20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada

I was like the youngest person in history to have a billion-dollar business.

Do you regret raising as much money as quickly?

Yes, 100%. It's 99% of the advice is bad advice. And then the rest of the advice is contradictory to each other. To be frank, I don't think startups should be run remotely.

But you've got to sell for $125 million.

Yeah, we would have sold for, for more than that.

Were you tempted to sell for that?

Tempted? Did I think about it? Yeah, of course.

Did you sell secondary?

Of course. A small amount.

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today we tell the story of Vise, a company that raised $126 million in just 6 months. The company's founders became the youngest founders of a unicorn company at the time, but it has not been without its challenges. Today we have a very frank and a very honest conversation with Vise's founder Samir on the biggest mistakes, what he would have done differently, and the impact of both personally and professionally raising so much money so soon and having such a large valuation placed on This is a very different style of interview, but an incredible discussion. I'd love your thoughts, and you can check it out by watching the full episode on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC. But before we dive into the show today, Merge is the leading product integration platform offering a suite of unified APIs across key software categories from HRIS to CRM that allows organizations to offer hundreds of customer-facing integrations. Merge also handles the full integration lifecycle from an easy initial build to handheld end-user onboarding to maintenance, support, and management tooling for all your integrations. Thousands of customers like Ramp, Gong, Semgrep, and Sendoso use Merge to power their integrations. Check it out now by visiting merge.dev/20vc to receive $5,000 off your annual plan. That's merge.dev/20vc. And speaking of total game changers there with Merge, you need to check out Public.com. Public.com is doing something no other broker brokerage has done before. They're sharing 50% of their options revenue directly with you, the customer. Get something back on every options trade. Oh, and there are no commission or per-contract fees either. Go to public.com and activate options trading by March 31st to lock in your lifetime debate. This was paid for by Public Investing. Must activate options account by March 31st for the revenue share, and options are not suitable for all investors and do carry significant risk. And this is only applicable for US members only. And finally, equity is your company's greatest asset, and managing it can be complex and expensive, but it's crucial to choose the right cap table provider. And that's where AngelList come in. For me, there are 3 main reasons why we love AngelList. Software simplicity is number 1. It's a one-of-a-kind tool that really keeps your cap table clean and compliant. Second is pricing and service. You only pay for team members with equity, not investors. And then third, ease and simplicity. AngelList provides a single provider bundle equity fundraising, banking, and people tools on AngelList in one. It's so important that you make the right decision for one of the most important elements of your company, equity and equity management. Choose AngelList at angellist.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Samir, I'm so excited for this, dude.

It's wonderful to have you in the studio in person.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Not at all, my man.

But I want to start with the beginnings of Vise. What was the aha moment for you with Vise? Take me back to that.

So I think it's less the beginning of Vise and more the beginning of our entrepreneurial journey. I started my first startup at 12. I was at the summer program at Northwestern. My parents are like, you cannot go to traditional summer camp. You must do college courses. So like 6th grade onwards, they sent me to this college summer program at Northwestern. And one year, I think it was summer of 8th grade, I met this kid, Roonick, and he was the kid across the hall from me. And we're like, I'm from Cleveland, he's from Detroit. We're like, we're so bored in the Midwest. School's like pretty easy. And like the iOS programming language Swift, it kind of came out recently and it just started taking off. And we're like, let's build apps for small businesses. Let's learn how to code. Let's use Swift and let's build apps for any small business that wants an app. And that was kind of how we got our start to our entrepreneurial journey. We started with a game and then we built an app for a chain of car washes. We built an app for a medical conference, all kinds of different apps. We made like $30 grand by the time we were 14, which felt like a ton of money. And my co-founder got a research opportunity with a prestigious university in AI research because he was a longtime math researcher. He was doing math research in, I think it was graph theory, and it translated quite well over to AI research. And we realized, well, what if we could use AI to build apps? What if any small business could type in their app idea in our system and we could use AI to build an app? And that was our, our first real startup idea. The challenge was The team we got to work with us was the wrong team, was people we met on the internet. We blew all the money we built making apps for small businesses on trying to fund the startup. And the technical challenge was way harder than we could have ever imagined it to be. So unfortunately, that was our first failure, but it opened us up to this idea of AI quite early on and got us all hyped on the idea of building a startup.

So it's funny, whenever I meet founders today, Samir, I always say, how did you first make money? Because I never— I always believe that the best entrepreneurs start early. No great entrepreneur came out of Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, went to McKinsey, and that's where they made their first money. It's always starting something very early. Do you agree with that?

100%. I think it's just having that, like, motivation, like that passion motivation that's developed early. So I think in our case it was building apps. But even before that, I was like obsessed with garage sales. Like, I would go to my grandma's house and like find all of her junk and like try and sell it at garage sales. And like, that was the thing I did when I was like single-digit age.

How old were you when you started Vise?

I was 15 and a half.

15 and a half. Okay. Who was the first big yes to you with Vise?

That's actually funny. So I think there's two stories here. I think the first is our team early on, we didn't have that much money. We were consulting with these financial institutions, which is how we discovered the need, the problem to deliver personalized portfolio solutions in an automated way to financial advisors who were actually consulting with these big financial institutions on AI. But we didn't have like a ton of money to actually pay people to like build us the product. So outside of us doing it ourselves, we found a team of engineers mostly just through scraping AngelList and cold emailing people and reaching out to people on LinkedIn. Like if you go through my LinkedIn in 2014, 2015, 2016, it's just like hundreds of cold messages. We got the first like 2 engineers to say, oh yeah, I'll like work on this on equity nights and weekends. That was the first big yes. And then our second big yes was actually— so my co-founder decided to go to college, which was a real challenge for me because I had actually dropped out of high school to build this business and moved to the Bay Area. I was living in the Tenderloin trying to bootstrap it to then raise capital. And my co-founder decides to go to UPenn. And at UPenn, I'm like, well, if he doesn't drop out of UPenn, then I don't know how I'm going to grow this business. I don't know how how we're going to make this thing work. He's like, well, in order for us to do it, we need to raise some capital. And we had called all these investors and cold emailed a ton of people and no one wanted to give us money. They're like, what, what business do you kids have building wealth management software? And the first investors that actually said yes were these guys, Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, who started a company called Flatiron Health and sold it for a bunch of money to Roche. And they actually went to Penn and they're like, look, we had a similar story to you guys. They actually did complete Penn, but that $100K an investment, which, you know, looking back at the small investment, but like that was the reason why we were able to keep going.

Was that a big unlock to further money? I think people forget the multiplier effect of a yes from an important group of people or person like Nat and Zach. Actually, when people say, oh, Nat and Zach are in, it's like, oh, well, fuck it, I'll do it.

Yeah, it was super important having them introduce us to people. I didn't know the power of a warm introduction until after that. It helped us get Founders Fund, who ended up leading that seed round, and Keith being one of his first investments at Founders Fund, partially through a warm introduction. I don't think Keith would have responded to a cold message. And I think that that like, aha, click of like someone in Silicon Valley actually believes in this was a really helpful motivator for us.

It's funny, Keith always says actually there's no point in going to a load of crappy investors first because they'll ask very different questions to what a great investor would ask. Have you found that the great investors ask different questions?

It's interesting because all the investors that ended up investing in Vise were all the great investors. Like, I don't think we have any crappy investors on our cap table, and all the crappy investors for some reason passed. Maybe they saw something that the crappy investors didn't see, but for the most part, they asked better questions. They understood things faster. But I think they were able to pattern match more effectively from successes they had seen and successes they had been a part of to what we were doing in a way where, you know, a crappy investor might not have been able to. As effectively pattern match.

How did the Sequoia deal come about?

This was actually kind of funny. So I— we'd already gotten Founders Fund and we're like, well, we're just going to build this business. We don't need to raise more money. This is not really that important to us. We don't need more VCs. We stopped talking to VCs. We're just like, we're going to build this business. But I had seen the show Silicon Valley as a kid and I was like, I want to do Startup Battlefield. And like Founders Fund was like, this is like a waste of time. What are you guys doing? Like, focus on your business. And I'm like, no, I really want to do the Startup Battlefield thing. I think it'll be fun. So I apply for Startup Battlefield. I get into Startup Battlefield and to, you know, do the pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt. And the night before the pitch, they're having a happy hour at Sequoia Capital's office. And I'm like, I don't really know if I'm going to go or not. But my co-founder and I were paying ourselves like $20,000 a year and we were looking for free food anywhere we could find it. And there was free food at this happy hour and it was like a 10-minute walk from our house. So we're like, okay, we'll go to this happy hour, we'll eat some free food. We don't really need to talk to Sequoia because we have Founders Fund. And we're just going to keep building our business. So we're sitting at the pretzel station at the Sequoia office. Everyone's like rushing up to Roelof and Mike Moritz and, you know, all these famous partners there. And we're sitting at the pretzel station chopping on pretzels. And this, like, guy who, like, looks really young walks up to us and he's like, what are you two schmucks doing? Like, how old are you guys? Like, who are you? And we start talking about Vise and what we're building. And he's like, look, like, you know, it's fascinating because I was at this retreat with the Collison brothers, you know, a couple of weeks ago, and they were talking about like a truth that the mass doesn't necessarily believe to be true, but they believe to be true. And it was that financial advisors will continue to exist and that the relationship is really important. So like, this actually makes a lot of sense. Like, I get the story you guys are going after. So then we pitch at Disrupt and he's like, you guys should come in and like meet the partnership and talk about what you're doing. And they had actually made an investment in a company called FutureAdvisor, which is one of the early robo-advisors at the time, which got acquired for a couple hundred million bucks by BlackRock. And the founder of FutureAdvisor was an investor of ours, and he called the Sequoia partnership separately and was like, hey, if I were to have kept building FutureAdvisor, Vise is taking the direction that we could have never gotten to. And having that kind of piece of credibility was really helpful going into the investment process. So they decided to kind of preempt us on a, on like a seed extension round. And we're like, oh, I guess we'll, I guess we'll take it. Why not? Doesn't hurt.

They then doubled down also.

I remember tripled down, tripled down, which I don't know if it happened before in Sequoia. Maybe it had, I think, in Stripe and a few other instances.

But why did you say yes to that? I know it sounds stupid. Obviously Sequoia, an incredible firm, but it just means they own a lot of one's business. What was the thinking around the tripling down?

And I think as we started to build, they tripled down in a short period of time. So the seed extension was done in October of 2019. Our A was done in March and our B was done in May. And it was—

what year was this?

This is all— this is 2020. So this is after— this is— venture deals are not getting done right now. The world shuts down. We were the last investment at Sequoia before everything shut down for the pandemic, like day before the global shutdown happened. I think for both Sequoia and I, we and Marounik, we saw that this thesis was starting to pan out. We were getting early customer feedback. It was coming in extremely positive. We were getting a lot of positive reception. It just started to seem like all of these dynamics that we thought were going to be true started to play out and start to be true, which gave them more conviction. And then for us, we also realized, okay, if we're actually going to build this and scale this, we need a lot of capital. At least we at the time, we thought we needed a lot of capital.

Do you regret raising as much money as quickly?

Yes, 100%.

Why?

And I also regret raising it all from the same firm. To some of the points. I love Sequoia. I think they're great, but you want multiple voices in the boardroom. And I think the challenge is when you have one investor that owns 30% of the company, you know, has piled in close to $50 million, then you're going to have that investor's perspective as, you know, the predominant perspective versus having some, you know, healthy debate, which I think is really important. And I think, too, the challenges— so we raised something like like $120, $130 million in an 18-month period. I think we went from a seed stage company to unicorn. It's probably like one of the fastest examples at the time in history of that having happened. And that was a bad thing. And the reason why that was a bad thing is because, one, when you have a lot of capital, you lose discipline, right? You don't have this existential threat of dying in 6 months. You lose a little bit more discipline. I think we grew—

where did you lose discipline most?

I mean, specifically around spending, like we hired a lot of people. I remember like, and again, this is to Deleon's credit, but I called Deleon one day. We had lost like AWS. We'd overpaid AWS by $4,000. And I'm like, Deleon, do you know anyone at AWS who can get us a refund for this $4,000? And he's like, dude, we gave you a seed round so you don't have to like worry about these things. Just lose the $4,000. Focus on growing really fast. And we're like, okay, like I guess money doesn't really matter. We're going to just focus on growing really fast. I think we learned the wrong lesson in that. And I think money does really matter. And being financially disciplined really, really matters. And I think even more importantly than that, when you hire, when you lose that discipline and you hire all of these people, like we had gone from 6 people to like 100 people overnight, basically. And 100 people don't actually make your business move faster. It actually slows you down. You have to deal with HR problems. You have to deal with all kinds of different perspectives on how to build. You have to deal with a whole myriad of different things with more people versus having a strong density of really, really smart people that are all problem solving and helping you get to that next incremental milestone, as opposed to dramatically scaling your organization for the sake of scaling your organization.

Respectfully, do you blame the investors? Like, I'm an investor today, and like, to me, that's irresponsible for growing of a company.

Yeah, you're foie gras-ing a company. I'm going to steal that term.

Yeah, you are shoving cash down a company. I mean, 3 rounds in 6 months is fucking ridiculous.

Yeah. I mean, I guess to a certain extent you can blame the investors, but at the end of the day, like, I'm the one as the founder who made the decisions. I have to take ownership and accountability for it. I think I learned a lot in the process.

Was the valuation a problem?

No, I think the expectations of the valuation was a problem.

What was— what was tied to the expectations of the valuation?

Just growth that was unrealistic. VCs have built this ethos that if it doesn't get big fast, it's never going to get big. And the problem with that was, and we were getting big pretty fast, but to grow into a, you know, a billion-dollar valuation in 18 months from being a, from having our founders funded around at like $4 million, it's just like not possible. It is unrealistic. I, in, especially in a market like ours where it is just a slow-to-change market, but billion-dollar businesses aren't built overnight. Right. And the bigger problem is that if a billion-dollar business is built overnight, it means someone else can go build that same billion-dollar business overnight and you don't actually have a moat. So the expectations it created for us were, were a bad thing. I think the type of people you recruit when they see that you're a billion-dollar business aren't focused on— we have a value at Vize called burn the boats. They're not focused on burning the boats. They're focused on a stable career and growing within an organization and like assessing you alongside Google when, you know, you're really like the seed Series A stage company. You're not Google. And there's going to be a lot of ups and downs and things that need to be figured out that a true billion-dollar company wouldn't have to figure out.

We're going to get to people. I do just want to stay on the kind of the valuation and kind of what it does to psychology actually for you. Did it impact your psychology and did you get too big for your boots?

100%. I was like the youngest person in history to have a billion-dollar business, like at 20 years old. I think I just turned 20 when our company was valued at $1 billion. Like every day would be a different billionaire or celebrity or someone hitting me up saying like, I want to invest in your company. Like it was just a change. Like it was a change in power dynamic. It was, it was definitely— it's not healthy. It's like, it's like a child star phenomenon. It's like not healthy for, for anyone to go through that.

How did you respond to that?

So I stayed relatively grounded in the sense like I don't drink, I don't do drugs. I was able to stay like I had a set of core principles that I fairly well adhered to and stuck to throughout my entire life that I think was important, you know, was maintained. I think the challenge was I really deeply valued money, like, and being very frugal. You can't really take, take the Indian out of me, not to be too politically incorrect, but I think that was a little lost and I had to relearn that. But it was, it was definitely an experience. It was definitely a wild experience.

What brought you back down to earth?

I think seeing all the other founders, this wasn't like a unique to me thing. I hung out with a bunch of other founders that were also young-ish that built decacorns or billion-dollar businesses, so to speak, overnight. I saw the way they acted and, you know, the way they behaved. And I was just like, okay, like, this just doesn't really make a ton of sense to me. Like, there's something off. Like, if something doesn't necessarily feel quite right, then like you kind of re-underwrite your thinking, you re-underwrite your decision-making. Like, it didn't make sense in 2021 for there to be a new unicorn every couple of days, you know, reading in TechCrunch. Everything felt off. And I think because it felt off, I was like, okay, I think one, this is going to come down and there's going to be a deep major correction. And I think, too, I don't like this feeling of feeling off. Like, maybe I have to change my actions, the way I'm thinking, the way we're spending our time as a company to reaccount for it. And I ended up being right because when— before the market really took a turn, we were one of the first companies to do a major reset. And it was more painful because other companies weren't doing it. But it ended up positioning ourselves so significantly better given that we had done it.

What was involved in the major reset?

It was first re-underwriting our culture. And I think building a company in the pandemic adds a complete new level of challenges because you are building a company in an all-remote environment. To be frank, I don't think startups should be run remotely. Like, you can't build culture when, you know, people are all on Zoom all day. Like, you build culture at those watercooler moments and in the team. And it felt like our entire culture was off. The second was we just recruited a lot of people that were mercenaries. They weren't missionaries.

Well, let's talk about that because I did speak to some of you. I mean, it depends how harsh you want me to be. I spoke to some of your investors. They said the one area where Samir fucked up is hiring.

Oh, big time.

Talk to me about that. What did you get wrong and what did you do to correct it?

One, every founder early on, especially as you raise all this money and you start to scale, is like, I need to scale. Okay, like, who do I need to take? Like, who do I need to involve when I scale? And I think all the investors are like, okay, well, you guys are young. You guys need senior executives, and senior executives will give you the leverage to be able to grow your team, to be able to manage more effectively. Those senior executives have usually run a big team before, and they've come from a big company. We recruited a lot of senior executives that, one, they didn't understand the financial advisor.

Who told you to get senior execs?

Of other venture capitalists and founders, people in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It just, it felt like the thing to do. So you bring on an executive recruiter. The executive recruiter puts 20 candidates in front of you. They say, hey, all of these 20 candidates have 25 offers. They've got more offers than they know what to do with. You need to sell. You can't even be thinking about interviewing. You need to be selling. And then if you get this person, you'll be super lucky and great. We did this like 5, 6, 7 times over with an executive team that fully turned over in like 12 months. And it was all people from big tech, all people that ran big orgs at companies like Dropbox, at companies like TripActions, at companies that were Twitter, Meta, places like that. And they run 100, 200, 300-person orgs. We didn't even interview them. Like, we were just in sell mode the whole time. We got our investors in sell mode. We were just trying to convince them to join. It was such a hot market that we get this whole group of people.

Did it feel wrong in the moment?

Yes, but it felt like the thing to do. Everyone was telling us that was the thing to do. Our mindset at the time was all of these people are so much smarter than we are. They have so much experience. We are going to do what they say to do because it feels like that's the right thing to do.

How quickly did it become apparent that it was not the right thing to do?

Pretty quick. Like, I would just come to work every day miserable.

Why?

It felt like, one, we weren't working on the right things. We were talking so much about how to make people feel heard, how to make people feel valued, how to be inclusive— things that, like, quite frankly don't matter. What matters are: can we build the best possible product such that our customers buy it and keep buying it and refer all of their friends to buy it? And we weren't talking about— like, when we went into our leadership meetings, we weren't talking about that. We were talking about making infrastructure decisions that will matter in 2026 and rewriting our code to better position ourselves 4 or 5 years down the line. We were talking about making different executives or different managers or sub-managers in the company feel better and feel more included. We were talking about DEI. We weren't talking about our customers and their problems and how to build our product to better suit our customers and their problems.

Do you know what I'm saying? We need to get fucking customers. We need to get some revenue. What the fuck is this stupid infrastructure discussion that we're having? Whether it's, you know, the culture of a firm that's got few customers or it's infrastructure problems for 2026, like, is no one going, hang on a minute, what the fuck is going on?

No, because when you raise so much capital so quickly and you have all of these great investors on your cap table and everyone says this company is the shit, like, you just think that it works. And like, you've been at companies where you didn't actually— none of these people had to go out and find product-market fit. They came into companies where there was already product-market fit and they just had to operate their little part of that company or big part of that company where they were kind of keeping it status quo. Most of these companies that they came from were just like, they haven't grown very much. Like, they're just there and they're operating and they're running their part, but like none of them had defined product market fit. So they just assume, okay, when I come, this company has already got to figure it out. I'm just going to do the same thing I did at X company. I'm going to run my playbook that I did at X company. I'm going to bring it over to Vise. And you've got all these people with playbooks versus first principles thinkers that are trying to actually understand the problem and problem solve with you to actually drive product market fit. So it felt like that was the case. And we got so much pressure on us at the time that it was like, we have to keep these people happy. They're going to solve our problems. That's why you bring executives in. And it was pretty apparent that that wasn't the case.

You know, when did that start turning? When was it apparent? 3 months in, 6 months in?

Yeah, it was probably 3 to 6 months in. We thought— I think we were too optimistic at the time. So 3 months in, we're like, this is a problem. 6 months in, we're like, okay, this is broken. And like, I think we were optimistic.

Are you talking to the board about it at this point going, this is not working?

I think the board was kind of like, you got to figure out how to make these people happy and like you. That changed. I think the board, as the market started to change, I think the board started to realize, okay, we actually need to make some changes as a business.

Did you feel that you could talk to the board?

Yeah, like I was friends with all of our board members, so I felt like we could, we could talk to all of them. I think the challenge is if you have a board member full of VCs, you know, VCs are going to just— they're going to act like VCs, right? They—

what does that mean?

They, they're thinking about their incentives. They're thinking—

what do you think our incentives are?

Their incentives. Look, I have empathy for VCs in some respect because you're such a long feedback cycle. You don't know if your investment is going to work for a decade or longer sometimes. So you're trying to find signals that will show to your partners, your LPs, that this investment is doing well. So when people are— so oftentimes it's like what other people say about a particular company. Like, oh, Harry says Vyse is great, my investment's doing well, if I'm— pick your VC. And oh, like Harry's blah blah blah executive is saying the founders are really causing problems and they're not listening to me, right? Then the focus on the board meeting is how do you make that executive feel heard? You're not talking about if you had some kind of industry expert or someone who, you know, prominent customer or someone who doesn't have the incentives of a VC that is on your board, that is voicing the customer, that is voicing the problem you're out to solve, that is voicing a set of things other than how the VCs perceive the world.

Do you think they were involved enough in your business to advise you?

Yeah, but just on the wrong things. Sean, rolled up his sleeves, worked super hard. That guy is a total, like, just grinds. Like, I think he was like a shadow third co-founder, but like, we were just working on all the wrong things. He'd spend all his time executive recruiting. He would join all the search calls. He would spend time, you know, making people feel heard. He would make— he would spend time defending us to these various executives or team members and saying, no, these are— they're great guys. You just got to— you got to trust them.

Were they rising up against you?

100%. Yeah. I think any time someone doesn't find success in a role, I think they need— like, a lot of people can't take the accountability that it was their fault. They need to point the fingers at someone, you know, because something wasn't working in one particular part of the org or another. They were pointing at us to have solved that problem, and that would then elevate up to the board. But I think the reason why we brought them in, which again was the wrong reason, was to solve some of those key problems when in reality we should have just been solving it on our own.

You take responsibility for that, though, don't you?

Yeah. Yeah. Like it was my— again, it's my fault for hiring all of these people. Founders don't realize this because for a long time you don't get enough advice and then you start getting capital and you have stakeholders and you get too much advice. And the problem is a lot of this advice is either bad advice. 99% of the advice is bad advice. And then the rest of the advice is contradictory to each other. So you don't necessarily know. And like someone who's built some super successful company or is at some world-renowned venture fund, you're going to just assume their advice is good advice, right? If you're, if you're a first-time founder. And I think that for us, like, we just assumed all this advice was good advice. And until we stopped listening to everyone's advice and like just started figuring it out for ourselves, the business just wasn't working. And then Once we figured it out for ourselves, everything turned around. It was great.

I think with advice is it's all rooted in context. It could be technology cycles, it could be different teams, it could be different go-to-market motion, you name it. Everything is so rooted in context. And I always think like founders need to be filtration mechanisms for like just different pieces of advice. You need to parse what's good and what's not.

I agree.

What are some big lessons when you made the decision to let people go and how you did it? And what are some big lessons from that?

If you feel like you should let someone go, you should just do it and do it as fast as possible. 99.9% of the time, never regretted letting someone go. It was almost always the right decision. And I think too many people, too many founders, too many managers drag their feet. And it's oftentimes the incentive of the manager. So when you're the founder and you've got a manager and that manager is managing other people and someone on their team isn't performing, they're not living up to their expectations. The manager is oftentimes not going to say, hey, let me fire them. Rather, it's let me take some time, let me really nurture them. Let me, let me figure it out. We put them on a PIP, something like that. And like, you just don't have time as a startup. You need to keep your bar super high. You're not a machine. You're a basketball team. You can only have 5 players on the court. And all of those 5, those 5 players have to be really good. They have to work together. They have to uphold the bar for all, for each of the other players. And I think a lot of people think about their companies as factories. And if a part is broken for a little bit, they can fix the part or, you know, at some point bring in a new part. But that's not how you should think about the startup. And I think thinking that way is really, really dangerous. And oftentimes a lot of managers, especially ones that come from bigger tech companies where there are these like kind of legacy HR policies, they're just not as ruthless with headcount and personnel decisions as they should be. Yes, I'm a bit ruthless. Does it come off a little bit cold sometimes. Yes, but like, you have to kind of be like that because we are fighting for, you know, survival and fighting to succeed every single day. And you just can't let anything get in the way of that.

Are there any other big lessons in terms of the way that you build that team and what went wrong?

Lessons galore. I think I want people to do— when they come to Vise, I want them to feel like they're doing their life's work. And when I think about the people that are the best performers, And it's not like the most senior people. It's like all kinds of different types of backgrounds. We had this kid who was like a trader for a year at Guggenheim who's now running— now he's 26 and he's running our entire enterprise product strategy. We had another guy who was just an investment strategy guy at his previous role, and he's now our chief investment officer. People have different irrational motivators, some kind of chip on their shoulder, some drive to win. Some kind of hidden fire, right? The same fire I had to prove myself in building this business. And you need to unlock that in prospective candidates, right? I don't want someone who was like, I was a VP of engineering and now I want to be a CTO. And then after that, I want to be a COO. I want someone who understands our customer problem, who understands our mission, has a deep sense of passion, of desire, has something to prove as to why they're going to work their tail off for us. Push harder here than they would at any big company. And, you know, there's signals you could find in the interview process, but sometimes, quite frankly, you just, you have to learn as they're at their company.

Did you pay people too much too soon?

Do we pay people too much too soon?

Yeah.

Yes. We weren't looking for the right things in the interview process. We were looking for biggest company, biggest role, most status. Like, what will people like follow this person because of how you know, successful they've been. And all of these people have a reputation. And the problem with people who have a reputation is that they're all trying to constantly defend their reputation. And if something is going to make them look bad, if there's going to be some kind of something that will potentially damage their reputation, they're going to flee, right? They're going to, they're going to, they're going to get off the boat before you burn it. That is, that's dangerous for startups.

Did you worry about being a tarnished startup?

We did, which is why we did for a little while, which is why, like, so in 2021, when we knew we had this bad executive team, when we knew our culture was wrong, when we knew we probably should have everyone just in the office and this remote work thing isn't working out, when we knew we had too many people, we were like, well, if we make a set of hard decisions, then like everyone's going to think we're like a broken, failing, you know, company. And, you know, we're not going to raise more money and we're not going to be able to recruit great people and customers aren't going to like us. And we were just scared. It's part of the reason why we didn't make the decision sooner. And at a certain point, I was just like, this is too much. I'm just going to do it. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

But how much were you burning a year at your peak?

We were probably burning $3 million a month.

How much did you raise in total?

$128 million, I think.

Okay. So you still have a shedload of cash then. Oh, we—

now we have a ton of cash. Yeah. We never have to raise again. But like, if we had kept burning and kept scaling at the rate we were, then we would be out of money like a lot of other growth stage companies that in 2021 that didn't make hard decisions. We just made the hard decisions basically at the end of 2021, early 2022, before the markets had really reset. And I actually— it's funny, I wrote this a year later. I wrote this blog post called Refounding Vise. And the reason why I wrote that blog post, everyone thought we made the changes in early 2023 and like that was like a pivot moment. But it was actually a reflective blog post of the decisions, the changes we made in early 2022 to convince all of my founder friends who are running companies who hadn't made hard decisions that you can make a set of hard decisions and you're going to be just fine. Everything about Vise after we made those hard decisions was better. It was hard for a month, but then a month later the team came together. Our burn was way down.

Okay, but it's with the caveat it's better if you have a shedload of cash. If you don't have a shedload of cash, you got to go back into fundraising markets with a slightly hit brand at the time. Time and a non-hot fundraising story, right?

But you shouldn't get to that point. You, you should have made the right decision years prior, right? A lot of founders are gambling, right? They're like, okay, I believe I can avoid making a tough decision because my business is just going to magically work, you know, a year from now, and this go-to-market's finally going to work, and I'm not gonna have to cut anyone. And then it doesn't happen, and they have 6 months of cash left, and they have to make a set of hard decisions. And they're forced to make those decisions.

Did your investors ever put pressure on you to return the money?

Not necessarily return money, but there was definitely pressure in the sense that— so in 2021, all of our competitors got acquired, and they got acquired for a lot of money. And there was definitely like, you guys could exit this business and you guys could both make a lot of money, number one. And number two, the investors that invested at that, those high prices, it's going to take them some time for us to regrow into that valuation, you know, if— but if they were—

if we were to sell the company with the late prefs, they would get their money back.

They would get their money back. Right. And again, it creates an incentive mismatch.

But would they like with the late prefs, you've got to sell for $125 million.

Yeah, we would have sold for, for more than that. It's a lot. Yeah.

Were you tempted to sell for that?

Tempted? Did I think about it? Yeah, of course. But the reason why I didn't is because my broad thesis on the space platform is going to be the biggest thing when it comes to asset management. Like all asset managers will have to become platform companies. Investment advice will no longer be delivered through people and investment products. It will be delivered through platform in a personalized way at scale for every single investor. And the DNA of these incumbent asset managers is not to build technology. It's not to build great product. And I know that because I spent time with the senior leadership teams at every single large asset management company, and I knew they didn't have the capability to build what we built. And the rate at which we were building what we were building and the rate at which it was improving was going to make it inevitably more valuable, you know, year after year after year. You know, I just looked at it from the standpoint of like I was at the time 21 years old. If I just stick at this for another 5, 10, 15, 20 years, whatever period of time, I'm going to inevitably create a lot of value. It's not about creating the short-term value. It's about sticking at something for the long term and compounding value year after year after year. And I just, I had that principle. And the only reason why I had that principle is because we were working on it 5, 6, 7 years prior. And I knew that year after year after year, it got better and better and better. And I would regret for the rest of my life not building this into what I believe it could be.

Did you mind investors selling secondary throughout?

We had transfer restrictions. So investors, unless they had special permission from the company, they couldn't sell secondary. But in the cases where we did have either employees or investors sell secondaries, If it was like, it was for the right reason, I get it. But like, if it's like, oh, we don't believe in these guys anymore, then I just kind of thought it was like, okay, fuck you. I'm going to like work extra hard to make this company 10 times more valuable. I don't want anyone on the cap table who doesn't want to be on the cap table.

So when you think about advising founders today, what would you advise them on transfer restrictions and how they engage with investors who want to sell?

Well, if an investor wants to sell, you should let them sell, but you need to know who's buying the stock because the worst case scenario is you let the investor sell to some rando and that rando ends up being a pain on your cap table. And like, they're someone you don't want on the cap table. I wouldn't necessarily want an investor selling to an investor I didn't know and wasn't comfortable having on the cap table. That's why you have the transfer restrictions in place.

When you think about the impact of investors, you know, I think people often say an investor doesn't make a company, whatever, whatever. The brands of Founders Fund and Sequoia make a big difference. To what extent do they negatively versus positively impact the trajectory of a company?

So it's a double-edged sword. And the reason why it's a double-edged sword is because on one hand, you've got all this great credibility by association. You have all of this social capital. And that social capital allows you to hire people. It allows you to get great customers. It allows you to get in the press. It allows you to raise money from other investors. Everyone pattern matches to What is Sequoia? What is Founders Fund? What are these prominent investors doing? The reason why it's a double-edged sword is a lot of people see it as their— especially prospective employees see it as their get-rich-quick. This company is a rocket ship. They raised all this money from Sequoia. I'm going to go join and it's going to work. It's going to be awesome, right? It's an attractor for talent. And oftentimes this is the wrong talent for your business. And you need to be extra mindful of, is this person joining my company because of my company and the mission and some irrational motivator as to why they're going to be really successful here? Or are they joining my company because they see it as a quick path to an exit because Sequoia backed it? And you don't want those people that are just joining because of Sequoia.

Did you sell secondary?

Of course, a small amount. I think for a founder to get a little bit of liquidity is really, really important in terms of long-term decision making. Because from an incentives perspective, if you're a founder and you've got 100% of your net worth in this company and you're going through hard times and like you're not sure if you can like afford rent or you're not sure if you can make it through some tough time, thus you want to sell or you want to make kind of a personally wrongly incentivized decision, that can be dangerous. Like it can oftentimes force you to not want to take risk. You're holding on to so much risk in the company. But I think there's a zone of reasonableness. And I think like selling $1 million of secondary, I think is reasonable for a founder to have a financial cushion.

Is that what you sold?

Around there?

Yeah. Do you regret not selling more?

It's crazy because I had offers to buy a lot more secondary. Yeah, I just, I didn't. I just didn't make sense to me. Like, one, we thought it was a bad look to our investors. Like, founders cash out all of this money in secondary. I think it would have been a smart personal financial decision. And it's clear that a lot of other founders took sometimes $100 million of secondary. So maybe from a personal financial decision, it would have been the risk-adjusted correct decision to make to have sold more.

Do you think you would be a better leader today if you had taken more cash off the table then?

No. I think the reason why is I met Jensen from NVIDIA and he's like, look, like in order to build like true resilience, and to like continue compounding, you kind of need to be comfortable being miserable. And I think if you have $10 million in the bank, like it's hard to be miserable. And like, I think there are points in time where I was miserable and that was like a deeply motivating factor. And I think that if I was just too comfortable, if I had, if I had all this money, if I had, you know, all the things that come with all of that money, maybe I just would have been too comfortable and I would have just not been willing to make the set of hard decisions.

That's interesting. Do you think money makes you happy then?

No.

And it's funny, you said it's hard to be miserable with $10 million.

I think happiness and comfort are two different things. Comfort can breed complacency. I think having like no money in the bank, being like borderline broke was our financial situation before we took a little bit off the table, is not good for you. I think having a little bit of money, it is healthy, it's good. You know, you can sleep at night. I think having too much money is dangerous. At least too much money early on is dangerous. So I think it's about the general reasonableness. But I had enough money to the point where I had the chip on my shoulder. I needed to prove, prove that it could work. I needed to prove that I could build a big thing, but I didn't have so much money that I was like, okay, if this doesn't work, like, I'm comfortable, I'll buy a mansion and I'll screw off.

Do you worry about scaling into the valuation?

No, because like, why? Why does it matter? Right. It would matter if I had a massive preference stack above me. But because we have so much money in the bank and we don't burn very much, I don't necessarily have to— what matters more than your valuation is your preference stack, right? If you've got a billion-dollar preference stack, not a billion-dollar valuation, and you go sell the company for $500 million, then you're still underwater if you don't have all that in cash.

Sure.

But if you have a $120 million preference stack and you sell the company for $100 million, and you still have $80 million of cash, that's, you know, $60 million of value that goes to— that waterfalls to the whole cap table.

And so not worried about scaling into it?

No. What matters more is the dilution you take in that every time you spend a dollar, you functionally dilute yourself.

Do you see investor engagement differ when you're not a hot company?

I wouldn't even say it's like investor engagement. I would say it's like, generally speaking, like I've learned a lot about people. And like, I further affirmed my belief of like, it's really important to have a core group of like close friends or like your friends regardless, or your friends from when you were a child, you know, onwards. Like, is your true group of friends? Because like a lot of people are going to come into your life and they're going to come into your life for the wrong reasons. And I think a lot of people aren't aware of that. And when something starts to change, those people move out of your life. You know, you're like, well, like, what did I do something wrong? Like, was I a bad person? Was I But it's just like you're not, you're not the cool hot thing. They're going to move on to like crypto's hot. They're going to move on to the cool crypto guy. Now AI's hot. They're all going to move on to the, the big AI founders and they're going to just keep moving from cycle to cycle to cycle. They're going to chase the hot thing. They're going to chase the—

they're going to do that.

Hurt for some people. Some investors, I think, pretended to be our friends, you know, when incentives were flipped or we weren't as hot, they weren't our friends anymore. And I think that hurt because I thought those people were truly our friends. I think there were some set of people where I was like, oh yeah, it's just like, like none of this matters. It's just noise, right? At the end of the day, we're going to compound, we're going to build a big business. Like, them not liking us or them losing some favor with us doesn't necessarily matter to us. People pretending to be your friends, pretending to deeply care about you, and then, you know, stabbing you in the back in some way, shape, or form, or talking about that, I think really hurts.

Do you think people stabbed you in the back?

I think people definitely tried to at different points in time. They just weren't successful because we wouldn't—

What was the hardest element of the investor base then?

The mistake I made was underwriting people's emotions, not their incentives. I was like, oh, this person is saying this particular thing to me. They feel this particular way. I don't want them to feel this particular way. I'm going to say this particular thing so they feel happy. And like, that's just like the wrong way to think. The right way to think is What are my incentives? What are their incentives? How do we get to a shared outcome to the common good, which is make or increase our enterprise value of the business? If it doesn't, right, if their incentives don't align with mine, I'm cognizant of it. I can replay back why their incentives don't necessarily align with mine. But like, I'm going to do the right thing for the company. I'm not going to like, I'm not going to like try and change myself or my emotional state or change something about the business to make that person feel happy.

Did you go through periods of depression?

Yes, but nothing dwarfs— there was a point in time I was 16 years old, I was living in San Francisco, I was living in the Tenderloin, and then I moved to this house called the Crypto Castle. I was living with 12 people. We shared one bathroom. My parents didn't really like me because I dropped out of school. My co-founder was still in high school, moving on to college. The business was kind of working, wasn't really working. We were bootstrapping it. I was like pretty much broke and I'm like, there's no plan B. Like, if this doesn't work, like, I'm fucked. That was the, like, lowest I'd ever been. And there's no way, like, no matter all the ups and downs I went through post, you know, raising capital and being the hot thing, there's no low that's ever going to be as low as the low that I felt at that point in time.

What did you tell yourself in that moment? Like, you're 16 out there.

I think— I don't know, I just believe in destiny and some— like, it's like, sounds kind of cuckoo, but like, I just believe like this was the thing when I was— there's just no way I would like not figure out how to be successful. This was the only, only path in life for me.

Can I ask, who are you trying to prove it to?

I don't— I think I'm trying to prove to myself at this point in time. In the beginning, it was a lot— a lot of the motivator was like my teachers at school were like, what's this kid doing talking about all this business stuff? He should be focused on school. My parents are like, You know, the rest of the class is, is, you know, thinking about college applications and getting good grades and extracurricular activities, and you're just so fixated on this. There's a point in time where they had hired a therapist to talk me out of running the business and just be a normal kid. And I think for a long time that had been like— this was like years of my life— had been like a motivating factor of like, I'm going to prove all of these people wrong and I'm going to be so successful. I think like I did prove those people wrong. I felt like for a while, you know, especially as we started to gain a lot of traction and then I think it flipped and I think it flipped, which is everyone's like, these guys are a foregone conclusion. They're the next Collison brothers. They're the next, next big thing. It's just going to work. Faze is going to be a $10, $20 billion business. And we're like, this feels weird. Like for our whole lives we were trying to prove everyone wrong and now we're in like, now everyone like believes in us. And it's like about proving them right. And like, there's something that felt wrong about that. There's something that felt like deeply wrong about that. And then when it like flipped again, then like we just kind of felt like we were back at home. We felt like we were— we had our motivating factor that, uh—

Do you have a relationship with your parents today?

Yeah, my parents and I are super close.

Do you not hold it against them that they didn't believe in you?

No, because I think they eventually believed in me when the signals were there, when the signal started to pop up. Yeah.

But like, and I'm not by no means comparing— my parents have many flaws— but mine didn't give a shit about me leaving law school. I was a scholar at law school, you know, but perfect way to do a, you know, very kind of corporate life. And I remember calling up my mother and I was like, you know what, I'm going to leave and I'm going to do the podcast. She's like, great.

I think if you're a parent, I think a couple things happen. I think what the other parents and the other parents' kids say about you, and you know, that, that kind of breeds some— like, they see the kid who got into Stanford, who won the debate, you know, debate champion, who's like, does, you know, a tennis star. Like, they see that kid and they're like, why can't you be him? Why can't you be that person? They're at the parent cocktail parties.

And, you know, I mean this in the nicest way. Do you not think that is bad parenting? Like, one, you are projecting an image of what you should be on your child, which is complete bullshit. Two, it's just groupthink.

But that's all parent— like, at least in the US. I don't know what it's like in London, but and in England, but different. In, in the US, like, it's— there's so much of this, like, tiger parenting, this group thing.

But the pressure on you is—

yeah, there's pressure on all these kids. That's why all these kids are super anxious and depressed, and they have a bunch of— they have expectations they don't know if they can live up to. There's— it's just the United States at this point in time. And I just never— like, I, I just always assumed I was playing a different game than everyone else was, and I'm going to win at my game, and they can all play their game. And do fine on it. And I just always saw the bigger picture. I'm like, this isn't— none of this fits into my world. It's not— none of this fits into my picture. And I think I— the reason why it didn't, like, cause a lot of damage long term with my relationship with my parents or my family in general is because, like, I think I had the introspection to believe, like, if I was them, right? If I'm a parent in the 2010s US and given the information I know at the time, what would I— like, I don't know anything about this, you know, startups in Silicon Valley and kids going out and starting company. Like, This is like unprecedented. Like, how am I going to react as a parent? So I think, like, I just had some empathy for them looking back that at the time I didn't have, that like they did the best they could.

Do you think you hold vengeance or revenge, or do you think you kind of forget it?

I remember people that like gave up on me. I remember like, I think it's not necessarily the people that gave me nos. It's not the people that like didn't believe in me in the beginning. I think it's the people that gave up on me. I think it's the people that were like, this kid just doesn't get it. He's not listening to me. Or, you know, I think this about him. I'm going to move on to the next thing, whether that's an investor, whether that's executive, whether it's, you know, it's another founder, right? Or a peer. I think I deeply remember those people that, like, I was friends with at one point in time that I thought believed in me, that I thought that told me they were along for the journey. They told me that I could call them at any night. And at any hour of any day of the year, and they're going to be there for me. And those people in the time of need were not there for me, and they turned on me. VCs are going to be VCs.

What piece of advice were you given that you disregarded that you should have taken?

It's a great, great question. I don't regret a lot. Like, I think I just kind of had to learn. There was a great piece of advice Ravi gave me that I should have internalized. I think there's a difference in terms of advice that Like, I think there's a world of difference in terms of what you know versus what you've internalized. So I think a lot of people can parrot things of like, you should do this particular thing. And it sounds like you should have integrity, right? And like, yeah, it's like something you should have. You should have integrity. But like, oftentimes people know that, but they don't have integrity, right? So I think there's a difference in terms of what people know and what they do. And I think, you know, one piece of advice that I was given is you can't necessarily learn other people's lessons for them. And I would spend so much time on trying to get someone, you know, whether it's a team member, whether it's someone to do something, to learn something, and they wouldn't learn it. Then they would go and they would make that set of mistakes on their own and they would learn their lesson. And I think a lot of that applied to me as well, which is like, I can't just listen to successful founders and all of their advice and blindly adopt it. Like, I have to kind of learn for myself to some extent. And I think so much of my ethos early on was, I'm going to go to the smartest people on Earth, the most powerful, connected, successful people on Earth, and I'm going to ask them what they did, and I'm going to just do that because, like, it clearly worked for them, it's going to work for me. And, like, it just didn't work for me. Their businesses were different than my business. Their market was different at that time than it was for me. I didn't learn the lessons for myself when in reality Over time, I just— the only way to learn was if I learned it myself.

I do want to move to a quickfire. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. That sound okay? Who do you not have on your board who you would love to have on your board?

I would have loved to have someone with deep domain expertise early on when we raised our Series A round in our space who had built a company similar in shape to ours. So then I think having a perspective like that in the room would have been really valuable.

What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started Vice above everything else?

Don't overly rely on others' advice. Like, figure it out for yourself and don't quit until the job is done.

What are you most insecure about today?

That I'm going to give up.

You're insecure that you're going to give up?

I don't know, that it doesn't work. I feel like I've put all of my eggs in this basket and like, I think there's—

You feel a bit trapped?

Yeah, I think trapped is— maybe not trapped because it's— I love what I do. But like, I think there's some worry, there's some concern that it doesn't work.

You know, if it doesn't work, it will be okay.

Well, I do. I know it. I think I rationally know it. But I think, you know, when you work on something for— it's been like 7, 8 years now since you were 15, 16. Like, it becomes your baby. It becomes your identity. It becomes a part of you. One kind of lesson I'll give to founders is separate yourself and your identity, your personal identity, from that of your company. Important to do, and I think it's hard to do.

Have you done it? I have not done it.

I haven't, but I would really like to. Like, I am Vise, Vise is me. Like, I'm, I'm in it. I think maybe that's a little unhealthy.

It's unhealthy, but I think it's a necessity. It's like obsession is a necessity, and it's very difficult to be obsessed and detached at the same time. Yeah. Um, so I completely get you. What leadership skill do you not have that you would most like to get?

It's something I started to learn as we had a, you know, a bigger team and, you know, I had to manage people and managers. But like, you know, this feeling of like deep empathy and the ability to, to elevate everyone around me more than just on the vision of the business. Again, it comes with, with time. It comes with experience. But I think so much of my time I'm just so focused on the business, on figuring out the drive to solving the problems of the business. And I'm not thinking about elevating everyone around me. I think there's some value in doing that. Like, I think it's important not to overcorrect. I think it's not— it's important not to get too close to Elon. I think there is some balance where you are— you're really helping support and boost those around you in a meaningful way.

Do you think he always did investor communications well, letting investors know about the status of the business, the progress of the business?

I think it was too optimistic. Early on, and I think now I see a deep sense of reality. And part of why I was very optimistic is just because I didn't know any other way to be. I was naive, and as, as a result of being naive, I was very optimistic. And I also knew that in every interaction, that investor was re-underwriting me. Now I realize none of it matters. The only thing that matters is building a great business and making sure that your, your customers love your product and you have a long-term sensible strategy and go-to-market that will support your growth aspirations into your vision. And for a long time I was like, how are investors going to perceive this? And how are they going to perceive that? And like, you know, how do I make them feel? And like, I don't care. Like, I'm going to like tell them what's going on in the business. If it's going well, I'll tell them it's going well. If it's not going well, I'll tell them what we're working on making it, you know, to improve it. And we're all on the— we're all on the journey together for the long haul. We all know this is going to be a business that is going to compound year after year after year. It's not going to be a business that just works one day and becomes a trillion-dollar business overnight. It's one that's going to take time.

Final one for you. It's 2034. Okay, so you'll be 33. God, you were born in 2000s, weren't you?

I was.

Yeah. Jesus, I played FIFA with your year. Where are you then? Where do you want Vize to be then? Where do you want to be then?

I don't know the time horizon, but my vision is to build the asset manager of the future, build a platform that enables all investors, regardless of their age, their net worth, to be able to deliver deeply personalized portfolios across all asset classes, publics and privates, all in one beautiful, elegant software experience. And I think that, you know, the path to getting there requires a shift in the industry to move away from people, you know, human portfolio managers and investment products like the mutual fund, like the ETF, like the separately managed account into platform-driven investing.

Investing.

That's going to take some time and some shaping as an industry, and I think we're going to help, help that shaping happen, but it's going to take time. In 10 years, hopefully we'll be well on our way to making this new market a reality.

Samir, listen, dude, I've loved doing this. I've known you for a while. It's so special to do it in person. It makes such a difference having that chemistry. And so thank you so much for joining me.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great reflecting.

I have to say, I so enjoyed that show. It was a different style of show. It was more of a profile of a company and really diving deep on those lessons learned from the founder. I'd love your thoughts. If you'd like more of this type of show, let me know by leaving a comment on YouTube. You can find us on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC, and I always love to hear your thoughts there. But before we leave you today, Merge is the leading product integration platform offering a suite of unified APIs across key software categories from HRIS to CRM that allows organizations to offer hundreds of customer-facing integrations. Merge also handles the full integration lifecycle from an easy initial build to handheld end-user onboarding to maintenance, support, and management tooling for all your integrations. Thousands of customers like Ramp, Gong, Semgrab, and Sendoso use Merge to power their integrations. Check it out now by visiting merge.dev/20vc to receive $5,000 off your annual plan. That's merge.dev/20vc. And speaking of total game changers there with Merge, you need to check out Public.com. Public.com is doing something no other brokerage has done before, they're sharing 50% of their options revenue directly with you, the customer. Get something back on every options trade. Oh, and there are no commission or per-contract fees either. Go to public.com and activate options trading by March 31st to lock in your lifetime debate. This was paid for by Public Investing. Must activate options account by March 31st for the revenue share. And options are not suitable for all investors and do carry significant risk. And this is also only applicable for US members only. And finally, equity is your company's greatest asset, and managing it can be complex and expensive, but it's crucial to choose the right cap table provider. And that's where AngelList come in. For me, there are 3 main reasons why we love AngelList. Software simplicity is number 1. It's a one-of-a-kind tool that really keeps your cap table clean and compliant. Second is pricing and service. You only pay for team members with equity, not investors. And then third, ease and simplicity. AngelList provides a single provider bundle equity, fundraising, banking, and people tools on AngelList in one. It's so important that you make the right decision for one of the most important elements of your company, equity and equity management. Choose AngelList at angellist.com. As always, we so appreciate all your support, and stay tuned for an incredible AI-focused episode with Matt Clifford, one of the UK and Europe's leading AI minds, coming out on Monday. Such a special discussion there.