Josh Wolfe '99 Managing Partner- Lux Capital

Uh, so, uh, for our next speaker, I want to introduce, uh, Josh Wolfe. So we all know that the Investor Review provides insight into the journey of entrepreneurship from a different perspective. Especially when it comes to growing a business and navigating the inevitable challenges faced along the way. Some VCs are always following the latest fashion, but Josh is definitely not one of them, and we're excited to hear some of his stories and lessons learned today. Josh Wolfe.

All right, so Scott is basically saying I'm the least fashionable venture guy. All right, so I talk a mile a minute, so you guys are gonna get basically like an hour's worth of content in about 18 minutes. and he is right, we invest in some pretty eclectic things. I'm going to run through really 3 case studies of things that we've done here, and I'm going to talk about a company called Shapeways, which is in 3D printing. Has anybody used or know about Shapeways? Any consumers? All right, so I do want critical feedback too on your experience from that. I'm going to talk about a nuclear waste company that we started from scratch about 4 years ago called Kurion, and then I'm going to talk about a business that we started with Bill Gates, and I serve on the board with Bill, called Kymeta, which is in the satellite communications space. And I'm going to do this as a backdrop against a bunch of philosophies that we share that sort of guide how we find these things and the kind of entrepreneurs that we look for. So these are some of the things we invest in. This is not a Nine Inch Nails playlist, but I am going to talk about exponentials to start. So basically, this is the world today. It's volatile, it's chaotic, whether it's political gridlock in Capitol Hill, whether it's capital markets. Most people presume that this kind of stuff happens linearly, and of course our view is that it never does. All this happens exponentially. It is very hard to predict the future. Most people that do, we think, are full of shit. So the people that we look for are the entrepreneurs. There's lots of trends for this. I'm going to run through at a mile a minute. We know this from storage, particularly anybody that had 3.5-inch floppy disks or 5.25-inch Commodore 64s. We know this from communications, going from Pony Express to telecom to iPhones. There's this march of progress that's pretty predictable. Film from halide to CCDs to CMOS. Cameras that today, the most sophisticated DSLR optical components are embedded inside of your iPhone. And it only keeps getting better. And then as you look through other trends, you can start predicting this mathematical progression without knowing anything about the technology. So you don't have to be an expert in MRI machines to know that you're going to go from 1 gig to 4 to 64 to 256, and that the speeds are going to be inversely proportional, that eventually you're going to have machines like today where you can do CT scans totally noninvasive without putting, uh, FF flow monitors inside the heart. So the same thing holds in totally different areas, right? So, uh, I knew nothing about energy and just followed these exponentials, and this is about energy density. And so in energy, all the hype and all the excitement was around clean tech and green tech and solar and wind and biofuels. And if you follow this simple progression, you go from carbohydrates, fields of fuel, to hydrocarbons, coal and natural gas, to uranium. And the undeniable trend was more and more energy density per unit of raw material. Nobody was looking at nuclear. We ended up looking at nuclear and saying, what's the biggest problem? What sucks? Which I think are the two most important words that any entrepreneur can basically ask of any market. And the biggest problem with nuclear is what do you do with the waste? So I'm going to talk about that in a little bit. So second thing is ghosts. Now, outside of my office, we're on 41st Park in Madison. We have an open-door policy. If people want to come in, you can sign up for office hours. You can come visit. We'd love to meet with you, particularly if you're entrepreneurs. There are all these little bronze placards that go from our office to the New York Public Library, and some of them are inspirational. This one struck me because there's basically 3 ghosts that I invoke, and they are 3 different literary folks. And each one represents a famous line that they had and how it ties into where we think you should allocate time, 'cause I always tell my guys, you basically allocate two things, cash and time. And the cash part is relatively easy. It's the time part because it's not recoverable. So F. Scott Fitzgerald, famous quote, is the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Okay, so you go back to the market volatility thing that I started with, and this is headline risk, right? This is what everybody sees every day on the front cover of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, et cetera. And it's basically, you know, is gold a shiny piece of metal with no intrinsic value, or gold is a great store of value in an otherwise fiat currency world? And you have, you know, brilliant people like Buffett and Einhorn on one side and other people that are quite cynical on the other. China. China is an engine of growth, or China is a bubble waiting to collapse and there's nothing but lies, damn lies, government statistics and Chinese government statistics. So you can follow this in the world, right? You can almost do infographic mapping of this to find all the different weightings of the debates that are happening across all the headline issues. And my basic contention is that the headline stuff is where we should spend zero time, because you have equally cogent people on both sides fighting it out. And the only certainty about that is that there's going to be uncertainty and volatility. So if you're an options trader, it's a really smart thing to do. But as a venture guy, stay away. Second one, Twain. So Twain's famous quote, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." And you can basically see the option payoff of this on the top. So the red dot is now, and that's what history— what the future holds. So here, this is the presumption of linearity. That things are going to continue as they are until they don't. And the consequence of that is huge. So this is the inverse of venture capital, right? So the past 7 years, particularly in housing, linear progression from 1990 through 2007, and then precipitous drop-off. My favorite more colloquial example of this that we experience every fall is the turkey growth index. So turkeys born, every day is better than the next. They keep getting fatter and fatter. So it ain't what you know, it's what you don't know, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so. So Schopenhauer, Arthur Schopenhauer, this is where we live, right? This is the domain of the entrepreneur. This is where you guys live. And his famous quote is, "Talent is hitting a target that nobody else can hit, and genius is hitting a target that nobody else can see." And that's arrogance of the highest order, right? Saying this is the way that the world should be, and I'm gonna go pursue it. So I'm gonna give you some examples here of talent. I don't know if we have sound. We're not getting sound, but you guys get the picture here. Actually, can we do a double check here for sound on this one? Yeah! So those guys just got a Series A term sheet. So, okay. Third thing here, we're gonna talk about sci-fi. Now, I'm gonna make the contention here that either our scientists are getting way more creative or our science fiction authors are becoming way less creative because the gap in time between the two is closing. Okay, so I tell my guys that 100%, and this is a philosophical truth that I think is like a timeless principle. I tell this to my daughter who doesn't quite understand it yet at 3 and a half. But I'm going to continue to tell until she gets it. I think it's the most important principle about accepting uncertainty. 100% of the information that you have right now is based on the past. And 100% of the value of the decisions that you're going to make is based on the future. And the future is inherently probabilistic and unknowable. So you have to think of probabilities. So this is the way that I think about the world. The past is sort of an important measure as an empirical input, but it basically, in my world, does not continue. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. And these are the people that were inventing our future in 1929. The notable feature about all these people at Bell Labs were they were mostly white males in mostly terrible suits. '70s and '80s, Genentech and Amgen, we start to let a few women in, but now they're in cheesy lab coats. Then you start to get these misfits, and many of you know who they are. We're going to come back to them. These are the people that we're backing. You see a lot of males and not a lot of women. Most of these are high-tech scientists and engineers. They come out of physics and material science and chemistry departments and serial entrepreneurs. But if you ask them all what was some of their inspiration, almost to a man— and they are, again, men mostly— that it's science fiction. And I'm going to run through some of these. You know, StarTAC, tricorder, of course, Motorola StarTAC, the phaser and the taser. It's actually pretty astounding because a lot of people ascribe genius to Steve Jobs. And when you actually look at where almost every product design came, it came from science fiction. I don't mean that to be cynical or arrogant, but it's actually true. So Star Trek: Next Generation invented the tablet about 15 years Before the iPad. FaceTime. 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL. Siri. Jetsons and Roomba. Gattaca. 23andMe. So this one's quite interesting. And sound might be a little loud on this one. This was the prequel, which actually came after Aliens. I don't know if anybody actually saw this movie, Prometheus. Not a very good movie, but a very cool scene. You're going to see— So you're seeing laser scanning of these probes that are basically like drones that are sorting through some cavernous wilderness that they've never been to, and it's sending it back to the mothership and reporting back the structure. And clearly that is science fiction. And one of our portfolio companies, of course, is turning that into science fact. So these are drones that are totally autonomous. They have hacked Microsoft Kinects on this first crew. On the top right, you can see what the drones see. On the bottom right is a guy following the robots. And on the left is the imaging. Left, right, scanning the sides. The robot is a— 20 years ago, another terrible but entertaining movie, Michael Douglas, "Disclosure." He's laser scanned, dons some goggles, and enters a virtual reality world. All right, so you get the gist. And now you may know of a company called Oculus Rift. Same basic premise. I'm going to skip through this for the sake of time, but inside, is one of our companies, Matterport. This is the inverse of a company I'm going to talk about in a moment, Shapeways, which takes digital bits and converts them to physical atoms. This does the inverse. This takes physical atoms and converts them to digital bits with rapid scanning of spaces. So this is one of our limited partners' homes. And it really is quite remarkable, down to the inch resolution. This is a pretty crude scan, so you can see some of the detail lacking in the corners and edges of the sink. That's a company called Matterport. We spun out of Y Combinator. Star Wars robotic surgery. We backed a company. Hasn't come out of stealth yet, though. It's a business founded by Fred Moll, who was the founder of Intuitive Surgical, which he built from zero to $22 billion. His new business is called Auris in robotic surgery. This is the da Vinci robot that he helped to invent performing origami. And again, you know, science fiction to science fact. Star Trek, the replicator. Ability to conjure a coffee mug. So this is one of the early crude 3D printers. I'm going to talk to you now about Shapeways. And this was printing one of the first coffee mugs out of a matrix. You can see how a 3D printer works, for those who don't know. It's basically layer by layer on a stage. So it's the same thing as XY printing on a 2-dimensional printer, but now you're adding a Z-axis to it. And now we can do ceramics and interesting materials. This was somebody putting up a coffee mug a day, so every day became a little bit more eclectic and impractical. We went from "Made in China" to "Made in the USA" to our tagline at Shapeways, which is "Made in the future." I serve on the board of this company, very proud of what they're doing. And there was a philosophical thing that led us to this, which is basically, if you think about communication, and then you think about manufacturing, there's analogies through history. So in communication, I would take a physical letter, I would mail it to Jane, Jane would get it in the mail. Then we could take a physical letter, we could digitize it in a fax machine, convert it to bits, send it to a fax machine, have it reassembled as physical matter on the other side. Now we can go just digital to digital. Now you think about manufacturing, I used to, you know, 150 years ago, have to come up with a design, send it to mass manufacturing, print 10,000 of them so that they'd be economical, send it to Pony Express, get it in a few days. Today, CAD design, smaller manufacturing footprint, FedEx, get it next day. And now we're able to go directly from CAD design to printed on the desktop. This is a sped-up version of a 3D printer that is a tool printing a tool. This is a wrench with a hybrid material that's already in it, a metal and then a plastic overlay, and it's a full-functioning wrench. Again, for time, I'll just skip through this. So the way we looked at this is we said, "Okay, exponential increase in the number of printers being sold, that's pretty interesting, and the price point's going from $50K to about $1,000 or $2,000 on the desktop. There's lots of players, and it's really crowded," and I'll get back to, in a moment, where we came out on this. This was something that we designed for a friend of ours. We had no experience in CAD design, but it was just that easy to tweak these things. Material expansion started increasing, so you can go from glass to rubber to concrete. The tools to do this went from $5,000 to free— Tinkercad and Google SketchUp. You can design this now online in the cloud for free. Pretty remarkable. And you can do scans. You can sell into the Invisalign market. This is stuff that's made on Shapeways— bras and panties and shoes. We made a dress for Dita von Teese. Shows my contemporary knowledge of that, but completely 3D printed prosthetic devices, jaw implants. So the markets were pretty wide and pretty applicable, and as we thought about this, we tried to figure out, you know, where do we want to play in the value chain? And, you know, there was a lot of hype and a lot of excitement, and there was some consolidation in the industry. You have the former CEO of Z Corp that's sitting here in the audience, a very smart, fascinating guy, and he sold to 3D Systems, which has been on this meteoric rise. So if I go back here, the analogy we made was to 2D printers. We're not going to bet on the 2D printers, because I couldn't back then, out of intellectual honesty, pick whether Epson, Seiko, Kodak, Canon, HP, you know, was going to be the winner. What I could predict was that the margins would get squeezed, the price points would come down, and that the benefits would accrue to the users or the consumers. So we had the same view here. And same thing on the software side. You know, this was basically approaching the asymptote of zero. So we thought that the winners here, as printers got really, really cheap, and software got really, really cheap or free, would be the guys in the middle. So, you know, this is pointing this morning here to Shapeways. I will show you very quickly the growth here in the community, all the crazy stuff that we make now. You can make stuff, you can buy it, you can sell it, but it's really unlocking and democratizing people's creativity. This is Mayor Bloomberg opening the Factory of the Future about 9 months ago in Long Island City. And I'll show you a very quick video of what they're doing. As humans, we've always strived to create, to build something that will solve a problem. Or meet one of our needs. How would you feel if you could hold some of your designs in your hand?

And they went like, "That's impossible." I said, "Well, let's assume it is possible." I'm not a designer, but, you know, now that I'm seeing the possibilities of this technology, you start to see the world differently, and you start to reimagine the objects around you. People are taking the power of creation into their own hands.

Boom! Open up your little skull, pull out your idea, and create it. Like, that's what Shapeways does in a nutshell.

3D printing is a way of making things element by element, additively. The things that we're designing, you can't make any other way.

I can make objects bigger, smaller, stranger. There's no limit to the variation you can apply. I suddenly realized how much I was restrained by a lot of the technology technologies that were around before. When something new comes to this home, she asks, "Have you bought it, or have you made it?" You know, if you look around us, we can buy any product we need to do whatever we want. What's missing, however, is our personal input into those products.

We have an idea, and then in the mail the idea comes sort of as an object, and like, That's never existed before.

As a designer, you can concentrate on making the best object, the best product that you can, and Shapr3D does the rest.

So we can make one of something and test it out, and all of this doesn't make any difference because there's no tooling, there's no molding.

There's no investment for designer. It means also you can innovate faster. There's no penalty for innovation.

This gives rise to a whole new way of solving problems. It's mind-blowing to think that we can build something today that was literally impossible yesterday. Anyway, so very excited, and certainly please go on Shapeways and create. So I'm going to talk now about this guy, John Raymond. He's the guy that I found about 4 years ago, and his contrarian thesis around nuclear. Basically, when everybody else was chasing clean tech and green tech, we said, let's look at nuclear. Nobody was looking at it. And let's look at the biggest unsolved problem, which is what do you do with the waste? And this market is absolutely enormous. The government will spend about $6 billion a year for the next 50 years. Doing cleanup of nuclear waste at our former bomb-making sites here in the US and abroad. So we looked around for a high-tech company. We couldn't find anything. And as a firm, we start companies from scratch. So we did the next best thing, having not been able to find one, and we started this company from scratch. Named after Madame Curie, who discovered radiation, spelled with a K to be a little bit cute. We took advantage of labor scarcity, that most of the people are over 65 and not that entrepreneurial. And most of the young MIT and Cornell nuclear-trained folks went to quant shops and hedge funds. So we locked up the best people in the space. And then frankly, we got very lucky. With less than $5 million of invested capital, following this original trend, and inspired in part by this 1972 movie that actually showed this cylindrical handling of nuclear waste. Earthquake struck Japan in March of 2011. Tsunami took out the Fukushima reactor and created an international disaster. This is footage that hasn't been shown publicly. That's Gaetan Van Holm, one of the first people I recruited to the company. This is our team on site. With less than $5 million of invested capital, we did $100 million in revenue this year. And $40 million of profit. You can see some of the overturned devastation there. We were the only U.S. company on the ground to help with the cleanup. You know, in our little bio there, it says that we invest in stuff that matters, matter that matters. And this for me was financially gratifying for our investors, but hugely socially gratifying. So these were systems that we designed, technology that basically did two things: isotope separation to grab cesium, strontium, and all the really bad stuff, and then technology that vitrifies it, turns it to glass and locks it up from ever getting into the environment. and we'll be here for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years. But there was a negative black swan there that became a positive black swan. So these are, of course, the Microsoft founders. Paul Allen's an investor in one of our companies, and Bill is an investor in 4 of them. I sit on 2 boards with Bill. I believe the only other boards he sits on are Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft, and I'm going to tell you the story behind these very quickly. So this one is a business called Evolve. It's basically— Just a Schwarzenegger movie. Schwarzenegger had the early incarnation of Google Glasses. We followed another Schwarzenegger movie, which was Total Recall. And there's a famous scene where Schwarzenegger's going through security. Again, science fiction meets science fact. So we locked up all these technologies called metamaterials. We teamed up with Nathan Myhrvold at Intellectual Ventures. And co-invested with Bill in this business called Evolv. It's basically ridding all the stuff on top that you have to do every time you go through an airport. The second thing we did was go after the satellite communication space, and this was really interesting because, you know, metamaterials basically have this thing technically called the negative index of refraction. The media got crazy about this thinking we could do invisibility cloaks, which maybe one day you can, but the practical application is to beam steer satellite communications with no satellite dishes. Something as flat as a piece of paper that can basically steer the antenna signals. So here we get rid of all of this kind of stuff, and we have something as flat as that. Very gratifying and surreal, frankly, experience for me. But this is one of the biggest breakthroughs in satellite communications in about 50 years. Now I'm going to end with a very quick story here, which reminds us that we are all social primates. So when this deal was happening, I'd spent about 4 years surveying the scientific literature and found this area of metamaterials. At the same time that I was hunting for all the stuff, Nathan Myhrvold was also licensing the IP from a variety of institutions. Mostly Imperial College and Duke and UC San Diego. And he effectively lowered our search cost but raised the price. So now instead of us going to a tech transfer office at a university like Cornell, we had to go to Nathan. Started introducing all kinds of corporate partners and business development people. And they come back to us, and we put in a term sheet. And they say, well, the good news is your financing risk is low. The bad news is Bill Gates wants to do 100% of the deal. And I kick and scream, and it was an appropriate time of show of emotion. And it proved to be quite effective. So now we're the second largest investor after Bill in this business, and sit on the board with him. And it's just an amazing experience, amazing company. This is the experience that I had, in fairness— and I'm going to leave you with this and then go to questions— of a famous primate experience of two people that are basically doing the same thing, but one is getting a disproportionate benefit. And you'll see the over-commentary from Frans de Waal, a primate researcher.

Then she sees the other one getting grapes and she gives them to her. So she gives a rock to us, that's the task, and we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it. The other one needs to give a rock to us, and that's what she does, and she gets a grape. Each of the other one sees that, she gives a rock to us now, gets again cucumber. She tests her rock now against the wall. She tests her rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us. And she gets cucumber again.

So every board meeting that we have now, that's a joke. They serve grapes and cucumbers. So I'm not sure how we end here, if we do questions and whatnot from Scott, but thank you guys so much.

I'm told we should move a little bit over for the cameras here, so we're gonna try that this time. And I think folks can, can, can ask any questions to Josh Wolfe. We'll try to fit some of them in the time we have here, but I'll just, I'll just kick off with the first question. So it seems like so many transformative technologies start as novelties that we all discount, you know, the Homebrew Computer Club, becoming Apple, of course. And I think 3D printing is a good example where, and still people are like, well, why would I ever need this gimmicky thing? And so one of the questions is, how do you help a team navigate the bridge between, oh, what we're doing is a novelty versus what we're doing is transformative for the world as we know it?

I would actually, I think it's a great question, and I would actually say it's the entrepreneur that does that for us, because they are the ones that have that vision that say, you know, this is what it's gonna be. And again, most people would consider that arrogance of the highest order, But they're the ones that are saying, let the naysayers be fuel for my fire. And they see exactly where it's going to go. So even in Shapeways, we looked at this and said, OK, people are printing these little trinkets and this kind of stuff. And he was like, no, no, you don't get it. And when an entrepreneur says that, those are magical words, right? They have the vision that everybody else doesn't. And that gap between perception and reality, the reality that doesn't yet exist that they see, is where you make money.

So why do so few investors get this?

I don't know. I think, again, it's sort of like a primate thing. We run with the herd. There's an instinct to not go out on a limb. And the colloquial thing is go out on a limb because that's where the fruit is. And people like to run with the herd. It's safe. And I think most entrepreneurs take an irreverent approach. I have a strong view that you can identify an entrepreneur at like 6, 7, 8 years old, which is the guy or girl that is starting to be very clever, to outsmart their parents, And I found that the pedigree, where they went to school, how they scored on their tests, like none of that matters. I couldn't tell you where half the people that we backed went to school or what their backgrounds were. I just know how effective and clever they are. And I don't mean unethical clever. I just mean that they can do more than anybody thinks possible with less than anybody thinks possible, which I think is sort of the definition of an entrepreneur.

Thanks. Let's take a couple here. So one question at the top here is just a little bit about your career trajectory and what it's been like. Any sort of turning points you can share as you look back?

I am very intellectually honest that— and it is a philosophy that I hold both in the investments we make and professionally— that randomness and optionality are the governing force in my life. So ex post facto, I can explain everything as this perfect linear chain of events. And I used to ask the same sort of thing, like, how did this person get there? What was the path? Everybody's path is idiosyncratic. And there's elements of luck and a random connection that happened. So I got very lucky and met a guy, Bill Conway, who was one of the three founders of Carlyle, that staked me and put me in business. And I can explain today that path of how I got to Bill. But it was totally random and serendipitous and lucky. But I do have an irreverent, sort of what I would call a respectfully irreverent streak, and I decided for me, being in the investment banking path and going the traditional route was not what I wanted to do. I didn't want to wait in line. I wanted to get it, and we went and got it.

Do you think, another question here asks about the role of venture capital over the next decade, and I mean, it's, what do you think investors, I'll just change that question a little bit. If you could tell a massive number of investors about the role that they should be playing in the next decade versus the default one they may just assume to play, what would you tell them?

I think that this is going to, on the one hand, be a little bit timeless again for human nature. I'm convinced that technologies change, and industries change, and companies change, but human nature tends to be a constant. That very first question that you asked is the reason why venture won't really change. I don't mean structurally or institutionally, but the fact that the vast majority of the herd is going to run one way. There's going to be some anomalous guy or girl that's saying this the way it should be. And there's going to be an even smaller set of people that are willing to speculate and give them money. So that's going to be a constant. But I think that the kinds of things that used to be really special for venture guys to be able to do, increasingly are becoming sort of technology commodities. Anybody who's going to hear Neil Goldman later from RELSAI, there are aspects there where there's better stuff that you can do on that platform than Rolodex of a guy at top-tier venture fund. So I think technology will be the sort of augmenting aid for venture guys, but by and large, it's still gonna be the instinct to bet on an entrepreneur and to do everything you can to help them succeed.

How about, so schools teach coding these days. Yes. And it's because we feel like it's an essential skill set, more and more so. But now I feel like schools should be teaching making. It sounds like that's one of the things that, we're gonna be empowered to make stuff. That otherwise you would have had to employ massive factories and had great amounts of capital to do. I mean, how can we teach making? How can we get people into this mindset that you can make, that you should make?

I think most institutions are about the inverse of that. Most institutions are about getting you to sit in a row and face a certain way and suspend your irreverence. And I think that the best way to teach making or coding— you think about the stuff that we probably learned in school, like HTML and JavaScript. Like none of that matters today, right? And so the obsolescence as new technologies go, it's hard to pick a specific thing and teach. I think it's more teach that curiosity is cool, right? To question authority is cool. And if you can inspire people to basically do that, then their passion will direct them. I really believe, without it sounding like some abstract colloquialism, that passion is the best predictor of success. Somebody just psychotically driven to go do something, they will be autodidacts. They will be self-taught. They will figure it out, whether it's making or Java or some new language that's going to be invented in 3 years.

Now there are some aspiring entrepreneurs or people doing new ventures in the audience. So my takeaway from your presentation, one of them was that the best way to pitch you is with a movie clip.

Yeah.

Is that true?

Honestly, I don't think we ever look at decks. If you can come in and just start talking, because in a sense, I want to know that the same way that you're pitching and selling me, you're going to be able to pitch your head of sales and your next investor. And I just want to see that centripetal force and energy that you're going to pull people into you. I don't need to see slides as a crutch or anything like that. Say it in 3 minutes and sort of the long elevator pitch, but just show that passion. But movie clips help.

Exciting. Josh, thanks again.

Thanks, Lasse. Thank you.

We're out of time, but I will ask one more question anyways.

With all due respect, that's too important a question not to answer. I think I saw it, which is women.

What is the question?

Women. I will say this. 3 term sheets we have out, literally 3 of 3, are all women entrepreneurs. One was a former Shapeways employee who's doing some amazing things. One was a former iRobot founder that is doing some amazing things now in robotics. And the third is also in a material science business, a woman, Angela Belcher. So in our particular case, the next 3 of 3 are women. I really, I don't know. I'm going to cop on this and say I don't know. Is it societal? Is it parental? Are there barriers? I think there's no silver bullet to this. But I think that the more women heroes there are, whether it's a Sheryl or somebody else, that can put the narrative out there that people can rally around. It's the exact same thing in a region. When people are like, how do we be the Silicon Valley of this? You need a narrative of success that people can rally around. So I think it's the same thing. The more successful women there are, the more successful women that will follow them as role models.

And also for boards and investors.

Totally.

I mean, there just aren't— many female VCs. I'm wondering, you know, what do you think? You think that's changing as well?

Uh, you know, in healthcare we see a lot of female VCs, but yeah, I think, I think this is going to happen with time. But I think, you know, it's what we celebrate as a culture. We get what we celebrate, and the more scientists, the more entrepreneurs, the more female scientists, more female entrepreneurs that we're celebrating, the more we'll get of that, and the less, you know, Britney Spears and Paris Hiltons and nonsense. Agreed.

Thanks, Josh.

Thanks. Thank you.