Jeffrey Evans -- Mantis VC

Hello and welcome to the LA Venture Podcast. This is Minnie Ingersoll, host of the podcast and partner at 1010. 1010 is a seed stage fund here in LA. All opinions expressed on this show by me and my guests are solely our own. If you are interested in LA venture, go to 1010.net/podcast where I've made a sortable list of all of the great LA VCs who've been on this show. Today I'm with Jeffrey Evans. Jeffrey is one of the founders of Mantis, an early stage venture fund he co-founded with the Chainsmokers. Jeffrey is also chairman of Buskin Records, an independent record label, and Baseline Management, an artist management firm. Jeffrey was also the founder of TigerText, an LA-based startup that raised over $100 million and built Snapchat before Snapchat. Jeffrey, thanks for coming on the pod.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Excellent. So I want to, um, talk a lot about your background, but maybe we start with Mantis. And I think this is a fair question because you did run a record label and an artist management company. So I want to know, like, what are Alex and Drew like? You know, what makes them really stand out?

Yeah. So, I mean, for me, like a couple of things, one about how we got to Mantis and then who Alex and Drew are, which I think are super important into what our story is. For me, I've done a whole series of startups, the 3 brick and mortars, 2 tech companies, and, you know, record label and management company. And what happened in that process of actually, you know, when I got into the music business was I realized how much I was truly inspired by brilliant young tech founders who were smarter than me and trying to build technology to change the world and do fantastic stuff. The idea came to me of saying, maybe I should be in venture capital at this point. But I had this theory that if I partnered with the right influencer that had real social capital, that it could create an edge. But for me at that point, it was, I was working with our 4th partner, Milan Koch, who's got more of a traditional venture kind of background and experience. But as we were talking through it, what I said was we needed to find the other partner who was going to more than likely be in venture if we didn't bring the idea to them. That kind of eliminated about 99.9% of the world's potential partners. And as we were doing research, read a Forbes article about Alex and Drew, the Chainsmokers, and where it talked about more than 25 investments they'd made into tech companies and startups. At that point, I thought that they might be a reasonable fit for what we wanted to do and have a real interest in it. I happened to be connected to Josh Klein, who is the founder of the Klein Group, which is one of the larger and definitely one of the better business management practices within this world of entertainers. And so I went to Josh and he works with the Chainsmokers. I went to Josh to sort of share this concept and idea. And Josh was very excited about it and said, I want to introduce you to them because they're in the process of looking to set up a fund to institutionalize their access. And so I was like, great, sounds fantastic. But, you know, like from an initial standpoint, super connected. They want to utilize their platform to build something important. They were talking about a generation of funds and wanting to actually build to the point where it wasn't considered a celebrity fund and it wasn't considered, you know, oh, it's the Chainsmokers Fund. They want to sit on the investment committee. They want to be involved in every company. Then who they are as people. One, they are 2 of the most hospitable and nicest people I've ever met. 2, they are the hardest working individuals I know. I will say, you know, on top of that, and we all say it, Alex might be the most responsive human I've ever seen on email and text. I think it's inhuman. And then 3 is they hustle. So no one's going to outwork us and no one's going to outwork them. And then the last piece is they're very curious and have a real keen interest in understanding the world and what's happening in the world, and particularly how technology's going to affect it and what areas are most ripe for disruption.

Right. So, so Alex and Drew are very involved. They sit on the IC and they're active with the portfolio.

Yeah, they sit on the IC because they get involved in every investment that we're going to make. It's important to me that people understand it because I don't want them to be ever discounted in any way from what their true value is. They are really great venture capital investors, period. If we were running this fund and they were not the chain smokers, they would be fantastic partners to have as venture capital partners. That's the first piece. That second piece about what they do for the companies, they take it very seriously. I mean, we all do. We feel like our platform support is one of the most important things we can do in bringing it, but they will do whatever needs to be done, but it's never what's expected. So early on, one of the companies that we were investing in, They were trying to hire a CTO and they needed him to leave one of the big tech companies. We were talking to them, they were saying, well, this is our biggest challenge. We got to get this guy this week. They weren't asking us to do anything. They're just sort of telling us what's happening. And at that point, Alex and Drew were on the call and Alex said, hey, send us his phone number and a couple of pieces of personal information about him. And they did. And then Alex and Drew picked up the phone and FaceTimed this guy who was completely shocked when he answered FaceTime and talking to the Change Movers. And I thought that was great. And then they went into why they invested in the company, why they liked the company, why they think he should join the company, and closed him on the call. He took the job, which was great. I mean, since then they have closed, I think, 160 out of 170 candidates for our companies by doing that same thing and taking the time to personalize it and spend time with people.

Wait, holy crap. On the 160 candidates closed. I mean, is it a silly question to say, should I go get myself a celebrity? Or do you have thoughts on building quote unquote celebrity funds?

I got really lucky with them, I think, because listen, we're, without calling other funds out, we've been asked to sit on calls with people who are starting or founding other funds with influencers. And we've been on the call and they've said, we've heard from so many people that Mantis is kind of setting the bar for how this is done. And we're on this call and they said, what's the secret sauce? And I remember one of them in particular, Alex said, where's your guy? What do you mean? He's like, look, I'm here and I'm present. I'm present for our companies. I'm present in our calls. I'm present in the investing decisions. That's the secret. And that secret is hustle. That secret is hard work. And if you have someone who's not going to be a part of that, then there's no secret. They're not really a part of it. And believe me, founders can see through it. So I think that, you know, 70% of life is just showing up. Alex and Drew show up everywhere.

Right. And you said something like you don't want this to just be a celebrity fund. Do you think being a celebrity fund Has a negative connotation?

Yeah, I think that there is a piece of it's a celebrity fund that comes off as a negative. So I think that there's, you know, there's a world of here are the top venture capital firms, here are the tier 1 funds, and there's, you know, and other people say, oh, this is a celebrity fund. So they're just utilizing celebrity to get stuff done. We want people to want Mantis on the cap table 100% for our merits as who we are as investors and what we do for the company. That needs to be irrelevant of whether it's a celebrity or not. Now, what we do is we use their social capital and their influence to open doors and create opportunities for our companies that their cachet allows them to do. But we don't want, I guess we don't want to be perceived as it's a vanity fund. It's not a vanity fund.

Do you think of Alex and Drew as founders in a way where Chainsmokers was their startup?

Oh, 100%. They're founders, right? I mean, it actually makes a lot of sense when you sort of lay it out that way. So if Alex and Drew, They're fantastic artists and fantastic musicians, but they really growth hacked their way into building this business as a founder would in any business. I mean, it's a long detailed story, but they figured out what was happening in the world of how to work the hype machine system to really get noticed in the industry, how to get their songs to chart, what needs to happen, who do they have to communicate with, who are the important people on the music blogging side that actually moved the needle and built relationships with them and added value to what they were doing. And that allowed them to sort of get noticed and build that sort of phase one. When they looked at doing, you know, early on before this was kind of obvious, when they looked at touring, as opposed to saying to the, you know, the agent, hey, just route us on a tour that makes sense, they spent time really crowdsourcing to understand where their fans were based. So they only did shows in places where it was going to sell out because they knew they had a strong fan base there and utilize the technology to go ahead and build that and do it. You know, when it came time to release music as They were in the edge of sort of CD sales ending, music downloads for purchase ending, and streaming really exploding when they first broke onto the scene. And they were the first ones to come up with the concept of the rolling album to say, we needed to drip and release singles to our fans on a regular basis. And then when those singles are near the end, then you release the album once you've sort of released all the singles. So let's do the rolling album, not the release a single on an album because people don't consume music that way anymore. And that's an obvious statement today to say, because that's kind of how most everybody does it. But they were the first, they sort of created that concept. And so I think that they're always thinking ahead in whatever they're building and doing. I really look at them as entrepreneurs and founders who happened to build the business of the Chainsmokers into a great and successful, highly profitable business. And now they're utilizing that to build other businesses around it where they can focus their time and effort.

Fascinating. I need to have one of them on the show next. And this is now Fund 2 for Mantis?

We're busting out of Fund 2. Yeah. And Fund 3 is right around the corner.

So what's the ideal size check? And, you know, are you leading those rounds? Are you participating? How does that dynamic play out?

So what we've, as we've looked at Mantis and tried to determine what our place in the industry is right now from an investing standpoint, there's been a couple of things that have been important to us. One is, We're not the lead check. We're trying to be the second biggest check into those rounds and partner with the best of the best funds and find the best of the best deals. We like to go seed and Series A. We don't typically go pre-product.

Great. Fair to move on a little bit and get some of your background then? What brought you here?

Sure. Where do you want me to start?

Well, one question. I don't know what a record label does.

Yeah, neither do I.

Well, you were doing this before Mantis, right? Like, or you, maybe you still are. What was the goal when you started? I wouldn't have even thought to start a record label.

So for me, I guess a little background on how I got there. I, I was at business school at Duke University, Fuqua School of Business, and I didn't want to work for any big corporation. So I decided to try to find a job at a small company coming out of business school where I could actually get real high-level experience in dealing with operations. So I took a job at a company called On Assignment, which is a staffing company that was based out of, at that point, Canoga Park. And I was a director of operations right out of business school, which was great. I didn't know a thing about this business, but here I was trying to figure out how to model this business and how to help it expand. So I spent about 5 years doing that. I learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes. And after doing that for about 5 years, I realized that I felt like I could build a staffing business on my own, that I understood it well enough to do it. So I took any money that I had been able to save from sort of the few options that I got for working at the company and bought a controlling interest of a local staffing firm that had, was a single office staffing firm at that point in time.

Wow.

And it was doing title industry staffing, expanded the services to full real estate settlement services and banking and finance staffing-related services. And then started to expand it city by city, office by office. And that's what I had done at On Assignment. So I followed a similar model and was able to expand it. Now, we built this company that was doing real estate settlement services at a time where interest rates went to close to zero and companies like Countrywide were exploding in their size. And so, those kinds of companies were calling us and saying, send us anybody you can who has any experience at all in this industry. We are so backlogged with paperwork that we will take them. And so we were growing at a tremendous pace. We grew that thing to a $2 million a week business, $100 million, you know, run rate business over a 3-year period.

Wow.

From a $3 million business and sold it. But, you know, there are a lot of things I did right in that, but if we didn't happen to be in that It happened to explode at an exponential level, then it would've been a much different pace of growth and expansion. I still think we would've been successful, but it would've been different. After that, this is going to explain why it ended up in the record business, but I had no business being in it at all. In 2008, when everything crashed, I got knocked pretty hard. Like I figured I climbed a mountain pretty well and I got knocked down to a much lower level at that point in time. So I was Lying in bed one night and I turned to my amazing wife, Lori, and said, I want to be in the music business. And she was half asleep and was like, okay, what does that mean? And I said, I have no idea what that means. But when I was in college playing in a kind of a band and moving around and didn't have 2 nickels to rub together, I was just always happy playing music and being around music. She was like, great, put it out there. Do what you want to do. I think that's awesome. support, whatever you want to do. And so I did put it out there. And I'm also a believer in, from the standpoint of karma, that if you are willing to say things and put it out there in the universe, it has a reasonable chance of coming back to you. If you're not willing to talk about it, it won't ever come back to you. So I kind of put it out there in the universe that I wanted to be in the music business. Lo and behold, my son, who at that point in time was 7, my youngest son comes home and has 2 new best friends. And one of them came to this playdate and was driven to the playdate by his bodyguard, which was a little bit, you know, I don't know what's going on. So Lori had called me and said, okay, you know, one of Eric's friends came with a bodyguard and I feel so bad for the guy sitting in the car. I invited him in the house. Super nice guy, you know, all good. Great. So I came home that night and said, Eric, because he had been to this kid's house multiple times, I said, well, have you met Kylan's parents? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, do you know what they do? And by the way, I'm asking my 7-year-old, right?

Right, right.

Like, he doesn't care. And he's like, no. And I was like, well, are they there when you go over to the house? He's like, yeah, he's always there. And he goes, I don't know what his mommy does, and his daddy plays the piano and he can't see. And so I'm like, holy crap. And so I show Eric a picture of Stevie Wonder. I said, is this Kyland's dad? And he's like, yeah. And, uh, I'm like, oh my God, Kyland's dad is Stevie Wonder. And Eric's like, I don't think that's his name. And I'm like, well, I'm sure Tyler doesn't call him Stevie Wonder. I would just call him Daddy. I said, but that's amazing. And so from that, Stevie, myself, and his other best friend, whose father happened to be a legendary producer in the music industry, all became friends. And one night at dinner, the idea was floated to me from Adrian that the 3 of us start a record label together. And It didn't come together in that light that Stevie never actually joined the record label, which was a total bummer, but he could have done it at any point in time. He could do it now if he wants to. One of the most amazing humans I've ever met, by the way, Stevie. But from that, I said, okay, we'll start a record label. And for me, that was me writing checks. Adrian was going to produce music and we're going to figure out together how to find some artists to sign. And at that point, Stevie and his wife at the time, Ty, said, we heard this incredible artist. singing at the Malibu Country Mart. You should reach out to her because she's incredible. So we did and signed her and immediately took her in the studio every day. And Adrian and her worked on making a record. That first artist was Andra Day, who most people probably know from the song Rise Up. She also is a world-class actor, one of the most talented artists on the planet. But it all came together from that. But I was really just writing the checks and I figured out a marketing plan of how we wanted to launch her because we wanted to try to do things as independently as possible. And this And in that process of launching her, she asked me to manage her. Now, when I tell you what's interesting about it as an industry and why I decided that it ultimately wasn't where I wanted to spend all of my time, I start with someone as talented and as amazing as Andra, and then to have to build from there is very difficult because I was looking for that same kind of inspiration and passion in additional artists. And we developed 3 more artists after her. All 3 major labels wanted to partner with us on once we got them done developing. All 3 got nice marketing funds and a lot of attention from a major label and all 3 failed. And it really hit me that it was a space where you could work really hard and do a lot of the right things. And you really didn't have a lot of control over whether it worked. And there wasn't an opportunity to learn and shift and adjust and build. And I didn't have a lot of control over the success in the end. That's when I sort of went back to and said, well, what are the places that I you know, most want to be in. And that's where moving back into the world of tech came from for me.

Man, I have so many questions. I feel like it just takes us off topic. Let me ask one thing. Why don't you have the ability? I mean, it seems like that's what the Chainsmokers did in some ways, as you were saying, they learned, they iterated, they growth hacked their way into success.

Yeah, they're fantastic. By the way, they're better at the music industry than I am. There's no question. I think it's different if it's you. And trying to get someone else to build it and do it. So what I'd found was we spent, you know, time, money, effort to really create and help develop talented artists that then turned into things that the best minds in the industry thought were great and had a chance at success. And then they all ended up failing because at the end of the day, it's just a public vote. It's a very quick public vote. I felt like you could create a really, what you felt was a great product, but there wasn't the real opportunity to iterate it and change it. And learn from the market, unless you had an artist who wanted to iterate and change and learn from the market. And most, not to their detriment, I'm not saying that they should be different, but, you know, an artist is not just a product. So at the end of the day, they have to want to learn and iterate and change versus want to share their art with the world. And I think art is different from, you know, just a pure product. I mean, artists are artists for a reason and they want to share their art. And so my job was to find a way for them to share their art and it just became frustrating. And I felt like I didn't have the kind of control I would have in, in different businesses.

So, okay, let's keep going. So TigerText then, was it your idea that communication should disappear?

Yeah. So I think that all of us that founded it would probably have a little different story as to the specifics of the conversation where it took place, but it was myself and Andrew Brooks and Brad Brooks. And we were at a retreat and just for having this conversation about the differences between text and email, because there were at that point in time, lots of people getting in trouble for text messages. And I will say that I said it, but who knows exactly who said it. I think all of us would typically said it, but it was a conversation that email was like a professional communication and texting was more like a conversation. And if you can imagine every conversation that you've had being recorded and archived to come back at you. be horrific in life. Although we're probably not getting far from that at this point.

Mm-hmm.

But that's how we felt about it. So when a conversation is over, it's over. So we said, why can't we create a technology that allows people to communicate on their mobile devices in a way that was impermanent, that the author of the message controlled the life of the message? That was the concept that we originally had. And that concept didn't exist at that point in time. And we created the first And permanent mobile communication company. By the way, this was a time, you know, this was 2011, I think when we started this and iPhones were just starting to take root, but they were a very small part of the ecosystem. Most people were sending messages on BBM back when BlackBerry dominated the market. The market dominance that BlackBerry had and the pace at which it fell is staggering to me. I mean, I think when we started this, BlackBerry had like 80% of the market.

And it had high NPS. Like, I think, you know, that's what's staggering to me too.

Yeah. I mean, iPhone literally just knocked, like the concept of a touchscreen phone just completely destroyed them. And then for the next 3 years, their market share plummeted. And of course Android stepped in at that point as well, you know, with the Google phone and came through. And there was so much competition happening for the phones. That's when Microsoft also spent those about $100 billion funding the Microsoft phone, which was a colossal failure as well.

And was it easy for you to raise your first couple rounds of capital because you'd had success scaling a business before?

Yeah, I mean, fundraising is never easy. I think at the end of the day, I say it's always, you have a great idea, you get excited about it, and then I always tell myself it's gonna be 10 times harder to raise the money than I anticipate. Just the right mindset to go into because it takes a lot of rejection. I will say of every business that I've run, where I've sort of started it, I have had a week where on Monday we were not going to meet payroll on Friday, every single one. And so the analogy I always use for that is I go back to Matt Damon in The Martian. At the end of the movie, he talks about things are going to go wrong, and when they go wrong, you just got to work the problem and ignore everything else until you solve the problem. And once you solve that problem, you can then solve the next problem, but survival is the key. And that's what, in each of those cases, that's what we did on Monday. We didn't have the money and we needed the money by Friday. So we just worked the problem and each time we ended up solving it. I've been asked like, what happens if you didn't solve it? I'm like, well, that company would've gone under. Like, that's what happens. But I like, I find that lesson to be very helpful for when I talk to founders in our portfolio, those kinds of lessons that I've learned from challenges that we've had in trying to build through those times. And that when you have a real challenge, Just work the problem and work it to solve it. And if you don't solve it, you won't survive. So nothing else matters. And then move from there. Yeah.

I mean, my equivalent is I say chop wood, carry water, which is kind of like me saying work the problem.

Yeah.

What are some other lessons learned from, I mean, you had this idea, this is pre-Snapchat. What other things do you take away from that experience? And you're one of the more prominent LA companies.

Yeah. I mean, That was my first technology experience, TigerText, building a technology company. I mean, you're the product of your experiences and your knowledge and what you have. My experience told me that I had to build a business, a real business that was going to make money. And that had to be the goal in the end. And because of that, TigerText, which had a ton of fanfare in the marketplace initially and a ton of consumer downloads, moved to becoming a healthcare HIPAA-compliant Mobile communication system, which was the right business to be in from a standpoint of how you could make that work financially. Had we just said, we're going to embrace the consumer, not worry about making money from them, and we'll figure that out once we can get 10 million, 50 million, 100 million, 200 million, 500 million consumers. I don't know if we would've been successful with that or not, but that would've been a different angle that I didn't understand could actually be a play at that point in time. I understand that much better now. So we went after the healthcare market and built that company. Evan came along with Snapchat and dominated the consumer market and then built, you know, a company at one point in time for $100 billion. Now, I also find this world of tech to be somewhat fascinating there. It's like, there's so much that's based on what the future potential is, like where companies are valued, that at times gets to be difficult to handle. You know, in the instance of Snapchat, an amazing business that culturally has changed the world since, still doesn't make any money. They lost $400 million last quarter. So my background and upbringing told me that you needed to build a business that's going to make money, and that kind of eliminated a lot of the options for the company we were building at the time.

Yeah. And losing $400 million last quarter is still pretty staggering to me. Do you tend now to lean one way or the other when it comes to profitability in your portfolio companies?

Yeah, we do. So we spend a lot of time with founders talking about negative contribution margin. And there is a rationale to take business that has a negative contribution margin, but it needs to be intentional. It needs to not be, I'll take any business for the sake of any business. Any revenue is revenue. We don't believe that. So are you willing to take the business with negative contribution margin because that's building towards something that's going to be positive? That's important because the market's frothy and people aren't going to keep putting money into your business. They're going to be more picky about where they invest their next dollars. Business is going to be forced to say, what is our business that we can build that becomes a real business, a real company? So I think that this difficult time period actually, a lot of winners come out of it from being forced to look at the business in a different light and to be more scrappy founders. And the ones that can't do that, I think at the end of the day, they wouldn't have made it anyway. It just would have taken them longer not to make it.

What is it that you think makes a successful founder?

Well, I give this analogy that hopefully your head is healthy enough to remember. I have an analogy of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. And if you remember the Road Runner, in every episode, towards the end of the episode, the Road Runner jumps up in the air and his feet start spinning at a blur. It's just a blur in the cartoon, but he's not going anywhere. He's just hovering in the air. And the coyote is typically standing there with a fork and a knife. ready to close in on the roadrunner. And as the coyote starts to close that fork in the knife, the roadrunner hits the ground and before you can blink your eye, it's over the horizon. And I'd say that the, to be an entrepreneur, you got to be like the roadrunner. And what I mean by that is you start your business and you jump in the air and you start sprinting as fast as you can, but you're not going anywhere, but running as fast as you can. Meanwhile, everybody around you at some point in time is going to tell you to stop. And tell you it's not working and tell you you're crazy and tell you your idea doesn't make sense and we're not going to fund this, whatever's going to happen. And if at any point in time you stop, you will be eaten and dead. But if you keep running long enough and keep working through it, at some point in time, you don't know when it's going to be, you're going to hit the ground. When you hit the ground, you're over the horizon before you know it. And I say that not everybody is that person and that's completely okay.

And people aren't that kind of person.

Why? I think it's any reason at the end of the day. Are you willing to Look, to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to listen to a lot of people tell you it's not going to work and you're crazy. Can you block all that out? Are you willing to put in whatever the hours are that it takes, whatever the time is that it takes, and just believe that you're going to be successful? Are you willing to do it? And do you want to do it?

And why are you this way? Or more specifically, what was youth like? What were your parents doing when you were growing up?

Yeah, my parents, what an interesting sort of, uh, You know, when you're growing up, you just live in your world. Like, it doesn't seem like it's necessarily different. It's just your world. And then later in life, you kind of figure things out. So my father was a CBS News correspondent, foreign correspondent. He was a Moscow bureau chief, the Southeast bureau chief. And then he moved in to become a national expert on energy and oil is power and Middle Eastern affairs. My mother was a consultant who was then hired as one of the first 50 employees of this local startup in Atlanta called CNN, which I remember at the time in the early '80s, she was like, oh, I'll do this for a couple years till it goes under. Ended up becoming actually the senior executive vice president of the entire network. I think at that point in time, the highest ranking woman in the news business, and then became an author on being a woman in business. So growing up at dinner table at night, you know, we would watch the evening news together. And this was a time where there was 30 minutes of national news at night, and that's where you got your news there. There wasn't yet, well, I guess until Ted Turner invented it, there wasn't this constant 24-hour news. There wasn't an internet. You were getting your news from the newspaper in the morning and from, you know, Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite at night. And so we'd watch the news and we'd have dinner and we'd end up talking about things that were in the news or things that my parents were dealing with at that point in time, a lot oil, energy, and Middle Eastern affairs. But the upbringing was one particularly that my mother, who is still a great influence in my life, taught me a lot about the importance of Empathy and inclusion. And it's been a tenet of how I run everything that I'm involved in. And I remember reading in one of her books early where she talked about, you know, people fill boardrooms with people that are like them and are going to agree with them because they want their board to be supportive of what they're doing. And so she taught me at a very young age the importance of diversity of thought.

Zooming out from just, you know, your parents and your current role at Mantis, More philosophical, like what motivates you in life?

I love building things. There was one time actually at one of the early holiday parties for OnStaff, the staffing company that we had, and there were 80 to 100 people at this party and we were all standing there and I remember going to the corner and almost breaking down and crying. And my wife's like, what's wrong? Nothing's wrong. I said, it just struck me that 2 years ago there was nothing. And now all these people are here celebrating this company's growth. They're all employed and building their careers and doing stuff. And it happened because we built something from nothing. It's the most incredible feeling. And I think a lot of people like taking the time to step back and look at that is, you know, it's hard because you're just caught in the daily hustle all the time. But when I realized it that first time, that's what I want to do. I want to be a part of building things that last and matter and change things for the better.

Well, that is an amazing note to end on. People with a vision really can build amazing things, and it's just amazing to watch that happen. Jeffrey, it sounds like you've got a great role. Thanks so much. This was amazing. It was amazing to get to know you. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Oh my God. So glad that we met. We should tell everybody we met during LA Tech Week as we're building out with LA technology investing ecosystem, and it's been a joy.

I believe we met at Paris Hilton's house, actually.

We did, although she wasn't there.

That's true. I know. Strange twist of the story.

Okay.

Thank you so much, Jeffrey. This was great.

Thank you. Speak soon.