Momentum, Moats, and the New Rules of Pre-Seed with Gaurav Jain

Welcome to Investing in Startups. I'm Joe Maeger. Our guest this week is Gaurav Jain, co-founder and managing partner of Afora Capital. Afora is one of the pioneers of institutional pre-seed investing and runs the largest pre-seed venture fund in the world. We talked about how momentum is a moat, market size is overrated, co-gen tools have changed pre-seed, and why sometimes focusing on the short-term instead of the long-term really is a rational strategy. Please enjoy. Gaurav, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

The Hyperswell guys speak so highly of you, and it was just a great reminder that I should try and talk you into coming on. So this should be fun.

Well, we think very highly of them, so it means a lot coming, have that coming from them.

I want to start with a saying of yours, which is momentum is the new moat. I'd love to start with that and get you to expand on it.

Yeah, totally. You know, one of the big questions obviously we get asked all the time, whether it's from LPs or founders, it's just where are the moats going to be in the future? You know, historically the moats would be switching cost, right? Like there's a lot of people you hear that are Salesforce customers, for example, complain about if they could switch out of Salesforce, they would do it like yesterday, but they're so invested in the product and it's just, It is what it is and they're going to live with it. Obviously with AI, it becomes a lot easier to switch products or the model layer, right? That's the big question is could that sort of absorb a lot of the value, right? Because most people just work with ChatGPT or Claude and so on and so forth. So that's sort of where the question is coming from is what are the modes? And I think the conclusion we've come to is that the companies that'll win in that AI future are the ones that move really fast on both product. And go-to-market. In fact, I saw Grant, who's a co-founder, CEO of a company called Gamma in our portfolio. They're like an AI slide deck company. He posted this the other day. I thought it was— and crushing it and doing pretty well. Yeah. And he posted this and I thought it was brilliant. He said the products in the future, it'll be less about moats and more about being magnets. And so I'm going to kind of append to my momentum is the moat to say, forget about moats. Altogether if you're a founder, an AI founder, and really ask yourself on how your product can be a magnet. And what Grant was talking about is, you know, with moats, you think of like a castle with like crocodiles and like, you know, you're protecting the castle and like that's the moat, right? That's where the analogy comes from. And that's what Salesforce has, right? Switching costs and you've invested so much in the product, it's really hard to leave even though you want to leave. And he talks about the concept of a magnet, which is there are no moats, right? If you wanna leave, you can totally, you're free to leave, right? right? But you will not leave because a product is so good that you keep coming back like a magnet. And that sort of relates back to what I talk about, you know, momentum is a moat. And the reason, the way you become a magnet is by executing on the product, right? Constantly building what customers want, what they can't even think of, and they tried and they're like, wow, the delight, it just keeps getting better and better. I mean, I think of in some ways like Amazon, right? They just keep making the service better. It used to be, uh, you know, first they launched Prime and then it was like next day, then the same day. Now I see like 2-hour, you know, delivery. It's just the product keeps getting better. So there's like no reason to leave even though you can. I think those are the companies that'll win because it is clear to us that AI is going to be an incredible force. It's going to solve a lot of problems and create a lot of value. The question is how you as a founder leverage that, and I think that is by just building incredible products and staying very close to the customer and executing on your business.

I want to come back to product distribution and AI, but while we're here, you know, on the velocity speed piece and iterating, when you are talking to founders, how do you size them up for their ability to execute at a rapid rate and iterate at the speed you'd like to see, knowing that they're of course gonna talk a big game about doing so and whatnot and kind of filtering them out.

Yeah, I look, it is obviously one of the most important parts of our diligence process, but also the hardest part of the diligence process because I can't ask them straight up, like, do you move fast and do you iterate rapidly? Right? So you've gotta kind of triangulate. Yeah, exactly. You gotta triangulate, right? So one way we do that is by just sort of trying to understand what happened in the last 6 months, the last 3 months, the last month, right? How many customers have you talked to? What idea did you start with? Right. And how did that idea change? Why did it change? What will make you believe this is the right idea? Are you willing to change this idea? Right. If the customer signals are pointing in the different direction, I think you start to get a sense of where on that spectrum does this, does this founder lie? Are they very top down, which is like, this is my vision. I see the future and this is how it's going to be. Sometimes that can work. We don't find that very frequently. That's what works or the other. Opposite, which is like, I'm here to solve a problem for my customer, right? And exactly what shape or form that'll take, or even if that customer is the right customer, or I might change the customer, everything is like up for debate and could be changed. But the core principles are right, which is moving fast, constantly iterating, taking feedback from customers. You know, they're technical, they can build, they can ship quickly. They're gritty. They understand there'll be ups and downs. There'll be days where it's like, feels like one step forward, but two steps backwards, right? And I think they can persevere through that because these businesses, as you know, take 10+ years, right, to build a really big company. I mean, the one that, you know, moves the dial for a venture fund. So I think those are the things you're trying to like triangulate. We do a lot of backchannel, right? You want to talk to people these folks have worked with. And frankly, what you don't want to hear is that they were a really good employee, which I know kind of sounds kind of a little ironic, right? What you don't want to hear is like, oh yeah, this person was going to become a VP here and then SVP and probably be running this company one day. They were that good. Because that means the person is probably very political, probably very good at like playing the company game, but maybe not an entrepreneur. What you kind of want to hear is like, oh yeah, the person like breaks a bunch of rules, you know, kind of bends the rules or sees how far they can push this thing. I don't know if they would have survived here very long, you know, given how the place works. But high integrity, moves fast, very technical, you know, builder, like all those things are constant. So anyway, you try to kind of piece those things together to figure out you know, if that's the right person to back or not.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I'd read plenty of your stuff before the show, and I thought there was an interesting mix of embracing and tracking the short-term in the context of long-term goals. And it reminded me of this conversation I had years ago with Tom Gardner, CEO of The Motley Fool. And Tom told me the story about early in his founding days there, as this probably would've been around the late '90s-ish, he was having dinner with Howard Schultz at Starbucks. And Tom was talking about how all the goals they worked towards were super long-term. And Howard was like, you know what, Tom, I think that's admirable, but the long-term is made up of a series of short-term, you know, and to reach those long-term goals, you've got to have short-term, medium-term goals that are aligned with stepping towards those. And I think sometimes the founders, it can, it could be easy to lose sight of that. And I say that as someone who, like you, is a founder running a firm day to day. But yeah, no, I think that's a great point.

You know, I wrote this blog post where I drew also a comparison to the biological concept of evolution, right? If you, you know, when we were like a single cell organism, I think it'd be impossible to design a human body or even like imagine a human body when you just have one cell to this like incredible machine with all these different organs and systems. And frankly, the only way you could go from one cell to where it is today is just through a bunch of trial and error, right? And in the case of evolution, trial is a bunch of mutations, right? Or I guess error is a bunch of mutations, and trials is like you try a bunch of stuff, see what sticks, and then you kind of double down on that, and then you get rid of the other mutations, and you kind of keep doing that. And the human body took, took a few billion years, but like, it's how I think you go from something that is very simple, a single cell, to something very complicated that you could never, never imagine. And I think that's what we would tell founders is like, look, start off with a wedge product. You can see that, you see that there's a need in the market today and you didn't find adjacencies, right? You learn from talking to the customer what other problems you can solve, what other customers you can sell the same product to, and give it time. In 10 years, and some of our best companies, frankly, when they look back, both for the founders and for the investors, like We could not have predicted this journey. We could not have predicted how big this company could be, frankly, when we started in the best cases. And I think that's just, you have to kind of go in with that mindset, which sometimes is hard, right? Because like you want certainty. I think the human, you know, psyche wants certainty and this uncertainty is like sometimes unnerving. But if you're going to be a pre-seed investor, if you're going to be a founder, I think that's, you have to be comfortable with that.

Now, appreciating you're not fussed about market size when founders come in and hearing everything you just said, do you have any points of view on certain markets that you're excited about and you want to back more founders in? Or do you operate more from a place of backing great people, founders with a rough sense of what it is they want to build, knowing that, that that's going to iterate?

Yeah. I mean, the short answer is very much the latter, right? Which is we're very much people investors and open-minded on ideas, markets, understanding that even after we invest, it'll pivot, change. I mean, one of our portfolio companies called Hightouch, they now are sort of in the AI marketing space, if you may, when we invested was actually a corporate travel company. Through building software for corporate travel through Slack. And then, you know, COVID happened and less than a year later, and of course in March 2020, you weren't buying corporate travel. That was not a top of your list as an enterprise. So they went through a series of pivots and then eventually found this idea in reverse ETL that became Composable CDP and that's become AI marketing. So I think we're very much are comfortable with that. That being said, look, I do think tailwinds help. The way I think about it is that you want to be in the right zip code. And then exactly what street you're gonna put your house in, like that I think can be figured out. But if you're not even the right zip code, it's really hard I think to build a fast-growing company. Right now the good news is the zip code has a very, very large blast surface area, which is like AI. Like yeah, historically there might be one or two zip codes that could be interesting, maybe fintech because of open banking or Plaid, maybe it's, I don't know, mobile or app store or whatever. Right now every market has tailwind, right? Every company on this planet right now is wondering what their AI strategy is. Is AI going to help me? Is it going to put me out of business? What should I— they literally have budgets to go buy AI. That, if you're a founder building an AI, it's incredible. But even as you double-click within AI, we found like healthcare is interesting, for example. We found a few other spaces that are interesting. But honestly, when Uber started, travel was not an interesting category. Gig economy was not a word. When Airbnb started, hotels were not an interesting category. And I think you have to be very open-minded and Frankly, the categories that VCs think are hot today are probably not where the best companies are being built. I think that's just the reality of it. So you have to be very people-centric if you're investing at the stage we are. For—

was one of the OG pioneers of institutional pre-seed. How has that market changed over the last decade?

Yeah, sort of to go back to the story around like just looking back and you're like, wait, I could not have predicted like this is how things would evolve, is I think pre-seed is in a a perfect example of that. When we started Afora in 2016, I used to be at a seed fund prior to that, and my co-founder was at a Series A fund, and we saw how even seed investors were telling founders, you're too early for us, you need to launch the product, get some traction, and then we could do a $3 to $5 million seed round. And founders would turn around and be like, wait, so let me get this right. So I need traction to get the money, but I need money to get the traction. Like, that's a catch-22. That's your job, just help me solve that. And all I could say was, touché, I hear you, but I just can't invest this early, and maybe you should talk to angel investors, AngelList, and, you know, accelerators or whatever it is. But it was very like chaotic. It was kind of, you know, messy, and there was really no good solution. And I think my co-founder and I basically saw an opportunity and saw, you know, think of a wedge product. We saw an opportunity to kind of help institutionalize that stage. It was starting to be called pre-seed, but frankly, it was a negative term, right? right? It was reserved for founders that couldn't raise a seed. So you raised a pre-seed. It was like a sign of failure, if you may. And call us crazy, but we kind of leaned into that and we said, you know what, we're going to make this a first-class citizen. We're going to raise the world's largest pre-seed fund. And we're only going to do pre-seed because right now people think of pre-seed as negative. We're going to say, well, it's all we're going to do. And the bar was kind of low because there was nobody else really doing pre-seed. So like $40 million was our target. We're like, that's going to be the world's largest pre-seed fund. And, and, you know, hopefully that'll help create the brand around pre-seed. 10 years later, you know, the category has grown by 10x, if not more. If you look at Crunchbase data, number of pre-seed rounds, and it's really taken market share away from seed, where now founders realize their first round is called pre-seed, right? I think that's become part of the vernacular for founders. It's become a positive term, and we've done a lot of work to help establish a category. We started a pre-seed summit a few years ago, and we could have called it the A4 Summit, but we chose to call it the Pre-Seed Summit. Because we felt if the category wins, then Afor wins as part of that. We've had founders of DoorDash, PayPal, Cloudflare, Instacart, Pinterest, you know, Box, all these folks come speak at this summit, which is an Afor event. But again, we called it a pre-seed summit because we really wanted them to talk about their pre-seed story, even though none of them called it around a pre-seed back in the day when they started their company. But we sort of synonymized this idea of taking, you know, nothing and converting into something as pre-seed, right? Going from 0 to 1 as pre-seed. So I think that helped us a lot. Obviously, we continue to be the world's largest kind of dedicated pre-seed fund, $500 million later, and the category has come a long way, which is huge. I think now founders have a lot of options as they're starting their company at the idea stage or sometimes even pre-idea for funding for a partner, and they don't have to anymore find scrapes to just to get business off the ground, which I think is a huge win for the ecosystem.

And outside of just managing much more than you used to, How has Afor evolved with the market?

Yeah, you know, we take a lot of inspiration frankly from the founders we invest in, which is, you know, we're constantly iterating on our own products and in our own business. We think of venture as a series of temporary advantages and, you know, pre-seed, us being the pre-seed exclusive, pre-seed dedicated firm was great for the first few years. I think it worked pretty well when nobody else was doing pre-seed, but now when Sequoia announced their most recent fund, they said, now we are a pre-seed firm as well. So yeah, I think pre-seed in and of itself is not going to work. So we're constantly innovating and trying a bunch of experiments. Some work, some don't work. We launched something called the Founder in Residence a couple of years ago where we have a set of 10 to 20 companies at any point in time come work out of our offices in San Francisco where we co-build with them. We go through the idea maze, try a bunch of different things. Connor from Hyperspell and Manu were part of that program where they worked in our office for a few months and actually they went through a bunch of different pivots of their own until they landed on Hyperspell, which is just an amazing, amazing journey for us to see. Firsthand. And we think with AI, that sort of goes to the next level. So, so anyway, that's been a, a program we launched. We now do something similar for university students as well, whether they wanna do it for a semester or two, or they wanna drop out. We wanna support that community as well. And that's been doing, that's been fantastic for us. And we're gonna keep trying things. We're gonna keep trying experiments. Again, the north star doesn't change, which is supporting exceptional talent that wants to start a company as early as possible, right? As early as possible. Once they have conviction on themselves, that's all we care about. The only risk we'll not take is the team risk, right? We're not going to take founder risk where they don't believe they want to do something or they— we don't think they're the best people to go do it. Outside of that, we're going to take all kinds of risks and we're going to keep launching products to support that.

How have coding tools changed how you approach pre-seed?

What we've found in our data is that our companies, you know, we invested zero revenue kind of pre-product, and a million ARR is kind of a loose proxy for product market fit, right? Where they can sort of unlock Series A, or most companies can. So if you think of like that A zero to one is kind of where we focus. What we have found in our data is that companies, the AI native companies can get to a million ARR twice as fast and by burning one-fifth the capital as pre-AI companies in our portfolio, right? So they're getting to a million ARR faster and more capital efficiently, which is great. Some of that is obviously the incredible market pull right now, right? For AI products, as I was talking about, every company has a budget now for AI tooling and there's customers all over the world. But the second is code gen tools, right? Our portfolio founders usually remind me, or a solo founder, when I'll be like, oh, you do have a co-founder? They're like, yeah, his name is Cursor. And these tools, Cursors and others, are generating a lot of code, right? I mean, historically, 70 cents on every dollar that VCs would give venture-backed startups would go to hiring engineers because you had to crank out a lot of code. And now if that code is being cranked out by code gen tools, companies are a lot more capital efficient and they move a lot faster. I mean, our founders tell me that they have multiple agents kind of working in tandem, right? Building the product and all they're doing is sort of the thinking work and getting the customer context to then be able to translate that into the product, which is massive. What's going to happen is more companies will get started, which I think is great for the ecosystem that more people will have be empowered to build businesses and solve problems. I think those founders will need less capital, right? Which I think is also great. And I think just like what Amazon Web Services or cloud did to startups, right? Where in the '90s, if you were starting a company, Or even in the 2000s when I started a company, you needed like $10 million because you needed to get a data center, you need to like have expensive shrink-wrap software you needed to buy and all kinds of stuff, right? Just to like get in business, right? And then with AWS and Stripe and everything else, that cost came down a magnitude, right? Because it was sort of just-in-time and usage-based. And now I think AI takes it to the next level, right? Where the fixed cost of engineers also becomes OpEx, which I think is great. And I think all you need at that point is just some time. right? And be able to support yourself as a founder, right? During that time when you try a bunch of different ideas and see what sticks. And the moment it starts to take off, you can raise an $8 to $12 million round for growth, right? And I think to grow and build a really big business, you probably still need a lot of capital, right? Especially if it's enterprise or B2B. But I think these companies, we're already seeing our round sizes are getting smaller and all founders, maybe they would have raised $2 to $3 million in the past are now saying with half a million, million bucks, I can get to Series A. Which I think is great. We think that's awesome for the ecosystem and we'd rather have more companies get started than fewer companies burn through more capital.

When do you want to see your founders start focusing on distribution? Do you want to see them building that native to the product and how they think about it? Knowing, of course, that, that they're going to iterate, tinker, and maybe pivot a few times along the way, but when should they be working on the distribution piece?

You know, in our case, Right from day zero. I'll caveat that with the kind of companies we invest in or the kind of folks that we invest in. So we don't really do like deep tech, hard tech, biotech, that kind of stuff. I think there, you know, you're inventing something new. It's a research project and distribution is probably, A, doesn't matter, but B, probably not as much of a risk, right? If you solve something massive, then distribution will come. I think in our case, we're investing in a lot more capital-efficient companies, tend to be software companies mostly. Tend to be a lot of times app layer companies. There, I think distribution matters, right? Because there is market risk. And I think you have to be thinking about there will be many competitors. How do you win that market? So I think it has to be very native to the founder's DNA and to the product. So that's why for us, I think it comes pretty early. And these days, especially given product development is becoming more and more democratized. I don't know if I would go as far as saying commoditized, but certainly democratized. The customer context will matter more and more, you know, who understands the customer needs the best, who's able to design a product that meets those needs in the best possible fashion. I think those companies will win. And hence, I think you have to have a really good sense of who the customer is, how you get to them.

You mentioned some data earlier from portfolio companies around differences between growth rates, AI companies. You've been at it for a long time, have a lot of data to work with. Are there any other interesting signals that have jumped out from looking at your data over the years?

We're certainly seeing some interesting datasets around AI. I guess one other one that comes to mind that was counterintuitive to us is when we started at Four, we thought at pre-seed founders might sell 5, 10% of the company because they want to reserve a bunch for seed and then Series A. What we have found across now dozens and dozens of companies, the founders actually sell about 18.3%. On average at the pre-seed round. And that was kind of counterintuitive to us. And I think what we realized though is that founders don't really think of this in terms of pre-seed, seed, Series A, right? They think of this as like, I need some money to get into business and get to $1 million ARR, and then I need some money to grow that. And I'll sell 20% here and 20% here. If the VCs want to call it pre-seed so I can get the round done, great. They called it seed 10 years ago, that was also fine. They called it Series A 20 years ago, be my guest, right? I don't think the founders frankly care about the terminology. They just care about who's the right investor who actually wants to invest at this stage so I can run an efficient process, they can be good partners, they can get me to the next milestone. All they care about is who can I partner with who can increase my odds of success? I understand this is a very risky path, so I just want to increase my odds. That's all they care about. So they sell 18.3%. And I think that's partially why we've scaled up the fund size is to say, we want to be your lead investor. Like, that's the biggest problem we can solve for you is there's tons of Founders used to come to us and be like, I'm trying to raise, let's say, $2 million. I have $5 million of interest to follow the lead, but I can't find a lead. Tons of people want to write $250,000, $500,000 checks. Nobody seems to want to be the lead investor and price the round. And we said, okay, fine, we'll play that role. And that's why we've scaled the fund size to be able to lead more and more of those rounds. But that was probably one of the counterintuitive points. I think, as I mentioned, we've seen the round sizes come down quite a bit because of AI. I think our data suggests something like by half for pre-seed, which is I think also really positive for the ecosystem. Those are probably the big ones.

What's something you've changed your mind about in the last few years?

I don't know how much it has changed my mind. It's more I've learned some very tough lessons over the years, especially as I look at my portfolio and companies that didn't work out. I think the one big lesson has been where I fell in love with the idea and I almost implicitly was like, ah, if I was running this company, it's exactly what I would do. And I totally can see this being a big business. And I sort of convinced myself that team was good enough to go after the idea. Never works. And I know it was a bad call because I was actually right on the markets because there were competitors who started after us that actually ended up being really, really big businesses. We were just in the wrong company. So I knew the timing was right. I knew the market was right. We were just in the wrong, wrong company. And it's hard, you know, as I've been a venture-backed founder of a company before, and you know, you always kind of have the implicitly, whether you realize it or not, put your operating hat on and you're like, no, no, no, like this will totally, this needs to work. I need to will it into existence. And I think you have to remind yourself as an investor, that's not my job. We're here to enable founders to achieve their vision. They're the ones who are going to build the companies ultimately. And while we may be frankly, even on the boards as a check and balance, it's not really a governance role, right? We're there when we invest, we're basically, at least from our perspective at Pre-Seed, we're backing the founders to figure this out and we're with them come hell or high water. That's been one I used to fall more in love with. Ideas that were business model innovations a lot of times, right? Or just ideas that were, that could be good businesses. And I think I've learned over time, and part of that is thanks to my co-founder who's really pushed us to invest more in technical founders with like technical insights. I think those companies have tend to outperform, frankly, in our portfolio, who just end up building better products versus just folks who can run a business, right? I think running a business is a part of obviously what we do, but a lot of it is just There's got to be some kind of fundamental insight and the product's got to be just 10x better. And then we've kind of wrapped the go-to-market around it versus the other way around where the go-to-market is strong, but the product has been weak. Those have been good, but not great outcomes.

In my experience on investing teams, each person will have kind of a thing that they're about. There's the broader strategy philosophy. People are aligned with it, but people on the team will have things that they in particular are into or stickler about? Is there anything for you, and maybe we've already covered it, but is there anything that stands out for you that if you were sitting around with the team talking about a company that the other people at the table would know, oh, I know, I know what Gaurav's gonna talk about here?

Well, they give me a lot of heat for the fact that I'm always harping on distribution. Going back to this debate of product versus distribution, a bunch of my team is very much product-centric. And as I said, I've come closer to that. I probably was on one extreme and I've come to realize that that definitely, that is very core, but I still think distribution, I guess where we debate a little bit now with AI, there is a world where the bar to build product just gets lower and lower, right? It becomes more democratized, more commoditized to spin up really good products. And I think where I feel if that, if you take it to the extreme, then distribution matters more and distribution, I don't mean like, again, a slimy salesperson. It's sort of like understanding the customer. Right? Being able to like get what is otherwise a commodity product in the hands of the right customer in the right way and making enough tweaks to it such that this really works for you in that moment and the right pricing and all that kind of stuff. Fundraising ends up becoming important. Like all of those other things maybe become that have more of a human element to it become more important than the stuff that is just pure bits and bytes. We have this debate all the time with every deal. It's healthy because like different people have different viewpoints internally. But that's why the one thing I definitely know the team kind of Every time I start on that tirade, they're like, ah, of course, you're on the, on the distribution team.

I like it. I'll wrap it up with a question I always ask people. What's a conventional view in venture that you think is bullshit?

I think the one that I hold, and part of it is again, where the stage where we play is, I don't think the market sizes matter. I think it's probably contrary until a lot of later stage funds, certainly that look at market size, frankly, before they look at anything, even sometimes team. But I think in our case, what we have found is our best companies have expanded the size of the market in weird and wonderful ways that we could not have predicted. There definitely are cases where, you know, our companies end up in smaller markets and maybe the outcomes are not as large, but I still would take that bet any day of just backing the person, the founder, the founding team, and not worrying about the market size, not worrying about frankly what market they're in, and just figuring it out as we go.

Cool. You know what? I'm going to ask one more. So you're on fund 5, roughly 1 in 10 firms that make it from a fund 1 make it that far. You're a decade in. How are you thinking about a 4 in year 20? What's your super long-term vision for the firm?

Yeah, I think there are things that we can predict and there's things that we can't. What was not going to change is our maniacal obsession of doing super early stage. It might still be called pre-seed, might not be, I don't know, but we just love this like inception, even pre-inception stage. A lot of companies, frankly, we invest in, after we commit, they go incorporate, they get a bank account, like that's how early we go, and we love that, and I think that's not gonna change. I think part of it is just the love for what we do. Part of it is that we believe the best opportunity to make money, to create value lies. So I think that's not gonna change. I think the tactics will change, obviously, and how we execute. Today, be a founder residence, tomorrow it might be something else. I think we've got to adapt and evolve as the markets change. You know, hopefully if folks on the team can grow and become, you know, GPs and help run the firm and help steer the firm, we really try to build a team culture around being full stack, right? Where it's not like somebody's doing sourcing and throwing it over the fence for somebody else to do diligence and somebody else is sitting on the board. That's not how I operate. Whether you're a junior or senior on the team, like you've got to be comfortable putting your name next to that deal. If you're pounding the fist on the table, which means you've got to do the work, which means you got to like search for that truth. And everybody pushes each other on like making sure we are being intellectually honest. So I think that, and my hope is, and we're already seeing signs of this, people grow inside of A4 and help run the firm. That's it. I mean, look, frankly, there are questions around AI and SaaS apocalypse and AGI and all these things that are probably bigger things that I'm wondering about that might be more near term on where the value creation pockets may lie if we end up in a world of AGI. Honestly, we don't think too far out. All we think about is the next year or next 2 years and just kind of put our heads down and execute and talking about kind of just the short-term wedges versus too much long-term planning.

All right. Well, Gaurav Jain, this was great. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

I enjoyed it. Thank you for having me.

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Joe Maeger is the founder and managing partner of Seaplane Ventures. The content here is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, or tax advice. The opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not reflect the views of Seaplane Ventures. Plane Ventures. Our host, guests, and clients may hold investments discussed in this podcast. Please invest responsibly.