Sh*t VCs Say with Jason Lemkin and Justin Kan

Most investors make a few investments per year, so if you send them a crummy email, it's not going to work. But if it's the world's best email and they haven't done a couple deals this year, there's a chance they're at least going to read it. Two of the unicorns I've done were from cold emails. They were effing awesome. When I opened this email, my jaw dropped. And if I showed you these two emails, you would invest too. Here's my revenue. Here's my growth. Here's my logos. Here's what I've done. Here's a screenshot of all my revenue growth. Here's what Dropbox said about us. Here's what Fitbit about said about us all. I love Saster. I've read everything you read. Here's my favorite article. So I know you. Do you have any time to meet? I need some traction. You need some traction? Let's get some traction.

Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors, this is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more, this episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year, the US And Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American companies leveraging Boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out B oast AI. This episode is also brought to you by Launch Academy, an international tech hub that provides mentorship, resources, network and the environment for entrepreneurs to launch, fund and grow their startups. Since 2012, Launch Academy has incubated over 6,000 entrepreneurs, of which 300 have grown their startups past seed and Series A and have collectively raised over $1.2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch Academy's programs, check out LaunchAcademy CA. Special thanks to our Podcast partner Content Allies From Podcast Production and promotion content allies helps B2B companies build revenue generating podcast. We recommend them to any B2B company that's looking to launch or streamline Their podcast production. Learn more@contentallies.com we thought we'd have some fun.

Justin and I have a few things in common, but we're both founders who have also been sort of accidental investors. Justin, among other things, was Twitch and Justin TV your first startup?

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

Not as good. All right. And then, among other things, Justin co founded Justin TV and then Twitch it was acquired. And then you joined YC and you became both an angel and an institutional investor. You had two more startups. How many investments have you done with different hats on? Over 100.

Yeah. Including YC, it's like 250.

250. Okay. And I'm an accidental investor too. I was a co founder twice. I built a community called Saster. I got tricked into being a traditional VC for 22 months. I did 10 investments. They're over 15x. And then I hated working for someone else. And then I accidentally invested my own 90 million to invest. But I consider myself an accidental investor. And I run also accidentally, sort of a community called Sassada that'll do 25 million next year. So I keep stumbling into things and Justin's had a fun journey. So we thought we could do at this time is take have a little bit of fun and take all this advice that you see on the Twitter and on the blog and on Bebo and MySpace that investors say and. And deconstruct a little bit. Because every bit of advice you'll get from an investor, from the smallest angel to Softbank to the biggest ones, it's all biased and there's a bunch of biases. The smallest investors worry you'll run out of money or that they'll get crammed down. The biggest investors want to stuff as much money into their winners as they can. We thought we would have some fun and just deconstruct things that VCs will say to you and maybe just dig into the actual truth. So the first one, just to warm it up, is you need a warm intro. A lot of folks will tell you, see on the Internet, like, it's very hard to just cold email an investor. You need a warm intro. And if you're in Y Combinator or if you co founded Twitch, it's probably not hard to get a warm intro.

Is it for me now? Now I can get a warm intro.

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

Is it.

Are you unfundable?

It's game over. Shut your company down now. You can, you can figure it out. Right. So people do respond. You can. If you start with cold intros, you just need a massive top of funnel because there's going to be a lot of fall off. But I think another thing you can do is just someone in this room, Right. Has a connection to someone you want to talk to. And it's not that hard to make friends with other founders who have been funded and figure out how to get access to their investors.

Yes. All right.

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

Well, today it is, but back then it was edgy. Right.

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

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

I think one time.

One time, yeah. Was it a good email?

So if you want to write a cold email, you just got to make it super short, very concise, don't include too much information. Just like basically why you are compelling. Like what you're doing, why you're compelling and what a specific ask in five sentences. Yes.

All right, so make it well and make it a sales email.

Yeah.

Can I get coffee with you?

No. You need a specific ask a specific ask. Okay.

Derivative question and then let's move on to the next one. So warm intros you think help a lot, but do you read them? If some. If a founder sends you an email, that's a really good email, whether you'd invest or not. Will you read it, open it?

Yeah.

So that's the real insight is people will. Most investors just even. Except the most highest velocity investors. Most investors make a few investments per year. You made 200, but you had the benefit the average institutional investor will make two or three. So if you send them a crummy email, it's not going to work, is it? But if it's the world's best email and they haven't done a couple of deals this year, there's a chance they're at least Going to read it, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

For me, for what it's worth, I'm earlier in my investing career than Justin. It won't be as successful, but two of the unicorns I've done were from cold emails.

Really?

And yeah, I don't have them here, but I will tell you, I'll post them online. They were effing awesome.

Yeah.

Okay. When I opened this email, my jaw dropped. And if I showed you these two emails, you would invest too, right? Here's my revenue, here's my growth, here's my logos, and here's what I've done. Here's a screenshot of all my revenue growth. But you don't have to open it. Here's what Dropbox said about us. Here's what Fitbit about said about us. I love Saster. I've read everything you read. Here's my favorite article. So I know you, do you have any time to meet?

That's great.

Yeah, so I can. All right.

No one ever wrote me an email like that.

Right. But they work, right? So. All right. There's just a lot on the Internet today, but it's worth chatting for a few minutes. As you see, a lot of advice today about don't giving up control. And it may seem like it's hard to raise money today, but for us old timers, this is the best of times, isn't it? Has it ever been any better?

This is the best time to raise.

Money ever since don't age, right?

Yes. Human beings evolved.

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

I think there's people you're optimizing for the short term when that happens. Right? So I had this company called Exec. We raised three and a half million dollars seed round company, did not work super good. We ended up like Aqua hiring it, right? And the problem was like in that two year period when we're working on the company, we had no board, right? There was no, no one to report to, no one who really was holding me accountable and saying, hey, your numbers are not good enough. Yes, you are fucking things up. And so without getting that direct, no one, there was this massive party round where no one really cared that much. While I thought it was, like, doing good when we raised the round, actually, I think it was ultimately to our detriment.

And what was for to help folks, you raised three. You leveraged. You leveraged your CV to raise three and a half million. What was the largest check at three and a half million?

It was half of it.

Oh, half. So you had someone that had skin in the game.

Yes, but I negotiated. There was, like, no control.

No control.

So there was no reporting requirement or anything like that. I didn't, like, have a board.

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

It was like $35 million at the time.

So they put a lot in, but they had no control. They felt completely disconnected from any engagement with the company.

Yeah, I think I raised the money and the next meeting I had was like, it's not working. We're shutting things down. Which I don't recommend. I don't recommend.

So that's the sub question. Will anyone care enough? You're learning is no.

Yeah. No one will, you know. No one will care. The converse example, actually, with Justin tv, which is the company that turned into Twitch, we raised a $2 million Series A, which. That was a Series A back then.

Yes. That'd be a seed. Minus today.

Yeah. Seed. That's like your pre. Seed.

Precede. Yeah, precede.

That's. So it was a $2 million price round from All Stop Louis Partners. And then when we couldn't raise a B the next year and everyone said no, they stepped up and gave us both a valuation bump and put in another letter round that was $4 million.

Yeah.

So they did care.

They cared.

Yeah.

Right. Did they care just because they were nice people, or did they care because the nature of the investment made them care?

They saw enough promise that they just didn't want to write the whole thing off.

Yeah. And the learning here for folks is when you split something up too fine, or even if you don't split up too fine, but you give no information, no anything, professional investors will not take it seriously. Every investor has investments that are either material or immaterial, and they'll make bets and they'll put chips in, but if they don't have enough skin in the game, the odds they're going to write another check or even care are low. They've already written it off. As may not have positive roi, they don't know, right?

Absolutely.

Would you rather give up a little bit of control like with Justin TV and Twitch, which was a billion, or not give up any control? What'd you learn at Atrium? How did you synthesize those learnings with Atrium? Because you've raised a few nickels. How much have you raised at atrium?

75 million bucks.

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

Yeah. So with Atrium, it's like I want to show up and report to someone, and I want. On our board, we have Nico from GC and Mark Andreessen and Andrew from Andreessen Horowitz and Michael from Y Combinator. So there's a set of people, all four.

Yeah, they're coming every six to eight weeks to hold you accountable.

Every. Every quarter?

Oh, every quarter.

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

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

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

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

I think that everybody's so obsessed with optimizing, they don't. They forget the most important part is you just need the fucking money. Like it's like DJ Khaled says, you got to secure the bag. Whatever is going to secure the bag.

Ventures. I think that would be a good, a good fund. Right.

That could be the Next fund after SaaS. Yeah. You just need the money. Right. Like it's really important to figure out how, like what, what is the mechanism by which you're going to be able to get access to capital? Yeah, that's really the most important thing.

And why on the Internet do we see so many folks advocating safes and so many VCs railing in tweets and tweet storms about them? What's, what's really going on behind this biased advice on both sides?

Well, I think it is better for founders. Right. It is faster. There's like almost no.

But do they care? Do the investors care? I know I don't care if I write a safe.

You don't care about the company.

I care about people. But I don't care as an investment.

Yeah.

I don't even hold it as a real, as a core investment. If it's a safe, it's below a line.

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

I think this is where people take good advice. The wrong direction is if you're going to raise a bunch of safes and debt and have no accountability, it's like training Without a trainer, it's like training for the MBA or something. Without it, I mean, it can be done. Right?

That's a good.

But how many folks can get to the NBA without a trainer? And what percent of the 200 investments you've done? I mean, you can't do this quantitatively, but how many would have done. Have done worse because they had no accountability for safes, they ran out of money, they weren't pushed, they didn't have anybody care, they couldn't raise another round. How often do you think you cut the wrong way? What's that?

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we think we have this accountability, but it's hard to train yourself sometimes.

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

So we all lived it. I get it. Yes.

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

If you're not the absolute hottest company in the world out of YC and you read the stuff on the Internet, if you find your dream investor, if you actually have more than one choice, because if you have one choice, the options are usually fairly simple. It's either go without or do the deal. But if you have a choice, the terms, the economics are essentially the same. And one investor that you love says, I just don't want to do safes. Should you do the safe and maintain that extra Internet control, or should you pick the investor that you want to.

Work with for a decade? Seems like a leading question, but I.

Would say on the, on the Internet, it's not clear what the answer is.

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

When you did it the second time, you did this yourself, split up the round. Right. How many investors? I don't want to be redundant, so I want. I'll skip to the next one. But how many is too many? How fine when you have too many investors in a round.

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

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

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

10%.

What do you think?

I think even today, most investors less than seven, even in, even today, they'll check out. So my worry is, look, if you're going to sell 60, 60% of your company in the round, you could probably fit in six good. And they'll all show up. But if you actually want to sell less today because your valuations are. Your burn rate's lower, anyone below 7 to 8, even in a seed fund, they're going to start to not believe they can make enough money.

Right.

And so they may still have other reasons to support you, but it won't be material. Right. So that's. I think people get a lot of. If you're hot, split it up. Yeah, but you may. Even if it's three hot investors, they may not have enough skin in the game.

Right.

Okay, next one I want to. And then this may shock some folks in the room because fundraising is hard, but what you see today is like endless seeds. Right. And safes and notes help in the beginning, but actually being 11 years in the bull run has helped too.

Right.

Because everyone's a genius today.

Right.

And I just started investing at the end of 2013. And when I started investing, I did these things. I didn't know they were called second seeds. They were seen as toxic. In 2013, that was seen as a failed startup. And I just fucking cleaned up because no one told me so. I would meet these companies, they'd be doing like a million growing 50% a month, and they needed another little bit of money. I'm like, wow, this looks pretty good. But that was seen as a bad signal. For now. It's not a bad signal at all. Right. To raise five seed rounds, is it.

More and more capital and it's just like.

And people don't care to be the third or fourth seed investor anymore, do they?

Yeah, I don't think so. There's this. Too many investors that want access.

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

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

Raise 10 in your seed, which is a lot for most people. For you, it's not that hard. How much did you raise after that?

65 million.

Okay, so my rule, for what it's worth for folks I've learned is it's got to be like. And I don't know if that 10 was an equity or debt, it may not matter. But my, my, if you guys raise these endless bits of money, when you raise the real round, it has to be at least three to four times that amount because people get spooked. People get spooked. If you raised 5 million. And I think 5 million for most startups is too much in equity debt because how the heck are you going to raise 15 million in your A unless you're super hot?

Yeah, unless you have to be doing. You have to be crushing it completely. And then you've limited your options and even you.

And we all still have a lot to prove, you still maintain that rule.

Right.

Even though you pushed it with the 10 million, you still had to do this 60 million, 50 million next to kind of get the ratios and math to all work out.

Right.

So anyhow, for what it's worth is a simple number for me because I see this more after 3 million in seeds. Like, just realize you may trip a line because you may have to raise so much money in the next round. You can't do it right so just before you raise three, even if the candy's on the table, just make sure you want to take another chocolate bar because you might regret it. Okay. A fun one. Just because things have changed if you guys are lucky enough. Big fund, small check. Four or five years ago, big funds just started to write smaller checks. Right. And create seed funds. But now you open up TechCrunch and there's 11 funds in the seed round.

Right.

And you see there's Sequoia and Excel and all these folks are in the seed round. When is that good and when is it bad and what are the issues?

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

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

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

And the flip. And then let's just do through three things. If you guys do get these great options, when the partners at the billion dollar firms meet on Monday afternoons, do they talk about the 200k checks?

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

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

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

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

They don't know they're. No one knows they're even the partner that did it. Maybe it was a scout or something. They don't even know that they're an investor in that entity.

Right.

So. But I don't want to talk about signaling next. But I want. But there is one point. Just if you do have this option that you brought about backstage brands do matter. In fact, in B2B, we're all trying to build brands and you get clients and customers and subscribers from your brand, don't you?

Absolutely.

So brands matter.

Yeah.

And if you get a Sequoia or Excel early, it does help.

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

Brand helps. Right. All right, and then the last one. Just because we read this on the Internet, signaling. And signaling is like, actually, if you raise a bunch of rounds over your life, you'll realize this is a nuanced issue. That does matter because everyone's a signal.

Right.

I mean, a poor brand is a signal of poor quality. A high brand is a signal of high quality because there's only so much data in the world. But the classic thing you read on the Internet of signaling risk is a really great fund puts in a marketing check and they don't write the next round. And that freaks people out because, hey, if Sequoia loved you enough to invest, why aren't they leading the A? So your thoughts? That's less of an issue in the old days.

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

Yeah. Going into notion at 800 pre, and.

You'Ve got these billion dollar funds writing these marketing checks or whatever. But I like the way you put it last backstage, which is like, it cannot help you. Right. If they don't invest in your A and they wrote a check in the seed round, there's no way that helps you. Right.

Yeah.

Can only be bad for what it's.

Worth when I do a check, because I take a lot of risk. Like, I only have if I have a $60 million core fund and I write 4 million like that can't fail, can it? I mean, it's risky. So I just scan the cap table, and if I see these names and they're not contributing. And I don't. We don't really care what other people think, do we? I mean, only a little bit. But I still get concerned.

Yeah.

When I see a brand name below the line and they're not engaged. And I like the numbers. I think something's wrong here. Like maybe the question, you're saying, what's wrong? Because there's so much money today, why shouldn't this hot fund at least be putting three to four? It's still. There's still not that much money for them.

Right.

And so I do more diligence than I would when they. That's even best case because of signaling.

That's a great point.

Even though we hit this, it's so important. I've never heard from you since I invested. We laugh, but this didn't happen five or six years ago, did it? People didn't never, never update their investors for years, did it?

Did they? No. You want to update your investors? You really want to update your investors? Your investors are a community people who are like invested in your success. Right. And they can't help you if they're not. If they don't have like some sort of update from you. The best scenario that I ever had was this company, Simple Contacts, that wrote. I put a seed check in into their seed round and then they wrote investor updates every week for the first like two years, I think.

104 investor updates.

Yeah, it was like the first. Every, every week there's an investor update. And some, most of them were good and some of them were not good, but there was, there was an investor update every week. So when people would ask me, what's a great company that you invested in? What should I look at? I'd be like Simple Contacts, just because they were top of mind, you know.

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

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

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

Oh yeah? Yeah.

Ever seen that in 200 investments?

Yeah. That's very pretty.

Even in great companies, it happens, doesn't it? CEOs get panicked. Like it's. They have a rough quarter and they stop sending them. So what's your learning advice from that?

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

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

Absolutely.

So it's okay. It's okay to even get the worst news as long as you don't seem like you're crazed? Absolutely.

And then when you bounce back from that, they're gonna respect you even more.

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

Yeah. I mean, if you're doing well, they're certainly going to want to plow more money into you.

Yes.

But if you're doing like, okay, but you've proven that you can do well in the past. Right. And that you just need a little bit more cash to get somewhere than they're much more likely to actually, if you send the. If you are communicating with them. Yeah. If you just Fade off into nothing. And then you come back, come back being like, hey, I need another X million dollars. There's no way you're getting that money.

You're not getting it.

Yeah. You have not secured the bag.

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

You need some traction.

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