What Two Operators Learned Writing First Checks

Okay, great. Well, we're going to transition over here, and to do that I want to tell you a story, a little bit of my founder story, founder to investor story. Started— I was working in aerospace on the Space Shuttle program. And years in advance, we knew the end was near. They had said we're only gonna launch 135 launches. And therefore they began waves of layoffs ahead of time, because they knew they'd be shutting down the program. And I created my first startup related to that problem, knowing that all of my coworkers and really myself, I thought, would get laid off. And so I created LinkedIn for engineers. Or so I thought I created. And very quickly went out after creating the startup, asking people if they'd use it. Well, no one wanted to, they just wanted to update their LinkedIn. And a very typical first-time entrepreneur problem where you go solve a problem before talking to a customer, right? So through many sick days, days off from my day job, because I actually was the only one I felt like that didn't get let go, by the way, from the aerospace company. I went and just looked at who is having the problem within the job space. And it turned out, The area I found a lot of need is students, people who've never had a job yet, who need to get hired, have this problem where it's like, how do you show employability when you've never been employed? And that's where we pivoted and became LinkedIn for students. And with that pivot, we applied to a bunch of incubators, got into one in San Diego called EvoNexus, and moved the company from LA to San Diego. And on the EvoNexus board of admissions were a bunch of Tech Coast Angels, now known as Newfund members. Who assessed us, our application into the incubator, watched us, met with us monthly, and then 10 months later pulled us in and said, when we said we'd like to raise capital, we said, we've been watching, yes, you are ready to get in front of Tech Coast Angels, now Newfund Ventures, to pitch for capital. We were first-time founders, two aerospace engineers starting a software marketplace, and those, members, the angel investors, ultimately championed us through, and we ultimately raised about $900,000 through Newfund Ventures. And, you know, that was our first round and had an amazing experience through it. The champion who led us through Newfund became a board member and is still a friend today, Allison Long. And ultimately we Got acquired by a large edtech company called Instructure, which makes Canvas, which is pretty much the de facto software of most universities. It's what most of us use, probably Blackboard back in the day. Now Canvas has taken over market share, and they acquired us and then promptly put us on the shelf and like really is not to be seen anymore. But we got acquired by a public company, got cashed out of both public stock and cash, and within 12 months and a day, thankfully for capital gains, we got cashed out again by the company getting taken private. So a large private equity company, Thoma Bravo, bought Instructure, took them private, and cashed us out for anyone who was still holding stock. A number of my investors had actually sold the stock, so they missed out on the second bump. I hadn't, and a number of us hadn't, and so Also, a decision of when to sell is also another part of the entire strategy of investing as well too. The part we missed, not that we could have, but this happened, we got our second acquisition in March 2020, right as COVID hit, which is right when everything became digital even more so. And so Instructure boomed in terms of market share even from there, and they were actually taken public back again in 10 months. From private to public again in 10 months. We were not part of the third bump, but that's okay. I think we did okay in the end. But very quickly, from a financial position, was very fortunate in the capital return to me. Or not returned, like I didn't put too much money in as a founder, but I was cashed out in two ways and was very excited to go invest in my peers, really, other founders who were raising. And that began my angel investment journey. And that pretty much was right around the same time that my friend Ashok Kamal had moved to San Diego, and very quickly took on the role of executive director of Tech Coast Angels. So we're going to tell that story in a second. But that is the beginning of when I joined Tech Coast Angels with the beginning of Tech Goes Angels' annual fund called ACE. So without further ado, let me introduce you to Ashok Kamal, Executive Director of Newfund Ventures.

Cool to be here. I have a lot of friends in the room, including Neal Bloom. Neal and I have to do events together to find excuses to hang out.

You don't get to hang out.

You don't invite me over for ceviche anymore. Those kids, you know, they're just so—

We're two new dads and finding time— this is the time when we get to hang out.

It's just got crazy.

But yeah.

We love doing this and seeing other great friends like I see Tracy, Ryan, Kathy, and then making new ones. So thank you for inviting me, Neal Bloom.

Ashok, I wanna— you also have a founder-to-funder story, and I think it's important to hear that a little bit because it is your lens of investing as well too. So I think that's an important piece of today is everyone's got their own lens of assessing, and usually it's based on your own learned experiences. And I think knowing that, know thyself, is important. And so that's why you'll hear a lot of people's backstories today. So, Shoaib, take us through a little bit of the founder to funder piece for you.

Yeah, and I'd go even further and say that entrepreneurship is the lens that I see life through, and angel investing is just food, hopefully healthy food, for entrepreneurs. Since I got to hear your story, I've heard it before, but always new details. I'll share a little bit. Kind of culminate without taking too many twists and turns in how we got to Tech Coast Angels and meeting each other and now a new fund. But the part of my entrepreneurial life that I'll start with was when I was in business school and in a business plan competition, not unlike what Zip has run over years, and came up with the idea with a couple of my classmates. This is in New York City. I'm from Boston. I went to business school and lived in New York City 15 years. Including business school being the tail end. And the problem we wanted to solve, because entrepreneurship is really just about breathing in problems and exhaling solutions. And again, that's how I look at everything in life, whether it's companies I start, companies I invest in, organizations that I'm involved with, or even raising my kids, right? It's just breathe in problems, exhale solutions. So the problem that we wanted to tackle, my 4 classmates and I, we started with 4, then it became— started with 5, then it became 3 by the time we actually incorporated— was the massive amount of plastic waste that was pervasive throughout the world. And this was in 2010, Pacific Coast Garbage Patch and everything. We didn't necessarily have the word microplastics, but we knew plastic waste was a huge problem. So the idea that we came up with to start was making backpacks out of recycled plastic bottles. So, you know, literally backpacks, you know, like the one that I have on the ground that's made out of tires, not by my company, but a backpack, a physical good. Who starts with that? Out of plastic bottles. And to fast forward, we ended up coming up with a prototype that won us a competition at the business school sponsored by Merrill Lynch. Again, this is 2010 on their swan song as a firm. And we were awarded $40,000 to then get out there and start that company. This is like at, you know, 29 years old, having lived in New York City for then 10 years or something like that, and not working obviously while being in business school full-time for the prior 2 years. So, you know, 40 grand was not a lot of money, but it was enough to seed a startup. We ran with it. It was not a linear and smooth process as I would learn over and over. I had been involved in other ventures before, but this is the direct tie to San Diego. I even remember in getting that award, the criteria was we had to get one purchase order for our backpacks. Imagine these typical kids-style backpacks, bright colors, made out of plastic bottles. We were making the fabric out of plastic bottles, which was pretty novel at the time.. And once we made our prototype, I created a one-sheet with one of my co-founders who was a graphic designer from Japan. And I just started cold emailing every single private school that I could find in the New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut surrounding area. So I'd literally just go onto websites and no AI to spider that stuff, right? Just, you know, spend nights while a full-time student, obviously, making lists. And emailing every single principal or parent council with our one sheet saying, "Would you be interested in purchasing this brand new eco-friendly backpack that we'll put your school's logo on?" Right? So I sent out probably 1,000 emails. I got, you know, 6 responses, something like that. One of the schools, which was in Maryland, and I was in New York, said, "I'm interested. Come and meet with me." Okay, I didn't even have a car. You know, most people don't in New York. My roommate did have a car. So I said, "Great, when would you like me to be there?" And he told me some time that was like during the school day. Of course, I have classes and stuff like that too, but you do what you gotta do. So he gives me a time, let's say it's Thursday at 10:30 in the morning, and I tell my roommate, "I need to borrow your car." Fortunately, he was my friend, so he let me do it. I know Neal Bloom, you would let me do something like that too. We do have asks like that, the modern-day equivalent, and we always say yes. So I hit the road, I go, it was maybe, I don't know, 2 to 3 hours to this school. School in Maryland, suburban Maryland, and I have a prototype now in my hand. Walk into the guy's office, he sits me down. I'm ready with every single sales pitch that I could have imagined, right? I have like 20 things about the bag that I could tell the guy as to why I need him to make a purchase order. Because remember, the contingency of releasing the money, the $40 grand from the business school center, was me getting a purchase order for the bags. Now we're in, by the way, like the end of the fourth semester of business school, so like we're getting ready to graduate, right? So I sit down, he looks at the prototype, I'm ready with all of my ammo, and he says, "I'll take 200 of them." And I just look at him and I say, "Okay, great, we can do that." Of course, I don't quite know how we're gonna make 200 of these custom backpacks out of recycled plastic bottles, but I say, "That sounds great." I think his name is, Principal Edmondson, and I shake his hand and I walk out calmly. I see a bathroom and I need to go pee, but I just want to play it off and head out. Book your win, right? And it's not like I don't have a 3-hour drive ahead of me, so it would make sense to go to the bathroom first, as we remind our children all the time. So I instead go to the car, and by the way, it's wintertime at this point, so there's snow on the ground and snow banks, and I remember getting in the car and just thinking to myself, holy shit, this is suddenly real. Like, not only did we just go across the penny gap, which like Josh Kopelman, whose dad was one of my business school professors, by the way, Richard Kopelman, Josh Kopelman's a super famous VC from First Round Capital in Philly. Josh has a famous article about the penny gap, crossing the penny gap. If you can get somebody to pay you a penny, then you potentially have something, right? So I crossed the penny gap, realize it, all these other kind of emotions and thoughts come to mind about this suddenly becoming a real business. And remember, I'm also graduating from business school, so I'm not looking to go and get a real job. I had a job in finance for the summer in Boston. This was in between the two years, and I wasn't really interested in doing that. So I get in the car, I start driving, I immediately think of my co-founders. I dial up my phone, and I realize that I'm not supposed to call them while driving, and I'm somewhere with ice on the ground in suburban Maryland. I just pull over into this parking lot as quickly as I could. I literally almost like drove into a pile of snow and then realized I really, really, really had to go to the bathroom. And I kid you not, I jumped out of the car. Fortunately, there was nobody there and I just made yellow snow. I'll put it that way. And this is no exaggeration. Like all these things, physical and emotional, were just coming together. And after I finished, I get back in the car, I sit down, I call my co-founders and I'm like, on the verge of crying. Like, that's how emotional, because again, remember, you've been like working on this idea for, in our case, a year and a half from when we started it in school, winning that first competition. And then it becomes not only an idea or a company, but your life, because we're about to graduate business school. And like that friend of mine, you know, fortunately, at least, you know, for me, I didn't feel that bad because it was sort of the downturn of, you know, the one of the economic crises in New York, but many of my friends were going back into industry, high salaries, all that kind of stuff, the stuff you're supposed to do as an MBA in most programs, right? Entrepreneurship was also becoming more in vogue in business schools throughout the world at that time. But here I am like, this is what we are gonna do. We are gonna launch Bennu. Bennu is the Egyptian phoenix. The idea is that we are recycling bottles and putting them into new products, and our tagline was new lifestyle, new dot lifestyle. New lifestyle, that was the tagline, right? So Benu was gonna become a real thing. So I get back to New York, we're super stoked, and I tell the person who runs the Entrepreneurship Center, somebody a little bit like Kathy, we became friends later, but at the time, when I told her I got the purchase order, Principal Edmondson's gonna email me, and she says, okay, once he gives you the check, then we'll, We'll give you the check for the other $40,000. I think it was like $38,000 was the prize money that we needed then to go and actually like build the company. And I became so incensed that she didn't believe me. I felt either my word or I had an email then from him saying, you know, 200 orders. That was a number, 200. I'll never forget it. I stormed into Monica Dean's office and I lost my cool because I just felt like she wasn't understanding that it wasn't just an invoice. This was our life. And by the way, I had at the time 4 co-founders in addition to me who were depending on me being the guy to go and get that sales order. Sayaka designed the bags. Kevin did our books. Cindy was from Taiwan, and she worked on the supply chain. Varun was helping with marketing materials. I was the guy who had to go and sell not only the backpacks, but sell the entire company. So yes, I was the person that would make the pitch at the business plan competitions and the things like you will see at SDAC, right? And it felt like this huge weight on my shoulder, and I had delivered, and then I wasn't being respected is what I felt. So long story short, Monica and I worked it out. She ended up bringing in one of the top mentors at the Entrepreneurship Center, amazing guy, mentor of mine to this day. He was an MIT Media Lab guy, and he actually helped with the Zahn Center at City University of New York. Like we have the Zahn building here, same family. So he kind of talked me off a ledge and was just like, "Do what she says. I'll talk to her. Don't compromise the deal that you have with the school. Just get it done." And I did. So I sort of also learned a little bit of a lesson there. Again, I was so emotional and still growing up myself. So long story, a little bit longer but not all the way long, we got the money. And then that led to what would, I learned later, would be described as the infamous pivots of a startup where within a couple years we weren't making backpacks, we were building recycling rewards software and Waste Management, the company in Houston, became our first and really the only customer that we needed. That then put me into a different echelon in terms of the types of customers I was dealing with. It was no longer selling to, you know, principals at small schools. It was selling into the Organic Growth Group, which is the VC arm of Waste Management, and, you know, kind of other similar companies. And that company then became a leader in recycling and green marketing software. We developed a suite for small businesses and I eventually sold that company, and that's when I moved to San Diego, and that's when I then made my first angel investment. So there's a lot of things that happened along the way too, and I kind of just accelerated over that 2-year pivot process. But the bottom line is I was coming from the perspective of somebody who knew when you're starting a company, your life is on the line, and your partner's life is on the line. Just like I know you and Adam, who had to build that relationship and kind of work through the complexities of it, right? So anytime that I deal with entrepreneurs right now, I always keep that in the back of my head. They might be telling their spouse, "Well, I don't know if we're gonna go and raise this $500,000 that we need the company." Or their whole personal identity may be tied up into that company and the pressure may be on them to deliver. This is not like working in a cushy job somewhere if there's any cushy jobs anymore. It's a fight for your life, you know, right? And I've maintained that perspective throughout, and hopefully it's helped me become a better investor with that, you know, kind of entrepreneur's lens that you alluded to, Neal Bloom.

What a story. I didn't know any of that story. I love it. Which takes us right to where we want to talk about. I love the empathy aspect because And this is, let's start talking about a little bit of your early and our early angel investing days. What is our responsibility, right? We have a shareholder, ourselves, of the capital we are deploying, maybe a partner. We also have a responsibility to every founder we meet, whether we invest or not. Take me through your first investment. Tell us a little bit of the story of the first one and share some of the lens of how you started to feel the weight. Of now you being on the other side of the table?

I think the first business person I met who I didn't know when I moved to San Diego was the late, great Brant Cooper, responsible for connecting so many of us, and will always carry on his community-building legacy. He introduced me to Neal through, first, one of his meetups, and then I think you might have been the second or third kind of individual, because Brant told me Neal knows everybody. And to this day, I'll get introduced to somebody and they'll say to me, "Yeah, so-and-so," you know, they moved to town or whatever it is, or whatever company says, you know, "I should talk to you and they also said I should talk to Neal Bloom." So, people have been saying you should talk to Neal Bloom for, I can count at least 11 years and probably for quite a few years before that. So, everyone who's in the room with Neal is in the right room. So, Neal and I then met and in that process of me kind of just poking around in the startup community, so again, I was, you know, out of my other company, I actually had another one in between that I used some of the money I made on that did not succeed, and that raised venture capital and raised money from two angel groups, which is another kind of dimension here. But I'd done well enough that I was able to start angel investing myself and go where I wanted to go. So I decided to leave New York City. I moved to Cardiff. I was poking around, and through a connection from one of my past startups, I got introduced to a guy who knew about an entrepreneur who had just moved part-time to San Diego who was expanding a company called Outsite. Outsite are basically co-living villas now around the world. The second location was in Encinitas right over there on Grandview. They basically take really, really nice houses now, boutique hotels, etc., but then only villas, build offices that look like mini versions of this, make sure the internet works. You can't take that for granted on the coast of Encinitas, for example, and then kind of build a community around it, and that's the business. So it's like an Inspirado for kind of digital nomads in those days, or WeWork but cooler is what we used to say. That was a tagline I came up with in the pitch deck helping to fundraise. But before I started helping outside fundraise and get directly involved with it, I went to go meet the entrepreneur who was literally putting floors in on the second floor of this property on Avocado Avenue. It's a space that Neal knows well, it's still standing, so he did a good job with the floors. And I go in there, again introduced by another entrepreneur friend through a different program I had been involved with, who just told me, hey, I think you should go meet this guy, he's doing something cool. And I was just poking around, meeting people like Neal, going and taking any chance like this that I had to build my San Diego network from scratch. So I go and I meet the founder, his name's Emmanuel. He shows me what he's doing. He tells me about the concept. I didn't know how I could help. I liked his vision, which was again, that people are detaching from, you know, kind of 9 to 5 workspaces, which I knew since I had been in a WeWork when WeWork was early in New York City. So I was in not only one of the first WeWorks, but before WeWork, Adam had a coworking space called Green Spaces. Remember, I was like a green tech entrepreneur and I even had done stuff at Green Spaces. I saw the co— working megatrend, you know, kind of not only bubble up but then take off, you know, in New York. So it seemed logical to me that this co-living, you know, which is the extension, now you're living in these spaces, would, you know, kind of follow suit even if it, you know, was sort of lagging a little bit behind, you know, working. So I understood the vision. I liked the entrepreneur. He started the company because when he moved to Silicon Valley from France, he felt like it wasn't the, you know, big sequoia trees and, you know, kind of you know, beautiful outdoors that he had envisioned. It was, you know, streets of San Francisco. So he started the first outside in Santa Cruz because he wanted to surf and code and build and find other people like him. So I sensed, although I didn't have the word founder market fit when I met Emmanuel, right? So I liked the macro of what he was building. I sensed founder market fit and I told him I'm ready to write a check on the spot. For you. How much money do you need and can I get involved? And he said, yes, I'm actually doing a friends and family round right now and I'm happy to take your investment. And can you help me go and raise more money? And I came back the next day with my check, literal physical check, handed it to him and then rolled up my sleeves and got to work with Emmanuel raising our, you know, post-friends and family round. The valuation on my investment was $500,000 pre-money. So it was $500K pre-money. The company's worth much, much more than that now, although it's illiquid, but it was a nice attractive entry point because it was a friends and family round, right? But then he wanted to go raise a real seed round, which at the time I think the target was like $1 million. That's when the whole WeWork but cooler and all that stuff came about. And I basically then just started helping him not only kind of get the company to the next stage operationally, but raise money. And lo and behold, one of my connections from New York who was a venture partner at 500 Startups then ended up investing in Outsite. And that was the first in kind of a series. And by the way, we did a bunch of other pitches that didn't get consummated. I pitched it to some VCs. We did interviews with YC and with Launch, Calacanis' Launch. So we were kind of doing the accelerator and the fund circuit, and ultimately we Got money from 500, which then gave us enough momentum and a little capital to then go to the next real VC round. And then this one just sort of has continued. And of course, there's ups and downs. I mean, you can imagine COVID was existential for Outsite since these are like, think of them as mini hotels, but the company bounced back and is doing well now. So that's how I started angel investing. And one of the other paths that I pursued after I wrote that check and was helping Emmanuel raise was the local investor community. I knew a guy from Tech Coast Angels Orange County who, again, I had met from one of my other startups at a conference in Oklahoma City. Again, long story, I'll spare you. And I reached out to him and he said there's an angel group chapter of Tech Coast Angels in San Diego. So I submitted the outside deck on Proceedr, the then, you know, deal platform. Eric Gasser called me back and said, we're not going to invite you to pitch, but I like what you guys are doing and I wanna help.

The hotel guy.

Oh, by the way, and he was a great fit for that, and he did help, by the way. And then Eric also said, however, we are interested in talking to you about this new position that we're creating called Executive Director for Tech Los Angeles San Diego. We just finished the job description, would you like to take a look? So he reverse pitched me on this job, and I kind of weighed my options. So one, I could kind of keep working on Outsite, you know, right? Basically immediately back in startup mode, right? Or I could take on this other kind of startup-y entrepreneurial opportunity for rebuilding Tech Coast Angels San Diego, which was not a healthy organization at the time. And I just decided that I'd have more immediate kind of impact, both to myself and the community, if I got involved in the TCA San Diego opportunity because it was established for better or worse. The reputation wasn't great, but there was some infrastructure there. There were some really good people involved, like Eric and some of the other leadership. Some folks here would know some of those people on the board, like Dean Rosenberg is an example. Jeff Friedman is another. There are a handful of others from that era who are still there. And I thought, what a great opportunity for me, now being less than a year, probably 6 months into my San Diego transformation, to know the people in San Diego who have been building here for a long time. And so, I went with door B, which was to take on the Tech Coast Angels San Diego executive director role. And I continued to be involved in Outsite, and at some point they just didn't need me anymore, which was great because I still was an investor early. I still had my options and all that stuff, and still do to this day. But that's how I got involved in Tech Coast Angels San Diego. Through my actual first angel investment.

And thank you for getting involved.

It's been a great ride, and we still got a lot of work to do. Tracy's debugging our AI automation, like what, like 10 emails in the last 12 hours, you know, right? So everything needs to get better. Everything needs to get better. And I did a speech once at Rice, and it was after my year of being in their competition, which was the biggest in the world. It still is, I think. It's like a million-dollar payout with my startup, right? Cathy's nodding yes. And the year after I competed, they asked me to come back and talk to 500 people in their auditorium, including all the 50 companies. And one of my takeaways to them— and they still have this on YouTube— was listen to your harshest critics the most carefully. Now Tracy has a very nice bedside manner, so the feedback is delivered in a very generous way. But I will never— the day that you guys hear me I can't respond to something being broken without trying to fix it immediately. It means I've lost my entrepreneurial edge. I no longer breathe in problems and exhale solutions. I breathe in problems and exhale excuses. And that's the day where you no longer are nice to me, Tracy. You slap me in the face, or Neal, or Brian, or Hans, or whatever, like whoever I'm with regularly. Yeah, that's when— yeah, just put 5 hands together. So in all seriousness, we're constantly trying to make Newfund better. We can talk about that at some point. And it's that same principle of accepting and embracing your problems and trying to fix them.

Amazing. Didn't Newfund or TCA ultimately invest in Outsite? Did it happen eventually? I think it did, right?

A bunch of people did. So that pitch that I made, I was the one putting the pitches into the platform, got turned down right at the doorstep. So never even went in and pitched. Gradually, just I guess through getting to know me and kind of hearing the story and just maybe the company progressing too, probably 15 different people, including Caitlin would be one that a lot of people know. She was the president of Newfund for 4 years, invested directly into Outside. So collectively over the years, at least $200,000, $300,000 from now Newfund has been invested, but not through our annual fund, which is kind of a different model. And our friend Hem Suri, when the company was on the brink, during COVID and Hem was building a syndicate, a virtual syndicate. So, you know, he kind of had the right model when he reached out to me and said, so can you tell me about a few companies that are interesting? I gave him like 3 that we had funded in then, you know, Tech Los Angeles, San Diego. He ended up investing in one of those and then he asked me for more and I said, well, here's one that I don't quite think is a fit for your, you know, tech global technology syndicate. It's Outsight, but they can't operate right now, 'cause we're in the midst of COVID They're in like Lisbon and stuff like that too. And he says, "Ah, that's interesting. I'd actually like to talk to that founder." Lo and behold, him basically bailed them out with a like million-dollar investment. He became a board member and that was instrumental in them being where they are today, which is now totally, it took advantage of the travel snapback and is off to the races and scaling.

So. Well, why don't you take a second and talk about Newfund in a nutshell, your slide here. Actually, we'll do a question. Then your slide, and then I want to double down on, on, uh, just some of the roles that you talked about.

I have a question. Like, you've been in both sides as an investor or, um, as a working in a company or like starting a company. How do you manage the conflict for you two person doing two different roles? Expectations are very different. What guidelines you follow? To do so that you kind of keep the both side happy, the guidelines are like nonstop.

And in this case, the scenario— I'll repeat the question for everybody here and let me make sure I understood it. Okay. The question is, if you've been on both sides so that, you know, kind of entrepreneurship lens that Neal Bloom talked about, but then now you're investing, is the scenario that you're considering an investment now and you might have training as an investor, negotiate the best deal, et cetera, et cetera. But then as an entrepreneur, you have this kind of empathetic DNA. And then how you reconcile those two feelings? Is that the question?

Yeah.

Well, I think you actually kind of answered it yourself, which was having a North Star. So for me, I will never, unless I fall off track and then give me that five different hand slap, overlook that empathy I have for anybody that's starting a company because I understand that like the saying goes, and this is just in life, be kind because everyone's fighting a tough battle. Well, entrepreneurs are fighting 100 times that tough battle because they probably also have a mom who's dealing with cancer and they're trying to make their company survive. So take all the things that every single one of us here is dealing with, and there's 3 of those things, and then add that by definition they're trying to run a startup that is doing nothing but kind of dealing with disasters all day. If you can't kind of have empathy because maybe you never walked in those shoes, at least by being aware of that, and I guess that's one of the reasons that events like this exist, you can have sympathy for just understanding that it's very, very hard to run a company. One of my favorite quotes about startups from Ben Horowitz, famous A16Z investor, is, When I ran a startup, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours crying. I don't know anybody that's run a startup that has not woken up and cried, literally, at some point. So if you have that understanding, I think it becomes part of your North Star. And now it can be very frustrating when entrepreneurs create more problems for themselves than they should. I mean, we're doing diligence on deals. Hans is a real sleuth. And sometimes entrepreneurs at best are misrepresenting their numbers, and sometimes they're kind of lying, and that's frustrating, right? Because guess what? We're considering putting money into your company, and for most of us, that money matters too, right? It's not just straight out philanthropy, at least that's not the intention. Until you get a return, it is sort of philanthropy, but you can be, pushed when an entrepreneur is not honest, you know, for example. And then at that point, your empathy may wane, but that's their doing. You don't go into the conversation like, I'm better than you, I'm smarter than you, and I have the money, so I'm going to treat you disrespectfully, right? If somebody wants to compromise that relationship— and most of the time it'll be, you know, basically integrity, that's what I find— even if somebody with all the integrity in the world, kind of fumbles the company because, you know, the market changed, you know, that should not be a reason for you to, you know, lose your respect for the founder. In fact, that's out of their control in many cases, and those are sort of the ones that I think your real character, you know, shows, you know, right? And if you've made, you know, 10 investments, you're going to have 4 or 5 of those kind of situations, right? That's not the one I'm talking about here. It becomes more of an acute conflict when somebody is being dishonest, for example. And that's when the best approach is, in my experience, to walk away. You're also not there to kind of teach them a lesson.

Actually, why don't you double down then, just because we tend to actually be in the role of saying no more than yes. We see a lot more companies than we invest.

99 times out of 100.

Correct.

So how do you do that? How do you give them— How do you say no? What is— how do you feel the responsibility is to say no? Like, what else do you owe them?

So first and foremost, as quickly as possible, because, you know, if a startup has a runway of 16 months and you, you know, waste 4 months of that entrepreneur's time unnecessarily— I don't mean because you, you know, have diligence that you need to do and they didn't get the university license done, so you have to wait for that. I'm saying if you, you know, spend time that you don't need to spend to get to a decision, yes or no, then you're wasting their time and yours, for what it's worth, right? So I think the first thing is time, knowing that that's the startup's, really, currency, right? Then when you deliver that decision and 99% of the time it's a no, right? Then I think what I try to do is one, acknowledge we could be wrong, right? Just because we're saying no doesn't mean that it's a shitty company. 2, if I can offer an olive branch to somebody that might say yes, and that somebody might be another investor because this accelerator focuses on pre-seed digital health, or this angel group focuses on companies in the Pacific Northwest, or insert XYZ. But try to provide them with some kind of a resource that comes out of that relationship that you built with them. Again, this is assuming that they've been honest throughout, which is the majority., you know, right? And that, you know, for me, an honest, you know, call it, I don't know, 2, 3, 4 week kind of relationship in startup land is a basis for you to try to be helpful, you know, right? So give them that olive branch. Sometimes it might be a potential customer, whatever it is, you know, right? And then finally leave the door open, you know? So if you can give them some feedback on like, okay, if you get your monthly recurring revenue to this point in this amount of time, then we'd like to look closer. Then that gives them kind of a benchmark to strive for. So those are a few things that I think are fairly tangible, in addition to just being respectful in how you communicate. Question? Yeah, it's kind of out of this focus, but does this mean that NuFund is obtaining at least 25% year per year of their investment?

Why don't we talk through NuFund? Yeah, walk through the slide and give a little background on what NuFund is today.

Sure. So I'll come— I'll come— yeah, yeah, I understand your question and I'll address it directly. So since Neal's asking me to just back it up a little, I'll, you know, conclude maybe there, right? So this is a snapshot of NuFund. There's, I don't know, 10 NuFund members in the room here today. So hi everybody. Our model is pooling our money together at a single point in the year, not unlike what, you know, now SDAC is going to be doing, you know, right, but on a little bit bigger scale at Newfund and throughout the year and, you know, year in and year out. So basically the members of Newfund who are all angel investors, you know, credit investors, pool their money into a fund and then we deploy that through a voting, you know, mechanism. Again, not totally unlike what, you know, happens at SDAC. Today there are more than 300 people in Newfund and that's spread around the country. So when I came in there was like 65 5, and they were primarily in San Diego. Then Neal became member 89 or something like that, something like that, and has stayed. Here we are 10 years later. So we've grown that number significantly over the— now it's been 9 years. I start to lose track. So the number of people around the country geographically and the number has grown a lot, and the volume of our investment has grown a lot too since there's a lot of people. They're investing together, we're investing about $10 million a year, primarily through our fund. We also do sidecar investing, which is just, you know, somebody could invest in a company that the fund invests in directly. So, uh, it's up to the company whether they want to take an individual check, or, you know, if we start like a small vehicle to pool capital. But in total, we invest about $10 million a year. These are some of the companies that we funded. If you're, you know, kind of native to San Diego, a few of them, you know, might be ones you've heard of, but they're pretty geographically dispersed. And the top 25% means that our fund, you know, right, so we run every year a fund starting back in 2019. Top 25th percentile is benchmarked to Carta, which is kind of the, you know, the holy grail of fund data, right? It's a platform and they, they publish all kinds of, you know, fund reports and their main product is cap tables. Which is kind of tracking who owns a company. So they publish every year, here's the valuation increases as a fund in totality. So the aggregate fund should have a return, like an IRR, for example, of XYZ. It should have a value of XYZ, which could be realized and unrealized. And it should have returned this much in cash of XYZ based on when the fund started, right? That top 25% means that we're in the top quartile in terms of those benchmarks for all of the funds now. We're in our 8th one. That's what that means. It does not mean that we return 25% IRR. I wish that we'd done that. If we'd done that, this building would be named after me, or it would be called the New Fund Entrepreneurship Center, because you would then be in the 0.001% of VCs if you were returning 25% year over year.

Amazing. Question, Randall.

Yeah, question on structure of funds. We say annual investment in number of funds. Are they independent funds annually like S-CAP, or is it like a rolling fund that gets contributions or redemptions?

So the question from Randall, I think it was, are the new fund annual funds independent entities year in and year out?? And the answer is yes, they are. That's why they're annual funds, which is different from a lot of other models. SDAC is also different and more similar to what we're doing at Newfund. Each fund is its own company managed by Newfund, and it takes new capital once a year. Usually it's in the late spring. We're in the 8th vintage right now and maybe has another 2 months, let's say, left on it. Then we raise the next one and then we deploy deploy it, and then we rinse and repeat.

Into how many companies on average in a fund?

A typical fund has like 15 companies in it, 12 to 15, and the typical checks are $250K to $500K is like the highest that it's ever been. It's based on the size of the fund. The funds each are, the last 5 have been between $5 and $7 million for that vintage in that 10 to 12 month period.

Let's stay on responsibilities. How about companies who do ultimately— well, what's the responsibility to a company while they're going through the diligence process all the way through to a yes? And then take us through what do you believe is the responsibility you and investors post-check? What have you seen? What works? Because I know what you do for our founders, but I want to hear you say it too.

So from the company's perspective, right, and whether you're running a startup or you're investing in them, It's, I think, healthy to have both lenses in your spectacles, right? Because you can see the world from the entrepreneur, whether you're on that or not, and likewise, if you're an entrepreneur, see the world from the investor. And that's, I think, the foundation for a better relationship and that two-way empathy. From the company's perspective, what's their responsibility? One, I think, is to be organized. These are things in your control, right? As investors, you will ask for data on a company, the cap table aforementioned, you know, that might be on Carta, and financial statements, and, you know, financing documents, etc. As a company, you can just be organized in that process. You can be ready to go, you know, as soon as you meet an investor, whether it's in an elevator, serendipitously for an elevator pitch, or in a program like SDAC. You can be organized, and therefore you will Elevate yourself among the many entrepreneurs who surprisingly are not so organized, probably because they're so focused on their widget, right? But fundraising is different from building a technology or marketing a technology, right? So I think just being organized, and as an investor when you interact with companies, that is a little bit of a tell. Do they understand even the basic documents of fundraising, let alone have they organized them in a way that's easy for you to digest?, right? That's from the company side. And then, I already talked about honesty, but I don't think they need to say, be honest, right? But you'd be surprised that sometimes, and I'm not just talking the Theranos of the world, I'm talking about the baby Theranos of the world where there was just numbers usually that are totally misrepresented or that lawsuit with former founder that they forgot to tell you about, you know, or, you know, insert many different, you know, examples that Neal Bloom and I could share from the field. As an investor, I think the responsibility post-funding is to be accessible but not intrusive. So, you've written your check, you're not running the company. You believed in the management team who you funded enough to be comfortable parting with your hard-earned cash. You can be helpful to them, and the data shows, especially for like earlier stage angel investing, that the involvement and the support can actually positively correlate with the outcomes of the company, right? So it is something more than just writing a check, especially as an angel investor versus if you're like a passive LP in a venture fund, and you know, you're never going that, you know, CEO. So I think being available and accessible is where you start, and then the entrepreneur will kind of guide what that support actually entails. So, you know, one of my favorite things to do is make introductions to other VCs that then write million-dollar-plus checks. It happens like 5 times a year, maybe, you know, right? I mean, we're constantly trying. We get ghosted, you know, all the time. So, you know, it's No harm, no foul. But a handful of times a year, somebody that I said, I think you should talk to this person. Actually, Hem in Outsight was an example. At the worst time in the company's history, wrote a million-dollar check. And nothing makes my little heart pitter patter more than when that happens. Even though I'm not getting anything out of that other than I may or may not have some involvement in the company and want to see it succeed. But that's the kind of thing that I love doing. But I let the founder tell me, can you help me find 3 family offices that might be interested in what we're doing. So just listening to the founder and then doing your best to deliver on their asks.

Mm-hm.

What about on, you said the non-intrusive part, but what's the right angle of getting information on the company versus, like, just knowing it and needing it versus knowing where can you be helpful, or are you still alive? Like, what's the full spectrum of that you have managed that expectation back from the company throughout the life after you've invested?

So the best thing the company can do, now going to the company's responsibilities post-funding, we talked about pre-funding before, is to provide semi-regular and on a regular rhythm reports to investors about what the hell's going on at the company. And the reports don't need to be long narratives. In fact, we prefer that they weren't a whole bunch of words and that there were some numbers in there, for example. If a company is providing you with, let's just call it quarterly, I think that suffices, a report saying, you know, what's going well, what's not going well, how you can help, just look at the how you can help section. I mean, that's the part that I read the most when we get these, you know, reports and I get, you know, many every single week, although not enough because there are certainly companies that disappear, you know, after they take your money. And some of them, by the way, are doing great.. And most of them that don't communicate at all are not doing great. But you never quite know. You know, I definitely have counterintuitive examples of companies that just disappeared. You know, we were pinging them for updates and it turned out they just raised a Series B, you know, round of $20 million. And that's an actual example from a company in Boston that I can remember. So as a company, you can help to keep your investors in the loop by reporting to them on a semi-regular basis and then just maintaining that frequency. So, one of the tells for me is not necessarily whether a company reports to us on a regular basis, although you'd think that's important and it is kind of. But when you've done this long enough, you also start to see some counterintuitive stuff and I'll tell you what. A company that is reporting, even if it's every month or every quarter, and then changes its frequency, that's the tell. A company that's not reporting at all may actually just be doing great and they may not need your help. And I've seen a lot of, you know, kind of research and heard a lot of VCs talk about how like in a portfolio of 10, there's usually 2 companies that don't want or don't need help. And those are the ones that are gonna be the biggest winners. And you know, it may not be 2 outta 10, I don't know what the number is, but that is a real persona. Those may be the other 2 out of 10 that the VC talked about that you can't help and they don't want your help, right? 'Cause they're just doomed and that happens. And we focus on kind of the middle, can you help and they want help, right? But the change in frequency of reporting is actually the tell that something is going wrong. And so that's the part that I look for most closely.

I like it.

Question.

Yeah. So when you're looking at the pitches and Everybody's trying to raise the money, they kind of make up the numbers, and they're always a future-looking investment. And if you feel like, based on the experience, these numbers are BS, so how do you like positively tell that founder, okay, these numbers doesn't make sense? What do you cross-verify with some database or something like that, or it's just a little like experience, just repeatable?

So the question is, when you're evaluating a pitch and you kind of know the numbers are BS, and they are 100% of the time, you know, right? Almost by definition, because they're speculative in a, you know, kind of emerging market. That's why it's a startup, you know, right?

Forward projection.

Yeah, forward projections, right? You know, how do you treat the veracity of those numbers? So the thought process behind the numbers is what you want to analyze. You know, right. So yes, the numbers are not going to be spot on even if they have the clearest thought process and the market, you know, kind of manifests as they think it will, because there will always be some deviations. But you want to evaluate the thought process. And what you don't want is like absurd exaggerations, which that is pretty easy to, you know, filter out as well. The BS, the showstoppers is when the numbers are retrospective and they're BS. That's the BS, and that's when the show is over, you know, right? But if it's all forward-looking, the numbers may give you a kind of, you know, lighthouse for where the company can be. Can they be a $10 million company? But almost invariably, I've really almost never seen a company that actually, you know, hits its numbers. I've seen a couple of cases where they, you know, go beyond even the numbers. Those are obviously very, you know, happy stories. But most of the time, they'll fall short for one reason or another. And that's okay as long as they're, you know, kind of logically, you know, established. Yeah, uh, just a follow-up.

How do you give them feedback? Let's say you like the picture, you like the founder, but you're not happy with the numbers. But how do you give them a word? Like sometimes the founder, they just don't want, you know, lower down with the projection. Oh no, I know this field really well and I believe in this numbers, but as an investor, you kind of on the other side, but I like your energy, I'd like to comment on every other thing, but I want to invest in your words. How do you persuade that conversation after investment alongside?

So the question is, if the founder is, you know, generating projections, let's say, it could be valuation, you know, some kind of number that just seems really off base to you, how do you have that conversation and give them that feedback? I would say by asking questions about how they rationalize and justify the number, and then not trying to convince them that they're necessarily wrong. But the note that I'm making is not that their numbers are wrong, it's that the entrepreneur is not self-aware. And is not able to see the world at all from the single-minded perspective that he or she has. So that's what I would take away from that conversation because maybe they will be right and maybe I'll be wrong and maybe I won't invest and maybe the company will be successful and I'll be happy for them. But the tell that I'm looking for is, is this somebody who's self-aware, who at least can accept feedback? Can you, going back to that point that I made in the past, listen to your harshest critics the most carefully? Even if they're delivering that critique constructively, can they listen? If they can't, they're generally going to have a hard road. Now, of course, there's all these exceptions, right? People would say Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanick, blah, blah, blah, right? But you're probably not going to invest in the next Apple or the next Facebook. I mean, that goes for all of us, right? So more likely than not, you're going to invest in a company that will have a very tumultuous journey. Might at best become a $100 million company or half a billion dollar company, which would be huge outcomes. And that founder is, yes, they're going to have to have strong conviction in their belief and in their approach. But they also do need to be able to take some feedback and accept the possibility that they could be wrong. So in this case, OK, you project you're going to generate $100 million in revenue in year 3. What if you are only able to generate $50 million? If they say to you, that's not going to happen. I'm being conservative in my projections. This is something you hear a lot. It's a big turnoff. I'm being conservative in my projections. It's going to be $100 million at minimum. I'm going to note that and think, I'm not sure if this person's really ever been around this block before. 'Cause even a very successful entrepreneur will know there's a chance that they might not hit that mark. And so they should at least consider that scenario and be able to discuss it.

Question.

I feel like this whole process, like the way you're vetting companies and the way you're talking about numbers and everything, you're really vetting the entrepreneur, not the numbers.

'Cause like you said, the numbers are just a quarter of it.

You're betting on whether you trust that that person can lead a company company and, you know, see and follow the vision. Is that not what you're betting on? That's what I bet on with Emmanuel from Outsight. That first example I gave when I said this guy understands the problem and he's here banging nails into the floor to solve that problem. Now, that principle applies more the earlier the stage of the company.

That's what I'm saying.

Angel investors. So, yeah, angel investors could still invest, you know, at a later stage, but certainly the The more formative the company, the more fundamental the team becomes to its, you know, success. And by the way, fun fact from Harvard, Noam Wasserman, you can look at the paper. The number one reason that startups fail is co-founder conflict. Now, some of them succeed even with co-founder conflict, and the co-founders can also succeed, you know, from that, you know, journey. But it is not uncommon. Remember my story with Benu? We started with 5. In school. We dismissed one and went down to four, and then the fourth person decided she wanted to go get a job at E&Y, and we went down to three, and three of us built Bennu, you know, for the next five years.

Yeah, and I think angels each end up with— we'll talk about frameworks— angels end up having their own lens on how much to bet on team versus other things. You'll hear this, you'll hear phrases like jockey versus horse, right? People versus idea, product, traction, all that. And everyone has their own different fraction of what that is to them, and at what stage as well. But in general, the people and who they are is a big part of it, when the less that they have besides themselves. Because they themselves are a projection of what they're going to go build, right, in that regard too. And back to you in a second. I just want to also move us to a little bit around first check, misconceptions around writing the first check. Take us through the lens, you mentioned your first check you committed on the spot, brought the check back the next day. I remember in my scenario, I think I wrote, after my exit, I think I wrote 10 checks in one year, which is common for first-time angels or first-time founders who have financial success. Take me through some of the misconceptions you've seen with first-time angels both from an expectation of what they should be doing and writing the check into, the size of the check, and time horizon to actually get any sense of return.

So I'll talk about two of the biggest traps, and it sounds like you and I each may have stepped into one, and possibly different ones. I wrote too few checks, but with a thesis, which was founder-market fit in a market that I understood. That was my strategy, right? But I only wrote that one check, and in that first year, right? You wrote 10 checks, but did you have a thesis or strategy, or was it just your friends?

The first 3 checks were actually founders who had had a similar situation happen to me, a co-founder breakup. So I had a co-founder breakup thesis, which meant on your next company, you're gonna run through a wall with a chip on your shoulder. So actually, it was on purpose, but those are people that I was drawn to and wrote that. But then after that, it was actually just, length of time I had known the person was where those checks ended up, not a thesis though.

And I'm guessing that other 7 were not necessarily, you know, the best outcomes if it was how long I've known the person because they were my neighbor. I mean, you might have gotten really lucky. I have a friend who wrote his college roommate, and, you know, that company sold to Groupon and it changed his life. But let's just say it's not a strategy. You can always get lucky. Luck is not a strategy. Let's, you know, put it— now, what is a strategy? Here's where you were further down, you know, kind of, I think, the fairway, you know, from the target than me, which is you had 10 companies. Because the only strategy beyond, you know, whether you're founder-oriented or geography-oriented or vertical-oriented or stage-oriented, whatever, but the only constant and universal truth to angel investing is you need to be diversified. If you are not diversified as an angel investor, you're just gambling. If you are diversified, you're the house in a casino. And that's the key. Now, what is the right number of investments? Again, stuff's very well researched and it can slide depending on your edge and, you know, kind of just your skill and your luck. But we're talking like, you know, 30 companies probably in the course of like 2 to 3 years at a minimum, you know, probably more like 50 companies. So like a new fund with our fund, there's 15 companies, call it, per fund, but we don't feel that we're diversified. And as an individual, you're not diversified unless you're in like, say, 3 funds in a row or 3 funds, you know, where you'll have more or less 40 to 50 companies that are probably different. There might be some follow-on investments, but that gives you the kind of minimum diversification that, you know, the math shows is most likely to not only cover the losses but then to generate the kind of return returns, which, you know, we're at least trying to beat the stock market, you know, right? So diversification is really the key, and it even goes beyond the strategy. It's just the, the math, you know, right? The strategy is more how do you achieve, you know, that diversification.

And there's also a bit of the learning aspect. You don't learn a lot about did I make a good bet till 10 years later sometimes. And if you just make a bet and then sit on the sidelines throughout the time, it's 10 years till you have a spark of, did I do the right thing, as opposed to placing bets into portfolios, then you start having a cohort of learnings, right? You want to speak to that a little bit?

Yeah, because then you get into what I call angel purgatory, which is, you know, you were Neal, you know, year one, you know, wired out $150 grand or something like that. And then he sat there, you know, for the next 3 years, 4 years, 5 years saying, where's my money? You know, now I need to put a down payment on a house. And you are in angel purgatory. And imagine a lot of people are that, you know, times 5 or, you know, times 10. And that is a problem. And it's usually when a lot of angel investors get out the game, especially if they didn't understand the game going in. Now, one of the strategies you can use there is to also invest in different stages of companies or take money off the table. And this, you know, may be too kind of technical right now, but there are ways that you can, trade in some of your wins even before they, you know, potentially become at their peak and get some money back. And then you can recycle that money, or you can go to, you know, do those home improvements or what have you. So a strategy can also be diversifying across, you know, stages and levels of risk within angel investments, as opposed to just all, you know, early founder-only, you know, types of bets. And that can help to lessen the time horizon that's required to actually get liquidity from angel investing.

All right, this has been awesome. Thank you for the time.

Do you want to get this comment?

We got one question, sorry, to Chris. I'll answer this one too. Okay, we'll take two.

Even if I have to be walking out.

Yeah, all good. And I know you're going to hang around for a little bit. A little bit, yeah. You don't pick up the kids till 1:30, I know. 2 o'clock.

That's on Mondays. Oh, okay, all right, good.

Chris, so you just talked about being the house, and how do you think about the position sizing in these companies? Kind of, as that, by the nature of the unit, the new fund also handles the potential position sizing in the cohort of companies you're looking at. Do you, within those, you know, 30 companies you look at, do you overhedge on the ones you're really confident in, or do you kind of spread it out? Even, how do you think about that in this context?

That's really going to vary by you as an angel, because, you know, if you overhedge, then you might, you know, get the even more outsized return. But obviously it's very possible you overhedged on, you know, a zero, right? I think just like the safest strategy in a, you know, very high-risk, high-reward, and fun asset class is to kind of balance out, you know, those checks. And especially if you're fairly new to it or you're not like super duper high net worth, um, writing, you know, kind of smaller checks, you know, kind of, and then spread. I would rather spread out smaller checks. And this is what I did, you know, a lot of time too. I would rather spread out smaller checks into a bigger basket of companies because you're more likely to not lose your money and generate some return that will keep you in the game and out of angel purgatory. And you're going to learn a lot along the way. And then your strategy will start to kind of crystallize and get, you know, probably better, you know, with time. The good thing about angel investing, it's like surfing, right? You can still do it when you're 80 years old or 70 years old, as long as your knees aren't, you know, totally shot, or you didn't waste all your money overhedging on one particular can't-miss opportunity, which always can miss.

One last question.

Yeah, yeah, thanks.

So I think you're touching on something I was curious about. So like, just lifecycle of— because you're investing in an individual company, and then you kind of alluded to maybe like a 10-year timeframe until they have some sort of like liquidity event that goes back to the fund. But here you've got a fund, right, where you've got a portfolio of different companies. So what should an investor have in terms of timeline, in terms of when they might be able to take some money out? What should they expect going into this? And then secondly, a little bit of a little different— sorry to hit you with two in the very last second, but I'm dying to know, are you guys even looking at SaaS companies these days? How do you evaluate a SaaS company when maybe one of the interns here could probably replicate the same, you know, solution for, you know, free, you know, in a couple hours.

Yes. And we have a very robust NuFund chat channel on AI that is talking about, you know, that exact, you know, kind of, you know, kind of dynamic. But the short answer is yes, we still do. To your first question, it really depends on, you know, you and your, you know, you're investing money. So it's part of your personal, you know, kind of financial strategy, you know. Right. But I think the thing to take away is there are ways to potentially get money back sooner than the typical 7, 10, 12-year horizon that it takes for the biggest winners to just naturally kind of ride out. And if you have that much time and money on your hands, then, you know, you may be best served just waiting for those winners to ride out. But if you need to take some money off the table, then you might, you know, diversify your strategy a little bit in terms of the stage of the companies you invest in, the, the verticals that are more likely to be or less likely to be, say, boom or bust. And also just knowing that the earliest exits in New Funds Fund were companies that maybe could have gotten really big, but they decided to sell sooner. So we got a 3x after 18 months on a cybersecurity company, which could have been a billion-dollar company if it had gone the way the pitch deck said it was and the projections were. But we were happy with the 3.5x that we got after 18 months. So sometimes, naturally, some of the capital will flow back in.

All right, let's give big—

Oh, hold on. Jen has an important question.

Oh.

Did you guys plan matching socks today? Do we have matching socks? I guess the answer is no, but I'm happy to hear that. No, Neal. Avocado. Oh my God. Totally serendipitous. Like I said, we're really friends. We really understand each other. Let's give a big hand to Shokamal and Ron. Thank you, Neal. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Kat. Me and Danny, everybody. Absolute classic. We're just meant for each other.