Justin Kan + Jason Lemkin: "Things VCs Say ..."

Alright, thanks everybody for coming. Um, we thought we'd have some fun. Um, Justin and I have a few things in common, but we're both founders who have also been sort of accidental investors. Um, Justin, among other things, was Twitch and Justin.tv your first startup?

Uh, I actually had a really shitty first startup that was kind of like Google Calendar, but not as good.

Not as good.

Alright.

So, and then, and then, and then among other things, Justin co-founded Justin.tv and then Twitch. It was acquired and then you joined YC and you became both an angel and an institutional investor. You had two more startups and now you're running Atrium after all those learnings to sort of revolutionize legal services for startups. But you've done, how many investments have you done? With different hats on? Over 100. Over 100.

Yeah. Well, with including YC, it's like 250.

250. Okay. And I'm an accidental investor too. I was a co-founder twice. I built a community called Saastr. I got tricked into being a traditional VC for 22 months. I did 10 investments that are over 15x. Um, and then, uh, I hated working for someone else and then I accidentally invested my own $90 million to invest, but I consider myself an accidental investor and I run also accidentally sort of a community called Saastr that'll do $25 million next year. So I keep stumbling into things and Justin's had a fun journey. So what we thought we could do with this time is have a little bit of fun and take all this advice that you see on the Twitter and on the blog and on Bebo and MySpace that investors say and deconstruct it a little bit because every bit of advice you'll get from an investor, from the smallest angel to SoftBank to the biggest ones, it's all biased. And there's a bunch of biases. The smallest investors worry you'll run out of money or that they'll get crammed down. The biggest investors want to stuff as much money into their winners as they can. So we're not going to talk about mega rounds today because of the audience, but we thought we would have some fun and just deconstruct until we run out of time. Hold on, let me not lose my Atrium thing. Things that VCs will say to you and maybe just dig into the actual truth. So the first one, just to warm it up, is you need a warm intro. And so a lot of folks will tell you, see on the internet, like it's very hard to just cold email an investor. You need a warm intro. And if you're in Y Combinator or if you co-founded Twitch, It's probably not hard to get a warm intro, is it?

For me, no. Now I can get a warm intro.

So do you have— what do you do if you don't have a warm intro? Is it death? Are you unfundable?

It's game over. Shut your company down. No, you can figure it out, right? Like, so people do respond. If you start with cold intros, you just need a massive top of funnel because there's going to be a lot of fall-off. But I mean, I think another thing you can do is just someone in this room, right, has a connection to someone you want to talk to. It's not that hard to make friends with other founders who have been funded and figure out how to get access to their investors.

Yes. All right.

That's what we— when we were just starting off, that's what we did. We like, for Justin.tv, it was like a stupid idea. We're strapping a camera to my head and like creating our own live reality show, which is not really a business actually.

Well, today it is, but back then it was edgy, right?

Yeah. But we just went and hit up all our friends who had investors, who had real companies, and asked them for intros. That's how we raised our first round. Yeah.

So I guess one learning is you're probably 1 or 2 degrees away from an investor, but you might not be 1 or 2 degrees away from Marc Andreessen, right? Have you ever invested off a cold email? Has anyone ever written you an email, Justin, da da da da, and you've written a check?

I think one time.

One time?

Yeah.

Was it a good email?

So if you want to write a cold email, you just got to make it super short, very concise. Yes. Don't like include too much information, just like, Basically, why you are compelling, like what you're doing, why you're compelling, and what a specific ask in like 5 sentences. Yes. All right.

So make it— well, and make it a sales email.

Yeah.

Can I get coffee with you?

No, no, no. You need a specific ask. A specific ask.

OK. Derivative question, and then let's move on to the next one. So warm intros, you think, help a lot. But do you read them? If a founder sends you an email that's a really good email, whether you'd invest or not, will you read it? Yeah, I will. Will you open it? Yeah. —so that's the real insight is people will— most investors, just even except the most highest velocity investors, most investors make a few investments per year. You made 200, but you had the benefit. The average institutional investor will make 2 or 3. So if you send them a crummy email, it's not going to work, is it? But if it's the world's best email and they haven't done a couple deals this year, there's a chance they're at least going to read it, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. For me, for what it's worth, I'm earlier in my investing career than Justin and won't be as successful, but 2 of the unicorns I've done were from cold emails. Really? And yeah, I don't have them here, but I will tell you, I'll post them online. They were effing awesome. Yeah. Okay. When I opened this email, my jaw dropped. And if I showed you these 2 emails, you would invest too, right? Here's my revenue. Here's my growth. Here's my logos. Here's what I've done. Here's a screenshot of all my revenue growth, but you don't have to open it. "Here's what Dropbox said about us. Here's what Fitbit said about us. I love Saastr. I've read everything you read. Here's my favorite article, so I know you. Do you have any time to meet?" That's great. Yeah, so I can. All right.

No one ever wrote me an email like that.

Right, but they work, right? So, all right. Another one, which there's just a lot on the internet today, but it's worth chatting for a few minutes, is you see a lot of advice today about don't giving up control, and it may seem like it's hard to raise money today, but for For us old timers, this is the best of times, isn't it? Has it ever been any better?

This is the best time to raise money ever.

Since the dawn, since the Stone Age, right?

Yeah, since human beings evolved. Yeah.

And so as if you're— look, the downside is there's so many startups today, it's hard to get attention, right? But if you're reasonably hot, you're hotter than ever, right? So the advice you hear is don't give up control. Split it up. Get 4 investors in your round, right? Get 20. Maximize everything and control your destiny. What's your learning on this?

Well, you— I think there's, you know, you're optimizing for the short term when that happens, right? So I had this company called Exec. We raised $3.5 million seed round. Company did not work super good. We ended up like acquihiring it, right? And the problem was like in that 2-year period when we were working on the company, we had no board, right? We— there was no one to report to, no one who really was holding me accountable and saying, hey, your numbers are not good enough. Yes, you are fucking things up. And so without getting that direct, you know, no one— there was this massive party round where no one really cared that much. And while I thought it was like doing good when we raised the round, like actually I think it was ultimately to our detriment. And what was—

to help folks, so you raised $3— you leveraged your CV to raise $3.5 million. Yeah. What was the largest check out of that $3.5 million?

It was half of it. Oh, half.

So you had someone that had skin in the game.

Yes, but we— they didn't— I kind of— negotiated, there was like no control. No control. So there's no reporting requirement or anything like that. I didn't like have a board. So that's—

so let's just deconstruct that for a minute for folks, because that's so important. Even though someone wrote a significant check— and how big was that fund? So they gave you a million something. How big was the fund?

It was like $35 million at the time.

So they put a lot in, but they had no control.

They had no control.

They felt completely disconnected from any engagement with the company, right?

Yeah, I think I like raised the money, and the next meeting I had was like Oh, it's not working. We're shutting things down, which I don't recommend. I don't recommend. So that's the sub-question.

Will anyone care enough? Your learning is no.

Yeah, no one will care. The converse example, actually, which we were talking about backstage, is that with Justin.tv, which is the company that turned into Twitch, we raised a $2 million Series A, which that was a Series A back then.

Yes, that'd be a C- today.

Yeah, that's like your pre-seed.

Pre-seed. Yeah, pre-seed. That's right.

So we raised a $2 million price round from Alsop Louie. Partners, and then when we couldn't raise a B the next year and everyone said no, they stepped up and gave us both a valuation bump, but put in another letter round that was $4 million. Yeah. So, you know, they did care.

They cared, right? Yeah. Did they care just because they were nice people, or did they care because the nature of the investment made them care?

Yeah, I mean, I think they just didn't want to, you know, they saw enough promise that they just, you know, didn't want to write the whole thing off. Yeah.

So when, when, and the learning here for folks is when you split something up too fine, or even if you don't split up too fine, but you, you give no information, no anything, professional investors will not take it seriously. Every investor has investments that are either material or immaterial, and they'll make bets and they'll put chips in. But if they don't have enough skin in the game, the odds they're going to write another check or even care are low. They've already written it off as may not, may not, may not have positive ROI. They don't know, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So would you rather give up a little bit of control like with Justin.tv and Twitch, which was a billion, or not give up any control? What'd you learn at Atrium? How did you synthesize those learnings with Atrium? Because you've raised a few nickels. How much have you raised at Atrium?

$75 million.

All right. So you've been able to combine these two learnings together, right?

Yeah. So with Atrium, it's like I want to show up and report to someone. And I want— on our board, we have Nico from GC and Marc Andreessen and Andrew from Andreessen Horowitz and Michael from Y Combinator.

All 4? Yeah. They're coming every 6 to 8 weeks to hold you accountable?

Every quarter. Oh, every quarter. But every quarter I've got to show up and be like, this is what we did. And I don't want to look like a dumbass in front of those people. That's my motivation. So yeah, it's good. It's good to have like a brain trust that you actually want their feedback from, people you want to see. Yeah.

Related to that for folks, the idea that Justin and I were talking about backstage on this as a tip, This really works. We both agreed. If you don't give up control, if you don't happen to have Marc Andreessen and Michael Siebel and all these folks and Andrew Chen on your board, have an investor meeting anyway. Have a synthetic board meeting. I think you should do it every 6 weeks. A quarter is OK for the billionaires on Justin's board, but anything longer than 6 weeks, people aren't engaged enough in the early days. Every 6 weeks, try to get your investors to meet in a room if they're local, or worst case on a Zoom and present slides. Every, how are we doing from revenue, burn rate, marketing, sales, take it seriously. And if you do that, I find that, and if you invite them in person, they actually come. Yeah. They actually come. But if you don't do it or you just send them an email, which is better than nothing. Yes. The engagement's so low, right? Yeah.

The engagement from an email, you know, you've probably sent them or received them. It's like, great progress. Like, how can I help? That's it. One line. Boom. I've been the sender of those emails. I just want to show I read it. That's it. Yeah. All right.

One other one that a couple of years ago we barely talked about it. Now it's like 70% of the VC articles on TechCrunch is SAFEs, notes, convertible debt, this debt, that debt. I want to talk about two things just because I think this is something that's been written about way too much and is not the biggest deal in the world. Yeah. But does it matter? Does it matter whether you have SAFEs or debts or a priced round or a discounted? Is this the biggest issue that founders face?

I think that everybody's so obsessed with optimizing, they forget the most important part is you just need the fucking money. It's like DJ Khaled says, you got to secure the bag.

Whatever is going to happen— Secure the bag ventures? I think that would be a good fund, right?

That could be the next fund after Saastr. Yeah. You just need the money. It's really important to figure out how— what is the mechanism by which you're going to be able to get access to capital? Yeah. That's really the most important thing.

And why on the internet do we see so many folks advocating SAFEs and so many VCs railing in tweets and tweetstorms about them? What's really going on behind this biased advice on both sides?

Well, I think it is better for founders, right? It is faster. There's like almost no— But do they care?

Do the investors care? I know I don't care if I write a SAFE. You don't care about the company? I care about people, but I don't care as an investment. Yeah, I don't even hold it as a real— as a core investment if it's a SAFE. It's below a line.

Yeah, because you're probably— there's a threshold of capital, I don't know, which you're not going to invest in a SAFE, right? Yes. Like in the millions of dollars range, you're probably not going to put that in a SAFE because it's like, uh, kind of irresponsible for you because you have no investor protections. So, um, you know, it is probably correlated with lack of, you know, these party rounds where you're not going to have any accountability. And that can work in certain circumstances if you are just really self-motivated, really good at holding yourself accountable. and you figure out how to grow until you can actually raise that Series A. But if you don't create that account, that structure for yourself, then it can be bad. That's a good—

let's dig in on that for a second because that's so important. And I think this is where people take good advice the wrong direction is if you're going to raise a bunch of safes and debt and have no accountability, it's like training without a trainer. It's like training for the NBA or something without— I mean, it can be done, right? That's a good analogy. But how many folks can get to the NBA without a trainer? And what— of the 200 investments you've done, I mean, you can't do this quantitatively, but how many would have done worse because they had no accountability for safes? They ran out of money, they weren't pushed, they didn't have anybody care, they couldn't raise another round. How often do you think it cut the wrong way? What's that?

That's probably 25%, 30%, I bet. Yeah.

So we think we have this accountability, but it's hard to train yourself sometimes, isn't it?

Yeah, I think that the kind of safe came out of Y Combinator, and YC is very strong ethos. It's almost like, you know, VCs are out there trying— they kind of came from this, like, early 2000s ethos where it's like VCs are trying to, like, figure out how to fuck you, right?

So, like, we all lived it. I get it.

Yes. So, so let's, like, figure out how to, um, you know, create these structures that are much more founder-friendly, which is really good, but then you lost the accountability with it. Yeah. Yeah.

So last question on this, because I think especially maybe If you're not the absolute hottest company in the world out of YC and you read the stuff on the internet, if you find your dream investor, right, if you actually have more than one choice, because if you have one choice, the options are usually fairly simple. It's either go without or do the deal. But if you have a choice, the terms, the economics are essentially the same, and one investor that you love says, "I just don't want to do SAFEs." Should you do the SAFE and maintain that extra internet control, or should you pick the investor that you want to work with for a decade?

Seems like a leading question, but yes, you should.

Well, I would say on the internet, it's not clear what the answer is, right?

No, you want to pick the person you want to work with, right? Like you want to pick the person you think is going to be helpful. You want to pick the person who you think you want to see and talk to about your business. Like that's always the rule, no matter how you're raising the round. Yeah.

All right. A related one, just because again, you know, when you did it the second time, you did this yourself, split up the round. How many investors— I don't want to be redundant, so I'll skip to the next one, but how many is too many? How fine— when do you have too many investors in a round? You lose that accountability.

Yeah, I think you want to have some people who have major stakes, who are going to be on your board, who are going to hold you accountable, who are going to be helpful to you, who are going to work really hard to help make you successful.

What do you think today, just to give people some milestones, what is material? It's still a number percentage for most investors. If they're not angels, isn't it?

Yeah, it's probably like, it's gonna be about to have at least like 10%. 10%.

Something like that. What do you think? I think even today, most investors less than 7, even today, they'll check out. So my worry is, look, if you're gonna sell 60% of your company in the round, you could probably fit in 6 good names. Yeah. And they'll all show up. But if you actually wanna sell less today, 'cause your valuation's higher, your burn rate's lower, Anyone below 7 to 8, even in a seed fund, they're going to start to not believe they can make enough money, right? And so they may still have other reasons to support you, but it won't be material, right? So that's, I think, people get a lot of it. If you're hot, split it up. But you may, even if it's 3 hot investors, they may not have enough skin in the game, right? No. Okay, next one I want to, and then this may shock some folks in the room because fundraising is hard. But what you see today is like endless seeds, right? And safes and notes help in the beginning, but actually being 11 years in the bull run has helped too, right? Because everyone's a genius today, right? And I just started investing at the end of 2013, and when I started investing, I did these things I didn't know they were called second seeds. Yeah, they were seen as toxic in 2013. That was seen as a failed startup, and I just fucking cleaned up because I did— no one told me. So I would meet these companies, they'd be doing like a million, growing 50% a month, and they needed another little bit of money. I'm like, wow, that's— this is— this looks pretty good. But that was seen as a bad signal. For now, it's not a bad signal at all, right? To raise 5 seed rounds, is it?

More and more capital, and it's just like—

People don't care to be the third or fourth seed investor anymore, do they? Yeah, I don't think so.

There's just too many investors that want access.

Too many. So when— how much is too much? If you're lucky enough to hack 2019 and can raise as many seed rounds as you want, when is it— what are the metrics, or when do you know to just stop and and maybe raise a traditional round or take this stuff a little bit more seriously?

Well, I think the problem is, I think people will think that they can continue to raise these seed rounds forever on SAFEs, and eventually we get to dollar amounts that you just can't aggregate from kind of random, like, people in Silicon Valley anymore. You know, like, you need to raise $10 million. Well, it's hard to aggregate that, you know. And so then you're going to need someone who has a real fund to step up. And the problem with that is that If you've done amazing and achieved these incredible milestones, then maybe you can get someone to do that. But if you haven't done that and you're somewhere in between, then the valuation might— your metrics might not support a valuation that supports them investing that amount of money. And so they're going to get a relatively small portion of the total invested, including the seeds. And as we talked about backstage, it's like, that is super weird to investors, and they're just not comfortable with it.

Atrium is an outlier because you've had some success. But you— I think you might— how much did you raise in like your ultra— you had a lot of—

It was like $10 million in like a seed round.

OK, so you raised $10 million in your seed, which is a lot for most people. But you can— that's— for you, it's not that hard in 2018. But then how much did you raise after that? $65 million. OK, so my rule, for what it's worth for folks I've learned, is it's got to be like— And I don't know if that $10 million was in equity or debt. It may not matter. But if you guys raise these endless bits of money, when you raise the real round, it has to be at least 3 to 4 times that amount. Because people get spooked. People get spooked if you raised $5 million. And I think $5 million for most startups is too much in equity debt. Because how the heck are you going to raise $15 million in your A unless you're super hot?

Yeah, unless you have to be crushing it completely. Crushing it, right? And then you've limited your options.

And even you— and we all still have a lot to prove— you still maintain that rule, right? Even though you pushed it with the $10 million, You still had to do the $50 million next to kind of get the ratios and math to all work out, right? [Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] That's right. [Speaker:BRYAN_LAWRENCE] So anyhow, for what it's worth, as a simple number for me, because I see this more, after $3 million in seeds, just realize you may trip a line because you may have to raise so much money in the next round you can't do it, right? So just before you raise $3 million, even if the candy's on the table, just make sure you want to take another chocolate bar because you might regret it. OK, a fun one, just because things have changed. If you guys are lucky enough, big fund, small check. There are— 4 or 5 years ago, big funds just started to write smaller checks and create seed funds. But now you open up TechCrunch, and there's like 11 funds in the seed round. And you see there's Sequoia and Accel, and all these folks are in the seed round. When is that good, and when is it bad, and what are the issues?

Yeah, so big fund writing a small check in you, like billion-dollar fund writing a $200,000 check, that's marketing. That's not an investment. They are just wanting an option and filling their top of funnel to see when, you know, you actually create something in your company, if they can come in and do the A. So, you know, they're not particularly invested in what happens. Yeah. Yeah.

And what if, if a big fund puts $200K into you, does that increase the odds they do the next round?

I think maybe slightly. Just that there's like a comfort level with you getting to know you as a founder. So if you have a good working relationship, I think that increases it slightly, but not like, it doesn't like ensure it. Like I think a lot of people think, oh, they're going to guarantee do my next round, but that's definitely not the case.

And then let's just do through 3 things. If you guys are, do get these great options, When the partners at the billion-dollar firms meet on Monday afternoons, do they talk about the $200K checks?

Well, I've never been there, but I don't think so. I don't think so.

I've been in a few of them. They don't even know. Actually, a lot of times they don't even know who wrote the small checks.

And they don't know that they're an investor.

They don't know. No one knows. Even the partner that did it, maybe it was a scout or something, they don't even know that they're an investor in that entity, right? No. So, but, and I want to talk about signaling next, but there is one point just if you do have this option that you brought about backstage. Brands do matter. Yeah. Brands— we're in fact, in B2B, we're all trying to build brands, right? Atrium has a brand now. It didn't have a brand when you started, but you do have a brand now today, don't you? Yeah. And you get clients and customers and subscribers from your brand, don't you? Absolutely. So brands matter. Yeah. And if you get a Sequoia or Accel early, it does help.

It can be helpful to you, not from a financial, like, uh, fundraising in the future standpoint, but definitely from a, with employees and customers, and I do think that brand helps.

[Speaker] Brand helps, right? All right, and then the last one, just 'cause we read this on the internet, signaling. And signaling's like, actually, if you raise a bunch of rounds over your life, you'll realize this is a nuanced issue that does matter, 'cause everyone's a signal, right? A poor brand is a signal of poor quality. A high brand's a signal of high quality, 'cause there's only so much data in the world. But the classic thing you read on the internet of signaling risk is a really great fund puts in a marketing check and they don't write the next round, and that freaks people out because, hey, if Sequoia loved you enough to invest, why aren't they leading the A? So your thoughts, that's less of an issue in 2019 than in the old days?

I definitely think it's gone down because everybody's out there writing checks at all these different stages. You know, you have angels participating in later stage rounds.

Yeah, going into Notion at $800K pre.

And you've got, you've got these, you know, billion-dollar funds writing these marketing checks or whatever. But I like the way you put it last backstage, which is like, it cannot help you, right? If they don't invest in your A, um, and they wrote a check in the seed round, there's no way that helps you, right? Yeah, it can only be bad.

For what it's worth, when I do it, Jack, because I take a lot of risk, like, I, if I, I only have, if I have a $60 million core fund and I write $4 million, like, that can't fail, can it? I mean, it's risky. So I just scan the cap table, and if I see these names and they're not contributing. And I don't— you— we don't really care what other people think, do we? Yeah. I mean, only a little bit, but I still get concerned. Yeah. When I see a brand name below the line and they're not engaged and I like the numbers, I think something's wrong here. Like maybe the founders are— question your thing. Yeah. What's wrong? Because there's so much money today. Why shouldn't this hot fund at least be putting 3 to 4? It's still, it's still not that much money for them. Yeah. Right. And so I do more diligence. Yeah. Than I would when they don't. That's even best case cuz of signaling. That's a great point. Um, all right, one last one because we'll run out of time. But, but even though we hit this, it's so important. I've never heard from you since I invested. We laugh, but this didn't happen 5 or 6 years ago, did it? People didn't— never, never update their investors for years, did it? Did they?

No, you want to update your investors. You really want to update your investors. Your investors are a community of people who are like invested in your success, right? And they can't help you if they're not, um, if they don't have like some sort of update from you. The best scenario that I ever had was this company Simple Contacts that wrote— I'd put a seed check in into their seed round and then they wrote investor updates every week for the first like 2 years, I think. 104 investor updates. Yeah, it was like the first— every week there was an investor update and, you know, some of them were— most of them were good and some of them were not good. But there was an investor update every week. So when people would ask me like, what's a great company? That you invested in, what should I look at? I'd be like, Simple Contacts, just because they were top of mind, you know, because they said—

I mean, you'd made 200 investments, you can't remember all of them.

Yeah, I just remember the last 5 that emailed me. And so, um, the funny thing was that that actually led— when they did their Series A, like after maybe it was a year or 18 months or something like that, um, they were asking me, you know, I, I introduced them to a bunch of investors because they were so top of mind. I was like, these guys are really executing. They ended up raising their, their Series A from Goodwater because of that. You know, so it can help. Your investors can help you. You just, they need to know that you still exist. Yeah.

And so just two, we could spend a whole session just on this because people are so much worse at this than they used to be. Right. Just two other points. What I see, two things. I see founders not even doing this. And then I see something that is not as bad, but close. When things get tough, they stop sending them.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

You ever seen that in Twitter investments?

Yeah, that's it. That's very common.

It's pretty, even in great companies it happens, doesn't it? CEOs get panicked. Like it's a bad, they have a rough quarter and they stop sending them. And so what's your learning advice from that?

Look, I mean, I think people have the— they're conflict avoidant. They're scared to update someone with something that's not super positive. But the thing is, the alternative is they just forget you exist because they have 200 investments or 50 investments or 20 investments or whatever. And so it's better to be remembered and like have them be the brain trust to help you, even if you have to have that difficult conversation. It's probably not even a conversation, right? Email rather than just like fade off into like black.

Too many people. Yeah. Yeah. Just, and let's, let me just one comment. Let's tie it to our last point in the second check. Remember something, because I see the best founders do this. Like, I mean, they crush it and they have a bad half and they go dark. Just remember this one thing. People feel like, like Justin said, we're, we're high EQ founders. We get it. But professional investors, they, they, it's not the first time they've gotten an email that the quarter wasn't great. It's like, yes, you want to get the email that said we grew 92% last month, but it's much better to get the email that says last month was horrible than no email. We've done enough. Like, we've seen it before. Professional investors— and in fact, you're not a professional investor for real if you can't afford to write off an investment. You have to be able to write off an investment or you can't be a professional, right? So it's okay. It's okay to even get the worst news as long as you don't seem like you're crazed. Like, absolutely.

And then when you bounce back from that, they're going to respect you even more. Yeah. And people will.

And if you send the bad news and you're not like totally a Debbie Downer, that is actually when people will try to help. They give a shit, right? They won't. They'll pretend to help when times are great, but they don't want to work on those ones. But if you believe in the founder and it's just a rough quarter, then okay, I'm going to find you a VP of marketing. Okay, I'm going to— I promised I would help, but so do that. And then the last one to tie People don't think about this enough, but who writes a second check? If you send the investor updates every week or every month, how much does that increase the odds an investor invests again?

Yeah, they may want— well, if you're doing well, they're certainly going to want to plow more money into you. Yes. But if you're doing OK, but you've proven that you can do well in the past, and that you just need a little bit more cash to get somewhere, then they're much more likely to actually participate.

If you send the updates.

Communicating with them. If you just fade off into, like, nothing, and then you come back being like, "Hey, I need another X million dollars," there's no way you're getting that money.

You're not getting it, yeah.

You have not secured the bag.

And just remember, people don't write about this topic. It's called reserves. But VCs, angels don't, but VCs always carry reserves, which means they have extra money for every investment. And that can vary from, like, 0.5x for small funds, all the way up to 3x for big funds. But I will tell you, if you don't send the updates, they don't allocate reserves. Even I don't do it, but nobody does. I've worked in a venture firm and you go through the reserve analysis, people that don't send the updates, the reserves, it doesn't mean the money isn't there if you're fabulous. Of course, everybody wants to put money, but they write off the reserves. But if you send that every month, and the best hack's the first day of the month, 'cause we're B2B folks mostly in this room. Just go into Salesforce, you know how much you closed. Send a 90% correct update on the first month rather than 3 months later with 100%. and then everyone knows, and if you're an A-, or even if you're doing B but the CEO's an A, I'm gonna put another check into a B company with an A CEO. If I'm already in for a dollar, I'll put in 50 cents, right? So send them. It's, uh, no one does it. All right. Thank you, Justin. This was great. Thanks everybody.

Thank you.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction!