Navigating Startup Funding in 2025 - Insights from Jonathan Greechan, Founder Institute CEO

I've done a similar talk like this for the last couple of years, just looking at the general outlook of what, uh, the investment environment should look like. You know, I'm definitely going to be skewing a little bit to the earlier stages, pre-seed and seed, just because that's generally the audience of the Founder Institute. Um, but you know, this has been really an amazing last couple of years. super interesting last couple of years in startups and venture capital. And I just wanna share some of my thoughts today. So very simple agenda. I'm gonna talk about where we are, uh, where we're going. So some just predictions for 2025 and beyond, and then how we are instructing entrepreneurs to prepare for some of these changes. So when we talk about where we are, let me just talk quickly about the last couple of years. 2020, nothing need be said. 2021, this is when the bubble started to form, um, as a result of everybody being at home and already frothy, um, starting to become frothy venture environment, uh, zero interest rate policies literally going down to basically zero, um, where it, it's just started to become a party, right? Everything into tech just became significantly magnified to the point where if you look on the right here, I mean, you know, I guess in hindsight we should have known that this kind of growth in unicorns was not sustainable. 2022 is when we started to see the bubble start to break a little bit. Okay, we started to seeing people get pretty concerned, like, hey, we gave you all this money last year and you're still burning tons of cash, right? And we started to see a lot of companies start to realize, oh wow, the money is not coming very quickly. So I need to start laying off people on the team and cutting costs to become a little bit more sustainable. And like any good bubble burst, there is going to be a bank that's gonna go down, right? And we had a couple, the two big ones were SVB and Signature. The SVB bank failure really was like the culmination of a lot of fear that people were having in 2022, because that happened in early 2023. Um, and when that stuff happens, right, the environment for, um, founders during the bubble is great, right? There's a fear of missing out from investors. This is a really interesting index that PitchBook puts out there where it's, it's basically using a lot of different, um, methods, and it's figuring out what is like, how friendly is the environment either to investors or startups based on the terms that they're seeing across a lot of the deals, right? So you could see here in 2022, there was so much FOMO, it was super easy to raise funding. You didn't need to have revenue or traction or any of this kind of stuff. Uh, and then in 2023, when things really started to break, now all of a sudden all of the power goes to the investor. And this is a chart that I've shared the last couple of years when I've been doing this talk, where basically as FOMO starts to recede, the need for actual strong business fundamentals increases, right? Things like unit economics, things like metrics and stuff like that. And that's what we saw correct in 2023. So 2024, I really see as sort of this calm after the storm. All right. We have stabilized for sure, and we're even seeing a little bit of growth this year. And I think there are a couple things that are keeping us from growth next year, but I'll get to those shortly. So some of the things that we're seeing this year, right, you could see from this chart, this was from Carta, that we have surpassed the total amount of funding last year and we still have a month left to go, right? So that, that is going to look even better. Than it does now. And the important thing really to look at too, and this is something that I've been preaching for the last couple of years, is a lot of people were sort of freaking out about the venture environment, right? It's the problem was that people were saying, oh, there will be all these headlines like venture funding has dropped 80% or whatever, right? And people thought the world was coming down. In reality, it was falling off of 2021, which was a massive, massive outlier, right? Leave out 2021 here and even 2022, which was sort of a sobering period of 2021, and you can see that 2024 is essentially going to be back, and this is what I've been saying for a couple years, is back to about 2019, right? 2019 to 2020, which was showing a nice sustainable growth of the startup ecosystem. 2019 was the second largest amount of funding of that entire decade. Across the startup ecosystem, right? So we are getting back to that kind of new normal of growth, right? 2023 is going to be also sort of be an outlier here, but, you know, you could expect 2024 to end up somewhere around here, right? Which is going to be a continuation of 2019 to 2020. Um, this is— that last chart was US. This is a chart of Europe, right? So again, this is only data as of September at the end of September. So fundraising season, like fall is the biggest fundraising season. So you could expect this 2024 number again to show a nice growth, right? Imagine 2021 and 2022 bars weren't here. You'd literally be seeing a nice little hockey stick, right? A sustainable hockey stick. Not— this isn't even a hockey stick. I don't even know what you would call what we were seeing back then. Some of the other things that we're seeing now is that it's in— for 2 years, we've seen the lowest number of layoffs, right? As the founders that were raising insane amounts of money for— with non— not good business fundamentals during the bubble, as they needed to cut and as even big businesses needed to cut to become more sustainable, you know, that stuff has started to level out. And we're seeing unicorns again too, right, which is always nice. So again, this is only showing up to Q3. Once we see some of those Q4 numbers, you know, once again, it's going to be, you know, looking at 2021 to 2022, it's going to sort of be on a nice sustainable growth path, right? And that's good for the industry. It's good for everybody. What we've seen as well is just a normalization, a stabilization, and a little bit of growth across the valuations of companies as well. Now, the funding, the fund rounds have generally decreased in size, okay? So this is on pre-money valuation. So it's really showing like what people think the value of the company is before they put the money in, right? If you looked at the same chart for post-money valuations, it's going to look a lot worse because the amount of funding has gone down. But the pre-valuations, you could see here, we sort of have the Series A crunch, right? And this is something we saw this about 2011, 2010 as well. You know, whenever there's sort of a hangover, that wasn't really like a bubble that burst, but it certainly was a time of excess. And once you, after you see that, after it starts to level off, there's always a little bit of a Series A crunch. And the reason for that, is that the Series A is really, you know, and it's to some extent the seed too, right? At the seed is when you receive the first valuation for your company. Before that, it's typically convertible vehicles where your valuation is not set yet because you're too early, you don't have enough metrics, and there's just not enough data to put a valuation on the business. So at that seed and angel stage, that's really where you sort of grow up, right? That's where you're becoming an adult. As a business. And you usually see this dynamic where that middle stage, that's when you're really getting a lot more scrutiny. And it's not just, oh, I'm creating this new market, so I need to spend money right now because to create this market, right? This is where the CF, like the real finance people are coming in and really starting to look at your spreadsheets. So we have seen, I've been really encouraged by the seed growth this year, right? And the Series A growth was expected. Again, this is something that we always see on the backside. It's, um, you know, that is generally speaking, we're still seeing this right now. Getting from the seed to the Series A is the biggest, the hardest leap that you can do in the ecosystem. This chart is something that I find that is super interesting, okay? Uh, so this chart really goes through what You can literally see, like, how the ecosystem is about to start meeting in the middle, right, to alleviate that seed to Series A crunch that I talked about. There are a very large number of rounds. It's just the dollar amounts are lower because there's so much more competition and so many more startups that are trying to raise money. There's just sort of a backlog of companies that are trying to raise money. Here in the early stages. Meanwhile, we're starting to see some alleviation on the later stages, which was sort of the biggest issue last year, right? And those things, again, it usually comes like kind of bottom-up and top-down, right? So it's going to meet in the middle, and that's why we still have this really large backlog of companies trying to get to that Series A and to make that leap there. And then finally bringing it back to this investor friendliness scale that I mentioned before, we're starting to normalize and starting to get back to normal, right? I definitely expect this to come very close to the 50% this year. I don't think it'll cross it necessarily, but it should be very, very close in 2025. And the other thing that I'd like to say too is that yesterday it was one of the biggest funding rounds of all time. This just came out, uh, which was Databricks. It was a $10 billion funding round. So in summary, the seas have calmed, okay? We had a party, there was success, there was a hangover, um, and now we're sort of in that in-between period where the seas have calmed. Um, there's a lot more pre-seed rounds because there's more investors in that space, and there's also just a lot more companies vying for it. But the amounts of those rounds have gone down. Series A, and we call this, I remember 2010, '11, '12, it was called the Series A crunch. Now it's like a chasm because it's much more extreme than it was back then. So if you're seeing a company able to raise Series A funding right now, it's a pretty strong indicator that it's a very strong business because that Series A, kind of milestone to get there is a lot higher than it was a couple of years ago. The power is still on the investor side, still normalizing. And, you know, on the bright side, we have a new foundational technology, AI, which typically would lead to a massive supercycle, as we call it in the investment world, because it is a foundational tech, right? If you look at the last couple of foundational technologies that created supercycles, you had the internet, right? That was about 2020 supercycle. You had, and, you know, basically cloud computing, which just led to massive amounts of new businesses and just lowered the cost of starting a business. You know, to some extent, you had crypto as well. And now we're looking at AI as essentially this new foundational platform, right? And honestly, a lot of those numbers that I was showing you guys before would have been significantly worse without AI. So the startup gods sort of sprinkled AI, you know, onto the ecosystem these last couple of years and helped us from really not seeing a huge dip that we might have seen without it. There's really just one thing that's missing from the ecosystem, and that's cash money, okay? And by cash money, this is what I mean. This isn't— forgive me, it's not one of the best slides that I've created, But a lot of people just kind of think, okay, well, LPs, right, limited partners, they invest money into a venture capital fund, right? VCs are raising money from other people, um, and then VCs take that money and invest it to startups, right? Super simple. A VC goes out, they put out a thesis, they almost kind of have their own little startup, right? Or big startup, I should say. Uh, they have a thesis, they go raise the people that are managing billions tens of billions of dollars, and then they take that money and invest it in startups. But what a lot of other people don't understand is that, look, it's the money. If a VC says, oh, I'm, you know, managing a $100 million venture fund, that doesn't mean that they have $100 million in their pocket ready to invest, right? VCs make capital calls to their LPs, and it comes in stages. It's staggered. It's staggered across the age of the fund. So, you know, generally speaking, they'll make a capital call right at the beginning, right, for a percentage of the fund, and then they can start making initial investments, right? And then over time, they will then start making additional capital calls, right? So they could start investing in more businesses, do follow-on investments on the initial investments that they made that are doing well, right? Doubling down, basically. But, you know, all in the meantime, typically VCs will start to distribute some returns back to those investors after a couple of years, right? Not returning everything, but just returning money. It's just sort of a trust thing, right? And these returns are known as DPI, distributions to paid-in capital. So when, you know, typically speaking, this is how long, or this would be the sequence of a VC actually being able to get the full $100 million of a quote-unquote $100 million fund that they raise, right? Now, it doesn't mean they're not misrepresenting themselves. The LPs have committed that capital, right? They've said it's in writing, right? As we all know, in writing is only in writing, right? Cash in the bank is different. And if you look at the situation we've had the last couple of years, a lot of the VCs that have deployed capital raised capital at the height of the bubble, okay? So they raised insane amounts of capital. They then lavished their startups with rounds that really weren't merited based on the fundamentals of the business that the startups had. And now they're faced in a situation where they're not able to return any DPI to their LPs, right? So if there's zero DPI, the VCs are going to be very reluctant to go to their LPs and say, hey, I need to call a next round of capital. On the money that you've committed to me, right? Or even worse, they'll make that capital call and they'll just— it'll lag, right? It'll sort of be ignored, right? Um, and then if the VCs aren't able to raise the full amounts of their fund, guess who suffers, right? The startups that invested or that got investment from them earlier that now in a very tough funding environment are looking for more investment, right? They're going to their VCs and their VCs are like, I'm also feeling this crunch, right? Um, and then when you see that, if the LPs don't get the DPI, then the LPs are going to be less inclined to put more money into the funds they're already investing in, right, when they get capital calls. But more importantly, also more money into anything else in the venture class, right? Anybody else that's coming to them with an investment in venture capital, they're going to be very reluctant to do so. Basically, um, it's a waterfall, right? It's a waterfall effect. The people that are managing the, the billions, tens of billions, it all comes down. There's a lag, right, for sure. And this is why when the bubble started to break, um, we always knew— and this is something we've been saying for years— that look, it's, it's the, the part of the ecosystem that's going to be impacted last is the earliest part, right? The early stages of funding. It's going to come basically from the latest stage and move its way earlier, right? But the early stage always has a benefit in this case as well because those are smaller rounds. So a lot of people that had money and now they start to get nervous but they still want to participate, right, they're going to move to the early stage because it requires less capital to get into companies, right? So that's— it's literally been playing out like a book these last couple of years. And just some charts to show you how much this DPI is needed, right? I think this chart on the right really shows it best from PitchBook. This is literally like, um, you know, the, the amount of money that they raised versus the amount of money that's going back to their LPs, right? So there's a huge mismatch there right now, and it's holding the ecosystem back. You know, again, what are the ways that investors will be able to start distributing returns? IPOs is a big one, been basically non-existent these last couple of years. And the other big one is M&A. And we've had, you know, not just the great M&A environment just because of the general status of the economy, but also especially here in the US, the Federal Trade Commission has been pretty aggressive and, you know, shutting down deals. I mean, this $20 billion deal would have alleviated a lot of pressure on the ecosystem, but, but it was blocked. So what we've seen is that it's created a massive secondaries market, right? So this is sort of a third way that people, uh, that investors can, can cash out and actually get money for the shares that they have, which are worth a lot on paper. But again, paper doesn't pay the bills, right? Actual money does. Uh, so the secondaries market has been huge. And honestly, this has been great for founders as well because it's allowed a lot of founders to cash out on their shares, 'cause it's one of the biggest issues in the startup ecosystem, honestly, is that when investors are sort of against the founders actually cashing out shares, because they say it's, oh, it's like you're not as invested or whatever, but this is like many, many years in where they've already been taking zero to very, very small salary, right? So a very strong secondaries market is very good. Or the ecosystem. Okay, 2025. So all of those indicators, 2025 is going to be a very strong growth year. The question is just how much. Okay, just stating the obvious, basically the growth is going to directly correlate with how strong the M&A and IPO environment is in 2025. Now it's not so obvious because 2025, as I showed you that chart before, because there's been such a backlog and also because 2024 has been a election year in the US, which is just traditionally is not a great year for IPOs because people are kind of waiting to see what the next administration is going to look like, right? We have just a massive backlog of really, really strong companies that are ready to IPO. And we're off to a great start. Just last week, ServiceTitan was the first one. Just a couple of the returns, right? So Iconiq, a venture fund, $1 billion. Bessemer, a venture, a huge venture fund, Silicon Valley. $800 million, that's 12x their investment. So again, you start to think about that waterfall, that money all starts to come from the top down, starts to alleviate the Series A crunch, and just starts to create a full healthy funding stack. So for 2025, I do think that because there's so many of them, I think they're going to start really strong, but then they're going to start to normalize. But there have been really encouraging signs just, you know, that the M&A environment should also increase as well. It should be a little bit more friendly. And I think the secondary market is also going to remain very strong, right? A lot of people think, oh, you know, as IPOs go up, secondaries may go down to some extent, but there's a very big lag on that, number one. Number two is IPOs create liquidity, but there's usually lockup, right? It's not like the investors, whomever, can sell it day one. If you do a secondary transaction, you're getting the money right away. So, you know, it's still, there's still going to be a ton of opportunity for secondary. AI will continue growth, but it's going to move downstream. We've been doing, or a lot more of the deals are on the actual model side of AI. Now it's going to be who is actually taking those models to solve problems for customers in a really profitable way, right? That's what we're going to start to see. I think the layoffs are going to continue. I think it'll be level, right? But we just really entered a new normal right now in terms of what people are expecting in capital efficiency because of these last couple of years. I would call it like this post-bubble accountability and this whole AI thing as well as creating efficiencies. And then really at the end of the day, capital efficiency is the end of the game. So I'll just be a couple more minutes here, and I'm gonna talk about just 4 strategies based on everything that I just said to fundraise in 2025. And the first one is to do more with less. Okay, so I just started talking about this a second ago. Post-bubble accountability, investors were getting a lot more, giving a lot more scrutiny onto companies on how they were spending their money and how it was actually impacting revenue and getting them to a sustainable sustainable place in their business. On top of that, more competition, right? Just so many more startups have been created because every single day, literally, the cost to actually get into the market and start a business continues to fall. That is equaled smaller rounds, right? Which means that any, anyone who's going out to invest is generally going to be talking to more investors. They're going to, you know, having to do more rounds of fundraising. All of this plus AI creates this new expectation of efficiency in your business. And honestly, I say here bootstrapping is 99.5% mandatory. It's probably more like 99.8% mandatory. That other, the only remaining portion of that 100% would be, you know, like multi-time founders, founders that literally people will invest in them just because It's their name and they have a track record. So it's just like, yeah, do whatever you want. Here's a check, right? Um, especially for first-time founders, there's, there's no excuse. You're going to have to bootstrap. Okay. AI is making it so that you can put out tools. I don't know if anybody's used Replit. Replit, like you could start, I'm not a coder guys, like more of a product manager, but you can just start talking to this thing to start the same way that you talk to ChatGPT and it just starts building a product for you. Right? You can get these MVPs out fast. There's tools. Not everything on here is AI, right? There's just no-code tools, low-code tools, right? There's no excuse for you to not do more with less. It is. And just one last thing I'll say here, right? Investors literally, especially at the early stages, are literally looking for businesses that have been able to kind of create a Kindle kindle of a fire with very little, right? A couple of sticks create a kindle. They need to see that kindle of a fire. They need to see a small flame because they're gonna give you gas to throw on that flame, right? They're not trying to come in and help you kindle that fire. Generally speaking, they wanna see your ability to do it yourself. So again, bootstrap, you, you, you gotta do it. The second thing that I said there was to de-risk your next round. As I had mentioned, as FOMO falls for investors, your need to focus on metrics rises. You know, there's still, especially as I said before, that Series A area is still the biggest choke point in the funding stack. So anybody who's investing in you in a pre-seed or seed stage, they're gonna be very concerned about your ability to raise your next round, right? They're just giving you the money right now so that you can get to the next round and continue growing. And ideally you get to the next round in a markup, right? So when you look at the funding benchmarks, please check these out. We just literally just updated these yesterday, or sorry, on Monday, with the latest details that we're seeing out there in the market. You can go to fi.co/benchmarks. This is, you know, we see dozens of deals, we see so many deals at Founder Institute all around the world. So we just try to publish just kind of a general analysis and just generally like what we're seeing that you need to raise a pre-seed round, what you need at seed, what you need at Series A, etc. And then similarly, right, a word that's thrown out there a lot is traction, right? Like, oh, you need traction to do this, traction to do that. And traction has a lot of different meaning depending on the round that you're at and also the industry that you're in. Right? If you're building deep tech, you know, some medical device or something, obviously we can't expect you to be generating revenue without a product, right? So there's different milestones versus something that is just, you know, just very digital that you can get out there. So please do look at these benchmarks. We update them about twice per year. And what you want to be doing, right, so this scenario, I took screenshots, not very good ones apparently. Um, but I took screenshots of these charts before, uh, because if you're raising a pre-seed round right now, right, you need to have these or close to it. But your pitch needs to be focused on how you're going to take the money from the investors to get this, right, to get that next round. That's your A to B. So a pre-seed round, this is where you need to be with the money that you're raising. This is the kind of traction that you're going to need, and you need to give them a detailed and realistic plan on how you're going to get there, right? I put in here with double exclamation points, no donut charts. It's a pet peeve of mine, the amount of donut charts that I see. And when I say a donut chart, it's like, okay, I'm raising $2 million, and it's a donut chart and just says like, I'm going to spend 40% on product, 20% on marketing, 20% on X or whatever. Right. And it's just like, come on, things like that fly during a bubble. They don't fly in normal times. Okay. Outline how you are going to get from point A to point B for that investor. And honestly, if you go through that exercise, it'll probably change the amount of funding that you raise as well. Right. Just raise what you need. What I would say is You know, plot out that plan to get from point A to point B, as I just said, then add 20%, right? So giving you a little bit of cushion and then plan out how to get there in 12 to 15 months. You know, generally the timeframe you're looking at is about 18 months. So I'm also giving you a little bit of cushion there. Right. And that's the language that you need to speak with these investors. Raise that amount, tell a story to help them get to that amount, because really investors are much less interested in how much gas you need, right? Oh, you need $1 million. That's fine. Right? What they're much more interested is where you're trying to go and your thought process to figuring that out. The third thing here is to embrace the suck, okay? You basically need to pitch 100 investors. And look, it sucks for everybody, all right? Like, be ready. Pitch, pitch 100 investors, get 100 nos, tweak your pitch about 50 times, devote a lot of time for 8 weeks Okay, it sucks for everyone. Um, Bezos was on stage at a New York Times event— I believe it was New York Times event— just last week, and he said that raising a seed round was the hardest thing he's ever done his entire career. Okay, this is one of the richest men in the world, um, and raising that seed round was one of the hardest things that he ever did. And, and this, this— trust me, you get the feedback from anybody, it doesn't matter. How many rounds of funding they've raised. It sucks, okay? It literally sucks, and you just have to embrace it. You have to look at going through that as it's a learning experience as well, all right? The more that you pitch, you have to be learning from the feedback that you're getting. As I mentioned up here, like, you need to be tweaking your pitch every single time, right? So literally going through probably like the first 50 nos or something, That's just you figuring out, okay, like, what are the right buttons that I need to push? All right, nobody cares about this. They care about this instead. Refining the message, right? It's just, that's the work that needs to be done to actually get to the right pitch and to the right narrative. Just think about those first 50 or so pitches as, look, you're gonna get a no. Just expect a no. Okay? So go into it much more with the discovery mindset. Right, you're doing the pitch. Chances of this person investing in me is maybe 1 to 5%, right? So I might as well use this experience to get feedback, and so that the next person I pitch, I'm a couple percentage points better, right? And I just keep increasing those percentage points. So honestly, guys, you just have to, um, embrace the suck. And then the last thing is to get back to basics. It shocks me how few founders that are going out there into, into the fundraising marketplace understand the love languages. Any who's married may be familiar with this, uh, the love languages of their partners that they are trying to create a partnership with, right? Your investors, it's a partnership, so you have to understand what drives them. What is their love language, right? You— sorry, going the wrong way. Learn about the love languages of your partner. Okay, so here is just one example. A lot of people don't know, but we have a sister company at Founder Institute called VC Lab or S-Lab Group, and they basically are Founder Institute for venture funds, right? They help people that are trying to launch new venture funds do so using a lot of the same methodologies as the Founder Institute. Used to be a program in Founder Institute. It was so successful successful, we spun it out. Long story short, uh, they have a ton of resources here, including a really cool AI tool called DecileBase that you can find to just get, get yourself a 101 on how, uh, venture investors think before you start to talk to them. Okay, I— again, it's just shocking how many founders I see go out into the marketplace without even a basic understanding of the business of venture and just the, the way that a venture capitalist or or any investor for that matter, is going to be analyzing their business and the love language that you need to start speaking with them. The second thing on the basic side is, look, you gotta tell great stories. Founder of a startup is the chief storytelling officer. Ideas are worth nothing. Everybody's got ideas. They literally just float into the wind until you can attach a strong story to it to then make that idea stick out. From all the rest. You have to tell a great story. And another one of my pet peeves is just people that no matter what the strengths of the business are, they just find some random template out there on the internet and they build a pitch based off that. And then I start seeing the pitch and it's like, oh, well, their team slides, like the last slide or whatever. And it's like, then I learned that the founder like literally has built like 2 businesses like this before and has experience at the 4 large companies that he's planning to like sell into. And I'm just like, dude, like, you know, in journalism speak, you're burying the lead, right? So at least this, at least will get you to, okay, look, based on the type of business that you're building, this is a general framework you can use to tell a great story, but please don't just find some random template on the internet and just say, oh, well, this will work for my business. Okay. Every business has strengths and weaknesses. You wanna, um, emphasize your strengths. Minimize your weaknesses, tell a great story. Check out this link here and we'll put it in the chat that will at least just go through some of these, these first frameworks. And then the last thing here, guys, is that again, as the power goes to investors and they just have so many more companies to choose from, right? And again, we're starting to see that level off. But just generally speaking, that's what we've been seeing. They're going to— I mean, just think about it in your mind. They're just going to start creating a lot more just quick screens, right? Because they're looking at so many companies. So what is an easy quick screen? Is like solo founder? Okay, nope, right? Like, that's— you're gonna see a lot of that, and we've been seeing a lot of that. So it's pretty close to a requirement right now, um, especially for first-time founders, uh, to have a team, to have more than one co-founder. Okay, and again, is it hard? Yes. It is hard, but that's the job, right? If it was easy, everybody would do it. And final word, all these things that I've been saying, guys, these are good for the industry, okay? Right now, if you have a strong business, you have a very strong advantage. In bubbles, right, building something investible doesn't necessarily mean building a strong business. It means throwing buzzwords on stuff, um, you know, being all hyped, being all like sizzle and no steak, so to speak, right? But now we're going into a more healthy environment where now strong businesses do matter, right? And this is good. The expectations are super clear. You need to be getting on a path to sustainability. So again, it's really good for the industry. Just build a strong business. Is it easy? No. That's why it's hard. Like, it's hard, and that's why it's worth doing. Right? So focus on the fundamentals. And we will, we will be sharing this, this deck out with everybody as well, along with this video. And it took a little bit more time here than I wanted today, but thank you all for joining. Hope you have a great holiday season. For 2025, I think it's going to be a fascinating year. This, we have this AI supercycle. We have a massive amount of companies waiting to IPO. There's going to be a lot of M&A. Again, I would expect it's going to be a year of growth. The question is just how much, you know, fingers crossed it's on, it's on the higher side. It's good for everybody. But yeah, thanks for allowing me the time to share my thoughts today, and hopefully it was helpful.