is the most important problem. And it might not be a problem that the company's immediately facing today, but if a gap is not filled, it will be a very pressing problem, you know, basically, you know, a year or two years from now. So one example that I like to give that I think was my most extreme basically, you know, times of focus over the past couple of years was in the summer of 2022. I recognized that we were basically starting to get some really great early traction with pharmaceutical clients at Varda. But we lacked a sort of, you know, executive business development leader that had closed these types of contracts before. We just didn't have that DNA within the team. While I think as a founder you should be doing a lot of founder led sales, ultimately I knew that I needed somebody that could speak the same language at the clients at a very high level, given the size of contracts we were negotiating. And so ultimately what I decided to do was basically buy a one way ticket to L A, stick myself inside of a conference room and literally only allow myself to work on this, which sometimes can be very painful because you end up deciding to actually proactively have a lot of free time on your calendar, which is where I could have obviously taken some Founders Fund pitches. I could have worked on other things at Varda. But you have to practically be very comfortable with the idea of actually like, no. I'm going to say no to all those things because that free time and that free space is going to allow me to have more time to ideate. Okay, how can I fill this role? Even better? Who are the people that I can talk to, network with? What is the information that I need to learn such that I'm able to interview these people? Well, I remember like the third or fourth interview that I did, I fucked up like a very basic concept that you need to know in the pharmaceutical industry. And I spent the next week just like drilling myself, reading textbooks, reading S1s, making sure that the next time around I wouldn't seem so unsophisticated to a candidate because obviously a top tier candidate is not going to want to work with a co founder that is totally missing basic concepts within the field. And then maybe the last lesson is just that product market fit is truly forged, not discovered. I think with my first company we just kind of threw a ton of shit at the wall and basically looked at what stuck and then tried to lean into there. I think at Varda we've been much more proactive about taking a very informed perspective in the market. And I'm not saying that we were perfectly right at like let's say the seed round when we were first starting the company, but it was much more proactive of assessing like what is our value proposition to clients, how is it resonating, where do we see the market basically sort of trending towards what are going to be some of the top priorities for both our DoD and commercial clients. And then, you know, forging a value proposition that we knew would strongly resonate with them, not like ab testing it amongst you. Hundreds of different clients with hundreds of different value propositions. It was a much more sort of intentional forging process that was very, let's say proactive rather than purely reactive.

There's a couple areas that stood out to me, but one I'll touch on is learning, continuous learning, which you talked actually about under your recent article yesterday. Well, happy birthday by the way.

Thank you. Bladed. Yesterday.

Bladed. Sorry. But you posted this article that talked about the 30 lessons you've learned at the age of 30 and one of the, I think the first one was like continuous learning. And so I think this is also very true for founders that are building in this space actually generally that founders should always be learning. And I see sometimes where founders kind of stay focused in one area and they kind of forget that they have to continue learning and staying on top of education and information that's coming in.

Yeah, this struck me twice really strongly earlier in my career that I think ended up motivating me. And I'll highlight both these stories because I think they're relevant to, you know, how to make sure that you're continuing to learn. I had this like coffee with Sam Allman when I was like 22, so called eight years ago. It was right before he was about to be president of YC and he was working on this like nuclear company at the time, but had his like hand in so many different, you know, basically, you know, pots and all of them in like these like highly technical fields. And I remember just thinking, it's like, you know, I think Sam is maybe like four or five years older than me. So he was like 27 or 28 at the time. And I remember just thinking, I was like, I'm too late. Like, you know, I understand computer science, I understand software, all these like interesting fields that Sam is working on. I should have been studying this stuff since I was like 12. I only have this computer science degree. How the hell am I going to impact the world in more interesting ways other than just in my opinion, just purely building software was not the way that I wanted to truly impact the world. And so I had this deep existential angst and frustration where I was like, it's just too late, I screwed up. And so I can't claim that I put a ton of effort into it for the next three or four years after that sort of coffee. But then three or four years later, I found myself at Coastal Ventures and, and working with, let's say the CEO of Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla. And that man is just truly phenomenal at being tip of the spear across even more so than the Sam Altman's of the world across 20 plus different fields. He can tell you about the net new machine learning techniques in TensorFlow. He can tell you about the new substrate materials that are being used in chips manufacturing, performance of solar panels, battery chemistries, et cetera. He is just nonstop. He has, I think almost a whole army of people around him that like help read condense papers for him. He does intellectual debates, he likes investing in these types of companies. And I remember just seeing him being like, oh my God, like this is just like another level. But then recognizing the way that he was just doing it was just like, you're not going to do this overnight. You need to just start absorbing information, start like, you know, talking to experts, start reading papers. And you're going to feel clueless at the beginning, but you have to, you know, be willing to do so. But it is possible to continue to learn throughout your entire life. You do not need to just stagnate at software alone. And so I took that first leap while working at Coastal Ventures was like, okay, I love aerospace. It's a field that I've always wanted to work in, but have never truly directly worked in sort of professionally. I'm just going to throw myself out there. I'm going to start reading all of the aerospace press releases. I'm going to start reading the Aerospace S1s by the public companies. I'm going to start going to aerospace basic conferences. I'm going to meet with aerospace founders because now I work at Coastal Ventures and they should hopefully be intrigued with meeting with me. And there's baby steps that I took and call it like the 2017 timeframe with I think the premonition that hey, if you look at SpaceX's, you know, basically cost to launch or mass to orbit, it's a perfect exponential curve. This will be very valuable three, four years down the line when I think this industry is going to be exploding. And lo and behold, that was obviously what ultimately led me to, you know, having the, let's say, knowledge and competency to both start Barda and attract great talent to it as well as, you know, right now, I would argue, I think I'm investing in some very interesting, you know, sort of early stage aerospace companies because of that very broad industry knowledge that started off with true basics, just reading basically press releases.

What's interesting is most venture funds allow their analysts to go out and look for startups, they're up to date on information and some of the VC firms I've worked with are not too close to the founders. And I think that's an edge that's missing in the space. Which is why I actually like the founders fund approach of, of always talking to the founder and the partner. Moving more closely to the venture side. You spent six years in investing what's probably one of the biggest pivot stories that you've seen and maybe just describe some things that you've learned that could be important for founders.

I'm not sure that at least within my personal portfolio I've had some sort of massive success that was what I would call a genuine pivot. Pivot. But in the history of Silicon Valley, the one that immediately comes to mind that feels the most obvious is obviously Stewart Butterfield with Slack. Originally starting off as a gaming studio, building this internal basically chat thing that obviously then ultimately ended up becoming Slack. That to me is the true epitome of some of the things that my companies have done have been what I would argue more like geographical market expansion or product feature releases and things like that versus I think Stewart having the conviction to truly hard left pivot with the venture capital that he had raised the team that he put together and go from gaming to corporate communications. That to me is a much, let's say braver pivot. Varda in some ways has gone through, let's say pivots along the way in that when we first started the company we did have a very strong initial belief that the primary market was going to be around the manufacturing of fiber Optic cables in low Earth orbit. That ended up not being the case as the company played out over the past three years. Both the DoD market around hypersonic testing. Partially because of the timeliness of China launching a hypersonic missile operationally for the first time in summer 2021, hypersonics went from being an academic exercise to something that needed to become operational and then that giving us basically enough revenue and enough size to actually be able to tackle the much larger market of in space manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. So in some ways the sort of core philosophy of Varda has stayed the same, but the core market segments has definitely in some ways been a pretty serious pivot.

When you assess founders that are pitching you, do you have a framework in place? What do you look for?

I'd say there's two things that always are standard and then a lot more that is custom on the per company basis. The first is I always like to say, why is this founder sort of like the superhero of this story? Why is this effectively their life's work? And I'll give it a particular analogy that is kind of funny today because I did this. I came up with this four or five years ago, which is take Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, two phenomenal sort of world class founders that clearly are very capable. If you put Mark Zuckerberg in charge of a rocket company, you're going to have a bunch of engineers that are drinking smoothies at 4 o' clock and screwing around and move fast and break things. Does not work that well in rocket land. I think they would probably never end up, you know, landing a rocket. Now my joke used to be, if you put Elon Musk in front of a, in charge of a social media company, that's going to be an unmitigated disaster because he's going to be hauled in front of Congress for shit that he's saying on the social media platform. Obviously now it's kind of funny because he's obviously done this and probably is going to get hauled in front of Congress. But the point being that I think that there's no one prototypical best founder, right? I think it's a question of why is this founder sort of best suited. Why is their life's work for the very particular, you know, mission, you know, envision that they're pursuing. The second that I would say is I think it's just looking for some level of just, you know, spark. And that spark can come from areas that aren't necessarily sort of professional. You know, one example, I definitely find myself Very predisposed to investing in former, you know, D1 athletes or professional athletes where if you have the discipline to be able to manage a like top tier university workload while also what is necessary to, you know, maintain the physical fitness of a D1 athlete, that discipline translating into the sort of startup land and leading to, you know, phenomenal success. Success I think is extremely likely. And so it's finding something. Where has this person shown an ability to be top 0.1% even sometimes in an unrelated field? Most recently we have this unannounced investment where the founder CEO was basically previously a very successful media and entertainment star. I won't go too specific on her background otherwise it'll reveal who she was. But pivoted hard into basically going to Harvard Law to study space law and then started an aerospace company. And obviously it's a wildly different skill set but in some ways she clearly proved herself by like, you know, releasing a platinum album and then like, you know, getting her own TV show, that stuff. Almost certainly, you know, that spark that is there is going to apply into the, you know, sort of business world. So those are probably the two things that I look for. Everything else is a little bit more custom, but it's sort of like founder fit and in spark.

I think Founders Fund was pretty Vocal back in 2020 about being in real life versus remote, which was very contrarian at the time. What's consensus today that you have in terms of some thoughts around maybe building a startup or things that most VCs think is consensus in terms of ideas?

Yeah, I think and this one's like, let's say mildly contrarian. But even in this world of high interest rates, high cost of capital, venture markets are definitely deflated relative to 2021. 2021. I would still argue that. I think if you look at the companies that are started, you know, call next year in 2024, the ones that are going to generate by far the most interesting returns over the course of the next decade are going to be capex intensive integrated hardware sort of software companies that impact like real problems in the real world. Much more so than like, you know, something that's just pure software GPT layer that is helping, you know, lawyers file paperwork, you know, more quickly. I just think that if you, you know, at the end of the day a venture capital's job is to, you know, aim at, you know, long tail outcomes. And if you look at the sort of top four most valuable companies on the nasdaq, Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, three out of those four Very deep in the sort of hardware land. And ultimately that's what you should be aiming for as an investor, not sort of a middling outcome. And so I still think that people have this false belief that software has zero marginal distribution, great gross margins, but that actually means that you actually have no moat. And because that your margins are actually totally fake, because in two or three years, Snowflake and Datadog are going to be at each other's throats and ultimately can only compete on price.

Let's talk about the 30 observations at 30 that you recently launched. I think it was yesterday.

Yesterday, Yeah, I wrote it yesterday and.

I wrote it a lot.

I launched it yesterday.

There are a couple points that really stood out to me. One was the learning piece that we talked about earlier, Continuous learning. Talk a bit about the YC experience that you had of being able to mentor founders. Why did you do that and why do you think that was important?

Yeah, in the moment, I felt like I just needed to pay back a lot of the favors that many mentors had done for me and former YC founders that had given me a lot of mock YC interviews. And so it truly felt like pure charity work at the time. I definitely maybe took it to the extreme where I would do 100 of these interviews over the course of like a week or two, and I would literally stack them back to back, basically three an hour, 20 minutes each, and I would do them for like four or five hours at a time.

This was after you started, after you went through YC, right?

Yeah, this is after I went through YC. So this was, you know, summer 14 is when I went through. And I think I basically started literally like the, you know, following batch. And so I would basically do like, you know, three hours a day for, you know, call it a week, basically, and, you know, non stop doing this. And at the time I was not a particularly, let's say, like competent founder or anything like that. Right. It's not like my company was off into the races or anything like that, but I did get into yc, so I felt like there was something that I had a value that I could sort of send back as sort of a contribution to future founders. Now when I reflect back on it, I sort of have two sort of major conclusions from that sort of willingness to help people are being interested in it. One, it turns out that stuff was not charity. By helping a lot of those founders, there were many of those that ended up turning into future investments, colleagues, you know, sort of that, you know, sort of, you know, if you pay it forward, it'll eventually come back around to you. Absolutely. Ended up being true. And then the second was I probably should have read into it a little bit sooner that I enjoyed so much coaching and working with other founders. That was likely, you know, I should have read into that signal and been like, man, I really should make that my profession in addition to, you know, building companies. And so obviously, you know, a couple of years later, as I was debating should I actually go into this VC thing full time, I reflected on that and I was like, you know, I've actually kind of been doing, like, I did Rough Draft Ventures, which is this basically, like, university venture capital fund. When I was at mit, I would do all these mock YC interviews that I really loved. I loved helping my friends basically chew on the particular problems they were working on. And so, like, man, I've been loving doing this for quite some time. I tend to believe if you make your professional job the thing that you just love doing, you're much more likely to be top point 1% in it, because it's not going to feel like work. Right. Me coming into Founders Fund today, even yesterday, I had nothing on my calendar. You know, I could have just gone and scoot around all day. The thing that I wanted to do was I came into the office and I was like, I'm going to write up a little essay that is half advice to founders, half personal, and hopefully people find it valuable. And that was the thing that I wanted to do on my birthday.

There's a lesson that you put in. I think it was top five lessons, which everything in life compounds. And I feel like people forget about that. In the world of distractions, notifications, and thousands of ideas, working on just one thing and focusing on one thing is lost. What did you learn from compounding? And why do you think all founders should be thinking about this?

Yeah, I mean, when I reflect back upon my, you know, I've now been in Silicon Valley for, call it, you know, 11, almost 12 years now. And when I think back on all that time, I look at some of the friends that were just constantly hopping from trend to trend, and we're never giving, you know, basically the compound interest curve, the time to actually get to the back half of the curve, right. They would. They start going up, they would get frustrated with their progress, and they go to the next thing. What they don't recognize is those things that appear to be basically overnight successes are people that have let that curve basically play out over the course of 10 years. And I Think it impacts so many different aspects of life. It's everything from literally individual, literal financial investments, investing 25k into a company and letting it ride through all the way to IPO rather than liquidating too early. I think it pays out sort of professionally where you need to be willing to. Like I did in aerospace, somewhat swallowed my ego, was comfortable being embarrassed. I went to these aerospace conferences without knowing a thing. And then rather than like, coming away from the conference being like, man, I'm overwhelmed. I don't know anybody here that wasn't actually that productive because, like, I didn't get that many meetings. Instead, it was a willingness to ignore all the distractions of, you know, in 2017. Crypto was a craze at the time, and it was being willing to just stay focused on the thing that nobody else was really paying attention to, but continue to hammer it down and do it for years and years on end to allow that curve to basically continue to go upwards. And then I'd argue, I think the same thing is true in sort of personal relationships. I think a lot of people are prone to sort of like friend hopping or trying to optimize for who's going to be the friend that can really help me with my next step on the professional life and take these very, let's say, surface level viewpoints of relationships. I think I've done a decent job of cultivating a set of very close friends that have now been my sort of friends for over a decade now since coming out to Silicon Valley. And irrespective of what they're doing professionally, continuing to invest in those friend relationships and then on the personal side as well. I've now been dating my wife for on the order of four years now, four and a half. And I think in some ways the depth of that relationship has only grown over time. The amount of joy it provides me, stability, the just viewpoint from somebody that deeply, deeply understands me and how valuable that is when I'm considering things professionally. I included in that essay an example where in the final moments of deciding whether or not to start Varda, I definitely had a little bit of confronting this existential dread of, oh, my God, things are working pretty well on the investing side. Why the hell am I taking, like, this, like, massive risk to go do this when, like, it's so hard to get the investing thing to work? Well, so many people would be like, love to do that. I'm now, like, you know, doing the thing where, like, am I not letting the compound curve ride enough by doing this? And you know, her resounding feedback was like, darling, you've like lined up the perfect team. This is your life's work. Like, screw the, you know, anything else. Like you got to, you got to go do this, right? And so imagine that I hadn't invested in that relationship and instead, you know, I didn't have the pillow talk and instead panic and then bailed on that sort of co founding relationship and Barda wouldn't exist. And so I think there's just so many of these things that people just like underinvest into. And the compound curve isn't just like sitting there passively waiting for it to compound. Right. I think that can be true in let's say a financial instruments. But unlike the sort of learning or the personal relationship side or professional relationships, it requires sort of, you are the interest, you have to constantly allow it basically to compound by continuing to put in small amounts of effort over the course of years and years and years.

Well, Dillian, thank you so much for your time. Of course, a lot, a lot's been learned with our talk today and thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for having me.

Yep.