EP 28: 25 Years of Internet Media & Investing in Founders with Kirby Winfield, GP of Ascend.VC

Today I talk about the last 25 years of Internet media with Kirby Winfield, who is a founding member or CEO of four distinct Internet media businesses from the late 90s to today. Kirby's currently the GP of Ascend VC which is a seed fund investing in companies here in the Pacific Northwest. And we talk about the go go 90s. We talk about when the industry starts.

To look inward at things like ad visibility and measurement.

And we talked through to today about.

How Kirby makes decisions on investing in founders.

In this conversation, especially towards the end, I try to set up Kirby to toot his own horn about his accomplishments. He does not really take the bait and so what you get are some.

Very thoughtful and at times self deprecating answers. Enjoy.

Welcome to the HI EQ Marketer. I'm John Busbee. This show is about learning from the best and most interesting marketers in the world which are, not a coincidence, highly emotionally intelligent. If you'd like inspiration lessons, war stories from startups or Fortune 500 companies, that's why we're here. So let's go.

Kirby, how are you?

Hey John, I'm doing great, how are you?

Good.

Good to see you.

You and I met many moons ago. When that happened, you were running marketing for a public company called GoToNet Shout out, which had gone public during the dot com boom. Talk a little bit about that time and what your biggest learning was early in your career.

Yeah, I mean I did nothing but learn I feel like for those four or five years. And you know, I just remember waking up one day and realizing I was the head of marketing at a public company and I think I was 23. It didn't make any sense. You know, my qualifications were basically I had an English major, I did an advertising internship and I did some copywriting for one of the founders of the company before they founded the company as a summer gig. And that led me into apparently that meant I could could run marketing for a $4 billion company. So like the learnings were early and often for me. But if I had to pull one out I think it would be team matters more than anything. I mean I've had the privilege of working with the founders of Gotonet on another company called Marchex. After that, as you well recall, we shared a desk there. Literally a desk where we stared at each other all day because we company was very frugal and we only had one desk but and then so worked there and then was fortunate enough to run a couple companies myself and I think I at the time we were doing gotonet and I was running marketing, I just took for granted that you would always get to work with people you really, really liked and really, really respected, who either gave you the time and the leeway to make your own way and create your own path and kind of do the hard learning that you needed to do. From a tactical perspective, whether it was my marketing job and having my boss who was the coo sort of take the time to redline my copy or take the time to print off my deck and tear it down for me and do that again and again when know he had a lot of pressing business to attend to. So just people who took care of each other and thought about each other's, you know, growth and people who like being around each other. We work, you know, 14, 16 hours a day, no lie. Right. For like seven days a week for five years. I remember thinking it was, I was so critical to the, to the mission of the company. In retrospect, it's, it's silly because as we know, the graveyard is full of irreplaceable people. Right? But at the time, I thought it was so important that I didn't visit my family. I didn't, you know, go to weddings. I didn't, I really didn't do anything but work for a long time. And as it turns out, you can do that if you really, really like and respect the people that you're working with. So I think that was the biggest takeaway. When people, people always say team's important, but really having that infused in your blood early on in a career is a real gift.

Well, you hit on so many good topics there. I mean, one, having a mentor or someone that was able, invested in your success, that's big. Second, I think hustle is really important, especially when you're trying to figure out everything on the fly. Just putting in those extra hours enabled you probably to overcome like mistakes that might happen or whatever. Writing, I mean, you kind of poo pooed your English major, but in marketing, and particularly when you're trying to work with senior leaders, being able to communicate is so incredibly important. But then I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the role of experimentation because it sounded like at gotonet you were given the reins to figure things out and you probably made a bunch of errors. And the ability that you felt like you weren't going to get, I don't know, in trouble or whatever for making those errors was probably fairly important.

Yeah, I mean, you definitely got in trouble. You and I both recall working for a CEO who had very high standards there. And I'll never forget we had, you know, goto net was a sort of tough name to get reporters to spell correctly, especially because we decided that it should be capitalized in an odd fashion. I'll never forget having to say a thousand times, capital G, lowercase o, the numeral 2, capital N, lowercase e, lowercase T. I'll never forget. Like that slides off the tongue, doesn't it? And when that would be spelled wrong in the Wall Street Journal, I certainly heard about it. But yeah, I think that's right. I think again, being relatively inexperienced and being given the keys to a $10 million ad agency review and really not having our senior leadership or my mentor and boss, who is the coo, John Keister, he didn't even sit in on the first meeting. Like he literally just let me go and interview a bunch of ad agencies. And, you know, I figured out how to do that, you know, through a course of kind of a comedy of errors. We ended up with a great firm and pulled off an ad campaign that actually got featured in Adweek magazine. And that was sort of a highlight for me because as a college kid I always thought I'd be in advertising in an old school way. But yeah, to get to that point, in that one example, I had to fail at hiring a lot of different ad agencies. And then with the ad agency we went with, I had to fail at seven different creative concepts, then I had to fail at pitching those to our management. And then eventually we succeeded in pulling something off that I think helped define a brand that, at least in that window of time, was part of something pretty special. The advent of Internet media and digital publishing.

Now it's funny thinking back then about how when something was in print, you'd put it up on the wall in the office.

Oh yeah, yeah, that was validation. I mean, I remember my father in law always asked, what the hell do you do? And I'd be like, well, it's like a magazine, but it's on the computer. And I think he only finally understood that when I was able to send him a copy of Adweek with our physical ad in it. But it's funny how that's changed.

I remember getting something in print in Barron's and that was like such a big deal. It was on the back page and Barron is like this big oversized newspaper thing offshoot of the Wall Street Journal. People probably know that for its online. I don't even know if it's in.

Print anymore.

But I wonder if how connected Thinking back then, how well do you feel like you knew goto nets mission and like, did that help you make the right decisions when it came to selecting the ad agency?

Oh boy, that's a great question. I don't think we had any idea what our mission was. Our mission was to, to crush it. I mean we had a very sort of competitive sports driven type culture where the founders were both college athletes. I think probably the first 10 employees were all college athletes. And we sort of, we were playing the game to win and it was very much sort of a Wall street type culture, more so than a Silicon Valley tech culture. So actually I think the concept of culture was relatively anathema to most of us and it sort of just grew up out of the early team. And in terms of, in terms of mission? No, I mean, I think, you know, it was so I think the challenge for a lot of companies that were founded in 95, 96 like ours is that you were, you were literally growing up with the medium as it grew. And so it was very difficult to decide what we're going to be. You know, we're going to do X for the Internet or we're going to do X for like a category. Because the Internet, the first ad had just been sold like nine months before we started gotomet. I mean we were hard coding. You know, Kevin Bauer was like in Adobe Acrobat or whatever, like coding up, like drawing ads that we would then like physically put on a web page that I had to like cut and paste HTML on and, and publish every night at midnight. And like, so, so I think the, the idea of like company building or you know, creating, I think we all felt like our mission was to create the Internet. I mean that's probably like the right answer is that we felt like we were changing the world. We felt like, you remember, I mean we would be in the office at you know, 8:00pm on a Saturday, listen, like with the coders playing techno and like, you know, drinking your 10th Mountain Dew of the day and just feeling like you were part of something that nobody understood because they didn't. I mean every, everyone I knew from school, you know, was either getting their MBA or working on Wall street or you know, working in industry. Family members almost to almost everyone who wasn't a part of the early Internet thought the early Internet was a fad. They thought it was a joke, they thought it was a lark. And, and so I think the mission was to prove them wrong and to say this is actually a real bit, you know, you can Build real businesses on what has been historically like a public, a public good for some small group of geeks to communicate. And being a part of the advent of search, being a part of the advent of E commerce, even with the business that you brought to the table, being a part of the advent of Fintech in a way, certainly with authorized Net payments. The advent of web hosting. We own the two largest web hosting businesses in the world. And I think it's easy to forget that you could make such an outsized impact in such a short amount of time because the actual medium was growing so quickly. And I don't know if we'll see that again in our lifetimes. We saw it a little bit with mobile, but the tracks were already laid with the early Internet business models. And so, yeah, no, I think the mission was just to, you know, to create something new.

Yeah, I do feel like that's the.

Mission after you sort of talked out those early times, you know, and I know you invest in early stage companies now. We'll get to that a little bit later. But when it comes to some of the things that, that some people may consider fads, whether it's crypto or NFTs or, or Web3 or anything like that, there's a segment of folks who don't think things will change or this will take off. And then there are a set of folks who are building companies who are very passionate about it. Even if they don't know where the endpoint is, they have a unique perspective on it. And that's probably some of what you're looking for when you invest in a company. I'll get to that in a little bit, but I want to. Before we get to your current, your current gig, I want to talk a little bit more about how your career evolved. So after GoTonet, you stayed in advertising and you were the CEO of a company that focused on ad visibility and measurement. It used to be kind of a novel concept that you should be able to actually physically see an advertisement before you are charged for it. Talk about a little bit about the challenges that the digital marketing industry faced during that time in your career and then how do you think it's evolved or is different today?

Yeah, I mean, I think the analogy I used to try to make to the folks we were pitching on this ad visibility measurement product was if you're a brand and you're watching the super bowl and it's commercial break and instead of your commercial showing up, it was just dead air for 30 seconds, would you pay for that? And the answer is of course not. And yet, provably, certainly, and I don't know what the numbers are now, I don't think they've changed that much actually. But certainly in 2010 or 11, provably, if you were buying on networks and programmatically, something like 40% of your ads were just not being. They were never in a position to be possibly seen by a human, whether because of fraud or because of, you know, placements below the fold or, you know, what have you. And so, you know, the challenge, I think, in digital marketing, well, and digital media, that's somewhat unique to digital media. And so that's why it's been so intractable, is because it's really not possible to be a problem in print and outdoor and over the top, sorry, in linear tv, is that there's a huge misalignment of incentives. So, you know, if you're, if you're a, if you publish the Seattle Times, you're incentivized to, you know, create great content that engages readers so that you can sell advertisements that are relevant to those readers. It's pretty straightforward. But in digital media, there are so many stops along the way from where an ad is purchased to where an ad is delivered that some vast majority of the time the publisher doesn't know who bought the ad, why they bought the ad. Was it bought based on data? Was it bought based on category targeting? Was it bought based on keyword targeting? Was it bought by a reputable holding company ad agency? Was it bought by a third party ad network? Was it bought by a demand side platform? Was it bought by a bad actor who's trying to infuse spyware malware onto consumers, desktops? And everyone in the every stop along the way, from the advertiser to the publisher, all of those stops are populated by people who are incentivized to extract value, not to create value for the consumer or for the brand or for the publisher. And I think that's what makes it really hard to get digital media, quote, unquote, right? And so what you get instead is inefficiency priced in or fraud priced in. And we found that, I mean, I think, you know, we sold our company to comScore, which is a big, one of the two largest digital measurement firms in the world.

And.

A number of our competitors ended up staying independent and either going public or getting bought by private equity firms. I wake up with night sweats about the fact that we could have been a $5 billion public company by now, like Double Verify. But the thing is I don't think much has changed. I think these companies just provide cover for everyone in the industry to continue to conduct business as usual because it's just too hard. It's a, too hard to police the problems and it's B, not worth it. Right. Because I remember someone at a conference, you know, said said once, like they called it optimizing for the edge. And kind of that's what you're doing when you start dealing with like large programmatic buying is you're optimizing for the edge. And so if 80% of the value comes from 20% of your spend, which is usually the case, then is it really worth you spending tons of time and money trying to figure out how to eke out another five basis points of yield on your programmatic ad? I mean, you know, look, 90% of all ads are programmatic now. So I'm kind of showing my age by even using the word. But I think that, I think the principle still, still holds true. And so, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of theater that goes on in the, in the digital media world around doing the right thing, but I'm not sure it matters.

Yeah, in the performance space, which is where I operate right now, the insistence is so much on measuring the results of something, whether it's a display by a doctor ad, paid TV or anything. And it's ultimately up to the publisher to prove to you, I think, that something is working rather than like you say, try to squeeze every little thing about optimizing X, Y and Z on the publisher. Control what you can control, which is the experience when someone gets to your site or your experience, and then understand where the ads actually are and you get most of what you need done. You can focus on what you can control. You know, you've worked a lot in marketplaces. I mean, Gotonet, as you were describing, it, was kind of an early marketplace. You were an enabler of making marketplaces more successful at the ad visibility companies. Sorry, the name escaped me. Although you just said it and then you pivoted to B2C where you were the CEO of Dwellable, which was a mobile first company, had a search engine for vacation rentals. So you've worked in marketplaces much of your career.

What, what are the recipes for success.

In growing a marketplace in your mind?

So I love SaaS enabled marketplaces where you say, you know, we're investors in one called Rock, Paper, Coin. It was founded by two women who had a very successful wedding planning business. And they realized there was no software that was purpose built for them to work with their own marketplace, which is vendors on one side, florists and caterers, events, event spaces and brides to be on the other side. And so they built software to serve that market. With the concept being that because they had, they would be able to have. Because they, because they, and they were necessary to both they were already as a bridal planning service, you're necessary to the supply and the demand. And because of that you can dictate to the demand what software they use. And so they took bridal planners as their go to market supply side partners and they gave them a SaaS production that they actually pay for. And then those planners force the brides and the vendors to use their software to consummate the transactions. And they take a fintech, you know, they take basis points off that, what do you call it, interchange fee on that. And that's a great example of solving, you know, solving that cold start and solving that sort of flywheel problem with SAS enablement. But you can also, you know, you can also do it. You think about marketplaces like Airbnb where, you know, a lot of times the, the person who's, who's renting their place out is also going to be a traveler. And I think that's how Airbnb initially spread, you know, or you start with a, with a high purchase value that gives you the margin to play with to acquire customers. So you know, Uber started with black cars and, and, and had the cushion to be able to go. Well, they just raised a ton of money. That's the other solution. But yeah, so, so I don't know. I think, I think marketplaces are best left to people other than me as operators and founders for sure. But you know, you can kind of, you kind of know one when you see one that you think might work because it's got a novel approach to solving that cold start and then getting a flywheel running.

So you mentioned the, the company that you invested in and now let's talk.

About your, your current gig.

You're the GP of Ascend vc. You've got the logo for those of you watching on YouTube, you've got the, the hat with the logo. So you invest in, in PNW Pacific Northwest startups.

Why did this become hot fire startups in the rainy Pacific Northwest?

Yeah.

What is, what is that about?

Like, yeah, why is there an umbrella? Why in a fire shouldn't the rain be putting out?

The rain is going to put out the fire about five days here.

So why did this become a passion of yours?

Why did you want to start, start the fund? And then what's great and unique about investing in the Northwest? Everyone talks about Silicon Valley. You don't do that. You do Pacific Northwest. What's, what's unique about investing where you and I live?

Yeah, I mean, I think for, for me after, So I did 20 years of startups as a, you know, either founding team member or founder and CEO. And in those 20 years we, you know, fortunate enough to get four exits. I mean, but each one of them was more difficult and each one of them was actually less financially successful. And I sort of realized like I, I was, I was just cooked, you know, I didn't have it in me to do another one as an operator. I don't think I'm actually really cut out for zero to one startups as an operator. I mean, if you think about it, the first two startups I did were actually financially engineered by some really smart people to where we kind of started the game with series A money in the bank, like at the idea stage. And then we leverage public markets to roll up, to roll up a bunch of properties using equity. So if I'm honest, like how much did I have to do with the success of those companies? I mean, I think I helped, but you, they couldn't have happened without, you know, Russ and John being just, and Pete Christophulo being just really, really smart financial engineers. And, and then when I got to doing the startups that were actually real startups, I found that being sort of more operator focused, more scale focused, maybe a little bit more cynical. Things that are rewarded in a public company. And you know, the first two we got public very quickly, if you recall. Like we were private for like nine months and both of them IPO'd through like a small business back door which was I guess back before us back existed. And so again, just kind of having to realize like, oh shoot, now you have to, you have to validate with customers and you have to pitch real venture, real venture funds and you have to figure out how to play that game and then you have to execute. It was just, I felt like I took my shots and I didn't see a big future for me on that side of the table. But what I had come to realize was that I just had some really unique experience. Um, you know, I think some of us are pretty good at sort of downplaying to ourselves the, the, the, the, the things we've experienced and the roles we've had and the successes that have, you know, arisen around us or even, you know, might classify, other people might classify as success, what we classify as failure. And so I kind of, you know, was able to step back and see I had some valuable experience and I thought I could apply that as an investor. And so I started angel investing full time in 2016 and 2019, raised the first fund. And I think, and we're on fund too now. I think one of the things that made it pretty straightforward to raise the fund is that Seattle is to a great extent, to a somewhat lesser extent, but still, still relevantly, the Pacific Northwest writ large. We were just at an inflection point. And having grown up here my whole life, and especially having operated in the technology industry here my whole life, we're at an inflection point that I think New York probably saw in 2008, and I think that the Valley saw in, you know, 1990. And that's where you finally have the depth and breadth of successful startups, startup outcomes and talent from a startup value creation perspective to make the next 10 to 20 years in this region just phenomenally successful for folks who are investing and operating here. And I'll kind of dig into that. I always make the analogy, and it's probably a little bit harsh, but for decades we had the two largest tech companies in the world here, and we had some of the highest density of technology talent in the world here. But the problem was there was no off ramp from those giant companies for entrepreneurs. And so when you had your sporadic, you know, outcomes and value creation, I feel like half of which were created by, you know, Rich Barton and crew, whether it was Expedia or Zillow, and a number of, you know, their sort of coaching tree, if you will, have created a bunch of the other startups in town. But outside of those sporadic value creation events, most of the time, these entrepreneurs. So the analogy I was, I was referring to is these entrepreneurs would kind of jump off the top story of, you know, the Microsoft building or the Amazon building, and rather than being able to slide down on a nice easy grade of pre IPO startups and series D startups and series B startups and kind of learn how to do startups, these entrepreneurs and all, by the way, technical entrepreneurs are just hitting the ground and breaking their legs and occasionally they bounce twice and live and they create something. But the hit rate was pretty low. And I think a lot of that was due to not only not having an off ramp, but also not having homegrown business Talent that knew how to scale venture companies. We've had maybe two venture capital firms that have survived since the 90s. There's just not a homegrown venture ecosystem here. And so you just had to have. I mean, I remember even 2015, there were no unicorns in the Pacific Northwest. I remember trying to help people hire marketers. You know this. If you needed to hire a growth marketer for like a, you know, Series B or beyond company In Seattle in 2012, you were, you were going to have to move them from New York or San Francisco. And the same could be said for, you know, a lot of business functions. And I think now with, you know, tableau going out for what, $17 billion in Salesforce, if DocuSign having a $32 billion outcome, Off Zero having a $6 billion outcome, and the insurance guys across the Lake had a $3 billion outcome, ZipWhip's a billion. These things are happening every year now. And so not only has that raised the profile of the ecosystem from a capital perspective, where now people always ask, why aren't there more venture firms in Seattle? I go, because they're all in sf. It's a our flight. They come up here now, trust me, they're asking to throw parties. They want to meet founders. They're here. You know, Madrona is not actually leading every Series A round or seed round in Seattle. Voyager's not either. God bless them, and we love working with them, but they're a very small percentage of the capital in this ecosystem. I mean, what do we have? I think year to date, $6 billion deployed. And the total AUM of funds in Seattle is like 2 billion. And that's AUM. So deployed in a given year is like 300 million. And fuse is emerging as a great Series A fund. And again, I'm not knocking local funds, but the fact of the matter is that you need Silicon Valley money to scale an ecosystem. And Silicon Valley money was shy here a decade ago because they saw what I think we were blind to, which is that there just wasn't a great place to build a company. And now it is. You know, you've got folks like the Convoy team, you've got the Offer up team, you've got the Amparity team, got outreach, you know, and these are companies that now have been around and raised enough money and got enough business to be at a place where they spin out their own entrepreneurs. You have people who are like, I came in at Series A and ran ops at Convoy. I'm going to do a startup now because they're at series D, this is too late for me. You know, I'm going to buy my options and go try my own thing. And that's happening, you know, dozens of times a month at 35 companies in the region. And so it's just an incredibly exciting time to invest here. I don't know that it's happening like that. I guarantee you it's not happening like that in Miami. I don't know that it's happening like that in Austin, these other towns that you hear about. I think, you know, there's validity to the concept that talent is more distributed than ever. Certainly we have teams that are remote. We're increasingly seeing opportunities out of market that are interesting that they may have a light tie to Seattle. But you know, you still need, I think that that density of geolocal talent and success, there's something really real about that. And that's what I mean, you know, that's what happened in New York. Again, largely on the back of advertising technology as it turns out, and health. And now increasingly New York is just has blossomed into the place where you can start any kind of technology company and raise money. And I think Seattle deserves to be there. And I think we're on the cusp of having that kind of a 10 year, 20 year run.

So two questions about the raising money part of it to close out here. Here's the first one. So what do you think about marketing in an early stage? And like what do you look for as an investor for, from the revenue, from kind of the marketing and revenue engine to really help you seal the deal? To say I want to cut a check here?

I mean I'm kind of the wrong guy to ask because we invest at the idea stage. And so, you know, typically there's not a marketing budget until after the next round of capital comes into a company. And so I think if I'm looking for sort of anything on the marketing side, it's sort of very early go to market.

Well, let me pivot my question then a little bit.

Yeah, sure.

So I asked a guest, Brendan Dell a few weeks back about the importance of a pitch deck. Because in a way you're marketing yourself. And so in the initial meet and greet or idea stage, what, what kind of seeds of marketing thoughtfulness do you feel like is important for a startup? Because any, anybody can have, can have an idea.

How do you, how do you gain.

Confidence that someone's going to be able to execute on it?

Yeah, I mean if, if I, if I knew that for sure, I'd bottle it and sell it. Right? I think so. I would say I'm actually at this stage, it's even less about having confidence in their ability to execute, and it's more about is what they're doing, is their insight about the world unique enough? And are they uniquely positioned to take advantage of that insight in such a way that then could possibly create a massive company, create a massive market if it doesn't exist? Is it. Are they the right person, is it the right time? And is it, Is there, Do they have an unfair advantage? And is their insight unique? I mean, those are the kinds of questions that I'm trying to get my head around. And I sort of have to grant that they'll figure out how to execute, grant that the product will be great, grant that the technology will work. Not that those things are easy, but those things can be done by talented people who aren't founders. Whereas the idea and bringing it to life from whole cloth is just, that's the founders. That's what has to happen for the thing to be, you know, wildly successful. And so, and so it's funny, most founders miss this and I missed it when I was raising money because I thought it was about, oh no, I'm gonna put the widget in the, in the wall. And then the thing comes out and money goes here. And then we do, we build a business. That's actually not what the, that's not the test that you're trying to pass. You fail if you, if you pass that test, you actually fail. Like the venture is like pitch test. You don't fail it if you pass it. But like, that's not the point. The point of the, the deck and the narrative and the story is to inspire the investor to believe that you're going to succeed in your mission. And so everything along the trail of that narrative or that every slide in the deck needs to lead to that conclusion and that the mission's worth taking. Right. And so, you know, you're judging. It's. I always say, it's like there's. There are three things going on when you're pitching an investor. Like, there's not actually one thing. Yeah, they're evaluating your business opportunity kind of. They're also evaluating you as a founder. What does that mean? I don't know. I. It. You. It's. It's inevitable. You can't describe it. How do. Are you inspiring? You know, like they're doing that in the back of their lizard brain. Like they're just trying to see like, we just want to see a pattern. Is it a pattern that we know? Do we? Are we? Like, holy crap, I gotta. The problem with any sort of pitch advice for founders is like, it's like, be special. You know, like, how useful is that? Like, the pitch advice, assuming you're special, then the pitch advice is do a really good job of landing one point per slide that leads people down a path that, that ends with them believing that you being special matters. Because if you're special, you're going to be special and everyone will know it. But, like, you need to then do the work to get credit for being special and being special in a way that then is going to create value. It's funny, I've never described it that way, but that's actually the job. And it's just so hard because most of us aren't special. I'm not like, I'm not special. I, you know, and so, and so I just tried to like. But if you're not special, but you're smart, because they're very different things. If you're not special, but you're smart, experienced, talented, and you, and you work hard and you're networked, then you just build a pitch and you're like, well, come on, this is going to be great. Like, we can make money on this. And that's just actually not the thing that a lot of people do, by the way. A lot of, A lot of those companies get funded. I got funded. But those aren't the companies that are successful, like, wildly successful.

The thing that I'm taking out from all of this is how do you neatly and succinctly say that you're uniquely qualified to solve a problem? It's one thing to say a problem exists and I can execute against that problem. It's a whole other thing to say I have this unique insider experience that I have that makes me better qualified to solve this problem than someone else or maybe some type of unique advantage. And to me, that's the marketing nugget that I'm taking out of all of this. And let me, let me ask you something to close this out, Kirby, which is, which is at an early stage, you need, you need a lot of help and investors help by infusing money, they can potentially also help in other ways that can also be a massive distraction. We've all heard about disasters of investors in the board, boardroom, and we've heard ways that investors can be hugely helpful. In your opinion, what should early stage companies expect out of investors? And then what advice Would you give to early stage companies to keep investors either appropriately informed or, or leverage your investors for help when they need it?

Yeah. Expect nothing but money from your investors. Expect the worst. I mean, almost right. Like depending on who they are, you should interview them and check their references. But if they're reputable, you know, you'll know. But, but, but especially with angel investors, they can destroy your company. You get one person who puts in 100k and then, you know, if you have to take a pivot or recapitalize the company or, you know, raise a bridge, they treat it like it's Enron. And we've seen it happen. They just want to blow up the whole company and they'll, and they could do it. So I mean, sort of like that's, that's, that's caveat one. You know, I don't. In terms of what can investors do for you, what should you expect from investors? I think, I think there are different ways to approach that. A one way is to actually manage your investors like an outsourced strategy team or an outsourced really good lead development team. But not all investors like being managed that way. So there's really no one size fits all sort of advice for getting value out of investors. I mean, I think if any. We've invested in 60 deals now as a firm. Not to toot my own horn, but we consistently hear that we're the most helpful investor on the cap table and that's. We're on cap tables with really big firms with really nice names. You know, I think we have the advantage of, you know, only focusing on precede and so I kind of know more about that stage and maybe I can be more helpful just because I focus on it. Well, I think a lot of great investors that we co invest with are they're investing in later stage companies and sort of more suited to later stage advice and solutions. So anyway, my takeaway is that, you know, and I don't think I'm that helpful. So, so if I'm the most helpful, then, you know, really investors aren't that helpful. You kind of what some people say is like the goal is to invest in companies that don't need your help. That said, like, the best way to keep investors posted on your progress and just keep them engaged is honestly, it sounds simple, but do the standard monthly email. You know, I have a template that I send our companies. Some of them use it, some of them don't. It's got emojis and, but you know, and actually the emojis I will say emojis serve a purpose. They break up the visual line of the update. You know, people have a hard time reading word vomit and chart vomit and number of vomit and they don't understand how the story is progressing over time. So I would say like, pick a KPI. Whether if it's early, it might be customer engagement. If it's later, it might be revenue. But pick a KPI. Be sure you're cool with reporting it every month and then report it every month. If you need to change it, change it. But you know, start with a TLDR that you know is a one liner on what your updates about. Start before that. Start with a one liner on what your company does. Because all of your investors are busy people with lots of other investments. And so you need, you know, every, and I will say this, John, you know, you're a masterful marketer, so you'll appreciate this. Your investors are a pretty fancy audience if you're doing it right. And your advisors are too. And your potential investors, everyone who's getting this update is a pretty fancy audience. And you, you, you have a newsletter that goes out monthly to them and you have a chance to brand yourself to that. And so you sure as heck want to, you know, land the point of like, who you are, what you do, who you do it for. And, and think about it like, think about it like lifecycle marketing, right? Because your, your investors are going to want to invest again or you're going to want them to invest again. Your potential investors are going to want to invest for the first time. And so I don't think enough founders treat it like that. I think founders treat it like a, like a duty, like a reporting duty, like, like an SEC report.

As opposed to a marketing investment.

As opposed to a marketing investment. It's really a marketing investment and the companies that do it well benefit and the companies that don't, sometimes they do well, sometimes they don't. But better to have it not need it than need it not have it.

Right? On and on that. Let's end it with, with a Go Hawks.

Go Hawks.

Good to see you, Kirby.

Good to see you, man.

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